Clerestory

Reading Log

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:49:06 GMT

This is a log of articles and books I’m reading, podcasts I’m listening to, conversations I’m having, and movies I’ve seen in reverse chronological order. But I’m calling it a reading log for short. I’m keeping it at a fairly granular level, so I can refer to it later, but not exhaustive, so I don’t get sick of doing it.

Legend:

R means “Recommendation,” and I’ll link to it if it was made in public.
SEP Is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

2024

July

Books

Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy (1872), as fast as possible, and Will to Power (~1888), both Kaufmann trans.
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946; for book club)
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; for Kate Kirkpatrick salon)
Sangharakshita, Living With Kindness
Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try (2014)
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
Michael Tanner, Nietzsche: A Brief Introduction (2000)
Schopenhauer, from The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1 (1818) and 2 (1844)

Articles

“Simone De Beauvoir’s Authentic Love Is a Project of Equals” (2020) for the event I did with Kate Kirkpatrick

June

Books

Luria, Cognitive Development (1936)
Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, vol. I (1818), Payne trans.
Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913)
Sivers, Useful Not True (2024)
Plato, “Protagoras” (Cooper trans., ~380 BC)
David Allen: Making It All Work, Ready for Anything, Getting Things Done, Team
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn (2022)
Daniel Dor, The Instruction of Imagination (2015)
Katalin Karikó, Breaking Through (2023)

Articles

Hilary Putnam, “A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed from Within” (1997)
John Searle, “Oxford Philosophy in the 1950s” (2015)
Michael Peters, “The Enlightenment and Its Critics” (2018)

May

Books

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1886), Kaufmann translation; reading this before reading Thus Spake Zarathustra
Varela, Embodied Mind (1991), to see what he says about dependent arising
Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), to see how he understands authority as relating to self-regulation, inner criticism, guilt
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986), to see how his “Two Modes of Thought” compare to Neither/Nor
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), specifically the private language argument in §244–271.
Stendhal, Charterhouse of Parma (1839), which influenced both Nietzsche and Tolstoy
Noga Arikha, The Ceiling Outside (2022) on the nature of self

Articles/Shorter pieces

Gregory Bateson, “Cybernetics of Self” (1971) on the self
Buddhadasa, “Idappaccayata: The Buddhist Law of Nature” (1982)

Films

Last of the Mohicans (1992)
The Ascent (1977)

2023

January

30th

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Sivers, Hell Yeah or No
Old Testament: Exodus, Psalms, Proverbs. Mainly reading this to see how Jaynes’ theory lines up.
New Testament: Matthew.

29th

Pierre Briant, Alexander the Great and His Empire
Schopenhauer, WWR1/2

27th

Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

16th

Michel de Montaigne, Essais, “Apology for Raymond Sebond”

15th

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, ed. Richard Bett, chapter 2: “Pyrrho and early Pyrrhonism” by Svavar Harfn Svavarsson
The always excellent Historiansplaining podcast: Myth of the Month 21

14th

Schopenhauer, more WWR1/2
By the Sea for my book club
Trying out a new podcast: Thresholds

13th

Clendinnen: Aztecs: An Interpretation, Part I: “The City”
John Berger, Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible

5th

Bible
Analog Sea Review, section from Zweig’s World of Yesterday

1st

Still reading Schopenhauer WWR vol I and II simultaneously (since the second volume comments on the first, though I didn’t know that when I started them!).

Schopenhauer, WWR I, trans. E.F.J. Payne, §15, on perception and knowledge
Schopenhauer, WWR II, trans. E.F.J. Payne, chapter VII: “On the Relation of Knowledge of Perception to Abstract Knowledge”

2022

December

29th

DN 21: Sakka-pañha Sutta: Sakka’s Questions

28th

Sn 4.11: Kalaha-vivada Sutta: Quarrels & Disputes

20th

Ñāṇavīra Thera: Nāma - Ñāṇavīra Thera Dhamma Page

18th

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism (~190, trans. Annas/Barnes 2000)
Carol E. Cleland, “Methodological and Epistemic Differences between Historical Science and Experimental Science,” (2002) PDF: Excellent paper on two types of reasoning (both used in both types of science, but with different emphases).

17th

Ñāṇavīra Thera: A Note on Paṭiccasamuppāda: Fantastic but difficult piece on dependent origination

14th

Wikipedia: Pre-sectarian Buddhism

11th

Madhupindika Sutta: The Ball of Honey
MN 126 Bhūmija Sutta | To Bhūmija
SA 300: 他—Choong Mun-keat
Deciding Without Delusional Thinking | by Douglas C. Bates | Medium: on the meaning of Logos in Pyrrhonism

10th

MN 109 Mahā Puṇṇama Sutta | The Great Full-Moon Night Discourse

9th

A Note on Paṭiccasamuppāda - Ñāṇavīra Thera Dhamma Page: Dense but good
Pre-sectarian Buddhism - Wikipedia: Excellent primer to the debate about whether we can ever construct anything roughly like what the Buddha thought. This matters, as it may explain later divisions in Buddhism.
Philosophy of Zettelkasten: What is the Ghost in the Box? • Zettelkasten Method
Very Bad Wizards Episode 250: Metaphors All the Way Down
A bunch of suttas on dependent origination
- SN 12:46 Aññatara Sutta | A Certain Brahman
- SN 12:17 Acela Sutta | To the Clothless Ascetic
- SN 12:67 Naḷakalāpiyo Sutta | Sheaves of Reeds
- MN 38: Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhayasutta—Bhikkhu Sujato: The Longer Discourse on the Ending of Craving

8th

Abelard’s Philosophical Works: Editions, Translations
Oldest Known DNA Offers Glimpse of a Once-Lush Arctic - The New York Times
Very Bad Wizards Episode 249: Phlegm and Carelessness (Hume’s “The Sceptic”): Good episode but would have been nice to hear more about Pyrrhonism.

7th

I released a podcast: Film, beauty, and iridescence, in which I discuss Powell and Pressburger, Wings of Desire, War & Peace, beauty, and iridescence with a friend of mine
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism (~190, trans. Annas/Barnes 2000)
Abelard: Logic, Semantics and Ontology
History of Philosophy without any gaps: Parmenides
History of Philosophy without any gaps: Zeno and Melissus

6th

A Note on Paṭiccasamuppāda - Ñāṇavīra Thera Dhamma Page

5th

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism (~190, trans. Annas/Barnes 2000), p20–32: “Things which we think shameful when sober do not appear shameful to us when we are drunk.”

4th

Schopenhauer, WWR II, trans. E.F.J. Payne, chapter VI: “On the Doctrine of Abstract Knowledge, or Knowledge of Reason”
History of Philosophy without any Gaps podcast: Zeno
What Hollywood’s Ultimate Oral History Reveals
Brain Science with Ginger Campbell: Neuroscience for Everyone: Evan Thompson: Is Meditation a “mind science?”

3rd

Schopenhauer, WWR I, trans. E.F.J. Payne, §14
History of Philosophy without any Gaps podcast: Parmenides
Gary Snyder: What is anarchism all about?
Buddhist anarchism
Siderits: Buddha
Kropotkin: Conquest of Bread, chapter 3: “Anarchist Communism”

2nd

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism (~190, trans. Annas/Barnes 2000), p16–20: dogs are more rational than humans, he argues. Dunks on Stoics.
History of Philosophy without any Gaps podcast: MM McCabe on Heraclitus
Clendinnen: Aztecs: An Interpretation, Part I: “The City”

1st

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism (~190, trans. Annas/Barnes 2000): FANTASTIC. ~~Is this the first FAQ in history?~~ See this for earlier FAQs
An Epitome of Pyrrhonism: good overview of Pyrrhonism
Pyrrhonism in a Nutshell: even shorter overview of Pyrrhonism
Review: Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism: critical but positive review of Kuzminski’s book
The Fire of Life: Rorty on poetry vs philosophy
How to think about truth: reasonable overview of the mainstream positions but with a lot of implicit assumptions

November

30th

Nietzsche, “On the Concept of the Organic Since Kant” (1868) PDF
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
Matthew Neale, review of Greek Buddha (2015) PDF
History of Philosophy without any Gaps podcast: Heraclitus

29th

I appeared on a podcast! Growing up with Delia Burgess #20. We mainly discuss the article I wrote on Dependent Origination
History of Philosophy without any Gaps podcast: Pythagoras
SEP: Sextus Empiricus
R: Tolstoy: Letter to a Chinese Gentleman
R: Inclining the Mind toward “Sudden Illumination”
SEP: Sextus Empiricus
Beckwith, Greek Buddha (2014)

28th

History of Philosophy without any Gaps podcast:
- Anaximander and Anaximenes
- Xenophanes
SEP: Sextus Empiricus
Schopenhauer, WWR II, trans. E.F.J. Payne, chapter VI: “On the Doctrine of Abstract Knowledge, or Knowledge of Reason”
Varela et al, The Embodied Mind, Chapter 6, “Selfless Minds,” on Dependent Origination

27th

I appeared on a podcast! Modern Golden Age #16; video here
Dīgha Nikāya 9
Saṁyutta Nikāya 1:25
“From Sensation to Cognition,” Mesulam (1998) PDF

What I'm up to

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 08:35:50 GMT

The Podcast

I’ve recently posted some podcasts:

Quandary Clinics

Some friends and I have been running a Creative Quandary Clinic which you can read about here.

Patreon

I’ve started a Patreon where you can support my work if you so choose.

I’m using Patreon as the place where I post a stream of absolutely everything I’m up to. If there’s anything you can’t access, you can always DM me on Twitter.

My newsletter is also free, but you can also opt to pay if you wish to support what I’m doing.

What I’m writing now

I’m writing a book, which is a work of original pragmatic philosophy called Neither/Nor. You can read a bit about here, or hear an update here.

What I’m reading now

See What I’m reading.

What I’ve read recently

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Tanya Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real
Katalin Karikó, Breaking Through
Julia Cameron, Write for Life
Vincent Bevins, If We Burn
Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge
Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

Telegram bots

I’ve been coding Telegram bots to facilitate groups like the Creative Quandary Clinic above.

(This is a now page, inspired by Derek Sivers. You should read his book.)

What I'm thinking about

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 10:32:18 GMT

This page was automatically generated from my Zettelkasten. It uses git to show which notes have changed recently.

I would love to talk to you about anything on this list. If any of this is of interest to you, please get in touch.

The progress of Logos
“The Conflict Thesis” (2022)
Draper thinks faith doesn’t change
Animals use “expressed reasoning” (speech)
Progress in the arts versus science
Does philosophy progress?
No Medieval progress?
Medieval view of progress
Law of the Excluded Middle (~350 BC–1908)
Law of Non-Contradiction (~350 BC–)
“How Aristotle Created the Computer” (2017)
Aristotle’s axioms
Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought (1971)
Conceptualisation is the opposite of freedom
Pyrrhonism is pragmatic, and opposes antilogies
Dukkha and sukha
History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874)
“Of a Monstrous Child” (1578–80)
Science makes no metaphysical progress
Sn 4.11: Quarrels and Disputes
Papanca connected with sense-perception
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)
Bruno Latour (1947–)
Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)
Iain McGilchrist (1953–)
Heraclitus (545–475 BC)
Martin Heidegger (1890–1976)
William James (1842–1910)
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950)
Process Philosophy
Reasoning arises in the indexical and the social
Greek Buddha (2015)
Problem of Induction, Criterion, Differentia, Universals
Adoxastous: “without views”
Pyrrhonism links ataraxia and scepticism
Timon of Phlius (320–235 BC)
Pyrrhonism (360 BC–210 AD) influenced by Ajnana (500 BC)
Pyrrhonism (~300 BC–210)
Ataraxia
Plato divides forms from senses
Shaking off every philosophical view
Digha Nikaya/DN: Collection of Long Discourses
DN 1: The All-Embracing Net of Views
Remain evasive, dull, and stupid
Buddha against metaphysics
Causality and teleology are both illusions
Only perception is clear; concepts are at best distinct
Philosophy should write to concepts, not read from them
WWR Volume II (1844)
Hume’s false scepticism about causality
Philosophy uses concepts too widely
Concepts can never contain more than the perceptions from which they are drawn
Causality applies only to physics, not metaphysics
The inadequacy of pure naturalism comes from empiricism
Sensualism: No a priori
How God Becomes Real (2022)
Humans are “wildly anthropomorphic”
The phenomenal world is a deception
Pyrrhonists seek sensations
On extirpating vanity
Tolstoy’s Diaries Volume 1 (1847–1895)
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783)
Difficulty of Kant’s first critique
Hume only questioned the origin of causality
Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)
David Hume (1711–1776)
Of National Characters (1748, 1777)
WP550: On causality
Mazviita Chirimuuta (~1984–)
“The Critical Difference Between Holism and Vitalism in Cassirer’s Philosophy of Science” (2023)
Goethe: Form is Bildung, not Gestalt
Pascal Boyer (~1954-)
“Religion: Bound to Believe?” (2008)
Nibbana is no craving, conceit, views
Problem of the Criterion (200–)
Infinite regress arguments
Skillful understanding (kusalata)
The Buddha, Pyrrho, and Hume
Samyutta Nikaya/SN: Connected Discourses
SN 1.25: A Perfected One
Mere expressions
MN 18: The Honeyball Sutta
No delight, assertion, clinging to papanca
Words as servants
Honeyball Sutta and papanca
Worldling with the grain, arahant against
Arahant
Two truths in Buddhism
Words as signposts

Meaningful Life

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 17:06:48 GMT

This page contains a transcript of the current question I’m asking. Listen here.

How do you balance the necessities of life with pursuing your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art?

Or to put it another way:

How do you balance making a living with living a meaningful life?

The idea is for you to send me a voicenote which responds to this question. I will then edit together a podcast which includes your experience and the experience of others. If you know someone who would like to participate, feel free to send them this link.

For instructions on how to record and submit the note, click here.

Transcript

If you have not heard my voicenote, please listen to it here for my question.

Start of Podcast

I’m Bryan Kam, and you are speaking to Clerestory. I’m hoping that you will submit your reflections on what I see to be a fundamental tension between doing what we feel we must, in terms of living a meaningful life, and what we have to do just to stay alive.

This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last few years.

As background: About five years ago, I had saved enough money to leave permanent employment. I had been working full-time in finance, which did not leave me a lot of time to pursue my creative goals.

Since then, for the past five years, I have been setting my own schedule, coming up with my own goals, and pursuing them.

On the one hand, I’m living the dream.

On the other hand, it’s required a lot of effort, and at times it’s been very tough, because I’m a very social person. I need to be around people. Even before the pandemic I was engineering all these social routines. I run a book club. I run a discussion group in Central London. And I’ve hosted many Interintellect salons both online and offline.

But during this time if I wanted to see anyone, I had to engineer it myself. This could be quite exhausting and at times it was very lonely.

I had no real external motivations of the normal variety: I made no money. I had little prestige or status. There was no interest in the parts of my work I was most excited about. I did have collaborators for brief periods of the project that I was working.

The project that I was working on started out as a novel and has since morphed into a work of philosophy, which I’m calling Neither/Nor, and which you can find out about on the podcast.

I’ve decided in the past few months to take a break which ironically means getting a job. I’m out of savings, but more importantly, I need a stable routine. I need to see people face-to-face. So I’m returning to full-time employment and I have quite mixed feelings about that.

So right now I’m asking you to record. I’d like at least five minutes but it can be as long as you want reflecting on this question.

As I shift gears and attempt to juggle my own life’s work with making some kind of income, I’m wondering how you have navigated this tension.

I’d love it if you could share:

your name,
where you’re from,
where you’re living now,
and what you do: both in terms of your life’s purpose as you see it and what you do day to day.

I’m very curious if these things are in tension for you or if they’re not. So for example, if you’re doing creative work and making a living from it, I would love to hear about that. If you are working full-time, but doing something creative on the side, I’d love to hear about that. Or maybe you’ve devoted your life to what you see as your life’s purpose and now you are struggling financially or otherwise to meet the demands of life, I’d also love to hear about that.

This does not need to be any grand artistic project. It could be raising a family, or starting a company, or doing volunteer work, or spreading a message. It could be anything you consider to be your purpose. And of course you could also still be figuring that out. So maybe you just need a bit of space away from work or school or whatever your day-to-day is in order to figure out what you want to do with your life.

Any of those are fine. I’m interested in getting completely open reflection from you. If you don’t like any of the framings that I’ve given, just say whatever comes to you. And if you wish to remain anonymous, you also don’t need to say anything about where you are or anything like that.

I’m very happy for you to say as much or as little as you like, but I would invite you to open up a bit and reflect for at least a few minutes and if you go over it’s fine.

I also invite you to share this invitation which you can find at bryankam.com/record. This page will allow anyone with this link to hear this message and upload audio should they wish to do so. If there’s anyone in your life where you’re curious how they answer this question, or would like to hear about the tension that they’ve experienced, how they’ve made a success of it or how they’ve potentially had problems with it.

You can go too far in either direction: Too rigid, which I’ve done working in finance, or too open, which I feel I’ve also done in the past few years. I think it’s been massively beneficial to the project that I’m working on, but I’m also very very tired and lonely and sad.

So I’m very excited to hear your reflections on this topic. And so if you’d like to contribute please go to bryankam.com/record.

So again, here’s the question:

How do you balance the necessities of life with pursuing your life’s purpose, your creative impulse, or your art?

Or to put it another way:

How do you balance making a living with living a meaningful life?

And I look forward to hearing from you.

Send Audio to Me

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 17:06:48 GMT

Short instructions: record in the highest quality you can (more info below). Then upload here.

This page gives information for uploading audio for my podcast, Clerestory.

Question Transcripts

Creativity and life (asked 2023-04-20)

Recording

Feel free to submit audio in any format. I want you to feel happy about the audio quality. So please listen back, and if it sounds good to you, it’s fine.

A dedicated mic is better, but phones or laptop mics are also fine (“Voice Memo” should be on iOS devices; “Voice Recorder” on some Android phones).

How you use your mic and your environment determine the audio quality. Record in a quiet place if you can, though some background noise is okay. Speak about a fist-width away from the mic, pointed at your mouth at 45 degree angle to the side (so you’re not breathing into the mic).

If you use your phone, the mic is on the bottom.
If you record outside, try to shield your mic from any wind.

Sending to me

The easiest for me is if you upload an audio file here.

If you don’t want to do that, you can also send me audio via Telegram or Whatsapp. DM me for my number.

If it’s easier for you, you can use Telegram to record voicenotes directly. You can also send recorded files to me via Telegram or WhatsApp. This may make it easier to send files from your phone.

I prefer that you don’t record into WhatsApp (which uses very low quality), but if you’re fine with the quality, then feel free to record/send however you like.

Dependent Origination without any Pali

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 10:02:33 GMT

This essay contains a practical guide to using the moment-by-moment interpretation of a central Buddhist doctrine to end disturbances in everyday life.

I’ve tried to write it for someone with little or no knowledge of Buddhism. As with all the Buddha’s teachings that I’ve encountered, it’s not about belief, dogma, or metaphysical claims. It’s a practical technique which should benefit anyone regardless of beliefs. My explanation is an invitation to investigation. The only requirement is curiosity, but for the main benefit (no less than the end of all disturbances), meditation experience is helpful. To get good at the practice, diligence and determination will be needed.

I can recommend Tasshin’s Introduction to Buddhism as a place to start if you’d like some background on Buddhism. I wrote this article as a submission for his Share Your Knowledge! Essay Contest.

My story

In late 2016, I was deeply depressed. I had hit one of my rock bottoms, and it was touch-and-go whether I’d make it through. My partner said that I had to get help — if not for my sake, then for hers. This reframed the problem for me. I told her I was willing to try anything.

I was lucky enough to be able to see a psychiatrist. She made several helpful suggestions, and she also asked whether I had ever tried meditation. I said no. I knew nothing about meditation; so little, in fact, that her suggestion surprised me a little. It had never occurred to me that meditation had anything to do with happiness. I asked her how it worked.

She said I could try any of the apps. She mentioned a few, including Headspace, so I downloaded it and began to meditate. Just ten minutes of meditation per day made an immediate difference in my ability to cope with life. I found it soothing, enjoyable, and easy to follow, and it calmed me down a lot.

Because I was curious about (and, I’ll admit, a little suspicious of) Buddhism, I took Robert Wright’s Buddhism and modern psychology course. I found I could immediately relate to several of the Buddha’s core assertions. In particular, I readily assented to the notion that life is suffering, and that suffering causes desire.¹ I had always had an extremely strong desire for things to be other than they were, and I knew that non-acceptance was related to my unhappiness. I just had no idea what to do with that knowledge.

I didn’t go nuts with the meditation at first. I stuck to 10-20 minutes per day. But over time, I read several books on meditation, and I had increasingly intense positive experiences. I became more interested in the practice. Eventually I went on meditation retreats. First, in March 2017, I did a 3 day retreat with periods of silence at Vajrasana in Suffolk (UK). In January 2018, I attended a 10 day silent retreat at Dhamma Vaddhana, in the High Desert in California, near Joshua Tree.

Those retreats and the experiences I had on them seemed to make a permanent improvement to my outlook on life. Or at least I can say that I’m still never as unhappy as I was before I did those retreats, now four years ago.

For the past few years my still-daily practice had not progressed a great deal from what I was doing 2017–2019.² But in the past few months, I’ve been learning a Buddhist analytical technique which has drastically improved my life. I’m still deeply imperfect but I thought I would share what I’ve learned. The technique has also changed my understanding of how the mind works.

As a disclaimer, I have no formal training in meditation within a Buddhist tradition, nor do I have any academic background in the study of Buddhism. I’ve just read a lot of books and done a lot of meditation. I did have the chance to discuss the topic with an extremely friendly monk at Dhamma Center, to whom I’m very grateful. In that conversation he corrected things I had wrong. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.

What is dependent origination?

Dependent origination is an explanation from the Buddha detailing what is required for a disturbance in our experience to occur. These kinds of disturbances are wide ranging: they include everything from a minor inconvenience to the death of a loved one.

Without insight into how this process works, we experience disturbances every day: a post on social media annoys us, the store doesn’t have the thing we wanted, we miss a bus, someone slights us, and so on. But dependent origination describes larger forms of dissatisfaction with life as well, from workplace malaise to the deep depression I described. A conceptual understanding of the requirements common to all such disturbances can provide us with a practical strategy for avoiding them before they start — or ending them once they’ve arisen.

The promise is no less than the option to end all such disturbances.

The teaching is called dependent origination because any such disturbance can only arise (“originate”) from a web of dependencies or conditions. Once these dependencies are met, the disturbance appears to arise instantaneously, and fully-formed. Usually we only notice such a disturbance once we are already fully disturbed and enmeshed in a story about why. By understanding the mechanisms behind these disturbances, we can sense when they are arising, and prevent them from coming to full fruition.

When we find ourselves enraged, disappointed, or acting out, we know that something has happened, but if we take the story at face value, we’ve actually misunderstood what has happened. Dependent origination describes a process for understanding exactly what must have happened in detail.

Imagine coming home to find that the house has burned down. Something has clearly happened, but what? Detective work is required. The same goes for states of disturbance, and dependent origination describes how to run the investigation.

Several things result from a cycle of dependent origination. The disturbance is what alerts us after the fact. So as a first step, it’s good practice to try to notice when we are disturbed. But the same cycle often produces sensations, feelings, a form of self-centeredness, and a narrative involving that self.

Dependent origination is one of the core doctrines in all schools of Buddhism. Sometimes dependent origination is translated as dependent arising, or as dependent co-arising. These terms all refer to the same thing. The way that I’m describing it is not the multiple lifetimes view you may have learned (see below); this is a practical guide for how to use this otherwise puzzling teaching within everyday life.

Dependent origination is fast and persuasive

The whole cycle of dependent origination is lightning fast. Without training, it seems to be a single event. The view that emerges from it is persuasive, and seems real, correct, and indisputable.

Some small examples

Imagine we’re looking forward to eating a dessert we’ve left in the fridge. We open the door, and it’s not there. By the time we are angry at our housemate, a full cycle of dependent origination has taken place. And it’s not only fast, but also persuasive. We now have a story: “He ate my dessert.” Notice the mine quality, as there will always be self-view. In fact, we can’t know what has happened. Maybe someone else ate it, or maybe we ate it and forgot.

I suspect if we get to the next inference (“He always does that”) then another cycle may have taken place, with the view from the first cycle as the mental source of another cycle.

Or imagine we touch a hot tray we’ve just taken out of the oven. We feel the burning sensation, but that is not dependent origination; that’s just pain. But if we feel anger at ourselves, and think, “How could I be so stupid, I knew it was hot” then a round of dependent origination has taken place.

Two analogies

Here are two analogies which might help us understand what dependent origination is at a high level.

If you know how to code

Feel free to ignore this analogy if it’s not helpful.

One way we could understand dependent origination is as a programming script: disturbance.py. This may seem an odd script to keep on our computer, but maybe think of it as a piece of malware: when it runs properly, we become disturbed. When it doesn’t run, we remain tranquil.

At the top of the script, we import a bunch of libraries or modules. These are dependencies for the script to run successfully — and some of these dependencies depend on each other. If we have all the dependencies installed on the operating system, then under the right conditions, almost anything can trigger the running of the script. The script runs quickly, and causes us to be disturbed.

However, if any of the dependencies are missing, the script won’t run, and we’ll stay calm. Moreover, the better we understand each of the modules, the easier it is to spot when the script is in the process of running or about to run. We might be able to put pauses into these modules. This gives us time to intervene, and stop ourselves from becoming disturbed.

A chemical reaction

Another way to think of dependent origination might be a chemical reaction. When all the reagents are present, the reaction will take place immediately. But if we remove one of them, it won’t happen at all.

This is a less good analogy because the ingredients don’t depend on each other in the way that they may in computer code, but it still gives us some idea. Dependent origination is about understanding the reagents needed to set off an explosion, so that we can remove reagents or keep them separate from each other.

So how can we use it?

First, we must understand the concepts. In the most common formulation found in the Buddhist texts, dependent origination has twelve conditions.

The remainder of this article will explain the dependencies and how to pick them apart skilfully.

Selfhood as a pyramid

A cycle of dependent origination describes in detail the web of dependencies that are required for unsatisfactoriness to arise. In this view, if you are dissatisfied or suffering, then one of these cycles must have occurred. Under normal conditions, they occur very quickly, and unconsciously, hence the sense of “must have.”

As I’ve said, it’s not helpful to think of these as twelve links in a causal chain. One way to think about them is more like a stack of 12 cups, with the disturbance at the top. If you knock one out, the top one must fall. But some are more structural than others, and some are harder to reach.

What are the twelve conditions?

The most common version of the teaching lists twelve conditions.

Here’s the list, provided in the forward order of conditionality. I’ve provided links so you can get a wider sense of each term, but I wouldn’t recommend going too deeply into the Wikipedia explanations. If you want to go deeper, I’ll recommend some readings at the end.

ignorance
concoctions or fabrications (sometimes called “formations”)
divided consciousness
name and form (or “mind and body,” or “mentality and materiality”)
open sense bases
sense contact
feeling tone, sensation, or “valence”
craving, thirst, or desire
clinging, grasping, attachment
the urge to become
birth
old age, sickness, and death

Confused? You should be. It’s not easy to know what’s going on here.

These are not best thought of as links in a causal chain, but each condition is necessary for the next link to arise. As an analogy, you need to have a phone in order to call someone, but having a phone doesn’t cause you to call someone. It’s a necessary condition but not a cause. The same is true in dependent origination. If birth doesn’t occur, then death can’t occur, but birth does not really cause death. It can only “set the stage.”

There are also some complex dependencies among the links. In this essay, I won’t go into detail about how all of them connect to each other, so we can just list them in order and understand that for #12 to exist, #11 must exist, and so on, from sickness back to ignorance.

Working through an example

Say I am upset at having received an aggressive text message from a friend. My reaction is: “I can’t believe she’d send that to me.” Notice that it has to have an “I” or a “me” in it. This is a sign that a cycle has completed.

This can sometimes be implicit: “Your behaviour is unacceptable” rather than explicit: “…to me.” It can be helpful to rephrase it to make it clearer: “I find your behaviour unacceptable.” But the exact words aren’t too important, and it is not at all important what specifically has happened. It just may make it easier to frame the problem in terms of an “I” or a “me” in order to do the detective work.

I’ve said that the conditions are not necessarily best thought of as being in a linear order. However, it’s easier to memorize them this way, so that we can use the list like a checklist. In fact, it is often easier to run the investigation starting at the end.

So we work backwards. This means we work in this order: death, birth, the urge to become, clinging, craving, feeling tone, sense contact, sense bases, name and form, consciousness, concoction, ignorance. This is the reverse order of conditionality.

The way I think about this is like detective work after an explosion. Let’s say we’re outside our empty house, and it suddenly explodes. We know that something has happened, but we start from a point of ignorance. We now have to dig through the rubble and figure out how this could have happened.

Dependent origination is like that. When the twelve conditions arise in tandem, they can cause immediate suffering. The suffering also tends to hide evidence of its origins; we can’t easily see what has happened, and this is probably adaptive, from the point of view of the suffering self that has just been born. If it were obviously false or easy to see through, it couldn’t “take over.” So when suffering arises strongly, it is like a form of persuasion or temptation. We feel a sense that it’s irresistible to see what has happened in a certain way.

In this example, I’m suffering “because” a friend sent me a text. As we’ll see, this ordering events is probably not correct, but it’s useful to think of it in these terms at the start. I’m not just angry, but I’m indignant, and it’s because of what the friend said to me.

Note that this is a postmortem. The point of working through an example in detail is to get familiar with what went wrong. It is not exactly about solving this particular problem, but becoming more sensitive to the process. The point of going through this is to improve your life. It’s like practicing scales; the benefit comes when you play the music.

The conscious part (12–6)

The Buddhist terms can be confusing if they’re taken too literally. We’re not talking about “birth” or “old age, sickness, and death” in terms of an individual’s lifetime. These are metaphors for the way a self (part of the mind) feels as it is born, decays, and eventually dies.

So the first step is straightforward: sickness, old age and death. We can understand this simply as suffering or unsatisfactoriness. In this case, it takes the form of anger at the friend who has sent the text.

Because I am suffering (death), a birth must have occurred. This is the birth of self. In other words, it’s not about a mother giving birth to a child. It’s more like my mind giving birth to a me; a self that can suffer, which requires a self-centered view of a situation. This is the “I” and “me” in “I can’t believe she would say that to me!”

If a birth has happened, there must have been an urge to become. The way I understand this is as the need to “make something of it.” It’s a spur to action, to respond to the text, or to show the text to someone else, to block the friend, or whatever else. It does not necessarily need to lead to action, but there’s a feeling of impulse, or in this case, perhaps the sense of “How dare she…”

If there’s an urge to become, there must have been some kind of attachment. Perhaps I was attached to a view of this friend as an ally; the sort of person who wouldn’t say this kind of thing to me. Or perhaps I feel that they’ve accused me of something, and this accusation conflicts with a view of myself that I’m attached to. “I didn’t think she was like that” or “I’m not that kind of person.” Often I notice identity in this stage, but it might also be attachment to a certain desired outcome (or to avoid an undesired outcome).

It can also be clinging to a not-suffering self: we’d be happy if everything were the same, but this one thing hadn’t happened. Notice how obviously illusory that feeling is: when that one thing dissipates, then something else takes its place. Clinging often produces distortions: think of the clinging of infatuation. We can only see a person’s positives; we idealize. Or the opposite, the view of our enemies: we only see negatives; we demonize.

If there’s attachment, there must have been craving. Let’s say the text is mean, and I take it as a rejection. I might have a craving for acceptance, and this text has prevented the fulfilment of this craving. Maybe I wish the friend hadn’t sent the text; that would also be a form of craving. Craving is just wanting things to be other than they are.

For there to be a craving, there must have been a feeling tone. This can be negative, neutral, or positive. In the text-from-a-friend example, reading the text had a negative valence. And probably most feelings that lead to suffering are negative. But it’s important to know that positive feelings can also lead to suffering. Let’s say I really love a notebook I bought recently (true story). If I lose that notebook, it will lead to suffering, because the craving for the notebook led to a clinging to the notebook, and the clinging has the potential to lead to suffering (whether the suffering emerges later or not).

If there’s a negative or positive feeling, there must have been sense contact: I read the text message, so the contact was through vision. If, instead, the friend had said something to me, then the sense contact would have been through hearing. It’s important to identify this first sensory source, without which the feeling response could not have arisen. This is because the whole subsequent story often hinges on a fairly minor piece of sense information. It can be helpful to inspect the actual sensory input to see whether it’s commensurate with the fiction that emerges afterwards. For example, it might help to carefully re-read the text in a different tone, offering the benefit of the doubt or even asking for clarification.

Typically, sense contact is the last part that’s conscious and reasonably easy to introspect. But with practice, earlier parts may sometimes become perceptible. It’s also important to remember that commonly all 12 conditions are unconscious, because the process is so fast.

The unconscious part (5–1)

For the sense contact to occur, the sense bases must be open. In this example, my eyes must be open; if they weren’t, or if I weren’t looking at my phone, then sense contact couldn’t have occurred. Remembering this can remind us how contingent the whole affair is. But it’s more than just having our eyes open, it’s something like attunement. We see (and don’t see) a virtually infinite amount of stuff all the time. I might see the same words written on a billboard, but because my sense bases weren’t open to that as directed at me, it’s not something I “noticed” or “took personally,” whereas I did notice the text from my friend.

For the sense bases to be opened, there must be name and form present. Sometimes this is interpreted as me having a mind and a body joined up and doing stuff in the world. But it might be better to think of it in terms of a mental concept being instantiated. It is sometimes translated as mentality and materiality. It’s having a conceptual notion of what is going on, and then having an instance of that happening. In this sense, it involves having concepts, and maybe also expectations (or predictions, or priors). So with the friend, I have a notion of “insult” and an instance of that insult; this text message is an instantiation of a known concept. It’s the co-arising of the name of a form, and the form that is named. Notice this depends on past learning which is itself contingent.

For name and form to arise, there must be a divided consciousness. This is a kind of directed energy, like energy accumulating around an irritation. It is not as sophisticated as the self-view that I described in “birth,” but a more basic version of “self and other.” For example, a baby might have a sense of toy and lost toy without having much sense of identity. In this example, there’s me and the text message; something conscious of something else (the concoction). I tend to think of it as the most basic division between subject and object, without any conceptual stuff (yet).

For divided consciousness to arise, there must be a concoction, fabrication, or formation in the sense of “the action of forming.” There is a sense of creation in this step, and of fiction. The mind is ready to tell a tale, and it is happy to use anything as its “once upon a time.” From doing this kind of meditation, I can sometime sense that my mind is in concocting mode. This is the feeling that “anything could set me off.” If we observe someone else in a very bad mood all day, where nothing is good enough or everything seems to annoy them, we might say that this is in a state of rapid concoction.

For concoctions to arise, ignorance must have been present. In Buddhism, ignorance means something specific. It is the illusory inversion of the three characteristics. Ignorance means belief in three illusions: permanence, self, and pleasure.

In other words, three assumptions permeate and support every part of the process:

“I definitely am a stable self,”
“this self can definitely be satisfied if certain conditions are met,”
“this state of affairs will definitely last.”

This will not happen if we’re mindfully aware of the present, seeing the three characteristics: emptiness, unsatisfactoriness, and impermanence. When we keep these three characteristics in view, the cycle can’t get off the ground. This is because self-view, permanence-view, and the promise of pleasure are foundations for each step; these illusion both support and fuel each of the twelve conditions.

We’ve just worked through a single example. But note that the indignant self which results from this process can become part of the trigger for another cycle to begin. This is because what we’ve called “sense contact” includes not just the five senses, but also the mind. In short, a feeling or thought can (and often does) trigger this cycle, and it’s common for cycles to repeat. “I can’t believe he did this to me” leads to “He always does this” and “I should have known he was like this,” and so forth. I plan to write more about this later; I think it may be related to conceptual proliferation.

I’ll give an example of the difference between mindfulness and ignorance. I’m quite sensitive to loud noises. They often seem to put me in a bad mood immediately. But if I’m in the middle of a meditation session, focusing on the impermanence of sensations, then I notice the effect the noise has on my body as well as the noise itself, and then the feeling dissipates. I’m aware of impermanence, essencelessness, and unsatisfactoriness of all phenomena, so the noise as phenomenon cannot trigger anything. The exact same noise might lead to nothing, rather than the cycle leading to an angry self. In the ignorant condition, it’s easy for the unpleasant sound to kick off a round of dependent origination. “Who made that noise? Don’t they know I am trying to concentrate? Why are they doing this to me?” is what comes up when I’m reading and I hear the noise.

This sounds hard

It is! But it’s a big promise after all: the end of all psychological suffering. And it gets easier to practice as you go along.

But also know that you don’t really need to get each condition “right.” They are more like frames for introspection. Once again, they are an invitation to investigation. It is more like cross-examination of a witness we suspect is lying than it is like an exam with right and wrong answers.

My current view is that the process would not work if it were not persuasive. If something is persuasive, it is hard to see it another way. Dependent origination, because it happens so quickly and appears so persuasive, is hard to perceive. If it were easy to perceive, it would not be able to cause so much suffering; the story wouldn’t be able to “take us over” as it were.

Note that what is hard to perceive is the pattern of dependencies. The resulting sense of self, the “story” that comes out of the process, is easy to see: more than that, it seems self-evidently true. It’s just that such a story rewrites the past to hide its own origins.

Understanding the concepts, however, even partially, can reduce disturbances or suffering, so in my opinion it is well worth a bit of difficulty at the start. Of course, this will depend on how bad our suffering is. It’s also practical; it can be used in daily life, and it shouldn’t seem like an abstract theory with no real-world consequences.

Although concepts are required at the start, the technique will only pay off if it’s practiced. Meditation practice should normally be done without concepts. It’s a bit like reading a recipe versus learning to cook. We need to know all the ingredients before we begin, but if we never start cooking, having that knowledge doesn’t really matter. We need practice, and we improve with practice. As with cooking, we get better over time, but it’s not the kind of thing we can ever really “finish.” If we want to continue to enjoy the results of our efforts, we have to keep at it.

Is there an easier, softer way?

Let me know if you find one! I have found this one quite effective. There are ways you can apply the above directly without spending 20-30 minutes every day analyzing where stuff went wrong (which is what I’ve been doing).

Here are ways to start:

If you still normally have self-view or don’t find it easy to get into a mindful state, the best place to intervene is at condition 7, feeling tone. There’s lots of advice to guard the sense doors in Buddhism, but it’s pretty hard to do and live a normal life. So paying very close attention to what feels good and bad is a great place to start. If something feels good, notice the good feeling, and notice if it turns into a desire for more. If something feels bad, notice the bad feeling, and notice if it turns into a desire for less. Neutral feelings don’t seem to cause many problems, though I’d love to hear from you if you find that they do.

If you already know how to meditate, then you can focus on cultivating mindfulness of the three characteristics. After all, in this framing, suffering can only arise if mindfulness of these drops. It’s not just that you won’t suffer during the meditation, but the practice will begin to affect everyday life.

If you’ve seen through the illusion of self at least once, then, by focusing on the characteristics, it should be possible to do so again. From this state, you can meditate analytically on the conditions whenever suffering arises — without risking mental proliferation. So if you feel angry, sad, upset, etc, take it as an opportunity to navigate backwards through the suffering and see where it falls apart. This can’t often be done in the moment, but it can be done in your next meditation session.

With scrutiny, in my experience, stories often fall apart around feeling tone or contact, but they sometimes last all the way back to ignorance. In the end, awareness of ignorance trumps everything. I like to go nuts, and aim for dramatic levels of scepticism. If someone not present has really pissed me off, for example, I can navigate all the way back to ignorance and conclude that they may have since died, and then it wouldn’t make sense to be angry at them. Maybe someone stole the phone I received a text from. Or maybe this whole day has been a dream…

Sources

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to read more, I can suggest a few sources, all free:

Leigh Brasington, Dependent Origination and Emptiness: Streams of Dependently Arising Processes Interacting (Leigh Brasington, 2021). Available here.
Buddhadasa Bhikku, Paticcasamuppada: Practical Dependent Origination (Vuddhidhamma Fund, 1992). Available here.
Ajahn Amaro’s Dhamma talks, available here or starting here (there are 9 lectures but they’re a bit hard to link to)

If you’re interested in meditation more generally, I can recommend The Mind Illuminated as a great place to start.

More to come

As a teaser, I also think that practicing dependent origination is important for having insights in other parts of life. I’m working on an argument that a similar commitment to practice, though not specifically this framing, has allowed thinkers like Spinoza, Darwin, and Nietzsche to gain insights into life, evolution, and the self, which are hard to perceive in the same way that the origin of suffering is hard to perceive. These are not precisely the same as the Buddha’s insights, but I think they amount to observations along similar lines.

If you’re interested in that argument, or in keeping up with my work generally, please consider subscribing to my newsletter, where I make infrequent announcements of what I’m up to. If you’d like to support writing like this, which I give freely, you can do so, and also receive frequent updates of everything I’m up to on my Patreon.

I thought it was about multiple lifetimes

Dependent origination is a complicated topic, but it’s also a controversial one. Without getting into the details, there is a divide between some Buddhists who think that dependent origination is about how ignorance leads to suffering across multiple lifetimes. In this interpretation, ignorance in your parents’ generation results in your birth. This seems to come from the fact that the eleventh link is “birth,” which seems hard to explain in a single lifetime. This understanding is very old; it appears to have been pretty standard by the 5th Century AD.

The other side of this argument believes that the Buddha was actually talking about how suffering originates moment-to-moment. That is the view that I have taken in this article. For now, I’m leaving aside the question of whether this fractally relates to multigenerational trauma, and just give you a practical explanation of how to use this procedure to end suffering in your day-to-day life.

To me, this interpretation makes more sense when reading that the Buddha, in discussing the profundity of dependent origination, says that, because “this generation” does not understand dependent origination, it “cannot pass over … the cycle of birth-and-death.” This is an odd thing to say; how could a generation pass over the cycle of birth-and-death? One way of understanding this is that he means cycles of selfhood within a generation. But I may well have misunderstood this!

A tip to weaken stories

As I’ve mentioned, stories are persuasive. One thing I’ve observed in practice is that they’re also often reversible. (An insight also given by Byron Katie; see this worksheet.) So if my story is “She let me down,” then I can do a number of reversals on this:

She let me down
She didn’t let me down
I let her down
I let myself down
She let herself down

Some of these may ring just as true as the persuasive story, which can weaken the story and make it easier to investigate. With enough practice, it can become clearer that “there is the feeling of letting down” and “there is another person,” and the rest is a fiction built on top of those blocks. Usually the self arises to “complete” such a story. In other words, pronouns and negations don’t seem to matter as much as they seem to from the naive self-view.

More on meditation

In Buddhism, there are two (mostly overlapping forms) of meditation, which differ in their object. The first is called concentration meditation. The point of this kind of meditation is to focus on an object, whether it’s the breath, a visualization, or a candle doesn’t matter. The trick, at least at first, is to stay observant, and keep bringing attention back to the object. It’s normal for attention to go away. A “rep” is to realize when attention has gone astray, and then bring it back. We should feel good when we realize we’ve lost concentration and bring it back, not bad. It’s like feeling sore after exercise; it’s a good sign that we remembered, not a bad sign that we forgot.

Dependent origination meditation is an analytical form of the second type, which is called insight meditation. In these practices, we take the concentrated mind, and focus it on experience. This is a shift in object, emphasis, and goal. A teacher of mine has compared it to comparing to sailing; we don’t get to control the conditions of the sea, we have to manage the boat regardless of weather. In this comparison, maybe concentration meditation would be like going in the pool: the conditions are more controlled.

Insight meditation can use any object of experience; it could use the breath, but we need to focus on the sensations of the breath as closely as possible. Eventually, we focus on the three characteristics.

The difference between concentration meditation and insight meditation is in the final product. The point of concentration meditation is to reach, explore, and master concentration states. The point of insight meditation is (1) to see clearly, and (2) to end all dissatisfaction.

The task of the first part, “seeing clearly,” is more specifically to see impermanence, not-self, and unsatisfactoriness in all experience. That part will lead to a temporary cessation of self. The task of the second part is to use this technique of ending self-view to interrupt patterns of disturbance as they arise — using dependent origination meditation. First we turn off the stove, then we take it apart.

The illusion of self is not a theoretical proposition, but a statement of experience, from those who possess experience to those who don’t yet possess experience. We could also think of it like a recipe. If we closely follow a recipe to bake a cake, especially with guidance from a baker, it doesn’t really matter if we believe it will work or not. This is not about beliefs; it’s about practice and experience.

It is easier to do dependent origination work we have seen through the illusion of self and can do so reliably, but I hope that an understanding of the technique is useful for anyone.

To do the practice and gain the experience, we need determination, persistence, and humility. So don’t take my word for it. I’m just a person on the internet who read books and meditated. Go out and try it for yourself.

On the decision to translate terms

In this guide I did not use any Pali or Sanskrit terminology, and instead substituted what seemed from my experience to be reasonable translations. This is itself a controversial decision. If you want a version using the Pali terms, please let me know. I may write a second version, using the Pali terms, to see which is more helpful.

In English, the traditional translation of what I’ve called a disturbance is “suffering,” or, more recently, “unsatisfactoriness.” A newer proposal is “a bummer;” or simply that “life sucks”.

A traditional list of what’s at stake may or may not help. It includes birth, ageing, death, sorrow, lamentation, grief, despair, association with disliked things, separation from liked things, and not getting what one wants.

Yes, I know that these are not quite correct, but they are what I first learned about Buddhism. Please keep reading as I try to address the translation “suffering” as well as causes versus necessary conditions in this article.↩
This was mostly visualizations for bliss states, and noting practice for insight.↩

Heidegger on Logos

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 13:20:50 GMT

A guest post by Zarina Mazitova and an extension to my article On the Origin of Logic, as well as the video lecture I gave on Strands I oppose in Western Philosophy.

Bryan’s article on Schopenhauer’s view of logic reminded me of Heidegger’s reflections about Logos† (the etymological root of logic) in his Introduction to Metaphysics, which I read last year. In this article, I’ll describe Heidegger’s view of Logos and its role in metaphysics based on this book.

Background about Heidegger and Introduction to Metaphysics

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher (1889–1976) best known for his work Being and Time (1927), which explores the different modes of being, including Dasein, the kind of Being able to be concerned with its own existence and which is open to the world it inhabits. Heidegger’s influences include Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who preceded him as Professor of Philosophy at the university of Freiburg, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and ancient Greek philosophers, especially the pre-Socratics.

Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933, and after the Second World War, was found guilty of supporting Nazism and banned from teaching for four years, until 1949. Introduction to Metaphysics does contains a nod to the Nazi Party in its chapter “Being and the Ought,” towards the end of the book: “In particular, what is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement [namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity], is fishing in these troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities.‘”¹

Heidegger was adamant that the part between brackets, which downplays his praise for the Nazi party, featured in the text from the time he gave it as a lecture at the university of Freiburg in 1935. However, scholars showed that it was added closer to the year of publication of the book in 1953, perhaps as an attempt to make this passage less sympathetic to Nazism and to allow the publication of the book in the context of post-war Germany.²

Introduction to Metaphysics was translated into French in 1958 (this is the edition I read) and into English in 1959 (for the English version I’ve used Gregory Fried and Richard Polt’s translation from 2000). Interestingly, his magnum opus, the earlier work Being and Time (1927) was translated later than Introduction to Metaphysics: in 1962 into English, and only in 1985 into French (although a partial French translation came out in 1964).

Heidegger in translation — a word of warning

Our German friend and philosophy doctor Roman had warned us that Heidegger was virtually impossible to read in translation, due to his inventive and complex use of the German language, rich in neologisms that could only be translated as awkward expressions or paraphrases, or best left untranslated, like the word Dasein. The 1958 French translation I read by Gilbert Kahn tried to stay as close as possible to the original text, and Heidegger himself reviewed and approved some of the most difficult parts of Kahn’s translation.³

However, I found the more recent English edition by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt much easier to read: perhaps because it didn’t stay as close to Heidegger’s phrasing, what the translation may have lost in fidelity it gained in clarity and intelligibility. Like these translators, I’ll indicate the German words Heidegger used next to the English translation.

Overview of Introduction to Metaphysics

Heidegger begins this work with the fundamental question (“Grundfrage”) of metaphysics: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” (in German: “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?”). To explore this question, we need to understand what being really means. He posits that language, its use, and its evolution reflect our relationship with Being: “Because the fate of language is grounded in the particular relation of a people to Being, the question about Being will be most intimately intertwined with the question about language for us.”⁴

Weil das Schicksal der Sprache in dem jeweiligen Bezug eines Volkes zum Sein gegründet ist, deshalb wird sich uns die Frage nach dem Sein zuinnerst mit der Frage nach der Sprache verschlingen.⁵

As Heidegger examines the numerous uses of the word Being and its variations today, he concludes that this word (and therefore, Being itself) is now almost devoid of meaning. He blames this on centuries of misguided Western thought. One of the main reasons for the historical decline of Being, for Heidegger, is the evolution and increasing dominance of Logos in the West, from the Platonic school onwards, to the point where Hegel writes, in the 19th century: “The logical (is) the absolute form of truth and, what is more, it is also pure truth itself.”⁶

By analyzing the language of Being in its historical context, going back to the origins of Western philosophy, we can uncover the original meaning of Being before it started to wither. For Heidegger, this means we’ll return to the pre-Socratics, Heraclitus and Parmenides in particular, and, to start from first principles, we’ll examine the initial expression of Being through an exegesis of their texts. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger shows how originally, for the pre-Socratics, Logos meant “language” or “gathering” and as such, it was tightly linked with physis, the Greek word for Being, which today is translated as “nature.” From Socrates onwards, in Plato and Aristotle, Logos comes to mean something more like “reason” (eventually Latin ratio), and, as the science of logic becomes the sole arbiter of truth, this new sense of Logos — reason — comes to prevail over Being (physis).

Being and Logos at their origins

For Heidegger, the pre-Socratics understood Being as physis (φύσις), which he translates as “what is emerging into light, coming out of concealment and into presence, stepping forth, self-flourishing.”⁷

He often uses the German word Walten (translated as “sway” by Polt and Fried) to designate physis — this has the meaning of “prevailing” and “dominating,” as in “swaying an opinion” or “holding sway [of something].” Later in the history of ancient Greece, the meaning of physis evolved to encompass the natural world overall. It is now conventionally translated as “nature,” which seems somewhat limited now compared to the original meaning of the term. Physis and its proto-Indo-European root -bhu are the etymological stems of many of the words we use today related to being: to be in English, fui in Latin, bist in German.⁸

Physis also gave us the word “physics,” and of course, “metaphysics.” “Unconcealment” or “disclosure,” another important term used by Heidegger and intrinsically linked to physis is aletheia in Greek, which is conventionally translated as “truth.” Before it meant reason or logic, Logos and its verb declension legein originally meant collecting, harvesting, gathering (zu sammeln in German) — it was used by Homer in that sense. Legein led to the Latin ligere, and the German lesen, which means to read, i.e., to pick out words, but it can also mean to harvest, in an old-fashioned way⁹.

For Heidegger, Logos was originally tied to Being, and existed in harmony with it, and he analyses pre-Socratics texts to prove this. He starts with Heraclitus’ notoriously cryptic fragments.

Here is Heraclitus’ fragment 1 in Ancient Greek (I emphasised the terms that Heidegger will cover in more detail):

τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει· τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται

A conventional translation:¹⁰

Of this Word’s being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Word, they are like the unexperienced experiencing words and deeds such as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its nature and show how it is. Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep. (B1)

Heidegger’s somewhat convoluted translation of the same fragment:

But while Logos constantly remains itself, human beings behave as those who do not comprehend (axunetoi), both before they have heard and after they have first heard. For everything becomes a being (kata ton logon tonde), in accordance with and in consequence of this Logos; yet they (human beings) resemble those who have never dared anything through experience, although they attempt words and works such as I carry out, laying out each thing (kata phusin), according to Being, and explicating how it behaves. But as for the other human beings (the other human beings as they all are, hoi polloi the many), what they really do while awake is concealed from them, just as what they did in their sleep conceals itself from them again afterward.

In this fragment, what Heraclitus really meant by Logos is still a subject of debate, and in some translations Logos is still left as it is in the original Greek.¹¹

Heidegger here interpreted Logos as close in meaning to physis, i.e., Being. At first glance, we might think that Logos here means “discourse” (and Logos could already have that meaning in Heraclitus’ time), since the fragment states: “men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it.” This phrase seems to imply that the Logos can be heard, like a speech. However, the fragment also says that the uncomprehending are trying to get to the Logos through words — epeia in ancient Greek, which gave us “epic” in English — and yet remain unexperienced, so Logos here cannot mean mere words. This fragment indicates that comprehending Logos is not the same as hearing words, and that those who talk and act but do not grasp Logos are as unaware, as absent as when they are asleep.

Fragment 2 tells us: “τοῦ λόγου δ’ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν”, conventionally translated as “Though the Logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.”

For Heidegger, in these two fragments, Logos is used in the other sense of the term: gathering, and he interprets it as the constant gathering of beings. By beings, Heidegger means all that is. In this sense Logos is very close to Being itself.

He mentions a few other fragments that point to people’s ignorance or misunderstanding of Logos as a collection of Beings — i.e., a gathering together of what is. Here is Fragment 72, which is quite similar in meaning to fragment 1 and 2:

“ᾧ μάλιστα διηενκῶς ὁμιλοῦσι λόγῳ τῷ τὰ ὅλα διοικοῦντι, τούτῳ διαφέρονται, καὶ οἵς καθ’ ἡμέραν ἐγκυροῦσι, ταῦτα αὐτοῖς ξένα φαίνεται”

“for they turn their backs on that with which they traffic the most, Logos, and what they run into every day appears alien to them.”

and fragment 34:

“ἀξύνετοι ἀκούσαντες κωφοῖσιν ἐοίκασι· φάτις αὐτοῖσιν μαρτυρεῖ παρεόντας ἀπεῖναι”

“Hearing they do not understand, like the deaf. Of them does the saying bear witness: ‘present, they are absent.’”

One of the lessons from these fragments for Heidegger, when it comes to Logos, is that words and hearing are authentic insofar as they are related to Logos and to Being. People encounter Being all the time and use words but the majority of them (οἱ πολλοὶ, “hoi polloi”) do not understand Being and are “absent-present.” At the other end of the spectrum, for Heidegger, poets and thinkers (especially philosophers) are the masters of Logos. Indeed, Logos is not easy to apprehend, and it’s probably better that way:

Thus Being, Logos, as the gathered harmony, is not easily available for everyman at the same price, but is concealed, as opposed to that harmony which is always a mere equalizing, the elimination of tension, leveling: ἁρμονίη ἀφανὴϛ φανερῆϛ κρείττων, “the harmony that does not show itself (immediately and without further ado) is more powerful than the harmony that is (always) evident” (fragment 54).¹²

For Heidegger, poetry, and in particular, Greek tragedy, is among the greatest of manifestations of Being. So he turns to Antigone, Sophocles’ poetic tragedy to understand how Being is expressed in it. The focus of this article is Logos, so I won’t go into the detail of his commentary on Antigone. Suffice it to say, he concludes from this text and additional Heraclitus fragments that conflict (polemos/πόλεμος, sometimes translated as “war”) is an intrinsic part of Being and that Being is a gathering of extremes in opposition with each other.¹³ Being is also gewalttätig (“violent”), which means that it must use violence to leave the heimlich, the comfortable and familiar, to explore the unheimlich, the uncanny or disquieting, which is what poets and philosophers do best. If this sounds familiar, maybe you’ve read Bryan’s post on Novelty and Safety, or heard him describe this phenomenon.

Heidegger then moves on to comment on Parmenides’ fragments and uncovers more insights about the pre-Socratics’ understanding of Logos and Being. Parmenides’ fragment 5 states: “τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι,” which translates literally to “but thinking and Being are the same.” Heidegger prefers to say that they belong to each other. In other words, they are mutually inclusive, but neither identical nor equivalent.¹⁴

Heidegger’s understanding of noein (νοεῖν) also diverges from convention. He translates it as “apprehending” (vernehmen), instead of “thinking”:

On the one hand, to apprehend (vernehmen) means to take in (hin-nehmen), to let something come to oneself — namely, what shows itself, what appears. On the other hand, to apprehend [in German] means to interrogate a witness, to call him to account, and thus to comprehend the state of affairs, to determine.¹⁵

After arguing for the unity between apprehension (noein) and Being in fragment 5, he points out another unity between apprehension (noein) and Logos, in relationship with Being in fragment 6: “χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ᾽ ἐὸν ἔμμεναι.” The conventional translation is: “It is necessary both to say and to think that being is,” which Heidegger, in his tortuous way, translates as “‘Needful is the gathered setting-down as well as the apprehending of this: the being (is) Being” — which sounds slightly better in German: “Not tut das gesammelte Hinstellen sowohl als das Vernehmen von diesem: das Seiend (ist) Sein.”¹⁶

In other words, Heidegger wants to emphasize that, for the pre-Socratics, apprehension, Being, and Logos are united. They cannot exist in isolation, though later philosophers will separate them.

In Parmenides the meaning of Logos/legein has already begun to evolve: it no longer means the gatheredness of beings. Now Logos is part of the effort to apprehend Being; Logos is still united with apprehension (noein), but Being has separated from them. To illuminate this new meaning of Logos, Heidegger uses another fragment from Heraclitus (fragment 93):

“ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει”

“The lord whose soothsaying happens at Delphi (oute legei oute kruptei), he neither gathers nor conceals, (alla semainei) but rather he gives indications.”¹⁷

Legei is used here in contrast with concealing (kruptei, which gave us “crypto”), so it implies that legein means unconcealing (rather than gathering). This is where Logos shows a new meaning — discourse — which is not just words, but a way for human beings to uncover Being, through meaningful language. Logos as language is a way for Dasein to open to the world and bring it out of concealment, by naming things. The act of naming (“indications” in the passage above) allows a shared apprehension of the indexical world. Epic poetry represents an early use of this power; in Homer we find the initiation of the history of the Greeks.

Fragment 8 — lines 34-36 also illustrates the close link between thinking, Being, and Logos:

“ταὐτὸν δ’ ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε καὶ οὕνεκεν ἔστι νόημα. οὐ γὰρ ἄνευ τοῦ ἐόντος, ἐν ᾧ πεφατισμένον ἐστιν, εὑρήσεις τὸ νοεῖν.”

Conventionally translated as “Thinking and the thought ‘it is’ are the same. For without the being in relation to which it is uttered you cannot find thinking.”¹⁸

As before, this fragment indicates that we have apprehension and Logos only insofar as we have Being, when noein and Logos are close to Being, similarly to Parmenides’ fragment 7 and the Heraclitus’ fragments we examined earlier.

Contrary to conventional belief, Heidegger thinks that Heraclitus and Parmenides say the same thing about Being, even though they say different things. If that seems paradoxical, it’s because Heidegger wants to challenge the traditional rules of logic applied to the history of Western philosophy:

One finds nothing out of order in the occurrence of such oppositions — here Being, there becoming — because they confirm a rule that applies from the inception of philosophy onward, a rule that supposedly spans its entire history, namely that when one philosopher says A, the other says B, but when the latter says A, then the former says B. Of course, if someone asserts the opposite, that in the history of philosophy all thinkers have at bottom said the same thing, then this is taken as yet another outlandish imposition on everyday common sense. What use, then, is the multifaceted and complex history of Western philosophy, if they all say the same thing anyway? Then one philosophy would be enough. Everything has always already been said. And yet this “same” possesses, as its inner truth, the inexhaustible wealth of what is on every day as if that day were its first.¹⁹

The decline of Being and the supremacy of Logos

After his reinterpretation of the pre-Socratics to argue for an original unity between Being and Logos, Heidegger moves to Plato and Aristotle, to explain how Being began to lose its original sway, and how Logos came to dominate Being.

With Plato, the word idea begins to define Being (physis) and this leads to a division of existence from essence, with Being becoming an imperfect reflection of its own essence. The idea becomes the paradigm, the ideal to which all Being must aspire.

In this part of the book, Heidegger’s writing is uncharacteristically clear and light in technical jargon, so I will quote him directly to elaborate on this and other points:

However, as soon as the essence of Being comes to consist in whatness (idea), then whatness, as the Being of beings, is also what is most in being about beings (das Seiendste am Seienden). On the one hand, whatness is now what really is, ontōs on. Being as idea is now promoted to the status of what really is, and beings themselves, which previously held sway, sink to the level of what Plato calls mē on— that which really should not be and really is not either— because beings always deform the idea, the pure look, by actualizing it, insofar as they incorporate it into matter. On the other hand, the idea becomes the paradeigma, the model. At the same time, the idea necessarily becomes the ideal. What is produced by imitation really “is” not, but only participates in Being, (methexis) participation. The chorismos has been ripped open, the cleft between the idea as what really is, the prototype and archetype, and what really is not, the imitation and likeness.

Now, appearing takes on still another sense on the basis of the idea. That which appears, appearance, is no longer physis, the emerging sway, nor the self-showing of the look, but instead it is the likeness that rises to the surface. Inasmuch as the likeness always falls short of its prototype, what appears is mere appearance, really a seeming, which now means a defect. Now on and phainomenon (what is and what appears) are disjoined. This involves still another essential consequence. Because the idea is what really is, and the idea is the prototype, all opening up of beings must be directed toward equaling the prototype, resembling the archetype, directing itself according to the idea. The truth of physis—alētheia as the unconcealment that essentially unfolds in the emerging sway—now becomes homoiōsis and mimēsis: resemblance, directedness, the correctness of seeing, the correctness of apprehending as representing.²⁰

With Aristotle, Logos, on the other hand, becomes assertion (die Aussage) and as such the place of truth, and Being is turned into the subject of Logos. In Parmenides, logic has begun to separate from Being, though it remains in harmony with it. But by Aristotle, logic has broken away from Being, and begun to dominate it. Heidegger explains this evolution beautifully, while also restating what we uncovered earlier about the original relationship between Being and Logos:

Logos, in the sense of saying and asserting, now becomes the domain and place where decisions are made about truth—that is, originally, about the unconcealment of beings and thus about the Being of beings. In the inception, Logos as gathering is the happening of unconcealment; Logos is grounded in un-concealment and is in service to it. But now, Logos as assertion becomes the locus of truth in the sense of correctness. We arrive at Aristotle’s proposition according to which Logos as assertion is what can be true or false. Truth, which was originally, as unconcealment, a happening of the beings themselves that held sway, and was stewarded by means of gathering, now becomes a property of Logos. In becoming a property of assertion, truth does not just shift its place; it changes its essence. From the point of view of the assertion, the true is attained when saying sticks to what it makes an assertion about, when the assertion is directed by beings. Truth becomes the correctness of Logos. Thus, Logos steps out of its original inclusion in the happening of unconcealment in such a way that decisions about truth, and so about beings, are made on the basis of Logos and with reference back to it—and not only decisions about beings, but even, and in advance, about Being. Logos is now legein ti kata tinos, saying something about something. That about which something is said is in each case what lies at the basis of the assertion, what lies before it, hupokeimenon (subjectum). From the point of view of the Logos that has become independent as assertion, Being displays itself as this lying-there.

Furthermore, Being is now analyzed and placed into categories by Logos:

That which lies at the basis can be exhibited in asserting in various ways: as what is in such and such a state, as what is so and so large, as what is related in this and that way. Being-in-a-state, Being-large, Being-related are determinations of Being. Because, as ways of Being-said, they have been created from Logos—and because to assert is katēgorein—the determinations of the Being of beings are called katēgoriai, categories. On this basis, the theory of Being and of the determinations of beings as such becomes a theory that investigates the categories and their order. The goal of all ontology is the theory of categories. Today it is taken to be self-evident, as it has been for a long time, that the essential characteristics of Being are categories. But at bottom, this is strange. It becomes intelligible only when we grasp that, and how, Logos not only separates itself from physis, but at the same time comes forth over against physis as the standard-setting domain that becomes the place of origin for the determinations of Being.

From Aristotle onwards, Logos reaches a level of authority and abstraction from Being, so that whenever there is a discrepancy between Logos and Being, Logos always wins because it determines what can or cannot be: “But Logos, phasis, the saying in the sense of the assertion, decides so originally about the Being of beings that in each case where one saying stands against another, where a contra-diction occurs, antiphasis, then the contradictory cannot be. In contrast, that which does not contradict itself is at least capable of Being.”²¹

Conclusion

Heidegger references and quotes many great Western philosophers in this book, paying homage to them and challenging them at the same time: Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche. To close the loop on Schopenhauer: in On the Origin of Logic, Bryan describes how the author of The World as Will and Representation observed that some pre-Socratics, at some point, started to codify empirical observations into abstract laws of reasoning, which gave us the theory of logic. Heidegger was also interested in the history of logic and in the pre-Socratics. His finding, that in these early days Logos was closer to Being seems parallel to Schopenhauer’s argument, that the rules of logic come from present lived experience, live conversation, and from empirical observations. For Schopenhauer, although logic is not particularly useful in practice, but is a “perfectly safe branch of knowledge,” for Heidegger logic as “ratio” has become our master and restricts our Being.

There seems to be another parallel with another of Bryan’s posts: In Aristotle, Heidegger finds the Logos becoming abstracted, increasingly detached from our Being, similarly to the abstraction of the idea of “perfection” that Bryan describes in Spinoza.

Heidegger’s critique was certainly influenced by Nietzsche, and there are a few references to him in this book. In the Gay Science and “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche takes down science, logic and even the concept of truth as tacit social agreements that give us a false sense of certainty, which is also a criticism of Heidegger’s. Heidegger points out that Nietzsche already noticed how vacuous the concept of Being is today, but he has a different explanation for it. For Nietzsche, Logos is a mere social convention, but for Heidegger it has become a dominant force over Being. They both praise poetry, art and (as usual) philosophy as life-affirming (or should we say Being-affirming?) pursuits.

Metaphysics seems like one of the most abstract topics there is, and yet I’ve got a lot of practical advice from this book. Some of the life lessons I’ve taken from it include: beware of what seems obvious and easy, anything that offers ready answers, reassuring certainty and consensus. Avoid hackneyed language. Being is about questioning more than it is about having answers. Striving and conflict are part of it, as is the quest for the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unheimlich. Great ways to explore the unfamiliar and strengthen your “emerging sway” are through νοεῖν (thinking), philosophizing, making art and using language in novel, poetic ways — and what better way to do this than through reading and writing about a rich philosophical view like Heidegger’s?

Martin Heidegger, Gregory Fried, Richard Polt, Introduction to Metaphysics Second Edition, p. 152.↩
Ibid. Translators’ Introduction.↩
Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Kahn, Introduction à la Métaphysique — Avertissement du traducteur.↩
Ibid. p39.↩
Martin Heidegger, Einfuehrung In Die Metaphysik, p.31.↩
Ibid. p93. Heidegger is quoting Hegel’s Encyclopedia §19, WW vol. VI, 29.↩
Ibid. p47.↩
Ibid. p54.↩
Ibid. p95. For more information about the fascinating etymology of Logos, have a look at this page.↩
Graham, Daniel W., “Heraclitus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL. The translation they use comes from http://www.heraclitusfragments.com, maintained by Randy Hoyt, who himself got the English translations from John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy (1920). See also this site for Burnet’s insightful footnotes on the translation. Heidegger notes that translating Logos as the Word, in reference to Christ, as was done here, is very strange and probably far from Heraclitus’ intended meaning.↩
see William Harris, Heraclitus, The Complete Fragments, link.↩
Martin Heidegger, Gregory Fried, Richard Polt, Introduction to Metaphysics Second Edition, p. 102.↩
Heraclitus says in fragment 53: “πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστ” — “War is the father of all and the king of all” and in fragment 80 “εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεμον ἐόντα ξυνόν” — “We must know that war is common to all.”↩
In this way Heidegger self-consciously denies a rule of basic set theory, in which “two sets are equal if they contain each other.” (Set theory dates from the 19th Century.) Heidegger denies that mutual inclusivity is the same as equality.↩
Martin Heidegger, Gregory Fried, Richard Polt, Introduction to Metaphysics: Second Edition, p. 106.↩
Ibid., p. 107.↩
Ibid., p. 130.↩
Ibid., p. 132.↩
Ibid., p. 74.↩
Ibid., p. 141. Here, Heidegger may have been influenced by Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873): “Every word immediately becomes a concept, in as much as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.”↩
Ibid., p. 142-143.↩

Introductions to Hegel

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 22:02:33 GMT

Today I asked Twitter to recommend introductions to Hegel written in English.

Here were the responses in order of length:

Richard Kroner: Hegel’s Philosophical Development (1948), 42 pages
H. S. Harris: Hegel: Phenomenology and System (1995), 128 pages (2 votes)
Peter Singer: Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (2001), 152 pages (2 votes)
GRG Mure: Introduction to Hegel (1940), 204 pages
Josiah Royce: Lectures on Modern Idealism (2007), 280 pages
Stephen Houlgate: An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (2009), 332 pages
Frederick Beiser: Hegel (2005), 384 pages (2 votes)
Richard Dien Winfield: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures (2013), 406 pages
Terry Pinkard: Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (1994), 463 pages
Richard Kroner’s introduction to the Early Theological Writings (1950)

For Kojève’s Hegel:

Alexandre Kojève: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1939), 304 pages
Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man (2020), 464 pages

I compiled a list of the tweets in this thread.

I received a microgrant

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 09:51:00 GMT

I’m thrilled to announce that Ben Yeoh has awarded me a ThenDoBetter grant to support the project I’m working on. You can read Ben’s writing here.

I am developing a methodology for healthy philosophical inquiry, which aims to provide better strategies for thinking about problems at an individual and collective level. This approach will identify warning signs in thinking and discourse. I’ll propose strategies which have worked historically to prevent us from doing either too much abstraction without testing, or too much action without reflection.

Philosophy must be contextual and alive. It is just as dangerous to leave intellectuals in an insulated realm of abstractions as it is to encourage unwise action by those with no understanding of history and theoretical context.

I think of this approach as “neither pure theory nor pure action, but both at once” or Neither/Nor for short. We need both strategies to thrive.

The current consensus is that truth is something objective and static, and that the scientific method is the only way to unveil this truth. This narrow conception of truth, which restricts how science must be practiced and communicated (“scientism”) impedes us rather than empowering us and is preventing the experimentation we need for progress. Thus, rather than something static we uncover, we should be aiming for a practical methodology for inquiry.

I do not oppose science but I believe that a narrow vision of it will limit our ability to understand the problems we face. However, I also oppose relativism and resist the modern tendency to dichotomize which makes it easy to leap to the conclusion that if there is no objective truth, then the only alternative is the opposite extreme: “everything is equal.”

As the first part of this project, I am working on an article, which will become a chapter in a book that I’m writing, about how a better understanding of philosophy and history can help innovation. This is a project I’ve been working on for the past two years (self-funding), but I’m now out of savings, just as I near the first public milestone. As part of writing the article, I plan to record podcasts and video lectures.

My main goal for this stage and for all my work is to move beyond theoretical formulations. I seek to also test and enact the conceptual framework I am elaborating, through a series of dialogical experiments. In the near future, I will look at how conceptions of selfhood have changed over time, and what impact this has had on society. I will question when a commitment to abstract truth might contribute to technological and scientific progress, and when such a commitment might impede progress. I’m also planning a practical guide to the technique of Buddhist “dependent origination,” which promises to end suffering through an analytical method. These would appear in a series of lectures, podcasts, and gatherings.

As part of this effort, I’m drafting video lectures on YouTube. You can also see a 2 minute summary of one of the main ideas here.

The microgrant has allowed me more time to make progress on this writing and the conversations that will support it.

If any of this sounds exciting, I’m searching for collaborators, so please reach out.

If you want daily updates on this work, please check out my Patreon. I post everything there, nearly all of it for free. If you just want the big news, please check out my Substack.

What I learned this month

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 10:14:48 GMT

On 1 November, I began writing. I intended to post something every day on this blog, even if I didn’t promote it much. It was a meant to be a long drafting-in-public experiment.

If you’re reading this, then I succeeded, at least in the posting: this is my thirtieth post of November.

I was surprised by how much I had to say. Perhaps I should not have been, given how seriously I’ve taken my research over the past few years. But I’d committed myself to writing just a few hundred words per day. If I had an aim in mind, it was something like 300 words. The actual average — 885 words — was higher than I’d expected. In total, I wrote 26,543 words, excluding the copious blockquotes, or about triple what I wrote in 2019, when last I tried this.¹

I began with a post on the Zettelkasten in which I reflected on what (and how) I’ve learned over the past two years. That was more of a meta-post, but so far it has been the most popular by about an order of magnitude. That doesn’t mean much; I’m planning to revisit and revise many of the other posts. I’m likely to send some to my newsletter, and I may try to get them published elsewhere as well.

It was useful to have public (therefore edited) writing as a daily ritual, though I must admit it made me anxious most days until I’d posted, and also that it was sometimes damnably inconvenient. But I think the perpetual return to certain topics clarified my thinking on them. And even the knowledge that someone could read what I’d written made me pay more attention to the editing process.

On the other hand, I have a deep love for the aesthetics of writing. When reading, I pay a great deal of attention to style. This month, in my writing, that was not the top priority, and I do not feel that what I wrote this month was beautiful.

Before I began, I had little idea what I would wind up writing. I found in writing my series on the West, which occupied me for exactly half the month, that I am more interested in history than I would have guessed. I also wrote more about philosophy than I had intended. I thought philosophy would be a background to my thinking rather than becoming quite as foregrounded as it did.

I also have not finished that thread on the West, by the way; I’m tracking progress as “breadcrumbs”. In many ways the month is unfinished. I have yet to write about the relationship between art and science, Kuhn’s take on Renaissance painting, or his take on the continuity between theology and science. Though those were some of my main intentions for the month, it does not really bother me that I didn’t reach them. I feel good about having future writing defined.

I am proud of a few of the pieces. Many I have yet to re-read, so I may compile a list later, but a few that come to mind regularly are Vision & Abstraction and the series that starts with On Perfection. I also liked writing How the West Was Spun, even though I feel it’s unfinished.

I enjoyed writing about several people who have been on my mind — no, not just Kuhn and Schopenhauer, but also A. C. Graham and Surendranath Dasgupta.

As in Novembers past, I tried not to drink. In 2018 and 2019 I succeeded. I’m not the first to have written that 2020 was a write-off; I didn’t even try. This month I slipped up a few times. But in those other Novembers, the not drinking was the primary point, whereas this year it felt like the writing was primary. I feel good about November as a whole.

I don’t think it is, for me, a manageable pace to post on the blog every single day, though I’m glad I did it this month. Going forward, I’d like to get into a rhythm where I post each day Monday to Wednesday to get some momentum, edit and reflect on Thursday and Friday, then take a break over the weekend.

I will probably continue this next year, with what is becoming a tradition.

Thank you for reading. It means the world to me.

I also posted daily in November 2018, when I wrote 19,464 words (648 per day). In 2019, I wrote 7,701 words (256 per day).↩

Perfection: A real nuisance

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 22:45:48 GMT

Yesterday I got distracted by Schopenhauer’s account of how logic. And we will have to come back to Logos, the etymological root of logic, eventually, both in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (lectures 1935; book 1953), as well as in the work of one of his famous students, Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958).

But as we reach the penultimate post of November (this is my twenty-ninth), I can’t quite stretch my brain to either.

So let’s keep it light and stick to Schopenhauer today, shall we? This comes from the Appendix, “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,” The World as Will and Representation, Volume I (1818), translated by E. F. J. Payne, 499.

In this section Schopenhauer is summarizing Kant for us. Although he hates Hegel, Schopenhauer always has qualified but nice things to say about Kant:

Kant’s greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect, and that on this account they cannot be known according to what they may be in themselves.

He is a big fan of Kant’s influence, but not a big fan of England’s (he frequently complains about how nobody in England has read Kant):

The change of tone and of the metaphysical background that has appeared in German works on natural science since Kant is remarkable; before him things were the same as they still are in England.

Kant’s merit, for Schopenhauer, is that he fights against the tendency toward the “unreflecting pursuit of the laws of phenomenon, the enhancement of these to eternal truths, and the raising of the fleeting phenomenon to the real inner being of the world, in short, realism, not disturbed in its delusion by any reflection […]”

This is important. The default position before Kant is a kind of naïve realism. You assume that your experience is real, you apply “reason” and form abstract/eternal truths, and then you take your fleeting and unexamined experiences to say something about fundamental reality. Earlier philosophers don’t examine how these perceptions themselves are formed, nor do they examine language.

Schopenhauer then notes that Berkeley (1685–1753; whom he likes much less than he likes Kant) and Malebranche (1638–1715) made some strides in the direction of idealism.

More importantly for our purposes, he notes that this view, i.e., that perceptions are fleeting and misleading, “prevails in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia,” by which he presumably means within Buddhism and Hinduism.¹ Once again, the ideas may actually have come from the East, as Alison Gopnik has argued for Hume’s “bundle” view of the self, which she found suspiciously similar to the Buddhist position (i.e., that no true self exists).

If what came before was, for Schopenhauer, a kind of naïve realism, then this naïveté was accompanied by a kind of naïve morality:

Ethics was also treated by that realistic philosophy according to the laws of the phenomenon, which it regarded as absolute and holding good even of the thing-in-itself. Therefore ethics was based now on a doctrine of perfect happiness, now on the will of the Creator, and finally on the notion of perfection.

So just as earlier “Western” thinkers perceive “reality” in a straightforward way, they also perceive “the good” in a straightforward way which they assume reflects the will of God. Ethics moves from happiness to the will of Creator, and finally to an abstract “notion of perfection” that need not invoke any God.

I’ve asked before: What does perfection mean?

According to Schopenhauer, not a whole lot, without context:

In and by itself, such a concept is entirely empty and void of content, for it denotes a mere relation that acquires significance only from the things to which it is applied. “To be perfect” means nothing more than “to correspond to some concept presupposed and given,” a concept which must therefore be first framed, and without which the perfection is an unknown abstract quantity and consequently means nothing at all when expressed alone.

Notice that Schopenhauer jumps immediately to the abstract form of perfection, and not the indexical sense of “complete” that Spinoza described as preceding the formation of abstract categories.

He finds this approach tautological:

Now if we want to make the concept “mankind” into a tacit assumption, and accordingly to set it up as a moral principle for aspiring to human perfection, then in this case we merely say: “Men ought to be as they ought to be,” and we are just as wise as we were before.

But then he backs up to Spinoza’s point, that etymologically, perfection relates to completeness:

In fact, “perfect” is very nearly a mere synonym of “numerically complete,” since it signifies that, in a given case or individual, all the predicates that lie in the concept of its species appear in support of it, and hence are actually present.

The idea that perfection once meant actually present is important; see my earlier mention of indexicality. The first kind of perfection is something you can point to in the world as complete or finished, something which is not abstract at all.

I find Schopenhauer’s exasperation at notion of perfection quite funny. “Mere idle display of words” and “a real nuisance”!

Therefore, the concept of “perfection,” if used absolutely and in the abstract, is a word devoid of idea, and so also is all talk about the “most perfect of all beings,” and the like. All this is a mere idle display of words. Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century this concept of perfection and imperfection had become current coin; indeed, it was the hinge on which almost all questions of morality and even of theology turned. It was on everyone’s lips, so that ultimately it became a real nuisance.

He laments the fact that intelligent people wasted brain power on this:

We see even the best authors of the time, Lessing for example, entangled most deplorably in perfections and imperfections and wrestling with them. Here any thinking man was bound to feel, vaguely at any rate, that this concept is without any positive content, since, like an algebraical symbol, it indicates a mere relation in abstracto.

To me it seems important that Schopenhauer laments that minds were wasted on a seemingly pointless abstract issue. I think this kind of lament may be characteristic of “the West”. The controversy has since melted away.

Later, to give another example, Otto Neurath (1882–1945) would argue that both magic and science involve observing regularities and trying to influence them to our advantage. The problem is with theology, which came between the ancient age of magic and the modern age of science. Theology, to Neurath, does nothing more than add useless metaphysical arguments.

I’ve also heard John McWhorter argue this about Thomas Aquinas, something like, “You almost feel bad for the guy, that he didn’t have anything [other than theology] to devote that enormous brain to.”

I’m beginning to think that such accusations are themselves a philosophical tendency in “the West.” Schopenhauer, at least in his youth, is insanely excited about German Idealism and the path to forward progress in philosophy that it represents. But it wouldn’t surprise me to hear a scientist today lament the use of Schopenhauer’s own enormous intellect toward “useless” metaphysical questions.²

I can’t really parse the last bit of Schopenhauer’s paragraph. I think he’s saying that action is related to the thing-in-itself, whereas the phenomena are not. But I do love the fact that he comes to see sensory experience as an “unstable and insubstantial dream,” like Chuang-tzu dreaming he is a butterfly.

Kant, as we have already said, entirely separated the undeniable, great ethical significance of actions from the phenomenon and its laws, and showed that the former directly concerned the thing-in-itself, the innermost nature of the world, whereas the latter, i.e., time and space, and all that fills them and is arranged in them according to the causal law, are to be regarded as an unstable and insubstantial dream.

I’d be super curious if he knew anything about Taoism.↩
Though it must be noted that by the standards of the “Western canon”, Schopenhauer is positively brimming with life and practicality.↩

Perfection of Logic

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 22:45:48 GMT

This continues directly on from yesterday’s post on Schopenhauer.

Today I’ll finish Schopenhauer’s line of reasoning about the perfection of logic, which I began with Spinoza’s take on perfection. You might also wish to revisit what I wrote about Indian logic

Schopenhauer has argued that the procedure of reason must, in Ancient Athens, have been rendered in “abstract propositions.” And I’ve argued that just as Spinoza observes “perfection” to move from a concrete adjective, perfect, to an abstract noun, perfection, so Schopenhauer’s concrete verb, which I’m calling reasoning, becomes the abstract noun reason.

Schopenhauer continues, describing how these abstract propositions would be used:

These [propositions] would then be put at the head of the inquiry, just like those propositions jointly acknowledged and concerned with the material of the inquiry, as the fixed canon of debate, to which it would always be necessary to look back and to refer. In this way, what had hitherto been followed as if by tacit agreement or practised by instinct would be consciously recognized as law, and given formal expression.

Just as people once agreed on the concrete propositions relevant to their particular debate, in any given conversation, the abstract propositions of “reason” would be agreed to in advance. But of course these would then apply to all debates, or all those that chose to follow this convention.

Schopenhauer proceeds to list a bunch of rules of logic as examples.

Gradually, more or less perfect expressions for logical principles were found, such as the principles…”

of contradiction,
of sufficient reason,
of the excluded middle,
the dictum de omni et nullo,
and then the special rules of syllogistic reasoning, as for example
- Ex meris particularibus aut negativis nihil sequitur
- a rationato ad rationem non valet consequentia
- and so on.

(I couldn’t find all of them.)

This did not take place instantaneously, however:

That all this came about only slowly and very laboriously, and, until Aristotle, remained very incomplete, is seen in part from the awkward and tedious way in which logical truths are brought out in many of Plato’s dialogues, and even better from what Sextus Empiricus tells us of the controversies of the Megarics concerning the easiest and simplest logical laws, and the laborious way in which they made such laws plain and intelligible (Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos, 1. 8, p. 112 seqq.).

It’s fascinating that what eventually become the universal rules of logic had to be invented (or discovered), and that this involved individual people. This relates to Kuhn’s point about Newton’s laws, to which I alluded yesterday. What took centuries of experimentation to establish come to seem almost like tautologies that no amount of observation could refute.

Just as with Newton, Aristotelian logic took time to be perfected, but once perfected, it seems self-evident. It seems obvious to the point of tautology. This is in spite of the fact that Sextus Empiricus describes the great difficulty at articulating them.

Schopenhauer continues:

Aristotle collected, arranged, and corrected all that had been previously discovered, and brought it to an incomparably higher state of perfection.

But what does he mean by perfection?

Yes, he might just mean “perfect” in the sense of complete. But it’s clear that perfection here also involves abstraction, and universality across previous debates. You might even call this consensus a kind of homogenization.

But did Aristotle perfect them himself? Had he no giants on whose shoulders to stand, as Newton had? Schopenhauer thinks that the period of imperfection proves that Aristotle did perfect them.

He therefore dismisses another possibility…

If we thus consider how the course of Greek culture had prepared for and led up to Aristotle’s work, we shall be little inclined to give credit to the statement of Persian authors reported to us by Sir William Jones, who was much prejudiced in their favour, namely that Callisthenes found among the Indians a finished system of logic which he sent to his uncle Aristotle (Asiatic Researches, Vol. IV, p. 163).

Wait, what? Aristotle might have gotten his logic from India? And a European philosopher says this is impossible? That sounds familiar!

I’ll come back to Callisthenes tomorrow.

I reproduce the rest of Schopenhauer’s argument just because it’s funny how bored he is by logic:

It is easy to understand that in the dreary Middle Ages the Aristotelian logic was bound to be extremely welcome to the argumentative spirit of the scholastics, which, in the absence of real knowledge, feasted only on formulas and words. It is easy to see that this logic, even in its mutilated Arabic form, would be eagerly adopted, and soon elevated to the centre of all knowledge. Although it has since sunk from its position of authority, it has nevertheless retained up to our own time the credit of a self-contained, practical, and extremely necessary science. Even in our day the Kantian philosophy, which really took its foundation-stone from logic, has awakened a fresh interest in it. In this respect, that is to say, as a means to knowing the essential nature of reason, it certainly merits such interest.

On the Origin of Logic

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 16:05:48 GMT

Last week I wrote on Spinoza’s view of perfection. Today I was planning to look at Schopenhauer’s perspective on the origin perfection. I was therefore searching The World as Will and Representation for the word “perfection”, as one does, and came across a fascinating passage in Volume I (1818), §9.¹

In this section, Schopenhauer discusses logic, beginning with a description of its structure. He notes the long chains that can be formed from basic syllogistic rules. He also describes how concepts can be combined into what he calls “spheres,” but they are basically Venn diagrams, which is interesting, since John Venn, whose name such circles now bear, described them in 1880. Schopenhauer credits Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–1790) for first doing it with squares, and Euler (1707–1783) with circles, but Wikipedia also notes that Christian Weise (1642–1708) had done this as well.

Here are examples that Schopenhauer uses in 1818:

This schematism of concepts, which has been fairly well explained in several textbooks, can be used as the basis of the theory of judgements, as also of the whole syllogistic theory, and in this way the discussion of both becomes very easy and simple. For all the rules of this theory can be seen from it according to their origin, and can be deduced and explained.

Then he seemingly begins to bore himself, and makes an interesting turn:

But it is not necessary to load the memory with these rules, for logic can never be of practical use, but only of theoretical interest for philosophy. For although it might be said that logic is related to rational thinking as thorough-bass is to music, and also as ethics is to virtue, if we take it less precisely, or as aesthetics is to art, it must be borne in mind that no one ever became an artist by studying aesthetics, that a noble character was never formed by a study of ethics, that men composed correctly and beautifully long before Rameau, and that we do not need to be masters of thorough-bass in order to detect discords. Just as little do we need to know logic in order to avoid being deceived by false conclusions.

Logic is only one tool for reasoning. Moreover, theory has little to do with practice. Knowing all about logic in theoretical terms means little or nothing for actual reasoning. This was certainly my experience in the only philosophy course I took in college, “Introductory Logic,” which put me off philosophy for nearly two decades (having before that class thought that I might make it my major).

Schopenhauer thinks that Aesthetics and ethics must have “some use in practice,” though “in a much less degree” than the thorough-bass has for music, and “mainly a negative one.” Of logic, “not even this much can be conceded. It is merely knowing in the abstract what everyone knows in the concrete.”

Not even logicians use logic in their daily lives:

Even the most learned logician lays these rules altogether aside in his actual thinking. […] To seek to make practical use of logic would therefore mean to seek to derive with unspeakable trouble from universal rules what is immediately known to us with the greatest certainty in the particular case. It is just as if a man were to consult mechanics with regard to his movements, or physiology with regard to his digestion; and one who has learnt logic for practical purposes is like a man who should seek to train a beaver to build its lodge.

Logic takes what is embodied and natural and makes it awkward, theoretical, and unnatural. To think one must know the laws of physics in order to walk is as preposterous as training a beaver to build its lodge. This kind of instruction has no practical value. It is a self-contained system that affects nothing outside of itself:

Logic is therefore without practical use; nevertheless it must be retained, because it has philosophical interest as special knowledge of the organization and action of the faculty of reason. It is rightly regarded as an exclusive, self-subsisting, self-contained, finished, and perfectly safe branch of knowledge, to be scientifically treated by itself alone and independently of everything else, and also to be taught at the universities.

However, he argues, logic is needed in the study of how rational and abstract thought works, and therefore it is inherently important for philosophy. I’m skipping that section to get to the next paragraph, where he explains the origin of logic:

However little practical use logic may have, it cannot be denied that it was invented for practical purposes.

First, he describes the explosion of debate that occurs among the pre-Socratics, i.e., the Eleatics (whom I mentioned here), the Megarics, and the Sophists (whom I mentioned here). He refers to the “pleasure of debate” which becomes “almost a passion.”²

The first step towards logic was formally stating which propositions the two parties jointly acknowledged. “These propositions were at first concerned only with the material of the inquiry.” In other words, they were concrete, directly relevant to the current discussion, and agreed on by spoken consensus. But from this point, patterns were noticed in the ways that the debaters returned to the jointly acknowledged truth, and how they attempted deductions:

It was soon observed that, even in the way in which the debaters went back to the jointly acknowledged truth, and sought to deduce their assertions from it, certain forms and laws were followed, about which, although without any previous agreement, there was never any dispute. From this it was seen that these must be the peculiar and essentially natural method of reason itself, the formal way of investigating.

This is important. They noted certain patterns emerged in reasoning, and because nobody argued that these particular forms were themselves invalid, they must themselves be true. The rules of logic were inferred from an apparent lack of evidence against them.

This relates to a much later developments, involving two American philosophers:

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who argued that even the most axiomatic assertions must start from empirical observations.
W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000), who argued that even the rules of logic are empirical, in the sense that they must be learned by experience and could be disproved by experience.

You may notice in yourself a tendency to assume that rules of logic are not empirically learned, and that no amount of observation could refute them. Does the italicized phrase sound familiar? If you’ve read my work on Kuhn, then it should: See this tweet and the two that follow it.

Having inferred that there are general laws of reason, someone decided to codify these abstractly. Notice that the appeal is aesthetic: “it would look fine.”³

Now although this was not exposed to doubt and disagreement, some mind, systematic to the point of pedantry, nevertheless hit upon the idea that it would look fine, and would be the completion of methodical dialectic, if this formal part of all debating, this procedure of reason itself always conforming to law, were also expressed in abstract propositions.

A mind “systematic to the point of pedantry”! This phrase captures both how unnatural and how annoying logic is. Keep this phrase in mind, as it reminds me of something Nietzsche will say in the Genealogy of Morality about Socrates.

Here I will refer to the post I wrote on perfection. Spinoza notes that “perfect” originally means complete or finished, which was judged when the creator of an object ceased to work on it — i.e., a local and concrete judgement. It is only through inference from many single instances, performed by an external observer, which shifts the judgement of perfection to an abstract category. This is how the abstract idea of “perfection” comes about.

“Perfect” starts as an adjective which can be observed, but becomes an abstract noun: perfection.

I want to argue that Schopenhauer’s observation about logic is similar. First, the Greek schools attempt persuasion by whatever means necessary,⁴ by providing relevant evidence which is embedded in an embodied conversation. It is only through many iterations of these conversations, during which people reason with each other, that apparent laws emerge, and “reason” untethers itself from sociality. These are then thought to be the way that a new abstract idea, “reason,” must function.

“Reasoning” starts as a social verb, but becomes an abstract noun: reason.

Continued here.

There’s a translation available here; I’m using the E. F. J. Payne.↩
Just reminding myself to write about A. C. Graham’s description of the explosion of interest in logic around the same time in China.↩
This relates to arguments made by James C. Scott, about the aesthetic appeal of numeric accounting for states.↩
Sophistry means “Specious but fallacious reasoning; employment of arguments which are intentionally deceptive.” In other words, reasoning in a way that is not allowed according to some abstract set of rules.↩

The Aphoristic Form

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 20:59:48 GMT

Where does morality come from?

Some might resort immediately to human nature, but this, to me, is tantamount to saying that it has no origin. Nietzsche thinks it must be a cultural development, and that it may have developed relatively recently. In his 1887 “polemic” On the Genealogy of Morality, he sets out to explain his views about the matter — or, perhaps more accurately — to provoke and incense his readers into thinking about it for themselves.

Today I want to reflect on a provocation in his preface, and his description of how to digest his difficult material. Morality will have to wait.

In the final section of the preface (§8), Nietzsche gives a rather stunning disclaimer (Carol Diethe’s translation PDF; German here):

– If anyone finds this script incomprehensible and hard on the ears, I do not think the fault necessarily lies with me.

With whom, then, could it lie?

It can only be you, the reader. There’s no one else “here,” as it were.

Well the room is so stuffy I can hardly breathe. Everybody’s gone but me and you, and I can’t be the last to leave…

– Bob Dylan, “Pledging My Time,” Blonde on Blonde (1965)

This is a provocation, and his argument still has yet to begin. An author feels called to write, hears the call and obeys. This brings the book into existence. But the reader, too has felt called by the book, heard the call and obeyed.

The meaning exists between them, in an intersubjective space. This is a conversation — but it’s not necessarily going to be an easy one.

We’re in this together now, or so he seems to say. And Nietzsche’s not going to make it easy:

It is clear enough, assuming, as I do, that people have first read my earlier works without sparing themselves some effort: because they really are not easy to approach. With regard to my Zarathustra, for example, I do not acknowledge anyone as an expert on it if he has not, at some time, been both profoundly wounded and profoundly delighted by it, for only then may he enjoy the privilege of sharing, with due reverence, the halcyon element from which the book was born and its sunny brightness, spaciousness, breadth and certainty.

Not having read Zarathustra myself as of this writing, I’m immediately at “fault” (as he writes in the first sentence; Schuld can also mean “blame” or “guilt”). And to say that the book came from a “halcyon element!” That is, exhibiting the peace and tranquillity of the halcyon or kingfisher! Nietzsche is not a man known for his “sunny brightness.”

It’s also staggering that Nietzsche assumes that the reader is not only willing to make an effort, but already has made an effort, by having read a book that is famous for its opaqueness and difficulty. Here’s Wikipedia:

Though there is no consensus with what Zarathustra means when he speaks, there is some consensus with what he speaks about.

I love how low a bar this is. There is some consensus about what the topics are, though no one can agree what is actually said about those topics.

Even more hilariously, Nietzsche is writing this preface in 1887, the same year that the first three parts of Zarathustra were published — it wasn’t published in its entirety until 1892. What a power move to expect the reader to have read Thus Spake Zarathustra, and not just to have read it, but to have been “profoundly wounded and profoundly delighted by it,” when it’s barely off the presses, and the final part is not even close to published.

Nietzsche continues, with the section that made me want to write about this preface:

In other cases, the aphoristic form causes difficulty: this is because this form is not taken seriously enough these days.

Presumably he is pre-emptively responding to the assumption that the structure Nietzsche uses in the Genealogy and elsewhere — short aphorisms ranging from a paragraph to a few pages — is not a serious form of writing.¹

What is the aphoristic form?

It’s a short essay that follows a single line of argument, but often references other aphorisms. Nietzsche quotes himself constantly, far more than he quotes anyone else.

See where this is going? An aphorism is basically a Zettel: an atomic piece of writing that is linked to other notes.

What would it mean to take an aphorism as seriously as Nietzsche expects his reader to do? It’s not just reading. It’s an active process, and he’ll even give an example of how to do this:

An aphorism, properly stamped and moulded, has not been ‘deciphered’ just because it has been read out; on the contrary, this is just the beginning of its proper interpretation, and for this, an art of interpretation is needed. In the third essay of this book I have given an example of what I mean by ‘interpretation’ in such a case: – this treatise is a commentary on the aphorism that precedes it.

The word Nietzsche uses for “deciphered” is entziffern, to “decipher, decode, or decrypt,” though it can apparently also mean to “make out someone’s handwriting.” It implies a close attention to detail, possibly handwritten detail.

What Diethe translates as “interpretation” is Auslegen; Walter Kaufman (a famous translator of Nietzsche’s) goes for “exegesis.” Here’s the OED definition of exegesis: “An explanation or interpretation of a text, esp. of scripture or a scriptural passage. Also more generally: a critical discourse or commentary.”

It’s striking that this is essentially a religious act, originally restricted to religious texts. Given that Genealogy is a concerted assault on morality, and therefore on religion per se, it is striking that Nietzsche is involved in a practice that is, at its heart theological — a point to which I have alluded with respect to Kuhn, and to which I shall return.

So to “decipher” an aphorism is not just to read it. It’s actually to interpret it in writing, performing exegesis. It’s writing about the writing you’ve read, interpreting and glossing it, as literate monastics and Talmudic scholars have done for millennia.

By the nineteenth century, literacy has spread. From the Reformation, people begin increasingly to read the Bible in the vernacular. By the nineteenth century, exegesis has extended to non-religious texts, but (from the late eighteenth century) religious texts have also become subject to secular analysis.

Exegesis has broadened from a theological pursuit to other texts. It has become, in other words, philology, which the anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined in 1980 as “the text-centered study of language, as contrasted with linguistics, which is speech centered, has of course traditionally been concerned with making ancient or foreign or esoteric documents accessible to those for whom they are ancient or foreign or esoteric.”

Nietzsche, in his youth, had been an academic prodigy, becoming the youngest ever Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel.

What is it like to do philological exegesis?²

I admit that you need one thing above all in order to practise the requisite art of reading, a thing which today people have been so good at forgetting — and so it will be some time before my writings are ‘readable’ —, you almost need to be a cow for this one thing and certainly not a ‘modern man’: it is rumination …

This is mulling over, close reading, which involves not just the act of reading closely, but the act of paraphrase, summary, interpretation, providing background and links. In other words, more-or-less what I’ve been doing this month, since my first post on my experience with the Zettelkasten.

In that post, I asked “Why take notes?” Nietzsche’s answer: “To ruminate.”

Nietzsche emphasizes the word rumination. The word is wiederkäuen, to “ruminate, rehash, remasticate.” To chew over.

To chew the cud.

I will come back to ungulates, their domestication, what humans have learned from them — and how this process relates to self-domestication.

I suspect he has Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena (1851; in English sections are translated as “Essays and Aphorisms”) in mind, but I’m curious to know how widespread this format was at the time.↩
An extremely pressing and relevant question, and one I’m glad to finally be addressing.↩

Indian Philosophy

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 16:05:48 GMT

Part 15 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

Yesterday I introduced the philosopher and historian of philosophy Surendranath Dasgupta (1887–1952). Today I want to look at his Preface to the History of Indian Philosophy, to which he devoted thirty years of his life (1921–1952). You can find the first volume on Project Gutenberg.¹

Dasgupta begins his Preface by arguing that philosophy in India was regarded as the highest form of art and the highest calling (my emphasis):

The old civilisation of India was a concrete unity of many-sided developments in art, architecture, literature, religion, morals, and science so far as it was understood in those days. But the most important achievement of Indian thought was philosophy. It was regarded as the goal of all the highest practical and theoretical activities, and it indicated the point of unity amidst all the apparent diversities which the complex growth of culture over a vast area inhabited by different peoples produced.

It was held in much higher regard than politics:

It is not in the history of foreign invasions, in the rise of independent kingdoms at different times, in the empires of this or that great monarch that the unity of India is to be sought. It is essentially one of spiritual aspirations and obedience to the law of the spirit, which were regarded as superior to everything else, and it has outlived all the political changes through which India passed.

Dasgupta believes that this was true to such an extent that India could even regard invasions with indifference:

The Greeks, the Huns, the Scythians, the Pathans and the Moguls who occupied the land and controlled the political machinery never ruled the minds of the people, for these political events were like hurricanes or the changes of season, mere phenomena of a natural or physical order which never affected the spiritual integrity of Hindu culture.

In Chapter I, “Introductory,” Dasgupta begins with a lament. Not just for “Western” ignorance of Indian philosophy, but for the ignorance in its birthplace, already in 1921:

The achievements of the ancient Indians in the field of philosophy are but very imperfectly known to the world at large, and it is unfortunate that the condition is no better even in India. There is a small body of Hindu scholars and ascetics living a retired life in solitude, who are well acquainted with the subject, but they do not know English and are not used to modern ways of thinking, and the idea that they ought to write books in vernaculars in order to popularize the subject does not appeal to them. Through the activity of various learned bodies and private individuals both in Europe and in India large numbers of philosophical works in Sanskrit and Pâli have been published, as well as translations of a few of them, but there has been as yet little systematic attempt on the part of scholars to study them and judge their value. There are hundreds of Sanskrit works on most of the systems of Indian thought and scarcely a hundredth part of them has been translated.

This, however, is perhaps unsurprising, given how hard philosophy is to study. Dasgupta describes the insane level of difficulty in understanding any of it for one “unacquainted with Sanskrit.” Worse, it turns out that it’s quite difficult even for those who do know Sanskrit:

It is therefore very difficult for a person unacquainted with Sanskrit to understand Indian philosophical thought in its true bearing from translations. Pâli is a much easier language than Sanskrit, but a knowledge of Pâli is helpful in understanding only the earliest school of Buddhism, when it was in its semi-philosophical stage. Sanskrit is generally regarded as a difficult language. But no one from an acquaintance with Vedic or ordinary literary Sanskrit can have any idea of the difficulty of the logical and abstruse parts of Sanskrit philosophical literature. A man who can easily understand the Vedas, the Upaniṣads, the Purânas, the Law Books and the literary works, and is also well acquainted with European philosophical thought, may find it literally impossible to understand even small portions of a work of advanced Indian logic, or the dialectical Vedânta.

There are two reasons for this, he argues. The first is that it uses extensive technical terms. This complexity begins to explode in the 9th Century:

The tendency to conceiving philosophical problems in a clear and unambiguous manner is an important feature of Sanskrit thought, but from the ninth century onwards, the habit of using clear, definite, and precise expressions, began to develop in a very striking manner, and as a result of that a large number of technical terms began to be invented.

The ninth century is also when the Buddhist Nalanda university was founded. In Baghdad, the House of Wisdom is well underway, collecting scholarship from Greek, Persian, Indian, and Arabic sources; it may be the “greatest repository of books inn the world” until the Mongols sack Baghdad in 1258.

Europe, by contrast, is not exactly experiencing a philosophical explosion during this period. I noted here how Columbia’s archetypal “Contemporary Civilization” course jumps awkwardly from Augustine (398) to Dante (1321).

Returning to Dasgupta, despite the definite, precise, technical meanings of Indian philosophical terms, they are very rarely defined. How can this be?

This is because we’re talking here about living systems of philosophy:

These terms are seldom properly explained, and it is presupposed that the reader who wants to read the works should have a knowledge of them. Anyone in olden times who took to the study of any system of philosophy, had to do so with a teacher, who explained those terms to him. The teacher himself had got it from his teacher, and he from his. There was no tendency to popularize philosophy, for the idea then prevalent was that only the chosen few who had otherwise shown their fitness, deserved to become fit students (adhikârî) of philosophy, under the direction of a teacher. Only those who had the grit and high moral strength to devote their whole life to the true understanding of philosophy and the rebuilding of life in accordance with the high truths of philosophy were allowed to study it.

This situation is not entirely different from that of the Greek schools (which, as I’ve discussed, may not be as different as popularly imagined). The Greek schools, too, were once living schools, which competed with each other, and (at times at least) jealously guarded their secrets. I’ll come back to that claim later (I promise; I’m tracking reminders here).

Suffice it now to say that what’s left of Greek philosophy is not living, and much of what we know is second- or third-hand; we know of thinkers whose work is lost. The Indian philosophies are living philosophies. Notice, for example, how long it takes for the wikipedia article on Vedanta to use the word “was,” as compared to, e.g., Epicureanism.

Unhelpfully, many of the Indian systems also reuse the same terms with completely different meanings:

Another difficulty which a beginner will meet is this, that sometimes the same technical terms are used in extremely different senses in different systems.

Yesterday I discussed G. E. Moore’s scorn for Dasgupta. Here’s Dasgupta writing on the Western view, specifically that of Frank Tilly’s 1914 History of Philosophy:

But is it necessary that a history of Indian philosophy should be written? There are some people who think that the Indians never rose beyond the stage of simple faith and that therefore they cannot have any philosophy at all in the proper sense of the term. Thus Professor Frank Thilly of the Cornell University says in his History of Philosophy, “A universal history of philosophy would include the philosophies of all peoples. Not all peoples, however have produced real systems of thought, and the speculations of only a few can be said to have had a history. Many do not rise beyond the mythological stage. Even the theories of Oriental peoples, the Hindus, Egyptians, Chinese, consist, in the main, of mythological and ethical doctrines, and are not thoroughgoing systems of thought: they are shot through with poetry and faith. We shall, therefore, limit ourselves to the study of the Western countries, and begin with the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, on whose culture our own civilization in part, rests.” There are doubtless many other people who hold such uninformed and untrue beliefs, which only show their ignorance of Indian matters.

Interesting! So Tilly mentions “Western countries” in the modern sense, before Spengler. Perhaps “Western civilization” goes a step further than “Western countries” though?

Tilly’s assumption that India has no thorough system of thought is astonishing. Recall the “hundreds of Sanskrit works” Dasgupta mentioned. The philosophies are divided into two classes, the nâstika (“it is not”) and the âstika (“it is”, presumably). The former, which neither regard the Vedas as infallible nor attempt to establish their own atuhority, include three schools: Buddhism, Jainism, and Charvaka. The latter do regard the Vedas as infallible, and include six schools (Yoga and Vedanta among them).

Dasgupta continues, contrasting the early stabilization of these nine Indian schools of philosophy with the unstable, even “revolutionary” progression of “Western” philosophy.

Most of the systems had very early beginnings and a continuous course of development through the succeeding centuries, and it is not possible to take the state of the philosophy of a particular system at a particular time and contrast it with the state of that system at a later time; for the later state did not supersede the previous state, but only showed a more coherent form of it, which was generally true to the original system but was more determinate. Evolution through history has in Western countries often brought forth the development of more coherent types of philosophic thought, but in India, though the types remained the same, their development through history made them more and more coherent and determinate. Most of the parts were probably existent in the earlier stages, but they were in an undifferentiated state; through the criticism and conflict of the different schools existing side by side the parts of each of the systems of thought became more and more differentiated, determinate, and coherent.

Yes, I’m thinking here of Kuhn’s idea of scientific revolutions:

If the condition of the development of philosophy in India had been the same as in Europe, definite chronological knowledge would be considered much more indispensable. For, when one system supersedes another, it is indispensably necessary that we should know which preceded and which succeeded. But when the systems are developing side by side, and when we are getting them in their richer and better forms, the interest with regard to the conditions, nature and environment of their early origin has rather a historical than a philosophical interest. I have tried as best I could to form certain general notions as regards the earlier stages of some of the systems, but though the various features of these systems at these stages in detail may not be ascertainable, yet this, I think, could never be considered as invalidating the whole programme. Moreover, even if we knew definitely the correct dates of the thinkers of the same system we could not treat them separately, as is done in European philosophy, without unnecessarily repeating the same thing twenty times over; for they all dealt with the same system, and tried to bring out the same type of thought in more and more determinate forms.

Although I’ve kept my commentary limited today, I hope that some of the above gives an indication as to where I want to go in comparing India’s intellectual history to that of Europe.

As a disclaimer, although I’ve learned a bit about Buddhism over the years, I know much less about Indian philosophy than I know about Greek or Chinese philosophy, though I’m far from an expert in either of those either. Please read this page as an instance of “learning in public.”↩

Surendranath Dasgupta

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 16:05:48 GMT

Part 14 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

I’ve previously mentioned Bryan W Van Norden’s brilliant piece and provocative piece “Western philosophy is racist.” Citing Peter K J Park, Van Norden argues that it was not until the late 18th Century that philosophy began to exclude “non-Western” philosophy. Before that, “the only options taken seriously by most scholars in the 18th century were that philosophy began in India, that philosophy began in Africa, or that both India and Africa gave philosophy to Greece.”

Around the turn of the 19th Century, Kantians “consciously rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his critical idealism was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was groping, more or less successfully.” I think “rewriting history” and “making the present the telos of the past” are both practices common to “the West” today, and especially of Germany, as I discussed here.

Van Norden goes on to describes how Heidegger and Derrida (both “Continental” European philosophers) denied that any “thought” outside the Greek tradition can be called “philosophy” at all.

Here’s Heidegger, for example:

The often-heard expression ‘Western-European philosophy’ is, in truth, a tautology. Why? Because philosophy is Greek in its nature; … the nature of philosophy is of such a kind that it first appropriated the Greek world, and only it, in order to unfold.

But this summary dismissal of “Eastern” thought, though only a few centuries old, is not limited to Continental philosophy (the German/French branch of 20th Century “Western” philosophy). Analytic philosophy (the Anglo-American branch) has also gotten onboard.

Van Norden provides this scene, in which G. E. Moore (1873–1958) mocked Surendranath Dasgupta (1887–1952):

It is not only philosophers in the so-called Continental tradition who are dismissive of philosophy outside the Anglo-European canon. The British philosopher G E Moore (1873-1958) was one of the founders of analytic philosophy, the tradition that has become dominant in the English-speaking world. When the Indian philosopher Surendra Nath Dasgupta read a paper on the epistemology of Vedanta to a session of the Aristotelian Society in London, Moore’s only comment was: ‘I have nothing to offer myself. But I am sure that whatever Dasgupta says is absolutely false.’ The audience of British philosophers in attendance roared with laughter at the devastating ‘argument’ Moore had levelled against this Indian philosophical system.

I became curious about Dasgupta. This led me his wikipedia page, where I found a few fascinating things.

One was that Mircea Eliade studied Sanskrit, Pali, and Bengali under him in Calcutta — and that Eliade fell in love with Dasgupta’s daughter, Maitreyi Devi. When this was discovered in 1930, he was told to leave and never to contact her again, which he did — though he was evidently not above fictionalising the romance in a 1930 novel, which he called Maitreyi (also called Bengal Nights). This was made into a film with Hugh Grant in 1988.

When Devi read Eliade’s novel, some forty years after its publication, she wrote a novel of her own, called It Does Not Die (1974). Though they were republished in 1994 as companion volumes by the University of Chicago Press, her novel was intended to stand alone.

I found it even more interesting that Dasgupta attempted the first fully comprehensive history of Indian thought from the original sources in Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit — though a more limited and less ambitious attempt had been made in the 14th Century.

Dasgupta originally intended to complete the whole project in a single volume. Instead, the first volume came out in 1921, and the effort was to occupy him for the next thirty years, even at the expense of his own philosophical work:

He had also planned to write out his own system of philosophy in two volumes. His friends and students requested him several times to complete the writing of his own first. Yet he looked upon his work on Indian philosophy as the sacred mission of his life, and thought himself to be committed to that purpose.

Despite his worsening health, Dasgupta continued working on what became his five volume History of Indian Philosophy literally until the day he died:

With strong determination and unwavering devotion he brought his life’s mission very near its completion. Until the end of his life he was working for this, and completed one full section just a few hours before his passing away, on 18 December 1952. Even on this last day of his life, he worked in the morning and afternoon on the last chapter of the section of Southern Śaivism.

The first volume of this incredible life’s work is available on Project Gutenberg, so I’ve taken a brief look at it. Tomorrow I’ll describe what I’ve found so far, and contrast it to what I’ve found in the West.

Sinitic Syncretism

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 12:05:48 GMT

Part 13 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

Today’s post is about A. C. Graham (1919–1991), a Welsh sinologist who was a professor of classical Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. I wrote a bit about Graham last year, in connection with originality and infinite knowledge.

Graham produced a brilliantly original translation of the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (~300 BCE). The translation was first published in 1981, and it is probably my favourite work of philosophy, at least of what I’ve studied so far. Graham brings Zhuangzi’s writings to life in an incredibly expressive way.

Here’s an example from the section called “The sorting which evens things out.” Graham translates Zhuangzi:

Saying is not blowing breath, saying says something; the only trouble is that what it says is never fixed. Do we really say something? Or have we never said anything? If you think it different from the twitter of fledgelings, is there proof of the distinction? Or isn’t there any proof? By what is the Way hidden, that there should be a genuine or a false? By what is saying darkened, that sometimes ‘That’s it’ and sometimes ‘That’s not’? Wherever we walk how can the Way be absent? Whatever the standpoint how can saying be unallowable? The Way is hidden by formation of the lesser, saying is darkened by its foliage and flowers. And so we have the ‘That’s it, that’s not’ of Confucians and Mohists, by which what is it for one of them for the other is not, what is not for one of them for the other is. If you wish to affirm what they deny and deny what they affirm, the best means is Illumination.

Graham describes this section as containing “the most philosophically acute passages in the Inner chapters, obscure, fragmented, but pervaded by the sensation, rare in ancient literatures, of a man jotting the living thought at the moment of its inception.”

I’ve always loved this passage, as well as Graham’s description of the larger section. I mentioned Zhuangzi just the other day in my post on Spinoza.

Graham edition is called The Inner Chapters, and he writes “Chuang-tzŭ” (in the old Wade-Giles style), rather than “Zhuangzi” (Pinyin).

The book was once hard to hunt down, but now you can even get the revised 2001 edition on Amazon. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

On stable equilibrium of disputation

Today I’m going to talk about a different book, one Graham published in 1989, called Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. In it, he summarizes the major Chinese philosophical schools.

Though the thinkers that founded these schools lived during the Eastern Zhou (771–221 BCE), the classics texts were used from the Qin Dynasty, in 221 BCE, until the fall of the Qing dynasty — in 1912. In other words, a period of 2,133 years, surviving collapses but always returning to several strands.

Here’s the overview, from Graham’s introduction to Disputers of the Tao:

Let us try to write down in a condensed prescription the Chinese secret of the immortal empire embracing nearly a quarter of the human race, defeating the destiny by which all things come and go.

(From Confucianism). An ethic rooted, below the level of critical reflection, in the most enduring social bonds, kinship and custom, which models the community on the family, relates ruler/subject to father/son and past/present to ancestor/descendant.

(From Legalism). A rational statecraft with the techniques to organise an empire of unprecedented size and largely homogenise custom throughout it.

(From Yin-Yang). A proto-science which places man in a cosmos modelled on community.

(From Taoism, reinforced from the Later Han by Buddhism). Personal philosophies relating individual directly to cosmos, allowing room within the social order for the unassimilable who might disrupt community.

(From Mo-tzu through the argumentation of the competing schools). A rationality confined to the useful, which leaves fundamental questions outside its range.

I want to contrast this with the situation I observed in the West, where homogenizing purges wipe out earlier schools of thought, sometimes for good. If we conceive of divergent thought more broadly, i.e., outside philosophy, then it could apply even to the crushing of Roman slave rebellions, martyrdom in the Early Church, the persecution of Celts, the Inquisition, the missions in the colonies, the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, the French Revolution, and so on.

The fact that we still have Plato’s side of his argument against the Sophists, and ~10% of Aristotle’s writing (no books, only notes, as I described here), is nothing like the preservation of these Chinese texts over such a long period. And as Biagetti pointed out here, Aristotle is only preserved by Islam.

“The West” has a tendency to insist on a single “Truth.” That applies as much to Greek polytheism or Old Testament monotheism as it does to modern science. As I’ve said elsewhere, this is a retrospective through-line. It has no historical coherence; it is just the modern “West” trawling through history to find examples of intensely centralizing periods of the past to construct its current identity.

Chinese philosophy, at least according to Graham, has no expectation that a single school of thought should explain everything. Nor is there a tendency (at least not early on) to enter into metaphysics, which, by making claims about the “true” nature of reality, will quickly and inevitably bring schools into conflict.

Instead, Confucianism puts ethics first (much like Buddhist Śīla). Though rationalism arises in China, it is restricted to pragmatist applications, and not allowed to enter metaphysics or (for the most part) ethics. That the Taoist texts are quite anti-Confucian doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

I don’t want to suggest that there weren’t purges; though the “burning of books and burying of scholars” of 213–212 BCE is almost certainly mythical, many schools from the so-called Hundred Schools of Thought period did not survive.

But equally, in Graham’s telling, the Chinese reduced down to five branches, which is a lot more than, for example, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, to which the Christian Church aspired from 381. Even if the Church never fully purged all heresies, that this was the goal is indicative. Schisms are not strictly “Western,” but I think that “the West” cares a lot about belief, whereas most other societies seemed to care more about behaviour. What I think is important in China is that a certain degree of divergence is tolerated, which allows dissent and contradiction, and possibly small innovation, without leading to purges.

This has downsides too; convergent consensus can lead to rapid (and deeply de-stabilizing) progress through revolutions. And you could argue that the Chinese did all converge on having a centralized seat of political power, after the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE). I just want to suggest that it’s important that this didn’t result in a fully centralized way of thinking.

What does Sinitic mean?

I couldn’t resist the title, so I thought I’d also give you a peek into the weird world of my Zettelkasten To this end I’ve left the title of this blog post the same as I have it in my notes.¹

From the OED:

Sinitic, adj.: Chinese. In early use often with wider reference to East Asian peoples viewed as constituting a single racial or cultural group with China at its centre.

syncretism, n.:

1. Attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices, esp. in philosophy or religion; spec. the system or principles of a school founded in the 17th century by George Calixtus, who aimed at harmonizing the sects of Protestants and ultimately all Christian bodies: see Calixtin n. (Almost always in derogatory sense.)

2. Philology. The merging of two or more inflectional categories.

3. Psychology. The process of fusing diverse ideas or sensations into a general (inexact) impression; an instance of this.

Or near enough. In the actual note it is “Successful Sinetic Syncretism.” Sinetic is an even rarer variant of sinitic; in fact it is in the OED’s rarest band, along with familiar words like abaptiston, abaxile, grithbreach, gurofhite, zarnich, and zeagonite.↩

Breadcrumbs

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:10:48 GMT

In my recent writing (e.g. on “the West”) I have promised to return to several points. I’m creating this page to track some of those things. It’s just a list of stuff I’ll write about in the future. I can’t guarantee that it will all make sense yet, and I’ll update it as I go (most likely linking/crossing things off).

As a brief reflection, having written every day of November so far, I do find it hard to keep on top of the direction of the writing. It’s almost as if doing too much cognition prevents metacognition. I feel that it’s hard to keep going at speed and also navigate, so my apologies if I’m not always making sense.

Anyway, here’s the current state of things…

Things I said I’d return to

Where I’d like to go

More Perfection

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 17:56:48 GMT

Continuing the Ethics (1678) where we left off yesterday, Spinoza makes his opposition to teleology even more explicit. For Spinoza, God is Nature and vice versa — his famous formulation Deus sive Natura. Nature does not act towards goals, and since God is Nature, it is equivalent to say that God does not act towards goals:

We see, therefore, that men are accustomed to call natural things perfect or imperfect more from prejudice than from true knowledge of those things. For we have shown in the Appendix of Part I, that Nature does nothing on account of an end. That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists. For we have shown (IP16) that the necessity of nature from which he acts is the same as that from which he exists. The reason, therefore, or cause, why God, or Nature, acts, and the reason why he exists, are one and the same. As he exists for the sake of no end, he also acts for the sake of no end. Rather, as he has no principle or end of existing, so he also has none of acting. What is called a final cause is nothing but a human appetite insofar as it is considered as a principle, or primary cause, of some thing.

Perfection or imperfection does not apply to nature, and our notions of perfection and imperfection come more from prejudice than from knowledge.
“Nature does nothing on account of an end.”
The operations of God/nature are as necessary as His existence (I won’t get into this claim).

There is no “final cause” or “prime mover.” These are illusions, based on projecting human desires onto Nature. When traced far enough, they always lead back to human values or desires. We also tend to mistake intermediate causes for first causes:

For example, when we say that habitation was the final cause of this or that house, surely we understand nothing but that a man, because he imagined the conveniences of domestic life, had an appetite to build a house. So habitation, insofar as it is considered as a final cause, is nothing more than this singular appetite. It is really an efficient cause, which is considered as a first cause, because men are commonly ignorant of the causes of their appetites. For as I have often said before, they are conscious of their actions and appetites, but not aware of the causes by which they are determined to want something.

This reminds me of a phrase of Schopenhauer’s, apparently from On the Freedom of the Will (1839), which Einstein was fond of quoting: “We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.”¹

This is the culmination of the argument, and also quite prescient:

As for what they commonly say—that Nature sometimes fails or sins, and produces imperfect things—I number this among the fictions I treated in the Appendix of Part I.

Perfection and imperfection, therefore, are only modes of thinking, i.e., notions we are accustomed to feign because we compare individuals of the same species or genus to one another. This is why I said above (IID6) that by reality and perfection I understand the same thing. For we are accustomed to refer all individuals in Nature to one genus, which is called the most general, i.e., to the notion of being, which pertains absolutely to all individuals in Nature. So insofar as we refer all individuals in Nature to this genus, compare them to one another, and find that some have more being, or reality, than others, we say that some are more perfect than others. And insofar as we attribute something to them that involves negation, like a limit, an end, lack of power, etc., we call them imperfect, because they do not affect our Mind as much as those we call perfect, and not because something is lacking in them which is theirs, or because Nature has sinned. For nothing belongs to the nature of anything except what follows from the necessity of the nature of the efficient cause. And whatever follows from the necessity of the nature of the efficient cause happens necessarily.

Before Darwin, the notion of perfection was thought to be important in understanding how organisms evolved. This thinking led to orthogenesis, a term which includes a variety of ideas that there is “progress” in evolution, at times even inferring an inner perfecting principle.

Darwin, of course, removes this teleology; there is no “end goal,” just continuous adaptation to an ever-changing environment. Kuhn gives a beautiful account of how disturbing this is, and Darwin himself uses the word “perfection” sometimes; I will return to both points later.

Perfection and imperfection are modes of thinking, and reality and perfection are the same thing, which relates to yesterday’s argument. This was once literally true (“perfection” just meant “completed”). But Spinoza thinks it remains true in the sense that what exists is more perfect than what does not exist.

In the next section he predicts Nietzsche quite strongly:

As far as good and evil are concerned, they also indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of thinking, or notions we form because we compare things to one another. For one and the same thing can, at the same time, be good, and bad, and also indifferent. For example, Music is good for one who is Melancholy, bad for one who is mourning, and neither good nor bad to one who is deaf.

But though this is so, still we must retain these words. For because we desire to form an idea of man, as a model of human nature which we may look to, it will be useful to us to retain these same words with the meaning I have indicated. In what follows, therefore, I shall understand by good what we know certainly is a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer to the model of human nature that we set before ourselves. By evil, what we certainly know prevents us from becoming like that model. Next, we shall say that men are more perfect or imperfect, insofar as they approach more or less near to this model.

Spinoza has something like a health-based understanding of morality.² Opiates are not bad in themselves. In some frequencies and dosages, they’re good for people. In other frequencies and dosages, they’re bad for people. Similarly, what we call “good” and “evil” are not so according to some higher standard, but just from experience, what seems to be good or bad for people.

I’ve so far been unable to find anything beyond this, which translates it as “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills,” from Schopenhauer’s “Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.”↩
This health model of morality is discussed in the Spinoza episode of the “What’s Left of Philosophy” podcast that I mentioned a few days ago.↩

On Perfection

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 17:56:48 GMT

What does perfection mean to you?

Had you asked me this question a few months ago, I might have replied, tongue-in-cheek, that it’s a made-up concept that people use as an excuse not to start things. I’ve always been too slapdash to fall into perfectionism, as may be apparent from my patent lack of any perfections, in my work or in my life.

My own sardonic response reminded me of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906). I wondered if he had an entry for perfection. In fact, he does!

PERFECTION, n. An imaginary state of quality distinguished from the actual by an element known as excellence; an attribute of the critic.

If I’m reading him correctly, perfection and excellence are imaginary, and critics imagine themselves to be perfect.

But what about true perfection? It’s not something I’d thought a lot about.

Spinoza, whom I wrote about yesterday, begins his section “Of Human Bondage, or of the Powers of the Affects” with this question. His explication is important. He illustrates how this word in particular, which was once concrete, became abstract over time, by steps. This relates to my recent writing on vision and abstraction, and also to a thread I’ve been working on about whether words were once more closely tied to the world.

Edwin Curley, a living translator of Spinoza, puts this footnote in the section: “As Hale White observed, it is important in understanding Spinoza’s analysis […] to realize that perfectus is simply the past participle of perficere, to complete or finish, itself a derivative of facere, to make or do.”

In other words, “perfect” originally just meant “complete.”

Here’s Spinoza:

If someone has decided to make something, and has finished it, then he will call his thing perfect—and so will anyone who rightly knows, or thinks he knows, the mind and purpose of the Author of the work. For example, if someone sees a work (which I suppose to be not yet completed), and knows that the purpose of the Author of that work is to build a house, he will say that it is imperfect. On the other hand, he will call it perfect as soon as he sees that the work has been carried through to the end which its Author has decided to give it. But if someone sees a work whose like he has never seen, and does not know the mind of its maker, he will, of course, not be able to know whether that work is perfect or imperfect. And this seems to have been the first meaning of these words.

Perfection is at first in the eye not of the Beholder, but of the Author (or, in this case, the builder). If I’m building a house, and I stop building, it is complete, therefore perfect. If you know what I’m up to (say, by talking to me), you’ll know when the house is done too. If I’m done, it’s “perfect.” If I’m still working on it, then it’s “imperfect,” which literally means “not complete.”¹

Notice that he already qualifies this situation with “or thinks he knows.” Even in the concrete example that you can point to in the world, theory of mind has slipped in. I will call the characteristic of being able to point at something “indexicality,” after the index (the Latin word for fore-finger). This is important because it produces consensus rather directly. It’s the difference between “Look at that bird!” vs “Look at the state of the West.”

But after men began to form universal ideas, and devise models of houses, buildings, towers, etc., and to prefer some models of things to others, it came about that each one called perfect what he saw agreed with the universal idea he had formed of this kind of thing, and imperfect, what he saw agreed less with the model he had conceived, even though its maker thought he had entirely finished it.

Universal ideas form after the particulars. Possibly it requires lots of particulars. At the same time, more complex buildings arise; human constructions articulate and become more complex.

With universality and complexity come preferences. Could this be rephrased? I might write: “With knowledge and choice come good and evil” as abstract concepts.

Think too of Nietzsche’s idea that “good and bad” is not the same opposition as “good and evil.” I’ll come back to this, but to summarize, he thinks that the older distinction is between “good” (what people do) and “bad” (what they don’t do). The dichotomy between “good” and “evil,” as judged by some external authority or higher standard, comes, for Nietzsche, much later.

Nietzsche’s argument seems to me similar to Spinoza’s. “Good” and “perfect” just mean what exists, what has been done, what is finished. It reminds me of the refrain “And God saw that it was good,” which recurs in slightly different forms in Genesis 1, specifically 1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, 1:25, and especially 1:31: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

I wondered if this might make more sense as “completed” rather than a value judgement; after all, whose standard is God using? I found this page on the Hebrew word used in this sense, tov (normally translated “good”):

First, we recall a basic principle in Hebrew, in Semitic languages in general: Words always start out life as a concrete something, and only later take on a conceptual meaning, or become an idea. The original meaning of tov is not “good.” […] The meaning is more basic, something concrete.

The King James Version translates these verses, “And God saw that it was good.” […] But that’s not what tov means in the Creation story. The original, biblical, concrete meaning of tov is more along the lines of “well-formed,” “well-wrought,” “well-crafted,” and these meanings make sense in the context of Creation. “Good” is conceptual, value-laden and suggests values that play no part in the early biblical narrative. Tov as “good” is a later understanding of the word, perhaps derived from its original meaning but it is not the original meaning.

Interesting! This seems to line up very well with my intuition.

So together, universal ideas, complexity, and preferences lead to an abstraction of the notion of perfection. Now, suddenly, houses can be more or less perfect in comparison not just to one another, but to some higher standard. Furthermore, this judgement is not made by the Author, for whom something is “perfect” when finished, but a judgement of the Beholder, whose judgement is based on past observations.

Each person, through a process of inference, has arrived at an abstract notion (“universal idea”) of what completion means. Then “perfect” comes to mean not the degree to which something is “complete,” but the degree to which it conforms to an inferred abstraction. Sound familiar?

To me it seems like it must be related to Platonic forms. Plato is mistaking these abstractions for pre-existing objects, because they seem to form so automatically.²

Back to Spinoza:

Nor does there seem to be any other reason why men also commonly call perfect or imperfect natural things, which have not been made by human hand. For they are accustomed to form universal ideas of natural things as much as they do of artificial ones. They regard these universal ideas as models of things, and believe that nature (which they think does nothing except for the sake of some end) looks to them, and sets them before itself as models. So when they see something happen in nature which does not agree with the model they have conceived of this kind of thing, they believe that Nature itself has failed or sinned, and left the thing imperfect.

So far, “perfection” has involved two mistakes: First, we’ve changed the measure of perfection, replacing concrete completeness with an abstraction based on inference. Second, we’ve replaced the author’s estimation with the beholder’s.³

Here, Spinoza introduces a third mistake: We assume that nature operates like a human, which is a form of anthropomorphism.

Humans operate with ends in mind. They behave teleologically. I mentioned this tendency offhandedly in discussing the “Western” tendency to see the present as the telos of the past.

I suspect this is because reason itself comes from two sources which are much more teleological than nature is. These are:

Immediate indexical reality, where if you drop something, it breaks, with simple causality that is readily learned. Animals must have this kind of reasoning.
Social reality, where people act (or believe themselves to act) with goals and reasonably straightforward motivations. These are harder to learn but still possible; and possibly it is social pressure — i.e., the need to reason about the social consequences of actions — that allows anything like “abstract reason” to arise in the first place.

It is not that causality does not apply in nature. It’s just that simple causality is far less common than it is in the case of man-made things or situations — the glass that breaks when dropped, the person who retaliates when struck.

But the horse does not gallop — nor the human think — because of any goal. There is no simple causality as with an object in the hand, nor any intentionality as in social action.

Spinoza thinks this anthropomorphism is a mistake. Nature is not teleological. We only think it is because we lack the ability to apprehend things that there is no need (evolutionarily speaking) for us to apprehend.

This is at the heart of Darwin’s thinking, but you can see it already in Spinoza. Schopenhauer (who thinks nature is teleological) points also to Lucretius and to Francis Bacon as non-teleological thinkers. I hope to treat those other thinkers in the coming months.

I continue the discussion of abstraction here.

It strikes me that this must be the sense still used in the imperfect tense; “I was thinking…” implies the thinking could still be incomplete.↩
As Anil Seth argues in his new book, even perception/manipulation of objects in the world requires a process of inference. In this view, both “real objects” and “abstractions” are the phenomenological results of processes of inference. The only difference between the two is the degree to which the perception is “controlled” by the environment.↩
Arguably, Plato makes these first two mistakes and then a third mistake that the abstractions are somehow more “real” than the instances that produced them.↩

The Accidental Spinozist

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 15:56:48 GMT

A few years ago I flew from California back to London. Upon landing, whilst still on the plane, I opened my bag to find an unfamiliar book.

The book was a Penguin Classics edition of Edwin Curley’s translation of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (1678). I had been looking at books in my parents’ house over Christmas, so I must have grabbed it by accident, though I had no recollection of having handled it at home. The book may even have been mine, from a high school philosophy class. Or it may have been one of my siblings’, since I tended to write my name in mine.

The slim volume, only 186 pages, sat on my shelf for many months. At some point I picked it up. The first part of the book is titled “On God.” It’s perplexing stuff, statements structured like a series of geometric proofs, with definitions and axioms. Here’s the first line:

D1: By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.

What?

Spinoza goes on to define God as “absolutely infinite,” and uses “q.e.d.” (quod erat demonstrandum, “That which was to be demonstrated”) in an apparently unironic way:

Therefore an absolutely infinite Being—i.e. (by D6), God—necessarily exists, q.e.d.

This of course reminded me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.‘”
“‘But,’ says Man, ‘The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’ ”
“‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.”

But it also reminded me of St Anselm’s proof for the existence of God, which I’d learned about in my Catholic high school, and indeed, Spinoza’s too apparently falls under this category, called an ontological argument. I had never found such a proof persuasive, or at any rate I had been unable to grasp it. It always seemed to me like a language game.

I put down the book.

A few months ago I listened to a great Spinoza episode of the “What’s Left of Philosophy” podcast. The odd coincidence that had led to my possession of the book, along with the conscience of having left it unfinished, led me to try it again.

They focused on part four of the Ethics, the irresistibly titled “Of Human Bondage, or of the Powers of the Affects.”

I still have not finished the book, but already a few sentences from that section have had a profound effect on my thinking.

This was unexpected. Spinoza is one of the great rationalist thinkers, whom Wikipedia describes as regarding “reason as the chief source and test of knowledge.” Traditionally, rationalism opposes itself to empiricism, i.e., actually having any experience. For rationalists in general, “the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive.” For some rationalists, “empirical proof and physical evidence [are] regarded as unnecessary to ascertain certain truths.”

I was put off by the opening of the Ethics because of precisely this rationalism. It seems to me easy to come up with an internally consistent system. The danger of such dreamed-up systems is that you can mistake the internal consistency for universal truth, or context-independence.

I care a lot about experience, about empirical testing, and about context.

I’m also a big fan of Zhuangzi, one of the great anti-rationalists.

I know, I know, anti-rationalism doesn’t sound great.¹ But given at least the strong definition of rationalism above — which amounts to saying that experience is unimportant — I must oppose that position. Rationalism also does not seem to to me to sufficiently question or explain how reason (which is no easy matter for humans) might have arisen in the first place.

I continue this with a discussion of perfection tomorrow.

It also has multiple meanings, and can sometimes be about faith rather than experience.↩

How diverse is Greek philosophy?

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 11:40:00 GMT

Part 12 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

How different are the Greek schools?

As I discussed last week, and continued discussing yesterday, Biagetti argues that Greek philosophy is a cacophony. As an example, he makes the point that the Stoics and Epicureans were at each others’ throats. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on Epicureanism supports his claim, saying that Epicureans first opposed Platonism, and later Stoicism.

I want to suggest a few things today:

Epicureans, Platonists, and Stoics aren’t really all that different, nor are they much different from Aristotelians, at least when you consider how different Taoism is from Confucianism.
The persecution of Epicureans is a case of Freud’s “narcissism of small differences” even though it did result in real purges.
Epicurus doesn’t really “survive” anyway; we only have scraps of Epicurus’ writing, whereas we have loads of Plato.

What’s the big fuss about?

I’m mainly going to focus on ethics here; Platonist and Epicurean metaphysics are importantly different, at least from the (narrow?) view of “the West.”

First, all the schools I’m about to discuss share the same virtues: Prudence (or Wisdom), Fortitude (or Courage), Temperance, and Justice.

Plato (428–347 BCE; in the words of Socrates; Book III of the Republic) believed that the good life (“flourishing” or eudaimonia) was reached by living in accordance with these virtues. Neither pleasure nor circumstance comes into it.

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) introduces the notion of moral luck. If you’re born into bad enough circumstances, you may not have the chance to live in accordance for the virtues, and therefore moral bad luck bars you from the good life. He also tries to define the virtues by the golden mean. I discussed Aristotle’s views on eudaimonia a bit here. But the overall message is almost the same, with the addition of a minor parenthetical: Live by the virtues (if you can), and you’ll live the good life.

The Stoics return to the Socratic position: It doesn’t matter how bad your luck is, you have control of your mind and your conduct and can live in accordance with virtue, therefore (whether slave or emperor) you can live a good life. Your circumstances don’t matter, and it doesn’t matter if you enjoy your life. You can “flourish” regardless of how hard it is.

Epicurus’ innovation is that the good life can’t be one that is not pleasurable. He thinks it makes no sense to talk about a life lived virtuously as “flourishing” if it is not enjoyable. This was called “hedonism” at the time, and had all the negative associations that the word still has today, of overindulgence or excess.

I’ve written before about Epicurus and how he had a hard time of it even during his own life, and even when written about by (potentially) sympathetic writers like Diogenes Laertius. But Epicurus defines pleasure as something like “being untroubled over the long term,” a state called ataraxia, which is the freedom from pain, worry, and fear.

How does one cultivate ataraxia? By living according to the virtues.

Which ones? The same ones as the Stoics, their bitter enemies.

Small differences

Can you see where this is going? All the schools listed so far basically think that there’s a strong link between the same four virtues and flourishing, it’s just a matter of emphasis on how much circumstances or pleasure matter.

I’m not saying there are no practical consequences. For example, the Stoics tend to see people as having a duty to enter public life whether or not it’s fun. The Epicureans, by observing politicians, and noting that they don’t seem to be having a particularly good time (more specifically, that it seems more often to lead to trouble rather than to ataraxia), tend to avoid public office.² But their overall worldview remains extremely similar. You might even call them “commensurable”, as opposed to revolutionary (therefore incommensurable) positions.

As I said at the beginning, their different metaphysics and attitudes towards nature may motivate different types of inquiry.

What I’m wondering is whether, if “the West” is already willing to conduct purges on the basis of commensurable differences, then it is preparing and homogenizing itself to create bigger purges when it comes to incommensurable differences. But I’m also getting awfully anthropomorphic so maybe I’ll not go there today.

What we have left of Epicureanism

We only have a few fragments of what Epicurus (341–270 BCE) wrote, though we have lots of rumours about him. Some people conflate the Roman Epicurean Lucretius (99–55 BCE) with Epicurus, assuming them to be equivalent, but this position is controversial.

In a sense, then, Epicurus doesn’t survive. Paper disintegrates. I’m tempted to say that people didn’t care enough about Epicurus to preserve him. But then again, none of the Greek Stoics really survive either; we know Zeno of Citium (~334–262 BCE), founder of Stoicism, wrote a lot, but none of it survives.

Some of this seems to just be bad luck; many of the important texts of Epicureanism were housed at Herculaneum, which happens to be close enough to Mount Vesuvius that the papyrus was carbonized when the volcano erupted in 79 CE.

I don’t know how this contrasts with the situation of Plato; as of 1989, there were 250 known manuscripts of Plato, mostly not transcribed. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to find out what progress has been made since then. The vast majority of Aristotle’s writing does not survive, so I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Epicurean texts were deliberately destroyed, or even intentionally not preserved. But it might be possible to argue that Plato’s texts were intentionally preserved.

Perhaps we could call Epicureanism a purge of omission*. I suspect many of the Christian heresies, by contrast, resulted in successful purges of commission. Pelagianism (to take a random example), and the word became a term of abuse rather than one referring to a living school of thought. Though that led to excommunications in the fifth century, it seems to have intensified in violence by the Medieval period.

What about the pre-Socratics?

Great point.

The pre-Socratics probably were radically different. Everyone who works on them seems to say so, anyway. This interview gives a nice overview.

But again, they don’t survive, or they survive only in scraps. We know of them, know about them, but we don’t know them. Here’s Wikipedia:

Very few fragments of the works of the pre-Socratic philosophers have survived. The knowledge we have of the pre-Socratics derives from the accounts of later writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Diogenes Laërtius, Stobaeus, and Simplicius, and some early Christian theologians, especially Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus of Rome.

Probably they are important; both Nietzsche and Heidegger seem to think that Socrates/Plato take the whole culture in the wrong direction.

I’ll return on what it means for something to survive when I get to a brief bit on Indian philosophy.

Possibly like the Chinese Yangists around the same time?↩

Homogenizing Purges

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 11:40:00 GMT

Part 11 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

A few weeks ago, I asked how wide the West was.

I then did an experiment where I followed references in a scientific paper that has been on my mind since I read it in March: “Two types of aggression in human evolution”.

I wanted to see how deep I’d have to dive to wind up in Ancient Athens. It only took two steps from the abstract to get back to Plato and Aristotle, though of course it’s possible this paper is an outlier.

This led me into a long investigation of the Myth of the West.

Is Greek philosophy a cacophony?

Today I want to discuss Biagetti’s claim which I noted few days ago, i.e., that there is little or no consensus in Greek philosophy, and that it’s a constant debate among conflicting worldviews, as a way of looking at what (if anything) unifies “the West.”

Here’s the quote, which is from the podcast I’ve been discussing, Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019). I’ve cleaned it up a little bit:

If you read the Greeks, first of all, almost all of their philosophical tracts, like Plato’s Republic, or his other writings, they are dialogues with people disagreeing with each other, advancing conflicting ideas.

And in the mix there are some Greek thinkers that you encounter in the dialogues who are Sophists, they were basically relativist and say there is no real truth, there is no real good and bad. Everything is just the custom of the country, or whatever you can get away with in an argument.

And then even if you look beyond those particular writings, and try to make some sort of summation, this is what Greek thought is all about. Well, you have all these contending conflicting schools. You have Epicureans, who see things completely differently from Stoics who see things completely differently from Aristotelian school. There was no consensus there, there was no shared notion about how life should work or what is true or false or what is good or bad. You can see certain shared values and assumptions in their ways of life, in the way that people lived in their customs. In their rituals, maybe to some degree in their poetry, right? But really not in their philosophy.

The philosophy is cacophony. Likewise, if we go forward into the Roman age, there were Roman Stoics. But they often were dramatically different from their Greek forebears. Not only that, but the way Roman society worked was totally different. Their laws were different. A lot of their deities were the same or close enough to the same, but their laws were different. Their government was different. The Empire centered on Rome was completely different from the small policies of Greece. There’s no coherent Greco-Roman thought it’s just not there.

He makes several great points here:

The Ancient Greek philosophers like to argue.
The Sophists are enemies of the Platonists, and they are apparently relativists.
The Epicureans and the Stoics are bitterly opposed.
The Romans are not the same as the Greeks.

A series of homogenizing purges

Before discussing the Greeks, I want tentatively to lay out my thesis, about the unifying tendency which unifies “the West.”

First, I think it’s a defensible position to say that intense debate recurs throughout what we now call “the West,” always keeping mind that “the West” is, as discussed, only retrospectively connected, i.e., it’s something we construct in the present, not something we observe in the past.

This construction is not limited to what we now construct as “our” heritage; it also resumes a tendency that peoples had in the past to construct a past of their own. The Romans admired the Greeks, the Holy Roman Empire wanted to assert the authority of the Roman Empire, and so on. And in each age, the past is constructed to appear linear, often in writing, as I discussed with respect to science.

But at each stage, there’s also lot of debate over authority. To be clear, I do not think that “debate” or “disagreement” is the defining feature of “the West.” As Biagetti has argued, that’s tantamount to saying “Western culture is a culture of no culture.”

Instead, I think that desire for certainty and consensus is the defining feature. Debate is a side effect. The constant argument is epiphenomenal to an underlying attempt to convert other people to a way of thinking.

People in the Old Testament, in Ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Christendom, the Reformation, the missionaries and colonisers, the French Revolution, or the 20th Century “West” care what you think. They want to change your mind, and they’re willing to kill you if you don’t. This kind of “homogenizing purge” is not present at all periods, but it seems to be a recurrent feature.

I want to think through the idea (hopefully not completely wrong) that most other societies in history care more about what you do than what you believe.

Neither persuasion nor coercion is a “Western” phenomenon. Nor are the construction of a heroic past, nor a history of debates and purges. But I will try to argue that for other places and other times, outside the ones now retrospectively defined as “the West,” action rather than belief is the main way you can get yourself killed.¹ In “the West,” there are recurrent homogenizing purges. These are centralizing, not just in the sense of centralizing the cooperation of larger numbers of individuals (as in city-states), but centralizing and homogenizing in terms of beliefs. Because of the intensity of each consensus and the loss of diversity involved in each purge, the retrospective “West” is prone to destabilizing revolutions, in which the old consensus collapses and a new one forms.

To jump ahead a bit, I think that the modern West, by selecting Ancient Greece, Judeo-Christianity, Medieval Europe, and eventually America, creates a mythical trajectory from animism to polytheism, from polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to Church authority, and from the Church to scientific materialism (whether or not it is aware that this is what it is doing). The strictures on belief can be relaxed only once those resistant to the dominant belief system (I’m tempted to write “paradigm”) are converted, subdued, exiled, or dead. At that point, history is rewritten to exclude and misrepresent them, as well as to make the present look like the telos of the past.

Finally, none of this need be planned or understood by any individual; it seems to be an emergent effect, what Althusser calls an “ideological state apparatus.”

I’ll attempt to contrast this “Western” tendency with China and India before the 19th Century, but not with Islam, since I think the Abrahamic religions all share this tendency. In this context, the USSR must also be considered “Western” for reasons I’ll go into later. To be clear, I absolutely think that there are homogenizing purges in China and India; I just think it’s rare that they ever leave only a single strand of philosophy alive.

Wait, what about Greece?

To summarize my responses to Biagetti:

The Ancient Greeks, like the early/medieval Christian Church, and many other “Western” institutions really want to convert people to their way of seeing the world. Arguments, but also purges, martyrdoms, witch-hunts, and executions for heresy, are all expressions of this underlying impulse. This intensifying impulse is produced by variation and selection, with a few loose rules; no one needs to think about it explicitly, nor is it some Spenglerian spirit of the culture, any more than there is a “spirit of predator” that produces carnivory.²
The Sophists’ writings have not survived; they’ve essentially been purged. We have only one side of the argument, and this is characteristic. Other relativists and non-teleological thinkers are purged (or risk purges) for the next two millennia. Teleology and “Truth” are strongly selected for.
The Epicureans and the Stoics are indeed bitterly opposed to each other, but what they believe is not actually much different in practice (common in the history of “the West”) — and in any case the Epicureans too have largely been purged.³
The Romans are not the same as the Greeks, but in many cases we’ve lost access to the Greeks, and people conflate them with the Romans.

I take up the discussion of the Greek philosophical schools here. You may wish to look at the points Thomas Kuhn made about the diversity of thought before Newton in the post I wrote yesterday.

Possibly identity is the other main way, and though the West also kills over identity, this practice is obviously not restricted to the West. I need to think more about this, as it will likely have similar effects as killing people for their beliefs. One possibility is that by accepting converts rather than a strict policy of killing outsiders, “Western” practices become viral — this would need to be compared/contrasted with the (also viral) policy of the Khans.↩
Reminder for myself to return to the many times that saber-tooth cats evolved.↩
Importantly not entirely.↩

The Nature of Light

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 13:54:00 GMT

Part 10 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

I wrote a post today about how divergent Greek philosophy really is, but it got too long, so first I want to look at the history of science as it relates to the Greek schools.

Before Newton, the Greek schools (Epicurean, Aristotelian, Platonic) had no consensus about the nature of light.

Here is Thomas Kuhn, again in Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), on how “Western” thinking changed with Newton (emphasis mine):

These transformations of the paradigms of physical optics are scientific revolutions, and the successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science. It is not, however, the pattern characteristic of the period before Newton’s work, and that is the contrast that concerns us here. No period between remote antiquity and the end of the seventeenth century exhibited a single generally accepted view about the nature of light. Instead there were a number of competing schools and subschools, most of them espousing one variant or another of Epicurean, Aristotelian, or Platonic theory. One group took light to be particles emanating from material bodies; for another it was a modification of the medium that intervened between the body and the eye; still another explained light in terms of an interaction of the medium with an emanation from the eye; and there were other combinations and modifications besides. Each of the corresponding schools derived strength from its relation to some particular metaphysic, and each emphasized, as paradigmatic observations, the particular cluster of optical phenomena that its own theory could do most to explain. Other observations were dealt with by ad hoc elaborations, or they remained as outstanding problems for further research.

For Kuhn, there is a pre-paradigm period in which each school argues with the other schools about fundamental questions. In physics, Kuhn sees the first consensus coalescing with Newton. Einstein represents a scientific revolution, after which the consensus is replaced with a new one, after a period of crisis.

In 1550, there were many competing theories, each of which explained some aspect of light better than the others. But by 1850, if you thought Newton was wrong, you were suddenly not a scientist.

For Kuhn, what is surprising is not that different branches of science debate one another. What is surprising is that this debate ever ends. I cover this in more detail in this part of my thread, but here’s the relevant section:

No wonder, then, that in the early stages of the development of any science different men confronting the same range of phenomena, but not usually all the same particular phenomena, describe and interpret them in different ways. What is surprising, and perhaps also unique in its degree to the fields we call science, is that such initial divergences should ever largely disappear.

For they do disappear to a very considerable extent and then apparently once and for all. Furthermore, their disappearance is usually caused by the triumph of one of the pre-paradigm schools, which, because of its own characteristic beliefs and preconceptions, emphasized only some special part of the too sizable and inchoate pool of information.

I want to suggest that this kind of homogenizing purge is characteristic of the West — not just of science, but the whole “West”, retrospective myth though it is.

Vision and Abstraction

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 17:34:48 GMT

I’m taking a break today from thinking about homogenisation of history and of science. Today I’m thinking about vision, and how it relates to abstraction.

Introducing Feuerbach

This morning a quote from by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) came up in my Readwise. Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) is a classic of humanism, which influenced Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In it, Feuerbach argues for an anthropological origin of religion. Rather than religion revealing something about God or the Universe, it reveals something about humanity. For Feuerbach, religion is a projection of human nature:

Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man, — religion the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.

If the name sounds familiar, you may have come across Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) which are short and worth reading. The final of Marx’s eleven statements is the most famous: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”¹

Philosophy and the stars

Here’s the quote from The Essence of Christianity that came up:

The eye is heavenly in its nature. Hence man elevates himself above the earth only with the eye; hence theory begins with the contemplation of the heavens. The first philosophers were astronomers. It is the heavens that admonish man of his destination, and remind him that he is destined not merely to action, but also to contemplation.

To me it’s a fascinating idea that the first philosophers were astronomers. Is it true? It got me thinking about the connection between vision and “contemplation.”

I think it’s fair to assume that Feuerbach is referring to the Ancient Greeks, since “Western” thinkers always do this.

More specifically, he’s probably thinking of the Milesians and Eleatics:

Thales of Miletus (~624–548 BCE), whom Aristotle regards as the first Greek philosopher, is reputed to have predicted the solar eclipse of May 28, 585 BCE.
Anaximander (~610–546 BCE), also a Milesian, was a pupil of Thales’. He was called the “Father of Cosmology” for his early attempts to give naturalistic explanations of the movements of bodies in the cosmos (in contrast with, e.g., Hesiod, who assumes they are deities).
Anaximenes of Miletus (~586–526 BCE) was a student of Anaximander’s, both a metaphysician and an astronomer.
Parmenides (~515 BCE?), from Elea, was also a philosopher and astronomer. I think he represents the road away from Thales’ observation and towards Platonic disengagement, but that’s a topic for another day.
Several more antiquarian astronomers are listed here. I may expand this list.

I want to consider the possibility that this act of distinguishing visible stars may be important both for critical faculties and for the development of theory itself.

In other words, the repeated act of “stepping back” and “picking things out” from vision may be an important step on the road to creating increasingly abstract categories, and eventually philosophy.

Theory and vision

Here’s Iain McGilchrist, The Master & His Emissary (2009), examining the contrast between the early and late Greek words for sight. Homer uses many words to denote seeing; Bruno Snell (1896–1986) notes at least nine.

Here’s McGilchrist on the diversity of words for seeing during the pre-Socratic period:

What is clear is that there was originally no single word to convey the simple function of sight tout court. There were originally only words for relations with things, the quality of the experience, how the ‘seer’ stood towards the ‘seen’. In other words sight had not been abstracted yet from its context within the lived world, where it is reverberative, itself alive, an expressive of betweenness – not yet thought of as unidirectional, detached, dead: not yet observation.

He continues, discussing the origin of Greek theorein, “to see” (but also “to spectate” or “to contemplate”).² This is closer to what we typically mean by “see” today, which has a sense of passive observation.

By contrast theorein, the origin of our word ‘theory’, is a much later word. Here it takes on the meaning we normally associate with seeing, the eye apprehending an object. Interestingly it was not originally a verb, but is a back-formation from the word for a spectator, theoros. What I take from this is that it is derived from what was thought of as a special situation, one of greater than usual detachment from a ‘spectacle’. Words for ‘thinking’, in the sense of abstract cognition, and words for ‘seeing’ come to be closely related. The prominence, after the Homeric era, of theorein and noein, when compared with the earlier terms for seeing, marks a degree of abstraction from what is under consideration. A related distinction, touched on above, arises between aspects of the mind, between thumos and noos: very broadly thumos is instinct, what keeps the body in motion, coupled with emotion, whereas noos is reflection, ideas and images.

Not to go all Heidegger but it seems pretty important that both the words “theory” and “idea” come from words meaning to “watch” or “see.” No doubt this also relates to the abstraction of the gods that is going on around the time of Homer.

Sound and vision †

As a bit of a teaser, Julian Jaynes writes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976): “The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind.”

From gustation and olfaction to vision

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” […] Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

In Genesis (3:4-7), a taste of fruit leads to the creation of abstract categories (“the knowledge of good and evil”) leads to the opening of the eyes. But could it have been the other way around? A change in vision leads to the creation of categories?

Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), thinks that much changed with the human development of upright gait. The sense of smell was attenuated, and vision had to sharpen:¹

The diminution of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait; this made his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provoked feelings of shame in him.

Vision seems obvious because it is fast

Here’s Anil Seth, “Being a Beast Machine” (2018):

Consider that in visual experience, perceptual scenes seem organised, to a large extent, into discrete objects and the spaces between them. In some sense, the experience of an object includes the perception of surfaces that are not directly represented in sensory data. When we perceive an object, we perceive it as having an external existence, with a ‘back and sides’, as ‘really existing’ out there in the world.

My question is whether this has always been the case. Some aspects of vision seem to depend, counterintuitively, on environmental factors in upbringing. Here’s David Epstein, in Range (2019):

Luria found that most remote villagers were not subject to the same optical illusions as citizens of the industrialized world, like the Ebbinghaus illusion. […] Since Luria’s voyage [into remote parts of Central Asia], scientists have replicated his work in other cultures.

Could it be that we learn to see at a young age, and it is that which makes it so fast, and provides such a strong illusion of “being out there?”

On the speed and apparent clarity of visual recognition, here’s Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. II (1844), ch. 2, “On the Doctrine of Knowledge of Perception or Knowledge of the Understanding”:

Therefore the sensation of the senses is not separated from the representation that is first formed by the understanding out of that sensation as raw material. […] Thus when we read or listen, we receive mere words, but from these we pass over to the concepts denoted by them so immediately, that it is as if we received the concepts immediately; for we are in no way conscious of the transition to them. Therefore on occasion we do not know what was the language in which we yesterday read something which we remember. […] Moreover, with empirical apprehension, the unconsciousness with which the transition from the sensation to its cause is brought about really occurs only with perception in the narrowest sense, with vision or sight. […] On the other hand, with every other perception or apprehension of the senses the transition occurs with more or less clear consciousness; thus in the case of apprehension through the four coarser senses, the reality of the transition can be directly observed as a fact. In the dark we touch a thing on all sides for a long time, until from its different effects on our hands we are able to construct their cause as a definite shape. Further, if something feels smooth, we sometimes reflect as to whether we have fat or oil on our hands; and also when something feels cold, we wonder whether we have very warm hands. In the case of a sound, we sometimes doubt whether it was a merely inner affection of hearing or one that actually comes from outside; whether it sounded near and weak or far off and strong; from what direction it came; finally, whether it was the voice of a human being, of an animal, or the sound of an instrument.

I realize this has been a bit of a quote dump, but hopefully there’s something interesting in it. Soon I’ll look at Spinoza’s notion of how the idea of perfection came about, which also relates seen examples to the process of abstraction itself. And there are probably a few more sections of McGilchrist that are worth a look.

Later I’ll try to query this, and to connect Marx’s notion of actively changing the world with Rousseau and some of the ideologues whom Napoleon tried to repress.↩
See this list for uses of theoros (θεατής).↩

The Winners Write the Textbooks

Sun, 14 Nov 2021 20:39:00 GMT

The historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), whom I recently introduced, argues that a tell-tale sign of a mature science is the appearance and usage of textbooks. He thinks that science is exceptional among disciplines in the extent to which textbooks are used.¹

He begins this argument in Chapter XII of Structure (“Progress through Revolutions”). Science is unique in the degree to which it is “insulated” from outside criticism. This is partly thanks to how it is taught:

The effects of insulation from the larger society are greatly intensified by another characteristic of the professional scientific community, the nature of its educational initiation. In music, the graphic arts, and literature, the practitioner gains his education by exposure to the works of other artists, principally earlier artists. Textbooks, except compendia of or handbooks to original creations, have only a secondary role. In history, philosophy, and the social sciences, textbook literature has a greater significance. But even in these fields the elementary college course employs parallel readings in original sources, some of them the “classics” of the field, others the contemporary research reports that practitioners write for each other. As a result, the student in any one of these disciplines is constantly made aware of the immense variety of problems that the members of his future group have, in the course of time, attempted to solve. Even more important, he has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately evaluate for himself.

In other disciplines, practitioners are aware of the fundamental debates, and the whole history of problems they have solved or attempted to solve. Often to be a part of the discipline means engagement with primary sources. He’s also implying that primary sources are full of the eccentricities and interests which are inseparable, in primary sources, from the minds of individual authors.

Kuhn says this doesn’t happen in science.

Students of philosophy obviously read philosophers that are hundreds or thousands of years old. But scientists are not generally taught about anything other than current theories, and perhaps the most recent change to that theory. They don’t study the older theories in detail. Chemists don’t study phlogiston theory, astronomers don’t learn the Ptolemaic system, and physicists don’t learn Aristotelian physics.

At most, they know of them. They certainly are not trained to apply the old theories.

I plan to argue that when scientists do pick up a primary source, this has something to do with the literary merits of the author — as in the particularly intense case of Darwin.

Kuhn continues, noting how long textbooks are used in science (emphasis mine):

Contrast this situation with that in at least the contemporary natural sciences. In these fields the student relies mainly on textbooks until, in his third or fourth year of graduate work, he begins his own research. Many science curricula do not ask even graduate students to read in works not written specially for students. The few that do assign supplementary reading in research papers and monographs restrict such assignments to the most advanced courses and to materials that take up more or less where the available texts leave off. Until the very last stages in the education of a scientist, textbooks are systematically substituted for the creative scientific literature that made them possible. Given the confidence in their paradigms, which makes this educational technique possible, few scientists would wish to change it. Why, after all, should the student of physics, for example, read the works of Newton, Faraday, Einstein, or Schrödinger, when everything he needs to know about these works is recapitulated in a far briefer, more precise, and more systematic form in a number of up-to-date textbooks?

Science, then, has a strong tendency to rewrite its own history, and to substitute theory for the practice that produced the theory. Science replaces the map with the territory, or at least hides part of its own creative process. This, for Kuhn, is no bad thing; it is much faster to learn a country’s layout from the map than it is to explore it yourself as a cartographer. But of course all map-making faces trade-offs of representation.

Kuhn also implies that science is more convergent than other disciplines, in that it teaches everyone the same things. Kuhn takes this argument much further in a lecture he gave in 1973, called “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice.” I recorded a reading of that lecture here.

Kuhn calls “normal science” those periods when science is progressing by applying the currently dominant paradigm. During those periods, scientists receive a rigid training in the paradigm from textbooks.

In describing this rigidity, he offhandedly makes a stunning comparison:

Without wishing to defend the excessive lengths to which this type of education has occasionally been carried, one cannot help but notice that in general it has been immensely effective. Of course, it is a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology. But for normal-scientific work, for puzzle-solving within the tradition that the textbooks define, the scientist is almost perfectly equipped.

He repeats the comparison between science and theology in Chapter XI, “The Invisibility of Revolutions”:

Furthermore, though the point can be fully developed only in my concluding section, the analysis now required will begin to indicate one of the aspects of scientific work that most clearly distinguishes it from every other creative pursuit except perhaps theology.

Science and theology, for Kuhn, are both creative pursuits, but critically, they are also extremely narrow.

A few pages later, he emphasizes that science rewrites history, and that this is adaptive:

For the moment let us simply take it for granted that, to an extent unprecedented in other fields, both the layman’s and the practitioner’s knowledge of science is based on textbooks and a few other types of literature derived from them. Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field.

Although this next section repeats bits of the above argument, it’s important enough to quote in full, because he is essentially arguing that scientific traditions do not exist in historical terms, but only in retrospect.

Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts’ paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative.

Sound familiar? This is quite similar to the thread I’m working on in whether there was a West, and especially in How the West Was Spun, about rewriting history to make the present appear to be the telos of the past.

It’s not just science that does this:

Scientists are not, of course, the only group that tends to see its discipline’s past developing linearly toward its present vantage. The temptation to write history backward is both omnipresent and perennial. But scientists are more affected by the temptation to rewrite history, partly because the results of scientific research show no obvious dependence upon the historical context of the inquiry, and partly because, except during crisis and revolution, the scientist’s contemporary position seems so secure. More historical detail, whether of science’s present or of its past, or more responsibility to the historical

I’ll save a longer discussion for tomorrow. The point about “writing history backward” is critical.

I covered some of this stuff in my Kuhn thread. For example, on paradigms and textbooks, or the section on the invisibility of revolutions.

This was certainly my experience in studying literature; I had a textbook as a freshman in high school, but not thereafter, and certainly not by the time I was studying literature as an undergraduate. I can imagine some of the social sciences might use textbooks as an undergraduate, and as Kuhn argues, the natural sciences use them for much longer.↩

Oak and Stone

Sat, 13 Nov 2021 15:03:00 GMT

Part 9 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet thought to have been active sometime between 750 and 650 BCE, making him roughly contemporary with Homer. Wikipedia, paraphrasing the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, offers the tantalizing detail that “He is generally regarded as the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role to play in his subject.”

Think about this. The claim is essentially that he is the first “Western” “subject.” Also, notice the implication is that subjectivity involves self-awareness, Hesiod’s awareness of himself as a self.

We’ve spent the past week on the many problems with “the West”, and soon we’ll be on to the connection between subjectivity and subjection, but first let’s have a look at what Hesiod (“He who sends forth the voice”) has to say for himself.

Hesiod’s Theogony (~700 BC) is the first known Greek cosmogony, which refers to any theory of how the cosmos or universe originated. (He also writes the even odder Works and Days to which I’ll someday return.)

“Theogony” literally means “the birth of the gods.” So a theogony is a cosmogony involving deities. I think the Genesis creation accounts (there are two) would also technically be theogonies, though if someone says “the Theogony” then they are probably referring to Hesiod.

Wikipedia also notes: “Theogonies are a part of Greek mythology which embodies the desire to articulate reality as a whole; this universalizing impulse was fundamental for the first later projects of speculative theorizing.”

Keep this in mind too: the universalizing impulse and its connection to subsequent philosophy.

If this all sounds a bit abstract, Theogony is classic Greek mythology stuff. It lays out the whole Greek pantheon, Zeus, Athena, and all the other gods, demigods, titans, nymphs, and Fates, that you may have learned at some point.

Hesiod really likes listing gods with odd bodily descriptors (my favourite might be the “tapering-ankled Okeanos nymphs”). The lists are almost childlike. As an example, here’s a section at the very beginning of the Theogony (lines 9–25) of Hesiod’s Theogony:¹

Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice, praising Zeus the aegis-holder and queenly Hera of Argos who walks on golden sandals and the daughter of Zeus the aegis-holder bright-eyed Athene, and Phoebus Apollo, and Artemis who delights in arrows, and Poseidon the earth-holder who shakes the earth, and reverend Themis and quick-glancing Aphrodite, and Hebe with the crown of gold, and fair Dione, Leto, Iapetus, and Cronos the crafty counsellor, Eos and great Helius and bright Selene, Earth too, and great Oceanus, and dark Night, and the holy race of all the other deathless ones that are for ever. And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon, and this word first the goddesses said to me — the Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis:

In light of the notion, mentioned above, that Hesiod is the first Western subject, it seems important that Hesiod refers to himself in the third person.

My sense is that Hesiod here is doing consensus-building. “Surely you remember Zeus…” And that this consensus building represents an action in the same vein as recollecting memories with friends (as I described yesterday). This invocation does not just name gods, but forces the hearer or reader to recollect them, thereby strengthening them and bringing them to life. I think he’s also inviting listeners to match their local gods with one of the gods in his long list.

Right now I’m also thinking of lines 29–41:

So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvellous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime; and they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last.

If “things that shall be and things that were aforetime” sounds a bit like Yeats’ “Of what is past, or passing, or to come,” have a look at this thread, in which I compare the Theogony to Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928).

Zeus breathes into Hesiod a divine voice to celebrate the gods. “Celebrate” once meant “to consecrate by religious rites” or even “to declare or announce publicly; to promulgate; to proclaim” (OED). These usages are rare, but it can still mean “to extol or spread the fame of” (as in “the celebrated poet”). These older senses are more important here than the modern “mark one’s happiness or satisfaction, revel, rejoice,” which is quite late, starting in the nineteenth century.

Why consecrate gods, declare gods, or make them famous? Aren’t they already gods?

I’m arguing that they’re basically not. The consensus about the genealogy of the gods is coming together here. Or more accurately, the genealogy has come together through centuries of oral tradition (i.e., consensus-making) and is being codified here.

Hesiod continues:

But why all this about oak or stone? Come you, let us begin with the Muses who gladden the great spirit of their father Zeus in Olympus with their songs, telling of things that are and that shall be and that were aforetime with consenting voice. Unwearying flows the sweet sound from their lips, and the house of their father Zeus the loud-thunderer is glad at the lily-like voice of the goddesses as it spreads abroad, and the peaks of snowy Olympus resound, and the homes of the immortals.

When I first read this, I was certain that by “oak and stone” Hesiod meant the old gods. These are the animistic gods, the kind that require no names or lists and live in rocks and trees. The gods were once immanent and direct, probably even more immanent than the Old Testament God was to Adam or Cain, and much more so than God was for Moses (who after all has to keep climbing up mountains to talk to Him).

I’ve subsequently traced this thread very superficially and found that this “oak and stone” passage is a bit of a mystery (many translations note that “Why all this about oak and stone?” just means “Why all these irrelevances?”), but at least one scholar (Lucy Goodison) has come to a similar conclusion.

And I think I was thinking of this passage from Plato’s Phaedrus (370 BC):

SOCRATES: But, my friend, the priests of the temple of Zeus at Dodona say that the first prophecies were the words of an oak. Everyone who lived at that time, not being as wise as you young ones are today, found it rewarding enough in their simplicity to listen to an oak or even a stone, so long as it was telling the truth, while it seems to make a difference to you, Phaedrus, who is speaking and where he comes from. Why, though, don’t you just consider whether what he says is right or wrong?

So what am I saying?

The first recorded subject, according to the (problematic) “Western” tradition, is explicitly past the point where the gods are immanent and self-evident in nature itself. Already they have become abstract, gaining names and epithets (“white-armed Persephone”) to distinguish their already hazy appearances. This is the claim made by Julian Jaynes: As the gods gradually cease to speak, or humans cease to hallucinate first their images and then their voices, the humans are left to write things down, which in turn hastens the “death” of the animistic gods.

But more than this, Hesiod is homogenising the gods. This is an attempt to reduce the chaos of people reverting to their own local gods again. This is also what’s going on with the Old Testament God, who has to keep cajoling His people to stop reverting to the old idols, in which gods once inhered.

I’m using the Evelyn-White translation and the Nagy translation.↩

How the West Was Spun

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 17:22:00 GMT

Part 8 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

In this post I begin my response to Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special episode of the excellent Historiansplaining podcast.

The topic is the problems with the concept of some coherent thing called “The West.”

Please read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7 if you haven’t already.

History versus Civilization

But why then insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’ (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, ‘Western civilization’)?

— David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021), ch. 1

At the end of my last post, I wrote that I agree with Biagetti’s argument against the historical coherence of anything called “the West.”

It is indeed a “ramshackle and unstable idea.” This is important. Not because I think that the West can be defined as being ramshackle; that’s the argument that Biagetti dismissed as tantamount to saying that “Western culture is a culture of no coherent culture.”

Though to give a hint where I’m going, where else have I heard the word “ramshackle” used?

Ah yes…

What has been said so far may have seemed to imply that normal science is a single monolithic and unified enterprise that must stand or fall with any one of its paradigms as well as with all of them together. But science is obviously seldom or never like that. Often, viewing all fields together, it seems instead a rather ramshackle structure with little coherence among its various parts.

— Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

What I want to suggest is that the West, while revealing little and obscuring much about historical cultures, actually reveals a great deal about the modern culture that wants to construct such an identity.

Back to Germany

As discussed from the beginning, it is really a Germanic idea; but the US is also more of a German state than it might at first appear.

Probably they are not alone in this, but Germanic peoples do seem to like connecting themselves up to potentially tenuous institutions of the past.

For much of its history, for example, despite its name, the Holy Roman Empire, did not include Rome. It existed from 800 to 1806 in what is now Germany and neighbouring countries.

Rome was just the place where the Emperors were crowned (at least for a little while¹). The Roman Empire had fallen by 476; Charlemagne was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor in 800, but that lineage was broken in 924, and resuscitated in 962 with Otto I. The term “Holy Roman Empire” was not used until the 13th century, or nearly 800 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and after the period that it actually included Rome.

Have you ever wondered what the first two Reichs were? You know, before the Third Reich. The first was the Holy Roman Empire, and the second was the German Empire formed by Bismarck in 1871. In other words, the Third Reich is attempting to connect itself to the Holy Roman Empire, which had connected itself to the Roman Empire.

To me, just based on the quantities of time between them, this seems more like naming a sports team after people who once lived where the team plays than it does like sharing a surname with a distant ancestor. But I could be wrong about this; I’m still very much in learning mode.

Rewriting philosophy

The Germans also rather successfully rewrote the history of philosophy.

I will point once again to the article on the origins of philosophy by Bryan W Van Norden. As I noted the other day, in the 18th Century, Europeans assumed that philosophy either began in India, Africa, or both.

That history was rewritten in the nineteenth century. Again citing Peter K J Park:

[…] defenders of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) consciously rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his critical idealism was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was groping, more or less successfully.

German Idealist philosophers in the 18th and 19th Centuries do a teleological rewriting of the history of philosophy, explicitly to make themselves appear as an end point.

Making the present the telos of the past

Please forgive me for this still-nascent idea.

Probably all voluntary collaborations (countries, companies, friendships) require a kind of myth-making, the construction of narratives which intensify and articulate each time they are recalled. To take the example of friendship, you’ll often be asked to recount how you met a friend.

This is a kind of “origin story” which, through repetition, places random facts and memories into a basic narrative. This story might, over time, develop a sense of telos, a word (from Aristotle) which refers to the full potential or inherent purpose or objective of something: an end, purpose or goal. The origin story may become more satisfying if it in some sense suggests that “This was meant to be.” (I discuss telos more here).

That sense can probably come in many different forms, but two occur to me now. A sense of inevitability can come either from the meeting being overdetermined (sharing many friends, or common interests/traits/goals) or underdetermined (unlikely, a completely chance meeting). The former makes it seem as if many threads come together in the friendship, whereas the latter’s very randomness makes the friendship seem fated or foreordained.

It strikes me that this may be a reason why it seems so important to friendships to recollect and re-tell stories that both parties already know well. This re-telling produces consensus, and recall not only brings the story to mind but strengthens and intensifies it, and thereby strengthens the relationship itself. The story need not be in any sense “true” — it just needs to be agreed upon.

Larger scale cooperations likely require larger myths. Early city-states may literally have been united by their agreement on the details of stories about Bronze Age heroes. Later states need the equivalent of Bronze Age heroes, whether those are monarchs, revolutionary leaders, or founding fathers. And cooperation among multiple states may require a connection to a historic past, including reference to previous cooperations among multiple states, since it is not a particularly natural thing to do. I’ve pointed out, for example, the diverse but harmonious Europe that Zweig envisioned, and noted its mythical quality.

Spengler is doing precisely this: picking parts out of history to create a narrative. In his case, it is a tragic narrative rather than heroic — but tragedies still have heroes.

That Europe loses access to Aristotle for centuries, or that the few notes of his we have are only preserved by Islam, does not really matter in this context. The point is by the time Spengler is writing in 1918, Aristotle has a prestige, mythical, perhaps even heroic quality. His audience need not even know Aristotle well (though some surely would have) for this effect to work.²

Tracing a line from Egypt to Mesopotamia, or from Athens to Jerusalem, does not actually connect things that exist in the past. As Biagetti says in the first post, one way to view the West is as a constellation. But critically, a constellation is an effect of the observer; it is projected onto an indifferent reality.

But it does connect things in the present. By picking specific parts of Greek philosophy, Judeo-Christianity, we reveal something about ourselves. And I think that has some coherent core, as I will argue over the coming days (I start here).

On apparent inevitability

For now, here is Tolstoy, War and Peace, Volume I, Part Two, ch. IX:

If I examine an act I committed a moment ago, under approximately the same conditions as I am in now, my action seems unquestionably free to me. But if I review an act I committed a month ago, I involuntarily recognize, being in different conditions, that if that act had not been committed, many useful, agreeable, and even necessary things which resulted from that act would not have taken place. If I transport myself in memory to an act still more remote, ten years back or more, the consequences of my act will appear still more obvious to me; and it will be hard for me to imagine what would have happened if the act had not been done. The further back I transport myself in memory, or, what is the same, ahead in my judgment, the more questionable my argument about the freedom of the act will become.

In history we find exactly the same progression of convincingness about the portion of free will in the general affairs of mankind. A just-accomplished contemporary event appears to us as unquestionably proceeding from all known people; but in a more remote event we see its inevitable consequences, aside from which we cannot imagine anything else. And the further back we transport ourselves in examining events, the less arbitrary they appear to us.

The Austro-Prussian war appears to us as the unquestionable consequence of the actions of cunning Bismarck, and so on.

Sometimes, at least before 1508. Even in the early period, coronations occurred in Ravenna, Bologna, and Reims. Still, it was usually in Rome. From 1508, Imperial elections took place in Frankfurt am Main, Augsburg, Rhens, Cologne or Regensburg. So the connection to Rome seems to grow more tenuous over time.↩
If you’re wondering how many pages it takes before Spengler mentions Aristotle, the answer is 9. If you’re wondering how many times he mentions Aristotle, the answer is 68 (Plato gets 80, and Socrates 17). See my post on the Athenians.↩

The Myth of the West VII

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 13:54:00 GMT

Part 7 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

In this post I continue my discussion of Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special episode of the excellent Historiansplaining podcast. Though I highly recommend the podcast, you don’t need to have listened to it before reading these posts.

The topic is the problems with the concept of some coherent thing called “The West.”

Please read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6 if you haven’t already.

Lepers and Crooks

You’ve been with the professors and
They’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks

— Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Yesterday we dismissed arguments that the West might find its one defining feature in science, in individualism, or in rapine.

Biagetti notes the irony in the fact that Spengler puts together his unified definition of the West during World War I, one of Europe’s greatest cataclysms. Spengler’s philosophy is pessimistic, tragic, and Faustian. But it is also classically “declensionist,” following (as discussed in the first instalment) Edward Gibbon’s 18th century Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Biagetti finds consonance between the “decline” narrative and conspiracy theories. If you feel anxious, confused, and uncertain about the future, you may (as Spengler does) conclude that your whole society is declining into moral decadence. You might also assume that there are hidden forces conspiring invisibly behind the scenes.

Conspiracy theories, he notes, have often been anti-Semitic, anti-Marxist, anti-anarchist. During certain periods, certain anarchists really were violent revolutionary conspirators — though there have also been pacifist strands. Today, these accusations have been extended, he argues, to include Post-Modernists, relativists, deconstructionists, and other schools of thought, who are influential within academia, though not found often outside of it. Calling someone a “post-modern neo-Marxist” today is to accuse them of conspiring to tear Western society apart from the inside, and it carries the same connotations as calling someone a “communist” did during one of the Red Scares.

The newer accusation does not necessarily allege a shadowy group of conspirators, as in the fabricated anti-Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903). But it operates along similar lines. It alleges that a loose affiliation of individuals, in a cultural minority but potentially holding positions of power, are somehow conspiring the culture from within.

Biagetti finds this idea almost inseparable from the idea of the West. Once you think of the West as a body, with the individual countries as parts, this leads to obvious metaphorical leaps. Bodies age (decline), get sick (become decadent), and die (collapse). Bodies can become infected and contaminated. And it plays on the strong feelings people have about their own bodily integrity.

Biagetti finds these worries extremely similar to those in the 14th Century, when High Medieval European culture is on the decline. There are famines, the Hundred Years’ War, and a rather famous plague. People turn to scapegoats and accuse them of literally poisoning Western Christendom.

In Biagetti’s telling, the lepers are the first to be accused. Here’s a related account by Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror (1978):

The accusation of well-poisoning was as old as the plague of Athens, when it had been applied to the Spartans, and as recent as the epidemics of 1320–21, when it had been applied to the lepers. At that time the lepers were believed to have acted at the instigation of the Jews and the Moslem King of Granada, in a great conspiracy of outcasts to destroy Christians. Hundreds were rounded up and burned throughout France in 1322 and the Jews heavily punished by an official fine and unofficial attacks. When the plague came, the charge was instantly revived against the Jews […]

Tuchman quotes a song by the most significant European composer of the time, Guillame de Machaut (1300–1377), which accuses Jews of poisoning wells. She goes on to trace this anti-Semitism back to the early Church.

Biagetti connects these to the European witch trials, which began in 1329, but reach their zenith (or nadir) in 1580–1630, during which about 50,000 people (80% women) were burned at the stake. He points out that about half of all the people prosecuted and killed in this period were in what is now Germany (then the Holy Roman Empire).¹

He refers briefly to the similar treatment of heretics; I’ll return soon to whether heresy is itself a Western phenomenon. But the 12th to 15th Centuries are also the period of the Medieval Inquisition.

Modern Fears

Biagetti sees these same fears as direct antecedents to fears of “cultural Bolshevism” in the last century, and of “cultural Marxism” today. Germany and Central Europe are the “crucible” of this kind of thinking. They don’t even really need to make sense: “Jewish Masonic communist banker conspiracies.”

In Spengler, he sees the search for a coherent West as expressing a fear of the East. Spengler’s thinking is not anti-Semitic and not itself related to Nazism. But Nazism’s xenophobia and anti-Semitism might be more extreme expressions of the same underlying fears.

Here’s Biagetti:

There is still this heavy German background to thinking, to our ideas about the West and Western civilization, but they’ve really taken off now more in the English speaking countries. In Britain and the united States and Canada. This is where the same sort of ideas about the rise and fall of civilizations, about clashes between inherently opposing civilizations, clashes between East and West, the internal weakening of the West by infiltrators from the East. These sorts of ideas are now really strongest in the Anglophone countries.

He calls the West “a ramshackle and unstable idea” which “papers over massive rifts and changes in belief that have happened in Western Europe and America through the centuries.”

None of the people now retrospectively considered “Western” would ever have described themselves as such; they would have described themselves as Polish, or French, or Florentine. He thinks this is an important hint for thinking about civilization today.

Rather than resorting to the murky level of “the West,” he thinks that, if you’re concerned about the West’s decline and “crisis of meaning,” you should consider starting at the local level. “What is your city, your state, your community, and how can it be strengthened? And how can life be improved? And how can its traditions be preserved?” Those are questions that should be easier to answer before referring to anything as abstract as “the West.”

I’ve covered Biagetti’s argument fairly exhaustively but I would still highly recommend the podcast. And on the whole I agree with him: as a historical concept, “the West” is worse than useless; it is deeply misleading.

But we still seem to know what someone means when they talk about the West. From here I am going to argue in favour of patterns that might be distinctly “Western.”

Fascinatingly, the Latin term for witchcraft is sortilegia, i.e., sortilege, the casting of lots, which Julian Jaynes writes about, and which occurs in several famous places in the Bible. And the witch trials outside the Holy Roman Empire mostly took place in France, with Spain and Italy comparatively spared.↩

The Myth of the West VI

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 16:18:00 GMT

Part 6 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

The topic is the problems with the concept of some coherent thing called “The West.”

Please read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 if you haven’t already.

Science and “Rationalism”

Another way one might try to define East and West would be to point to science and rationality. Maybe the West is “scientific” and “rationalist,” with the assumption (whether spoken or unspoken) that the East is “mystical” and “irrational.”

The profound problems with this view, now called “orientalism,” have been discussed in academia for decades, beginning famously with Edward Said’s 1978 book by that title. However it remains a fairly common assumption.

Biagetti argues that “rationality” just refers to the belief that you are right and others are wrong. To say science is rational and Buddhism is irrational is really just saying that you believe science is right and Buddhism is wrong. He also points out that “Westerners” have believed in alchemy, phrenology, race science, eugenics, and so on, as well as the spiritualism of people like Madame Blavatsky and the aforementioned Spengler. He compares Spengler’s thinking to Blavatsky’s Theosophy and to the Golden Dawn, each believing that there is a deep spirit in each civilization, but that each civilization is nevertheless doomed to destruction. He also notes the astrological beliefs of Galileo and Copernicus, and the “mystical overtone” of Spengler’s thinking.

On the one hand, I think it’s possible to provide definitions of rationalism that are a bit more specific than the one Biagetti provides. Some combination of symbolic logic, use of mathematics/a quantitative approach, etc. But of course many of these things are not really “Western” either. Indian logic and Chinese utilitarianism, for example, pre-date “Europe,” and therefore long pre-date the European Enlightenment.

On the other hand, I think there are persuasive arguments against the notion that it’s easy (or even possible) to draw a hard line between science and other modes of inquiry. As Thomas Kuhn points out, the scientific revolution (beginning in astronomy with Copernicus in 1543 and ending with Newton’s 1687 Principia) simply cannot be cleanly separated from the “non-scientific” thinking which went before it, and on which it depends. Of representatives from the Epicurean, Aristotelian, and Platonic schools of physics (which do not now look particularly scientific), Kuhn writes: “Those men were scientists.”

Biagetti points out that the majority of the West was not discernibly rationalist. Most were religious for most of the West’s history, and atheists sometimes feared for their lives. Only a recent and small core of scientists can really be put in this category. Having a small group of atheist rationalists cannot be the defining feature of Western civilization, since that description also applies to Brazil of Japan, and presumably most other nations. If you resort to founding principles, then Brazil’s flag says “Order and Progress,” from arch-rationalist August Comte (1798–1857), whose maxim for positivism was “Love as a principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal.”

Not uniquely individualist

What about “the West” as individualistic? Could one argue that “the East” differs in that it is more collectivist?

Biagetti argues against the idea that the West as a whole is uniquely individualist. Parts of it are now, but this is very different from much of European history, for most of which the Great Chain of Being and the Body Politic were unquestioningly accepted as defining a hierarchical collective. In those times, individuals who sought their own profit were banished or exiled — merchants, for example, are utterly reviled in the Late Medieval period.

Some, says Biagetti, have pointed to Martin Luther (1483–1546) as an early defender of “individualism” because of his belief in individual salvation. He believed that people should be able to read scripture in the vernacular. But he absolutely did not believe in freedom of thought, freedom of speech, or even freedom of religion. He assumed that by reading scripture, people would come to the same conclusion that he had, i.e., salvation by grace.

Not uniquely rapacious

Though the West has engaged in atrocities and oppression by imperialism, capitalism, and racism, Biagetti does not find this uniquely “Western” when compared to, for example, the Mexica Empire, with its enormous proportion of human sacrifice, or the vast ethnic cleansing of the Inca Empire. There may be technological differences, but there’s no reason to think that the Mongols would not have used atom bombs, had they had them to hand, rather than the hand weapons used to massacre civilians in the Siege of Baghdad (1258). In that siege, in about a week, Western sources report that Mongols killed 200–800,000 civilians, with Arab sources reporting up to two million (Hiroshima killed an upper estimate of 166,000 including aftermath effects).

Biagetti also points out that many “Western” atrocities have been directed at other Western nations. This is not to minimize the enormous colonial atrocities — this article estimates 56 million, or 90% of the indigenous population, died in the European “discovery” of the New World. It’s just to note that most of the ~70 million dead in World War II were Westerners killing Westerners — though don’t forget that China lost at least 15 million, or about the horrific Japanese policy. Once again, this shows that there is no particularly unified West, nor is the West particularly unique.

I continue with the connection between Declensionism and conspiracy theories.

The Myth of the West V

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 10:58:00 GMT

Part 5 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

The topic is the problems with the concept of some coherent thing called “The West.”

Please read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 if you haven’t already.

The Invention of Western Civilization

Last week, I described Spengler’s influential role in the creation of the myth of the West. Biagetti notes that around the same time, Columbia University started teaching a course called “Contemporary Civilization”. This began in 1919 “as a course on War and Peace issues.” It is still taught today. Their timeline is worth a look; the jump from Augustine (398) to Dante (1321) is especially abrupt.

Interestingly, this is in the same period (1880s–1920s) when majors are introduced at universities, education begins to take place more in modern languages like English, and the classics themselves are no longer taught in Greek and Latin. Before the nineteenth century, the knowledge of these languages was what it meant to be “educated.” In other words, it is not just the birth of “the West,” but the birth of modern education.¹ (I’m curious whether this is also the period where the “Western canon” itself is created, and whether German writers were excluded from it until after WWII.)

Columbia’s course and others like it (“Great Books,” “Humanities Sequence”) were possibly political from their conception. From Wikipedia:

The “Contemporary Civilization” course of the time has also been described as a direct response to the US entry into the war, seeking to encourage US involvement by stressing the importance of Western civilization.

Biagetti argues that these courses are in part created to show that America is the true heir to “Western history,” and not Germany, which had “gone awry with Kaiserism.” Anti-German sentiment had intensified in Europe with the unification of Germany in 1871, when the creation of a new rival nation threatened established European states. But it had also grown in the US due to German immigration.

The Rightful Heir

(Me editorializing:) Germans entered the US in enormous numbers before WWI, wiht a total of about 7.5 million entering between 1820 and 1870 (the total US population was 9.6m in 1820 and 38m in 1870). Germans were the largest immigrant group at the turn of the twentieth century — and they still are the largest self-reported group, at 43 million people.

Biagetti argues that the creation of these courses in America was largely about showing that America, and not Germany, was the rightful heir to “West Civilization.” Remember that this notion of “the West” as a thing was only then being created, so it was in some sense up for grabs.²

The professors who put together programs at American universities in the 1920s saw the West as a dialectic between Jerusalem and Athens, between Judeo-Christian values and Greco-Roman ones — the problems of which I noted yesterday.

Biagetti points out that these two lineages are fundamentally in conflict. Liberal notions of personal freedom, which come from a roundabout Enlightenment reading of the Greco-Roman tradition,³ for example, are completely at odds with the absolutism of the Catholic Church. He thinks this remains an unreconciled — and perhaps unreconcilable — paradox.

Lack of explanatory power

Biagetti considers the possible response that the West is defined by paradox, but he finds this unsatisfying. It would be like saying that to be a part of Western culture is to be a part of no culture.

As I’ve described, he thinks Greco-Roman philosophy is not a single thing. He also thinks that even to consider Christianity a single category is misguided. If Christianity is one thing, he asks, then how do you explain the Reformation? The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was purely Christians killing Christians, and may have killed up to 50% of the population in some parts of Europe.

I want to return to this point because I think there is something particularly “Western” about things like the Reformation, but I’ll leave it here today.

Biagetti then enters a discussion of the problems of referring to “Europe” without first providing qualification or definition, as in the example of Douglas Murray’s book The Strange Death of Europe (2017). I’m going to skip that discussion and continue tomorrow with the idea that perhaps what defines the West is its approach to scientific and rationalist.

If you’re interested in this seismic educational shift, Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) is a great introduction.↩
They also try to rewrite the history of philosophy in a similar way, as I discuss here.↩
This rather ecstatic European re-encounter with classical sources is referenced about halfway through this podcast.↩

The Myth of the West IV

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 14:07:00 GMT

Part 4 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

In this post I continue my discussion of Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special episode of the excellent Historiansplaining podcast.

The topic is the problems with the concept of some coherent thing called “The West.”

Please read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you haven’t already.

The Ideology of the West

Yesterday I wrote about the problems encountered in an attempt to identify the West geographically. Biagetti also gives an account of the term “the West” in Medieval Europe, when it referred to an opposition between the Latin (Catholic) West and the Islamic or Greek (Orthodox) East.

I discussed the transmission of physical technologies and styles of government here, but this also applies to ideological Greco-Roman philosophy as well as to Christianity.

Cultures considered “non-Western” today were deeply influenced by the Greeks and Romans — not only were scholars in the Islamic caliphates deeply indebted to Greek philosophy, but they are responsible for its preservation (and more). And “non-Western” countries like the Philippines or Mexico are often much more staunchly Christian than their European counterparts.

Why, if the US and Canada are Western, isn’t Mexico?

Biagetti sees there as being two possible responses to this the question. The first is to revert to physiognomy, i.e., what people look like. This is a racial definition, i.e., that to be Western one must be white, so Israel or South Africa are included, but Latin America and Japan are not, no matter how “Western” they become in their government, culture, and so on. This kind of definition quickly ends in racist pseudoscience.

He sees the other option as almost the opposite: Say that race doesn’t matter, it’s about ideology, about subscribing to a certain set of “beliefs or values.” In this response, it doesn’t matter what people look like; they’re Western based on their ideology. This of course has the odd consequence that people who have “Asian” or “African” or “Muslim” values (however you define them) but live in France or the US are suddenly “not Western.”

Some commentators are fine with this. So he tries to use this line of reasoning. It leads obviously to the question: If “the West” is about a Western ideology, then what is the Western ideology?

A Cacophony of Philosophy

I wrote last week of the many unexpected paths back to Ancient Athens. Biagetti first considers the possibility that the defining feature of the West is its connection to classical Greco-Roman philosophy.

He then dissects what we mean by classical philosophy. He points to the fact that Socratic dialogue is mostly people disagreeing with each other. Among the Ancient Greeks there are relativists and absolutists, idealists and realists, some who place being before becoming, others who place becoming before being. He contrasts the Epicureans with the Aristotelians, saying they have no shared values or assumptions about how life should work, what is true or false, what is good or bad. He calls Greek philosophy a “cacophony.”

He also rightly points out that although the Romans take up elements of Greek philosophy, they live in different centuries with different laws and forms of government. “What you have is a tradition of constant disputation.” He considers the possibility of defining the Western tradition of one of debate and disagreement, but he finds this paradoxical:

That’s almost like saying it’s a tradition of no tradition, or it’s a philosophy of no shared philosophy. It’s paradoxical, right? And as we go and look at other possible meanings of Western we find more paradoxes like this.

I want to return to this and consider how different the surviving Greco-Roman philosophies in fact are, and why certain philosophies (and not others) have survived. I also plan to contrast this with the philosophical schools in China and India (see China, India). But for now let’s move to religion.

Judeo-Christian

Instead of a philosophical tradition, perhaps you could point to Judeo-Christian values. But as noted yesterday, “Christianity is an eastern religion.” Naturally Christianity has its roots in Judaism, which begins in the Levant in the late Second Temple Period, and is now thought to have evolved out of Ancient Canaanite polytheism.

You immediately run into the problem of how this relates to Greco-Roman thought. The Bible has its roots in the ancient and Roman Near East. The Greek wisdom traditions have some influence on the Bible, but Christianity saw itself as radically opposed to the Roman Empire. (In the Early church, there was a martyrdom ideal, i.e., the best imaginable thing that could happen to you as a Christian was for the Romans to kill you.)

He also raises the problems of places like Ethiopia, which are now not considered Western even though they became Christian earlier than any part of Europe. (Armenia, geopolitically “European” though located in Western Asia, also became Christian around the same time, about 301.) Why isn’t Ethiopia Western? What about the converts to Christianity in India as early as 52 CE? Are they western?

I would add another question: Islam is an Abrahamic religion too. Why isn’t Islam western?

Fusion?

Biagetti considers the possibility that it’s a synthesis of the Greco-Roman philosophy and the Christian religion that might define the West. But he then asks: “What synthesis?” There were a few scholastics like Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) who were interested in Aristotle, but there were far more Christians who wanted to destroy all traces of pagan deities.

Aquinas is the exception; most medieval scholars wanted to purge the influence. And where did Aquinas get these manuscripts? From Islamic Spain, which was much more diligent in preserving these texts than anywhere Christian at the time. Aquinas was also reading Islamic commentators. The Greco-Roman heritage was much more important to the Islamic world than it was to the Christian world before the Middle Ages, where it was thought to be a threat.¹

This series continues with Biagetti’s description of how the Western canon comes to be codified at Columbia University and elsewhere in the 1920s.

This changes over the course of the Middle Ages, but even by the end of the fourteenth century, an Italian dictionary gives only a single page to Aristotle, whereas Hannibal gets three. See Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (1978), ch. 11.↩

The Myth of the West III

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 10:58:48 GMT

Part 3 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

The topic is the problems with the concept of some coherent thing called “The West.”

Please read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already.

Searching for a West

Biagetti leaves aside Spengler’s Decline theory (discussed here), as many people in what we call the “West” do not fit the Faustian mold.

Franciscan preachers or nature poets, to take random examples, are not famous for their commitment to technological progress. (Though as a complete aside, Benedictines did adopt new technology, and may even have developed it, in areas like book-binding which were only coming into existence when they were founded in 529 CE.)

He then attempts, by way of reductio ad absurdum, two potential ways of defining what we mean by “the West”:

Social geography: The landmass or set of countries that we mean by “the West.”
Ideological: The set of countries which adhere ideologically to some set of “Western values.”

Today I’ll look at the geographical argument. I look at the ideological argument here.

The Geography of the West

What do we mean by “the West?”

We might say that we mean the landmass of Europe and its daughter countries. That would include places like the US, Canada, and Australia, founded by immigrants and colonists from Europe.

The first problem is that Europe itself is not really a distinct landmass. It’s connected to Asia, as a part of what we now call Eurasia.

In the Ancient world, supposedly Western people simply did not think of themselves as Europeans. Ancient Greeks, from whose language the word “Europe” comes, would not have called themselves Europeans.

It might be like describing yourself as “Eurasian” today; it’s weirdly unspecific. They would not have felt they had anything in common with the Celts or Germans living elsewhere in the land they called Europe, just as you might live in Tajikistan and have little in common with someone in France, though they’re both on Eurasia.

No Ancient Europe

If you asked the Greeks which cultures they cared about, they would have said first Egypt, and second Persia. They would not have cared that these places are on different “continents” — a relatively recent concept which is itself fraught.

Biagetti argues that they would have seen themselves as having much more in common with the Egyptians or Persians than with Celts or Germans. This is because “Europe” is just an arbitrary line up from the Black Sea through the Ural Mountains with no historical meaning or importance.

Russia straddles the Ural mountains, but nobody cared about that until about 1725, and the border between Europe and Asia was still moving around until at least 1958. See if you can follow the many attempts to draw the line. There can be many maps of the same territory. But for the Ancient world there was no coherent concept of Europe as “European.”

Nor did the Greeks see themselves as an important start to civilization or philosophy in the way many “Westerners” now describe. Here’s Bryan W Van Norden, writing on the origins of philosophy:

In fact, as Peter K J Park notes in Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon (2014), the only options taken seriously by most [European] scholars in the 18th century were that philosophy began in India, that philosophy began in Africa, or that both India and Africa gave philosophy to Greece.

The Ancient Greeks themselves felt that civilization had begun in either Africa or further East, and Europeans believed this until the nineteenth Century.

The Medieval “West”

When does the term “European” come about, then? Biagetti points to Charles Martel (688–741) and his grandson Charlemagne (748–814). These are the first leaders who strengthened and centralized the Kingdom of the Franks, the post-Roman barbarian kingdom which covered much of what is now France.

Martel was the first to present himself as a self-consciously as a defender of “Christendom,” meaning the Christian faith as well as all its followers. Martel defeated the Moorish army at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, which stopped the advance of the Umayyad invasion of Gaul.

Martel sometimes referred to the army under his command not just as “Frankish” but also as “European.” This is the first instance of using the previously arbitrary geographic definition to mean something social and political.

So already in the 8th Century, “European” has a religious meaning, and it defines itself in opposition to Islam. “Western Christendom” is the Latin Church. Later, the opposition is not just to Islam, but later also to the “Eastern Church,” which speaks Greek, and includes Greece, but is centred at Constantinople. In the Middle Ages, when people talk about “the West,” they usually mean in contrast to Eastern Christendom.

Can you see the problem here?

If we accept this meaning of Western, then Greece is at the very heart of the East.

Continued here.

The Myth of the West II

Sat, 06 Nov 2021 11:05:48 GMT

Part 2 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

The topic is the problems with the concept of some coherent thing called “The West.”

Please read Part 1 if you haven’t already.

Lack of European unity

Samuel Biagetti points out that European countries did not see themselves as unified in the nineteenth century, and indeed, these countries (or their forebears) had been at war for most of the previous millennium. The British, Austrians, and Russians (to pick at random) did not care that they had technology in common, or that their educated classes had read the same Greek classics.

That does not mean they actually had nothing in common, just they saw themselves as largely opposed to each other — in language, culture, and government.

He points to the diversity of forms of government: Britain was a comparatively free constitutional monarchy. France was a republic. Russia was a Tsarist autocracy. They (rightly) considered these to be very different governments, and each country was suspicious of the others. That there were other countries in the world which were more different would not have mattered to them.

But, Biagetti argues, the “educated or somewhat educated literate middle classes in these countries began to think of themselves as part of one larger coherent unit because of the crises they were in, because of their anxiety about where they were headed, and what they were afraid they might be losing, or what might be inadvertently destroyed.” This, he says, is where our idea of Western civilization ultimately comes from.

Zweig invents Europe

I want to drill down on this because I think that he is right.

Here’s the novelist Stefan Zweig, writing in his 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday about Vienna before the First World War:¹

There is hardly a city in Europe where the drive towards cultural ideals was as passionate as it was in Vienna. Precisely because the monarchy, because Austria itself for centuries had been neither politically ambitious nor particularly successful in its military actions, the native pride had turned more strongly toward a desire for artistic supremacy. The most important and the most valuable provinces, German and Italian, Flemish and Walloon, had long since fallen away from the old Habsburg empire that had once ruled Europe; unsullied in its old glory, the capital had remained, the treasure of the court, the preserver of a thousand-year-old tradition. […] At court, among the nobility, and among the people, the German was related in blood to the Slavic, the Hungarian, the Spanish, the Italian, the French, the Flemish; and it was the particular genius of this city of music that dissolved all the contrasts harmoniously into a new and unique thing, the Austrian, the Viennese. Hospitable and endowed with a particular talent for receptivity, the city drew the most diverse forces to it, loosened, propitiated, and pacified them. It was sweet to live here, in this atmosphere of spiritual conciliation, and subconsciously every citizen became supernational, cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.

I suspect that Zweig is inventing a multicultural Europe here as much he is describing it. Or at least that during the time he is describing, circa 1900, the phenomenon was very new. Presumably the men who died in the unsuccessful military actions would not have felt the way that he does.

If the phrase “citizen of the world” sounds familiar, then it’s once again from Ancient Greece, though this time far from Athens. Diogenes of Sinope (~412–323 BCE), founder of Cynicism, had said something similar: “I am a citizen of the world.” But citizen (civis) referred originally to civitas, which meant active civil engagement in the community of a single specific city-state.² In my estimation, Diogenes’ remark remains recorded not because it was representative of most people’s experience. It remains recorded precisely because it was a preposterous contradiction, something like writing “Everywhere” as your address on a form.

Zweig continues, describing music, p32:

For the genius of Vienna — a specifically musical one — was always that it harmonized all the national and lingual contrasts. Its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Whoever lived there and worked there felt himself free of all confinement and prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that to a great extent I must thank this city, which already in the time of Marcus Aurelius defended the Roman — the universal — spirit, that at an early age I learned to love the idea of comradeship as the highest of my heart.

I’d argue that Zweig, like Diogenes, is projecting this harmony. Don’t forget that the First World War is about to start. By referring to the Romans, he is more-or-less engaged in myth-making.

On the other hand, myth-making may well be required for large-scale cooperation. And Zweig’s myth is undoubtedly preferable to the opposing myths that would be used to enlist soldiers.

(If you’re interested in Zweig, I also wrote about him in another post: Cycles of Youth.)

I continue on the topic of “the West” here.

Biagetti does not cite Zweig, but I think he’s relevant here. I don’t know whether Zweig is actually an early representative or an example of a developed type. But a quick google yielded this (“Zweig [is] one of the intellectual forefathers of the European Union”) and this (which also mentions Zweig).↩
See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chapter I, §2.↩

The Myth of the West I

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 18:46:48 GMT

Part 1 of a series on Whether There Was a West.

About a year ago, I listened to a podcast called Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special episode of the excellent Historiansplaining podcast.

In it, host and historian Samuel Biagetti systematically argues that the term “the West” is incoherent. I found his argument persuasive and important so I’ll summarize the podcast here. Though I highly recommend the podcast, you don’t need to have listened to it before reading these posts.

To be clear, what follows is not my argument; it’s a summary of the podcast linked above.

This is in connection with a piece I wrote the other day on tracing things back to their sources.

The winding way “West”

Biagetti describes his doubt while teaching classes on early “Western civilization,” which covered the period from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages. This is already awkward just at the level of geography, since in this telling, “the West” starts in Egypt (northeast Africa/southwest Asia), moves through Mesopotamia (now Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait), and winds up in western Europe. Though the story starts in North Africa and in the Near and Middle East, by the end, none of these places are a part of the West, even though naturally none of them have moved. He notes that students sometimes intuit that this has something to do with Islam.

“Western,” he continues, obviously begins as a relative term. Not only must a place be west of something else in order to be western, but unlike North or South, there is no “West Pole,” nowhere to which one can point and say “That’s the West.” Citing Lévi-Strauss, who wrote that certain oppositions engender each other (e.g., there can be no concept of raw without a concept of cooked), he points out that West only makes sense if there is also an East.

But didn’t the Roman Empire split into East and West? It definitely did.¹ And centuries later, Byzantine chroniclers in Constantinople write about the Crusades coming from the west, and “Western crusaders” crusaded into what is now Syria and Palestine.

But that sense of “western” is quite different from what we mean today by “Western.” It was just a way of dividing up a territory. To see the problem with conflating the two senses of “west,” for example, just think of what we now mean by “Western medicine.” If this is the tradition going back to classical sources like Aristotle and Galen, then by the time of the Crusades, this tradition was practiced primarily in the areas of the Islamic Caliphates which are in this context “eastern.” Western Europeans were, by and large, unaware of the classical sources at the time. Even if they were comparably connected to the medical lineage, there’s no sense in which this lineage was originally “Western.”

No geography

Nor can geography be used to delineate what we mean by the West. It is not just Western Eurasia.

First, from the beginning, societies were linked all the way across Eurasia, so that technologies we might associate with the West (e.g. gunpowder or printing) actually originate in the East. Similarly, phonetic writing and more sophisticated artillery, invented in western Eurasia, made their way east. Bronze workers in Renaissance Italy were using the same alchemical ideas and symbols as those working in China and Korea.

Beyond the cultural contact, there’s no sense in which the kingdoms or empires viewed each other as being across some dividing line from each other. Eastern and Western monarchs and emperors tended to see themselves as peers. They had diplomatic relationships, or perhaps adversarial relationships, but they did not think in terms of a dichotomy between East and West until very late.

Skipping ahead a bit in the podcast, Biagetti points out that technologies (physical or cultural) spread virally. Gunpowder, telegraphs, and steamships get picked up by extremely diverse societies throughout the world. The same goes for style of government. Japan was a traditional society in the nineteenth century, but it quickly assumed “Western” technologies as well as a “Western” style of liberal democracy. Latin America has deep foundations in Spanish Catholicism and the Spanish language. Many Latin American countries industrialized, have American-style constitutional democracies, flourishing universities, liberal presses, etc. If the US and Canada are considered Western, then why aren’t other parts of the Americas? I come back to this question here.

Definitions and constellations

For Biagetti, the loosest definition is probably the least problematic. “Western civilization is the set of all socities that have laws, customs, or institutions with roots in the Western part of Eurasia.” But even this faces immediate problems: Where do you draw the line?

Some, he notes, have tried to describe the West as a “constellation of ideas and practices,” which might include Greek philosophy, Judeo-Christianity, science, liberalism, and individualism. He is fine with this approach, but reminds us that “constellation” is an effect of vantage point; it groups stars (or even galaxies, all completely unrelated) according to the made-up patterns of an arbitrary observer.

Biagetti thinks the country that is most unambiguously in “the West” is Britain, followed by France, and in more recent history, the United States, and perhaps a few other European nations. But he thinks that defining “the West” as countries which are “similar enough” to those countries is also vague, ambiguous, and unhelpful.

Decline and fall

Who first uses the term “the West” with a capital W, then?

In Biagetti’s telling, the modern sense is only about a hundred years old. Oswald Spengler is the first to use it; he is a German historian who wrote a problematic but popular book called The Decline of the West.¹ The work, written during WWI but published in two volumes (1918–23), argues that cultures have a lifespan of about a thousand years of flourishing, followed by a thousand years of decline (he calls the flourishing part “culture” and the declining part “civilization”). Spengler observes decay in the Europe of his day, as well as corruption, decadence, and a loss of direction and ambition.

In short, this is a declensionist narrative. “Declensionist” means that it describes a decline, as in Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89). This is the view that societies inevitably have a small virtuous beginning, grow into a strong expanding middle, after which a loss of values leads to a decadent/corrupt end.²

In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment — the West-European-American.

— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. I (1918), ch. 1, “Introduction”

Spengler thought that the late medieval and modern “West” had its own distinctive character, separate from the Greco-Roman classical world as well as from Christianity. He considers the West to be Faustian, i.e., reminiscent of the German legend about a man who sells his soul in exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Spengler sees in the West a lust for technological and imperial power which would cost the (newly-invented) West its soul, in an ultimately doomed exchange. He is making a myth of the West which follows the trajectory of the Faustian myth.

Historians tore apart many things in his argument, but Biagetti finds some parts of this myth persuasive. There have been many domineering empires, but one unusual aspect is the certainty (I’m tempted to write “faith”) that it can “solve all riddles and unravel all mysteries and attain complete knowledge of everything in the universe.”

Biagetti thinks that Spengler is wrong to lump the modern West in with the Middle Ages, as the narrative can’t even explain things as obvious as the Reformation, in which Protestant and Catholic understandings of salvation and sources of truth go to war. I think what he’s getting at is that Spengler’s simplified narrative does not explain how the West is unified over the past thousand years.

Spengler’s views, however, became immensely popular. Biagetti thinks that we so readily understand what people mean by “the West” that it’s hard to imagine that this was a very new way of thinking in the 1920s. Though he was opposed to race science and to the Nazis, Spengler’s views were compatible with a contamination narrative of the “Aryan race” which was taken up by the Nazis. Both the decline narrative and the racial contamination propaganda plausibly come from similar anxieties about society.

Continued…

In writing this, I learned that the split was first administrative, starting in the 3rd Century CE, and it was a split between regions administered in Latin and those administered in Greek. The fall of the Western Roman Empire meant that this split intensified from 376–476 CE.↩
More recently, William Ophuls’ book Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (2012) continues this declensionist vein. In fiction, an example of this thinking is Asimov’s Foundation series. Asimov explicitly based his writing on Gibbon.↩

On Whether There Was a West

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 12:05:48 GMT

This series will look at the concept of “the West,” and whether it is coherent or useful.

Thomas Kuhn

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 10:13:48 GMT

Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science, best known for his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In March 2020, I became interested in revolutions, which led me to read his book. I never finished that writing about revolutions, but I did finish the book, which I read carefully over a period of about six months.¹

Even after months of attention and thought, I did not know the argument, in the sense of knowing I described yesterday. I felt there was more to learn.

To better grasp the argument, on 9 September 2020, I started tweeting every part of Kuhn’s argument. This was to teach myself more than it was to teach anyone else, but I am glad that people encouraged me to work in public.

76 days and 544 tweets later, I completed the thread. Since then I’ve been processing my own thread through spaced repetition in Readwise, as I described here.

In the book, Kuhn lays out a standard set of assumptions about how science works. Here’s how I’d summarize that view of science:

Science is an orderly endeavour, in which diverse theories are tested by decisive and repeatable experiments, leading to right theories being verified (or wrong theories being falsified). This “scientific method” produces a steady, gradual, and linear series of refinements of theory and precision, which leads to improved technologies and scientific progress.

For Kuhn, none of these things are true.

Instead:

Scientific theories are not refined but completely overturned (in “scientific crises” which lead to changes of paradigm). These revolutions produce new unforeseen vistas and new types of progress. New theories are totally incompatible (“incommensurable”) with old theories. Scientists during crises are involved in a wild search for theories, which are often provided by outsiders to the field (including resorting to philosophy). Science essentially does not progress during these periods.
Science progresses rapidly during periods of “normal science” (i.e., not during crisis) not through a diversity of opinions but through consolidated consensus about how to apply a single paradigm. Scientists during this period solve well-defined puzzles. If you disagree with the paradigm, you are not a scientist. Outsiders and philosophers are excluded by specialist vocabulary and other tactics.
Progress in improving precision (articulating a given theory) is extremely rapid as long as this consensus persists. But when progress slows, consensus collapses, leading to to a new crisis.
There is no scientific method. Crisis science is a random search, and normal science is a period of intense puzzle solving. The attempted solutions are diverse, but the assumptions/central questions are not diverse. Rather than by unified method, science might be better defined as “that which progresses.”
Technology produces new sciences; science does not produce new technologies, except by accident or as a side effect.
Falsification faces the same problems as verification. Scientific theories cannot be falsified by facts, because there are no facts that are theory-independent.
Scientific theories cannot be tested against nature, but only against other theories, framing a specific subset of nature.
To put it more strongly, there is no “truth” towards which science steadily progresses. Instead, scientific investigation reveals what works in practice. To me it seems close to a pragmatic theory of truth; it is absolutely not a relativist position.
The central analogy of how science progresses is Darwin’s theory of evolution through variation and selection. It becomes “better” and more complex for a given scientific environment, but it does not progress “toward” anything, in the same way that evolution does not progress “toward” any fixed goal, but rather away from a simple beginning, to reflect a changing environment.

Where does the appearance of gradual progress come from, then? From rewriting the history of science in textbooks to make it look linear, thinks Kuhn.

I think that Kuhn’s theory possesses not only great explanatory power but also important consequences not just in the history of science, but for history itself. This applies to the history of civilizations as well as to each individual’s history (narrative identity). I’ll be updating this page as I go.

Index

Because Kuhn remains central to my thinking and because I’ll be writing more about him soon, I’m starting this page as an index.

My work related to Kuhn:

The Kuhn thread. You can also read it on Thread Reader.
I quoted him in writing about how people change their minds
I recorded a lecture he gave in 1973, titled “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice”.
I wrote about how he sees the importance of textbooks.
I wrote about how he sees the transition from pre-paradigm though to science.

Technically I listened to the audiobook, which turned out to be slightly insane given how ornate his style is. I was constantly backing up the audio to listen again, and again, and again as I walked. I later read it digitally. I’m glad I did it both ways.↩

On knowing, of and about

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 12:59:48 GMT

In my recent writing on note-taking, I noted that “to know of something is not to know it.”

In writing on following things back to their sources, I noted that “We know of writers whose writings are no longer preserved.” I also mentioned that, when using Wikipedia, I’m reading about a subject.

The distinction between knowing of a subject, knowing about a subject, and knowing a subject is a distinction that has been on my mind this week. I’m also thinking about knowing how to do something.

Two related posts: Last year I wrote about the problem of infinite knowledge in Taoism and about how to learn what to learn.

Knowing of

To know that something exists, or once existed, is what I’m calling “knowing of.”

We know of Epicurus’ lost works, of which there were more than three hundred, but we can’t know what he actually wrote.
I know of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), though I have not read it.
I can know of a friend of a friend without knowing anything but that person’s name.

Knowing about

To know the territory surrounding something, to know facts about something, or to know the effects it has left, is what I’m calling “knowing about.” It depends on knowing of.

I can know about Epicurus by reading a later writer (like Diogenes Laertius or Lucretius), who knew Epicurus’ work directly.
I know about Tolstoy’s life from reading his diaries, though I never knew him personally.
I know about Kant’s Critiques, though I have not read them — mainly from reading secondary sources, and from conversations with people who know it directly.
And of course I can know facts about friends of friends or strangers without knowing them.

This kind of knowledge means I could start sentences with “Kant said…” from excerpts I’ve read.

Knowing

To know something is to possess (or be possessed by) a living version of it. This is obviously a much higher standard than knowing that it exists, as well as than knowing things about it.

To know Darwin’s theory, or a branch of mathematics, is to be able to apply it yourself. This is much more active and takes much more time than knowing that it exists, or knowing facts about its existence.
To know another person’s work deeply is also to have a living version of it. People who know Kant well enough can start sentences with “Kant would say…”
To know another person well is more-or-less to walk around with that person hanging out in your mind (not necessarily consciously).

It seems to involve having a model of someone or something, and it reminds me of the concept of generative models, a concept I know of and about but don’t myself know. I just know that it exists, and enough about it that it seems to be related. (If you know generative models, please tell me if I’m right or wrong!)

Perhaps to know another person is also to have a version of that person living in my mind. If I know her well, I know what she would do or say. I can (and perhaps must) generate rich predictions about what she would or wouldn’t like. In some sense these come unbidden; the people I know well live alongside my “self” (or model of myself) in my consciousness. I encounter something, and my model of that person springs to life in my mind, in the form of “So-and-so would love this.”

Knowing how

My intuition is that knowing how to do something is a subset of knowing. It’s enacted and embodied. Knowing how to cook or how to ride a bike is being able to do it yourself.

It also strikes me that knowing how depends on knowing of but may not depend on knowing about. You can know how to ride a bike without know much about bikes or riding.

Another way to carve up knowing

In an example of what I pointed out yesterday, the closeness of the Athenians to everything we think, I’m going back to Aristotle.

I read the Nicomachean Ethics a few years ago and remember that Aristotle divided knowledge into three categories. Last February (looking at the Zettel) I read this article about the question and wrote up this summary:

Episteme, meaning “to know,” is scientific knowledge, which is universal, invariable, context-independent, like maths.
Techne, meaning “craft” or “art,” relates unsurprisingly to craftsmanship and art, i.e., making/doing.
Phronesis is “practical wisdom,” with a primary emphasis on ethics.

Possibly episteme is “knowing about” and techne is “knowing how” in my above divisions. Phronesis seems to be about “knowing how to act” which is not one of the categories I considered.

Also covered in that blog post:

Sophia involves reasoning concerning universal ethics, whereas Phronesis includes a capability of rational thinking.
Techne, the knowledge of how to do, allows praxis, bit like right action, which leads to phronesis, which leads back to techne.

On tracing things back to their sources

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 12:05:48 GMT

Yesterday, in writing about my note-taking system, I mentioned that I’ve become bolder in following references back to their source. That inclination has grown over the past two years; at the end of this post I’ll say a bit more about how the note-taking system itself has encouraged this.¹

But first, in following trails of footnotes and references, it has struck me how often they lead back to the Ancient Greeks, and especially Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. I’ll call them the Athenians and consider them to have essentially equivalent views, e.g., that “reason” and “virtue” are desirable.

Their influence may seem obvious, but I’m struck by just how close to the surface they often are. I eventually want to compare this situation with what little I know of what happened in the development of philosophy at other times and places — i.e., in cultures not influenced to the same degree by the Greeks.

How wide is the West?

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

— Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929), pt. II, ch. I, §1.

I’ve started to write about the problems with using “the West” as an unqualified term, but for now I just want to wonder here about how wide the West actually is.

By “Western,” I’m thinking mainly about writing in English, French, and German in the past four centuries. By “wide,” I’m wondering how diverse this thought is in comparison to Indian or Chinese thought, and whether it has a tendency to converge or diverge. (I wrote more about this question here.

I’ll give an example of what a little digging can reveal. In 2018, the English anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham wrote a brilliant paper called “Two types of aggression in human evolution”.

The question is an old one: Are humans in the “state of nature” violent or peaceful?²

Wrangham makes no mention of any of the Athenians. However he immediately labels the sides with the names of two familiar philosophers:³

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who thinks humans in the state of nature are violent.
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who thinks humans in the state of nature are peaceful. (Rousseau is explicitly responding to Hobbes.)

I decided to search them for the Athenians.

Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) references Socrates once, Plato seven times, and Aristotle twenty-seven times. Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) references Socrates fifteen times, Plato twelve times, and Aristotle eleven times.

Wrangham’s work, not a piece of philosophy but one listed under “Biological Sciences » Anthropology” and “Social Sciences » Psychological and Cognitive Sciences,” and not obviously related to the Ancient Athenians, is actually closely connected to them. Just follow the references two steps from the abstract (without needing to wade into the footnotes) and we’re back at the Athenians.

I’m not saying that Hobbes and Rousseau are just rehashing Athenian debates, nor that they only cite Athenians; they’re certainly doing more than that. I just think it’s important to point out the prevalence of this influence.

Obviously this is a single example, and probably most papers are not linked so linearly. That could plausibly be because other papers are, in fact, not so closely related to the Greeks. But it is also possible that most are just as closely linked and that their writers are less aware of their influence.

This is not at all an indictment of Wrangham — he is conscious of the provenance of his questions, which can only be a good thing.

Why always the Greeks? †

One possibility is that a genuine creative explosion occurred in Athens, and those guys pretty much thought of and addressed (or attempted to address) all the important questions. It is easy, while studying philosophy, to come away with this impression.

Another possibility is that their way of thinking has limited later thinkers by setting limits on philosophical inquiry.

In other words, did the Athenians really identify all important avenues of inquiry? Or do we consider certain avenues of inquiry to be important because identified by the Athenians?

There seems to have been a greater diversity of thought among the Presocratic “Greeks,” many of whom came from Greek islands or from Anatolia (i.e., they are not necessarily Athenian). I have yet to read any books on the Presocratics, but so far my attempts to read the Presocratics themselves has led me only to echoes and tatters.

We know of writers whose writings are no longer preserved. Thinkers like the Sophists act as foils for the Athenian thinkers. Only a few fragments remain of Heraclitus’ book of unknown title. Although philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have identified Thales of Miletus as the first Greek philosopher, not a single one of his many books survives. Both Heraclitus and Thales were from Ionia, now in Turkey, and Heraclitus lived under Persian rule (Miletus was spared). Diogenes the Cynic, whom I write about here, is way up in Sinope, Northern Turkey, 1,361 km (845 mi.) from Athens.

As I noted last year, paper disintegrates fairly quickly, which is to say that anything before the printing press which was not deliberately copied by hand every few generations no longer exists. The default is to disappear — and defaults matter.

Originally I intended to compare the situation in ”the West” to India and China, but I wound up waiting. See my posts on India starting here and China here.

More on note-taking

What led to these deeper dives on sources?

I try to do a daily Readwise review. This surfaces random passages that I’ve read and highlighted. In the past year I have evidently made 4,356 highlights, or about 12 per day, which also happens to be the number of highlights I typically review in a day. Lest I look too organized, I often miss days, especially on weekends, and have to catch up later. But I’ve kept a streak going for the past nine months.

This review introduces serendipity and allows for spaced repetition. The serendipity leads to unexpected connections and to the identification of subtle patterns. The spaced repetition allows me to go deep without getting bored, which is how I often wind up back at the Athenians.

When something comes up in a Readwise review, I don’t just read it. I write about it in the Zettelkasten as well, including the paraphrasing I mentioned yesterday, and also my own reflections. I also often end up back on wikipedia, reading about the topic.

In the spaced repetition I normally mark things to come back “soon,” “later,” or “someday” — I almost never mark them “never,” only maybe 5% of the time when something really was only of ephemeral interest, or when something has begun to annoy me. Anything that enters Readwise (primarily through hypothes.is or Kindle notes) is something that I was at one point interested in. Beyond interest, I also highlight things I don’t understand, knowing that they will come back in spaced repetition when I may be better equipped.

I take curiosity as a strong signal.

I fear the future †

I use Zotero to save references; right now there are 1,226 entries, mostly books but also many articles.

I’m old enough to have seen the rise and fall of many websites, or at least enough to worry about digital durability. I therefore save snapshots of webpages to Zotero when I think they’re important enough. I’ve also looked at technologies like IPFS and Perma.cc, but worry about those too. If you know about these or have any advice about saving things forever, please let me know, as I am thinking in terms of decades when it comes to the work.

A friend asked me about how fussy I am with citations a year ago, during which I’ve gotten more fussy.↩
I’ll leave aside the minefield of what the “state of nature” means for today. But the question of whether humans are violent or peaceful remains consequential. The former implies that a state’s function is to reduce violence, whereas the latter implies that the state causes violence. I don’t know either side well enough to do them justice here, but I’ve read enough to safely say that both positions are frequently caricatured. Since I wrote this article, I’ve started Graeber/Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which looks at the problems of this opposition.↩
He also refreshingly adds Kropotkin and Huxley into the mix.↩

Zettelkasten again

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:20:48 GMT

Just over two years ago, I wrote about a note-taking system called Zettelkasten. If you’re interested, you can read that post, and a follow-up I wrote a little later.

I am still using that system today. I’ve written 617,496 words in the system, and saved an additional 119,528 words in quotes. I’ve made 6,837 notes, connected by 27,629 links.¹

This post is about what I’ve learned from persisting with the system.

Why take notes?

Why do I take notes? To learn, and so as not to forget, and to keep information accessible. But I’ve forgotten much of what I’ve learned and known. That includes many subjects on which I took extensive notes.

Those notes are strewn in dozens of notebooks and various pieces of software that I used before the Zettelkasten, none of which I ever open. This loss also extends to things I was once good at, but am no longer. In other words, things I knew how to do, as well as things I knew, or knew about.

Even deep, extensive, or embodied knowledge can be lost in just a few years, and sometimes less. Not everything is like riding a bike. I once brewed beer and baked bread, but now I could not do either without a significant review — right now it feels like it would amount to re-learning — and that’s knowledge that’s only about five years old. Decades ago, I was reasonably good at geometry and calculus. Now I might be able to remember the absolute basics, but I certainly could not solve the types of problems that I could when I was a teenager. That knowledge is effectively gone — though I wonder how readily it might be resuscitated, under the right conditions, and how familiar it might feel.

My friends, knowledgeable in subjects quite apart from mine, report similar losses. There are vast swathes of things that they have learned and lost: knowledge gleaned, then unwittingly relinquished. Some say that what they once knew dwarfs what they know now, even when what knowledge remains to them remains considerable.

It is not just that educational testing incentivizes short-term learning, though that likely does not help. But I never minded testing, and I could never find it in myself to oppose myself to cramming. Maybe that says more about me than it does about the method; I’ve always worked best in wild bursts. But I also think that forgetting is as important to learning as remembering is. Forgetting individual instances, for instance, is critical to abstraction, to acquiring concepts and principles. Learning then forgetting things (crammed or otherwise) probably has benefits. And of course not everything needs to be remembered.

But now there are things I do want to remember, and I want to remember them in detail, as when they were freshly learned and living. Often this is because I want to use the details as evidence. Abstract concepts and conclusions can become lifeless and unpersuasive when one can’t remember how one reached them. Providing detailed evidence allows others to arrive at their own understanding, as well as to assess mine.

On research

I have inadvertently begun research in earnest, on subjects I plan to describe over the coming weeks.

When I started using the Zettelkasten, it was as an experiment in note-taking. I thought it might help me retain a bit more of what I learned, or get a bit more out of books. It has absolutely done both. But it has also done much more.

If you’re doing a job, and you find a better tool for the job, you’re then faced with a choice. You can do the same job, but better, or you can undertake a bigger job. If in the process of building a shed, you gain access to reinforced concrete, you can build a stronger shed than you could have with wood. But with reinforced concrete you can also build a skyscraper.

The Zettelkasten has been like that for me. To some degree, I was searching for a tool, and the Zettelkasten filled that need, allowing me to pursue that project. But to another degree, finding the tool precipitated a project, expanding what was possible. It has given me the courage to take on areas that would otherwise have daunted me.

The Zettelkasten allows me to choose what I remember. It’s not that it permanently installs facts into my memory. It’s that it allows memories to live on in situ, so that I can revisit them close to the time of their conception. It’s not just that it produces an objective record — though it does, I rarely use it that way. It’s much more process oriented, and associative.

Knowledge is enacted. If you train to run a marathon, and run it, that is no guarantee that you’ll be able to run a marathon for the rest of your life. It may be that this is true for many of the most important parts of life: it’s use it or lose it. It certainly seems so with learning.

On process

What is the process of using the Zettelkasten like?

In short, it’s associative, and it forces metacognition.

In summarizing an idea, I paraphrase it. This is true of the content of the note and of its even-shorter title. Trying to change every word in a sentence while keeping the original meaning makes it very apparent which parts I haven’t understood. This in itself is learning by teaching, without waiting for a student. Rephrasing an idea into words that I myself can understand — and that my forgetful future self can understand — is like phrasing it for a student.

The fact that I link to other notes forces me to think about why this information is important, and how it is related. It also provides a trail back, showing where I started and how arrived, which can allow me to resume trains of thought from months or years earlier. I always try to note where I got the information, and why it is interesting.

Because the resulting short notes are in my own words, the system is trivially easy to search: I just search for the words that I associate with the subject. The structure is associative, not hierarchical or categorical, and notes are typically linked to several other associated notes — often people — which makes recall easy.² If I am not working from an existing note, I typically create a note for the person I most associate with an idea. Often this means tracing things back to their source, learning about their works and books, and finding out who their influences are. This also means keeping notes for friends, to answer questions like “What was that thing that so-and-so mentioned?”

I do search the whole system constantly, and certain keywords and keyphrases (some coined, some purloined) become central to my thinking. Occasionally I’ll search a sub-section, like every note under a single person — files under 12/101 to search the 94 notes relating to Thomas Kuhn for example. But I search the whole thing (with ripgrep) much more frequently.

One problem I had with previous note-taking systems was that I never felt motivated to review notes. Very rarely would I flip through them, and they felt almost instantly stale. This system removes the friction of stale notes. By keeping notes atomic and short, they are easy to read. When I’m adding a new note (and taking notes on new stuff is exciting) then it is energizing to link it to old notes. In the process I review the old notes, and especially the list of links in those notes.

I used to spend long hours following wikipedia rabbitholes. I consider this to have been indispensable for expanding my knowledge of what’s out there. But to know of something is not to know it. Now, in plumbing the depths of a rabbithole, I don’t continue unless it is interesting enough to take notes. Or else I make a note to return to it later. This both keeps me more focused, means that I can’t lose afternoons reading things I won’t remember, and (again) that I can come back to the precise point where I left off. There’s a ratcheting effect.

Now I know that if I start a thread, I can pick it up again — even a year or two later. The Zettelkasten is a system of thinking in writing. It allows me to externalize the associative webs of thought themselves, which allows reinstantiating them in my mind. So I’m much bolder in going further, and less fearful of seeking out primary sources. If I don’t understand something at first, I trust that it will resurface again.

With a few exceptions, I don’t write full literature notes and then dutifully process them line by line anymore. I did that with a few books, but it can easily sink to drudgery. Now I do most of that work through Readwise, where I send notes from my Kindle and hypothes.is. This means much of my reading is digital now; for Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), I’m in the process of shifting from notes in a paperback book to hypothes.is notes on the Project Gutenberg ebook, which is slow, but in this case almost undoubtedly worth it.

I realise I haven’t said anything yet about what I’ve actually been working on by using this system. But (perhaps characteristically) I thought I’d look at the meta/systems level before going into the content. The two are related.

I’ve written a bit more on the system as I explain why I try to trace things back to their sources.

Just over 4 links per note, a figure which has slowly but steadily increased over time.↩
Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes explains this admirably.↩

On the Syntax of Feelings

Thu, 27 May 2021 08:59:06 GMT

As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “feeling is first,” after the famous opening of an E. E. Cummings poem from 1926:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

This is certainly the case if the question is between feeling and language. Language follows feeling, as anyone who has regretted saying something in the heat of an argument can attest.

More than that, there is a distancing effect to language, perhaps even to concepts per se, even when uninstantiated in words. The poem also has a sense of the problem of self-consciousness, of not being wholly immersed in the experience; some part of the attention is lost in thought. The poem puts phenomenology over philosophy — experience over thought.

But is it “the syntax of things” that distances us from experience?

Everything depends, I think, on what one means by “things.” I’d like to say something in defence of the firstness of syntax, or if not of its primacy, then at least of its simultaneity with feeling.

First, a few words about feelings.

Feelings appear to come “from us.” But do they?

Feelings are occasioned by events, whether physical, mental, or otherwise: a conversation we had or are having, something we read or are reading, or an occurrence that causes us to recollect an emotional memory. Nor need the stimulus be synchronic; the diachronic can be even more deleterious — or even more delightful. A bad night’s sleep, or a month or more of loneliness, can certainly affect one’s affect, make one melancholy, as can a trip abroad, or a long lazy afternoon in the company of a good friend or book.

In other words, there is a cause, a stimulus, for feeling, whether chronic or acute. What kind is not important, for my present purpose, though it is of course often worth investigating after a feeling has faded.

Almost simultaneously, but actually just after such a stimulus, we feel an energetic reaction. If this is what we mean by feeling, and by syntax we mean language, then there can be no doubt that “feeling is first.” The incontestability of this energy is probably what makes feelings feel primary. But this feeling of firmness and of primeness can itself obscure the fact that any energy must be interpreted if it is to be put to any use — or if it is to be dissipated in any other way, utility notwithstanding.

Reasoning occurs ex post facto. Rationalisations which follow feelings can themselves cause feelings, in a vicious, virtuous, or petering-out cycle. But they cannot be a first cause for feelings. In other words, reasons can amplify feelings, they cannot produce them. (Other people’s reasons can naturally act as a potent stimulus.)

Even if the causal reason for a feeling appears crystal clear, and it seems that this reason leads to the feeling, I would argue that, on closer inspection, the feeling was there before any reasoning. Whether the reason appears as a niggling annoyance or an explosion at an injustice, it is the feeling that niggles or explodes — and reason follows. The stimulus produces the energy. The energy precedes the thought, and the thought produces causality, often including an apparent causality for the feeling.

Furthermore, the feeling that accompanies reasoning can further obscure the already obscure ordering. Rationalisations which seem certain are more tempting, and probably more effective. The certitude that follows from a satisfying rationalisation can occasion further reasoning, and thence further feelings of certainty.

Feeling, then, is primary, at least with respect to language.

But are there primary feelings?

Lisa Feldman Barrett has found that an inquiry into basic emotions raises more questions than it answers. More specifically, the harder she looks at emotions across cultures, the less unity they seem to have. If the theory of constructed emotion is right, it would mean that even the most basic emotions must be learned.

In meditation, moreover, I’ve found that a close examination of the physical sensations which underlie feelings make them, if anything, harder to categorize. This seems odd if feelings really are first.

So at the societal level, as well as at the level of individual introspection, feelings, which seem so solid when they loom, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. When in the sway of strong emotion, introspective scrutiny is, of course, the hardest thing to muster, so I do not wish to diminish the difficulty of this scrutiny, however slight. And for psychology as a discipline, it must also be difficult to interrogate something as obvious as the “basic emotions,” since they seem so self-evident to anyone experiencing them. Nonetheless I do expect the categories to collapse.

Here’s Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878), “Of First and Last Things,” §14 (Hollingdale, p19):

Sympathetic resonance. — All stronger moods bring with them a sympathetic resonance on the part of related sensations and moods: they as it were root up the memory. Something in us is provoked to recollection and becomes aware of similar states and their origins. Thus there come to be constructed habitual rapid connections between feelings and thoughts which, if they succeed one another with lightning speed, are in the end no longer experienced as complexes but as unities. It is in this sense that one speaks of the moral feelings, of the religious feelings, as though these were simple unities: in truth, however, they are rivers with a hundred tributaries and sources. Here too, as so often, the unity of the word is no guarantee of the unity of the thing.

If there is no unity to the basic emotions, then how do we know what the feeling is, or means?

It’s my current feeling that feelings must be learned.¹ This includes the apparently basic categories of feelings, like sadness or happiness. Learning must come from experience, which is always embodied and never without context, however much we might strive to ignore the body, or to escape its environment.

So what is my working hypothesis of the “syntax of things” when it comes to an individual feeling?

A stimulus occurs.²
A feeling arises in response, coded with a positive, negative, or neutral valence before anything can hit the conscious mind.³

This coding comes from past experience. Most feelings are neutral, and most feelings dissipate here without entering awareness.

If the feeling is sufficiently strong, action proceeds immediately, before reaching awareness.
Otherwise, the feeling enters awareness, and interpretation kicks in.
The first interpretive step is causes “me” to attach “mineness” to the feeling — I mistake myself for the generator of the feeling, and I take ownership of it, become its executor, or else I attribute ownership of it to someone else, and thank or blame them for it.
I further interpret the feeling and generate meaning. I quickly attribute causality (why I feel this way) and generate teleology (what I want to do about it). These reasons and impulses not be clear or expressible, and often aren’t, at least not directly.
Rationalisations flow from “my” feelings, and I attach myself to the rationalisations.
These rationalisations become stimulus for further feelings.

In other words, by the time I know that I feel something, it is already positive or negative. Then my mind attaches itself to that positivity or negativity, and subsequently begins generating interpretations. Many or most of these steps may themselves have been learned. They are cultural. My ignorant guess is that most animals, most of the time, do not do 3-6 — and I might not either, had I somehow survived without ever having learned a language.

The process is so fast that the steps can appear simultaneous, but they are not. It is also so fast that the order can appear jumbled, and it is probably adaptive for thoughts to try to jumble the order in order to make themselves more persuasive to me, and by extension, to whomever I’m speaking. It’s easier to argue a point if I myself believe it, or to voice a thought if I think that it is mine.

The feeling is indeed first, before any syntax of language. But it cannot precede the stimulus which produced it, nor can it occur in the absence of context — the current context, of which past experience is itself a context.

Our experience lays down a matrix — a syntax, one might say — for the interpretation of even the most powerful and apparently self-evident emotions. There is always a context, and everything that was learned was learned in context. There is always learned interpretation lurking in the dynamic tension between the context and the stimulus.

The brain changes with every experience, and with it, the “syntax of things,” since there can be, for us, no things in the absence of experience, however abstract or psychological those things or that experience might be.

If by “things,” then, we mean words, thoughts, mental objects, rules, social conventions, and so on, then I do not dispute that “feeling is first.” But if by “things” we mean something more like experience, then syntax is first, at least with respect to the feeling in question. In a phrase like “that’s how things are” or “on the nature of things”, experiential reality might not be a bad reading of the word “things.”

In the beginning, perhaps, “things” were unconditioned.

Or were they?

This unconditioned state may slip away even before the oceanic feeling of infancy slips away, i.e., even before birth, given evidence that children learn language sounds within the womb.

We are expected before we are born. And we are born into syntax.

We half-perceive (or half-receive), but also half-predict (or half-project) what is happening “to” “us.” This is always happening in the only moment in which we can perceive the present or predict the future, which is in the present. But our perception of what is present is conditioned by our past.

We learn by induction and by example, and we half-generate and half-inherit a worldview with baked-in obviousnesses. One of the most basic (and therefore “obvious”) is that our feelings or thoughts are “ours” and mean something. This is undoubtedly an adaptive way to be in the world.

But simple experiments can challenge it, even beyond the white bear. Can you produce any thought at will, without reference to your past experience? What about an insight? Can you generate a feeling? If you can, what is its relation to feelings you’ve felt in the past?

Feeling and syntax co-arise in every situation, conditioned by all things which currently are, which in turn are conditioned by things past; the syntax is path-dependent. The feeling comes from current stimulus, whereas the syntax is formed from the past. But the syntax affects how feelings feel now, and the feelings affect the syntax which follows.

(In writing today, I also found that I’ve written on the ephemerality of feelings before.)

I have at times been criticised for writing “feeling” when I appear to mean “thought,” but despite all these thoughts on feelings, I know of no clear distinction between the two. If feeling is first, then why not write “I feel” rather than “I think”?↩
Buddhist sparśa.↩
Buddhist vedanā.↩

An Audio Experiment

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 10:13:43 GMT

I’ve started a podcast, which, like this blog, is called Clerestory.

The initial structure is that I speak for 20-30 minutes about topics related to writing, complexity, and selfhood; i.e., pretty much what I wrote about on this blog last year. Right now I loosely organize the discussion around the reading of a piece of a prose and the reading of a piece of poetry.

So far I’ve discussed/read:

Episode 1: McPhee’s Basin & Range/Hart Crane’s “The Air Plant”
Episode 2: The two main texts of Taoism/Keats
Episode 3: Althusser/Hardy’s At Castle Boterel
Episode 4: Viktor Shklovsky/Eliot’s Little Gidding
Episode 5: Interstitial/Yeats’ All Things Can Tempt Me
Episode 6: Thomas Kuhn’s “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice” (1973)

How has this come about?

This experiment is thanks to two friends’ forays into the medium which I have enjoyed — and thanks to their encouragement:

JP Hummingbird’s podcast Daily Musings
Patricia Hurducas’ podcast Flânerie Experiments

Also, Anchor now offers free hosting and an easy-to-use platform.

I had never seriously considered starting a podcast before. I have yet to post it or promote it elsewhere, as I am, for now, less interested in increasing my listenership than I am in increasing my listenability.

In other words, I’m using it primarily as a place to practise more polished speech. But if all goes well, that will change. I hope to share the podcast further once I sound better, and once there are a sufficient number of past episodes that only the most devoted will take the time to delve into my inevitable early mishaps.

Still, putting the podcast somewhere somewhat public puts pressure on me to perform better than I otherwise might, which is why I’m posting it here — and I do hope you’ll listen.

My interest in improving my speech has come partly from more frequent usage of voicenotes over the course of the pandemic. This lovely, meandering medium reminds me more of written letters than of anything else. They are unlike phone calls and are often better (particularly when dealing with very different timezones).

It has also come thanks in part to my enjoyment of the conversations on Clubhouse. If you’re on it, you can find me here.

I appreciate your listening as well as any feedback you might have; easiest thing is to DM me.

How has it gone so far?

So far I’ve enjoyed selecting prose and poetry from the top of my head and talking about it. But I’m not wedded to that format. I may eventually attempt interviews, discussions, and the like. I may try more completely extemporaneous podcasts, as well as more readings of poetry, at some point in the future.

It’s been a learning experience to produce the podcast, if what I’ve done warrants such a word. At first I wanted to speak fully off-the-cuff, but it seems like this is optimistic for a first-time podcaster. Not only do I do a lot of “umming” (see below) but I frequently think of things out of order and have to backtrack.

I’m less keen to learn editing than I am to learn eloquence, but I’ve nonetheless already switched from using Anchor’s built-in recording to Audacity. It’s powerful but unintuitive to use. It also amuses me that it looks pretty much the same as it did a decade ago, or even two. If you know any other free/open source alternatives, let me know.

I’d eventually like the podcast to feel less formal, so I may try to reduce editing over time.

Ah

I’ve been told by some that I “um” too much, while others have said they don’t mind it.

This has led to me looking up the verbs “um” and “ah” in the OED. I reproduce that research here mainly because I find the British phrase “umming and ahhing,” which means “to vacillate,” funny.

The humour comes in part from the fact that in non-rhotic varieties of British English, the h in “ah” is pronounced as an r: “umming and ahhring.” See intrusive R.

Example: He was umming and ahhring about starting a podcast.

um, int.:

Used to indicate hesitating or inarticulate utterance on the part of a speaker.
Used to indicate hesitation or doubt in replying to another.

I especially like the teleology of “to um.” The definition states that it indicates hesitation (which it would do in speech) or to indicate inarticulate utterance (which it would only do in writing).

ah, int.:

intransitive. To say ‘ah’ as an expression of surprise, wonder, realization, etc. Frequently in collocation with ooh or oh (cf. to ooh and ah at ooh v. 1, oh v. 1).
To say ‘ah’ in hesitation or indecision; to vacillate. Usually in collocation with a similar verb or verbs; now chiefly in to um and ah (cf. um vb. at um int. Derivatives).

The Muses

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 16:35:49 GMT

In recent weeks it has occurred to me that I know next to nothing about the muses. Their enumeration — nine by most counts (also known as an ennead, a rare chance to use a rare word) — dates back to Hesiod’s Theogony,written in Greek epic verse around 700 BC. The Roman writer Ovid also wrote about them around 8 AD, for example the weird story of the Pierides.

I had a quick look through the Theogony but couldn’t find any relevant passages. I’m still learning about them but here is what I’ve gathered so far from wikipedia:

Calliope: Chief muse, responsible for eloquence and epic poetry, mother of Orpheus and Linus (musician/lyricist).
Clio: Muse of history (as in cliodynamics), possibly also lyre playing and fame. I’m wondering if she’s more of a prose muse than Calliope? Etymology includes “to recount,” “to make famous,” “to celebrate.” That makes sense for history, but could it also include non-lyric storytelling?
Euterpe: Muse of music, later of lyric poetry. “Giver of delight.”
Thalia: Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry. “The joyous,” “the verdant,” from the verb “to flourish.”
Melpomene: Originally muse of the Chorus, later Muse of Tragedy. Etymologically, “to celebrate with dance and song.”
Terpsichore: Muse of dance and chorus; etymologically, “delight in dancing.”
Erato: The muse of love poetry. Etymologically, “desired” or “lovely.”
Polyhymnia: Muse of sacred poetry and dance, as well as (for some reason) agriculture and pantomime, sometimes also of geometry and meditation. “Many praises.”
Urania: Muse of astronomy. “Heavenly.”

I’m curious as to whether these muses correspond to real mental modules which produce the arts in question, or whether they represent anthropomorphic incarnations of the arts.

I also find it interesting that while we often think of art in terms of objects today (painting, writing, etc.), the muses are mostly concerned with performance. For verse this makes sense, since writing would have been rare before 700 BC, but it’s a bit surprising that there are none to do with painting, for example, given that painting probably dates back 44,000 years.

Epicurus and Happiness

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 09:41:53 GMT

Today I’m thinking about Epicurus’ view of happiness.

This section comes directly between the two passages on the future (“We must remember…”) and on pleasure (“Pleasure is our first and kindred good”) which I quoted in my first post on Epicurus.

From the Letter to Menoeceus, p653 in Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers:

We must also reflect that of desires some are natural, others are groundless; and that of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some natural only.

We have a desire for food and shelter. These are natural. But we may also develop longings for certain luxuries, purchases, extravagances, and so on, which Epicurus would probably call “groundless.” (Desires mimetically acquired, through culture?)

Natural desires can be further divided. We have some natural desires which are necessary — food and water being the most obvious. But we might have other desires (for sex or vengeance, maybe?) which are natural but not strictly necessary for our continued existence.

The divide between the natural and the necessary in the moral world reminds me of the line Epicurus draws in the physical world, between the natural (atoms and the void) and the conventional (human government and affairs). Here’s Catherine Wilson, The Pleasure Principle (ch. 9):

Implicitly, the Epicurean distinguishes between three levels of reality: the eternal, indestructible things – the atoms; natural composites of atoms like animals, plants, geological formations, sun, moon, stars; and conventional things – driving licences, royalty, clocks, chess games.

I like that he considers basically all human affairs, including government and morality,¹ conventional, or to put it another way, cultural.

Epicurus continues:

And of the necessary desires some are necessary if we are to be happy, some if the body is to be rid of uneasiness, some if we are even to live.

So there are degrees of necessity. Social contact and purpose may be necessary for us to be happy. Healthy food, friendship, and comfortable clothing may rid us of uneasiness. Some minimal amount of food and water, some level warmth, protection from the elements, and sleep are obviously sine qua non, without which we will die.

He who has a clear and certain understanding of these things will direct every preference and aversion toward securing health of body and tranquillity of mind, seeing that this is the sum and end of a blessed life.

For Epicurus, since there is neither any afterlife nor are there any moral absolutes, only conventions, the only thing worth pursuing is ataraxia, or tranquillity. Since “pleasure” is such a loaded word, it might be better to think of “contentment” or “satisfaction,” something that lasts.

If one is untroubled in mind and body over a long period of time, that, for Epicurus, is the good life, the goal. He can’t see how an unpleasant life could be the goal — what would the end beyond this be? But this definitively does not mean pursuing every pleasure, nor having every luxury. Food, after all, tastes best when you’re hungry.

For Epicurus, there is nothing beyond this kind of contentment. But notice that it includes mental tranquility. This reminds me a bit of Aristotle’s idea of man as rational animal. I’m not sure that Epicurus would go so far as to argue that man must use reason, but he probably would agree that man must put his mind to good use. Physical bliss is insufficient without mental calm.

Hedonia for Epicurus is more about the absence of pain than it is about the presence of pleasure:

For the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear, and when once we have attained all this, the tempest of the soul is laid; seeing that the living creature has no need to go in search of something that is lacking, nor to look for anything else by which the good of the soul and of the body will be fulfilled. When we are pained because of the absence of pleasure, then, and then only, do we feel the need of pleasure.

The passage immediately following this continues to explain what he means by pleasure, and I quoted it in my first post. I also wrote about Epicurus and Death yesterday.

I almost wrote Architecture & Morality.↩

Epicurus and Death

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 11:08:20 GMT

Epicurus is sometimes seen as anti-Stoic. Certainly Epictetus and other Stoics seem to have reviled him, as I wrote yesterday.

Epicurus was pro-pleasure and anti-principle, believing that most of human affairs are conventional, and therefore that they can and should be revised over time. The Stoics tend towards asceticism and belief in absolute principles. Catherine Wilson makes the case for Epicureanism as anti-Stoic well in this piece. She worries that Stoicism’s opposition to emotion will reduce the pleasures of life.

It’s worth noting, though, that William B. Irvine (in A Guide to the Good Life) interprets the Stoics differently. In his reading, Stoicism is about “banishing negative emotion” (p5–10) — not all emotion.

I probably fall between the two interpretations; some of the Stoics seem to me anti-emotion, and others seem anti-negative-emotion. It doesn’t matter much either way, at least not to me. I have found reading the Stoics useful, even though I’m now quite interested in Epicureanism. I don’t necessarily find a hard contrast between the two schools of thought.

And more generally, I find the fear that Stoicism will diminish emotions to the point of reducing enjoyment of life to be rather far-fetched. Similar points are raised as a way of avoiding or attacking Buddhist thought and practice.

To me, the straw man of “I’m worried Stoicism will make me totally indifferent” is a bit like an obese person saying “I’m worried that exercise will make me too thin.” It’s not out of the realm of possibility that this could eventually happen, but one has plenty of time to change tack before it does — not to mention a huge amount of work.

Stoic (or Buddhist) practices can be useful for managing emotions or suffering. If you have the “problem” of too little emotion or too little suffering, then you probably don’t need to do those practices. You can also stop using them when you stop needing them, much as the Buddha suggested doing with his teachings. Surely this is all just common sense?

I’m a bit of a pragmatist about these things; if a Stoic approach works in one situation, great, but no need to commit to it for life. Likewise, if Epicurus is useful, then read him alongside, or later. Anything more rigid than that smacks to me of dogmatism.

I’m actually thinking today about whether Epicurus is himself a religious pragmatist. From the Letter to Menoeceus, p649 in Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers:

First believe that God is a living being immortal and blessed, according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of mankind; and so believing, thou shalt not affirm of him aught that is foreign to his immortality or that agrees not with blessedness, but shalt believe about him whatever may uphold both his blessedness and his immortality. For verily there are gods, and the knowledge of them is manifest; but they are not such as the multitude believe, seeing that men do not steadfastly maintain the notions they form respecting them.

In my (possibly biased) reading, he seems to think it worthwhile to believe in a God, not as a commitment to the truth value of a metaphysical claim, but because of its relationship to notions of blessedness and immortality. He thinks that the fact that people experience gods means that they are real, at least phenomenologically. (Here I’m thinking of the claim made by Julian Jaynes.) Like Jaynes, he suggests that uncertainty about the nature of the gods has increased over time, and that people are no longer certain how to interpret the gods.

The preoccupation with immortality is interesting given Epicurus’ rather strong take on death, which comes just a page later (p651):

Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an illimitable time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality.

Not caring about death improves life, not by lengthening it, but by removing the desire for immortality, which is, of course, unattainable, and the desire therefore unfulfillable. I suppose I was thinking along related lines when I did my fast, and wondered about whether I could slow down time by doing very little. Doing nothing does reduce desire, strangely enough.

He continues:

For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly apprehended that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect.

This is actually something I’d written about and half-forgotten in this post on fear: “If one doesn’t fear death, or value life, then one can’t really be threatened or coerced.” The post came up recently because I was collecting sources which advise favouring process over outcome, which I suspect Epicurus would also endorse.

Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

Death does not hurt when it is present: it can’t, because when it’s present, you’re dead. Because life and death cannot overlap, there is nothing for us to fear.

On the other hand, Epicurus does not welcome death. Non-Epicureans both fear death and commit suicide, but Epicurus disapproves of both. As Wilson writes, “But as well as believing that death was not an evil, Epicurus also believed that being deprived of life is the worst thing that can happen to the individual.”

In this passage, he explains why:

But in the world, at one time men shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise man does not deprecate life nor does he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offence to him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as men choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest.

Just as one seeks the best food, and not just the largest quantity, one should seek the best life, not just the longest. (This seems to relate to the point yesterday, that we should neither seek every pleasure, nor shun every pain.)

I thought it worth comparing the above with Golden Saying XLV of Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who accused Epicurus of effeminacy (several centuries after Epicurus’ death).

In it, Epictetus argues that banishment is ineffective as a deterrent, because one can always go somewhere else, and imprisonment is ineffective as a deterrent, because one can always commit suicide. (Is this part of Sartre’s radical freedom? I could never quite figure that out.)

I think that the arguments, though different in emphasis, are comparable. Epicurus argues that if one does not fear death, then life holds no terrors — and presumably, fearing nothing, one cannot be compelled, coerced, or intimidated. Epictetus argues that one cannot be punished, because one can always leave any situation — in the worst case, via suicide.

The Epicureans were opposed to suicide and to war, whereas the Stoics thought self-sacrifice (and possibly conflict) were sometimes necessary. But for the reader, is the advice so different?

Finally, to come back to the question of divinities, perhaps the focus on the immortal and benevolent aspects of “God” or “gods” is not so strange, since Epicurus also espoused the immortality of atoms.

Today, perhaps a useful interpretation of all of the Epicurus above would be something like: “Though you are mortal, there is nothing to fear in death, because ‘you’ and death are mutually exclusive. Not fearing death, you have nothing to fear in life. But in your indifference to death, and your knowledge of your own mortality, you must not abandon immortal ideals.”

See also Epicurus and Epicurus and Happiness.

Epicurus

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:44:22 GMT

Epicurus has had a tough time of it since he wrote and taught (~341–270 BCE). It’s a good thing he was level-headed about posterity:

We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come.

Though Epicurus espoused a life of wisdom, moderation, and prudence in the pursuit of tranquility (ataraxia), his philosophy has been slandered for its hedonism, and excoriated for its atheism, for over two millennia.

Even Diogenes Laërtius, a biographer of Greek philosophers who may himself have been an Epicurean, begins his chapter on Epicurus with a long list of scandals and accusations levelled at the alleged reveller. (Laërtius, whose Lives of Eminent Philosophers is one of the major places where Epicurus’ thought has been preserved, reproduces Epicurus’ Letter to Menoecus, providing most of what I quote on this page.)

Among Epicurus’ alleged sins are that he performed magic tricks, that he “vomited twice a day from over-indulgence,” and that he “corresponded with many courtesans, and especially with Leontion, of whom Metrodorus also was enamoured.” Diotimus the Stoic (100 BCE) falsely adduced fifty scandalous letters to Epicurus. Cicero (106–43 BCE) deplored his ethics. Epictetus (50–135 CE) calls him a “preacher of effeminacy and showers abuse on him.”

The list goes on for several pages, before Laërtius attempts a defence of him. Even after the classical period, Dante, in the Inferno (14th C), inters him in a flaming coffin in the Sixth Circle of Hell for having believed that the soul dies with the body.

I find it sort of impressive that his philosophy sustained such controversy over such a long period of time.

It’s not that the accusations of hedonism are entirely groundless. Sometimes Epicurus doesn’t do himself any favours, writing things like: “I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, sexual pleasures, the pleasures of sound, and the pleasures of beautiful form.”

It’s hard to imagine many Stoics stomaching such a statement.

But his more famous line is that “Pleasure is our first and kindred good.” Catherine Wilson reports in The Pleasure Principle that the Marquis De Sade liked to quote this line to his victims.

The problem is that neither the old Marquis nor many others in history seem to have had the patience to read the lines which directly follow. This seems a little unfair, given how much Epicurus cares about context:

[Pleasure] is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing. And since pleasure is our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but ofttimes pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them. And ofttimes we consider pains superior to pleasures when submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence a greater pleasure. While therefore all pleasure because it is naturally akin to us is good, not all pleasure is choiceworthy, just as all pain is an evil and yet not all pain is to be shunned. It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these matters must be judged. Sometimes we treat the good as an evil, and the evil, on the contrary, as a good. (Laërtius, p655)

I love that he balances pleasure not with pain but with annoyance. Some pleasures have side effects that are just too annoying for them to be worth it. Others pleasures are worth pursuing (he’s quite keen on friendship, for example), just as some pains are worth enduring; it all depends on context. And what is good or evil is circumstantial.

It seems that even during Epicurus’ lifetime he faced criticisms of the same kind that still affect his thought today. I’m talking about the connotations of the words “epicurean”¹ and especially “hedonist.” This is despite the fact that Epicurus went to great pains to distance himself from the assumption that he’s advising wanton orgies:

When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or wilful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul. Of all this the beginning and the greatest good is prudence. Wherefore prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy; from it spring all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot lead a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and justice; nor lead a life of prudence, honour, and justice, which is not also a life of pleasure. For the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them. (p657)

Pleasure is not to be pursued directly, but prudently, with a view to the long-term. The pleasurable life — the good life — is synonymous with the one lived with prudence, honour, and justice, because one who lives that way is most likely to remain healthy and to keep a clean conscience. Another potential surprise, given the modern fine-dining connotation of the word “epicurean” is that he advises fasting, writing that “bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.”

As if all this misunderstanding and misrepresentation were not enough, Epicurus’ work was stored near Herculaneum, and therefore lost in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. He wrote some 300 treatises, and the library near Herculaneum also housed some of his students’ work (notably Philodemus, a contemporary of the other major Epicurean philosopher, Lucretius). But there’s some hope that parts of Epicurus’ major work, On Nature, can be restored from the Herculaneum papyri.

There are many aspects of Epicureanism which are interesting today. Epicurus, for example, followed Democritus, in arguing that matter was made up of invisible, indivisible atoms — thinking which directly influenced modern physics. The balancing of pleasure and pain influenced the utilitarians, like Bentham.

Epicurus believed that morality and all human institutions were essentially conventional, and he is ambivalent about the existence of gods, though at times he seems to see some pragmatism in believing in holding them as an ideal.

The Epicurean school was also the only Athenian school which permitted and encouraged women to join. The Epicureans’ views on marriage were mixed (Epicurus was against it, Lucretius for it, if I remember correctly), but they felt that the highest relationship was not between friends (like Aristotle), nor between husband and wife, but between an educated man and an educated woman.

The quotes above are from Lives of Eminent Philosophers. I’ve learned a lot from Catherine Wilson’s book The Pleasure Principle, which is great. I first heard about her on Robert Wright’s podcast, but I also loved her piece in Aeon.

We will be discussing modern and ancient notions of hedonism at a salon this week if you’re interested!

You can read more at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Might Epicurus be the most wronged philosopher of all time?

I continued the above post in Epicurus and Death and in Epicurus and Happiness.

OED, epicurean, n.: “A person devoted to sensual pleasure, esp. to eating and drinking; a hedonist; a glutton […] In early use chiefly depreciative.”↩

Freedom

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 13:42:59 GMT

A few years ago, at my discussion group, we read Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958):

Berlin divides liberty into negative and positive.

The Stanford Encyclopedia defines negative liberty as “the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints.” It is freedom from interference or coercion. Though it has some roots in Greek philosophy (Otanes? Chrysippus?), Berlin believes it became widespread only relatively recently, in the 17th Century. It is associated with civic disengagement (and, for Chrysippus, with freedom from desire).

Positive liberty is the “possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes.” In other words, it is the freedom to do what one wants to do. This is the Aristotelian notion of liberty, which is civic in that it requires engagement with and involvement in society.¹ It may involve acting in accordance with one’s highest desires or aspirations. In short, it’s something like self-mastery or self-actualization.

The essay has stuck with me, and I’ve occasionally thought about this distinction since then. In my recent fast, in particular, I noticed that freedom from distraction allowed for freedom to engage in activities more intentionally. In particular, by reducing the noise of everyday life, it seemed to put me more in touch with intuition, and it seemed to free me to focus on what was in front of me.

Just how different are the two types of liberty? What is their relationship? Berlin seems certain that they are distinct, at least politically. In some cases they may even be opposites — extreme pursuit of negative liberty might involve leaving society entirely, whereas extreme pursuit of positive liberty might lead one to sacrifice one’s life for society.

Is the distinction useful in the life of an individual?

Answering for myself, I suspect that negative freedom might be a necessary — but not sufficient — condition for positive freedom. Having free time, freedom from coercion, and freedom from distractions all seem elements to a life lived intentionally. On the other hand, certain of the Stoics (like Epictetus, who was born a slave) might argue that one’s freedom should be independent of circumstances, some of which are always out of one’s control.

Since the fast, I’ve been trying to think about which aspects of the experience made it seem so freeing, and which were more trouble than they were worth.

I’m starting to suspect that it may be more to do with screenlessness than it is to do with silence, with food, or with meditation. I noticed the disruptive role of screens in my earlier retreat as well, but I think it warrants further consideration.

I think the Epicureans believed that political engagement caused unhappiness, and therefore advocated against it; that would put them on the side of negative liberty (but please correct me if I’m wrong).↩

Heritability of variability

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 11:48:18 GMT

Yesterday I wrote about Darwin’s foreshadowing of r/K selection theory.

Today I’ll argue that The Origin of Species also predicts punctuated equilibrium, even though Darwin himself is very reluctant to admit the possibility that nature makes abrupt changes.

Here’s an example of Darwin’s views on the speed of selection (emphasis mine):

That natural selection will always act with extreme slowness, I fully admit. […] But the action of natural selection will probably still oftener depend on some of the inhabitants becoming slowly modified; the mutual relations of many of the other inhabitants being thus disturbed.

He uses “slow” and its variants 135 times, about twice as often as “rapid” or “quick” (which he mainly uses to describe birthrate rather than variation). He frequently describes natural selection as “gradual.”

But yesterday I noted that he predicts that a higher number of individuals should mean more opportunities for variation. In other words — all else being equal — a larger population ought to be more variable.

Darwin is quite clear (vivid, even) about how rapidly numbers can increase under favourable conditions:

There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in less than a thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny. Linnaeus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds—and there is no plant so unproductive as this—and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants. The elephant is reckoned the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase; it will be safest to assume that it begins breeding when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth six young in the interval, and surviving till one hundred years old; if this be so, after a period of from 740 to 750 years there would be nearly nineteen million elephants alive descended from the first pair.

Other passages make it clear that he thinks variability itself should vary across varieties/species (remember, he thinks species are just differentiated varieties). And individuals, obviously, must be the bearers of any variations within a variety. He also thinks that variability is inheritable:

A large amount of inheritable and diversified variability is favourable, but I believe mere individual differences suffice for the work. A large number of individuals, by giving a better chance for the appearance within any given period of profitable variations, will compensate for a lesser amount of variability in each individual, and is, I believe, an extremely important element of success.

Some species constantly vary, apparently regardless of circumstances:

There is one point connected with individual differences, which seems to me extremely perplexing: I refer to those genera which have sometimes been called “protean” or “polymorphic,” in which the species present an inordinate amount of variation; and hardly two naturalists can agree which forms to rank as species and which as varieties. […] Genera which are polymorphic in one country seem to be, with some few exceptions, polymorphic in other countries, and likewise, judging from Brachiopod shells, at former periods of time. These facts seem to be very perplexing, for they seem to show that this kind of variability is independent of the conditions of life.

And variable species tend to stay variable:

An extraordinary amount of modification implies an unusually large and long-continued amount of variability, which has continually been accumulated by natural selection for the benefit of the species.

Moreover, species with low levels of organisation vary more than those with higher (more specialised?) levels of organisation:

As “vegetative repetition,” to use Professor Owen’s expression, is a sign of low organisation; the foregoing statements accord with the common opinion of naturalists, that beings which stand low in the scale of nature are more variable than those which are higher. I presume that lowness here means that the several parts of the organisation have been but little specialised for particular functions; and as long as the same part has to perform diversified work, we can perhaps see why it should remain variable, that is, why natural selection should not have preserved or rejected each little deviation of form so carefully as when the part has to serve for some one special purpose. In the same way that a knife which has to cut all sorts of things may be of almost any shape; whilst a tool for some particular purpose must be of some particular shape.

What I’m getting at here is that if larger numbers of individuals have more chance of variation, and variability itself can vary, and nature can produce an explosion of numbers in short order, then nature might sometimes select for variability itself in a burst-like fashion.

Unstable conditions in nature would not “cause” variability. But there must always be some background level of variation for natural selection to work at all.

During stable periods, any given mutation will be bad for the individual, who will (on average) be at a disadvantage compared to the species which is adapted for the stable environment. By surviving this far, the species is likely to have specialised for the given environment, outcompeting less specialised organisms.

If circumstances change rapidly and dramatically, then any given mutation would still probably be a bad thing for any individual organism. Across the species, though, a few might be beneficial. This is just basic natural selection.

But if we understand different species, and different individuals within a species, to have different levels of variability, it might be that by selecting for new variations (as a result of the unstable conditions), nature is (as a side effect) selecting for individuals/species that will tend to vary more in the future.

If the environmental conditions cause selection for variability itself, then this would seem to me to accelerate change.

Even in periods of exploitation, explorers must be randomly produced. But when conditions change, there may be a population explosion of explorers, who would explore the fitness landscape. Once the environment settles down again (assuming it does eventually), then a new form of exploitation may become the new equilibrium.

There is evidence, for example, of the extremely rapid optimisation of photosynthesis:

We have also shown evidence that these structural changes and duplication events were accompanied by rates of evolution of the reaction centre proteins at least 40 times greater than any rates observed in the past 2.5 billion years in any cyanobacterium, alga or plant.

I believe that what I’m describing is roughly Gould’s view, i.e., punctuated equilibrium, which Dawkins opposes. Without having read much Dawkins or any Gould, it seems to me that Gould’s view is supported by Darwin’s reasoning, even though Darwin himself wishes to disavow it.

Darwin’s belief that natural selection must proceed slowly, at least in the first half of The Origin of Species, seems to be an article of faith. Perhaps he gives more evidence for this view later.

If so, I’ll update this post. But for now, I’m wondering whether this view of evolution isn’t to make it more palatable or less disturbing to the religious; something like a belief that He doesn’t play dice.

On the other hand, perhaps I’m reasoning circularly. I suppose I’m betraying a discontinuous (“punctuated”) view of geological history independently of life, as a result of reading about extinction events. Perhaps Darwin’s view is that geological change is more gradual.

Darwin and r/K selection

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 11:18:35 GMT

Today I’m thinking about Darwin and r/K selection theory.

Wikipedia had led me to believe that this was an idea of Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson in 1967’s The Theory of Island Biogeography which had been on my list for a while.

But last week I started reading The Origin of Species and Darwin seems to be pushing in that direction already in 1859. Here he’s talking about artificial selection (“Variation under Domestication”, p35 of my edition):

I will now say a few words on the circumstances, favourable or the reverse, to man’s power of selection. A high degree of variability is obviously favourable, as freely giving the materials for selection to work on; not that mere individual differences are not amply sufficient, with extreme care, to allow of the accumulation of a large amount of modification in almost any desired direction. But as variations manifestly useful or pleasing to man appear only occasionally, the chance of their appearance will be much increased by a large number of individuals being kept. Hence number is of the highest importance for success.

All else being equal, in other words, a larger number of individuals should mean more chances for variation. Larger populations should therefore be more variable.

I’m pretty sure he predicts “r-species” under natural selection, too. If that is of interest, let me know and I’ll try to hunt down the passage.

Darwin continues:

On this principle Marshall formerly remarked, with respect to the sheep of part of Yorkshire, “As they generally belong to poor people, and are mostly in small lots, they never can be improved.” On the other hand, nurserymen, from keeping large stocks of the same plant, are generally far more successful than amateurs in raising new and valuable varieties. A large number of individuals of an animal or plant can be reared only where the conditions for its propagation are favourable. When the individuals are scanty all will be allowed to breed, whatever their quality may be, and this will effectually prevent selection. But probably the most important element is that the animal or plant should be so highly valued by man, that the closest attention is paid to even the slightest deviations in its qualities or structure. Unless such attention be paid nothing can be effected.

So one problem with small lots is that they usually can’t afford to sacrifice individuals. This seems to relate to economies of scale, somehow; typically I’d think of economies of scale in terms of factories, which would have high overheads in terms of switching what they’re producing. But it’s an interesting idea that if the product you’re dealing with is natural, you might actually have more variability if you have a larger stock, not less.

Darwin’s anecdote about people assuming the wrong directionality of strawberry variability is quite funny:

I have seen it gravely remarked, that it was most fortunate that the strawberry began to vary just when gardeners began to attend to this plant. No doubt the strawberry had always varied since it was cultivated, but the slight varieties had been neglected. As soon, however, as gardeners picked out individual plants with slightly larger, earlier, or better fruit, and raised seedlings from them, and again picked out the best seedlings and bred from them, then (with some aid by crossing distinct species) those many admirable varieties of the strawberry were raised which have appeared during the last half-century.

He also makes me very curious about all these allegedly “admirable varieties of the strawberry.” I want to try these strawberries! Have we lost these varieties or are there still many?

Next, I continue thinking about Darwin and punctuated equilibrum.

Five-Day Fast

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 07:28:36 GMT

Last week, from Monday 2 November to Friday 6 November 2020, I did a self-run writing retreat at home, during which I also fasted.

For those five days I didn’t eat, speak, or use screens. I just read, wrote, meditated, exercised, explored, and slept.

I found it quite intense. Several people have expressed curiosity about my experience so I’m writing here to document it and to decompress.

If you’re interested in this topic, you may also be interested in my upcoming Asceticism salon, where we’ll discuss this and related issues. The salon partially motivated me to do this fast.

As this article got a bit long, here are some shortcuts:

The Rules
What did you do?
Why did you do this?
Fasting
Insulin usage
How did you track stuff?
What did you get out of it?

Didn’t you do this before?

In April I did something sort of similar (a five day Zoom meditation retreat) which you can read about here.

During that retreat I found that there is, for me, a trade-off between writing and meditation — they tax my brain in similar ways. That time, I focused on meditation. This time, I very much focused on writing.

I also ate once per day on that retreat, whereas this time I was basically water fasting for the duration. (Water fasting means you’re not eating, only drinking water.)

What were the rules?

From after dinner on Sunday night to dinner on Friday night, I decided that…

I would not eat anything.
I would not drink anything other than water.
I would not use screens.
I would not say anything.
I would not listen to anything.
I would not buy anything.

Did you break any of the rules?

In short, no.

The longer version is yes, but barely. I followed rule #1 to the letter, and the rest with very mild tweaks, some of which were out of my control.

Did you eat anything?

I didn’t eat anything at all. As a Type I diabetic, this was a bit tricky at times; in the end, I was using very little insulin (see below).

Did you drink anything other than water?

Yes. I decided “I will not drink anything other than water and one cup of black coffee per day.”

On a normal day I would drink 2–3 cups. I changed the rule after the first day, during which I fell asleep four times. I probably could have pushed through and gotten used to it, but I decided that since reducing caffeine wasn’t one of my goals, and I know from previous experience that coffee doesn’t affect my insulin levels or hunger, that I should just try to stay awake for more of the experience rather than to doze my way through the week.

I did need to drink a lot of water. I normally drink a lot, but when fasting seem to need even more.

Did you use screens?

No, none that I hadn’t planned to.

I didn’t use any smartphone or computer screens. I did use my Kindle as planned. I don’t find that it breaks concentration/mindfulness or distracts me. Most of the books I have on there are fairly heavy anyway, so it’s not very tempting to switch.

These days, medical devices for diabetes have annoying smartphone-like screens, which I had to use. They were better when they were liquid-crystal; their batteries lasted longer. Anyway, I knew I’d have to look at these.

Apart from those, I didn’t use screens.

Did you speak?

Yes, I did occasionally speak.

I live in London, where it is impossible to walk or stand near people (or even 2m away from people) without saying “sorry” and “thank you” a lot. Apologies in particular are a part of the culture which it would be rude to forego entirely. If intoned in proper British fashion, they should sound like an apology for your very existence, in addition to the apology for wherever you happened to be walking or standing. I sometimes did this without thinking.

On the third day, at midday, precisely halfway through the retreat, I also spoke to someone, by accident. This was unplanned and more-or-less unavoidable; I was in our garden and a builder called down to me from another flat. I could not have ignored him without being rude, and in any case I did not think to do so until after I had already responded. He might have needed something. Instead, he wanted to chat (to be fair, in 2020, maybe he just needed that).

We talked about London (we had both been here around a decade, give or take). He asked about California (I’m from Orange County) and I asked about Romania (he was from Satu Mare). As soon as I was able to do so politely, I went back inside. The conversation lasted less than five minutes.

I also wrote letters, to my wife and to a few other friends. This was as planned.

Did you listen to anything?

I normally listen to a lot of podcasts, audiobooks, and music. I didn’t listen to podcasts or audiobooks at all. I didn’t listen to any music, at least not intentionally. Though there were two ways I did so unintentionally.

One was just from walking around London:

At Lauderdale House, when I walked by, there was a jaunty piano tune emanating from an upper window, perhaps the same one from which Nell Gwyn was reputed to have dangled the young Earl of Burford.
In Queen’s Wood, I walked into what appeared to be the making of a Spanish music video.

It sounded like a love song, or least I caught the word “corazón” before they stopped playing to let me pass (unnecessarily; I would have waited, but they had already stopped).

In the silence of my existence for the remainder of the week, I had a few notes of that unfamiliar Spanish song stuck in my head.

Which brings me to the other unintentional way I listened to music: I had whole albums playing in my head from memory. This got more intense as the week went on.

Did you buy anything?

No, although I did mention that a pen of mine had run out (a Pilot G-Tec-C4 which is perfect for underlining), in a letter I wrote to my partner. She ordered it and it arrived during the retreat. In my defence, I did not expect her to do this immediately, nor for it to arrive before the retreat had ended, but she did and we received it.

What did you do instead?

I read books and Kindle (25 hours).
I wrote by hand (17 hours).
I exercised (10 hours).
I meditated (7 hours).
I explored my area of London with a 2007 mini A-Z.

People looked at me strangely when they saw me standing around, leafing through this.

Why did you do this?

I’ll give ten reasons:

I’ve been feeling really uncertain lately and wanted to decide on a plan (which I did; see below).
I’m hosting an Interintellect salon on Asceticism on 19 November (information here if you’re interested), so it seemed an appropriate time to do it.
I wanted to see whether time slowed down. (It did.) Lots of people are working on objectively extending life; why not work on subjectively slowing the passage of time?
I’m interested in the phenomenology of extreme experiences generally.
I wanted to try a Digital Minimalism-style hard reset on technology and distractions.
I wanted to see how much I could write in that time if I was entirely undistracted, and whether handwriting significantly differs from typing.
I wanted to burn the first week of the new UK lockdown doing something other than doomscrolling (but see below).
For the past three years I have stopped drinking alcohol for November, and I wanted to kickstart that process.
I wanted to see if I could do it.
I wanted to lose some weight.

Was this to miss the election?

No, that was just an unexpected bonus. I planned it without thinking about that, and it didn’t occur to me until a few days in that I would not hear about it.

Why do you do Dry November?

As I said in #8 above, I’ve taken off a month from drinking for the past three years, a practice I think of as “Dry November” by way of analogy with “Dry January.” I have no idea whether anyone else does this.

I’ve done Dry January before too, and I understand why people do it, to reset after the holidays. But I also like the idea of resetting before the holidays. In 2017, I had a particularly heavy November, after which it was hard to keep up that level of momentum in December. So in 2018 I tried Dry November and it’s become a bit of a tradition.

Did you burn a week of lockdown?

Sadly, no. If anything I prolonged the lockdown for myself.

I’m in the UK we’re now in the second lockdown of 2020. I was not happy going into the first one. The April retreat made a big difference.

I was also concerned about getting anxious during this lockdown. I expected it to start on Saturday 31 October, so by going on retreat, I’d miss the first week. Instead, the announcement on the 31st was that the lockdown would start on the 5th November. This means I missed the last week of “freedom” (if such a thing can be said to exist this year). This was annoying, but I thought I’d better to stick to what I’d planned, since I somehow felt I was mentally prepared.

Fasting

Weren’t you hungry?

Yes, at times. The first three days were surprisingly easy, though as I said above, I’m used to fasting.

The worst time was on Thursday, around 5pm (92 hours in), when I faced debilitating hunger, the worst of my life. I knew it would come at some point, and I wanted to wait it out. I had already walked 8 miles that day, so I did not particularly feel like exercising (which I find reduces hunger). So I just kept reading.

It was not exactly painful, but it was extremely intense. Since we had a fully-stocked fridge, I was not entirely sure I would be able to control myself. What was most surprising is that it went away after about twenty minutes, on its own, without my moving or doing anything. It didn’t come back.

Did you miss food?

Yes, and that’s different from being hungry. I missed food and I missed cooking. I also fantasised and dreamt about food, which I never do, and if I made the mistake of imagining food, I would salivate intensely. This is not a normal thing for me; I’m fairly stoic when it comes to food.

George Orwell, in his amazing Down and Out in Paris and London:

This was a blow. I was horribly disappointed, for I had allowed my belly to expect food, a great mistake when one is hungry.

I missed cooking because I love the ritual and the chemistry-experiment feeling that it always has for me. I find cooking to be an absolute pleasure, and therapeutic. It was a big relief to cook on Friday.

Actually, that may have been my most Stoic moment of the week, another test which I wasn’t sure whether I would pass: On the fifth day of the fast, I prepared and cooked a stew to go into the slow cooker, i.e., I dealt with a bunch of food that I wouldn’t be able to eat for another five or six hours and was in and out of the fridge. Somehow I managed, and I felt a bit proud about this. The stew was good.

Why did you fast? Why not just meditate?

I fast anyway. And I had been wanting to try a longer fast for a while, just to see what they are like.

I suppose reasons to try this were:

Mental clarity, which I invariably get on shorter fasts.
My upcoming Asceticism salon.
Rumoured benefits of autophagy.
I read Fung/Moore’s The Complete Guide to Fasting last year and enjoyed it.

Since then I had been wanting to try a longer fast. I recommend that book if you’re curious about fasting.

Mark O’Connell wrote a great piece called “Splendid Isolation” recently which also made me want to do a fast without screens.
I’ve been wondering whether fasting might improve neuroplasticity.

I have no way of directly verifying that but I thought there might be some phenomenological ways. (This was inconclusive.)

Have you fasted this long before?

No, nowhere near. I frequently fast 24 hours, but my longest fast before this one was maybe 2.5 days (~60 hours). This fast was 5 days (120 hours), or double the length of my previous longest fast.

Was it harder than a short fast?

For me, yes, dramatically so, but maybe that’s just because I’m so used to short fasts.

Fung/Moore say it should get easier after the second day:

The majority of people find day 2 of an extended fast to be the most difficult in terms of hunger.

After day 2, many people describe a gradual lessening and then a total elimination of hunger. (Some have hypothesized that this effect is due to the high number of ketone bodies that begin circulating after a couple of days.)

Orwell heard that it should get easier after three days:

We went several days on dry bread, and then I was two and a half days with nothing to eat whatever. This was an ugly experience. There are people who do fasting cures of three weeks or more, and they say that fasting is quite pleasant after the fourth day; I do not know, never having gone beyond the third day. Probably it seems different when one is doing it voluntarily and is not underfed at the start.

I highly recommend reading his whole description of hunger, which begins on p42 of this PDF.

Anyway, I found the fourth day the hardest. Maybe I should have pushed on and it would have gotten easy by day six or seven, but by day five I felt I’d had enough.

What made you fast originally?

Come to think of it, the above passage of Orwell was the first time I’d ever heard about fasting in the modern era (I think of 1933 as being modern). It made me curious about it.

I read that book in 2007. I started intermittent fasting around 2010, via Leangains, when the refrain from everyone around me was “That’s super unhealthy!” A few years later, when the BBC began running stories like this one, several people who had previously admonished me sent them over.

Was this a dopamine fast?

Yes, or no, whichever you prefer. Names don’t matter to me.

“Dopamine fasting,” or something similar to what I’m describing on this page, has been in the news in recent years.

For some reason it seems to have caused some controversy. Possibly it’s just because of the tone of that NYT article. Or perhaps it’s part of a more general reaction against anything perceived to have originated in Silicon Valley (though as that article points out, the Buddhists and the Amish have been doing such things for much longer than tech bros).

I will respond to my (probably incorrect) understanding of the objections. If I’m missing the point, please get in touch.

Some objections seem to be to the name, e.g., “That’s not what dopamine does.” Though probably true, this is frankly irrelevant, and it’s addressed early-on in that article: “It’s more of a stimulation fast.” If you find this usage of “dopamine” to be pseudoscientific, then I understand the objection. Though if you’re confident that you know what is and is not scientific, I might refer you to my Kuhn thread.

Whatever term you use is a convenient label for a set of practices (a deliberate period of no food, screens, speech, eye-contact, whatever) that doesn’t have another name. It doesn’t matter whether it’s “scientifically accurate,” if that term even means anything in this context. I see no reason that the set of practices need have anything in common other than that you are choosing to do them together. This is about phenomenology.

Another objection seems to be that you should naturally take breaks from screens and the like, and that these breaks don’t need to be formal, ritualised, or structured. This is surely true; not everyone needs to or wants to do something like this. In like manner I have friends who remain fit despite “not exercising.” When I question them, it often turns out that they lead active lives (sometimes far more active than those who “exercise”), but they don’t think of walking/cycling/whatever as exercise, because for them it’s not structured. Fair enough, that works for some people, and other people go to the gym.

I feel the same way about a decision to take a deliberate period of abstinence. It’s just a tool; not everyone needs it.

There also seems to be a bit of a moralistic element to the backlash. This reminds me of what I’ve heard from friends who are teetotal or vegan. Of course there are proselytizers of every type, and these people are tedious, but my friends are not among them. Their decisions are personal, having nothing to do with anyone else. Still, sometimes when they say “I am vegan” or “I am teetotal,” it is taken as a judgement upon, or even as an attack against, people who are not.

Lest there be any confusion, I’m not advocating for or against fasting, “dopamine” or otherwise. I’m just reporting on my own experiences, in case they are of interest to anyone else.

As I’ve implied, I also don’t care much about what a thing is called. I have read articles about “dopamine fasting” and found people’s experiences interesting, and their experiences informed my decisions. Before going in, I thought of it as a “meditation retreat,” but afterwards, given how much I wrote, I’m starting to think of it as a “writing retreat.”

No terminology can exhaust an experience, nor does word choice matter much as long as you know what I’m talking about.

How much insulin did you use while fasting?

Because I am a type I diabetic with an insulin pump, I can tell you exactly, in units of Humalog.

For reference, on a normal day I would use around 50-60, and last Sunday (when I ate a lot) I used 93. Years ago, when I was far less careful about what I was eating, I probably used 80 on an average day.

Monday: 39.35
Tuesday: 16.22
Wednesday: 11.99
Thursday: 9.78
Friday: 37.82

So Thursday’s 9.78 is insanely low.

On Monday I was probably still digesting food from the weekend. On Friday, I ate dinner. Still, it’s interesting to see how it dropped over the week.

How was your blood sugar?

I checked my seven-day average on my Freestyle Libre and it said 5.9 mmol/L (106 mg/dL) for the week. It said I’d been in target 95% of the time and below 3.9 (70) 5% of the time. This is very good.

How much did you exercise?

I exercised every day. I walked on average around 10km (6.2 miles) per day. The longest I walked was 14km (8.7 miles).

I also ran three times and did bodyweight exercises twice (once on the third day and once on the fifth). I was slower running, but surprisingly I managed to set a few PRs on things like pull-ups (perhaps because I was lighter). Fasting, in other words, doesn’t seem to impact physical performance as much as I might have expected.

I figured exercising when completely fasted would burn fat. But more importantly, there just wasn’t that much to do, and exercising seemed to make me less hungry and to put me in a better mood.

Did you lose weight?

Unsurprisingly, yes.

I weighed in with a lot of food/carbohydrate weight on Sunday, and with obviously zero food and some dehydration on Friday, but the scales showed me down 6.6 kg (13.9 lbs, or, in British parlance, a stone). Most of that has since come back, but I still seem to be down 2 kg = 4.4 lbs, which is a lot to lose in a week.

What was it like?

The Good

I read and wrote a ton (see what I read).
I had many, many ideas and realisations. I’ve got stacks of notes I’m still working through.
Without eating or cooking food, I felt like I had way more time in the day.
Unsurprisingly, I was a lot less distracted, a lot more aware of my surroundings, and significantly more intentional about what I was doing.
I found things more beautiful.
I felt extremely clear-headed and focused the whole week.
Perhaps more surprisingly, I had a lot of physical energy most of the time.

I exercised a lot.

As a diabetic, in everyday life a certain amount of admin is involved in trying/failing to keep my bloodsugar levels (mostly) flat.

When fasting, they just stay (pretty much perfectly) flat, which saves some hassle.

I lost weight.
Time went very slowly; I felt like I had tons of it.

The Bad

Time went very slowly; this was sometimes agonizing or boring.
From the third day, I was very cold in the evenings, and could not get warm.
It was sometimes hard to sleep.
Though my blood sugars were flat, I did have to do mess with my insulin pump an annoying amount to avoid hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar) without eating anything.
With less to think about, small inconveniences seemed like bigger deals than they were.
I stayed sore longer from exercise, though it did not really seem to affect performance.
I was more moody in the morning than usual (and my mood in the morning is not usually great).

The cold may have been the worst part physically. It usually came on after I stopped moving for the day, sometime in the late afternoon, while I was reading. A hot shower/bath would help for an hour or so, but then my body temperature would drop again. I notice this a little after 24 hours of fasting, but it was much more intense after the third day.

I also got pretty irritable around the time I would normally “break fast,” in the early afternoon. (I don’t eat breakfast normally.) This seemed to go away once I got moving (walking or running). It’s almost like my body was satisfied with me moving and potentially looking for food. Maybe it figured I was hunting or gathering?

The Ugly

Any medication is much more potent.
I got sick on Thursday, shortly after my hunger spell.

I’m not entirely sure why, but it may well have been because I took paracetamol. It wasn’t a big deal as I had nothing but water in me. But also something to be aware of.

It was difficult to start eating again on Friday.

I’ve read that you’re meant to break your fast with something easy; for some reason people suggest dates and yoghurt. I did not think too much about this and tried to start eating normally. My throat swelled up and I couldn’t eat for about an hour afterwards.

I assume this was my body sending a strong message that it was not ready for food yet. I waited until it went away after a while, and I was able to eat normally after that. I got full quite quickly, which I suppose is a good thing.

The Unexpected

I didn’t expect all the bad/ugly things to come from fasting; I thought that other parts of the solitude/screenlessness would be difficult, but they were not too bad.

I cared more about my physical environment, and kept it tidier than I normally do. I suppose you could say I felt more “embodied,” whatever that means. I did not feel as intensely mindful as I did in my last retreat, probably just from meditating less.

I got noticeably better at mental arithmetic. I would wonder things like, “How fast am I writing?” Then, because I had little reason not to, I would average the words on the line, multiply by the number of lines, divide the number of words by the number of minutes, etc. These are the kinds of things I used to do when I was a kid and curious. Now I think I bother with less of that, and also if I do want to do it, I can easily do it in a calculator (or more frequently in Python). The fact that I can do it so quickly in normal life means that I don’t spend much time wondering, and if I want an answer, no arithmetic is necessary.

I also greatly improved my London geography by exploring and getting lost with the A-Z. I learned alternative routes, explored new areas, and learned a lot. Reading London history also made me curious about this. I think if you’re going to do this kind of thing, or even just a digital detox/walking without a phone, I’d recommend both reading the history of your area, and taking a map.

Did you get bored?

Yes, I got bored, which was strangely sweet, and reminded me of childhood. That only happened a few times though. Mostly the reading I was doing was interesting.

Did time slow down?

Yes, definitely.

If time poverty is a problem, I felt like part of the “time top 0.01%.”

I definitely had times, especially on days 4 and 5, when I wished it was over. But I also experienced some effects like last time, where I badly misestimated time, thinking that an hour had passed when it had only been five minutes.

What about admin?

I’m not working, and I’m lucky enough not to have many responsibilities at the moment. My wife was very kind in helping out with the few things that needed doing.

I let family members and other relevant people know that they could get in contact with her if there was any emergency, and I also posted stuff on social media indicating that I’d be away.

The rest just had to wait until I was done, because obviously I was unaware of it!

I sometimes think about the fact that in any period before the late 19th century, even if a parent, sibling, or spouse died, you would only know about it immediately if you happened to be in exactly the right place. Otherwise you’d have to wait for post to arrive, and the post might have to wait for you to arrive (e.g. if you were travelling).

What did you read?

I read a lot. I’m haphazard with my reading. Even with such focus and clarity as I had this week, I could not keep myself to one book, or indeed even just to one domain.

I read just over a third of Darwin’s Origin of Species (this edition) which I loved. He’s just incredible as a complexity theorist, and he anticipates so much. I also love how he frequently says he has no time to give examples, then goes on to give the most insanely comprehensive example imaginable.

I read around half of Kim Sterelny’s Dawkins vs. Gould, which I picked up randomly in a charity shop a month or two ago. It’s an excellent, concise summary of what the two men think and why, despite so much agreement, they so vehemently differ. Though I have not yet read Gould, Sterelny’s summary already makes it palpable how much he was influenced by Thomas Kuhn, whom I’ve been tweeting about since September.

I started Alexandra Berlina’s Shklovsky Reader. I highly recommend this article if you don’t know who Viktor Shklovsky is, or especially if you do. He had an extremely crazy life.

For “fun,” I read a lot about the history of North London, where I live. Much of that was in Prickett’s History and Antiquities of Highgate, originally written in 1842, which I also picked up in a charity shop. There’s also a great chunk of Walford’s 1878 Old and New London available free online so I read a bunch of that on my Kindle. Those links are to Volume 5 which is about North London.

In that reading I learned about the practice called Swearing on the Horns, which was apparently ancient in nearby pubs in 1785, still done in 1830, and barely remembered (having fallen out of favour) by 1880 or so. By 1906 (pictured), it was already a nostalgic revival. I recommend reading about it, it’s quite funny.

I also read some of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”. I can’t go into my objections here, but our worldviews may well be incommensurable.

Did you avoid eye contact?

Not any more than usual. If you’re walking around a busy city, sometimes it just happens. I’m not quite sure why this is considered stimulating. It doesn’t seem so to me.

What was your system like?

Very simple. I had an A4 moleskine notebook where I did my journaling, reflections, any thoughts that I thought were worth keeping. I wrote 29 A4 pages which I estimated at around 15,000 words (using mental arithmetic, of course). That’s around 15 wpm.

I also kept several pocket notebooks around. I probably should have just kept one, but as I said I’m haphazard, and tend to grab whatever is to hand. I took a few dozen pages of notes like this, many of them lists of things to do or look up when I was back online.

For tracking time, I have Rhodia pads like these ones (with a grid/graph paper) and I just wrote a time whenever I started an activity. If I took a break then I just wrote “break,” but that didn’t happen very often.

On the other hand I did spend a lot of time just in reveries, in thought, gazing off into the middle-distance. I didn’t track this time separately. Depending on how you regard activities like writing, I may have over-reported them above.

How did you decide what to do?

How does anyone ever decide what to do? (I’m genuinely curious.)

I suppose I just did whatever felt right. I didn’t use an alarm or stick to a schedule or anything like that, though I did follow roughly my usual daily pattern.

I normally use Complice to plan my day, then stick to that maybe 40-80%. During this week, I only planned mentally, or maybe in the journal. Usually it was like one or two things per day, like “I’ll write about this,” or “I’ll walk south today.” Since there were not many things that I could do, I mainly just switched when I felt like it.

With limited choices, and because I was tracking what I was doing, context-switching felt more expensive, and I didn’t do it as much. Often I’d feel like doing something else, remember that there was little else to do, and then wind up reading for another hour, or walking for another hour, writing more, etc.

Actually, that was one of the most jarring things about getting back online: How easy it was to switch from doing one thing to doing another. I felt like my willpower had diminished. I would exert my will to do some task, but get really easily distracted.

Are you less distracted now?

I wouldn’t say that the week gave any long-lasting protection against distractions, but it did make those distractions more acute when I returned. That makes it easier to address them, if not easier to resist them.

I have an easier time getting up and staying off social media for several hours.

What did you get out of it?

Mainly, I got a break, a reset, and a plan going forward.

Which part was most important?

I think time away from screens was the most important. I will probably do this periodically in the future, if not at the same time as fasting.

I also think I did get a reset on stimulus somehow. Now I’m fine waking up and beginning to write without checking anything online. We’ll see whether that lasts or not.

What was it like emotionally?

It was a roller coaster. Like any long period of solitude, it teaches you that most of your moods are self-generated, even when conditions outside yourself change little. This was what I found on the last retreat and the ten-day Goenka retreat I did in 2018.

I would say that because I was writing more (which can take the form of venting) and meditating less (which tends to cause weirder experiences), I was probably less emotional than on other retreats I’ve been on.

Still, there were the usual ecstatic highs, depressed lows, moments of self-doubt (“Why am I doing this?!”), angry moments, sad moments. Overall, though, and despite all that, I would say that I had less emotional turmoil and self-loathing than I do on a normal week.

Another thing I noticed was that my regret seems tied to social interactions. I generally think that I’m a regretful person, that I just naturally wake up with regrets from whatever I did the day before. By being completely isolated, I realised that it’s often things I say in conversation that I regret, whether or not that’s warranted. Evidently if I don’t interact with anyone, I don’t get regretful (though I do still get moody).

Any breakthrough insights?

Because I wasn’t meditating as much, I didn’t feel like I made much progress with wisdom.

Mostly, I felt like I got clarity about how I needed to structure my days, and what I would do about the writing that I’m working on.

I have yet to read my voluminous journaling, so I may update this section later.

How was your mood?

I noticed that I was less despondent.

Anything else?

I did notice, especially on day 2-3 when I was meditating a few more hours than I usually do, that I was having more prediction errors.

This came in the form of trouble writing (I’d sort of become too conscious of a letter or spelling, and lose fluency).

I also saw a few things that weren’t there. That probably makes it sound more dramatic than it really was. I would look, and think I saw a bird of prey perched in the birch, then realise that no, actually that was just a branch. Or I would think I’d seen a cat where there was in fact no cat. It was the kind of thing that can happen in everyday life, but it was more frequent.

I saw more patterns in nature, and was generally more absorbed by it, for example watching the wind move the leaves of trees.

What did you most look forward to afterwards?

Eating food and talking to my partner. In normal life I probably also would have looked forward to seeing friends, but I was coming out of retreat into a new lockdown, so I knew that wouldn’t be a thing.

How did the planning go?

You’re reading this as a result. I came up with a pageful of rules I wanted to follow, one of which is to write 2,000 words immediately upon waking on weekdays, and to publish five blog posts per week.

I’ve been very uncertain about how to proceed with my writing. After over a year of thinking within my Zettelkasten, I have hundreds of ideas, but I have not been publishing many of them. I am also in principle (and was, in practice, until March) working on a novel. Intuitively I know that the work in the Zettelkasten relates to the novel, but I don’t yet know how.

I wanted to think through and consider many possible options. For example, I could resume my editing of the previous draft of the novel, scrap it and rewrite the whole thing, double-down on the Zettelkasten, or commit to public writing for some period before returning. In the end I chose the last.

I felt that silence, and diligent note-taking, was the best way to do this. On Friday, I felt I had a solid plan.

Any regrets?

I should have got a haircut before this lockdown.

I should also have made sure that I’d done a more thorough “admin catch-up” before beginning, because I’d forgotten to send several emails.

Finally, I should have written down friend’s addresses on paper so that I could have sent them letters more easily. For one friend who doesn’t live far away, I hand-delivered a letter.

Did you get what you wanted from this experience?

Overall, yes.

Would you do it again?

Probably not in exactly this way. In a way, I did six things at once: I fasted, I did a digital detox, I kept a vow of silence, I wrote a lot, I read a lot, and I meditated more than usual. I think in the future I would probably divide these things up rather than doing them all at once.

I actually think that the intense focus I get from fasting would be better used when I can do more things. I feel like I could have been super productive at certain things online during a five-day fast.

Conversely, both writing and meditating are hard, and probably even harder without food. So if I really wanted to focus on a week of writing or meditating in the future, I would still do most of that stuff fasted in the morning, but I would eat later in the day so I could continue with the same intensity the next day. It was getting hard to keep up the pace of reading/writing/meditating by day five.

Would you recommend this to others?

I would absolutely recommend that you try this for 24 hours. I think it would give you a lot of the insights without too much of the pain.

I don’t think I’d recommend exactly what I did to anyone. If you’ve read this far, you probably understand which parts appeal to you and which don’t.

Overall it was good

If it’s not clear from the above, I’m very glad I did this, even if I would not do it in precisely the same way again.

Thanks for reading. If you liked this, please consider signing up for my infrequent newsletter. I’d also love to have you at the Asceticism salon or to hear from you on twitter.

Oxygenic Photosynthesis

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 11:23:28 GMT

In the beginning, there was anoxygenic photosynthesis.

OK, not in the beginning beginning, but at least before oxygenic photosynthesis.

First, a refresher. Photosynthesis is a way to convert light energy into chemical energy. Though the term is general, and energy can be captured and stored in different ways, the most modern and familiar form occurs in plants and cyanobacteria.

This is oxygenic photosynthesis, and it is what is typically meant when the term photosynthesis is not qualified. This method captures sunlight and stores it as carbohydrates (for example, sugars). In the process it absorbs (“fixes”) carbon from carbon dioxide, and releases oxygen. Hence oxygenic, as opposed to anoxygenic, which does not release oxygen. The exact details are complicated, but here’s a simplified overview:

We now enjoy breathing oxygen. But it was not always so.

The early atmosphere had little or no oxygen. Oxygen was produced by photosynthetic organisms, using the above method. This change in the atmosphere, caused by the success of cyanobacteria, is called the Great Oxidation Event. This was explosive and extremely dramatic, and certainly one of the biggest revolutions in Earth’s history. I’ll write more about it later, but for now I want to focus on the conditions leading up to it.

Oxygenic photosynthesis was preceded by anoxygenic photosynthesis. By how long is debated, but the important thing for our purposes is that it there were two earlier independent photosystems.¹ Modern oxygenic photosynthesis combines these two earlier photosystems, which each separately did anoxygenic photosynthesis.

Photosystem I

Some still extant Heliobacteria use the first photosystem (PS I). This bacteria has something very like chlorophyll, the pigment used in plant photosynthesis, but which absorbs a part of the light spectrum that penetrates deep water. They are obligate anaerobes which means that they cannot survive in the presence of oxygen. They are also in the strange position of being photosynthetic but heterotrophic. Photosynthetic organisms are typically autotrophic, i.e., they provide their own food (assuming access to sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water). But Heliobacteria cannot fix atmospheric carbon, and so must find environmental pyruvate, acetate, or lactate as their source both of carbon and of electrons (whereas plants get these from carbon dioxide in the air and water, respectively).

Recap: Heliobacteria cannot tolerate air, lives deep underwater, and has diverse ways of getting carbon. (In fact, they can even survive in the dark by fermentation of pyruvate.)

Photosystem II

Another kind of bacteria, Chloroflexus, has another kind of photosystem (PS II). Bacteria is colourful. Chloroflexus is green filamentous bacteria, and there are also purple sulphur and non-sulphur bacteria that share this photosystem. The system can use either hydrogen sulphide or hydrogen gas as their electron source. They fix carbon using the Calvin cycle which is also used by plants. They are also extremely versatile: they can grow with sunlight in the absence of oxygen, or heterotrophically if oxygen is present.

Oxygenic Revolution

Why am I telling you all this? The details aren’t too important. What’s important is that these two earlier methods of photosynthesis depended on stuff in the environment as a source of electrons to use sunlight to store energy (by fixing carbon).

Here’s Plants: Diversity and Evolution (15):

The cyanobacteria are the most important oxygenic photosynthetic

bacteria. They have two photosystems: Photosystem I is related to the RC-1 containing photosynthesis most primitively seen in the heliobacteria, and Photosystem II is related to the RC-2 containing photosynthesis seen most primitively in the green filamentous bacteria. Probably this conjunction of photosystems occurred by gene transfer between distinct Heliobacter and Chloroflexus type organisms. It was a coupling that was to prove enormously successful, transforming the world because it permitted oxygenic photosynthesis.

This leads to the Great Oxidation Event mentioned above. But notice that there are two existing systems that get combined by horizontal gene transfer. The revolution is recombinant, depending on older technologies, and not fully novel.

Plants continues (emphasis mine):

It worked because the two photosystems acting in concert provide a double hit, boosting the energy level of electrons and thereby providing sufficient oxidising power to split the inexhaustible supply of water to provide a reductant without sacrificing the ability to use photons in the red region of the spectrum. Oxygen is produced as a side-product. The first hit is from Photosystem II and results in noncyclic photophosphorylation, the flow of electrons to Photosystem I with the production of ATP, and the splitting (oxidisation) of water (Figure 1.13). The second hit is from Photosystem I where electrons are excited again, and now they are transported to ultimately produce reducing power in the shape of NADPH. However, when sufficient reducing power is already present Photosystem I can carry out cyclic photophosphorylation to produce ATP.

First, this revolution overcomes an energy barrier, which is the barrier to split water. You need a certain amount of energy to release the energy from water. This is also true much later in human development; you need to be able to heat things to a certain temperature in order to start a Bronze Age or Iron Age, and that depends on agricultural tools. Perhaps more straightforwardly, you need industrial technologies to make use of fossil fuels, and you need fossil fuels to get to nuclear.

Also note that there is inertia, and the process is cyclical; once set in motion, it’s more efficient.

The fact that the water supply is inexhaustible is also important. This is at least 2.4 billion years ago. There was little life on land at this point, so water was not in the environment; water was the environment. What was previously environmental becomes a resource.

Notice that oxygen is a side effect, not just a waste product but a deadly waste product, as we’ll see later. When it accumulates, it first kills off everything. At the same time, it paves the way for eukaryotes. Cellular respiration, a form of metabolism which releases the energy which photosynthesis has stored as carbohydrates (and which requires oxygen, which we use, as do plants) is fifteen times more efficient than anaerobic metabolism. Just as water was the environment, which was changed into a resource, oxygen is a deadly waste product which later becomes a fuel.

Most importantly, notice how photosynthesis is now untethered from environmental ions like hydrogen sulphides. They may have been plentiful, but they were not as plentiful as water. This revolution breaks the bottleneck for storing sunlight efficiently. It acts as an accelerant for the later stages in life.

But first it kills off most obligate anaerobes, i.e., pretty much all life. There are unexpected winners and losers. I’ll write about the Great Oxidation Event next time.

One final point is that the diversity is reduced on one level, but increased on another. Modern photosynthesis is dominant, at least on land. We only have evidence of these other methods from stagnant ponds, alkaline soils, and other places that are inhospitable to the dominant form of life. (Think of surviving groups of human hunter-gatherers; they no longer occupy the most fertile areas, as they did before agriculture in the Fertile Crescent.)

These early organisms were weird. They could live in the dark, fermenting stuff, or by sunlight, looking for random sources of carbon. They could switch between living in the air or not in the air, or using sunlight or other energy sources. The success of this revolution killed diversity when it comes to how to obtain energy. But it provided a new playing field, at a higher level, for a later explosion in the diversity of plants.

In part, it did this by accident, stabilising an out-of-equilibrium situation; the release of oxygen formed the ozone, which protected from the sun’s damaging short-length UV-C radiation. But that’s enough for today.

There is no consensus about exactly when oxygenic photosynthesis began; it could have started in the early Archean (3.7 billion years ago) or just before the Great Oxidation Event (2.4); see Early Archean origin of Photosystem II. And the two photosystems themselves had likely diverged from a single earlier photosystem, but again, that’s not important right now.↩

Revolutions break bottlenecks

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 11:05:50 GMT

Part of a series on revolutions.

On this page we define bottlenecks and think about some revolutions that break them.

Definition

What is a bottleneck? OED:

2.
a. A place where a road, watercourse, etc., narrows, esp. one on a road where the flow of traffic is impeded. Hence: a part of a route where congestion is caused, usually by a high volume of traffic; (also) a traffic jam.
b. In extended use: a part of a process or system (esp. in business or industry), in which progress is obstructed or delayed.
c. Chiefly Biology. An abrupt and severe reduction in the size of a population caused chiefly or wholly by factors other than natural selection, such as natural disasters or human activity, and resulting in a decrease in genetic variation; an episode during which such a population remains reduced.

For our purposes probably sense 2b is closest, though 2c is also worth thinking about.

Revolutions which break bottlenecks

Oxygenic Photosynthesis
Fuel revolutions
Culture from genes
Multicellularity and ribosome
Speech/grooming and group size
Alcohol and group size

The Fertile Crescent

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 10:11:30 GMT

Part of a series on revolutions.

Here I assert that abundance is a condition for step changes in complexity using the example of the Fertile Crescent.

The Fertile Crescent’s bounty is mentioned in its name. It is one of the cradles of civilization for precisely this reason. Wikipedia cites Spenser’s 1590 metaphorical usage of “cradle” to mean “the place or region in which anything is nurtured or sheltered in its earlier stage.” Note that in addition to protection there’s a notion of nurture, implying nutrition, and the fact that in this metaphor, people are the baby. The region was so rich in resources that you could remain infantile and still enjoy its fruits, since they were already so abundant and so concentrated.

Sound like the Garden of Eden? That’s probably no coincidence. But more on that later.

James C. Scott describes the sudden change in conditions in Against the Grain:

Then, around 9,600 BCE, the cold snap broke and it became warmer and wetter again—and fast. The average temperature may have increased as much as seven degrees Celsius within a single decade. The trees, mammals, and birds burst out of the refugia to colonize a suddenly more hospitable landscape—and with them, of course, their companion species, Homo sapiens.

This is significant because all the flora and fauna, including humankind, were already evolved by the point that the conditions changed. In some sense, from the organisms’ point of view, the change was random. And it produced abundance by concentrating resources. This will of course lead to all sorts of behavioural changes, at the level of the species, and changes in dynamics among the species, but these changes do not cause the conditions, even if they may later reinforce them.

Scott goes on to contrast the Crescent to its condition today:

Rather than an arid zone between two rivers, as it largely is today, the southern alluvium was an intricate deltaic wetland crisscrossed by hundreds of distributaries, now merging, now diverging, with each season of flooding. The alluvium operated as a great sponge, absorbing the annual high water flow, raising the water table, then releasing it slowly in the dry months beginning in May.

[…] At the height of the annual flooding the water courses regularly overtopped their natural ridges or levees, created by the annual deposition of their coarser sediments, and spilled down the backslope, flooding the adjacent lowlands and depressions. As the beds of many watercourses were above the surrounding land, a simple breach in the levee at high water would accomplish the same purpose—we might call this last technique “assisted natural irrigation.” Seed grains could be broadcast on the naturally prepared field. The nutrient-rich alluvium, as it slowly dried out, also produced an abundance of fodder for wild herbivores, as well as well as domesticated goats, sheep, and pigs.

In other words, it was not just incredibly abundant in resources, but it was essentially self-irrigating. Random conditions in that region created self-reinforcing virtuous cycles.

[…] inhabitants exploited virtually all the wetland resources within reach: reeds and sedges for building and food, a great variety of edible plants (club rush, cattails, water lily, bulrush), tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals, and migrating gazelles that provided a major source of protein. The combination of rich alluvial soils with an estuary of two great rivers teeming with nutrients, dead and alive, made for an exceptionally rich riparian life that in turn attracted huge numbers of fish, turtles, birds, and mammals—not to mention humans!—preying on creatures lower on the food chain. In the warm, wet conditions that prevailed in the seventh and sixth millennia BCE, wild subsistence resources were diverse, abundant, stable, and resilient: virtually ideal for a hunter-gatherer-pastoralist.

Revolutions occur in conditions of abundance. Abundance is an out-of-equilibrium state. Eventually, revolutions often stabilize out-of-equilibrium states, allowing newly emergent phenomena. But at this stage, the occurrence is essentially random.

In this example, humans found a rather self-sustaining virtuous cycle in nature, which produced and protected abundance and diversity. Agriculture is a behaviour which emerges to stabilize this unlikely situation.

For humans to take advantage of the change in conditions via agriculture depended on iterative developments that took place over the former (biological evolution of suitable grasses, geological features to create an alluvial plain). A sudden change in conditions produced the concentration, a far-from-equilibrium situation which began to allow people to settle down:

The density and diversity of resources that are lower in the food chain, in particular, make sedentism more feasible. Compared, say, with hunter-gatherers who may follow large game (seals, bison, caribou), those who take most of their diet from lower trophic levels such as plants, shellfish, fruits, nuts, and small fish that are, other things equal, denser and less mobile than the larger mammals and fish, can be far less migratory. The cornucopia of subsistence resources from lower trophic levels in the wetlands of Mesopotamia was perhaps uniquely favorable to the early creation of substantial sedentary communities.

Today, the vast majority of the human population could not survive at all without agriculture — nor could such vast amount of wheat, corn, rice, soy, and so on, persist without humans. An irreversible dependency has been created.

It’s my current view that this process is analogous to what happened in Margulis’ account of endosymbiosis, i.e., cells absorbing and “farming” previously independent organisms which later became internal plastids/mitochondria (summary; original paper PDF). Eventually, an external symbiotic relationship became so interdependent that one organism actually engulfed another, after which they are entirely interdependent; they are literally inseparable. That is further than we have gone with wheat, which is more like obligate symbiosis, at least at the level of individual organisms. But more on that later.

Revolutions occur in conditions of abundance

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 13:20:25 GMT

Part of a series on revolutions.

What constitutes abundance? More influx than efflux is one way of seeing it. Of what? is a good question. For now, let’s leave it as broad as “resources.” We could also answer “energy,” as energy can be contained, for example, in chemicals or in matter.

Here are some examples:

First I’ll write about the Fertile Crescent.
The cell. All known life has a lipid bilayer membrane. This allows concentration of scarce resources from the surrounding environment.
Plants and fungi have large surface area to volume ratios to concentrate nutrients, elements, minerals, and sunlight.

Characteristics of Revolutions

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 08:16:44 GMT

Part of a series on revolutions.

On this page I’ll keep a list of observations I’ve made about revolutions, as defined here. This represents thinking I’ve been doing since the end of April. Unlinked pages are as yet unwritten.

Revolutions occur in conditions of abundance
Abundance means the persistence of a far-from-equilibrium state
Revolutions stabilize out-of-equilibrium conditions
Sometimes abundance results from a glut of resources
Sometimes abundance occurs within a protected sandbox
Sometimes pressure produces abundance
Revolutions are produced by virtuous or vicious cycles
Revolutions are preceded by long periods of experimentation
Revolutions are preceded by competition
Revolutions follow irruption or diaspora
Revolutions break bottlenecks
Revolutions are recombinant rather than fully novel
Revolutions often occur from a change in conditions
Revolutions make fuel from previously inert parts of the environment
Revolutions must overcome inertia
Revolutions create unexpected winners and losers
Revolutions change the nature of a game
Some revolutions occur when top-down pressure is reduced (increased entropy)
Some revolutions occur when chaos is reduced through ordering (decreased entropy)
Revolutions create new identities
Revolutions are often accompanied by arms races
Revolutions require diversity
Revolutions result in a reduction of diversity at one level, but often an increase at another level
This reduction is rarely (but sometimes) total

Revolutions, Step Changes, Paradigm Shifts

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 13:04:05 GMT

Part of a series on revolutions.

You say you want a revolution?
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

— The Beatles

This page will define terms. See also: Characteristics of Revolutions.

Defining complexity

When I write revolution, I mean a step change (increase) in complexity. Complexity — as in Complexity Theory — has no specific definition, but rather complex systems have a set of characteristics that often occur together. You can find a great introduction to the topic in this article or this video intro.

In complex systems, the characteristics I’m interested in are:

Systems consist of many constituent parts or nodes
Systems are layered on top of one another
Emergent behaviour at the system level
Self-organisation, limited top-down control
Feedback loops, vicious/virtuous cycles, non-linear dynamics
Dense interconnectivity
Benefit from diversity
Adaptivity/iteration/selection
Sensitivity to initial conditions, path dependence
Operate at the edge of chaos/criticality, close to phase transitions
Global disorder or unpredictability at the system level, but local order, and resilience/antifragility of the system as a whole
Relationships between nodes are more important than the nodes themselves

If there’s demand, I’ll write a separate page on complexity. Otherwise the above two links are a good introduction to these principles.

The particular aspect of complexity that I’m interested in is how and why complexity increases.

Defining revolutions

So what are revolutions? I gave a fairly random list in the introduction to this series. Here I’ll try to give more specific examples of how levels of complexity interact and increase. Ultimately I will give a list of characteristics, as others have done for complexity (above).

Physics: A molecule is a group of two or more atoms held together by chemical bonds. The molecule is more complex than any of its constituent atoms. Atoms have a similar relationship to subatomic particles. And in the other direction, molecules can be combined to make all sorts of interesting things (e.g., you).
Biology: Organisms were once entirely unicellular. Eventually certain organisms became multicellular.
Human organisation: At some point, humans probably had group sizes of a few dozen like other primates. This increased, maybe to 150. Then it increased again, into city-states. Eventually it increased again to nations, and now we may or may not be on our way to something else.
Language: Presumably before we had grammar, we had single words to refer to things. Eventually these were combined into sentences. Sentences were later combined into oral traditions, and then into longer texts.

Already some trivial patterns are obvious. The simpler elements must come before the more complex ones. Atoms predate molecules, unicellular organisms predate multicellular ones, humans predate states, words predate books.

Furthermore, it is apparent that the more complex elements combine the simpler elements. These combinations have emergent properties, which cannot be ascribed to or explained by the parts that comprise them. They emerge at a higher level of organisation.

A simple example would be that of water. Water has properties, like being a liquid at room temperature, or wetness, that neither its constituent hydrogen nor oxygen alone has. Or think of a company or nation, which can take actions or have attributes that are not really shared by all (or even any) of its individual constituents.

What I’m calling a revolution is the point at which complexity increases, often leading to an explosion of diversity at a newly emergent level. In physics, this would be the formation of atoms from particles, or molecules from atoms. In biology, this would be the development of multicellular organisms. In human organisation, this would be the development of city-states, or nation-states. In language, this would be the first oral traditions, or the writing of longer texts (or much later, the printing press).

These are just examples. They are hopefully illustrative both because of their simplicity and because they show how broadly I’m intending to sweep across domains.

I’m also going to discuss fertile periods for development and change that precede or follow revolutions. For example, periods of experimentation, Golden Ages, periods of political upheaval, and so on. The connection between these periods and revolutions should become clearer in later posts.

Step changes

Often these increases in complexity look like “step changes,” and I may occasionally use that phrase.

The term step change is of recent origin. Wiktionary says that the concept has been borrowed from mathematics and technology, from step function. For that term Wiktionary gives a rather boring description about how the function actually works.

The OED improves this: “a function that increases or decreases abruptly from one constant value to another.” The abruptness is key, as is the notion of ascending the stairs. It is not that the ascent cannot be stopped or sometimes even reversed; but when ascending the tendency is not to turn back. More on when complexity decreases later.

The key thing here is that reaching a new step or level opens up a new playing field.

Revolutions and Paradigm shifts

Kant was the first to use the phrase “revolution in thinking” (Revolution der Denkart) in the Critique of Pure Reason (1787). I will use it in that sense, and not just political revolutions specifically. But I will also be using it for cultural developments that are less obviously ways of thinking. For example, you could view the development of language, or the development of monotheism as revolutionary events, but they are not typically thought of as revolutions in Kant’s sense.

Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is incredibly insightful when it comes to the evolution of ideas. He refers to scientific revolutions (Newton, Copernicus, etc) to describe times when a scientific paradigm shift occurs. You can see more about his schema here. His revolutions, like Kant’s, are narrower in scope than the ones I’m discussing, as they mainly relate to a scientific understanding of the world.

For me, a revolution is when, in any domain, complexity increases, opening a new field up for diversity. A canonical example would be the Cambrian Explosion, when complex multicellular organisms really took off, including pretty odd things like a five-eyed arthropod.

Revolutionary Disclaimer

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 12:11:27 GMT

This is a disclaimer which applies to the series I’m doing on revolutions.

First, I’d like to reserve the right to be wrong in the writing which is to follow. Or at least to make mistakes, later to be revised. I’m not setting out to be wrong, of course, and perhaps this is (or ought to be) implicit in everything that’s written. But it is not just that I am as unlikely as anyone else is to be infallible, which is to say unlikely in the extreme.

It is that I am more likely to be fallible.

Why would I say this?

There are four reasons.

This is intended to be an expansive, exploratory search for patterns in nature and culture. As I’ll explain later, one consequence of the thinking I’ve been doing is that the search must far exceed the answer space, and later be pruned. This means searching high and low. If I don’t hit false positives, finding too many matches to the pattern, then I am not looking far enough.
I want this to be a collaboration. I am going to write about a wide variety of domains. At best I have read several books and taken some classes on a subject at uni in the distant past. At worst I have come across an idea in a paper or a wikipedia article. If you are an expert in any field I mangle, misunderstand, or misrepresent, I’d love to hear from you.
This is intended to be a live draft, an expansion of the writing I’ve been doing in the Zettelkasten, and therefore experimental, provisional, and subject to change over time.
I want to change my mind about things. I like testing out wild views then learning why they are wrong. I think this is a faster way to learn than staying close to what is easily proved.

A separate disclaimer is that I am going to discuss rapid and dramatic changes in nature and history, usually without appeal to morality. In other words, things that produce rapid change are neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad — though they do, in my view, follow the same pattern. Things are not good because they are natural (Appeal to Nature).

Scylla and Charybdis sit on either side when it comes to the moral question. There is something roughly equivalent to Social Darwinism on the side of enthusiasm, and another to nostalgia or Neo-Luddism on the side of caution.

For example, it should be obvious that I don’t think the Wehrmacht is a good thing, even though it undoubtedly produced rapid changes. But neither do I want to go down the path that “Things were better before agriculture/industrialisation/eukaryotes evolved.” I’m not particularly interested in making moral pronouncements, though I hope to make it clear that there are always serious trade-offs when step changes occur.

With that in mind, please read the next post, on definitions.

On Revolutions

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 10:54:45 GMT

Today I want to begin a discussion of the big, exciting events in history writ large — by which I mean nothing less than the sum total of human history, evolutionary history, Earth’s history, stellar history, and ultimately, the history of the universe.

You know the events I mean. The revolutions, the explosions, the Golden Ages, the times in history when unexpected, unpredictable things happen suddenly, often in quick succession, and after which nothing is ever quite the same. When the whole world effloresces or withers, explodes or collapses. Call it punctuated equilibrium, call them Black Swans, or recall the quote of unknown origin (though often misattributed to Lenin): that “There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.”

I want to talk about the weeks when decades happen.

Often the gravity of such occurrences is obvious from the name, as in the Great Oxidation Event, also called the “Oxygen Catastrophe,” the “Oxygen Revolution,” the “Oxygen Holocaust,” or my favourite, “The Rusting of the Earth.” Or take its opposite in hue, “The Greening of Land.” As if that verdant name were insufficiently magnificent, it is sometimes called the “Land Plant Explosion.” (And the big one, that is, the Big Bang, needs no comment.)

At human scale, revolution is typically the term — the French Revolution, the Chemical Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and so on — no doubt thanks in part to that great intersection of two meanings of the word revolution, in the Copernican Revolution. It is for this reason that I’ll call them revolutions, a word I like for its connotations of rotation, of upheaval, of reversal and yet of irreversibility. But in human history they are also called Births and Rebirths (Renaissances), Awakenings and Enlightenments, formations and Reformations — and there are naturally twilights to follow the Dawns, deaths as well as births — the great Collapses, the Extinctions, the Declines and Falls.

Such shifts are not just seismic because of their size. There seems to be an element of irreversibility inherent to the process. Ingrouille’s incredible book Plants: Diversity and Evolution describes it well, and gives some hints as to where I’m going:

If the whole history of the earth took place in one day, the first cells had evolved before 8 a.m. but the land was not properly colonised until 10 p.m. Then at the end of the Silurian Period and the beginning of the Devonian Period, about 400 million years ago, after all the waiting, like a kettle suddenly coming to the boil, a full terrestrial vegetation and an accompanying arthropod fauna appeared in just a few million years.

What I intend to establish, if it is not already evident, is that all of these events, across such a diversity of domains, have something (or rather a set of things) in common. There are patterns in the conditions that produce them, and patterns in the conditions that succeed them. I am far from the first to try to trace these patterns across long time spans — and in fact, while writing this today, I discovered that examinations of such a scope even have a name!¹ But I hope to give a comprehensive account of the commonalities as I have seen them, across a widely divergent variety of disciplines.

My intention, as of today, is to begin with biology, proceed to astrophysics, and then perhaps to geology, with analogies to human history, over the next few months. As I am neither a biologist, nor an astrophysicist, nor a geologist, nor a historian, I need your help! I am hosting salons via the Interintellect. You can hear about these or get in touch via my newsletter.

If any of these ideas excite you, I would love to hear from you. I would also appreciate contributions, other examples, counterexamples, critiques, or any other thoughts or questions you might have. In particular I’d love to hear things like “But what about X?” or “Have you thought about Y?” or “How have you not read Z?!”

This will eventually connect with the series I began on human culture.

Posts

A rough outline, subject to change. Unlinked posts have yet to be written.

Disclaimer
Definitions: Revolutions, Step Changes, Paradigm Shifts
Characteristics of Revolutions
A List of Revolutions
Phase Transitions
Two Types of Revolution

Namely “Big History” to which I say… “Great!” Maybe I’m onto something. And one thing I’m interested in, in this expansive exploration, is why good ideas seem to happen simultaneously over vast distances. In recent months, I’ve also become aware that Complexity Theory has much to say on the subject.↩

The Jakarta Method

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 14:28:02 GMT

I recently finished The Jakarta Method, a new book about the dynamics of the Cold War by Vincent Bevins. Its subtitle, Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, leaves no doubt about the book’s ambition, but it does little to intimate its intelligence, its nuance, and its readability. Bevins writes for a popular audience in an admirably direct and straightforward voice about an extremely difficult topic. This is an important book, which I recommend regardless of whether you know anything about the topic — and odds are you don’t.

The book describes little-known but important aspects of the Cold War, beginning with the Non-Aligned Movement, so-called because they aligned themselves neither with the US nor with the Soviet Union. Following the Second World War, this international coalition was anti-colonial, and expressed the Third World’s intention to democratically determine their own destinies as they developed and caught up with the West.

Indonesia’s Sukarno was a leader of the movement at the 1955 Bandung Conference, along with Nehru (in India), Nasser (Egypt), and Tito (Yugoslavia). In total, the 120 countries which joined would include over half the world population. The term “Third World” in this original context was a hopeful one. In the three-world model, the US and its allies were the first world, the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Bloc were the second, and the remainder of the world would be the Third World. There was an explicit sense that this would be the newest and best World, and an improvement on the first two attempts, having learned lessons from the history of what would become the former worlds. The future looked bright.

Starting in the 1950s, the CIA began to intervene in the Third World, backing right-wing movements and governments. The list is long. Bevins looks at how the organisation’s tactics evolved from direct and obvious in the 1950s to tacit and covert by the 1960s. He argues that this was something like a foreign version of McCarthyism. Many of the decision-makers were genuinely afraid of the effects of communism, and believed they were doing the right thing. But some of the movements the CIA wound up backing had far from democratic values.

Indonesia was a new country, formed of some 17,000 islands, united only by the fact that they had all been colonised by the Dutch. Sukarno, the country’s first president, was not a communist himself, but he had not banned the PKI, an unarmed communist party which was one of the larger parties in Indonesia’s democratic elections. In 1965, they looked set to win the next election. Instead, in events which still remain unclear, six Indonesian Army generals were killed in an abortive coup attempt called the 30 September Movement.

Suharto, who was a general but was not killed, seized power from Sukarno and reported to the population that these generals had been genitally mutilated by members of the PKI. Whether the PKI was actually involved, or whether it was staged for Suharto to consolidate power is still unknown.

The book centres on the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 which immediately followed. Suharto purged the PKI and leftists or perceived leftists throughout the country. The killings were carried out by the Army and impromptu militia death squads. Many Indonesian civilians took part, responding to the horrific propaganda,¹ or simply to settle personal scores. These killings left up to a million innocent civilians dead and another million in concentration camps. On Bali, one of the worst areas, 80,000 people (around 5% of the population) were killed, including women and children.

A top-secret CIA report from 1968 stated that the massacres “rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s. (From wikipedia)

If you’ve never heard of this, you’re not alone. The West regarded whatever was going in Indonesia, insofar as it regarded it at all, as a victory over militant Communism. The press largely ignored or misreported the events. What is new is that a set of CIA documents was de-classified in 2017, and they make it absolutely clear that the CIA not only knew of the killings, but supported their planning, providing lists of names of leftists for the Indonesian Army to murder. The world turned a blind eye. All this despite the fact that when they were killed, the victims had been peaceful participants in democratic elections.

I knew of these events only from Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, which shows in chilling detail how the perpetrators (the people who literally committed the murders) remained unpunished and unrepentant; some prospered and became prominent. This is a must-see film which Bevins references in his foreword. But the book goes further, finding in the case of Indonesia evidence of a larger pattern.

Bevins argues that it was in Indonesia that forced disappearances were first used. The tactic is devastatingly effective. Imagine your spouse simply never comes home. You never learn what happened, or whether he or she is coming back. You can’t ask any questions because you too might be taken. The tactic paralyses you, because you do not know whether your child or spouse is alive or dead. Maybe by acting or speaking out, your family member will be killed as a reprisal. Bevins discusses the similarities between these acts in Indonesia and those used in the following decade by Operation Condor, also supported by the CIA, which killed and “disappeared” tens of thousands throughout the Americas.

This is the Jakarta Method. Stage a coup, or just stir up fear of one, with terrifying propaganda. Arm militias, begin forced disappearances, and allow enthusiastic civilians to take part in the killings. This wipes out all opposition, both directly (through murder) and indirectly (through terror). The word “Jakarta” — as in “Jakarta is coming” — was used as an explicit threat in several Latin American countries which later killed leftists in similar fashion.²

As if the method isn’t awful enough, there was another effect, beyond the bloodbath itself, beyond the terrible psychological trauma to the survivors, beyond the paralysis of the institution of democracy. This was the effect on the left in the rest of the world. The PKI was not just a large left-wing party in Indonesia; it was also the largest unarmed communist party in the world until its eradication, which took only a matter of months. Bevins establishes convincingly that the Indonesian killings sent a strong message to leftists in other countries: Arm, or be killed unarmed. Che Guevera, Pol Pot, and others took note.

It is critical to understand that these people were kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, raped, and killed for voting for a mainstream party in a democracy. These were neither revolutionaries nor radicals. The PKI was one of the biggest political parties in Indonesia, representing 16% of the total vote in 1955 (up to a third of the vote in some areas). And they believed, as Marx had, that capitalism was a necessary step on the way to socialism. They consequently intended to develop capitalism gradually, without violence and without revolution. They were also genuinely unaligned; they had no connections with the USSR, and the Soviet Union did nothing to intervene. China did nothing either, though they did accept refugees from the violence.

Some of those killed were active supporters of the party — though, again, that was no crime. Often they had been enthusiastic supporters of Sukarno’s resistance to Dutch colonialism — but that described almost the whole country. Many others imprisoned were, for example, teachers or other workers who had done nothing more than joined a labour union, knowing little of politics. Anyone lucky enough to have survived the mass killings was stigmatized for life for any association, real or perceived, with the Communist Party. There was no truth and reconciliation. The “winners” wrote the history. Suharto welcomed western capital, and the world forgot that anything had happened. Luxury resorts went up over the bones of Bali’s dead; even today, bones are still found.

If all this sounds bleak, it obviously is. But the book is not an unrelenting look at the horrors of the torture and murder that occurred, as The Act of Killing is. Nor is the book a tough read; on the contrary, it is so engaging that it is all but impossible to put down. For such a grim topic, this is an impressive feat.

Bevins follows a huge number of threads, diplomats, CIA operatives, and victims for decades and across a dozen countries. Despite this complexity, and the amount of uncertainty inherent in a story that was actively concealed by key actors, the narrative lines remain clear and compelling. Bevins remains on the firm and damning ground of the CIA’s own documents, the historical record, and in some cases the memoirs of the men making the decisions, or interviews with their families. To this he adds the harrowing first-person testimonies of survivors of the atrocities (Bevins, an American, learned Indonesian to conduct these interviews, and conducted others in Portuguese and Spanish).

The book is striking in in its ability to be at once both erudite and eminently readable, horrific and gripping, and thoroughly damning while at the same time circumspect. Bevins assiduously avoids speculation. The book is extremely well-referenced but never dry or academic. He does not shy away from the painful aspects of the story, but neither does it read as a catalogue of atrocities.

In addition to all these virtues, the book is, in some of its most moving passages, a picture of a hopeful world, which could have been, but never was. This was the hope that the Third World was embarking upon a peaceful but inspiring journey towards self-determination and actualisation. The connotations of the term “Third World” today speak for how thoroughly this dream was crushed. With admirable verve and clarity, he captures this mood of hope not just in the broad historical strokes, but also in the heartfelt individual stories of those who lived through the Indonesian atrocity and many others.

This book has changed my view of 20th Century history and politics. As of this writing, the book is sold out in many places, but you can order the book anyway. It’s worth the wait.

The British advised on how to create suitable propaganda.↩
They used the term “Jakarta” in spite of the fact that Jakarta faced relatively little violence; the worst massacres were in Aceh, Bali, Central Java, and East Java.↩

Cultivation of the Soul

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 11:09:58 GMT

Part of a series on culture.

In 45 BC, when Cicero was 61, his daughter Tullia died shortly after she gave birth. “I have lost the one thing that bound me to life,” he wrote. He left public life, retiring to Asterra, an estate of his near Tusculum, where he devoted himself to philosophy.

Cicero was executed two years later. But in the interim he wrote both the Tusculan Disputations and De finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”), each in five short books.

Together, the two comprise his most extensive philosophical work. The latter summarised and criticised Epicureanism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and a branch of Platonism. The former includes the transcripts of philosophical debates he had with friends who had accompanied him in his mourning.

You may have learned, as I did in school, that the Romans “stole” Greek culture (a word we’ll come back to). But I do not recall learning that this effort (and the Romans’ own estimation of their inadequacy in comparison with the Greeks) was quite so self-conscious as it appears to have been. Cicero writes, for example, in the Tusculan Disputations:

But yet I am so far from desiring that no one should write against me, that it is what I most earnestly wish; for philosophy would never have been in such esteem in Greece itself, if it had not been for the strength which it acquired from the contentions and disputations of the most learned men; and therefore I recommend all men who have abilities to follow my advice to snatch this art also from declining Greece, and to transport it to this city; as our ancestors by their study and industry have imported all their other arts which were worth having.

As an orator, his focus on disputation is perhaps unsurprising, but I like his perspective: that it is in discussion and cross-examination that we find out whether ideas are true, and that it was in dialogue that Greek philosophy reached its zenith. (He has shade for Epicurus and Metrodorus, who did not encourage debate, and whose writing he found too boring to read: “I do not despise them, for indeed, I never read them.”)

Cicero intended not just to appropriate, but to popularise Greek philosophy in Rome, to address a lack of ability and introspection which he perceived in his own people. But his efforts clearly had a personal and therapeutic purpose as well. Titles of the Tusculan Disputations include “On the contempt of death,” “On bearing pain,” “On grief of mind,” and “Whether virtue alone be sufficient for a happy life.”

Middleton, who made his life work his three-volume Life of Cicero, summarised the Tusculan Disputations like this in 1741:

“The first book teaches us how to contemn the terrors of death, and to look upon it as a blessing rather than an evil;
“The second, to support pain and affliction with a manly fortitude;
“The third, to appease all our complaints and uneasinesses under the accidents of life;
“The fourth, to moderate all our other passions;
“And the fifth explains the sufficiency of virtue to make men happy.”

It is this second book, “On bearing pain,” which interests me today, because in its few dozen pages occurs the first use of the term culture as a metaphor. I find this doubly interesting given the self-conscious appropriation of culture that Cicero himself was undertaking — at the Tusculan villa, where he and his friends engaged in their dialogues, he even had a gallery which he called “the Academy.”

As a reminder (I needed one), the first entry in the OED for culture is “The cultivation of land, and derived senses.” The original meaning of culture, Latin cultura, then, is in the tilling of the fields. Here’s Cicero’s famous passage:

It is not every mind which has been properly cultivated that produces fruit; and, to go on with the comparison, as a field, although it may be naturally fruitful, cannot produce a crop without dressing, so neither can the mind without education; such is the weakness of either without the other. Whereas philosophy is the culture of the mind: this it is which plucks up vices by the roots; prepares the mind for the receiving of seeds; commits them to it, or, as I may say, sows them, in the hope that, when come to maturity, they may produce a plentiful harvest.

The phrase is cultura animi, here translated as “culture of the mind,” but equally well-translated as “culture of the soul.”¹

Cicero does not explain what harvest a cultivated mind should yield, and after this quote, he changes the subject back to pain. Fields may be naturally bountiful, but without cultural management they will not produce a crop. Minds may be naturally bountiful, but without cultural management they will not yield… What, precisely?

All we can take from the metaphor at this point is philosophy is preparation for the mind.

In an earlier post I thought about Aristotle’s assumption that art evolved to perfection. It’s worth quoting another section of the Tusculan Disputations, where Cicero proposes that rhetorical study be replaced by philosophical:

Thus the praise of oratory, raised from a low degree, is arrived at such perfection that it must now decline, and, as is the nature of all things, verge to its dissolution in a very short time. Let philosophy, then, derive its birth in Latin language from this time, and let us lend it our assistance, and bear patiently to be contradicted and refuted […]

In other words, Cicero seems to think that cultural forms decline over time. And rather quickly, too; he was famous for his oratory, and yet he thinks (modestly, no doubt) that the form’s decline is imminent. Prima facie this seems the opposite of Aristotle, who assumed that art forms would rapidly reach their perfection, and thereafter freeze.

I think, as I said in reference to tragedy, that the rate of change of an art form declines. And perhaps Cicero is right; neither tragedy nor oratory seem to be at any current apex.

In the next post I’ll continue tracing the use of the word “culture.”

I’ll probably write about anima (breath/spirit) and animus (mind/soul) a bit more later; Cicero brings up this distinction, later reanimated by Jung, in the first of the Disputations.↩

Paper Disintegrates

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:03:27 GMT

Part of a series on culture.

Nicholas Ostler, in 2005, wrote the impressively ambitious Empires of the Word, and in it sought to trace nothing less than the history of every recorded language. Not the etymological or linguistic history, but the history of the people among whom each language was actually spoken.

This gives fresh insights, because language does not always equate with empire, nation, or ethnicity, and when they diverge the story becomes particularly interesting. In one example, Ostler asks a question that may not have seemed pressing — but he raises it in such a way as to make it so:

What was really happening in Assyria in the seventh century BC? It was a period when the rulers’ ascendancy was assured and new conquests were being made: yet all the while its language was changing from Akkadian, the age-old language of its rulers, to Aramaic, the language of the nomads it was reputedly conquering.

Ostler discusses language prestige at length, which accounts, in different eras, for the communicability or persistence of Sanskrit, Greek, Persian, and Latin. But Aramaic is an intriguing counterexample, in which the language of slaves supplanted that of their oppressors.

The arguments in the book are so numerous, so unexpected and so fascinating — others include the thesis that the Plague of Justinian is the reason England speaks a Germanic rather than a Romance language, and that among major languages, the most similar language to Chinese is English¹ — that they entirely defy summary.

Today I’m interested in a point so specific that, in the book’s oceanic scope, it amounts to little more than an aside. The point seems obvious in retrospect, as many good points do, but I had never had cause to think about it before reading this magnum opus of Ostler’s.

In discussing the disappearance of the Punic (Phoenician/Canaanite) languages and literature of North Africa, he writes:

The Punic cultural traditions ceased to be fostered, and the physical record of this once highly literate society did not last much longer.

The universal medium for administrative and literary records had been papyrus, a material that survives long-term only in extremely dry conditions (such as those of the Egyptian desert). Texts that were not inscribed on a durable medium such as stone, ivory or clay would not survive unless they were repeatedly copied—a service that was maintained for seminal texts in Greek and Latin, and indeed Hebrew, throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages, until the printing press made them safe. There was no tradition to preserve Phoenician or Punic texts, and so they perished with the papyrus on which they had been written.²

As I said in pondering Aristotle’s view of artistic development, it is important to remember that any text we had today had to be copied by hand many times for it to have persisted to the present. The process was manual in the most literal sense. And I think it gives insight into what a unit of culture is.

With the absurd abundance of cheap books today, it may be easy to think of any work as something like a polaroid, an endlessly replicable snapshot of some point in the past. A fixed and mass-produced object, in other words.

But the fact that paper disintegrates means that anything of a certain age which we can read today was copied many, many times by hand for us to be able to read it.³ In that sense, a copy of a book — any book — is like the echo of some long-ago speech, which has been repeated to us through the generations. It is a still ongoing process, not an object.

A book is a process that is going on too slowly for us to see it as such, so we mistake it for an object. And everything we think of as an object represents a mistake of this nature.

That speech was a process would have been completely obvious in oral tradition. It is less so with books, which make the speech seem fixed, and prevent the clerical errors (or emendations, or amendments) which would have occurred in the reproduction of manuscripts.

The situation seems somehow worsened, rather than improved, by the insubstantiality of ebooks.⁴ In principle they could seem more fluid, but perhaps the analogy with books is so strong that we assume them to be fixed objects as well.

While we’re still, in some loose way, on the subject of Aristotle, it is worth pointing out some facts about his personal corpus (not to be confused with the Corpus Aristotelicum which includes the work of members of his school) as it relates to this point about paper:

Wikipedia lists this litany of subjects to which he either contributed, or himself introduced as an area of study: “physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, esthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government.”

Wikipedia then goes on to note that “only a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication.” In other words, we have in his surviving works not just the instantiation of an insane number of disciplines, but we have that just from his notes. If you doubt whether that would have made much difference, it is worth noting that Cicero called Aristotle’s literary style “a river of gold”. If you’ve read Aristotle you will know that this could not have referred to the paltry extant notes that we have.

Cicero, incidentally, will be the topic of the next post.

These examples demonstrate my own anglophone bias, which the book does not have.↩
Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, 1st ed (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), 78. Emphasis mine↩
I say “anything of a certain age” because before papyrus, writing on clay was more durable, and some of that we still have. This tendency towards fragility seems to be a general trend in technology, about which more later.↩
I haven’t quite made up my mind about ephemeral blog posts like this one. On the one hand, it should follow the same principles as any other digital format. On the other, it is more obviously conversational, and more obviously the product of one person on one day (or at least so it seems to me as I write this).↩

Does art evolve?

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 13:58:32 GMT

Part of a series on culture.

Let’s start with the oldest book on my bookshelf that talks about origins of cultural-type things.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) argues in his Poetics that poetry derived from human inclinations towards representation and improvisation. He thought that representation comes naturally to children, as does their pleasure in it, and that “this marks off humans from other animals: man is prone to representation beyond all others, and learns his earliest lessons through representation.”

Wow, earliest? Interesting. But let’s continue.

Aristotle argues that melody and rhythm, also natural, led to metre, which, when combined with representation, resulted in poetry. Furthermore, “those with the greatest natural gift for such things by a gradual process of improvement developed poetry out of improvisation.”

So: representation is natural, rhythm is natural, together these lead to poetry, and skilled individuals refine the art gradually. It raises questions, but so far I have no strong objections.

When he discusses the specific types of poetry, though, it becomes clear he thinks that though art forms change, they also have an endpoint. He begins his discussion of tragedy rather testily:

This is not the place to inquire whether even now tragedy is all that it should be in respect of its constituent elements, whether in itself or in relation to its audiences…¹ Certainly it originally took shape out of improvisations. Then it developed gradually as people exploited new possibilities as they came to light. After undergoing many changes tragedy ceased to evolve, having achieved its natural condition.

Because Aristotle uses the term “evolve” (no idea what it is in Greek), at this point I’m going to start using the term evolution, because it seems that we agree that art evolves, even though he thinks it eventually stops. There’s also tension between the fact that people seem to be debating whether tragedy is yet “all that it should be” and the fact that he concludes with the idea that tragedy has “achieved its natural condition.”

After this, he enumerates some of the evolutionary changes (increasing numbers of actors, etc.). But from his point of view, after that, it stopped developing. He views the art form as having matured much as a person does, i.e., to adulthood, after which she stops growing.

This is important. He does two quite natural things:

He assumes that evolution has produced a functional object and stopped, rather than being a potentially infinite process, whose constituents are not objects at all but subprocesses.
He assumes evolution is teleological, i.e., that it had to yield something approximating what it did in fact yield, which is a form of survivorship bias.

Let’s consider these in turn.

Has tragedy continued to innovate?

The first point might seem obviously false. Surely tragedy has developed in the past 2,400 years.

Or has it?

Wikipedia notes that the primary divergence from Aristotle’s definition is that we now generally reject his dictum that “true tragedy can only depict those with power and high status.” Steiner argues that Shakespearean tragedies are not tragedies at all, because they do not possess the traditional “tragic spirit” (which consists in “the image of man as unwanted in life” whom “the gods kill for their sport as wanton boys do flies”) and because Shakespeare mixes in comic elements. But this seems to me something of a quibble. It’s not that Steiner wasn’t pointing to something important in how culture has changed; it’s that his definition of tragedy doesn’t seem drastically different from Aristotle’s.

So from these I would say: Tragedy has changed, though (perhaps surprisingly) not all that much. You could say its development has had a very long tail with minor innovations.

Still, I think it’s important to realise that when a process (here the evolution of tragedy) looks “finished” to a human observer, it’s often ongoing, just very slow. Many things that are actually processes look like objects, for example books.

Does evolution have a goal?

The second point is that Aristotle observed cultural development, but believed it to be teleological, and believed that it had a “natural condition” or terminus.

I think it is wrong to think that this is the case for tragedy, but that this is not because anything is possible, nor for any relativistic reasons. What persisted in drama is what worked, and it continues to be preserved because it continues to do so.

If we still read Aeschylus, that innovator whom Aristotle noted increased tragedy’s cast from one member to two,² then it is because Aeschylus’ writing, as a set of works which persists to this day, is an ongoing process that has been actively maintained since then. This would not have happened if his art hadn’t “worked” on some level. Here it is important to remember that for most of history, in all but the driest places on earth, paper disintegrates after a few generations, so works had to be continually copied out by hand.

On the other hand, it is not as we could have foretold that any particular art work or art form would work. There is no “tragedy area of the brain.” There must have been experimentation (Aristotle’s “improvisation”) accompanied by a selection filter for this to have happened. This would of course have been bounded by what humans are interested in (tragedies then and now still always involve human stories). And it would have been bounded by what had been observed to work before, through a process of imitation. But outside of those loose limits, the experimentation process was probably more-or-less random, with lots of failures.

Value judgements

In what amounts to my introduction, I promised to sensitively navigate the question of whether culture evolves, and I seem already to have fallen into betraying my belief that yes, culture evolves. In that sense I have perhaps already failed.

If it’s any defence, what I’m writing now represents new thinking. I would be happy to discuss anything I’ve gotten wrong and to publicly reflect on dissenting views. I plan to look at later writers who are opposed to the idea of cultural evolution.

I should say that I very much do not believe culture improves. I don’t think that there’s any sense in which we can say that Arthur Miller is better (or worse) than Aeschylus because he writes working class tragic heroes rather than kings as the gods’ playthings. Perhaps more importantly, I don’t think there is any meaningful sense in which genres (or cultures) can be compared to one another, so comedies are neither superior nor inferior to tragedies except perhaps in terms of personal preference. Nor is the fact that art has persisted any evidence of goodness, moral or otherwise. Persistence of any process (here, “tragedy”) is as dependent on the vagaries of that process’ environment as it is on anything inherent to the process; and at any point at which a tragedy is performed, it is inseparable from the culture which produces it.

But I do think that art can succeed or fail on its own terms, in its own time, within its own rules and context. A play may wind up working in contexts far outside the one in which it was written. That cannot be by any design of the original author. An author neither knows of nor can control the conditions of any future environment. And again, persistence is not exhaustive when it comes to the quality of the play (just think of Alexandria), and I’m not even sure it makes sense to talk about quality, however much we might be tempted to do so.

Maybe this seems like equivocation, but I do think there’s a difference between assessing what’s effective without reference to what is good. And I do think that selection is at play, I just don’t think that there’s much point in saying anything about fitness.

The Birthplace of Tragedy

Finally, as a teaser for later thinking about cultural technologies, I think it’s worth noting that Aristotle thought of whole genres of art in terms of their regional origins:

This too is why the Dorians claim ownership of both tragedy and comedy, offering the names as evidence. Comedy is claimed by the Megarians—both those on the mainland who date it to the time of their democracy, and those in Sicily which was the birthplace of the poet Epicharmus, who lived long before Chionides and Magnes. Tragedy is claimed by some inhabitants of the Pelopponese.

This reminds us that the invention of certain genres must have happened in certain places. It is obvious, now, that they later spread, to the point that it seems odd even to think “tragedy” as once having had a locus, a birthplace, though perhaps this should not be so surprising, as at least one person has famously thought about its birth. For now, it mainly seems salient to think of the birthplace of tragedy.

For a bit more on Aristotle see the next post about paper disintegrating.

Here Aristotle writes: “This is true of tragedy as well as of comedy: the former began with the leaders of the dithyramb, and the latter from the leaders of the phallic singing that is a tradition that still survives in many cities.” I leave it as an exercise for the reader to research “phallic singing.”↩
I nearly sarcastically wrote mind-blown, but then I reflected on how genuinely mind-blowing it must have been.↩

On Culture

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 12:08:35 GMT

Lately I’ve been thinking about culture in the broadest of all possible senses, including human behaviour, language, knowledge, beliefs, art, technologies, and so on. Obviously these aspects (and many others) change across time and space, sometimes apparently slowly, while at others very rapidly, as one looks through the centuries, or across the terrain.

By what mechanisms does it change? Is this change generally gradual or sudden? Who changes it, if anyone at all can be said to do so?

This post will introduce a series of posts about what culture is and whether culture can be said to evolve. It is part of the thinking I’ve been doing about the avant-garde, as well as the question of whether humans are getting more plastic.

I know almost nothing of the history of this question, so I’m seeking to learn in public. This is not a disclaimer so much as a request to bear with me, as I sense this is a controversial topic. If you know more about the history of this question, I’d love to hear from you.

This series is on hold, temporarily, but will eventually connect to a larger series On Revolutions.

Walking the Planck

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 00:03:07 GMT

Planck’s principle is bleak. It says that scientists rarely change their minds. Instead, they die, and younger scientists, brought up with an updated set of theories, replace them. Put succinctly, it states that “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

Here’s the quote from Max Planck’s Scientific Autobiography (published posthumously in 1950):

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.

This is incidental evidence that the 1950s promised to be a good time to be young, with regard to the cycles of youth I mused about yesterday. (Zweig had made a similar claim in favourably comparing the early 1940s to the 1890s.)

Certainly there were anxieties about youth as the baby boom took off, but Planck reminds us that there was hope too — for the future, if not for the minds of the older generation.

Polanyi seems more sanguine about the speed of scientific progress. In The Republic of Science (1962, PDF), he argues that Planck was himself the beneficiary of a relatively rapid paradigm shift:

Scientific opinion imposes an immense range of authoritative pronouncements on the student of science, but at the same time it grants the highest encouragement to dissent from them in some particular. While the whole machinery of scientific institutions is engaged in suppressing apparent evidence as unsound, on the ground that it contradicts the currently accepted view about the nature of things, the same scientific authorities pay their highest homage to discoveries which deeply modify the accepted view about the nature of things. It took eleven years for the quantum theory, discovered by Planck in 1900, to gain final acceptance. Yet by the time another thirty years had passed, Planck’s position in science was approaching that hitherto accorded only to Newton. Scientific tradition enforces its teachings in general, for the very purpose of cultivating their subversion in the particular.

Two things here:

The tension between scientific dissent and scientific authority is exactly the tension I described between the avant-garde and her critics.
Thirty years is a generation, but that’s how long it took for Planck’s canonisation.

It only took eleven years for the acceptance of a paradigm-shifting idea, which is genuinely pretty good. Polanyi’s point is that progress had been much more rapid under science than, for example, it had been under the Catholic Church, because science encouraged and assimilated dissent, rather than discouraging or silencing it. Under Church dogma ideas might languish for centuries, if they were lucky enough not to be doomed to oblivion. (Not that there weren’t merits to the church; I’ll write more about religion later, starting here.)

Thomas Kuhn coined the term “paradigm shift” in his incredible Structure of Scientific Revolutions (suspiciously also 1962¹). Such shifts, he writes, can be hard:

Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.

How, then, are scientists brought to make this transposition? Part of the answer is that they are very often not. Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus’ death. Newton’s work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on. The difficulties of conversion have often been noted by scientists themselves. Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his Origin of Species, wrote: “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume …, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. … [B]ut I look with confidence to the future,—to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.”

At this point Kuhn quotes the same passage from Planck that I quoted above. It seems salient that paradigm shifts are essentially binary. But also note the timescales: a century, half a century, then Planck’s eleven years. They seem to be getting faster…

What if paradigm shifts, which once occurred only inter-generationally, had begun to occur intra-generationally? In Copernicus’ time (1473–1543), it took more than three generations. In Newton’s (1643-1727), it took nearly two. By the turn of the twentieth century, it took about a third of one generation. How many times might a scientist born today change his mind? Does the question not seem to be asked fairly often?

Could, in short, Planck’s principle have been true in his time (1858–1947), but be true no longer?

What if this is an indicator that adult plasticity via juvenescence is increasing over time, with real consequences for the speed of cultural change?

Of course, however plastic individuals may (or may not) have become, institutions, incentives, or groups of individuals might impede such shifts. So plasticity is not the whole story. But I’m beginning to wonder whether something hasn’t changed in the past few centuries.

I noted a lot of similarities between Kuhn’s view and Polanyi’s, and I am evidently not the only one; I may need to investigate this.↩

Where to Start

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 23:59:59 GMT

As there are now a few hundred posts on this site I thought I’d provide some entry points to my writing.

Note-taking: I wrote a post on a note-taking system called Zettelkasten, which got some attention on Hacker News. There’s also a follow-up post, and I might do another one soon (currently at ~335k words in there, in just over 3,000 “Zettel”).
I’m currently working on a series on Revolutions. See that page for a summary of where it’s going.
Before that, I started a thread on what is interesting, ambition, and the avant-garde. This is an series of reflections on how step-changes occur in nature and human culture. The plan is to connect it with the revolutions series.
You might like to read about a silent Zoom meditation retreat I did in April 2020, or a five-day writing fast I did in November 2020.

Cycles of youth

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 12:49:53 GMT

The first book that I think of when I think about youth is not the perhaps most obvious — namely Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (which is excellent) — but another book on the same period, i.e. 1900-1925¹.

The book is Stephan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, which he wrote in 1942, and which captures Vienna at its fin de siècle height.

In it, he uses the words “young” or “youth” 322 times². He has many insights on youth, but this passage in particular made me wonder whether youth might not have a cycle, rather than a constant trend towards juvenescence. It’s vivid enough to be worth quoting at length:

This dissatisfaction with school was by no means a personal attitude. I cannot recall a single one of my comrades who would be reluctant to admit that our interests and good intentions were wearied, hindered and suppressed in this treadmill. It was only much later that I realized that this unfeeling and soulless method of the education of our youth was not due to the carelessness of the authorities, but represented a definite, and what is more, a carefully guarded secret intention. The world about and above us, which directed all its thoughts only to the fetish of security, did not like youth; or rather it constantly mistrusted it. Proud of its systematic “progress” and of its order, bourgeois society proclaimed moderation and leisure in all forms of life as the only effective virtues of man; all hasty efforts to advance ourselves were to be avoided. Austria was an old State, dominated by an aged Emperor, ruled by old Ministers, a State without ambition, which hoped to preserve itself unharmed in the European domain solely by opposing all radical changes. Young people, who always instinctively desire rapid and radical changes, were therefore considered a doubtful element which was to be held down or kept inactive for as long a time as possible. And so there was no reason for making our school years pleasant; we were first to earn every form of advancement by patient waiting. Being thus constantly pushed back, the various age groups were valued quite differently than they are today. An eighteen-year-old student at the Gymnasium was treated like a child; he was punished if he was caught with a cigarette, and he had to raise his hand obediently if he wished to leave the room. But a man of thirty was also regarded as an unfledged person, and even one of forty was not yet considered ripe for a position of responsibility. Once, when a surprising exception occurred and Gustav Mahler was appointed Director of the Imperial Opera at thirty-eight, the frightened whisper and astonished murmur went through Vienna that the first artistic institution of the city had been entrusted to “so young a man” (completely forgetting that Schubert at thirty-one, and Mozart at thirty-six, had already finished their life’s work). This distrust that every young man was “not quite reliable” was felt at that time in all circles. My father would never have taken a young man into his business, and whoever was unfortunate enough to appear young had to overcome this distrust on all sides. So arose the situation, incomprehensible today, that youth was a hindrance in all careers, and age alone was an advantage. Whereas today, in our changed state of affairs, those of forty seek to look thirty, and those of sixty wish to seem forty, and youth, energy, determination and self-confidence recommend and advance a man, in that age of security everyone who wished to get ahead was forced to attempt all conceivable methods of masquerading in order to appear older. The newspapers recommended preparations which hastened the growth of the beard, and twenty-four- and twenty-five-year-old doctors, who had just finished their examinations, wore mighty beards and gold spectacles even if their eyes did not need them, so that they could make an impression of “experience” upon their first patients. Men wore long black frock coats and walked at a leisurely pace, and whenever possible acquired a slight embonpoint, in order to personify the desired sedateness; and those who were ambitious strove, at least outwardly, to belie their youth, since the young were suspected of instability. Even in our sixth and seventh school years we refused to carry school bags, and used briefcases instead so that we might not be recognized as attending the Gymnasium. All those qualities which today we look upon as enviable possessions – freshness, self-assertion, daring, curiosity, youth’s lust for life – were regarded as suspect in those days that only had use for “substance.”

The attitude, and relative power, of the older generation towards the younger seems to have some resonance today. And it’s interesting that then, as now, a thirty year old was considered to be a fledgling. It’s quite funny to imagine people trying so hard to look older.

In Zweig’s lifetime, youth went from undesirable to desirable. (Max Planck agreed.) What if attitudes towards youth are cyclical? Since generations are not born in lockstep, it would mean that some people, when young, would enjoy better treatment in youth, whereas others (like Zweig) would have a harder time.

What is today’s attitude towards youth? Favourable, one might think; people certainly try to look younger. On the other hand, the relative balance of power seems very much to favour the old.

It seems worth mentioning, though I can’t say what it means, that Zweig’s second wife was 27 years his junior. He posted the manuscript for The World of Yesterday, which she had typed, to his publisher the day before they both committed suicide, in February 1942, believing that there was no hope for the end of the War.

This coincidence makes me wonder if there isn’t some invention of youth going on at the start of the 20th century.↩
I grepped, or rather ag’d, it.↩

On Juvenescence

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 11:55:55 GMT

Neoteny, or juvenilization, is the delaying or slowing of the development of an animal. It is, at a cellular or physiological level, the act of staying young.

The 100-Year Life argues that the same thing is happening at a behavioural level, and calls the phenomenon “juvenescence.” Though the book is rather short on answers, at least for the people most likely to live to one hundred, its treatment of this aspect of the question of longevity is worth citing:

With this decoupling of age and stage, we will see characteristics previously associated with a specific age becoming more widespread. In particular the multi-stage life requires all ages to retain features previously associated with the young: youthfulness and plasticity; playfulness and improvisation; and the capacity to support novel action taking.

There are some obvious connections here to what I’ve written about serotonin, as well as the avant-garde and selection filters. Serotonin is higher in children, and may increase plasticity in adults. It seems probable that it is involved in creative/exploratory thinking.¹

The book’s authors credit Robert Pogue Harrison with the original observation of this phenomenon, and continue:

This youthfulness in part reflects the elongation of adolescence. Humans are unique in the length of time they are socially and economically dependent. The evolutionary advantage of an elongated juvenile stage is the fact that there is more time for education, ensuring that the adult is operating on the basis of learning from past generations rather than simply instinctively. It makes sense with a longer life to further increase this investment in education. Adolescence is a time of flexibility – a time for discovering options and keeping them open rather than making commitments. With the lengthening of life, options become more valuable and so the period over which we explore and create options also lengthens.

Take a look back to the pictures of 16- and 17-year-olds from your grandparents’ generation. In these pictures you will see serious faces that look full of life experiences and dressed in a way indistinguishable from their parents. Now look at pictures from the mid-1950s and already people of the same age are looking and dressing in a more youthful manner. Their style marks the emergence of the teenager – a new social phenomenon of that time. Now look at current photos of people in their 20s and 30s. A similar phenomenon is occurring – but at a different age. These people have the same youthful experience and responsibility-free look of those 1950s teenagers.

In other words, the book argues, people are postponing milestones and look younger even as they get older. Adolescence is elongated, meaning that people are both dependent for longer and educated for longer.

I suspect that the point of this longer education is not, as the authors argue, to improve our knowledge of past learning. It unlikely that we have a better knowledge of history (or have accumulated more general knowledge) than we had in the past — though maybe I’ll think more about this point. Instead, I agree with them about plasticity, and I think that’s what is elongating is the ability to learn itself. I’ve written about this idea in the context of scientific progress.

It also seems to me that rather than a constant trend, as this book observes, it could be the case that society’s attitude towards youth is cyclical.

Could higher serotonin levels (therefore higher entropy) be a mechanism for “juvenescence?” (On the other hand, Carhart-Harris has argued that we’re currently in a lower entropy state than previously, a kind of advanced depression as a species.)↩

Serotonin and Fasting

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 21:50:44 GMT

This is a continuation of the discussion of serotonin and dopamine begun on this page. I want to talk about fasting.

I’m fascinated by the fact that 5-HT_2A appears to be the mechanism for the antidepressant effects of acute fasting in rodents. Fasting is famously associated with religious experiences, and some of the big names in religion (Jesus, the Buddha) were quite into it. But it also seems to me that if you’re short on food, you may need to do some learning, some lateral thinking, or some literal exploration. I’m inclined to guess that this was the original use of these serotonin receptors. I could be completely wrong. But I can’t remember anyone else arguing this; I’d love to hear of anything, so do let me know if you know anything about this.

What are you trying to argue?

I’m speculating that acute fasting was the original trigger for the 5HT-_2A receptor, and the purpose was to put the brain into exploratory/learning mode. It caused you to go on a quest for food, essentially, modulating exploratory behaviour. This is the exploratory half of the equation I described here.

I suspect near-death experiences evolved later and used the same system. Maybe near-death experiences flood the brain with serotonin to put it in a massively plastic state as a last gasp attempt at saving the life of the organism (“Try something super surprising, you’ve got nothing to lose!”). Or maybe becoming extremely chill and “one with the universe” when you’re badly sick or injured makes it more likely your friends will save you than if you’re screaming bloody murder.

Later, religions figured out methods to trigger this learning mechanism (via iconography, patterns, rites of passage, etc). They used this plasticity to bind larger groups of people into bigger communities, and to encumber them with rules.

At some point before or after that, humans noticed that while many mushrooms kill you slowly, others seem to pull the learning/near-death experience trigger. And finally, Hofmann figured out how to put all this on a piece of paper.

Dopamine seems the more obvious case. It makes you crave and consequently seek basic necessities like food, warmth, sex. But in a certain sense, given its role in addiction, it has a tendency to make you “double down” on certain stimuli. The addicted brain can be very good at seeking, but it is not particularly expansive/exploratory. The link between addiction and exploitation seems fairly straightforward.

I have another theory about the link between dopamine, effort, and serotonin, but that will have to wait for another time.

Serotonin and Learning

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 12:00:46 GMT

I’m still thinking about the creative/editorial cycles involved in writing and in filters more generally.

Kristijan Ivancic pointed out that this cycle of exploration and consolidation relates to the explore-exploit trade-off, and to the trade-offs between going “a mile wide and inch deep” versus going “an inch wide and a mile deep.” In short, another way to look at the two modes is in the trade-off between generalists and specialists.¹ The generalists seek new horizons (explore), switching frequently, whereas the specialists stay put and double down on what they’re doing (exploit). This is loosely the same opposition I discussed between the avant-garde and its critics.

I have a hunch that these two modes, namely exploration and exploitation, may be mediated by the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine, respectively.

The backstory

I’ve been thinking about these two transmitters for a few years, since reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, and Robin Carhart-Harris’ phenomenal paper The Entropic Brain, which the book discusses at length. I wrote about both works here in 2018.

Since then, one question that’s stuck with me is this: What possible purpose could the neurotransmitter receptors to which psychedelics bind have had over evolutionary time? Carhart-Harris argues that the effect of psychedelics depends entirely on how potent of a partial agonist of a specific serotonin receptor a substance is (the receptor is 5-HT_2A, one of 14 different serotonin Receptors found in mammals). LSD is extremely potent, possibly because of its similarity in shape to the shape of serotonin itself, which can leave the drug stuck in a receptor for a long time.

Obviously these brain receptors had already evolved by the time LSD was discovered in 1943, and they must also have existed before psilocybe mushrooms, which act by the same mechanism, could have had any effect when eaten. Even if you accept McKenna’s highly controversial “stoned ape” theory, which not only dates mushroom consumption to around 100,000 years ago, but credits them for much of subsequent human development, we would still have needed to have some response to psychedelic compounds before that. And of course, the fact that scientists experiment on rodents who also have these receptors in their brains suggests that these receptors are ancient (though of course their purposes may have changed).

People have long noted the similarities between the psychedelic experience and religious experience (e.g., Alan Watts in 1968). Religions as we typically think of them today arose only a few thousand years ago, but even if you include much older animistic religions, religion itself must also have evolved (culturally speaking) to co-opt existing systems in the brain which had evolved for other purposes.

Carhart-Harris has also noted the similarity with near-death experiences. But it seems unlikely to me that there could have been sufficiently strong selection pressure for producing a pleasurable or trippy death, doesn’t it?

What do these neurotransmitters do again?

For a refresher, see Healthline. The tl;dr is that serotonin seems to maybe have something to do with happiness, though it’s not as simple as “more serotonin means more happiness.” Dopamine pretty clearly has something to do with rewards/pleasure/craving, and therefore with addiction. SSRIs, drugs which increase the amount of serotonin in the brain by preventing its reuptake, do help some people with depression, though the mechanism is not straightforward .

But what if serotonin’s primary use is to facilitate learning?

There’s at least some evidence that agonists at this receptor are “cognition-enhancing” and that they’re involved in learning and memory consolidation.

This paper gives evidence that 5-HT_2AR is involved in “acquisition of fear memory extinction,” which is a nice way to say that scientists terrified mice then taught them not to be terrified and in the process found that this receptor was involved in learning not to be afraid again.

Antidepressants seem to work better when administered in conjunction with therapy or other interventions, suggesting that these drugs make changes easier rather than cause changes directly.
There’s also evidence that psychedelics increase the personality trait of openness, even in adults.

Personality traits don’t change much by adulthood, so it’s surprising that psychedelics can do this, and that the change is in the direction of openness to new learning. The changes were found to persist for a year.

Serotonin levels seem to peak in infancy if I’ve read this paper correctly, and to decline with age.
Psychedelics seem to attenuate the activity of the Default-Mode Network, or DMN, which among other things seems to act as a sort of “top-down routing table” for the brain.

Interfering with this network seems to improve neuroplasticity (as well as suspending reality-testing, etc). For more on this, read the The Entropic Brain. I’m serious, it’s really good.

Perhaps the mechanism for improved learning is improved plasticity by a reduction in the strength of priors, which Carhart-Harris has argued more recently (2019):

The hypothesized flattening of the brain’s (variational free) energy landscape under psychedelics can be seen as analogous to the phenomenon of simulated annealing in computer science—which itself is analogous to annealing in metallurgy, whereby a system is heated (i.e., instantiated by increased neural excitability), such that it attains a state of heightened plasticity, in which the discovery of new energy minima (relatively stable places/ trajectories for the system to visit/reside in for a period of time) is accelerated (Wang and Smith, 1998). Subsequently, as the drug is metabolized and the system cools, its dynamics begin to stabilize—and attractor basins begin to steepen again (Carhart-Harris et al., 2017). This process may result in the emergence of a new energy landscape with revised properties (Fig. 1).

In other words, serotonin, via 5-HT_2A, may relax priors about the world, making it easier to find other ways of viewing it.

I also think serotonin has a connection to fasting. This post was getting a bit long so I concluded the argument about dopamine and serotonin on that page.

David Epstein’s excellent book Range is largely about this trade-off, and he very much comes down on the side of the former, i.e., going as wide as possible and specialising late.↩

Balance in writing

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:55:18 GMT

This is just a short post about the balancing act or filter which writers have been advised to employ.

Dorothea Brande, in Becoming a Writer (1934):

The grain of truth in the fin de siècle notion, though, is this: the author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the “innocence of eye” that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeon-holing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word “trite” has hardly any meaning for him; and always to see “the correspondences between things” of which Aristotle spoke two thousand years ago.

But there is another element to his character, fully as important to his success. It is adult, discriminating, temperate, and just. It is the side of the artisan, the workman and the critic rather than the artist. It must work continually with and through the emotional and childlike side, or we have no work of art. If either element of the artist’s character gets too far out of hand the result will be bad work, or no work at all. The writer’s first task is to get these two elements of his nature into balance, to combine their aspects into one integrated character.

In other words, they must cultivate both a fearless creative side (increasing the energy of the work), as well as a ruthlessly critical side (reducing the energy of the work).

It reminds me a bit of that Flaubert quote: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” It’s not quite the same idea, but might be related.

On Filters

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:31:47 GMT

The reason I wrote about the relationship of “critics” or an “engaged audience” to the avant-garde is that I’m interested in how they act as an intermediary between the bleeding edge of a movement and the broader public or mainstream.

The simplest description of the model I’m proposing is that an artistic movement pushes out the boundaries, experimenting vigorously, while a larger audience or class of critics reins them in, acting as a proving ground or selection filter.

In this model, it’s not too important whether any given movement continues to innovate, or ossifies and is replaced by another movement pushing in some other direction, provided some movements occasionally overcome the inertia of the mainstream, and (over time) shift what is acceptable.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about filters. I might call the concept a low-pass filter for energy, which ends up selecting values with low entropy (which is to say highly ordered or stable) by cutting off things with too much energy. In audio, a low-pass filter just removes high frequencies, which might be hiss or just treble. In my thinking, there are many cases where too much energy is unstable in some way, just as too little energy is uninteresting. For example, too little energy might lead to never finishing an artwork; too much might lead to something so weird that the critics reject it.

The reason I think this is so important is that I see these kind of filters everywhere. It’s almost as if there is an entropy valley, a stable-ish midpoint between too little energy and too much energy. Sometimes this looks like a balancing act between too much and too little, other times it looks like an explosion cooling or annealing into disparate smaller parts. There is nothing moral or qualitative about this midpoint. We see it because it just happens to persist for longer than things on either side of it. It’s selection for stability.

It also relates to the idea of a phase transition. In complexity theory, there is interesting, often life-like, behaviour at phase transitions, which doesn’t occur on the side with too little energy (which is too ordered) nor the side with too much (which is too chaotic).

In star formation there is a balancing act between too little hydrogen and too much. Below a certain amount of hydrogen and the molecular cloud won’t be dense enough to collapse, but above another (much larger) amount, a neutron star or black hole will result. See this graph of the Main Sequence.
In the stable nuclides, there is a balancing act between the number of protons and neutrons (and maybe between the attractive nuclear force, and the repulsion of the electric force?). See this graph.
I’ve tried to suggest that this is what’s going on between the avant-garde and their critics, i.e., a balancing act between too much energy in the exploratory/creative impulse and too little, or too much rigidity in what’s permissible, which is the critical/reductive impulse.
I suspect that trade-offs between the exploratory (high energy) tendency and stabilising (energy-reducing) tendency are what play out in transitions from revolutionary governments/conquistadores to incumbent governments (e.g., Mongol invasion to Golden Horde rent extraction, French Revolution to Napoleon, Bolsheviks to USSR, early Christian martyrs to Holy Roman Empire). Probably also in the transition from startups to corporations.
Individual writers have long been advised to pay attention to this balance, to cultivate both an unfiltered creative side, and an utterly separate brutal editor side, who acts as a filter.
Presumably this is what Yin and Yang is about, with the Tao as the stable valley.
It is starting to look like the settlement of the Americas happened quickly (from around ~16,000 years ago) from a small population, a kind of explosion across the continent that rapidly “cooled” into a ton of different cultures (think the formation of igneous rock after an explosion of liquid volcanic magma).
I think this pattern happens a lot in early evolution, I’m trying to work out if this is a good way of thinking about the evolution of diploidy and sex. If that bears fruit, I may be able to argue that this pattern is a feature of increases in complexity generally.
I suspect that hedonic adaptation, or to put it more traditionally, dukkha, operates in this way. There’s a pattern of high-energy acquisition followed by lower-energy stabilisation/integration, after which the pattern repeats from a new stable set point (which can still be lost, but no longer feels like gain).
Probably relates to the movement of pivotal components in swing votes. (Thanks to Taylor Pullinger for this.)
This is how ambition as a technology operates.
Daily rhythms vacillate between novelty and safety.

Connoisseurship

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 12:27:51 GMT

Yesterday I speculated about the critics of the avant-garde, saying that they are connoisseurs, which literally means “knowers.” The word can be used to connote elegant refinement, or snooty arrogance. Some have called such knowers as art curators and critics elitist.

That’s why I’m still thinking about connoisseurship today. I said there was perhaps a cost to becoming connoisseur, and the cost (or risk) is elitism. This reminded me of the Stoics.

William B. Irvine, in A Guide to the Good Life, writes that this is one reason that the Roman Stoics advise you to avoid this kind of knowing:

Finally, the Stoics are careful to avoid becoming connoisseurs in the worst sense of the word—becoming, that is, individuals who are incapable of taking delight in anything but “the best.” As a result, they will be capable of enjoying a wide range of easily obtainable things. They will keep firmly in mind Seneca’s comment that although “to have whatsoever he wishes is in no man’s power,” it is in every man’s power “not to wish for what he has not, but cheerfully to employ what comes to him.” Thus, if life should snatch one source of delight from them, Stoics will quickly find another to take its place: Stoic enjoyment, unlike that of a connoisseur, is eminently transferable. Along these lines, remember that when Seneca and Musonius were banished to islands, rather than succumbing to depression, they set about studying their new environment.

In other words, he argues that there is a cost to knowing, and the cost is the loss of simple pleasures. But what is costly to the individual can sometimes be beneficial for society as a whole, and vice versa. Perhaps bearing the loss of simple pleasures is the price to be paid for forward movement. In some sense, the avant-garde and entrepreneurs are often making risky sacrifices which may advance society — but equally may not.

Is there a more inherent connection between knowledge and pain? In Essays & Aphorisms (1851), Schopenhauer writes:

Knowledge is in itself always painless. Pain affects only the will and consists in an obstruction, impediment or frustration of it: nonetheless, this frustration of the will, if it is to be felt as pain, must be accompanied by knowledge. That is why even physical pain is conditioned by the nerves and their connexion with the brain, so that an injury to a limb is not felt if the nerves leading from the limb to the brain are severed or the brain itself is devitalized by chloroform. That spiritual pain is conditional upon knowledge goes without saying, and it is easy to see that it will increase with the degree of knowledge. We can thus express the whole relationship figuratively by saying that the will is the string, its frustration or impediment the vibration of the string, knowledge the sounding-board, and pain the sound.

I can’t quite work out whether this metaphor makes any sense, or specifically whether it adds anything to the idea that knowledge, the will, frustration, and pain are somehow related. But he does seem to think that though learning is not painful, knowledge leads to potential pain. That’s as far as I’ve thought about it today.

Etymology

I got a bit sidetracked learning about the word “connoisseurship” today. “Connoisseur” is ultimately derived from Latin cognoscere. As I said above, in English connoisseur has a mixed connotation (a word related not to “knowing” but to “noting,” from Mediaeval Latin connotare).

The English (and evidently I) have occasionally added -ship to the word, of which suffix the OED states “Added to adjectives and past participles to denote the state or condition of being so-and-so. Such compounds were numerous in Old English, and many survived (or were re-coined) in Middle English, but few have a history extending beyond the 15th century.”

Among the Old English examples are some funny ones like “goodship” (meaning “goodness”) and “drunkenship” (“drunkenness”), but only a few, like “hardship” and “friendship” seem to have survived the whole time.

Connoisseurship is attested in two still-read novels from the eighteenth century, namely Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1761), the former in the straightforward sense of “The rôle or part of a connoisseur; critical acquaintance with works of art or matters of taste; the sphere or realm of connoisseurs,” and the latter “humorously, as a personal title:”

Which [picture] your connoisseurship knows is so exquisitely imagined.

Byron made a similar joke in Childe Harold (1818):

How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend.

I personally think we should bring this sense back.

The Avant-garde

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 18:59:23 GMT

In artistic movements, the pattern of ambition is clear enough: the avant-garde literally advances art. Wikipedia notes that the avant-garde, which is French for “advance guard” or “vanguard,” is “frequently characterized by aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability.”

In other words, it is risky, highly experimental, and typically undertaken by an unusual few. Moreover, this unacceptability seems to me important, as the avant-garde has an interesting relationship to criticism. And what follows is as applicable to science as it is to art.

Art and her critics

Writers have been complaining about critics since at least 1711. Alexander Pope begins An Essay on Criticism (emphasis mine throughout the quotes):

‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill

Appear in Writing or in Judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mislead our Sense:
Some few in that, but numbers err in this,
Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss;
A fool might once himself alone expose,
Now one in verse makes many more in prose.

Pope considers bad criticism (which leads us astray) more dangerous than bad writing (which merely bores us), but he also notes that ratio of critics to writers is 10:1. This, I think, is no coincidence, and may be no bad thing.

I have argued that what we find interesting is limited by the bounds of what we know. We find ourselves metaphorically adrift, unmoored, when we drift too far from the shores of our existing knowledge. But the purpose of the avant-garde is to push as far forward and as fast as possible, through a series of experiments. In that sense, they are like evolution in a highly mutagenic environment. Many may die for a single successful experiment.

The avant-garde, by definition, advances the guard. This means that the mainstream, almost by definition, is not interested in most of its experiments, but only in its successes. In order for society to comprehend and assimilate the innovations of the vanguard, a group that is larger than the avant-garde, but smaller than the public, must engage with (and hence judge) the art.

You might say that critics in such a situation tolerate higher entropy than the mainstream can sustain, but that the artists, in their experiments, are even more entropic. And the mainstream, with its bulk, has no trouble acting as ballast against all the furious experimentation at its edges. It is fundamentally conservative.

But if the mainstream is to remain impassive, it needs critics who follow developments closely. Critics must be immersed in their subject. But as judges, overall, they could be seen to reduce entropy in art, reining it in by judging, rightly or wrongly, the merits of the experiments.

Pope loathes such critics (and in this he is no doubt joined by many other artists), preferring to be criticised by other practitioners:

‘Tis with our judgments as our watches, none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
In poets as true genius is but rare,
True taste as seldom is the critic’s share;
Both must alike from Heav’n derive their light,
These born to judge, as well as those to write.
Let such teach others who themselves excel,
And censure freely who have written well.

But the idea that only writers should be critics seems slightly ludicrous. Isn’t it hard enough just to write? True, there was once an age of writer-critics, but even if it long outlasted Pope, I think it is safe to say it is over now, and those people were probably the exception rather than the rule (like athlete-coaches?).

The word connoisseur literally means “knower.” And if you become a connoisseur in anything, you are apt to acquire a taste for it. There is a cost to knowing so much, to being so immersed in the output of any art; it takes time and effort. Much of avant-garde art is not exactly easily absorbed. It is hard work to keep up with the latest and most difficult trends, and presumably it rarely pays. Being immersed with the avant-garde may well make one elitist and judgemental. Or it may attract elitist, judgemental people. Likely a bit of both.

However I think that this on balance is a worthwhile trade. Elitism is the price that society pays for a valuable service, just as weird failed experiments in art are the price artists and critics pay for the advancement of an art.

Golden Years

Overall, I’m arguing that for art (or any movement) to thrive, you need a small group of people iterating and performing a large number of experiments. Under the right circumstances this can lead to a kind of creative explosion. Then you need a larger group (but still small compared to the general population) who is engaged enough with that domain that they can judge the output of the smaller group. They act as a selection filter.

To the extent that this combination produces successful experiments, those successes will enter the mainstream. Together, these two things can actually provide sufficient momentum to overcome the mainstream’s inertia. In conjunction, as successful experiments attract newcomers, a virtuous cycle will lead to a Golden Age, after which the mainstream will be moved in some small way toward the direction of where the avant-garde was. Meanwhile the avant-garde (or more likely their replacements in later generations) will move in some other direction entirely.

This is the pattern Clifford discussed in ambition, but I think that the pattern is more fundamental in nature, and relates to evolution.

Part of the reason I think that this pattern applies not just to ambition and to art is Polanyi’s 1962 essay The Republic of Science (PDF), about which my feelings are greatly mixed. More on this to come.

Critic?

After speaking to someone more in touch with one such movement (“Glitch Art”), I’ve decided that the term “critic” may be too specific. I did not mean to include only formal art critics (like Ruskin — what a photo!) — though I was surprised to learn that one appears to have theorised about the movement already, and she is also a practitioner.

I suppose by “critic” I meant something more like an “engaged audience” which would include formal critics or theorists, other artists, fans, newbies, and so forth. I think the important thing is that they act as an intermediary between the bleeding edge of a movement and the broader public. Especially the way in which they might act as a proving ground or filter.

Ambition

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 11:45:23 GMT

I argued yesterday that what interests us straddles the boundary of what we know and what we don’t. Today I’m thinking about how this area expands at a societal level.

Matt Clifford wrote a great piece on the history of ambition as a technology. In it, he argues that literacy (via the priesthood), military command, and finance were previous paths to ambition, with tech entrepreneurship being a modern one.

At first, highly risk-loving individuals forge the path, often as an escape from a stratified society with too few opportunities. Others follow in their stead, and eventually, these once-risky paths become democratized, then institutionalised. (Somewhere hereabouts, it is my current hypothesis that such paths effloresce into a Golden Age.) By institutionalisation, the initial high energy of the risk-loving individuals has moved the mainstream in some way. In the long run, each path declines, becoming sufficiently mainstream that it ceases to seem ambitious, and eventually decays, to be supplanted by subsequent paths.

Even if some zealous individuals still enter the priesthood, or assume military command, or get MBAs, Clifford implies, those paths cannot be said to be at the height of their prestige. And recently, some have even questioned whether the technological path might be past its peak.

I want to suggest that there is an even broader pattern here than there may at first seem. These pioneers might broadly be termed the avant-garde. And I want to suggest that the tension between pushing forward and stabilising results in a sort of selection filter.

Novelty and Safety

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 11:31:19 GMT

We live on a boundary between novelty and safety. This is a balancing act between order and disorder of exactly the same nature in which matter exists.

Think of the structure of your day. You begin and end it, under normal circumstances, in a familiar location, called home. But during the day, under normal circumstances, you venture out.

You may go out to do what you feel to be an unvarying job, but the day outside the house inevitably brings some degree of novelty. You do (or endure) something new at work. And even at a rote job, your lunch differs, you have a different conversation, or you see something different on your commute than you did the day before. For knowledge workers, it is all but inevitable that you encounter some new knowledge, or are forced to learn of some new problem, on any but the dullest of days. And the dull days can make for rich conversation.

This is not to say that home life is entirely predictable, but it is comparatively so. It is 2020, so it would be odd not to say something here of the current situation. I’ll say that we are like the hikikomori, and I have been saying for some years that they are probably a preview of our future. But it was not always like this; humans spread rather rapidly throughout the globe. As a race we tipped quite far towards novelty, and now, perhaps, have bounded back towards safety.

Whether or not we are becoming more predictable as a race, when it comes to leisure, under normal circumstances, the same balancing act is captured by the question asked by The Clash. In every social situation, it arises eventually: “Should I stay or should I go?” This question represents the crux of the issue, no matter which direction you are facing.

If you start from home, then staying is the status quo, a vote for the known, whereas going goes out into the unknown. In the social situation it is reversed: Going home is a vote for the known, whereas staying is a vote for some diminishing return of novelty.

You can see something about a person’s risk tolerance by the point in the night when they vote for the known. This is neither a good nor a bad thing; everyone is somewhere along the spectrum. If the hikikomori are close to the pathologically predictable end, then the homeless are close to the other. One never leaves home, the other never goes home. I am not saying that either group consciously makes this choice — it may well be made for them — just that the opposition of two pathological ends shows that there must be some trade-off going on.

Another way to put this is in terms of entropy. Staying in your room for a decade is low; living on the street for a decade is high. What’s interesting is normally somewhere in between. And it is selected by a filter.

What Is of Interest

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 09:45:45 GMT

Everything interesting exists at a phase transition between order and disorder. I mean that literally.

If you say that something is interesting, what you mean that that thing exists in some balance between familiarity (order) and novelty (disorder). It is neither so ordered that you already knew it, knew all there was to know, nor is it so random that you cannot apprehend it, or integrate it into your worldview. If it were entirely disconnected from anything you knew, it would be impossible to understand what was being said, whereas if it were familiar enough to be entirely known, then it would not be of interest. The interesting exists in the balance, in an interstitial space.

At a phase transition, in other words.

Entropy is a way of measuring unpredictability or uncertainty. If something is entirely new, or if you don’t understand it, then you could also say that entropy is high, because you can’t make good predictions. Anything is possible.

If on the other hand something is entirely familiar, or if you understand it entirely, then you could also say that entropy is low, because you can make good predictions. Possibilities are circumscribed.

What is interesting exists on the boundary of what you know and what you don’t know. It is at a phase transition between familiarity and unfamiliarity. What is interesting extends your existing knowledge into the unknown. In that sense it is always relational, combinatorial. It begins within the boundary of the known, and pushes the borderline further into the unknown, but not so far that it feels unsafe.

If you speak to me about a book, and I’ve never heard of the author, know neither the language, nor the period, nor who he or she is or was, it will be a struggle to hear you out about the book. You’ll need to backtrack until you hit familiar ground, if nothing more than “It’s a novel.” That’s a familiar enough island to get my bearings, though obviously it will be more interesting if you could connect it to the mainland of something I know more intimately.

What we know is never fixed, and varies greatly between people and across time, and of course from topic to topic. The avant-garde pushes this forward, but to apprehend the avant-garde, you need to be fairly well immersed in a subject.

Another way to look at this is in the daily balancing act between novelty and safety. You could also call it a salience filter.

Entropy

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 13:20:31 GMT

Entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, uncertainty, or even surprise.

If you have shied away from entropy in the past, you’re not alone, in at least two senses.

First, we observe that all things in nature eventually increase in entropy, which is to say that they decay, but living systems (like you) appear at first to be a bit of an exception, as they (like you) resist the tendency towards entropy by repeatedly reducing it.

Second, Claude Shannon also tried to shy away from it, wanting to call the concept of entropy “information” instead of “entropy” in information theory:

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it “information,” but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it “uncertainty.” When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, “You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name. In the second place, and more importantly, no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”

The details of this anecdote are debated, but the point stands: Entropy is counter-intuitive, possibly because we’re more likely to think about measuring things in terms of order rather than in terms of _dis_order.

More on entropy: It is originally a concept from thermodynamics, but was later applied to information theory. There are many other uses for it as well.

Order and disorder

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 12:53:29 GMT

Matter must approach a phase transition in one direction or the other. Either ice is melting into water, or water is freezing into ice. The original temperature, and the change in temperature, dictate which one is happening.

You can think of solid matter as being more ordered than liquid matter. It is less fluid and behaves less randomly. Liquid likewise behaves more predictably than a gas. A gas is the least predictable and most random of the three.

Think of it this way: If you drop a piece of ice, you can just pick it up again. If you wait for it to melt, you can mop it up, which requires more work. But once it has evaporated, you essentially can’t reconstitute it. It’s not that the water has actually disappeared, it’s just mixed in with the air in such a random fashion that it is impossible to separate.

This irreversibility is important. You can think of this as a move away from order and towards disorder. It an increase in entropy. For now, it’s just that it is harder to predict where any given molecule is in a gas than a liquid, and in a liquid than a solid. If you freeze water, that’s the opposite: a move from disorder to order. That’s a decrease in entropy.

I think that the directionality of phase transitions is important. Either something can freeze, becoming more ordered, or it can melt, becoming less ordered. In the most interesting cases, it will go through repeated cycles of freezing and thawing. It is in these cases that something new can emerge.

Phase Transitions

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 12:12:43 GMT

A phase transition describes a transition between different states of matter.

You may remember this from high school chemistry. As temperature increases, ice melts to water, which eventually boils to steam. As temperature decreases, steam condenses to water, which freezes to ice. The states, which are slightly different from phases, are solid, liquid, gas. In this case, the transitions are mediated by temperature.

A phase transition is just the boiling point, or the melting/freezing point, at which the two neighbouring states of matter are equally liking to exist. So precisely at the boiling point for water, an individual water molecule is equally likely to exist as liquid water, or as gaseous steam.

Elements have different melting points. Those whose melting point is below the temperatures we encounter in daily life we think of as a gas (oxygen) or liquid (mercury), while those whose melting point is above typical Earth temperatures we typically think of as a solid (iron).

Why am I writing about something you may feel that you had justifiably forgotten the minute after your final chemistry class?

It’s because I think that much, much more can be explained by phase transitions. I’ll say it now: I think that everything interesting happens around a phase transition. What is stable acts as a filter on reality.

Complexity theory observes that interesting, often life like behaviour occurs even in inanimate matter at phase transitions (also called “critical points”). A famous illustration of this is the Ising model; see this video for an illustration of what this behaviour looks like in iron atoms.

But first, I’ll write about order and disorder.

The Axial Age

Sun, 03 May 2020 07:14:01 GMT

Carl Sagan, in Cosmos (1983), introduced me to the notion of the Axial Age, a period of “pivoting” in human history:

The sixth century B.C. was a time of remarkable intellectual and spiritual ferment across the planet. Not only was it the time of Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras and others in Ionia, but also the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho who caused Africa to be circumnavigated, of Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius and Lao-tse in China, the Jewish prophets in Israel, Egypt and Babylon, and Gautama Buddha in India. It is hard to think these activities altogether unrelated.

William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (2009):

However and whenever it may have started, philosophical thinking took a giant leap forward in the sixth century BC. We find Pythagoras (570–500 BC) philosophizing in Italy; Thales (636–546 BC), Anaximander (641–547 BC), and Heracleitus (535–475 BC) in Greece; Confucius (551–479 BC) in China; and Buddha (563–483 bc) in India. It isn’t clear whether these individuals discovered philosophy independently of one another; nor is it clear which direction philosophical influence flowed, if it indeed flowed.

David Graeber makes the same point in Debt (2014), chapter 9:

The phrase “The Axial Age” was coined by the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. In the course of writing a history of philosophy, Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagorus (570–495 BC), Gautama Buddha (563–483 BC), and Confucius (551–479 BC), were all alive at exactly the same time, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently, unaware of the others’ existence. Like the simultaneous invention of coinage, why this happened had always been a puzzle. Jaspers wasn’t entirely sure himself. To some extent, he suggested, it must have been an effect of similar historical conditions. For most of the great urban civilizations of the time, the early Iron Age was a kind of pause between empires, a time when political landscapes were broken into a checkerboard of often diminutive kingdoms and city-states, most often at constant war externally and locked in constant political debate within. Each case witnessed the development of something akin to a drop-out culture, with ascetics and sages fleeing to the wilderness or wandering from town to town seeking wisdom; in each, too, they were eventually reabsorbed into the political order as a new kind of intellectual or spiritual elite, whether as Greek sophists, Jewish prophets, Chinese sages, or Indian holy men.

Jaspers’ observation had antecedents, some of whom he cited as well as others he was probably unaware of. There was (and is) a lot of debate about the dates and details. The period in question is now put at 800–200 BC.

This idea fascinates me, and I will be developing some thinking related to it here.

2020-06-19: Something rotten in the state of Assyria, when a slave tongue supplants that of its oppressors.

Gaia House Retreat

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 19:36:58 GMT

November 10, 2020: You may wish to read about my more recent retreat.

Last week I did a five-day home meditation retreat in the Sŏn (Korean Zen) tradition. It was taught by Martine and Stephen Batchelor.

This was the third retreat I’ve done since I began meditating in 2017. The big difference was that it was conducted at home, over Zoom, as so many things are these days, and not at a retreat centre. Previously, I’d done a weekend retreat through the London Buddhist Centre at Vajrasana in Suffolk, UK, as well as 10-day Goenka vipassana retreat at Dhamma Vaddhana in the high desert of California.

I’d always wanted to go to Gaia House in Devon, but never managed to sort out the logistics.

This was my first Zen retreat. They welcomed everyone, and you could freely attend whichever sessions you wanted. For me, the retreat involved staying silent for five days, which meant no news or email or messaging or reading, and meditating 4-5 hours per day (full schedule below).

Why would you do this to yourself?

I figured we were in lockdown, so what better time to burn five days? But I also thought that it would be a useful time to make mental progress.

Meditation has been really transformative for me. Though I am not a naturally happy person, I am consistently happier than I was before my last retreat, which was just over two years ago.

Meditation has lasting benefits for me, even though it has also been disruptive/tough during periods of progress. Overall I figured I might come out of it with more happiness/equanimity during a difficult time, and that maybe it would give me some insights, which I think it did.

Korean Zen

I learned a lot about Zen. Both the Batchelors have serious knowledge of several traditions, including Tibetan (Gelug), Theravada, as well, of course, as Korean Seon, the tradition in which Martine Batchelor was a nun. Interestingly, in spite (or perhaps because) of having done intense philosophical/theological training as a Tibetan monk, Stephen has come to a rather anti-intellectual viewpoint.

Both Seon and Zen are derived from Chan, which I vaguely knew, but I learned that the word Chan is derived from jhana which means “meditation” (as well as referring to the fun bliss states). In other words, Chan practitioners considered themselves the “ones who meditate” as opposed to the more philosophical traditions that had arisen to debate things like metaphysics and epistemology by the 6th Century AD, when Chan began. In that sense, it’s a form of fundamentalism, as it went back to the basics of what the Buddha taught — a millennium before that, around 450 BCE.

This seems to happen routinely in any tradition (just think of Christianity’s periodic Great Awakenings in America), but I hadn’t realised that Zen was an example of this. As I understand it, Theravada remained relatively untouched by the changes brought by Mahayana Buddhism, but the Thai forest tradition (which was where I started with Buddhism) still intended to bring Theravada back to pre-sectarian Buddhism.

It seems like the stripped down versions of Buddhism appeal more to Westerners, presumably for their relative lack of focus on things like deities and the cycles of rebirth, and for their focus on meditation. Stephen Batchelor in particular believes that what the Buddha taught was strictly ethics and meditation, and essentially nothing to do with metaphysical or theological claims. He has become a strong proponent of Secular Buddhism, after having left his Tibetan Buddhist monastic life.¹

If it matters, despite meditating, I don’t particularly consider myself a Buddhist, but if I were to be one, I suppose I would have to identify myself as a secular Buddhist too. I find the Buddha’s insights tremendously useful, but have no real interest in organised religion, rituals, or traditions, except as a strictly intellectual exercise. I find that theories generally make little difference to the practice of meditation, just as theories about exercise make little difference if you don’t do the exercise. That’s not to say that guidance doesn’t help though. But there’s a difference between instruction and dogma.

The practice

The practice we undertook for the week is called hwadu (Hua Toa in Chinese, wato in Japanese), of which I knew nothing. It’s somewhat similar to koan practice, which I’d also never done, but unlike koans, questions which typically change over some period of months or years, a Seon practitioner is given a single hwadu for life. They are also shorter and less riddle-like than koans.

Over the course of the retreat, the question/hwadu was “What is this?” You were supposed to bring back attention to that question constantly, as an investigation to inquiry in the moment. Unlike a koan, it is not supposed to have a right answer, or any intellectual answer at all, but to be posed as a full-body interrogative, to provoke a sort of child-like wonder at the nature of experience itself. In that sense, it is an insight practice, though the Batchelors seemed to view it as a hybrid concentration practice as well (this could also be said of the breath, though notably not of noting).

They also advised two other practices, to be changed at will. These practices were mindfulness of breath, and awareness of sounds. I found the latter particularly useful.

I had never had instructions to switch freely between objects before, and I found that this suited me much better than attempting, e.g., to focus just on the breath for 45 minutes. In practice it’s what I do anyway; some visualisation concentration, maybe some time with the breath, body-scanning, metta bhavana, or other interrogative practices.

The teaching

Both of the Batchelors, as well as Tony O’Connor, who hosted some of the sits, were profoundly knowledgeable, compassionate, helpful, and wise throughout. I was seriously impressed by their ability to host a Zoom call with 200-300 people, give a brilliant talk, and then get through many of the questions asked in chat with such serious insight, intelligence, and patience. I took notes furiously and will be working through those in the coming week.

It was as intense as a normal retreat

I was surprised to find that it was pretty equal in intensity to the 10-day silent vipassana retreat I had done. On that schedule, you meditate around ten hours per day, potentially slightly more with walking meditation. So I thought that this schedule, with only around four hours per day, would be much less intense.

I was wrong. Partly this is because a lot of the effect seems to come from noble silence (about which more below). But I was also writing, doing strenuous exercise, and fasting, all of which are forbidden on Goenka retreats.

Now I can sort of see why they’re forbidden, as they seem to intensify an already intense experience. And I think that in some way, it’s the total silence and isolation that has a bigger effect than the number of hours of practice. Given that Goenka takes total newcomers to meditation, it would probably increase the odds of breakdowns. I did not have a breakdown, but as I’ve said it was intense.

Here was my schedule for most of last week:

04:30-05:00 wake up excited, make coffee
05:00-07:00 yoga, meditation, writing
07:00-07:45 Zoom group meditation
07:45-09:00 sprints/silent walk
09:00-10:30 Zoom sitting instructions, meditation, questions
10:30-13:00 walking meditation, bodyweight exercises, writing
13:00-14:00 lunch (only food)
14:00-15:30 Zoom dharma talk, questions
15:30-19:00 write, meditate, read the Zen books
19:00-19:45 Zoom meditation
19:45-23:00 write, read zen books, meditate a bit more, feel disconsolate/despondent, struggle to sleep

So I probably overdid it. Still, I was happy to learn I could be so excited on such an early schedule.

Meditation itself seems to prevent sleep

I was surprised to find that exactly like on Goenka, I could not sleep more than a few fitful hours per night, even with all the exercise and exhaustion. This is a commonly noted feature of meditation retreats.

I figured this effect on previous retreats was due to being away from home, in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people and practices. I did not expect the effect to occur meditating in my own home, sleeping in my own bed, without strangers around.

In fact, this was Goenka’s recommendation for how to meditate. He said everyone should meditate two hours per day, and when people balked and asked him how they could find the time, he advised them simply to sleep less.

I’ve never heard of anyone besides Harari actually doing this, nor have I ever been tempted to attempt it — I laughed when Goenka suggested it in his lessons. But it is interesting to know that a few hours of meditation does seem to cause one to sleep less. Whether that’s sustainable or a good idea is another question.

Phone screens break mindfulness

This wouldn’t have surprised me as a general point. But in this context it did, since I was using an old wiped phone with just a meditation timer installed, in airplane mode with the screen in black and white.

Even with those settings, looking at it was somehow deeply distracting, even though I never got on the internet or read the news or anything. Maybe it’s conditioning, or maybe it’s a property of the device itself, or maybe some combination. I felt like the phone sucked me in, and I would end up fiddling with settings or stupid things like that.

This did not happen when I used a computer, nor when I wrote on paper or read books.

One consequence of the retreat is that I’ve decided not to use a phone unless I absolutely must. I’ll still use it for phone calls. But I’ll keep screen usage to a minimum. Since I’m stuck in the house, there’s nothing I can do on the phone that I can’t do on a real computer, and it’s usually quicker on a computer anyway.

Writing was very tough

I found that insight practice and writing do not go well together.

It does not seem to break mindfulness, at least not in the way that the phone seemed to; it was more that writing was taxing in precisely the same way that insight meditation was.

Journaling and reflections were fine, and useful, but trying to compose/edit writing intended for anyone other than myself was a struggle. I suppose both are about paying rapt attention to minute details.

As a result of this combination, over the course of the week, I managed to exhaust myself. I was uncharacteristically drained and unable to do much for about three days afterwards.

Physical exercise is also mental

Like meditation, exercise can be tiring, particularly if you can’t sleep. Nonetheless I did yoga, cardio (running/walking), and strength training every day. I think I thought that it would stabilise my mood.

I found yoga and walking complimentary to the insight practice, but both sprints and strength training seemed challenging, maybe just depletion of energy or willpower. I sort of think Goenka is right to forbid strenuous exercise.

Fasting might not be a great idea

I decided that during it I would eat one low-carb vegetarian meal per day, at around 1pm, after finishing all exercise for the day.

This turned out to not be enough food, and is one possible reason that the retreat overall was so intense. I half-remembered Daniel Ingram having noted in MCTB that fasting amplifies things. I figured it would be fine, or that it might even be a good thing, leading to more rapid practice. Looking up what he said now, I sort of wish I had re-read it:

When on intensive retreats, there are a few basic ways to sail a bit too far out there too fast. The first is to stop eating. It is true that there is a long and glorious tradition of people fasting when doing spiritual practice, but generally they do so because they want to bring on severely altered states of consciousness. Fasting when meditating is an effective technique for doing this. Should you be doing insight practices, altered states are not your intended focus, and so these are more likely to be distracting than helpful. Further, severely altered states of consciousness can sometimes be very disruptive and hard to process, leading to what might be considered by some to be temporary insanity. If you are the sort of person who would drop LSD when out in public, then the altered states that fasting might bring on would probably not be a problem for you. On the other hand, if you are on retreat with other people, consideration for the fact that they may not want to deal with the potential side effects of your vision-quest is warranted.

Then again, as I was silent/on my own anyway, I might well have ignored it even if I had re-read it.

At Goenka, I stuck to a two meal schedule (breakfast and lunch), with no fruit in the evening (which is allowed for beginners). Even that was tough. Meditation definitely burns calories, and fasting also intensifies emotions/stress, and maybe interacts with serotonin.

Noble silence

I live with my partner, so noble silence was more optional for me than it might be for people alone in lockdown. We agreed that we wouldn’t speak (to be honest I suspect she was grateful for my silence). We stuck to it. I also didn’t read email or messages, though I did write a bit here.

I turned off my phone on Monday, and did not use screens except for the Zoom calls, to write, and Insight Timer. So I did not read the news or social media, which was great.

I also read the Tao Te Ching as well as some of the three books that the Batchelors wrote and recommended for the retreat:

What Is This? which describes the meditation practice.
The Way of Korean Zen which is a more academic text about the history of Zen Buddhism in Korea.
Women in Korean Zen, about Martine’s experiences as a Seon nun.

I missed my partner

Strangely, since we live in the same house, and during quarantine are more cooped up than ever, I found that I missed my partner a lot. This was one of the benefits of doing the retreat during lockdown, that it was a true break from each other, more like my going on a five-day trip than it feels when she is gone for work.

Perception of time

As on the longer retreat, meditation and silence seemed to affect my perception of time quite a lot. I would think, for example, that I’d forgotten to take tea out of the kitchen an hour ago, then look and see that it had only been one minute. Or I’d find that I had meditated for thirty minutes when it felt like thirty seconds, though this was less frequent.

Though the seconds seem to pass extremely slowly, the days were full and full of effort, and did not seem to go either slowly or quickly.

The community

On the final Zoom call of the week on Friday, we had a breakout session in which we got about ten minutes to talk to people about how it had gone. I spoke to an Italian woman who had known the Batchelors for years and was scheduled to be on the original in-person retreat at Gaia House. She had been in lockdown alone for much longer than I had. There was also a woman in the Lake District. Both were kind and it was really interesting to hear how it had gone for them, as we all had different rules for ourselves and experiences, though everyone was very positive.

I only wish we’d been given a little more time in the Zoom breakout. A good reminder if I ever host such a call.

My mind both wandered and did not wander

At times I had torrents of what felt like intellectual insights, and later would be writing furiously. At other times I had a strange blankness, my mind would be so tired that I would just be staring blank and thoughtless.

I would recommend a retreat

Despite all my talk of exhaustion, it was a great experience, and I feel calmer, less anxious, and happier. I’ve also had what felt like breakthroughs on intellectual and emotional questions. I would recommend a home retreat to most people, including people who are fairly new to meditation.

A friend sent me this link which I read before the retreat, and I’d definitely recommend giving it a try, even if just to get a break from the news/social media these days. But I’d say, stick to yoga/walking meditation rather than strenuous exercise, try to sleep, and eat something. Finally, I think it’s important to keep in mind that it may be just as intense as going on a real retreat, so you should plan accordingly (not quite sure what you’d do, besides bearing it in mind as you plan).

If you want to read about a writing retreat I did in November 2020, I wrote about it here.

I do disagree to some extent with Batchelor that the Buddhist claims are only ethical. Batchelor is pretty explicitly against the progress of insight, i.e., progress towards enlightenment — which in some forms I am as well, and I understand why he finds it more expedient to focus on ethics over enlightenment. On the other hand, I think it would be hard to argue that the Buddha didn’t believe that there was some kind of progress towards an end goal, i.e., greater insight into the three characteristics and the four noble truths than one started out with. I also think that that progress, i.e., the stages of insight, do correspond to something real (which are mental/neurological events, neither ethical nor magical). But anyway, that’s a theoretical quibble and was not at all important in practice.↩

Space & Originality

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 13:19:40 GMT

So lacking am I in originality that I set out to write against it today, and in the process found out that I had already done so, and forgotten. Never one to pass up a good rant, I will argue against it again today, in favour of imitation, and in a much more roundabout way. Hear me out.

The desire for originality does not itself seem to be particularly original, at least not, Wikipedia argues, since the Romantics. Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, thought that he was the first to “discover” the idea that the interior space was the most important aspect of a building:

Chesty with all this, I was in danger of thinking of myself as, more or less, a prophet. When building Unity Temple at Oak Park and the Larkin Building in Buffalo, I was making the first great protest I knew anything about against the building coming up on you from the outside as enclosure. I reversed that old idiom in idea and in fact.

When pretty well puffed up by this I received a little book by Okakura Kakuzo, entitled The Book of Tea, sent to me by the ambassador from Japan to the United States. Reading it, I came across this sentence: “The reality of a room was to be found in the space enclosed by the roof and walls, not in the roof and walls themselves.”

Well there was I. Instead of being the cake I was not even dough. Closing the little book I went out to break stone on the road, trying to get my interior self together. I was like a sail coming down; I had thought of myself as an original, but I was not.¹

I love this idea of “not even being the dough,” and as far as I can tell is an original saying. And I love, too, that one response to perceived unoriginality, appropriate at least for a diminutive architect circa 1908, was to go out and break stone on the road, whereas my only outlet, evidently, is to blog about it.

The reference, as A. C. Graham notes,² is to chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching. As I’ve said before, the Taoists are often better read in multiple translations, so here are a few worth reading (the passage is just a few lines):

But Graham does rather better than any of the above, in an otherwise unpublished original translation:

Thirty spokes share one hub: just where it does not exist is the wheel’s use.
Knead clay to make a vessel: just where it does not exist is the vessel’s use.
Cut out doors and windows to make a room: just where it does not exist is the room’s use.

Therefore we find it beneficial that they exist, and find them useful where they do not exist.

I find this rendering, especially the last line, to be as beautiful as it is profound. The tension between benefit and use, and that and where is brilliant.

Graham, himself, is quite the writer. Earlier in the same essay, this is how he describes the Tao Te Ching:

It is very short, by Chinese standards as well as our own, a loosely strung series of aphorisms grouped in stanzas which are always highly rhythmic and often rhymed. The text which tradition has preferred is pruned to a degree of terseness unusual even in Chinese writing, sometimes at the cost of syntactic ambiguity.

Beautiful.

Graham argues that the title of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs no more misunderstands what “straw dogs” means in the Tao than Wright misunderstands the point about space: “Lao Tzu does not qualify it, he leaves you to go in your own direction when you notice its collisions and interactions with other parts of the book.”

But Graham stops there, whereas Wright continues to write:

But I began to swell up again when I thought, “After all, who built it? Who put that thought into buildings? Laotse nor anyone else had consciously built it.” When I thought of that, naturally enough I thought, “Well then, everything is all right, we can still go along with the head up.” I have been going along—head up—ever since.

In quoting Wright, Graham neglects to include this. And it seems to me to get at the heart of originality. It is by doing that we become originals, even if that action is intentionally imitative, or turns out to have been so unintentionally.

Just think of Rimbaud memorising Latin verse, and then going on to write it. Or look at the early paintings of Malevich or Schiele. I’m serious. Click those links and look at the progression in their painting.

Do their early paintings remind you of anything?

Could you have predicted where they would end up?

They imitated before setting out on their own path. There is no shame in imitation, in unoriginality. You can’t know in advance where an act, even an act of imitation, will lead.

And in the end, it may be for you as it was for Wright: Finding out that you’re on a path at all might be a sign that you’re on the right path.

Frank Lloyd Wright, The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Writings on Architecture (Princeton University Press, 2010), 363.↩
A. C. Graham. “Two Notes on the Translation of the Taoist Classics” in Harold David Roth and Angus Charles Graham, A Companion to Angus C. Graham’s Chaung-tzu: The Inner Chapters (University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 130-134.↩

Trillions dead for one to live

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 10:45:28 GMT

I was reading about Welwitschia this week, a strange plant found in Namibia and Angola. Its strap-like leaves grow slowly but continuously along the desert floor. A single plant can grow to thirty metres in diameter, and they can live for millennia. One site noted that only 0.1% of seeds produced manage to germinate.

Those odds don’t seem too bad to me. The odds against your existence are much higher than that.

It’s not just that your parents could easily not have met, but just the sheer number of gametes between them. I began the calculation, learning in the process that women are born with 1-2 million eggs, most of which are never viable, and that men can produce up to 300 million sperm cells in every mL of semen. Just multiplying those two numbers gives a result that is already in the trillions.

I gave up there when I found that someone else had done it, and made an infographic here. He found that the number was 1 in 400 quadrillion against you, assuming the existence of your parents.

But the same odds were against them too. The numbers reach the truly astronomical when you try to trace back the lineage. And the final number he comes to is 1 in 10^2,640,000 — which the graphic compares to 10⁸⁰ estimated number of atoms in the universe.

Everything in nature, I would argue, has faced similar odds against its existence. There is a massive survivorship bias in everything we see. If we see it, then it has persisted.

Over 99% of earth’s species are long-extinct; of the 5-50 billion that have existed, there are about 8.7 million today. That was in 2011; it’s not just dropping quickly but accelerating, and we might be about to lose a million more.

Depending on how you measure it the odds against something’s existence may be much more than trillions. This does not begin with evolution; it begins long before that. I’ll be discussing this issue of bias in future posts.

You can't know in advance

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 10:41:02 GMT

In Foreknowledge I proposed that you can’t know in advance what you’ll learn before you set out. If you could, you wouldn’t need to learn it. I wanted to give a few other examples of this thinking.

In this post on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life (archive.org), Shane Parrish points out that you can’t predict the benefits of learning:

Investing in Learning: The upfront costs are real and visible and, like any investment, the future payoff is uncertain. So we tend to skim the surface, thinking this will “save us time” versus doing the real work. Yet this surface-based approach leads to no improvement in our ability to make decisions. In fact, it may harm us if we think we’ve learned something for real. Thus, surface learning is a true waste of time. It’s just that the link to our bad learning is unclear, so we rarely identify the root cause.

This is an argument in favour of method. You don’t know, and can’t know in advance, what you will learn. The only thing you have control over is how well you learn it, as I also argued here.

In Range, David Epstein quotes Jack Cecchini, a rare musician who plays both jazz and classical guitar:

I could show somebody in two minutes what would take them years of screwing around on the fingerboard like I did to find. You don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong. You don’t have that in your head. You’re just trying to find a solution to problems, and after fifty lifetimes, it starts to come together for you. It’s slow, but at the same time, there’s something to learning that way.

Emphasis mine. He’s implying that how you learn is important, not what you learn, and that the best learning is essentially trial-and-error. Excerpt here.

In this undelivered graduation speech, Paul Graham argues that you can’t plan your career based on what you like.

First, because it’s quite hard from the outside to tell what most jobs involve. But second, because much of future work probably doesn’t exist right now:

But there are other jobs you can’t learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans.

He calls this “premature optimization.” Don’t waste time optimizing something which you might never use.

This is advice often given for writing: write at speed without caring about the quality, then cut it down and edit it later, with care. You can’t know in advance what will be important, and what you’ll cut.

Throughout Antifragile, Taleb argues that nature doesn’t plan anything.

She just places a huge number of random bets and sees which ones come up:

Jacob argued that even within the womb, nature knows how to select: about half of all embryos undergo a spontaneous abortion—easier to do so than design the perfect baby by blueprint. Nature simply keeps what it likes if it meets its standards or does a California-style “fail early”—it has an option and it uses it. Nature understands optionality effects vastly better than humans, and certainly better than Aristotle.

Nature is all about the exploitation of optionality; it illustrates how optionality is a substitute for intelligence.

There’s a widely cited Taoist story in which a man says “May be” (sometimes “We’ll see”) to a succession of occurrences.

You may well have read, but it’s very short if not.

I’ll keep this page updated as I come across more examples.

Writing as Cooking

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 10:46:05 GMT

Today I’ve been thinking about writing as cooking. If we don’t quite control the output, then at least we control the initial conditions.

Cooking is a chemistry experiment, a kind of transmutation. It is almost alchemical, in that it transforms ingredients into something that is more than the sum of its parts. If all goes well, that is; certainly into something that’s different from the sum of its parts, though whether that difference amounts to more or less depends on experience, attention, and a bit of luck.

This is true even of extremely simple operations, say steaming and salting, which already change food quite a bit. So does chopping raw ingredients. I really believe that a julienned carrot is not a carrot (though I won’t take the stand that “a white horse is not a horse”).

If the process amounts to only chopping, then perhaps it is in our control, but anything heated, or marinated, or fermented, is somehow “not us” at work. We set the starting conditions, then we pay attention at the appropriate times, and take corrective action. Our unimportance in this process is less obvious in vigorous cooking (like a stir-fry) than it is in slower cooking (like slow-cooking a stew). It’s not that we do nothing, but it’s more like we sustain the correct conditions for the right amount of time than it is like we produce something ourselves.

(“Cooking from scratch,” incidentally, always struck me as a fantasy, if by scratch you mean something like unprocessed ingredients. It’s not that “scratch” so often includes things like flour or butter, which are already processed. It’s that even raw ingredients have been perfected and homogenised, not just by industrial processes, nor by our selection of them in the store, but by ten thousand years of artificial selection. Michael Pollan’s difficulty in foraging a meal is testament to this.)

Cooking from raw ingredients, though, requires about a bit of effort, time, temperature, and to some extent attention. The apparent magic of this process probably accounts for the adulation of chefs, and my own faint wonder every time my bumbling produces something edible.

But the same is true of writing. The ingredients matter. You get to pick what you read — though you can’t pick what it contains. You do get to pick how you read it, though, and how much you read.

In the same way, you get to choose how and how much you write, even if you don’t, at least not to any great extent, consciously decide what words you will write, when it comes time to put your pen to paper. This all seems to lead back to the point about method as our primary control knob.

As in cooking, a lot of churning goes on out-of-sight. Most of the result comes from the quality of the ingredients, the amount of time, and the quality of attention, not from any conscious composition or meddling. At the end of cooking or writing, you can tweak the result, but you can’t alter it entirely, unless of course you start from scratch (and here I mean to start from nothing). Which amounts to a new experiment.

scratch, n. OED 4b. The starting-point in a handicap of a competitor who receives no odds; sometimes colloquially used elliptically for such a competitor. Also figurative; esp. in from scratch, from a position of no advantage, knowledge, influence, etc., from nothing.

At least that has been my experience with writing. There may be others who can radically alter the course of a piece of already-written writing. But I always have to start again. That’s part of why I’m writing frequent short pieces here: as a series of experiments.

Output

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 18:48:13 GMT

If we cannot control much of what we take in, then at least, surely, we can control what we put out? We control what we say and write, don’t we? (This is not a question about determinism. I’m asking about the phenomenology.)

Anyone who remembers early attempts at meditation will remember the frustration, maybe even the surprise, at how little subject to conscious control thoughts turn out to be. Try to stop thinking, and thoughts seem to get louder. But I am not really talking about that issue either. Let us assume that we have free will and can think. Do our thoughts determine what we say?

Julian Jaynes argued that they do not. We do not control our speech, at least if by “we” you mean something like “our conscious selves,” i.e., the bit of us that seems to be able to exert will to stand us up or walk us around, if it so chooses. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:

Try speaking with a full consciousness of your articulation as you do it. You will simply stop speaking.

And so in writing, it is as if the pencil or pen or typewriter itself spells the words, spaces them, punctuates properly, goes to the next line, does not begin consecutive sentences in the same way, determines that we place a question here, an exclamation there, even as we ourselves are engrossed in what we are trying to express and the person we are addressing.

For in speaking or writing we are not really conscious of what we are actually doing at the time. Consciousness functions in the decision as to what to say, how we are to say it, and when we say it, but then the orderly and accomplished succession of phonemes or of written letters is somehow done for us.

I think he is right. Before I speak, I don’t usually have a clear conception of what I will say, thought I often feel a sort of “itch” or “energy” around some vague topic.

Instead, when I begin to speak in conversation, “I” express some high-level intention to convey a thought (often not yet well thought-through). It is a bit like doing some other habitual action, like standing up to go to the kitchen: it’s an abstract intention, and you don’t think about the individual footsteps you take. In the same way, you can’t easily think about each consecutive word while you speak. The words link themselves up.

I think this is what Joan Didion meant when she wrote (in “Why I Write”) “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

We do seem to have some high-level control, which comes to the fore when there’s an awkward silence, or when we want to change the subject. We have veto power over things we might have an urge to say, but decide we’d better not.

But that is not the same as choosing the words. Some other part of the brain seems to choose the words for us. Those words and phrasings seem linked, inscrutably but inextricably, to the inputs, to what we’ve been reading and seeing and hearing. To what we’ve been thinking, of course, as well, though as I noted above, that’s none too subservient to us either.

It’s almost as if we have more control over the rate of input and output than we do over their contents. But if that’s true, is that just another aspect of method?

Foreknowledge

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 18:09:12 GMT

There is a further problem, though, with inputs, and that is that you do not and really cannot control inputs either.

You set out to read a book. But you don’t determine its contents, nor do you know them in any real sense. If you knew what the book contained beforehand, you would learn nothing from reading it. Yet you must somehow have learned that it contained something of interest… Which leads to the question of how you learned that.

This is Meno’s paradox. If you already know what you’re looking for, you don’t need to look. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how can you hope to find it? Plato decides that you must just be remembering things, the doctrine of recollection or anamnesis, which doesn’t feel right. Certain lessons learned can feel like long-forgotten memories, but most (to me) do not.

You must know something of the book you intend to read, assuming it is not chosen entirely at random. But you probably have little more than a vague sense of its emotional valence, or a handful of details which have made it through someone else’s relevance filter. People can take extremely different details from identical scenes, in literature and life.

If the book is worth reading (for you), then it must contain things you don’t know, things which aren’t contained in whatever summary you received as recommendation.

If the book is worth reading (in general), then it’s a fair bet that it cannot justly be summarised at all. There are works good enough that nothing could be justly cut without something worthwhile being lost, so to summarise them is to do them a sort of violence. Then again, as my friend is fond of saying, there are books that would better have been blog posts; a summary would have been an improvement.

If you can’t know in advance, but it matters what you read, how do you decide which parts of infinite knowledge to ingest? And can you at least control what you say?

Inputs

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 23:36:00 GMT

If method matters more than we commonly think with respect to output, then what of input? If how you do a thing matters as much as what you do, then what about what you take in or take onboard, before you take action?

Lately I’ve been thinking about life’s inputs, outputs, and methods. In learning, there is what you read or try (input), then what you write, or say, or do (output), and how you go about the two (method). And then there are outcomes, which are maybe a second order evaluation of outputs. I once tended to focus on outcomes, even though they were, at best, tenuously tied to the actions that produced them.

This week I was trying out the idea that only the method matters. If that were the case, you could investigate anything, and it would yield insights. In a sense this is the view of vipassana meditation. Though most instructions begin with the breath, the practice can in principle take any object of experience, including emotions and thoughts. It’s the quality of attention that counts.

But no teacher would recommend that a student start by trying to observe their thinking or strong emotions. Attention, unmoored as it is in the untrained mind, would be too easily swept away, and the student would lose metacognitive awareness of phenomena.

So the input does matter, if only to the ease with which one can generate the right kind of attention. And it certainly seems to matter whether we spend a few hours reading philosophy versus scrolling through social media. But I suppose the question remains whether you couldn’t learn something, even from the worst inputs, with the right kind of concentration and analysis.

Infinite Knowledge

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 13:40:46 GMT

The Taoist Zhuangzi writes, in Burton Watson’s translation of the ancient Chinese:

Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger for certain!

Taoism is notoriously cryptic, not just from the twenty-three centuries which intervene between us and the texts, but also as a result of Taoist skepticism that language can convey truth at all. Paradoxes abound in its writings, not to obfuscate, but to reveal. The truth is in the contrasts, and words are only signposts to the Tao, the Way.

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” as many translators opt to open their attempts at the Tao Te Ching — which proceeds, nevertheless and famously, to try to tell us something about the eternal Tao. Despite relative consensus on this wording of the opening, thenceforth translations diverge drastically. It’s often useful to compare translations of the Taoist texts. (Here’s a great list of English translations of the Tao.)

Zhuangzi (or Chuang-tzŭ as he was once transliterated), a good Taoist, would never pass up a good paradox, and he frequently argues against logic itself. “Like all great anti-rationalists,” writes A. C. Graham, “Chuang-tzŭ has his reasons for not listening to reason.” Here is Graham’s translation of the above:

My life flows between confines, but knowledge has no confines. If we use the confined to follow after the unconfined, there is danger that the flow will cease; and when it ceases, to exercise knowledge is purest danger.

Knowledge is infinite, and life is not. You can’t catch a river in your mouth, and if you try, you may well drown.

This apparent deficit of lifespan to knowledge takes many forms:

Ought I to begin the study of a subject with a textbook? With the canon?
Should I read what preceded this? Won’t that go on forever?¹
If it does, what is the purpose of learning? Is it only done to scratch an itch?

I find I have to answer no to the last question, and I have been so far unable to give up the hunt, however little hope I have for its conclusion.

One response to such questions is that maybe the method matters more than the outcome. The process matters more than completion. I started a Twitter thread to collect some of the sources related to this way of thinking.²

Where to start is a red herring, because it is the search itself, from whatever starting point, that is valuable. Another way to put this is that searching for a solution leads us to seek nouns, when the answer is really an adverb; it is not what we find but how we explore.

Its interruptus somehow reminds me of the winding of the clock at the start of Tristram Shandy, which sets him backward-looking.↩
That thread and the newsletter I’ve just started are partly an experiment inspired by a Ribbonfarm post on a recent resurgence of text.↩

News

Fri, 17 Apr 2020 16:38:50 GMT

I’ve started a newsletter, so please sign up to get news about the novel I’m writing and the thinking going on behind the scenes.

Much has happened since I wrote last year, but you’ll have heard about all that. Here’s what I’ve been up to, which has little to do with what’s going on in the world.

Six months ago I began thinking in writing, in a system called a Zettelkasten. Today I broke a quarter million words in that system, in 2,405 notes.

Much of this thinking has centred, over time, on two questions:

On the origins of selfhood and suffering: Philosophy, cognitive science, and ancient wisdom traditions have led me to believe that existential suffering is not a part of human nature, but has its origins in history and is transmitted by human culture.
On the origins of complexity from simplicity in nature.

I’ve begun to notice certain patterns in the emergence of complex systems from simpler ones, and that the ones in nature (the evolution of plants, e.g.), have important parallels in human evolution and technological progress.

I will be writing and thinking in writing here, and showcasing the results in the newsletter.

Dry November: Day 30

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 18:27:34 GMT

Final evening, having finished the re-read of the novel, which was painful in places, in good and bad ways. There is a staggering amount of work left to do. And maybe it will all fruitless in the end, but that doesn’t matter much, can’t matter much in final analysis. What is a year, in the grand scheme of our little life? The method, the action, the lived experience, is what matters. And what did Dylan say?

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

Thanks to those who have allowed me to do what I wanted and needed to do this year, and tolerated me while I did it.

Dry November: Day 29

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 18:05:58 GMT

And death shall have no dominion. A productive day, 320 pages read out of 413, and everything else more-or-less done. A friend’s raucous fortieth, I stayed on the soda and lime.

The best conversation was also the worst, about whether there’s any point in saying that there is an objective reality at all, or whether even the barest of facts, turn out, on inspection, to be interpretations, interpolations. I’m coming down on the side that there cannot be anything usefully described as objective reality, that we cannot inspect without interpretation, without the lens of the senses, which evolved not for objectivity but for survival. And certainly we can know little or nothing without trusting others.

But I still argue that this lack of any hard reality upon which to balance our beliefs does not mean that therefore everything is subjective. It’s more like everything that matters exists in an intersubjective space, a social level which requires some consensus, and ideally, which will also provoke and absorb critiques of itself without violence. No one individual can have much apprehension of anything like “reality.”

This got a bit hot when the topic turned to famine, as proof that there is a real world, and that denying “reality” has consequences. But when a famine occurs, presumably because of some belief, what “reality” was denied? Only a different kind of social belief. I definitely was not saying that there are no consequences to this; just that even a famine, or the causes of a famine, consists in consensus. Leaving aside causality, and whether any single belief could be said to have “caused” a famine, there is the question of what a famine is. No single person can “see” a famine, because it’s a social concept. Just look at how wildly famine statistics vary to see what I mean.

I am saying that even something like a famine — or something less charged, like whether the earth is round — depends more on consensus, and the senses of others, than it does on our own direct apprehension of reality. And I’d take it further, and say that there is no reality, to which we have access, that doesn’t also involve human concepts, which are an interpretive layer.

Again, this does not mean that all subjective views are equally worthwhile. It just means that we are more-or-less the blind leading the blind. The answer is not “anything goes” but rather that we must be even more assiduous, and better at coordinating than we already are, because of how easily we, individually, are misguided.

Dry November: Day 28

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 23:26:01 GMT

An exceptional day, in several ways, at the Royal Geographical Society. I haven’t the time to say all I need to say, so I’ll leave you a section of Stephen King’s On Writing, which you may well know, but this is how this week has felt.

When you come to the correct evening (which you well may have marked on your office calendar), take your manuscript out of the drawer. If it looks like an alien relic bought at a junk-shop or yard sale where you can hardly remember stopping, you’re ready. Sit down with your door shut (you’ll be opening it to the world soon enough), a pencil in your hand, and a legal pad by your side. Then read your manuscript over.

Do it all in one sitting, if that’s possible (it won’t be, of course, if your book is a four- or five-hundred-pager). Make all the notes you want, but concentrate on the mundane housekeeping jobs, like fixing misspellings and picking up inconsistencies. There’ll be plenty; only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, “Oh well, let it go, that’s what copyeditors are for.”

If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own.

With six weeks’ worth of recuperation time, you’ll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. I’m talking about holes big enough to drive a truck through. It’s amazing how some of these things can elude the writer while he or she is occupied with the daily work of composition. And listen—if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us. There’s a story that the architect of the Flatiron Building committed suicide when he realized, just before the ribbon-cutting ceremony, that he had neglected to put any men’s rooms in his prototypical skyscraper. Probably not true, but remember this: someone really did design the Titanic and then label it unsinkable.

Dry November: Day 27

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 22:44:48 GMT

Nearly finished with my month of not drinking, but like last year not much looking forward to diminution by drink. The only upside I can see is that it makes me more social. Without a drink, I less desire to go out, and find conversation more draining. I feel awkward and slow. Of course I’m probably less awkward, quicker, and remembering more; it’s just that with a bit of a buzz you miss the pauses, miss that you’ve missed something.

Otherwise I’m halfway through my reread of the novel, which with current spacing is 413 pages. It’s a strange experience to read what I’ve written, like meeting a former self, even though it’s only been set aside for three months. Some sections were written at the start of the year, and some I’d been thinking about for a year before that.

There are many parts that I’d entirely forgotten writing, some of which are quite good; others parts I remembered as being better than they are. And of course some parts are awful, but most of the awful parts look rushed, provisional, and this will make them easy to cut. Or if I still deem them necessary, then their standard will be easy to improve.

There’s also the mounting list of missing scenes to write, of revisions to do. Overall, it coheres much more than the last draft, but it still is not submission quality, and that in itself, after months of work, is daunting. Reading half the novel has generated 12 pages of A4 notes and edits. That’s in addition to the 276 todo items I stored in the document itself, and the additional 244 in Todoist.

Another year of work, then? It’s looking that way. But in rereading it I’ve also gained confidence that there’s something there, that what I’ve written was worth writing.

Dry November: Day 26

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 23:25:56 GMT

In an unexpected turn of events I’m going to How to Change the World on Thursday. Will post about that on Friday.

Today I began, after a three month break, re-reading the novel I’ve been writing this year. It was daunting to start. But the bad parts are not as bad as I’d feared, and the good parts are better than I’d remembered. Negativity bias in action no doubt.

I’ve still got a few hundred pages to go, but I’m feeling better than the dread I had before beginning. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there. But the break has also allowed me to look at it with fresh eyes.

Dry November: Day 25

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 22:34:04 GMT

Learned a lot about power laws and criticality today. Most interesting was this idea that for communication to occur requires both variability and coordination. And that it might be a feature of systems operating near a critical threshold that information travels long distances efficiently through them.

Otherwise feeling a bit under the London weather.

Dry November: Day 24

Sun, 24 Nov 2019 21:48:52 GMT

I failed yesterday, or rather through rationalisation and deliberation decided to have some drinks at a pub, at a party. It was good to see everyone, a friend from New York, friends met in the Balkans. But my memory and the night’s memorability were reduced, so I must reduce again, reductio ad absurdum, return to resolution.

The wagon today moved slowly, of course, laden as it was with nocturnal impedimenta, though I’m still enjoying Byatt’s Possession. Now off to read a paper about criticality in the brain.

Dry November: Day 23

Sat, 23 Nov 2019 21:27:24 GMT

Today a discussion of pleasure ex negativo, of whether pleasure can be thought of as absence of pain. Seems plausible, though phenomenologically, when one feels pleasure it feels like a presence, not an absence.

Then again, there are at least two types of pleasure, the fleeting kind that comes from indulging a desire, and the longer-lasting kind that could be called contentment. Perhaps the former is best described ex negativo, the absence of craving, while the latter is a presence: satisfaction.

The WHO: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” And absence of sickness is not quite thriving, not quite flourishing, is it? It seems to me that positive flourishing, beyond just health, is possible. Perhaps beyond rude health too.

Eudaimonia isn’t mere absence of problems, nor is it merely happiness, but it entails action.

The question of reducing craving (swallowed bait?) might relate to the free energy principle, the idea that action is motivated by a desire to reduce uncomfortable energy, something like the libido, which Freud said was analogous to hunger. Hunger, too, feels like a presence, one which one wishes to reduce, rather than a lack, precisely.

Dry November: Day 22

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 18:59:29 GMT

Today thinking about Shakespeare’s Sonnet XCIV, which somehow reminds me of the chimp/bonobo divide.

I’ve also been discussing Sonnet CXXIX with a friend, about how it seems to nail dopaminergic impulses. “Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream” is pretty descriptive. Beforehand, one is sure one really wants to, and in the aftermath, one wonders what it was all about. I wrote a bit about desire with respect to George Eliot, and may need to think about that again through the lens of Shakespeare.

When it comes to my own desires, three weeks off booze has made it far less tempting, even when I’m with others who are enjoying it. It makes me wonder where this disinclination comes from. Is it that alcohol-adapted flora are dying off in my microbiome, and they cease to cause my brain to want to drink? Or is it that well-worn neuronal pathways just aren’t as greased as they normally are? Is there a moral element that comes to assert itself in defence of the actions I’ve undertaken, ex post facto? Or is it more like I have many consciousnesses, which cause me to behave in different ways, depending on the environment and interaction therewith?

Maybe they all amount to the same thing. In any case the not-drinking has gone well, though my mood hasn’t always been great. Otherwise I am greatly enjoying Byatt’s Possession, about which more later.

Dry November: Day 21

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 23:43:11 GMT

Another great day. Tonight I’m thinking about whether connectionism might be more true of “System 1” and computationalism might be more true of “System 2.”

In other words, what if most of our barely-conscious actions are intuitive, parallelised, and based on competing behavioural bids. But when we are forced to switch to System 2, this system is genuinely more serial and more like computation.

I know it sounds a bit tautological, but there are things I like and dislike both about connectionism and computationalism. I guess this idea amounts to little more than, “Might it not be both?”

Dry November: Day 20

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 21:04:32 GMT

Another day, another lime and soda in the pub, discussing the admin aspects of publishing, and other things literary. Otherwise I’ve been thinking about how we shorten our own lives through inattention.

We might be moving soon, meaning I may be out of Angel for the first time in over a decade. I have mixed feelings about the possibility, mainly due to physical laziness and a mild anticipatory nostalgia, but overall it’s likely time.

In unrelated news, at the gym today I tested normal back squats, at a fairly light weight, after doing overhead squats since August. My depth is much improved, though my better shoulder flexibility mean that the bar tends to slip lower on my back. Overall the overhead work helped mobility a lot, though.

Dry November: Day 19

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 00:36:49 GMT

And now the days are flying by. Good night, discussing Williams’ Stand out of Our Light with a larger group than usual.

He’s made me curious to read Harold Innis, Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, though I can’t say I’ve historically been too interested in media. But Laurence Scott mentioned several of these figures too on Russell Brand.

More than anyone, William James seems to crop up in all my reading, so I may need to go back to him before any of these other guys.

Dry November: Day 18

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 23:00:35 GMT

The paperback edition of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind came out a few months ago. For a little while now I’ve been lugging around a podcast with him from this summer, and today I finally got round to listening to it. I recommend it.

This interview was a lot less formal, and less specifically about the book than many of the podcasts and talks he did last year. (I attended one; I wrote about that talk, and his book, here.) It was more personal and more personable, less technical. Nonetheless it was quite insightful, and Pollan is invariably enjoyable to read and to listen to.

I liked his idea that a single question, in his case about man’s relationship to nature, defined his whole career, though he could not quite have known that at the outset — even though his first book contained an uncanny number of seeds for his later ideas. (He says offhandedly that Michael Lewis’ “single question” is about unlikely success stories.) I also liked his idea of his first book as a point in space, the second as another point, and from the conjunction arises a line, a sort of trajectory for the third.

He says he does a longform article on any topic he’s tempted to write about. After writing an article, he gets a fairly binary feeling:

“I’m so glad that’s over,” or
“I’ve barely scratched the surface.”

He says, as a friend of mine sometimes says, that most nonfiction books should really be articles or blog posts. He doesn’t undertake any book until he can see that there are many perspectives that a topic requires.

He feels himself to be weak on narrative. (So, incidentally, do I, about myself. I am inattentive to it, and perhaps this is one reason I like his style.) I need to think a bit more about his idea of the subject as landscape, the story being the path through it.

His claim that the construction of the first-person is one of the hardest parts — of which “I” to use, since we each have too many aspects of our personality to include them all — was fascinating as well.

Pollan wonders why more authors don’t use their own education as a narrative arc, as in his conceit of beginning as a naïf and describing his own learning process. I especially liked his impression (which I too have felt) that ideas are at their freshest and best when they are new to your mind. Afterwards, from a position of expertise, it becomes harder to describe, to recreate that ingenuousness.

Ericsson’s overview of deliberate practice has some insights into why this might be the case. But this also seems to be related to fact-free learning, a topic I’ve become interested in since a mention in REBUS, on the anarchic brain.¹ This is the idea that many breakthrough insights seem to come in the absence of any new information, and therefore may be actually from a stripping away of detail to reveal an underlying truth.

Pollan may prefer to write from the neophyte’s perspective because, at that stage, before he has digested the knowledge, he literally has richer information in his brain about a topic. Familiarity may be, in quite a fundamental way, a process of digestion, a simplification of the specific underlying knowledge into something more abstract and more general. It is not just that, as he says, people don’t like experts; it may be that a certain kind of expertise actually obstructs explanation.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, I first encountered Carhart-Harris’ work through Pollan’s book.↩

Dry November: Day 17

Sun, 17 Nov 2019 23:42:54 GMT

An extremely busy weekend. Lots of reading and writing. Dinner at Barrafina, houseparty last night, café, cocktail bar, and dinner today, offered booze at every turn. I managed to stay dry, though tonight I had a non-alcoholic beer. It did satisfy some part of the ritual, made it feel less of a privation to be out with people who are drinking.

Meanwhile my reading list grows ever longer, from other avenues. Marcuse, Fromm, Nagel, Hegel, Heidegger, Haugeland, Merleau-Ponty, more Schopenhauer, Kant. And that’s excluding the neuroscience and physics stuff I need to read before I can return to the novel.

Dry November: Day 16

Sat, 16 Nov 2019 19:41:53 GMT

Today I’ve been thinking through podcasts I’ve heard recently, Douglas Rushkoff and others, and catching up on comms. And sending out announcements; in a few weeks we’ll be reading this paper on criticality. With so much reading in the week I find it hard to make time for emails and WhatsApp, which is negligent.

Despite the social negligence, I’m now off to a party. Wish me luck.

Dry November: Day 15

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 10:17:04 GMT

Yesterday there was a fire in my building, which I forgot to mention. There were, apparently, six fire engines downstairs, and I could smell the smoke. There seemed to be no warning, I heard no alarms, but I thought of Grenfell, and thought I should at least get ready to go.

I deliberated a bit about whether to take my five dozen notebooks, the only thing that occurred to me might be irreplaceable. It makes me think I should probably get a fire safe for them. The digital stuff (on my home servers) is probably not perfectly backed up, but the most important among it is.

Otherwise, there’s little I’m likely to lose. I’ve noticed that when I’m away for a month or two, there is nothing I miss. We discussed this the other day, the question of whether people are owning fewer physical things, which I’ve somewhere heard termed “dematerialisation” (possibly by Pinker?) and which seems to be behind books like this.

People challenged my perhaps naive assumption; they said that people own more, though the stuff they own is undoubtedly cheaper, more easily replaced, and more expendable than it was a hundred years ago. But apparently there’s something to it, even if, in the grand scheme of things, this difference is insufficient.

By the time I’d prepared to leave, the fire brigade was knocking at my door; they were called at 10:40, and the whole thing was over by 11:12. They put a fire alarm in my flat.

California, where I’m from, has also been burning of late. I’m reading Taleb’s Antifragile, and have been thinking about whether he’s right, whether things must be allowed to burn occasionally, and imperfectly, to prevent later and too perfect conflagrations.

Dry November: Day 14

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 22:57:03 GMT

I spent some of today reading Stand out of our Light, a book about digital distractions which is available here for free here, which is for my book club next week. My Android phone had ground to a halt in recent weeks, so I wasted a bit of today wiping it. I then had to fiddle with it for a while, so in a way, today I too was dealing with digital distractions. But not really of the engineered-addiction type that Williams writes about.

When Williams asks me to reflect on what goals my technologies have, as opposed to my goals, I think of Linux, of vim, of git, of LaTeX, and I wonder what he means — surely their goals are to be good at what they intend to do, and they enable me to do what I’m trying to do. But that’s because they’re open source; there’s no profit motive. I know, of course, that what he’s really talking about is advertising.

It’s undoubtedly a minority position, but the concern about attention feels irrelevant to me. I personally have never felt more focused, nor have I felt less addicted to technology at any point in my life than I do now, even though I still sit at a computer for much of the day, and even though I’m posting here. My use of technology is deliberate and intentional, and though in some sense I fall ever more behind with reading as I discover how much more there is to be read, on so many more topics, I also spend more hours in “deep work” than I ever have before.

Most of this is probably to do with having a purpose, and my luck in being free from work, at least for now. When I worked in offices, I was extremely sensitive to messages, and my mental health suffered from it.

Now I have all notifications off, and leave my phone in “reading” (i.e., black and white) and airplane modes for most of the day. Around 7pm, after I’ve finished the hardest work, I’ll manually check messages and email, unless I’ve had something to coordinate earlier in the day. Some days I don’t get round to checking messages at all, and I seem to miss remarkably little. Sometimes I check Mastodon or certain lists on Twitter, but that only takes a minute to catch up on everything that’s going on, and it’s high quality conversation. Typically I go back to work until 1am or so.

In a way, modern tech is suited to modern work. I’m tempted to say more, but it’s late, I’ve been reading and writing for about twelve hours today, and I had better not.

Dry November: Day 13

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:57:04 GMT

Lovely dinner tonight with a friend, discussing many of the topics that have been on my mind lately: enactivism, learning, writing, note-taking, moments of insight, how fact-free learning might relate to decision tree pruning. She’s rediscovering fiction after lots of nonfiction, a balance over which I’ve been grappling too. We discussed chaining habits together, and habits as the path of least resistance — which seems to relate to certain notions about thought patterns (addictions, anxieties) as well.

Otherwise today I tangled with Ribbonfarm, Venkat’s take on ways to fall off productivity wagons, and why he recommends doing so. I can’t say I’ve fully grasped its implications, but attempting to do so has been interesting. I decided early on in the reading of the article that, within his schema, I’m a process-oriented disruptor, i.e., a hacker.¹ True to form, I dislike holy warriors, and occasionally slip into my “contrarian” evil twin type. I don’t think I fit into the reluctant hero’s tale pattern particularly though. But maybe that’s exactly the kind of thought that a reluctant hero’s tale would produce.

I do wonder whether the vagueness of such models doesn’t verge on astrology at times. Myers-Briggs has sometimes felt that way too.

Finally, I highly recommend the latest Lexicon Valley. Man originally meant human, woman is from wifeman (female human) whereas male human was were as in werewolf. Lord and lady come from loafward and loafmaid, revealing their rather untoward and unladylike feudal origins. And bridegroom was originally bridegoom; goom is related to human, but man is not, if I understood correctly? I won’t try to explain how person and people relate to French and Latin but it’s all fascinating stuff.

Given yesterday’s solution to how to keep a list of books, he may be onto something.↩

Dry November: Day 12

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 22:28:35 GMT

Another night in a pub on the lime and soda, seeing a few friends I’ve not seen in some time. Everyone is coming and going, leaving London or about to return, trips to Stockholm and South Africa.

I’m staying put, though I need to book flights to California sometime soon. Today I read Emma Darwin, Balzac, Taleb’s Antifragile. I listened to Robert Wright speak to Jack Goldsmith about his new book about Jimmy Hoffa, which sounds fascinating, and might be a nice break from the kind of research I’m doing.

Frustrated by half-complete lists of book recommendations across Workflowy, Zotero, text files, the Zettelkasten, and scraps of paper, today I also put together a SQL database to hold them in pretty little rows. It hooks into Zotero’s SQLite, and uses a list of names which I was already using for film recommendations. I wrote a short Python script to manage it, and it’s all working now.

+---------------------+---------------+-------------------+-------------------------------+
| Date                | Person        | Book              | Note                          |
+---------------------+---------------+-------------------+-------------------------------+
| 2019-11-12 10:50:40 | Robert Wright | In Hoffa's Shadow | From Hoffa podcast 2019-11-04 |
+---------------------+---------------+-------------------+-------------------------------+

That’s a joined up query; there’s a many-to-many table linking the list of people to the list of books and articles in Zotero’s SQLite database.

Dry November: Day 11

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 23:10:34 GMT

Dry in the pub tonight at Darkly as we discussed the ideas of Andy Clark — a really interesting discussion. It began with where to draw the boundary of the mind, and whether this could be usefully done at all. If the mind includes everything we come in contact with, doesn’t it lose all meaning? But some felt Clark was just pushing the boundaries out, showing that thinking doesn’t occur solely in our head.

Most didn’t like Clark’s rather naive assumption that interconnectedness would mean a bigger and better connected public sphere, and felt that instead surveillance had gotten stronger without improvement in civic engagement.

We discussed absolutism in digital domains, the ways in which extremism can grow, and may be fostered in echo chambers. We considered whether we select friends based on cognitive compatibility, and whether we can (or should) resist this temptation. Much time was spent on how far afield one can go in terms of confronting opposing views, and how communication differs among adults of different backgrounds, and between adults and children.

I was a bit disturbed by the notion that logic can’t properly be done without technology (i.e., paper). It seemed to me a blow against the enlightenment, against any attempt to ground the future in rationality. Descartes’ demon had seemingly sunk his teeth less deeply into the others, who felt that logic was possible without writing, And to them it was more obvious than it was to me that ponderous rational thinking is recent and tenuous.

Is writing a process of looping between mind and page? Can long composition happen at all in the absence of writing technology? Of course an oral tradition of literature can form, but perhaps it’s restricted to verse, and prose requires paper. Maybe writing is not so different from recitation, thoughts can be rehearsed and edited in conversation. The difference may just be in the speed of the loop: re-reading and re-writing can happen dozens of times an hour, whereas a conversation is unlikely to reach that level of refinement.

We grappled with Friston’s free energy principle, private language and inside jokes, and the sweet (or sour) spot we find with friends: familiar, but not too familiar. We like some randomness, but also efficient comms. We had one of our many goes at entropy, this time less steam-powered, based on ice in hot tea, and thought about how and whether to expose oneself to contradictory viewpoints.

We went on to deliberate practice, how it must necessarily be uncomfortable, and thought about whether genius might not be a practice rather than an attribute. Or perhaps it’s just a very high tolerance for discomfort? We thought a bit about whether it might be easier to incentivize better thinking at an organisational level than in one’s own mind, wherever that might reside.

And of course on Remembrance Day we spent a lot of time on memory, whether it was what separated us from computers. Artificial Intelligence came up quite often too, as it usually does: enactivist, cognitivist and connectionist paradigms.

Overall a great conversation, great people, great ideas. Next time will be our one-year anniversary, as our first meeting was on 26th November 2018. The group has been a really positive thing in my life, one to which I always look forward, one which has challenged me intellectually. I am better for it. I’m grateful to everyone who has made it possible, and I hope they’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.

Dry November: Day 10

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 22:53:37 GMT

Officially, I only made it nine days in. Yesterday I toasted a friend’s birthday with sherry, and had another drink later on. But I avoided most of the booze throughout the evening, and can’t do much other than to get back on the wagon, after having walked a few forlorn paces.

Today I’m still processing notes on Polanyi’s Republic of Science (1962, PDF). The section I can’t get over is here:

Consider, also, the fact that these scientific evaluations are exercised

by a multitude of scientists, each of whom is competent to assess only a tiny fragment of current scientific work, so that no single person is responsible at first hand for the announcements made by science at any time. And remember that each scientist originally established himself as such by joining at some point a network of mutual appreciation extending far beyond his own horizon. Each such acceptance appears then as a submission to a vast range of value-judgments exercised over all the domains of science, which the newly accepted citizen of science henceforth endorses, although he knows hardly anything about their subject-matter. Thus, the standards of scientific merit are seen to be transmitted from generation to generation by the affiliation of individuals at a great variety of widely disparate points, in the same way as artistic, moral or legal traditions are transmitted. We may conclude, therefore, that the appreciation of scientific merit too is based on a tradition which succeeding generations accept and develop as their own scientific opinion. This conclusion gains important support from the fact that the methods of scientific inquiry cannot be explicitly formulated and hence can be transmitted only in the same way as an art, by the affiliation of apprentices to a master. The authority of science is essentially traditional.

The idea that science is basically a tradition, more-or-less like a literary canon, fascinates me, and I think he is probably right. A canon doesn’t really exist as some list, but rather as a broad consensus passed through generations as a tradition — so too with scientific opinion, which is a consensus.

Moreover, though literature may not so explicitly train its acolytes to argue against it, I do think that people who undertake to engage with a literary canon are bound to challenge it in its particularities. To be fully onboard with any syllabus or canon seems to me to be evidence of not having really read critically.

Dry November: Day 9

Sat, 09 Nov 2019 12:33:32 GMT

On the whole it’s been a good week. Yesterday I finished Barney Norris’ Turning for Home which I thought was excellent. It’s quite moving, and in some ways reminiscent of John Banville’s The Untouchable, as well as Thomas Hardy (Norris names the latter a few times, and clearly knows Hardy’s poetry).

Other than that I’m still working through Polanyi’s ideas from a few days ago, and listening to The Knowledge Project.

Tonight I’ve got a friend’s birthday, a rather big one, so I’m steeling myself not to drink at that. But I’m looking forward to it and I’m not too worried, as I’ve been out with people drinking a few times in the past week and it’s been fine.

This morning I also wrote an update on my note-taking system if you’re interested.

Zettelkasten!

Sat, 09 Nov 2019 10:21:55 GMT

It’s been a month since I wrote about the adoption of a strange and intense note-taking system, so I thought I’d give an update about how it’s going. If you have no idea what I’m on about, please see that original post.

The Process

My current process is to take notes on paper, whenever I encounter ideas or they occur to me — reading generates the most notes, followed by conversations and listening to podcasts.

For reading, I paraphrase every idea I encounter in the text. Interestingly, it doesn’t feel that laborious. It takes longer, but it also produces a flow state rather readily. That means I’m more limited by time than I am by concentration. Paraphrasing forces me to realise when I haven’t actually understood the point the author is making.

During conversations, and while listening to podcasts or audiobooks, I also take notes on paper. As you might imagine, this produces a lot of notes. I’ve used whichever notebook was nearby, and in the beginning I was mostly binning notes once they were processed, so I can’t tell you exactly how much it increased my note-taking, but it has been significant.

I then take these paper notes and process (i.e., organise and type) them into a bullet-point list, usually in Zotero. This is equivalent to Luhmann’s literature notes and basically amount to “X says Y in chapter Z.” Probably significantly, I don’t copy the handwritten notes directly, but rather paraphrase and simplify them again.

Finally, I go through that list of bullets, and think through how it is connected to what is already in the Zettelkasten, creating new notes and links in the system as I think. This usually involves a third paraphrase and stripping down of the material. The experience really is more like thinking in writing than it is like writing or transcribing.

Since I am using the excellent Gollum, this can be done in any web browser. At the start, I mainly edited through its interface. Lately, however, I have been editing the Markdown text directly.¹

I manually maintain all links, forwards and (often) backwards. This means thinking at each stage how this is connected to another note, and how the other note is connected back. But not infrequently I will write something like “Heidegger [[12/26]] disagrees” and I don’t create a backlink from Heidegger’s note page because it’s not important enough (yet).

It’s also worth saying that I virtually never delete anything, even though the software (via git) would provide a record of any deletions. Instead, when I change my mind or encounter new evidence, I just append a new note to the existing one. In effect this produces a living record of my thinking.

The Stats

How many notes have I taken? I wrote a script that counts them up each day (and adds a bullet point to a note). Thirty days in, I have 802 notes, with 2,224 links between them, and a wordcount of 56,321. So on an average day I make 27 new notes, and about 75 links. I write just under 1,900 words per day in the system.²

So an average note is 70 words long, with a median of just 18 words. At the moment, the longest note is 367 words.

Why such short notes? Well for one thing, they are meant to be atomic. But quite frequently I make notes that are basically just bulletpoint links to several related thoughts. And I’m creating a note for every writer or thinker I reference — currently numbering 85 people, from Ahrens to Wright, with Chuang-tzu, George Eliot, Von Neumann, and plenty of my friends in between.

The Graphs

Even though Ahrens argues that there neither can nor should be any overview, I disobediently wrote another script to make an SVG image of it using GraphViz. I originally had it generating PNGs but they rapidly got too large. Here’s what the whole system looks like as of this morning:

Obviously it only shows the titles, not the contents of the note. Though my titles are not always strictly meaningful, attempting to summarise contents as concisely as possible also seems to be a good exercise.

Here’s a zoom into a random region:

As you may be able to glean from that image, it’s a random mix of people, notes from articles and books I’ve read, and original thinking.

The Benefits

The biggest benefit seems to be that a wider variety of thinking is closer to the surface of my mind at all times. I feel that I think more clearly and can make better analogies. I also feel more confident that I have mastered the material I’ve read (or alternatively, that I know when I haven’t understood, and need to learn more before returning to the material).

A second benefit is the serendipity that Luhmann and Ahrens predict. I often find notes that I’d forgotten about, either by a search or by realising that one note connects to another, then finding more links on that note. This produces novel and insightful connections.

The Concerns

The LessWrong post I read before adopting the system mentioned a concern that it might create biases in the types of ideas it produces. I was slightly worried about that, and recently had a discussion with the writer of that post here. We both agree that there’s a strong impression that this system has improved our thinking, without constraining its content or having structural effects.

I still worry that I may be producing too many “false positives” when it comes to analogies and metaphors. Then again, these analogies can always be revisited or revised. I’ve found that I often come back to individual notes to add arguments and contradictory evidence against previous thinking, in a much more systematic way than I’ve ever done before. This can only be a good thing.

Venkatesh Rao (of Ribbonfarm) raised a more serious concern in this 2016 podcast with Shane Parrish (of Farnam Street). He warns against the seduction of densely interconnecting ideas across domains, because it can create mental models so complex that they obscure reality and discourage reality-testing.

So far, this has not been my experience. I speak more clearly about my ideas, and have a better system for gathering and recording contrary evidence.

The Conclusion

I have found that the benefits of using this note-taking system to be immense, so far, and I intend to continue with it.

Have you written anything from this system?

Yes, starting in June 2020. Please see my current writing on ambition and the avant-garde, or on cultural evolution.

Update (November 2021): I wrote some more reflections after two years of using the system.

This is partly to have git commits that are more meaningful, as otherwise Gollum does a commit for every individual edit. Now I use vim directly, and commit big chunks of thinking in git at once.↩
Since I paraphrase, and virtually never quote anything verbatim, it is nearly all original writing, even when it’s more properly considered someone else’s thinking.↩

Dry November: Day 8

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 10:38:42 GMT

This week I listened to a podcast that James Clear and Cal Newport did together, on concentration and habit formation. Much of it was about the synergies between their respective books, Atomic Habits and Deep Work, though they also discussed Newport’s other books (particularly Digital Minimalism).

I’ve read three of Newport’s books but not Clear’s. Quite a few things interested me:

When Clear is asked about how to form a creative (deep work) habit, e.g. writing, he basically concludes: “You can’t.”

This is because creative acts are necessarily conscious, whereas an established habit is basically unconscious. (Merleau-Ponty would say that it isn’t even a mental kind of knowledge; it’s the body’s knowledge how to do something physical.) However, you can form the habit of physically getting yourself into the position to do the deep work.

“A habit must be formed before it can be improved.”

Often people start tweaking before a habit is fully-formed, which can endanger the habit.

Pros spend a surprising amount of time on their systems.

Newport reports that one of the most surprising things is how much time is spent at the systems level rather than the execution level. To put it another way: “The meta element is large.” This lines up with Karl Ericsson’s notion of deliberate practice; he says that experts continuously increase the complexity of their models and strategies (his overview is really worth it).

Newport suspects that deep work (which he also calls “the craftsman mindset”) is deeply satisfying because it delivers three things we seem to be evolutionarily wired to need:

(1) Mastery, (2) Impact, and (3) Autonomy.

Clear’s notion that “Every action you take is a vote for the kind of person you wish to become.”

And Newport’s corollary, that “Distractions may be troubling because they represent a vote against mastery.”

There are other interesting things in the podcast; the four aspects of successful habits, the balance between strategy and effort, the downsides of habits, “monk-mode mornings”. Highly recommended.

Dry November: Day 7

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 08:52:11 GMT

After a week without alcohol, I feel healthier and more content, more intellectually engaged. But as I said the other day I feel less social, and I’ve skipped a few writing meetups to think more.

Yesterday I read Michael Polanyi’s Republic of Science (1962, PDF), and could make neither heads nor tails of it. At first it seems he’s taking a Hayek line, arguing that scientific research operates according to market principles that ought not to be interfered with, but then he half-disavows that, and concludes somewhere in the territory of Isaiah Berlin’s positive liberty. I.e., that people need to self-actualise unidirectionally.

Surprisingly, he seems to think that individual agents working on their own independent “self-improvement” will lead to both the progress of science, and to a better society. Modernity (implied to be an absence of religion) will lead to an unmanaged tradition of science — much like a literary canon.

He goes on to describe an almost medieval guild-like system of master/apprentice relationships, which as a side effect produces a kind of spontaneous “scientific authority.” This authority is formed of a consensus, that will lead the progress of science in a totally unknown (possibly unknowable) direction. And yet he seems quite confident that wherever it leads will be good?

Though he never quite says it, he implies that the pursuit of science, unfettered by human meddling, will result in something like Von Neumann’s (wisely vague) singularity. In that sense, at times it sounds almost religious. I definitely agree with some parts of the argument and disagree with others, but as a whole I can’t quite decide whether I recommend reading it or not.

Dry November: Day 6

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 10:11:31 GMT

Today I’m thinking about a friend’s article on resourcefulness, which is great and I recommend reading it. In it, he argues that there are various ways to train one’s own decision-making and thinking.

I’m especially interested in the claim that roguelike computer games might be good for you. I agree with his sense that most games are something like trigger/response, and hook you via dopamine, without engaging much creativity.

A corollary to this could be that challenging games like roguelikes provide their pleasure primarily via serotonin, like other effortful activities (exercise, meditation). If that’s true, they might improve learning. I had forgotten (or perhaps never known) that Sebastian Marshall wrote a book on this topic, which I’m resisting the temptation to read today due to an already encumbered and delinquent list.

At first I was resistant to the idea that these games might be good for you, for two reasons:

I’ve spent plenty of time playing roguelikes, and don’t need excuses to sink any more hours in them.¹
It seemed like the choices in roguelikes are artificial and constrained, which doesn’t seem to map well onto decisions in real life.

Then again, they do emphasise lateral strategies, probabilistic thinking, and careful planning. They also readily produce flow states, and my friend believes that familiarity with flow states is itself helpful in producing this kind of concentration in the pursuit of other goals.

I also started thinking about the fact that choices in roguelikes are far less constrained than they are in that more familiar turn-based game, i.e., chess. Especially as the game progresses, you might have hundreds of options open during a given turn. You also take a lot more turns. Chess lasts roughly 40-80 turns, with a long game lasting maybe 300, whereas the average NetHack ascension takes 50,000 turns, with a record-settingly short game lasting 2,130.

This question has also made me wonder whether chess improves decision making.

Certainly I have the impression that chess is good for you. On the other hand, I’m not aware of chess pros being great at life in other regards (they may well be excellent, but I’m just not aware of it). Conversely I’ve never heard non-chess-high achievers, who routinely recommend things like meditation and exercise, recommending long hours of chess. I can think of a few who enjoy it, but I can’t recall any who are particularly evangelical about it.

It got me thinking about constraints in games in general. My intuition was that less constrained games must be better. Though I’ve never played either, I would just conceptually guess that Minecraft is better for you than Candy Crush. But is this true?

I must have started playing NetHack around 2004, when I first installed Linux. I was attracted to it because of its reputed difficulty. I ascended eventually in AceHack, a minor interface tweak to NetHack. Then I committed to beating the vanilla game. My only NetHack ascension was in 2012, meaning that it took me roughly eight years of (casual off and on) playing. I’m half-ashamed and half-proud to say that I did it in the office, and then had to spend a considerable amount of time explaining why I was so excited to colleagues, who could not have cared less.↩

Dry November: Day 5

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 09:04:04 GMT

I’m considering whether my life and mind have contracted from stretches of solitude. All I do is read and write these days, fast and exercise, and seem to wait. But what am I waiting for?

It’s not clear. I don’t do well in social situations at the moment — though since my early twenties alcohol had been a crutch in that regard, so going without it must leave me a cripple.

I’m developing ideas, and when I do speak to others, inept as I am, I am less inept if we speak along those lines, about abstract ideas. Even if it’s just an assemblage of the ideas that I (or they) have recently discovered, I find it much easier to interact. Conversations about the particularities of life, its incidents, or what I think of as content rather than meta-content (though perhaps pattern recognition, or analysis of content, is better) I find almost painful to discuss.

This doesn’t make me a very good friend. And most, even my closest and most patient friends, can’t quite see what I’m getting at, what precisely my ideas are. Which is fair enough. The ideas seem chaotic, when I talk of analogue and digital perception, of novelty and safety, of abstraction from particulars to universals, and how such acts of abstraction might be relate questions of physics to questions of sociology, or literature to philosophy.

Neither can the people in my writing group, who have had the misfortune to read an amorphous submissions package for the book. They think it sounds hard work, which it is, and some can’t see why it’s a novel at all, though at the moment that’s what it is. People at Darkly seem sympathetic to my aims, though my thinking must sound strange and disparate to them as well.

There’s nothing wrong with these people (perhaps you’re even one of them — if so my apologies for my recent social reticence, relative to recent years). They (and you) are intelligent and receptive, and give me every benefit, and still I can’t explain. The failure is entirely mine, both socially and in my inability to articulate what is inchoate in my own mind.

But there are a few interesting things about developing what feels like a big idea. One is that, though I cannot express it at the moment, it is clear to me that sometimes I am closing in, and at others I am drifting further away. This is how I feel while writing the novel too: I am not making up whatever I like. There is something in there, and writing is more like chipping away than it is like composing.

Another is that it is deeply fulfilling, animating my days and my dreams.

What I don’t know, and what most scares me at the moment, is whether what I unearth through this current effort will turn out to be the same thing I was attempting to dig out in the novel. When I see the big idea — or, more likely, bewildering network of ideas — will it be something entirely other than what I spent most of this year trying to do? Or will it bring everything together?

There is always the possibility that I’m merely losing my mind, and sometimes it feels like that, especially when I’m unable to articulate what I’m working on, what I have been working on for so long, to someone patiently listening.

But most times it doesn’t feel like that. It feels purposeful, and, however daunting, like there is something of value in the earth, and in its unearthing.

Dry November: Day 4

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 23:18:51 GMT

The fog may finally be lifting on my mind. A good day, mostly spent reading, with a bit of writing as well. Tonight heard Richard Beswick of speak about the process of being edited and published. To be honest it focused quite a bit on the acquisition/commissioning aspect, but that was just as interesting.

Also enjoying Barney Norris’ Turning for Home. More tomorrow.

Dry November: Day 3

Sun, 03 Nov 2019 17:25:29 GMT

Last night, the Arts Club, discussing Kaliningrad, the evacuation of East Prussia, the history of horror films, and more divisive topics. A dinner and celebration, the wine flowed, but I didn’t drink. We left just as the music got good.

Today, I felt like the weather, lacklustre and grey. Still, I got up and went out.

I sat in St. Luke’s Garden, and I finished reading the article on haptics. Then I thought about an article a friend wrote, especially whether roguelikes assist in decision-making.

I went to the Barbican to read some more, and sat outside by the water until it began to drizzle on my notes. Inside there was something called the Battle of Ideas Festival going on. It looked dubious, from the topics and the few names I recognised, and I couldn’t get a read on the type of people attending — were these academics? People interested in politics? Tech?

I tried to walk into one of the talks which sounded interesting, about whether we’re losing the will to read. They nearly let me in, but at the last second, asked for a wristband. No dice; tickets were £55 per day.

So I sat in the hubbub of the crowds outside the talks, and read Emma Darwin’s book. I’m greatly enjoying it, and her thinking at times is similar to some of mine.

Dry November: Day 2

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 09:49:24 GMT

This morning, though I’ve awoken late, I’m writing this post, then I’ll do some handwriting, then I’ll go to a writing critique group in Kentish Town.

The group has been a positive discovery for me, with great people giving earnest and thoughtful feedback. But it can also be overwhelming. Last week, on six pages I submitted, I received seventy-two different comments from seven people — or at least that’s how many I was able to parse afterwards from the notes I took.

I’ve been taking a lot of notes. Last night I was reading an article on the haptics of handwriting (which related to another new interest: enactivism). This is because I’ve been wondering whether there is an advantage to writing longhand, and if so, whether it is merely that the slower speed of handwriting forces paraphrasing over the verbatim notes of typing, as some have suggested, or whether there might hidden disadvantages, as someone else said some time ago.

In many ways it has been a year of writing. I’ve typed some 598,000 words of thoughts, another 170,000 in drafts of a novel, and around 42,000 in the new note-taking system, of which some have taken note. Then another 25,000 on this blog. I’ve probably forgotten to count a cache or two.

The handwritten stuff is harder to measure, but a brief calculation estimated another 130,000 words of thoughts in seven notebooks. Most of the ephemeral notes I’ve thrown away, though there are still stacks of those around me. That’s 967,000 total, so I’m comfortably on track for a million this year.

I have noted, too, that there are things I wrote last year that I’d write differently this year.

Dry November: Day 1

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 08:16:54 GMT

This year I am (if not fresh) than at least not hanging. It’s rainy and grey.

Last night I was reading Antifragile, about which I have mixed feelings, after finishing Omeros, about which I do not. The former is interesting and provocative, but I finished the latter in just a few days. Omeros is the masterpiece that was promised. I should say more, but I can’t; I’m still too moved by it.

I won’t say much today, as I have a lot I need to say later, not here, but elsewhere.

Last November’s commitment did not prove permanent. This year, my goal is different: To clear my head is primary.

Fiction ratio

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 09:50:43 GMT

Part 6 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview.

Or, how much fiction does a man need?

After writing about fiction for the past few weeks, I began to wonder how much fiction I myself in practice read. In my head, it was about 50/50. Luckily I log most book-length reading on my Goodreads (add me!) so it’s reasonably straightforward to count, and it was less than I expected.

Since about the end of 2016, I’ve logged 104 books. Of those:

37 are fiction = ~35%
67 are nonfiction = ~65%

This reminded me of something Philip Tetlock, in a nonfiction book, wrote about people describing odds:

But as researchers have shown, people who use “50%” or “fifty-fifty” often do not mean it literally. They mean “I’m not sure” or “it’s uncertain”—or more simply “maybe.”

Baruch Fischhoff and Wändi Bruine de Bruin, “Fifty-Fifty = 50%?,” Journal of Behavioural Decision Making 12 (1999): 149–63.

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Fiction and trauma

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 09:24:17 GMT

Part 5 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview.

The next claim, by Chad Grills, I found completely bizarre:

I completely agree, because I think a lot of fiction is created (and authors don’t want to acknowledge this) but fiction, the most popular kinds especially, are created when an author is, whether they know it or not, they basically are trying to resolve traumas in their past.

And they don’t want to talk about this, but it’s clearly the case that, if you have anyone who’s trained the least bit in psychology, they can look at fiction and basically see what that person was struggling with or where they’ve been hurt or where they’ve been abused. And this is great that the author was able to process that in a healthy way and turn it into art.

However it’s not so clear if it’s great for millions and millions of people to read this. Maybe it’s therapeutic for them. I tend to think that’s why books like Harry Potter are therapeutic; it’s because the author was trying to work through something through fantasy and many other people had to work through something similar. However, I think the risks of fiction go unacknowledged.

If I understand him correctly, he is saying:

A lot of fiction is written as a direct result of abuse or trauma.
Often authors won’t acknowledge — or don’t know themselves — that this is why they are writing.
Psychologists, on the other hand, can read fiction and easily recognise evidence of abuse in the author’s past.
It might be good for the author to turn their trauma into art.
But it’s bad for the general population to be exposed to this process.

I have so many problems with this.

The first claim seems to be saying that all stories are told as a result of trauma, which seems ludicrously reductive. Fiction, particularly if you extend it to all forms of storytelling, is capable of telling basically any story. A story of trauma, told from first-person experience? Absolutely. But once again, fiction can tell any story.

Now, it’s worth acknowledging that there’s a lot of dark fiction out of there, and that it can sometimes be extremely tempting to ascribe authorial experience to events. Is All for Nothing written as a result of trauma? It would be hard to argue that it wasn’t. The evacuation of East Prussia was extraordinarily traumatic, and the author was a child during the war. (Though equally he catalogued ten volumes of the suffering of others in the decades after the war, so one should still be cautious about how much trauma to impute to his personal experience.)

Dostoevsky? I’m with you. He writes such explicit passages of child abuse that they are difficult to ignore, difficult at times even to stomach. One is often left to wonder what he, the author, went through. But I would argue that we should resist the temptation to reflect too long on this, precisely because it’s reductive, and because the best fiction aims at universals. Whatever happened to little Fyodor — I would say in final analysis that it’s irrelevant — he left something of profound value behind.

And what about light, happy fiction? What about The Enchanted April? It seems more plausible to say that it’s written as a result of a rather enjoyable holiday than that it’s written as a result of trauma. Unless you count mild dissatisfaction with a comfortable bourgeois existence (depicted at the start of the novel) as “trauma” that the author needed to work through.

You could argue that there needs to be some kind of highs and lows in fiction, requiring conflict, learning, and goals. But does this amount to trauma? Does it not amount to a description of life?

The second claim — that authors don’t know why they are really writing — is just insulting. A novel takes at least a year, more commonly three, and sometimes eight or more to write, even by consummate masters. I won’t deny that authors will vary in their levels of introspection into why they are writing, but I think it’s at best uncharitable to assume that most of these people, during these three or six or ten years, haven’t thought about their own motivations more than any outsider has.

I disagree with the third claim too, that anyone with any psychological training can easily psychoanalyse someone (once again, from their fiction), and ascribe root causes in the author’s life. See, for example, this Sally Rooney interview in which she discusses how reductive it is to assume that all fiction is autobiographical.

For the fourth claim — that fiction is a good way to work through trauma — I don’t disagree that it can be, I just disagree that that’s automatically what it is. I can’t see why fiction (or any other form of art) could not be used as therapy. But to ascribe a therapeutic purpose to most examples of fiction seems perverse.

Fiction is a broad endeavour which many different people undertake for many different reasons. Storytelling is a human universal, a bit like physical movement. It would be like saying that when you see people exercise, a lot of them are just exercising because they suffered trauma. Also, they are too stupid to know that this is why they’re exercising, but if a psychologist watched them, it would be obvious to that psychologist that this was what was going on. Also, watching marathons (longform exercise) is bad for society. Maybe that’s taking it a bit far but you see the point, about warning against something (storytelling) that people do in some form every day.

The fifth claim, that fiction can be morally problematic, I addressed last time.

I’m somewhat curious about how one could arrive at such a reductive view, but I’ll resist the temptation to psychoanalyse the maker of this claim. I should also say that I have nothing against writing as a way of recording or working through trauma. And the cliché of the tortured artist can be hard to avoid altogether. Still, I don’t think trauma can fairly be called the root cause of “most” fiction.

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Fiction and morality

Tue, 22 Oct 2019 08:26:21 GMT

Part 4 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview.

Wiblin says:

I think people should be cautious about what fiction they read, because you have given access to this core part of your brain to an author who is only constrained by their own moral fibre.

I’m of two minds about this claim. On the one hand, I do think that what you absorb mentally has an effect, otherwise reading itself would be fairly pointless. And this effect can be pernicious, particularly if it’s the same thing all the time. Though the evidence is mixed, I think it’s fair to worry about daily exposure to high dosages of social media, for example.

On the other hand, even prolific readers are unlikely to only read a single author for hours each day, for years on end — the way they might with a single social media site, however often its algorithm changes. Particularly if one engages in a wide reading of the classics, one would be exposed for reasonably short durations to quite a range of thinkers, and my view is that this can only be a good thing.

Wiblin’s claim also sounds a lot like the same moral panics that have plagued society for centuries. They are well-documented from at least the 18th Century, and were levelled in particular at Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe. In fact, one name for the concept of copycat suicide is the Werther effect, named after Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe eventually came to feel quite guilty about this possibility. Might his writing really have increased suicides?

There is some evidence that fictional portrayals of suicides do increase suicides, though the effect was found with a film portrayal, which might plausibly have a stronger effect than novels. Moreover, a meta-analysis showed that the effect from fiction is outweighed by cases of celebrity suicides (14.3 times more likely to show an effect) and by reporting of real suicides (4.03 times more likely to find an effect).

If there is a problem with “copycats,” in other words, it seems to be one of reporting and exposure to the idea, and not with fiction per se. And even in the 18th Century, the media coverage of the suicides was extreme. There is sparse evidence that many Werther-related suicides even happened, but a ton of media coverage suggesting they had, which would make it difficult to disentangle the effect of the fiction from the effect of the reporting.

I should say, though, that I do think literature does get access to a “core part of your brain.” If it weren’t capable of changing your mind, it would probably not enable the increase in empathy that Wiblin also argues for later. And it might not be worth reading.

So I do think that literature can have a profound effect on your thinking — but then again, so can reading science and philosophy. One should be careful about immersing oneself exclusively in the worldview of a single literary misanthrope — but then again, that surely applies to misanthropic scientists or philosophers as well. I don’t think there’s much of a case for a generalised concern about the influence of fiction over nonfiction, and the few studies done in this area seem to indicate that nonfiction (if you include the news) might be worse than literature.

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Does fiction improve understanding?

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 17:13:35 GMT

Part 3 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview.

The World

Implicit too in Wiblin’s argument is the idea that all writing is intended to “improve your understanding of the world.” As I implied last time, with my point about the constraint on the believability of characters, it might be better to construe fiction as an attempt to improve your understanding of human nature, rather than of the world per se.

If that’s true, then it is not really important to distinguish between the true cases presented by nonfiction and the invented cases presented by fiction, provided that fiction gives insight into human actions. Fictional narratives must centre on human behaviour (even if they’re represented as ghosts, or rabbits, or whatever), which may give some insight into the evolutionary roots of narrative.

The inflexibility of narrative on this point is interesting: You simply can’t tell a story without human characters or anthropomorphising. It makes me wonder whether narratives didn’t arise first as a way of learning about human nature. Perhaps it was only later, through a hack, they allowed us to convey and absorb (and, perhaps most importantly, to remember) other types of information.

I think there’s also a further point to be made here, which is that a reader should not be too credulous when reading either fiction or nonfiction. In either case a work represents a single viewpoint, regardless of whether it invents a fictional world or presents a narrative about a large dataset.

You could argue that scientific papers are often co-written and peer-reviewed, but any novel in a bookstore will have been before dozens of pairs of eyes and many rounds of editing before it gets anywhere near a press. Novels (even in these waning days) are often more of a collaboration between an author and several different types of editors.

I have also argued elsewhere that a realist novel essentially is the analysis of a large dataset of human behaviour.

The Message

Wiblin makes the point that fiction could misrepresent a group of people as routinely doing terrible things, with the intention of turning sentiment against them. But nonfiction can do this too, simply by focusing on non-representative examples.

Any sufficiently large group of humans over a long enough period of time will contain true stories that could, in isolation, make members of that group look as bad as any fictional denunciation. Presumably these arguments would be more persuasive by virtue of the truth of the incidents.

This seems to align with one of Wiblin’s other points, which is that you should be aware of the writer’s biases before reading them. I have mixed feelings about this, which I’ll discuss next time.

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What is fiction?

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 15:48:16 GMT

Part 2 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview.

Scope of discussion

The first thing to notice is their reduction of fiction to modern Hollywood superhero movies, which is a very narrow subset of fiction. That’s fine as far as scope goes, but one cannot then make generalisations about “fiction.” It’s interesting that they immediately conflate the two, almost as if “this is now the only kind of story.” I find that quite depressing. To be fair, it sounds like it followed on from a previous they discussion they were having about Hollywood’s simplifying effect.

Still, it is a straw man, and makes their conclusion — that one probably right to be cautious of fiction — seem more justified. This is equivalent to restricting the discussion of nonfiction to autobiography, going on to point out that people can make unverifiable claims in an autobiography, and then concluding that one should therefore be cautious of nonfiction.

The issue is partly that the categories of “nonfiction” and “fiction” are so broad. If we add to Hollywood the classic and modern novels (and potentially the myths and religious texts), “fiction” quickly extends to include such a diversity of writing that it becomes closer to a medium (“writing” excluding a handful of early philosophical texts plus much recent science) than anything else.

Again, in their discussion they explicitly do not dismiss all novels, and say that many novels probably do teach people about life, and that most authors are well-intentioned. But still, it’s so broad that it seems like blanket statements at this level are unwise.

Exposure to false stories

Wiblin’s point at the start is that literature presents invented narratives, and the brain is not good at distinguishing between true stories and false stories. I agree with this and think it’s an important point. An invented narrative can lionise anyone or any kind of behaviour. The Turner Diaries, mentioned in a recent Sam Harris episode, comes to mind.

But here are a few other points:

Nonfiction (for example journalism) can take a rare or otherwise non-representative event and create a narrative around it. This seems (to me) little different from fiction.
Facts don’t really have any inherent story at all; the story comes at a later stage of presenting facts. To equate nonfiction with “unstructured set of facts” is also problematic, and potentially dangerous.
Even the driest nonfiction is will still need to use narrative.
Narratives can make information much more forceful and memorable.

As I suggest in #1, I don’t think that the constraint to correspond to something in the world is a strong one, given how random the world is.

It’s worth pointing out that literature, too, is constrained, though in quite a different way. Certain constraints vary by genre: what can happen in a realist modern novel is quite different from what can happen in science fiction.

Constraints like these are set quite early in a work of fiction. Thereafter they cannot be changed without a revolt from the reader. One can’t introduce a time travelling deus ex machina in the finale of a work of historical fiction, for example. It seems plausible to me that as a reader, learning to work out the “rules” early on in fiction could be useful social or even logical training.

But there are also constraints beyond continuity. Fiction is constrained by what is believable. These constraints apply whether the characters are millennials, or members of the Victorian aristocracy, or aliens. This leads naturally (though not inevitably) to a kind of archetypal storytelling, in which characters are understood to represent universals.

The novel can contain almost anything, but there are still constraints of continuity and of believability.

I would also claim that constraints of believability do not apply to nonfiction. In nonfiction, something can be reported by the mere virtue of its having happened. The news shows how this self-justifying tendency can become problematic, by leading people to become confused about which kinds of events are commonplace.

An aside

In an earlier post about when fiction began to differ from science, I said that the kind of fiction I’m most interested in is realist fiction. E.g., Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot. This discussion has got me wondering whether those authors aren’t better thought of as anthropologists.

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In Defence of Fiction

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 09:22:59 GMT

Yesterday I listened to an episode of the Mission Daily Podcast from May 2019. In it, Chad Grills interviews Rob Wiblin of 80,000 Hours. The episode was cross-posted to the 80,000 Hours Podcast.

The podcast as a whole is wide-ranging and interesting. The section I’m interested is about fiction, and it begins around 0:55:54. I’m planning to write a few posts about the six minutes that follow, and I will probably excerpt snippets from their conversation.

The overall takeaway from this discussion is that people should be careful which fiction they read. Neither Rob nor Chad advises people not to read fiction, but the sense is that because it is difficult to ascertain which fiction is good, or rather which authors are good, it might be safer not to read it at all.

I found this discussion really interesting. As a disclaimer, I studied English literature, have run a fiction-heavy book club in London for many years, and I’m writing a novel — so it should come as no surprise that I am rather in favour of literature. But I thought that Rob’s concerns were principled and interesting, and worth addressing. I don’t disagree with all of them. I also like the 80,000 Hours Podcast, in large part because of Rob, so it was personally fascinating to me that he doesn’t read fiction.

This post amounts to little more than a teaser at the moment, but I’ll update this section as I write.

Overview

1: In Defence of Fiction (this page)
2: What is fiction?
3: Does fiction improve understanding?
4: Fiction and morality
5: Fiction and trauma
6: Fiction ratio

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Posting Daily

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 16:24:14 GMT

I’ve let my daily posting lapse, in part due to adopting the new note-taking system. It might sound strange, but the system has been mind-bending and time-consuming to put into action, and I’m thinking differently about thinking as a result.

That post also made it to Hacker News via Mastodon, which was a nice surprise and led to a lively discussion.

Much of the thinking I was doing on this blog, “aloud” as it were, is quite nicely done within that system. The upside of the Zettelkasten is the lateral thinking; the downside is that the writing within it is not as polished as when I post it publicly.

I haven’t made up my mind about the relative trade-offs between public posting and private thinking yet. For now, I think I’ll resume posting every day, and see how I get on.

Originality

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 22:36:20 GMT

Why is originality so highly valued? What does it mean to be original?

If you’ve had a great idea, wouldn’t you want it to be related to a gamut of good ideas from other people, rather than being something totally unrelated to what has come before?

If it were totally unrelated, how could it even be understood? Aren’t all good ideas relational? What would Einstein’s formula mean, in the absence of ideas of what mass and energy are?

Or is it that originality of expression is valued? But surely that’s tautological — virtually all expression is original. Excluding quotations and plagiarism, it’s quite rare for even a phrase of any complexity to be repeated by another writer. A few sentences would be rarer still, and a paragraph must be astronomical. Anything longer than that would be pushing infinite monkey territory.

And yet I do feel the urge to say: “No, this is different. This is something that hasn’t been said before.” Whence this urge?

Zettelkästen?

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 20:24:48 GMT

Not a great word, is it? Neither is its most typical English translation: “slip-box.” In German, a “Zettelkasten” (plural Zettelkästen) is a box for holding index cards. Despite the sound of the word, I’m finding it a surprisingly good tool for tracking information and thinking.

Some brief googling, at least if your German is as bad as mine, will make it sound like a system of note-taking, with heavy linking between notes. My first thought (like many other people’s) was: Hang on, isn’t that just a wiki? But no, it’s more than a wiki — though it can be implemented in one.

Basically it’s a methodology for thinking in writing, developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. It combines note-taking while reading, a bibliographic system, and a separate system of heavily linked individual thoughts. He dreamed the whole thing up on paper between the 1950s and his death in the 1990s, with over 100,000 index cards. He credits the system for his productivity — he wrote some seventy books along the way — though nobody took this claim too seriously until the formidable collection began to be put online (auf Deutsch, natürlich, though a few have translations) in the past few years. That project is planned out to 2030.

Most of the writing about him and his system remains in German. The primary English resource is Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes (2017). It describes the Zettelkasten system as being akin to GTD, but better suited to knowledge work.

The book views academic/knowledge work as exploratory, in contrast to business, to which GTD is better suited because of business’ tendency towards pre-defined objectives. In that sense, you might say that Zettelkasten is to a wiki what GTD is to a todo list. Both are different ways of thinking about a rather flexible (potentially misused?) underlying tool.

I’ve had a go at implementing it in software, using Gollum (a git-based markdown wiki). The book also introduced me to the excellent Zotero (an open-source research tool) which is drastically better than my Goodreads/Workflowy hackjob for tracking my thoughts on books.

Although everyone seems to get hung up on Luhmann’s system of numbering and lettering items to link them together, that really doesn’t seem to matter all that much. Here’s how it differs from typical wiki usage:

Each “zettel” (aka note) can only contain a single thought. For index cards, that’s a limitation of its physical size. But software encourages short entries too, as well as the branching/splitting of zettels. This makes it unlike a Wikipedia page, which is more like a book chapter or article. You could think of Wikipedia articles as being molecular; zettel entries are atomic.
There is no automatic central index, and you refer to zettels by arbitrary slugs. You have to link things up as you think of them, manually, in both directions. You either have to search or traverse the tree a lot. This is by design and provides a lot of the benefits.
Massive interlinking. Of course Wikipedia does this too, but it’s interesting how manually maintaining links between single thoughts seems to accelerate lateral thinking and insights.
It’s intended to work similarly to your brain, and therefore Luhmann himself viewed using it as more like having a conversation with another consciousness than tool use. There’s a strong emphasis on serendipity of connections.
The size limit encourages the recording of inchoate thoughts, to be developed by their relationships. If they’re not linked strongly enough, they may be lost forever in the network. (Less likely in software, but still possible, if you forget to link/search. Also sounds sort of like your brain, doesn’t it?)
All this facilitates and encourages thinking directly in writing, so that the thought can be dropped totally, and resumed exactly as it was, picking up the thread from whatever zettel you left it in, regardless of how far you have developed the thinking.
There is a strong focus on spatially arranging the zettels in order to write papers or books.

If you’re not up for reading the whole book mentioned above (which is a bit long for what it is, though still probably the best English resource), there are a few other things online:

Here’s a LessWrong post that describes it (including the insight “I honestly didn’t think Zettelkasten sounded like a good idea before I tried it” which I also felt).
Here are two translations of Luhmann’s own brief essays.
There is also a Zettelkasten blog, begun in 2013, and therefore somewhat intimidating to navigate; probably best to start with the overview.

I’d be really interested to hear if you try it.

A big thank you to dredmorbius for posting this article to Hacker News! It made the front page, leading to around 10,000 reads of this article and many helpful comments.

Update (November 2019): I wrote a follow-up post after using this system for a month. I used the system to write some thoughts on ambition and the avant-garde, or on cultural evolution. I’m also starting a series on revolutions.

Update (November 2021): I wrote some more reflections after two years of using the system.

Systems

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 10:59:47 GMT

Like many nerds I’ve used many productivity systems, and naturally it all started with Getting Things Done. David Allen promised to provide a flowchart for life, capturing all the chaos, saving every fleeting thought, and reigning in forgotten commitments into a rational system. His promise is tantalising, and yet like many such mystics (Marie Kondo comes to mind) the fervour he inspires eventually succumbs to the entropy of the everyday.

Why is this?

Tools always look so shiny when they’ve not been used. And I’ve used a great many. Some I’ve tinkered with excitedly for a day or two before forgetting all about them; others I’ve filled until they’re bursting at the seams.

Long ago, I liked the simplicity of the text-based tools, like todo.txt, or a spinoff of todo.py that I hacked together, or the more featureful Taskwarrior. Now I use Todoist, and for some time I’ve been using Complice and Workflowy to manage daily todo lists — officially forbidden by GTD, but which have, for a period of a few years, worked quite well for me. In Todoist, on the other hand, I’ve hit the 300 item limit for the inbox.

All of these tools are great. Am I the problem?

One thing I’ve noticed about posts on this topic, even introspective ones that seem to get at the heart of the matter, is that (like me) people seem to get excited by a system for a while, then it seems to grow slowly out of control.

Too much attention to the systems themselves seems to result in indecision, and constant switching between them, which fails to confer the clarity that one seeks, and is frankly a waste of time. But even if one doubles down and sticks steadfastly to a system for a year, it typically still accumulates irrelevance, and, over time, becomes a mess. For me at least, this seems to happen regardless of whether I have a regular review — though of course it happens more quickly without them.

Maybe this is a normal cycle. There are lots of things we have to do periodically, but which won’t cause serious problems even if they’re not attended to for quite some time. Haircuts, for example. Or closets. It would be overkill to review all the contents of a closet every week, but if you never do it, it can take a kind of psychic toll, as Allen and Kondo no doubt warn.

Is this a problem? There are a few who write in defence of mess, at least in one’s office. As someone who writes in a slovenly room, this too is tempting: just let go.

When I was young, not having encountered such systems, I did just wing it, and for periods I probably did not even use a calendar. I certainly never reviewed notes. But without a system I missed opportunities. And I feel differently about non-physical systems, where ambiguity seems somehow more paralysing than does a mess in my physical world.

Maybe it’s just that productivity systems just need some attention every once in a while, and it really doesn’t matter whether you switch to a new tool or just declare a backlog, and clear out the old one. Maybe it’s like getting a haircut: you can kind of do whatever whenever, and the effects aren’t permanent anyway.

Or that’s what I’m trying to tell myself, as I agonise, like all the rest, over which one to do.

Fame

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 11:02:52 GMT

Last night, in a fit of insomnia, I found myself reading the 80,000 Hours Guide, which is an excellent resource for thinking about what to do or not to do with your life. Their advice not to go into the arts concerned me, however.

It’s not that the advice itself isn’t sensible. It is undoubtedly true that “the odds are stacked even against very talented individuals,” and, on some level, I must reluctantly agree with the pessimism of the article as a whole. The arts are certainly winner-takes-all, probably more so than they once were. The market is also shrinking, especially for writers of literary fiction.

It’s that the 80k article consistently equates “artist” with “entertainer,” which I think is unfair. The single mention of novels is especially exasperating:

While great art can entertain or improve those who receive it, there is already a great stock of art available for people to enjoy. For example, even if you write one of the best novels ever written, most people who read it would have been able to read a different outstanding novel in its absence.

This implies that novels are more-or-less interchangeable, and that their primary purpose is to entertain. I greatly disagree with this view of art. (So did Kafka, by the way, and for reasons I eventually intend to argue — though not here — make sense with respect to modern neuroscience.)

To be fair to the article, it tries to limit its focus to “musicians, visual artists, actors and fiction writers, and in particular attempts to become famous within these fields.” Fame is certainly the wrong reason to go into any field, and I am only going to discuss the writing of fiction. If by fiction they mean only mainstream genre fiction, the thrillers and romance on which billions are spent each year, then maybe they are right: it purports primarily to entertain, and producing more may not be humanity’s top priority.

But as I’ve argued, there are places where literature overlaps with science and philosophy — or at least it did so in the past. And I would argue further that the most important novels transmit, link, and preserve ideas, and also retain a record (in some respects more comprehensive than history’s) of the milieu and way of thinking at a particular period in history. Since history tends to repeat itself, both in ideas and in moods, this is important. And the importance of this is not reflected if one only considers how entertaining a novel is. Some of the best novels are not particularly entertaining, nor are they easy to read.

But they would be even harder to read if they were written as nonfiction. Entertainment and aesthetics are important aspects of fiction. Nobody reads Tolstoy’s straight philosophical works anymore, however insightful they might have been. But it would be absurd to claim that his novels are pure works of entertainment. They contain important philosophical and historiographical ideas which are an enduring source of provocation to every new generation of intellectuals. War and Peace is still getting new reviews arguing for its modern relevance, 150 years after its publication.

As a result of this, though it would be difficult to prove, I don’t think that nonfiction is as durable as fiction. Scientific ideas might persist, might eventually permeate. But they will not permeate humanity as quickly or saturate it as deeply as the equivalent work of literature. Furthermore, I suspect readers rarely resort to the primary sources in science or history, preferring to have them summarised, unless the author happens to be a brilliant stylist. Probably more people read Milton’s Paradise Lost every year than Newton’s Principia, even though they are roughly the same age, and the latter may have been dramatically more important for the trajectory of humanity. And if members of the public still read Darwin, it is not strictly because of his ideas, but because of his literary abilities.

Of course it would be reductive to argue that novels always care about transmitting ideas. Tolstoy and Milton represent the highest bars there are for writing of any kind. And yet to dismiss fiction as being about entertainment is to truncate, at a stroke, some of the greatest thinkers in history. More importantly, not to invest in literature going forward would represent an enormous loss in cross-domain thinking. A novel, after all, can contain anything and everything that’s in the air, and is not subject to the rules of science or attribution, which I would say is a strength.

A final reason to write may be that some people just can’t help it. A defence of this nature comes from the unlikely source of the economist Tyler Cowen:

One good reason to write a book is when you have the feeling you cannot do anything else without getting the book out of your system. In that sense, you can think of the lust to write books as a kind of disability.

Consider me disabled.

Feelings

Sun, 06 Oct 2019 15:52:06 GMT

Lately I have been thinking through Derek Sivers’ idea (well worth reading) that you ought to write things down because it’s hard to remember how your previous selves felt about the states of your previous worlds:

We so often make big decisions in life based on predictions of how we think we’ll feel in the future, or what we’ll want. Your past self is your best indicator of how you actually felt in similar situations. So it helps to have an accurate picture of your past.

You can’t trust distant memories, but you can trust your daily diary. It’s the best indicator to your future self (and maybe descendants) of what was really going on in your life at this time.

I think that he’s right, in the sense that feelings are ephemeral, and often surprising, when written down and read only a week later.

To this end, I’ve been keeping a log each day of the thing most worrying me on that day. Checking it the next week shows that virtually none of the things I worried would happen were borne out; most are totally irrelevant within a week, which gives some insight into the utility of worrying.

Though of course feelings don’t feel ephemeral at the time. They can dominate experience.

This makes sense, as they probably evolved to provoke some kind of basic action, and are crude tools in this respect for modern life. They are shared at least with other mammals, and the more primitive ones are likely also shared with reptiles.

Maybe some feelings provoke a reaction there and then, and, having served their purpose, are thereby rightly forgotten. Other feelings persist, perhaps because the reaction they were intended to provoke is frustrated in some way, and maybe the duration for which they hang around determines how easy deeply they imprint the mind. A first heartbreak, for example, or a terrible boss. Then the memory remains here and now.

But there may be other reasons that most of our recollection of feelings is unreliable. One, as the Buddhists have long been fond of noting, is that despite its persistent illusion, the self does not itself persist through time.

The other may have to do with memory. If memories are the mental structures left after a process of discarding irrelevant details, as I’ve started to suspect, then emotions (which, as suggested above, are rather better suited for immediate action) are some of the first things to be stripped away.

There seems to be some disconnect here. Sivers’ contention is that it is important to remember how we once felt, since our memory is so bad. But implicit in this thinking is that it matters how we feel. Buddhists, Stoics, and probably CBT would say that feelings have little or no veracity, no meaning in themselves. If that’s true, it would be better to regard them as passing like the weather, and in that sense, maybe not worth remembering.

And yet I can’t shake the feeling that Sivers is right, and that we ought to make some attempt to fight the faultiness of memory on this point. Maybe recording in writing and recalling in reading will ultimately reveal how transient feelings really are.

But maybe building a bastion against time’s erosion, however inevitable, is an act that is in itself worthwhile. One would not refuse to start a project just because that project will not persist for all eternity. Perhaps consciously engaging in long-term thinking, even just on a personal level, is virtuous.

Or maybe even if feelings (and memories of them) are unreliable and crude, they still contain important information. Maybe it is the fact of their tendency toward domination that makes predicting them important.

Relaxed Beliefs under Psychedelics

Sat, 05 Oct 2019 14:50:37 GMT

Robin Carhart-Harris, whom you might know from Michael Pollan’s book, may have done it again.

In 2014 he wrote the insanely insightful Entropic Brain paper, which everyone, regardless of interest in psychedelics/neuroscience, should read. It’s that good.

Now he’s written the rather less beautifully titled REBUS paper (“Relaxed Beliefs under Psychedelics”), and so far it does not disappoint. Here’s a sample section that I’m still thinking about (BMR = Bayesian Model Reduction, BMS = Selection):

BMR is a particularly intriguing form of BMS that is likely to play a central role in brain development, e.g., in the form of synaptic pruning (Piochon et al., 2016) and formation of small-world architectures (Avena-Koenigsberger et al., 2014). In brief, BMR is the hypothesized mechanism via which high-level models are stripped of their redundancy so that simpler, more refined solutions may be revealed. Again, we see the theme of complexity minimization and compression in play. In this setting, one can refine high-level models or narratives to make them simpler by removing redundant parameters, thereby revealing the underlying core structures and manifolds. Crucially, this mechanism can proceed without the need for new data (fact-free learning) and is thought by some to be the purpose of sleep and accompanying synaptic homoeostasis (Hobson et al., 2014).

In other words he’s arguing that moments of insight come not from new facts, but from the stripping away of detail, to reveal underlying structures. This relates to my interest in induction. I suspect that induction requires a period of exploratory gathering of data, followed by a period of outwardly inactive “stewing” — after which a pattern emerges. Critically, these patterns are recognised by the subconscious, not the conscious, mind, which is why the insights seem to come out of nowhere. And these insights have less information, not more, than the stimuli that provoked them.

I also wonder if a similar process isn’t going on with mastery. Learning seems to involve a process of apprehending that there is something out there to be learned, followed by increasing attention to that object, then eventually a decreasing amount of attention to the object once it is known, with a concomitant loss of detail. These stages each seem quite separate to me. Carhart-Harris divides the first two stages in terms of “explorative search” (which dominates in childhood) and “exploitative search” (preponderant in adulthood, both facts probably relating to the formation of the default-mode-network).

I still need to think about the explorative stage in light of Agnes Callard’s points about aspiration.

Anyway, during learning, an object increasingly dominates consciousness, but eventually the level of detail falls away. Once it is mastered, it becomes “part of the landscape,” which can also mean that it’s harder to articulate. (Think of asking pro athletes precisely how they did something, or the speed with which you recognise a familiar word in your native language.)

Perhaps there is a neurological basis for this: during learning, you’re forming new synapses. But mastery is a stripped back, compressed (therefore more efficient and less entropic) version, having lost most of the detail gleaned along the way. Autopilot; part of the landscape. I also wonder if this isn’t how memories simplify.

Perhaps the types of platitudes he discusses under psychedelics (“Love is everything”) also relate to near death experiences (like when Andrei falls and can think of nothing but “that lofty infinite sky” in War and Peace). And perhaps this loss of detail could also explain the platitudinous ring of some interviews with consummate experts in various non-speech-related fields.

I have a lot more thoughts on this paper, which I’ll probably need to re-read a few times. If you’re in London, we’re discussing it on Monday in Angel.

Observation

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 10:58:03 GMT

I have a theory that it is in the act of observation that philosophy, science, and literature converge. They all require prolonged, repeated exercises of induction. But first let me backtrack and explain how this all came about.

I’m still wrangling with Seth Godin’s provocation to post publicly every day (would it better be called an avocation?). I’ve been doing this here for about three weeks, with mixed results. Godin argues that blogging every day is the best way to become better at “noticing,” which sounds to me suspiciously like induction. Also, Godin sometimes introduces himself like this: “I’m Seth Godin and I notice things.”

It may sound like a tangent, but I wonder whether this introduction wouldn’t also suit Schopenhauer. I read the Essays and Aphorisms last year, and this seems to me to be a good example of devoting decades to deliberate observation.

Philosophy as a whole once had more interest in determining what the good life, or eudaimonia, might be, and (at least for some philosophers) this was based on an observation of what works and what doesn’t.

Science takes for its object the material world, according to a method which any educated person will understand in principle, but which is so rigorous that it often defies practice. (Most experiments are not being replicated, for example.) But it is clear that observation is intrinsic for it to work.

Literature might seem more of a stretch. It examines human behaviour, which resists measurement in a way that material does not tend to do. Or at least, to stipulate scope, the nineteenth century realist novel seeks to examine human behaviour. For this kind of literature to work, the characters and situations must be truer than true. And as literature takes not material but human behaviour for its object, this can only be done after observing humans for extended periods — just like some of the soft sciences.

For much as we might wish to reason a priori about how humans behave or ought to behave, every endeavour to do so from an armchair, at least of which I am aware, has failed.

But literature succeeds. The best nineteenth century novel is something like a vast, lifelong scientific experiment, including innumerable observations, with everything but the “discussion” and “conclusions” sections left out. This is why they (like many of the best works of science) are still read. They are brilliant acts of induction.

In this the Victorian novel is unlike poetry, which is direct transmission of individual experience and emotion into another medium, and therefore more akin to music. (This might even be an idea of Schopenhauer’s.) Because it requires an unfiltered access to one’s own experience, and perhaps even myopia, narcissism, or lack of empathy (here I am thinking of the heights of Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Mozart), poets and musicians can peak at an earlier age. This is not to say that poetry is not universal — it is — but it reaches its universals through simplicity and specificity, rather than through the complexity of induction and analysis. The “conclusions” section of the best scientific papers is also simple, but it was not arrived at simply.

The classic novel simply cannot be written in the absence of experience, or in a vacuum — I am thinking now of the dullness of Charleville, which Rimbaud so deeply despised, even as he proceeded, in the dullness of this youth, to surpass every previous poet, but after a few minutes of searching I cannot find his amusing acrimony to quote here. Instead, the novel must be based on long and dogged observation. It is therefore best written by the old. (I might even argue that many of the classic novelists reached their heights only in late middle age, and their zeniths only shortly before their deaths.)

But what has all this to do with Schopenhauer? As R. J. Hollingdale argues in the introduction to his translation of the Aphorisms:

Schopenhauer is not difficult to understand provided one knows first something of the problems German metaphysical speculation was engaged in during his lifetime, and then something of his own background and experience.

The combination — personal problems and subjective attitudes expressed in the language of metaphysics — is of the essence. Much of what in other nineteenth-century literatures went into novels, plays and poetry, in Germany went into philosophy, and this includes much of what was most original. There are no doubt other reasons for this, but one reason is certainly the overwhelming presence of Goethe.

Fascinating stuff. The argument is that Goethe cast a shadow so vast that would-be poets and novelists were forced to find their place in the sun as philosophers. He continues, rather beautifully:

The middle decades of the preceding century had been barren, but only in the way a field in spring is barren: the seed is down but it is not yet time for the harvest.

In due course the harvest appeared, and Goethe reaped it all. In every category of ‘literature’ as usually understood he supplied the model instance: Wilhelm Meister was the model novel, the first part of Faust the model play, Dichtung und Wahrheit the model autobiography, the Italienische Reise the model travel book; Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe — the ‘best German book’ in Nietzsche’s opinion – is the German equivalent of Boswell’s Johnson; the collected letters, which number over 13,000, is incomparably the greatest collection of its kind; and in poetry the comprehensiveness and size of his achievement threatened literally to exhaust the capacities of the German language, leaving nothing more to be done. One effect of all this was to drive original intellects out of the conventional literary categories into other fields, especially the field of philosophy, which Goethe had not harvested; and so it is that the world figures of German literature in the age after Goethe are not to be found among novelists or poets or dramatists, but among philosophers: Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche are the German peers of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Flaubert, Dickens and Mark Twain.

This is not just a mind-blowing argument, but it seems to indicate to me that there is no fundamental difference between what the best minds in literature, science, and philosophy were seeking to do, at least until the nineteenth century. Science was not even consciously distinguished from philosophy until around that time.

Tolstoy, though, would already not have liked to be lumped in with the scientists. Science, he felt, was already beginning to diverge from its inductive inception, and to become somewhat more authoritarian:

These new justifications are termed “scientific.”

But by the term “scientific” is understood just what was formerly understood by the term “religious”: just as formerly everything called “religious” was held to be unquestionable simply because it was called religious, so now all that is called “scientific” is held to be unquestionable.

and

Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.

And yet it seems to me that literature and philosophy, at least in their older senses, could be said to be different attempts to answer the only question that interested Tolstoy:

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: “What shall we do and how shall we live?”

The scientific method is at heart, anarchic — i.e., the opposite of hierarchical — because anyone is welcome to undertake a challenge to any previous theory, without either side appealing to authority, simply by repeating an experiment. Through this repetition of experiments, eventually an induction about the truth can be made. As we have seen in the past several centuries, no assumptions are beyond challenge, even those most fundamental to earlier scientific understandings of reality.

Finally, on the connection between Schopenhauer and Tolstoy. Andy Miller, in The Year of Reading Dangerously, argues:

But the one book which most affected the final shape of War and Peace was Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation; the German philosopher’s most renowned work.

‘Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I’ve never experienced before,’ wrote Tolstoy to a friend while he drafted the closing sections of his book; he openly acknowledged that the philosophical conclusions of War and Peace, especially the long passages concerning history and the will of the individual — the actions of so-called ‘great men’ and those of the multitude of people — derived from Schopenhauer.

I argued once, many moons ago, that Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is the unsung influence on the final shape of War and Peace. Many have remarked that Tolstoy read it, but no source that I could find analysed in detail the vast number of parallels in character and plot. (A few in more recent years have cottoned on.)

Miller and I could both be right; I said that Thackeray mainly provided the incidents (parties, jealous rages, duels, and so on) and characters for War and Peace, whereas Miller argues that Schopenhauer provides the ideas. I have a further theory, yet to be fully articulated, that plot/incident/character are relatively independent from the ideas in the classics—and that it is their willingness to deliver the goods in both domains that makes them classics.

But I’ve written enough. The main question now is: What makes us think that there are hard boundaries between philosophy, science, and literature?

I am, by the way, not the first to wonder about this.

Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 23:26:42 GMT

I recently learned about the distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence. The former sounds something like induction, thinking on the fly, comprehension, problem-solving, and learning, while the latter is about making deductions, and using accumulated knowledge. Studies have shown that the former peaks around 20, while the latter can in principle increase indefinitely.

It was mentioned in an offhand way on some podcast, possibly Sam Harris’ conversation with Judea Pearl. The idea that there is an age-determined apex has been bothering me since then, for a few reasons.

One seems obvious: I’m over a decade older than the proposed peak, and unlikely to reclaim much youth. So perhaps I’m naturally resistant to the idea that I’m in cognitive decline. Interestingly, though, I do know a few very intelligent people around my age who feel that they did peak at 20. (Though we disagree on whether we’ve peaked, we do agree that it’s not a happy prospect.)

But what bothers me more is that fluid intelligence doesn’t just refer to “raw compute,” at which I might (grudgingly) admit I’ve regressed. Learning and comprehension, too, I might be persuaded were easier, once upon a time.

But the idea that I’m worse at induction runs quite contrary to my experience. Personally, I don’t just feel that I know more than I did when I was 20, but that I am better at making abstract connections, even ones which depend on induction. (Then again, the wikipedia page lists analogies as relating to crystallized intelligence, so maybe what I’m referring to really is part of that more resilient part of intelligence.)

Or maybe I am worse at induction than I was then. It’s hard to say, given how hard it is, with my ageing brain, to remember what happened last week.

Anyway, the podcast made me wonder whether we hadn’t been discussing different kinds of intelligence, my friends lamenting one crumbling capacity, and I assuring them they could and should expect to grow sharper—in another.

They Shall Not Grow Old

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 21:08:37 GMT

On the plane home I watched They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s documentary about World War I. Though the title was vaguely familiar, it was not until I saw the colorized footage that I remembered having heard about it. It focuses on the British experience of the Western front, though it does not announce this too clearly at the start.

Nonetheless it is a powerful documentary, and I highly recommend it. It brings the grim reality of WWI to life, by cleaning up and colorizing the images, as well as fixing the jerkiness associated with lower frame rates. This makes the scenes look thoroughly lifelike, as if they had occurred in the recent past, rather than over a century ago.

The end result is haunting, a bit reminiscent of The Great White Silence, in how vivacious and optimistic the doomed men at first appear. But there is some a dissonance between the recorded voiceover and the footage, because (by definition) the voiceover was recorded by the survivors. The footage, unsurprisingly, shows a vast quantity of the dead.

I found it a little disappointing that the documentary lacked all specificity about which battles or years the narration described. Jackson wanted it to be an overview of what life was across the Western Front, and in that sense it succeeds. He apparently said enough books had been written on each battle.

But especially after the opening comments, to the effect that every year was drastically different from every other, I could not help wishing for a bit more detail about what part of the war was being described. One soldier said that a soldier from 1914 could not have recognised 1917, but it was never explained precisely what had changed, beyond implying that they had gone in with high spirits and faced a very different (though not always negative) reality. He seemed to be saying something much stronger than that, but the documentary does not delve that deeply.

This risks giving the impression that the experience was fairly uniform. On the other hand, the documentary describes and depicts many details that are glossed over in more traditional accounts like The Face of Battle or The Storm of Steel.

One thing that fascinated me was how aware the British were of which specific Germans they were fighting at any given time. They liked the Bavarians, and considered the Saxons almost British, but greatly disliked the Prussians—as apparently did Germans from other regions. I would not have expected them to know much at all of the individual soldiers’ origins, but I suppose regiments were organised by region, and there were enough bilingual soldiers that information could be got from POWs.

The total refusal of civil society to discuss the war in its aftermath was also quite interesting. I would have not expected there to be such silence, especially given how much weight it is given in current British discourse.

It had not occurred to me that returning veterans would have been despised, or that nobody would have been interested in their accounts. It was also interesting how uniformly they felt that the Germans wanted the war to end, and how deflating, and in some cases disappointing, the end of the war was for some of the British soldiers.

Home

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 14:02:44 GMT

I’m ready for home, however humble.

My siblings and I sang a song from childhood this weekend, a song itself about what is lost in childhood, called “My Home”. It asks what makes a place home, or an ancestral home. It’s elliptical, evocative, and hits home the question of origins, of where one is from, and whether one might also belong there.

It’s clear that New York’s not my home, a song they didn’t seem to know. Its lyrics half-capture New York’s anonymity, but half of its power lies in Croce’s tone of longing, which varies so little between his songs.

London feels like home to me now; could New York feel that way? From outward appearance it seems unlikely, though I can’t say why. But maybe in my first visits to London, I could not have conceptualised it as home either. And it no longer feels so stable a home as it once did.

It makes me want to find my writing from then, from 2006, when I first visited London as a tourist, to see what my impressions of the city were like.

Walking

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 13:52:48 GMT

In New York we’ve walked a lot: 7.34 miles, 8.03 miles, 10.12 miles, 11.43 miles. Not as much as we did on the Camino of course, and less encumbered, but we’ve still done some distance.

I’ve been wondering about the link between thinking and walking, which I discussed at the end of this post. Must one walk solo, or in nature, to benefit thinking? Would a group trek across a city provide a different kind of benefit from a hike on one’s own?

Or is there a point beyond which the walking actually impairs one’s ability to think, through exhaustion? Is that limit relatively stable, or would it increase as fitness increases?

Visions

Sun, 29 Sep 2019 15:01:05 GMT

I dream more under certain conditions. When I travel, when I sleep in, when it’s warm, my dreams seem to become more monumental. This morning, in the warmth of a lie-in in an unfamiliar room, I dreamt of being in an enormous theatre, which projected a movie onto a screen far above the reclining seats. The ceiling was several stories away, and yet the image projected was so tall and wide that even flat on my back I could see neither the bottom nor the top of it.

The image was of a mountain, cloaked in mist. The only other thing that I knew in the dream was that the film about to be shown was related to one of two important research projects that I was working on.

In waking life I’m not doing any research. If dreams are a side effect of integrating new memories and experiences, making new neural connections, then it makes sense why travel would stimulate more of them. And something about the lightness of late-morning sleep seems to reveal them, to bring them closer to the surface.

But I’m not sure why the temperature would matter. Maybe I’ll sleep in at different temperatures, to see if affects the vividness of my dreams.

Density

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 15:14:57 GMT

We’re still trying to work out what it is that separates the feeling of New York from cities like London, Paris, Chicago, Berlin. The density seems to be part of it. Most European cities have a separate historic centre from commercial centre, and those two are separated again from the densest residential areas. Much of Manhattan feels dense in all three dimensions.

There is something about the quality of the sky, as well, which we can’t quite work out, how it seems to loom so large despite often being blocked out by the height and sides of the buildings. Perhaps this is due to the variance in their heights, that their verticality draws the eyes up, towering as they do over the low-rises. And yet we felt this expansiveness as soon as we landed, before we were amidst the tall buildings.

I think the density and diversity of the populace seems to make a difference too, that people seem to be doing such different types of things, for such different reasons. And yet they co-exist. This diversity of intentions seems to contribute to the sense of anonymity, which is somehow liberating. Though again the overall feeling is not quite one of liberty, but of possibility.

New York

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 15:10:52 GMT

New York has all the energy I remember, but it’s hard to express exactly what this is, or how it’s perceived. There’s a hum throughout the city, which I remember from first feeling it a few decades ago. London, even in its most exultant moments, never has it in quite the same way.

There’s still a sense here that anything could happen. And yet there’s no guarantee that this unspecified thing, whatever it is, will be good. New York feels less safe than London, more wild, and yet not exactly more free either. It does not feel that I could do whatever I want, but rather that anything could happen to me.

Perhaps in its unfamiliarity it feels more anonymous than London as well. We spoke of an Tom and Jerry episode, and of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. Even Taxi Driver still somehow resounds. We overheard a conversation about it, and discussed how American and European intellectual interests diverge.

Priorities

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 14:55:37 GMT

As I write this I’m on a flight to New York to see family, in particular my brother on his birthday.

On the flight I listened to several podcasts. The most interesting was Robert Wright’s interview with Agnes Callard (mp3) about akrasia (acting against one’s own intentions and interests) and aspiration (trying to change one’s interests), two topics quite close to home for me. The question is how it can be the case that part of us wants to act but another part prevents us from doing so, and how we can aspire to possess values that we do not yet possess. It seems wrong to say that we must always have had the values, but equally it seems wrong to say that they came entirely from our environment, or that we can dream up whatever we want. Fascinating stuff.

Tim Ferriss’ panel on psychedelics was also interesting, though if you’ve read Michael Pollan’s book, it’s not too much of an update. (mp3). I was excited to hear Robin Carhart-Harris, but he actually didn’t speak all that much. I’m planning to read his new anarchic brain paper in the next few weeks.

On the plane we also had a good discussion about James C. Scott’s notion that domestication is not necessarily a thing that humans did to plants and animals, but possibly just a side effect of dense agrarian cultures (i.e., we would expect similar effects in humans). There’s some evidence that this is happening, and the discussion today was about whether human brain sizes will shrink (as domesticated animals’ brains apparently have done).

On a related note, we discussed the correlation between brain size and intelligence. There can’t be a strict correlation, but it also seems like there must be some correlation, otherwise human brains wouldn’t have grown at the expense of child and maternal mortality, which is much higher in humans than it is in animals.

Too Articulate

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 19:32:50 GMT

Not that I “talk too wise”, but that I write too much, and in too many places.

I’ve just finished writing about Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing, which I loved. Please read what I wrote.

But this is a meta-post about why I posted it there. After all, I wrote that review on this blog. Then I decided to post it instead both on Medium and on my other blog.

Museless Aiming was my original blog. In some form, I wrote there since 2006, mostly reviews of films and music. In its earliest incarnation it was a static site generator that I wrote myself, before I was even aware of Markdown. Later, in 2013, I migrated it to WordPress.

This blog, i.e., Clerestory, was originally at write.as, which I liked for its simplicity. But then I discovered GatsbyJS, and preferred it for its usage of git.

In the end I’ll probably need to tear down one or the other. I like Gatsby enough that it’s probably going to be the other blog, though that will mean (without further work) the loss of comments and other dynamic features.

So maybe I’ll consolidate everything from 2006 onwards into one Gatsby site. But for now I’ll keep posting in random places, I think.

Inarticulate

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 17:12:43 GMT

I’m uncharacteristically inarticulate today, and not my usual inexhaustible self. I’m writing about Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing, and after that I need to write about Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word. But whether as a result of exhaustion or just the two books’ gravitas, I’m having trouble expressing how meaningful they were for me.

Both are staggering works of research, genius, and empathy.

The former is a novel about the evacuation of East Prussia. Its dozens of characters, drawn vividly but with impressive economy, alternately delay and scramble before the inexorable advance of the Red Army in 1945.

The latter is a history of the relationship between empires and languages. A textbook in size and scope, it’s about how and why certain languages became spoken as first or second languages across vast territories.

Neither is without troubling aspects, and both have changed my world-view.

The trauma of All for Nothing makes it hard to write about. I’ve written a thousand words or so, but working on the words I’ve written is slower than usual.

And the scope of Empires of the Word makes it hard to review. It took me over a year to read, with fairly continuous effort, because it is so dense, so interesting, and so paradigm-shifting.

Here’s to a night of rest, and another go tomorrow…

Silence

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 10:47:26 GMT

The other day I wrote about noise. But in addition to the roar of the ever-louder city, the sound of silence has been growing stronger for me too. No, not the Simon and Garfunkel song, but rather that high-pitched humming in one’s ears as one sits silently.

In true silence, I hear something: a ringing, sometimes monotonous, but at others almost musical. Now, for instance, it sounds like a very high-pitched twinkling, faint and somewhat pleasant, which I can hear because I’m wearing hearing protectors that render the world completely silent. There’s a discussion on whether this is tinnitus, whether there is anyone who doesn’t have it, whether the deaf can hear it. Interestingly, it seems to increase even further when I’m fasting.

Ajahn Sumedho, a Western Buddhist responsible for bringing certain aspects of Theravada to the West, wrote a book called The Sound of Silence (free PDF). I picked this book up at Cittaviveka (a monastery in West Sussex) a few years ago, and still it sits on my shelf. From the little I’ve read, he prescribes meditating on the exact sound I’ve described.

I wonder whether tinnitus isn’t the mere fact of hearing this sound, but rather becoming troubled by it. Then again, for me, the sound is quite faint and I can only hear it in silence, in the same circumstances that allow me to hear my heart. If it were constant and disruptive, during conversation for example, that would be quite different.

Still, I wonder if the eeriness of the sound, which I remember from childhood, isn’t what George Eliot had in mind when she wrote in Middlemarch:

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

The fear is not of true tragedy, but of the vastness of perception, its infinite depth and detail. “Well wadded with stupidity” describes being on auto-pilot, the salience filter of the default-mode network, the layering of dull concepts onto the terrifying strength of sensate reality. As one ages, and papers one’s world over with more and more abstract thinking, it takes stronger stimulus to pierce the veil of conceptuality.

Or maybe I just have tinnitus.

Sedated

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 19:20:06 GMT

Does social vitality have a limit? Does vivacity strengthen, like a muscle, or is energy for socialising a finite resource?

I’ve never liked the question, intended to divide the introverts from the extroverts, of whether one gets one’s energy from other people or from being alone.

I suppose it’s because it seemed so obvious that everyone needs some mixture of both. It’s like asking whether one gets more energy from fat, from protein, or from carbohydrates. Different combinations are possible, and there’s not really one right answer. It could vary over time. And nobody eats only one macronutrient to the exclusion of the others.

But that’s not to say every diet is balanced. Socially, too, one can veer too far to one side or the other. After a week of isolation I’m dying to talk, and after a week of conversation I’m dying for solitude. At different times I’ve needed and wanted different amounts of social contact.

I can tell when I’m overdoing it, though it doesn’t always stop me. Yesterday I wrote, critiqued writing, met a dear friend, bumped into another, then attended a party that had me speaking into the wee small hours of the morning. Something like twenty hours of talking. Today I’m unable to do or say much.

Perhaps it is like physical exercise: after exertion, rest is required for recovery, but afterwards one comes out stronger.

But on the Camino, on the second day of five, I felt exhausted, with pain in my feet and legs. The third day was easier. And it continued to get physically each day. It was as if the body adapted to what was required of it.

I’m not convinced that socialising constantly would result in a similar adaptation. But perhaps salespeople, or others who must be “always on,” do manage this.

Blood

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 09:59:29 GMT

As I said yesterday, I often wear earplugs or other hearing protection as I go about my daily business. I often leave them in during meditation. A side effect of doing this is that it’s easier to hear my blood.

When I was a child, I heard that the sound inside a conch shell was the sound of your blood flowing through your ears. Apparently that’s not true. It’s not entirely clear what it is; perhaps the amplification of otherwise imperceptible noises.

But there are times that you can hear your blood, or at least you can hear your heart pumping, and this is easier with earplugs. The reason I mention this is because I’ve always been a bit bored by the breath as a meditation object. If you have ever been taught to meditate, it’s quite likely you were told to pay attention to your breath. But why the breath? Why not the beating of your heart, or the sensations of the hairs on your head, or in the soles of your feet?

Others who have proposed the heartbeat as a meditation object, at least to Buddhists, have not received much encouragement. Though it looks like Sufism may be more open-minded.

I understand that the breath is partly used because it exists on the border between the voluntary and the involuntary. You can control it, but if you don’t pay attention, it happens automatically. Therefore it is seen as somehow lying on the border between the conscious and the subconscious. But I’ve gotten mileage out of testing whether my heartrate is under any control. Can the speed of controlled breathing influence it, for example?

I have also found other techniques, like Goenka’s “body scanning”, quite useful. Visualisations have helped me as well. I seem to be in the minority in not particularly liking the breath.

Clamour, Cacophony

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 11:34:55 GMT

Silence is hard to come by in Central London. When I’m reading or writing, I need at a minimum earplugs, if not the kind of over-the-ear hearing protectors which builders wear. “35 dB — Protection against high noise levels in industrial settings,” they advertise. “Ideal for extreme noise levels, such as mining, airports, engine rooms, printing factories, cement machines.” Sometimes I even wear those over earplugs.

I can still hear the drilling.

There is that much construction where I live. Four of the tallest buildings in London now dwarf my neighbourhood. None of them were here when I moved in, a decade ago. Then-mayor Boris Johnson approved them in 2014, despite the fact that Islington Council had rejected them planning permission.

They now tower over my own seventeen-storey ex-council building, and from outward appearances some still stand empty, as there was some fear they might do, being bought as investments rather than places to live. But laments on this point have been disputed.

Whether they are occupied or not, the noise on this road drones inexplicably on. It is insufferable. Two of my flatmates moved out last week, to South London, citing construction as a primary reason.

This is not a new complaint. Schopenhauer wrote a whole delightfully spiteful chapter about noise in his Studies on Pessimism. It begins:

The superabundant display of vitality, which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is true — nay, a great many people — who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the matter, it is only for want of an opportunity.

Though we are mercifully spared the cracking of whips which so troubled Schopenhauer, I think it is fair to say that the world is louder than it was in 1890. The WHO estimates 1.6 million disability-adjusted life years are lost each year due to environmental noise. A list of other studies suggests that depression and cardiovascular disease, even type 2 diabetes, correlate with noise levels. And London Councils receive more noise complaints than any other issue: over half a million in 2016.

Some people never learn to tune it out. That article introduced me to a new word: misophonia, which is an unusually strong aversion to noise, and says that the problem may even be genetic.

But I have found myself getting more sensitive to it, and have wondered whether the attempt to write more makes it worse. “It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought,” wrote Schopenhauer. “Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful.” He might not be wrong, though my sensitivity seems to persist even when I’m not engaged in writing.

I have a theory about this. I wonder if creative endeavours and flow states, by reducing the activity of the default-mode network, might also reduce one’s defences against sensory inputs. If that’s true, then Schopenhauer could be correct that writing makes one more sensitive to noise. “No one with anything like an idea in his head can avoid a feeling of actual pain at this sudden, sharp crack, which paralyses the brain, rends the thread of reflection, and murders thought.”

Or perhaps this is just elitism, and a defence for the ornery side-effects of ordinary ageing.

A Meditation on Absence

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 10:41:58 GMT

Lately, as I’ve experimented more with meditation, I’ve begun doing a meditation on self-absence.

This is not quite self-enquiry, which involves a mental search for the self, which leads to the conclusion that one can never quite locate it. It may not be entirely unrelated however. And maybe it’s not unlike what Marcus Aurelius meant by meditating on one’s own death (e.g.).

The practice is simple: I imagine places that I’ve been, which are meaningful to me, but where I am not now (i.e., everywhere but here). Then I imagine what they are like without me in them.

It’s not imagining that they are different because of my absence. I just try to visualise them as vividly as possible, as a reminder that they still stand.

It can be literally anywhere else in the world—old houses, old schools, or even places nearby I like, that I’ve been to recently. It could even be the adjacent room in my flat.

But for some reasons I’m drawn to thinking about places that were meaningful to me in childhood. Parks, beaches, playgrounds, and so on, outdoor places that I wanted to go as a childhood. Sometimes they are indoors, but these seem somehow less effective.

These places exist without me there, even if in a different form from how I remember or imagine them. The playground may be gone, but some kind of ground is still there.

Perhaps the place is an early morning beach, totally deserted. Or perhaps the place is bustling and full of people, but I am not among them. Or a spot on the Camino I recently walked, now passed by pilgrims other than myself.

What’s interesting is that this seems to give some insight into the nature of self. I’ll write more about that later.

Chess and Stress

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 09:47:21 GMT

Apparently chess grandmasters are known to lose weight while playing chess. The sheer mental effort can burn 6,000 calories per day.

I’ve been thinking about this relationship between mental and physical effort, in part because I recently walked 115km of the Camino de Santiago. On the trip I had, after a 35km walk, my first experience of being mentally stultified from physical exhaustion. I’ve naturally felt pretty stupid from lack of sleep before. But on that day, I was well-rested. At the end of the walk, I found myself uncharacteristically speechless and thoughtless.

In youth, I absorbed a kind of mind-body dualism from the culture around me. As I’ve grown older, and investigated the question more thoroughly myself, my belief in the inseparability between the two has grown stronger.

But there are still surprises, like the fact that you can lose weight by thinking, or stupefy yourself with exercise. I’ve also wondered whether addictions to food or alcohol might really be a gut microbiome issue, dressed up as mental weakness.

Productivity

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 21:07:23 GMT

Today I’ve been thinking about an article my friend Vincent wrote a few years ago, called Productivity is Dangerous. I largely agree with him, and definitely when it comes to most forms of modern work.

Many jobs today simply don’t need to be done, as David Graeber persuasively argued in his 2013 article, and even more persuasively in his recent book. People doing bullshit jobs don’t need to do them more productively. And people doing non-bullshit jobs are unlikely to be reading productivity blogs.

The advice of such blogs tends to engender administrative tasks of dubious ultimate importance, then lionize the act of ticking them off of a list, which is pretty much how Graeber defines bullshit.¹ When it comes to edification, though, and more specifically to reading and writing, I admit to having operated under the assumption that such endeavours do have ultimate importance, and that in such areas I should try to be as productive as possible.

As a result, I am guilty of most of the things against which Vincent warns: I try to break time-consuming habits, wake up early to read and write more, and I have withdrawn from social life, all in pursuit of intellectual productivity—namely, in the interest of writing a novel.

I had assumed that the creation of art is at worst morally neutral, in the same way that Vincent describes reading and exercise as “probably good in most situations.” And at best it could create something of value to others.

But I suppose I’d been thinking of writing as akin to taking up the violin. It would be difficult to argue that one should not practice an instrument, if that’s what one wishes to do. And perhaps some forms of fiction or poetry could be classed in this category. But I’m interested in ideas, and they are certainly not always morally neutral, so maybe I need to re-examine the assumption that pursuing ideas at full tilt is itself a good idea.²

Is it wrong to get good at something for its own sake? It depends on whether that thing helps or harms others. I had been thinking along the lines of Maslow’s hierarchy. In this model, writing is a form of self-actualization to which one should aspire, because that’s what he observed flourishing humans to do.

But does that make it a good idea? I realise now that I had assumed that the pursuit of mastery would, in and of itself, produce virtue as a side effect. In some ways, it has. I have better and less destructive habits now that all of my energy is going into reading and writing. I’m more fulfilled and less depressed, now that I have a purpose.

But if I pursue publication, then it’s not only about whether the act of formulating the ideas makes me a better person. The ultimate moral question in the dispersion of ideas still must come down to whether they tend to help or harm the world. Naturally most people must be convinced that their ideas, or the ideas that they are interested in, are helpful. But surely some of these well-intentioned ideas have had terrible outcomes.

Tonight I am wondering whether discretion is not the better part of valour when it comes to productivity.

NB, I write lists every day and dutifully tick things off them, so I’m not trying to pretend that I don’t fall into this category.↩
I have also worried that my commitment to intellectual improvement has taken on a kind of zealotry. It does seem to lead to a sense of piety which does not seem ideal. Maybe no more unhealthy than the urge to play one video game over another, or supporting a sports team, but it’s still something I’m worried about.↩

Missed

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 00:25:24 GMT

I missed a day. Or rather, I wrote a post but it got too long, and I decided I needed to spend more time thinking it through.

Tonight at Darkly we discussed this documentary, about the ways in which the great apes differ from humans. There are fewer than you might think. Despite its sensationalist style, it’s a good documentary, and well-worth watching. I was particularly surprised by the sentence-understanding and number-memorising abilities of other primates.

Signals

Sun, 15 Sep 2019 21:08:57 GMT

Recently I have been thinking about whether or not it is helpful to think of brains in terms of signal processing. In short, the question is whether brains do, within a short timeframe,¹ produce more-or-less the same output if given the same input.

On the one hand, when presented with the same stimulus, I often have the same thought, or make the same connections. I suppose this is most pronounced in areas of sparse knowledge. For example, if I only know one word in another language, and I hear mention of that language, that lone word will predictably pop into my head, whereas the mention of English will do nothing of the sort.

But it seems to happen in more complex arenas as well. When I’m editing my own writing, I will sometimes make the same change on the screen that I have made, a few days earlier, on the page, even without looking at it. This could just be remembering the changes—though it does not feel like recollection. Instead, when I see that I have done the same thing twice, I have a distinct feeling that I lack freedom, as if I was predestined to make the same change when presented with the same sentence.

The feeling is something like déjà vu, quite unsettling, though the sense is less “This has already happened” and more “I lost the illusion that I have agency.”

Agency is important, because this view might suggest that the mind is a passive signal processor, and effort is therefore irrelevant. This is a perpetual fear, which crops up whenever it comes to free will: that disbelief in it will have moral or behavioural consequences. And the fear may be pertinent.

Effort matters. (By effort I do not mean stress, which I definitely think is not required.) While I think it’s true that much of thinking goes on “behind the scenes,” i.e., in the subconscious, I am quite convinced that conscious effort does have an effect on the quality of this underlying thinking. But the effect is quite indirect, in that you do not know where such effort will lead.

Thinking could be likened to driving a car into terra incognita, and effort to the steering of the vehicle. To get somewhere, steering is quite important. But steering does not create the destination or its attributes, it merely determines whether one tends to get closer to it or farther away. And in the absence of a map, one might end up anywhere.

I like Cal Newport’s contention, in Deep Work, that one must be at the forefront of one’s field to have breakthrough insights, and that ideally one should at on the forefront of multiple fields. This seems to be because new ideas are not precisely new, but something more like abstract connections across domains. For example, it could be an application of knowledge of a metaphor from one domain to another.

I have a feeling, sometimes uneasy, that creativity itself might amount to a very high level of this cross-domain thinking, and in some sense be less aptly termed “creativity” than “connectivity.” This would also line up nicely with my intuition that one is most predictable in domains where one’s knowledge is sparse.

Truly brilliant and unpredictable insights might arise out of a dense mixture of simpler things, heated with the effort of attention. If this is true, deep work could be likened to the Miller-Urey Experiment.

“Within a short timeframe” is important, because I think the structure of the brain changes with every thought, so I would not expect myself to make the same changes in a month’s time, and certainly not in ten year’s time.↩

Inexhaustible

Sat, 14 Sep 2019 08:12:33 GMT

Lately I’ve been thinking about what the upper limit might be for writing, in terms of words written per day.

A fast typist can type 100 words per minute. Once, even I could type that fast. But now I can’t sustain anything like that without wrist pain later in the day. 50wpm, though, is achievable. Easy, even. That would mean 3,000 words per hour, were typing the only limit.

But it’s not the only limit. Time is another, and not just how long one happens to have free. I know from experience that however empty my calendar, I cannot write sustainably for more than four hours per day—when timed strictly (and ignoring, for now, the fact that the maximum duration has increased with practice).

If I write for longer, in other words, I cannot write for as long on the day that follows. Still, that would mean 12,000 words a day.

That number is clearly unachievable, or, if achieved, then unsustainable. I have Googled this question on other occasions (whether in procrastination or at the end of a proud day), and I have found posts like this one, listing the averages asserted by various authors. The highest is by Michael Crichton, at 10,000, and he’s an outlier. A more common upper limit seems to be 3 or 4,000.

The wrists, then, are not really the limiting factor for writing. Perhaps this makes sense. The mouth is not really a limiting factor for speaking. When I used to drink more heavily, I could speak for days on end. But little of it was likely to be enlightening. And the limiting factor was the length of time I could remain upright, and not the movement of my jaw.

I am unable not to measure things, and words are no exception. For the past few days I’ve managed almost 5,000 per day, recording the events from a very eventful few weeks, in which we walked the final 70 miles of the Camino de Santiago. That is to say, I was not composing fiction, which would have been much slower. In four days I wrote a total of 19,102 words, excluding what I handwrote. This represents something close to my (current) upper limit.

I suppose I should also add the adjective “meaningful,” as in “the upper limit for meaningful writing, in terms of words written per day.” Perhaps, then, it is the mind itself that is the limiting factor. But it too seems to be inexhaustible, at least when its output is measured over time. This is not just because it is possible to speak ceaselessly. I firmly believe that demanding more of the mind, over time, causes it to change and grow.

Or at least that’s what I’ll be telling myself as I attempt to post more frequently. Already, committing to broadcasting more often seems to have caused my mind to generate more topics, more ideas. I am convinced that in order to improve, one needs to practice—and that anyone who does anything exceptionally well also does that thing in exceptional quantities.

So let this post represent a toast, an avowal to write more. At least to be loquacious, on a good day to be garrulous. Let us promise to expatiate, and to remember that practice makes prolix. Let not the peril of pleonasm prevent us from improving.

Types of Meditation

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 12:37:37 GMT

After I learned to concentrate, for several months I only did concentration meditation. It’s blissful and gives blessed relief from the mental monologue I’d suffered/inflicted on myself for most of my adulthood. But when I stopped meditating the monologue resumed.

Then I learned about insight meditation, and I switched to doing mostly that. This had lasting effects on my happiness, outside of the time that I was meditating. But after a while it was diminishing returns: I was happy enough for everyday purposes.

Along the way I learned loving-kindness meditation. I found that it made a less judgmental person, though I never did it with the regularity and assiduity that it deserved. This is one I plan to spend more time on going forward.

More recently, I experimented with visualisation meditations, where I imagined fulfilling my goals. This improved my confidence, but I worried that it would make me arrogant, as if I’d already achieved all the things I was picturing.

When working intensely on the novel, it hardly mattered how I meditated. Once my mind calmed after a minute or two, I would enter the novel’s reality. I wasn’t able to sustain other types of meditation. This had the adverse effects on my well-being and mood that I would expect from not meditating much at all.

These days, in addition to a brief maintenance concentration/insight practice, I do a few variants of my own. In one, I just imagine myself doing the important tasks of the day, in the hopes that this will motivate me to do them with care. It seems to work.

Another is a variant on a Stoic meditation, where I try to picture the worst thing that can possibly happen during the day. It’s usually not that bad, which can be encouraging.

I think meditation has a lot of similarities with physical exercise. Just as one won’t get strong by only doing cardio, nor fast purely through powerlifting, one’s mental prowess improves in different directions when one varies the stimulus.

This doesn’t mean constantly jumping around; there should be a period of intensity in each area. But I don’t think that any one form of meditation can deliver the benefits that a diversity of methods can.

Frequency

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 06:46:49 GMT

Last year I posted here daily for a month. It was a good experience.

Seth Godin advises everyone to blog every day. Since I’m on a break from my main writing project, and because it seems daunting, I’ve decided to try this again.

On the one hand, this seems like a perverse categorical imperative. Would it not lead to cacophony, to nonsense?

On the other hand, we already have that on the internet. And daily practice has a way of forcing one to improve. No one needs to read it.

I write every day privately (on paper and otherwise) anyway. Why not make part of it public?

On Feedback

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 17:55:06 GMT

Submission, or The Silence

In the past few months, I’ve written my first fiction. In the past few weeks, I’ve let people read it for the first time. And in the past few days, I’ve begun to receive feedback.

This exposure to the eyes of others began with my submission to the Curtis Brown First Novel Prize this month, which was a gruelling but worthwhile experience. I interrupted a structural rewrite of my novel to enter, which meant polishing 10,000 words (the first three chapters) of my work-in-progress. Because editing requires a drastically different mindset from writing, it turned out to be quite painful to switch from writing to editing, and then back again. But I’m glad that I did it, because now I have a piece of work that I can use as a writing sample, as well as a “sanity check” for the project I’m working on. I also learned some lessons about how to switch between the two processes, and about submissions, which will presumably remain pertinent when I begin to submit to agents next year.

After hitting send, I had a strange post-partum feeling, which I (melodramatically) felt must be like suffering a stillbirth, since eight continuous months of effort had produced nothing in the world whatsoever. Even in the least likely, best scenario, it would be a case of waiting months before I received feedback. In the meantime I would face silence.

The overwhelming odds on the outcome are that I receive no feedback at all, until the shortlist is announced, and my submission is not on it. An absence conspicuous to me, and to no one else. This was a useful thing to learn, since presumably all submissions are like this—no fireworks, just silence.

As a result of this harrowing feeling of having shouted into an indifferent void, I decided to seek feedback from a few other sources, whom I hoped would be more forthcoming and responsive. In other words I asked a few friends and strangers to weigh-in on my sanity.

These included “beta readers” from Writers’ HQ, as well as a few other writers. Though I have many highly literate and intelligent friends, I’m not yet emotionally ready to bare this section of my mind to them. I feel reluctant to involve the laity, though this is no reflection on them, but only on the state of my soul. “Someone fetch a priest” as Bowie once sang, and the feeling is not far from that, though I hope only to require a confessor, rather than last rites.

Preparations for feedback

This week I’m getting the first of that feedback. I am incredibly grateful to receive it, as I know from experience that it is hard stuff to formulate and give. But even knowing this, I wasn’t sure whether I would be mature enough to take criticism on a subject so close to home.

I therefore spent a lot of time in mental preparation for it. I wrote the following list of reminders to reflect on while reading the responses. Perhaps they will be of use to someone else:

This is a draft. It’s not finished, and it’s not perfect, nor should you expect it to be. That’s why you’re asking for feedback in the first place.
Your readers are offering to do hard work to help you for free. This is no small undertaking. It is kind and generous of them to do at all.
If they just say “I like it,” you can’t improve. You need criticism. You need to be told what doesn’t work.
You are yourself unsure about some things you’ve written, and you are worried you’ve gone too far in certain places. If your readers confirm or deny this, that’s excellent feedback about where the line is.
Focus on the positives; don’t ignore the negatives, but remember that your brain is wired to focus on them, so you need to compensate.
Negative feedback is great meditative practice for insight into the fundamental nature of suffering, self, and impermanence (sorry if that’s too Buddhist).

I also turned to Emma Darwin’s immensely helpful blog. I searched her tool-kit and she did not disappoint—she wrote a great post about taking feedback a few years ago, which I highly recommend.

I’m relieved to report that my first feedback was actionable and not unduly painful to take, even with my strong negativity bias. But I’m still glad I did the mental preparation to ensure that I could receive the feedback graciously and make the most of it.

If you’re lucky enough to receive feedback, do yourself a favour and gird yourself spiritually to use it effectively.

I Grant You Ample Leave

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 22:20:39 GMT

I’m ahead of schedule on the novel, but today I did not hit my wordcount in the six hours I wrote. Here’s my progress so far.

Since I have no more energy either to think or to write, I’ll leave you instead with a shockingly insightful poem by George Eliot: “I Grant You Ample Leave”. She continues to astound.

The Rewrite

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 18:01:10 GMT

New beginnings

This week I’ve begun rewriting my manuscript. Although I’m six months into writing this novel, and though I wrote a zero draft in around 40 days (described further here), I am still not spectacularly close to the finish line.

The latest issue (one of many faced so far) is that when I began that draft, I knew nothing of how a novel was structured. In retrospect it seems strange, given the volume of fiction I’ve devoured in my voracious life, that I’ve paid so little attention to things as basic as how and where chapters are divided.¹ In my own draft, I simply created a new file each time I hit 10,000 words, which, as it happens, does not naturally lead to a brilliant structure. Nor even a brilliant anti-structure. It was just bric-a-brac, full of repetitions and missing critical scenes.

Not that none of it was worthwhile. I liked much of what I had written, but in the end, after fiddling for a few months, I had to admit to myself that my 112,000 words did not amount to a novel. I therefore moved everything I had written into a subfolder, and started a new document on Monday.

In the preceding three weeks, I had forced myself to write a plan. This was not a blow-by-blow outline, but just a rough ordering of the major events, a cast list, and a developmental synopsis. Synopses are typically submitted to agents and publishers with manuscripts, as an overview of the arc of the novel as a whole when only the opening chapters were sent. Part of the pitch, in other words. A “developmental synopsis” is a private one for keeping track of the structure of the novel.

While painful to produce, this has been immensely helpful. And quite probably I could not have made one without first having done the zero draft. Now, I feel like I know where I’m going, at least enough to carry on. My goal is to have a first draft of the manuscript finished by the end of August.

Wish me luck.

Reading as eating

Over the past few months I’ve had many conversations which must have been as frustrating for my friends as they were for me. Many people, regardless of whether they have written anything of any length, imagine that they know something about how one ought to set about such a task.²

This type of ex nihilo advice has led me to the realisation that the relationship between reading and writing is something like the relationship between eating and cooking. One can stuff oneself endlessly, becoming an admirably ecumenical gourmand in the process, without having the slightest clue how to cook a meal.³ The problem is that, because storytelling is actually more indispensable to modern life than food preparation is, people are spellbound by the illusion that they know something about it.

It’s not that the public knows nothing about storytelling; they actually do know something. But a little learning is a dangerous thing. Those who have never tried to cook at all are generally well-aware that they cannot cook. So immersed in narratives are we that we imagine—indeed, I imagined—that writing a long work of fiction would be something like relating an anecdote.

It’s not.

The difference between a spoken yarn and a novel is more drastic than the difference between boiling an egg and preparing a seven-course meal. After all, even a long an anecdote takes at most half the minutes required to hard-boil an egg. And even an extraordinarily elaborate meal would typically only take a day or two to prepare (though of course years of practice). So the range of time spent in food preparation is something like six minutes to two days. But a novel is rarely finished in less than a year, might easily take three, and not a few have taken six or ten.

Perhaps a better analogy would be between jogging for three minutes at whatever pace you happen to be capable of, and training for and successfully running a record-breaking marathon. One takes minutes and is relatively painless, the other months or years, and pain is all but inevitable.

Anyway, at this point I’m three days and 6,729 words into the rewrite. If it sounds like I’m complaining, let’s chalk it up to the inevitable pain, but nonetheless I’ll leave it there, until I write again…

Then again, until I began thinking about publishing, I had also never paid any attention to the publisher of any book I read, nor thought at all about genre.↩
There are merciful exceptions, i.e., friends who never make any suggestions but simply offer their ears and support. If you are one of these, I am forever in your debt.↩
There is the added complication that sometimes it is best not to know how the sausage is made. Revealing certain things about the writing process seems to destroy people’s image of how fiction is conceived. For example, I contend that not a few opening lines were among the last things in a novel to be written, rather than occurring to an author with a thunderclap at the novel’s conception.↩

It Rains on Our Love

Sat, 29 Jun 2019 11:59:35 GMT

This week I watched Bergman’s It Rains on Our Love (1946). It’s a twisting tale of a lowly, desperate pair who meet in a train station and, though a series of rather reckless choices, wind up making a go of a relationship.

It’s an eclectic mix—they get caught in the rain, break into a cabin, end up renting the cabin, and befriending some very odd characters—but it does manage to tie up the many loose plots with Bergman’s characteristic aplomb and affect by the end. It is both social realist and magical realist, presenting the hopeless prospects of the well-intentioned poor alongside a somewhat flimsy deux ex machina, foreshadowed none-too-subtly from its first scene.

The leads, Barbro Kollberg and Birger Malmsten, are not immediately recognisable as Bergman regulars, though the latter was in The Silence (1963). I have seen a few others Malmsten was in, including Prison (1949), Thirst (1949), Summer Interlude (1951), and Waiting Women (1952), though I couldn’t recall his face from those. More noticeably It Rains features a shockingly young Gunnar Björnstrand as a petty bureaucrat.

What was most interesting to me was to see how quickly Bergman improved. Nine years after It Rains on Our Love he made Dreams, which I think is quite underrated, as well as the excellent Smiles of a Summer Night.

Only two years after that, he made both The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. That one year—1957—was insane enough that quite a good documentary was recently made about it, called, in something of an understatement, Bergman: A Year in a Life (2018) (trailer).

The difference between It Rains on Our Love (1946) and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) suggests a steady improvement over nearly a decade. But to ascend from that to Wild Strawberries (1957) in just two years represents a jump of dizzying height. It somehow does not give the impression that slow and steady wins the race, but that sustained serious ambition can produce something like a pressure cooker from which anything might burst.

This view of Bergman’s trajectory may well be biased. And yet it would be difficult to argue that one ought not to try on the basis of such biases.

The documentary makes it clear that Bergman’s approach was largely pathological; the people alive today who knew him then still seem traumatised by those times. Yet how many failures, either in Bergman’s own life, or in the endeavours of artists more broadly, might we endure to retain his masterpieces?

Everything Static

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 01:41:42 GMT

If you’re reading this, you’re on my new blog. I’m now using GatsbyJS. It’s fast.

The gist

The basic idea is that a bunch of complicated JavaScript software generates flat, fast, modern web pages. You should be able to tell from the speed of navigating the posts.

Not that any site that’s as bare-text as mine should be slow, but it should be even faster. Compare it to the old site though, you may notice a difference.

If you want to know more…

I’ve used the Gatsby starter blog as a basis for a new site. Using bash I’ve converted all the markdown I had over at write.as into posts here. It took a bit of doing but it seems to all be working now, and I’ve hosted it all (for free) on Netlify.

It’s a slightly weird way of working, in that it requires pushing to Github, which Netlify monitors. When it senses a change, it builds the flat files using Gatsby.

It’s not weird to use static pages. They’re fast. My ancient film database works this way. (I wrote it in 2006 and it’s still running! A benefit of simplicity.)

No, what’s weird for me is that the code for the site as well as the static content (in the form of Markdown files) all reside within that repo. When you update the master git branch, it deploys the site automatically.

The local development process is also very cool, in that you can just run gatsby develop on a local machine, and it will show you changes to the site instantaneously.

I think there’s also some features for pushing to a test branch, but I think that’s enough technological procrastination for one night.

Not much to write home about

Tomorrow, it’s back to the writing grind. Last week I was somewhat elated with the progress I was making on small sections. This week I’ve got the dread, over the amount of structural work that needs to be done. But so it goes, I suppose.

_{And the title of this post, as well as an earlier one, are an Elliott Smith reference}

GatsbyJS

Thu, 13 Jun 2019 21:25:15 GMT

Today I thought I’d try to learn GatsbyJS and see if I could turn this blog into a static site.

I got Gatsby working in Docker, then tried following a tutorial which was quite helpful. I got most of the way through it, and it is quite cool how responsive both the development process and the site itself are.

However I was having trouble getting the images to load properly. I’ll spend some more time on it this week or next, or maybe I’ll start with an easier project that doesn’t require the generation of pages.

Interstice

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 21:35:02 GMT

Today I’m thinking about the need for novelty and the need for security, which seem in humans in constant tension. I saw a literary agent speak and she said more-or-less the same, that people want something that is different but not too different. I think there’s something in this.

Otherwise have a friend visiting so writing apart from the novel is on hold.

On Nicomachean Ethics

Thu, 23 May 2019 23:07:09 GMT

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is an admirable attempt to define the good life. It is empirical and insightful, and seeks to answer questions as relevant today as they were when it was written in the 4th century BC. It’s also unfortunately extremely boring, at least in the two English translations I looked at (W.D. Ross and Joe Sachs). I don’t particularly recommend reading it unless you have a strong interest in the history of ethics, as I think the Stoics or the Buddhists write much more practically and eloquently on the questions that concern Aristotle. On the other hand, I think he’s an improvement over both deontological ethics and utilitarianism, so you may still find his ideas worth a look.

Aristotle makes many points with which I agree. He thinks that the good life (eudaimonia, sometimes badly translated as “happiness,” but better rendered as “flourishing”) is not a state but a continuous process, requiring constant practice not just to enact but even to understand. He believes that virtue consists in habits and principles, and not in isolated actions. He thinks this process is hard to attain to, and that most people will not reach it. He is an empiricist, as I am, and he bases much of his discourse on his keen observations of how humans actually behave. His ability to discern patterns in behaviour is probably his greatest strength. His description of the mean of moderation is particularly well-argued, and not as obvious as it sounded when I learned about it in high school.

However I disagree with him on many points. First, I think it is too simplistic to say that each action has a single end, and that the ultimate end of all actions is eudaimonia. It is useful to distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, as he does to describe the relation of things like health and wealth to happiness, but I don’t agree that people pursue health or wealth as intermediate ends, with the true end being eudaimonia.

I believe most actions are motivated by a variety of factors, which need not necessarily be known to those enacting them. People in general are not particularly good at knowing their own reasons for acting, and probably never (or virtually never) think things through in the kind of logical way that he prescribes. They do strive, of course, and give some thought to objectives, but I don’t think it’s common to consider why one strives.

Nor do I agree that such an exercise is necessary for morality. Aristotle argues that an action cannot be virtuous unless it is deliberate, with knowledge of what is being done, and further requires that the action is taken because it is a virtuous action. I think I more-or-less disagree with all three requirements. It might not make sense to have a virtuous action that is accidental, unknowing, and done for the wrong reasons, but I think it is possible to behave virtuously without any deliberation whatsoever, which seems to be opposed to Aristotle’s view.

Basically I don’t think deliberation necessarily leads to good actions. Aristotle often advocates the contemplation of the greatest good. If by this he means thinking rationally about the good, as he seems to, then I vehemently disagree that this has any effect on morality. If by contemplation Aristotle means meditation, or something along those lines, then I do think that’s required for the cultivation of virtue. But meditation does not require reason, and may in some cases be opposed to it. (On the other hand, some rational understanding of the goals of meditation could be helpful—but I think this may vary. I’ve found that reason is useful for understanding the fruits of meditation, but it does not lead to their acquisition, and certainly not in the absence of practice.)

Aristotle seems to realise this on some level, saying that clever men can be wicked, but he continues to mandate reason as part of virtue. To me it seems clear that reason can be used to support any and all behaviour, virtuous and vicious alike. Nor are the right motivations required for an action to be good. It is perfectly possible to do the right action for the wrong reason, or, which is perhaps more likely, for no reason, i.e., with no altruism aforethought at all, which does not diminish its altruism. (In that sense it seems I’m a consequentialist, although I’m not quite arguing that consequences are the only thing that matter—just that premeditation is not a prerequisite for virtuous action.) I believe it is possible to behave morally without ever thinking about ethics in the systematic way that he advises.

Morality, in my view, basically requires meditation and practice. Virtue is not, as he suggests, a precondition either for contemplation/meditation or for the practice of virtue. You can meditate or cultivate the right actions without first being virtuous, and they will be effective even if you do them for some other reason than seeking virtue. In fact it is probably necessary to do some of this before virtue can arise at all. Good habits (ethos) are, as Aristotle argues, definitely required.

I might also agree that reason/contemplation is required for eudaimonia if he means that the use of the mind is a part of flourishing, just as the use of the body is. My dispute is not with his argument that contemplation is pleasurable and important; just that it is not a necessary condition for virtue.

I also think his way of dissecting the world into categories is probably counterproductive, because it risks dogmatism of the kind that his empiricism ought to avoid.

I dislike his attempt to make morals appear like mathematics. It is appealing, prima facie, to argue, as he does, that reasoning can be done about morals even if it can’t be as precise as mathematics. But this line seems to imply there will be some bedrock premises on which the reasoning rests, when it is actually circular. E.g., he argues that a man cannot attain virtue without practical wisdom, but neither can he gain practical wisdom without virtue.

That’s fine—there are many paradoxes in life. And perhaps he is observing that these things tend to arise in tandem. But he never explicitly acknowledges the many chicken-and-egg problems that he raises. In the end, I think focusing on the correct practices and ways of thinking (as the Stoics and Buddhists do) is more helpful than expecting a series of syllogisms to lead to the right actions.

I agree with him that practical wisdom (phronesis) should be distinguished from philosophic knowledge (sophia) and from technical knnowledge (techne). But the Buddhists are better empiricists and more practical on this point, explicitly explaining how to cultivate this kind of wisdom. The Buddha’s claims seem more testable and less dogmatic than Aristotle’s.

Overall I think he’s a profound observer of human actions, with no small amount of insight. His emphasis on the contextual nature of most ethics is also welcome. But his extreme focus on reason is counterproductive, and at the end of the day the Ethics seem to me more descriptive of the problems of ethics than prescriptive of solutions thereto.

Keeping Everything Moving, Everything Static

Fri, 17 May 2019 00:29:47 GMT

As a brief update I’m back from the Balkans, where I saw unseasonably touristy Croatia, snowy Montenegro, and beautiful Bosnia and Herzegovina. I learned a lot more about the history of the region than I did when I was last in Croatia in 2014, and may write more about my impressions once gathered. (I’ve written nine thousand words and have only covered half of the trip so far, which is a bit much for a blog.)

Back in London I’ve had interviews this week, which has been hard since I’m physically exhausted from all the hiking. But the process has been interesting, and a nice counterpoint to the fiction I’ve been working on.

An interest in tech has been a general trend, probably in response to the extent to which I’ve saturated myself with literature and philosophy in the last year. I may soon move off write.as and onto static hosting using GatsbyJS which I’ve become interested in. I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile I’m reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” and this weekend will re-read von Neumann’s The Computer and the Brain (which is mind-blowing). In their own ways, each of these works align exactly with an aspect of what I’ve been thinking about in the past year. I’d summarise those questions as: What is the good life? What are the limits of perception? And is human experience itself discrete or continuous?

A Passing Feeling

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 23:07:28 GMT

Let this be a placeholder for future thoughts on the topic of events and their contents, their planning, execution, and aftermath.

What I mean is that this weekend we were married, and I have yet to catch up, mentally, or, as is my wont, in writing, with all that has happened. The wedding itself was beautiful, perfect in every way except for the absence of my family, to be rectified by future convening.

There was also a bit too much faff just after the ceremony, but before the photographer was satisfied. That will not be memorable, however. What we will remember is the mercifully spartan ceremony, the intimate, joyous reception, the impromptu tearjerking speeches. These, along with the beautiful faces, the intelligent conversation, the energetic dancing, and the exuberant after-party, were all a perfect embodiment of what we love about each other, and what we love about our friends. That our disparate friends, some now too rarely seen, got to meet each other, was deeply fulfilling for us.

To have had it go off without a hitch, with less than a month of planning, has been a lesson in what’s important in life. It is also a testament to my wife’s (and mother-in-law’s) considerable abilities under pressure. All three of us were terrified during the day, and all three of us were thrilled by the evening by just what a success it was.

I feel now, two days later, like I could sleep for weeks after all the excitement, but tomorrow I will try to write more about what the first moments of this beatific union felt like, while they are still fresh.

A thoughtless week

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 20:26:49 GMT

I failed either to edit or to write as much as I would have liked this week, though I watched several films, read Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, and began James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State which, so far, is great. It reminds me of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years in scope, novelty, and some of its view of history.

On the plane to Phoenix I watched—and wrote about—the 1954 and 2018 versions of A Star Is Born, but I may have left it too long to motivate me to write it, to want to type up my views. Maybe I’ll try to see the 1937 and 1976 ones and then write a comprehensive post. The Cukor (1954) version is less earnest and more self-aware, it feels like, about the extent to which both the industry and the audience are culpable in such cases.

Tonight we‘ll watch Brazil, which I‘ve not seen in a decade. I‘m looking forward to it.

Arizona

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 19:31:47 GMT

I’m writing from a hotel in Desert Ridge, Phoenix, AZ. I flew here on Friday to surprise my parents; I’m flying back to London today. I have no deep qualm of conscience on this point, short though the visit was, because it meant that I at least got to see my parents before my wedding at the end of this month, which for reasons of miscommunication and our own ineptitude, they will not be able to attend.

Phoenix, in particular Scottsdale, is more interesting than I’d expected. What its sculpture lacks in diversity of subjects it more than makes up for in variations in treatment. We found the art shops interesting, and the restaurants nice, if a little anodyne.

Taliesin West, where Frank Lloyd Wright set up shop to avoid winter and pneumonia in Wisconsin, has become a tiny (~30 student) architecture university. It is a place that is a true statement of vision, constructed according to one man’s principles. It continues to allow this man, now dead, to display the many aspects of his mastery over the elements, and the elements of his art, which was domestic architecture.

He rarely relented on wishing the place to be constructed of local materials, to blend into the local landscape, though he did compromise and allow windows, eventually, in concession to his third wife’s entreaties, to keep out the dust and desert wildlife. (Previously all the buildings had been open to the elements.) The students must build their own shelters to attend the university. Particularly impressive is the cabaret, in imitation of what he had seen in Weimar Berlin. Any picture is bound to distort it, and perhaps these are worse than most, but they’re still worth a look.

After that we went, on the tourguide’s advice, to see the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, designed in 1929 by one of Wright’s students, Albert Chase McArthur. Wright consulted for some time on the hotel, and it reminded me of Ennis House in Los Angeles, which I had not realised was also designed by Wright. The hotel is impressive but understated in a way, with the low ceilings which Wright liked. (Being 5’6” or so, as well as a spendthrift, he said that any space about 6’ was wasted material.) Most presidents since Hoover have stayed there, as did Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Marilyn Monroe, and so on. It made me wonder whether the other cast members from The Misfits had been there as well, in those tragic early ’60s. The staff was kind, showing us a bar where, during Prohibition, a signal from the opulent Aztec Room could alert the bartenders, who could rotate the bar around to show bookshelves. Something about its Native American influence reminded me of The Shining. It also evidently was where Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas”, and the Tequila Sunrise cocktail was invented.

Otherwise Phoenix is clean, there are fewer homeless than either Los Angeles or London, and in general it seems like a good life, perhaps not so different from Orange County. The weather was mild while I was here, 20–30° C mostly, and of course sunny, though it did rain a bit on Friday night.

The main reason for my being here, to surprise my parents, went swimmingly, they were surprised and very happy, as was I. It was well worth the jetlag and disruption that long travel often entails.

A fond farewell to freedom

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 21:12:53 GMT

Nothing to say in particular this week. I’m dreading editing, even though every time I succeed in starting, I enter the flow state readily, really, sometimes instantly. Nonetheless I have trouble sustaining it. I have been dividing time into pomodoros, which help me to start, but cause me to stop. I managed twelve hours this week, but maybe I ought to aspire to bigger blocks of time, something like 50/10, and to aim for more, four hours per day, and structure every other hour around those four. That would make for twenty hours on the weekdays, and perhaps that volume would warrant a break at the weekend.

I’m in a strange place socially. I’m drinking little, from concern for a liver damaged by disease, treatment thereof, or just by a lifetime of irresponsibility. I’m trying to be more attentive to the circumstances and plights of others, yet usually this backfires, as, in the absence of alcohol, I want nothing so much as solitude. Most interactions appear as distractions, even as I wish to be a more inquisitive friend, I forget to question what it is I really wish for. I wish to be left alone, though when I’m alone I’m just as unhappy. Not dissatisfied by a desire for sociability, but by my own inability to progress as much as I’d like, to make tangible progress towards what is important. In other words I’m miserable to be around.

A job looms. I shall probably have to work again soon. If that happens, I hope that the change in circumstance will allow me to construct a more suitable routine, that is to say more ascetic, from which I neither deviate nor desire to. The reality is likely to be starker.

On Marriage

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 23:47:38 GMT

Today I “gave notice” of marriage, which in the UK requires a period of publicity, during which the public can raise legal objections. The primary concern seemed to be whether either person had lied to the registrar, with the most important question being whether either of us had ever married, followed by whether we were related by blood. First cousins, we were told, can marry, but there’s an additional form. It doesn’t come up often, but it does come up, the registrar reported.

The notice period is twenty-eight days. We’re to be married in thirty-three. The registrar found our delinquency amusing.

The process was strange, two parts quiz and one part thoroughly British bureaucracy. My proof of address was summarily rejected, which necessitated emailing and printing a PDF in order to placate a boorish and maddened mandarin. In the interview itself, my partner ascribed to me a profession from which I do not yet make money, while I struggled to pronounce her patronymic. We at least got each others’ birthdays right, just, and nationalities, though I sort of got my own wrong—I said American, when I should have said British because that’s the passport I gave (I have both).

In other words it was something like our relationship: amusing, unlikely, haphazard, unconventional. And at the same time beautiful in our own insouciance towards even the most important parts of life.

If you’re reading this and it’s the first you’ve heard, don’t despair, we’ve only really told people we’ve seen in person. She takes a somewhat spartan attitude, desirous of symbolism over any ancillary adornment. My attitude of one is complicity in our own dear domesticity, an unknown but promising world, and a kindred kind of kindness that is yet beyond my ken.

On Fear

Mon, 11 Mar 2019 18:51:17 GMT

I am not a fearful person. Last year, I was ill enough that I thought I would die; I made my peace with it. This experience was useful. It taught me what I find important in life. The certainty that I would die made life feel like a second chance, to be used more wisely than the life before. Fitzgerald said this wouldn’t happen; I’m American, and should get no second act, after wantonly wasting the first. It put things into perspective. If one doesn’t fear death, or value life, then one can’t really be threatened or coerced.

These past few weeks, though, I’ve been afraid. Or if not afraid, at least daunted and stressed. I am not afraid of failure. The easiest way to avoid failure is simply not to attempt anything. But that’s what I did for most of my life, and it’s self-evidently unsatisfying. It can only appear satisfying if one sufficiently busies and stultifies oneself into an inability to consider things as basic as satisfaction.

I’m daunted by how much work I have left to do, how much is left for me to write, and whether I can write it within the time I have. I’m sensitive, too, about how others view my progress. Friends want updates, when they really can’t understand the nature of what I’m doing. They ask the wrong questions about the novel I’m writing. The worst is “What is the story?” or maybe “What’s it about?” What I’m trying to write is like music, or architecture; to ask what it’s about is to show ignorance of the basic form.

I’ve read advice not to speak about writing; I am finding this is right. Others harbour the illusion that they know what writing is like, because they think they know how to read, though this ability in reality is rare and rarely exercised. But even if they’re well-read, words do strangely little justice to writing.

I’ve never felt this way about work before, because I’ve never done any work this difficult, or work in which I felt invested in the outcome.

Investment may explain the fear. If that’s the problem, the solution must be not to invest myself in the outcome, only to invest myself in the process. A process can be learned, while an outcome can’t. A process is simple, in a sense: it’s the application of effort over time. Anything needed on the way is gleaned by virtue of the effort. Whether the process can be taught is another question. It may be that each person has to learn it for him- or herself.

Writing is unique, and to be unique, it can’t really take input from others, and certainly not from those who have not created anything. A musician or a painter would probably be in a better position to give advice about how to write than would a reader.

In a way, whatever I needed to know before embarking had to be learned then, not now. If I take my own advice, then I need only apply myself to the utmost to this task, and proceed. And in this way losing my fear of work may be the same as losing my fear of death. It may depend on a sense that I’ve got a second chance, and that this is it: I have to use it.

I’m a talkative person. I will say what I think and what I feel. At the moment, I only really think about what I’m writing, and my feelings are wrapped around that too. This is a problem, since I speak to others, and others don’t understand what it’s like to write, but they think that they do.

It’s not that speaking about it does the writing itself any violence. The words, in a certain sense, don’t come from me anyway, and in another sense cannot be harmed by the words of others. But I do feel protective, defensive of the inchoate work itself, as if it were a child. And as if I were a child; I do feel that the part of me that writes is a child. I, in my limited ability to be an adult, just set up the conditions for the child.

The violence that comes in these conversations is a defensive violence, that comes from defending the defenseless against the incursions of the world. To be pacific, I must be silent. To suffer in silence. Which is what I’m finding hard.

36 Questions

Mon, 18 Feb 2019 23:21:35 GMT

Tonight a friend arranged a conversation dinner in which people were paired up (with friends of friends) to try the 36 Questions that Lead to Love which you may have read about a few years ago.

The plan was to do it with acquaintances, but I did it with my partner of four years, and we found it enjoyable and interesting. We each learned a few things, and it was a positive experience overall. It was probably easier and less uncomfortable than it would have been with a stranger or an acquaintance, but that may also have made the experience less powerful; to some extent, we knew and have said some of the sensitive things that the questions attempt to get you to know or to say. Probably the vulnerability, and therefore the effect, would have been greater with someone less familiar.

Because there was an odd number of people, one group did the questions as a threesome. We eventually joined them. Their chat seemed to be more intellectual, less intimate than it might have been one-on-one. One other couple persevered to the end, taking around three hours in total to finish it (we finished it in around two).

Overall an interesting experience, and I look forward to hearing from the couple that persisted—and, I suppose, seeing whether they‘ll become a couple!

Goals for 2019

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 19:40:33 GMT

In a bit of holiday downtime, I’m planning what I’d like to do in 2019. Beeminder is having a New Year’s Resolution Survivor competition, with contestants listed here. The basic idea is to commit to a goal for the whole year of 2019, and stick to it throughout. I’ve decided to enter with three different goals:

Meditate, which I blogged about here.

I’ll be committing to an achievable 1.5 hours per week, which I may increase later in the year.

Pages read.

I’m committing to reading 200 pages from a book each week. In 2019 I averaged 299, but that was without working. I think 200 is a difficult but achievable goal, and setting a goal in pages rather than books will allow me to read longer books. You can see the fifty books I read in 2019 here, and I reflected on the ten best here.

Pomodoros written.

(A pomodoro, for me, is a 25-minute block of time.) I’m committing to writing 40 pomodoros each month, which works out to about 20 hours—including ten minute breaks each hour, for which my wrists will thank me. In other words, it is a count of how many blocks of time I do nothing else but write, whether that’s in a journal, for a blog, or some other form of composition.

I think the writing goal will probably be the hardest, but depending on what 2019 ends up looking like, reading could also be difficult. One of the reasons I’m writing this post, my blog goal, is one that I’m probably going to want to vary in pace over the year, which is why I’ve not included it.

In any case, happy new year, and best of luck as you make or break your resolutions!

On choice

Sat, 29 Dec 2018 00:01:18 GMT

Lately I’ve been thinking about free will. This is in part thanks to Sam Harris, who has been examining the topic in his new Waking Up app. He seems especially interested in the fact that we seem to have little influence on which thoughts appear in consciousness. We hear sounds, but we don’t produce them in consciousness. We think thoughts, but we don’t produce them either; there’s a sense in which they happen to us.

He illustrates this with an exercise intended to maximise freedom: Think of any movie you’ve ever seen. Or even any movie you’ve ever heard of. This is maximal freedom of choice. Yet what pops into consciousness is to a large extent governed by what we have previously thought, seen, or done, and recent stimulus is disproportionately represented. A choice this free is still somehow not made freely, but remains constrained by past conditions. Even the exercise “happens to you”, in a certain sense; regardless of whether or not you did it just now, as you‘re reading this, it was an idea that came in from outside, and it was therefore not something you chose to do (or not to do) of your own expansive, voluptuously free volition. There is something of the “Don’t think of an elephant” nature to any such exercise, which seems to give insight to the lack of governance we have over our own minds.

This has got me thinking about whether freedom is inversely correlated with number of choices, on a more intrinsic level. The choice that follows the prompt “Pick Manhattan or Annie Hall” seems somehow more free than the choice that follows the “Think of a movie, any movie” prompt. Moreover the ability to stream any movie ever made produces less movie-watching than the days of the ritualised video rental visit, for those old enough to remember it. Might the unlimited choice limit freedom? We don’t seem to read more books as a result of the immense increase in the availability of literature, for example. Any internet connection dwarfs what I had access to when I learned to read in the 80s, which was already enormous compared to what even the elites of the eighteenth century had access to—which was in turn a huge improvement over the libraries of the eleventh century.

Perhaps artistic freedom proves the same point; the constraints of metre and rhyme produce better poetry than free verse. The straitjacket of stanza can produce Eugene Onegin. And maybe the strictures of a half-hour block of television are now producing better art than the films whose length and budget limits are vast but nebulous.

Presumably Harris uses this movie exercise because we have the impression that our thoughts lead our actions, so if we cannot freely choose what to think, we also cannot freely choose what to do. I’m not certain that he’s right about this. I think there’s a large extent to which past conditioning matters; I often feel that in order to act, the thinking has to have been done “upfront”, as it were. It is rare to do something truly random, that one has never considered doing, with no context or time to get used to the idea. Even something familiar, like taking a walk or going to the gym, takes a measure of preparatory internal dialogue, in which we get the various drives within ourselves onboard. Maybe we use tricks, like a Trigger-Action Plan, but this is merely to have the dialogue with oneself (oneselves?) even earlier. And yet we seem to have at least some control of our intentions, and, over time, these intentions can produce the pre-conditions necessary for volitional acts.

Harris thinks that we cannot, in some sense, choose a film freely, because we cannot decide, beforehand, the options which appear to our conscious mind. The prompt causes certain films to surface in consciousness, but something other than our conscious mind dictates what arises. Harris believes this to be a decisive blow against free will. I’m less interested in whether it precludes free will than in what insight it gives us into the relationship between our conscious and unconscious mind. It makes it seem like consciousness is a side effect rather than the main event, and that the important mental processes are operating out of view. To me this seems more important than the question of whether our will is free.

This idea of consciousness as a sideshow is reminiscent of the idea that the conscious part of our brains may be more like a press-secretary than a CEO, i.e., that self-conception may arise as a way of appearing competent to others rather than out of any advantage to ourselves as organisms. Maybe we are conscious to improve our appearance to others; but maybe consciousness is just the tip of an iceberg that is still “ours”, in the sense that we have some level of control, over time, on the inputs, even to the unconscious mind.

Meanwhile I’ve been slowly chipping away at Tetlock & Gardner’s book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. One of many interesting ideas it contains is that evolutionarily, there may be high pressure to avoid uncertainty, meaning that the human brain’s “default” may be black-and-white thinking, with a grey area appearing only under extreme duress. The book describes this as “yes-no” as opposed to “yes-no-maybe” thinking (it also implies that even “yes-no-maybe” thinking is woefully insufficient for probablistic thinking).

It’s a persuasive argument. In evolutionary time, the question was: Is there a tiger or isn’t there? Yes means run, no means drop your guard. Coming to a conclusion of maybe is expensive, because then one has to keep paying attention. And today’s political climate shows that people will forego a great deal for the promise of certainty, however unkept. This idea of the expensive of “yes-no-maybe” is also likely related to Kahneman’s idea that the brain might have different systems, with different operating costs; fast thinking tends to be black-and-white, but slow thinking is difficult and disincentivised at a fundamental level.

It has also occurred to me that this “maybe” which we so dislike may itself give some insight into consciousness. The “yes” and “no” are pre-human; the simplest single-celled organism responds to stimulus. Even non-living forces, like gravity and electromagnetism, have this pattern of attraction and repulsion. Could it be that this “maybe” is where we become conscious? Most of the choices we make in life are on autopilot; maybe the CEO illusion comes partly from the fact that only in dire circumstances are decisions escalated into consciousness. Maybe consciousness only crops up when hard choices, or difficult justifications, need to be made.

All this relates to a question raised at our discussion on Isaiah Berlin’s essay: Does increased freedom lead to human thriving? Does it improve artistic output? Are those questions related, or might the conditions for artistic output be unrelated, or even opposed, to those required for material thriving?

On Getting Good

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 02:13:57 GMT

This weekend I finished Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Much of it rings true for me. Although it’s intended to motivate and to help one maximise career potential, it can also be painful to read, since it can highlight one’s career missteps. Or at least it has thrown my mistakes into high relief. Nevertheless I’m very glad to have read it. It is an easy book to outline as Newport clearly delineates the constituent ideas into rules, so I’ll summarise them and explain how I reacted to each of them in turn.

His first rule is that “Follow your passion” is bad career advice, not merely because most people don’t commence life with profitable passions, but because this attitude leads to constant career switching and dissatisfaction. It encourages the belief that work should be immediately gratifying, when in fact the research shows that satisfaction comes with skill, and skill comes with time and effort on the job. One needs, therefore, to do the hard work of cultivating skills before one can expect fulfilling work. Some reviewers have misunderstood this to mean that there is no place for passion in one’s work; this is a misreading of the argument, which predicts that passion will grow from cultivating skill. The point is not that one need not be passionate about one’s work; it’s just that passion follows skill acquisition, and shouldn’t be used as an upfront indicator to lead one’s career decisions. Passion, when it arises, should be used as fuel for the hard work of mastering skills; it should not be passively “followed” to and fro.

I largely agree with the first rule, and it posed no real obstacle for me, as I’m not one to shy away from hard work, nor am I short on passion.

In passion’s stead, Newport proposes his second rule, the titular “Be so good they can’t ignore you”, a piece of advice attributed to comedian Steve Martin. To flesh this out, Newport describes his own “career capital theory”, which emphasises the importance of skill. He advises readers to drop the “passion mindset” and to cultivate the “craftsman mindset” wherein one engages in deliberate practice to improve a skill through effort. Deliberate practice requires setting high goals to stretch one’s abilities and receiving fast feedback to guide one’s efforts.

The overall goal of this approach is to build up “career capital” by becoming extremely skilled at something rare. Once cultivated, career capital can be exchanged in various ways. The most obvious is financial: once you become exceptionally good at something, you will command a higher salary. But salary (beyond a certain point) does not correlate particularly well with happiness or satisfaction. Citing Daniel Pink and “self-determination theory”, Newport defines the most important metrics of fulfilling work to be:

”Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important
Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do
Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people”

Deliberate practice leads to competence, but the best way to improve autonomy is to exchange career capital for it. (Newport doesn’t spend much time on “relatedness,” though probably career capital can also be exchanged for this, if one finds oneself in too isolating a job.)

This second rule was more painful for me. I certainly believe in deliberate practice, though I was more prone to exert this in my hobbies than in my work. His examples of what deliberate practice looks like, and how difficult it should be, also inspired me to set my goals higher. As for the three psychological needs, they do seem important for happiness at work, and I had precisely none of them at my last job. In response to this, however, I jumped ship with no land in sight, and have thereby risked losing what career capital I had accumulated without exchanging it for anything.

This exchange leads to his third rule: “Turn down the promotion”. This argues that one should privilege control over capital-building after a certain point. In fact, Newport argues, career capital can be exchanged more-or-less directly for control.

How does this look in practice? Tim Ferriss’ instructions on how to switch to part-time work in The 4-Hour Work Week come to mind. Once you’re indispensable, cut back hours, or otherwise use this indispensability to define your own terms.

Newport describes two traps when it comes to this type of exchange: trying to get freedom before one has sufficient capital, and the fact that as capital increases, an employer will be less amenable to allowing one more freedom. The first would be like trying to switch to part-time a few months into a first job; one is not yet particularly important to the business, which is as likely as not to say no, or even to let one go. Newport warns about the dangers of “lifestyle design”, in the mould of Tim Ferriss, when one is young and skill-less.

But in ten years’ time, one may quite possibly have become not only indispensable, but capable of doing whatever needs doing in fewer hours per week. In this case, a company might try to prevent one from gaining more control. This is the second trap: as competence improves, bids for more control are more likely to be rejected.

In examining these traps, he turns to the inimitable Derek Sivers. Sivers’ incredible book Anything You Want led me to his FAQ, which is what led me to read this Cal Newport book. From Sivers, who has switched careers several times with meteoric success, Newport derives the “Law of Financial Viability.” This means that one shouldn’t attempt to switch careers until others are willing to pay one for it. This is not an act of selfishness; Sivers famously gave away $22m after the sale of his company. Rather, he treats money as neutral value indicator, which shows whether one is sufficiently skilled to move into the new domain.

This third rule was especially hard for me, as I am sorely tempted to switch careers, but I certainly have no certainty that any other career will pay me. This has led me to consider whether I might not be better off trying to get more autonomy in my old career, assuming it can be salvaged.

The fourth rule is about mission and is confusingly called “Think Small, Act Big”. Newport argues that the very best careers will have a mission which spans multiple positions and projects. But a mission can take a long time to find and decide. One won’t find it unless one is in the region of the “adjacent possible,” i.e. the cutting edge, for a while. Missions decided before this point are likely to be unproductive.

Once at the cutting edge, and in order to stay there, Newport advises that one take “little bets” which are one month projects that stretch one’s limits and test new areas (remember deliberate practice?). These may contribute to finding one’s mission, but even if they don’t, they will contribute to competence.

In this rule he also proposes the “Law of remarkability”. This states that the best projects should be remarkable in two senses: that people will literally talk about them, and that they are presented within a forum conducive to amplifying such remarks. He gives the example of open-source software as a place to launch projects.

I agree with his point about trying to stay at the cutting edge, and I like his idea about little bets and remarkability. I’ve done this, in a way: last year I spent a few months attempting translation as a way of seeing whether I could do it. But I did not do it in a forum with particularly high remarkability.

That pretty much sums up the book. It is not always palatable. It often made me feel like I’d made the wrong choices in my life. But I think it does give insight into what it means to have a fulfilling career, as well as how to get there. The advice is not easy to follow, as it provides no shortcuts around the extremely hard work required for mastery. On the other hand, it does give fairly concrete advice about how to build this expertise.

On Improvement

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:48:18 GMT

I recently read Derek Sivers’ Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur. I can’t remember how I came across it, but the subtitle was not (and is not) particularly promising. Some sort of glorified set of bulletpoints, I thought, aimed at businesspeople. I was surprised, then, to find such a moving and eloquent account of discovery, something closer to Marcus Aurelius than to the tepidly inspirational listicle I’d expected. I remember ordering from his company, CD Baby, in my youth, but knew nothing of the story behind it. In a way, the company and its story are of little importance, either to him or to the book. Ignore the title; this is worth a read—or a listen, as I consumed it, which is what Sivers recommends. I may even uncharacteristically revisit it, once I’ve followed the advice in Sivers’ equally concise and compelling FAQ. I have the feeling I came across his blog decades ago; I wish I’d taken more note. He seems to be living something like the life I wish I were, which, without going into it, is a rarity in this day and age.

The first question on his FAQ is “What should I do about my career?” and, since this is a question foremost on my mind, I took his advice, and started Cal Newport’s (better-titled) book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. This latter, like the former, is a book about mastery, arguing (as does Sivers) that passion (or talent) are minuscule variables in the algebra of genius, in which perspiration counts more than most might guess. This got me thinking about what it would take to improve my writing. As recently as October, most of my writing was done under a bushel, as it were, shown only to closest friends and confidantes, if at all. November, as you may have witnessed here, marked a change, in that I wrote, for that month, more publicly.

Matthew Sweet inspired me; he spent three full years writing every day on his blog. Whether I have the time or mental wherewithal to attempt that remains a question, as my current unemployment keeps all things precarious. I’ve at least resolved, on the back of November, Newport, and Sweet, to write publicly more frequently. I vacillated on this point last week, but further thought has somewhat swayed me. Newport believes that improvement is contingent on two things: deliberate practice (which I could always improve, but is probably not my primary impediment) and fast feedback. I’ve thought about this second aspect for some time, more from tech’s “move fast and break things” or “fail fast” perspective than from anything else.

This idea of deliberate public practice, with the potential for feedback (even though I fully expect most of my writing to be chanting into the void) is better matched by blogging, today, than by physically writing things down. Newport also has strong views about the discomfort required to stimulate improvement; this has led me to think about my discomfort writing fiction, and to a lesser extent, poetry.

I don’t know where this will all lead, but I expect to write more prose, and more poetry, more publicly, in the months to come.

See also On Getting Good, in which I write at greater length about Cal Newport’s book.

On Whether to Write

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 11:42:10 GMT

Last night we had our second meeting of the new discussions I’m holding, called Through a Glass Darkly. It went exceedingly well; I wrote at some length about what we discussed.

I’ve also hosted an internal debate about whether to continue writing publicly in December, and if so, the frequency at which I ought to post. November’s barrage, though not always great, led to six articles of reasonable interest, and I imagine there’s an inevitable ratio of chaff to wheat that mandates a minimum amount of writing. What I mean is that if I’m not writing all the time, it’s unlikely I’ll write anything worthwhile. And while I write every day for myself, what I write in a journal is not as polished as what I write for the consumption of a public, however potential, however small. I’ve spoken to someone else who wrote publicly every day for three years, and he reported that it massively increased his ability to have ideas.

Whether having ideas is my goal is another question; I would have said that improving writing quality was primary, possibly exclusive, though I wonder whether that goal isn’t inconsiderate to both ideas and to readers. In any case, I’m considering reducing the frequency to twice or thrice a week, at least for December, to see how it goes. I don’t think this can be too injurious, though I’m mildly wary of committing at all in December. California is normally placid, though for me not complacent, but I’ll have my family to be with, and wouldn’t like to add any undue stress, or to detract from our time together. Then again, it’s always lazier than London, and maybe I ought to make the most of the languor and hours, and put my mind at least partially to work.

I have mixed feelings about digital versus analogue as well. I’ve piled up notebooks over the years; they make me fear fire followed by tears. The digital word, ironically, is now more durable than its more concrete counterpart, but the public remnants are more embarrassing—and perhaps less poignant—than the private print, the secretive scrawl of the laboriously written word.

When I write longhand, I also write more verse. On the one hand, I love the liberty of metre’s strictures. On the other, there’s no demand for it now, little place for it today, unless, I suppose, one writes songs. Then one seems either to write for dozens of indistinguishable performers, or to be a singer songwriter of one’s own, and I am neither, none. Meanwhile poetry itself, insofar as I have seen, has lost not just the plot but the verse to boot, leaving it little life, and worsening the uncertain state of an anachronistic artform.

Dry November: Day 30

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 18:23:54 GMT

My final hours of sobriety; our revels now are starting. Tonight I’ve got a friend’s birthday followed by a Christmas party, and I fully intend to have craft beer at midnight to celebrate the completion of my ascetic month.

Despite the autumn drear of some of my writing, I am hopeful, happy, and this week I’ve felt unusually energetic. Perhaps it actually takes a month to see the benefits of boozelessness. Though I forgot that it was Thanksgiving until the intercontinental texts arrived, I’ve been exceedingly grateful this month, to my family, to my partner, to my glistening new friends and the unassailable old: I’ve met some great people this month and had quality one-on-one time with some very dear friends.

At the start of the month, I worried that hitting a full year of unemployment might daunt me into torpor, but instead I feel invigorated, galvanized, excited for the future. I am glad and (perhaps pathetically) proud to have abstained for a month despite frequent social commitments in an unapologetically drunken city, already on its Christmas warpath.

Besides being dry, I got a lot done. Hopefully this list is not too annoying (better yet, maybe it will appear paltry compared to your November productivity). I’ll post it here for posterity, as a possible source of motivation to those considering a dry month of their own, and to my future forgetful self, as a reminder of what can I can achieve on the wagon. Some of this surely would have gone unmitigated by drink, but perhaps not in such variety and volume.

I applied to Entrepreneur First, and have an interview with them in January.

I applied to stay for a month on Bergman’s island estate on Fårö, a place I’ve dreamed of going for over a decade; I proposed I’d write a novella and poetry for the locals. I also applied to some tutoring jobs and sent out some tentative journalistic tentacles, and I did a few other interviews at startups.

I hosted the first meeting of Through a Glass Darkly, a loosely structured, interdisciplinary, in-person intellectual chat which I’m very excited about.

I also made the website which looks better than my normally lacklustre efforts.

I learned about the odd phenomenon of ultraworking, which I found boosted my productivity these past three days (I’m in my ninth cycle of the day as I write this). In a similar vein I did eleven Focusmate sessions.
I got to meet, at least briefly, some great people, including Adam Curtis, Matt Clifford of EF, and Jonathan Haidt.
I attended dinners, parties, dinner parties, brunches, pub nights, an Effective Altruism social, and several other events, all with the comparatively crystalline recollection of a teetotaler.

For my forebearance I have met some amazing people, had some incredible experiences.

For instance I went to Christmas at Kew with a very beautiful bunch.
I found a way to track and commit to meditation, using Insight Timer, RescueTime, and Beeminder.

I will write about this approach soon.

I finished the opening scene of a novella I’m writing.
I watched three films: General Magic (2018), Religulous (2008), and The Awful Truth (1937).
I finished four books: Anathem by Neal Stephenson, The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt, The Awakened Ape by Jevan Pradas, and Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie.
I also started three: Empires of the Word, The Sense of Style, and Waking Up.

I made some marginal progress on Superforecasting as well.

I went to the gym ten times, and I did four fasts that were longer than eighteen hours.

I ate pretty healthily. Annoyingly, I also gained weight!

I clocked 25 hours writing, in total, in explicitly timed sessions (49 pomodoros); RescueTime puts me at 40 hours on the sites I normally use for composition.

I wrote through 3/4 of a written moleskine journal which I started on the 6th. I also published six articles on Medium, mostly adapted from my Dry November posts:

All in all it has been a life-affirming month, and I owe it to all the friends who supported me, and to you, Dear Reader and Friend, for enduring my inanities. I wish you all the best for December, and maybe we can meet for a drink! ☺️

Find me elsewhere…

Dry November: Day 29

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 16:26:43 GMT

On my penultimate dry day, I’m writing in an empty pub on Tottenham Court Road, where the staff knows me, as I used to work nearby. I’m in a pub because, although I’d secured a coveted seat in the excellent TAP Coffee No. 114, the tiny venue lacks a loo, and I’d had to drink two litres of water at the hospital.

Today I had an MRI. I’ve had an ongoing mystery illness, to which I’ve occasionally alluded, but for which I still have no diagnosis. After worsening abdominal pains from July to October, including a few hospitalisations, I have mostly recovered, though I can’t say Western medicine deserves much credit for this development. The best I can say for their invasive but unproductive meddling is that had I truly been about to die, as I sometimes felt that I was, they might have been able to intervene. Though I’m not totally certain even of that. I suppose it’s also good to know I don’t have cancer, Crohn’s, Celiac, or any of the multitude of other conditions they’ve eliminated in their fruitless, painful search. And to be fair to them, they have done quite a lot of work, quite a number of procedures, though to call this “care” would be an exaggeration, given the lack of comms or guidance that there has been.

An MRI, I learned today, takes more time than a CT scan. I arrived at 11:20 and, over the course of an hour, had to drink the aforementioned litres of water in a hallway. “You’re nil by mouth?” a nurse asked. “No…” I said, confused. “When did you last eat?” “Last night.” “Then you’re nil by mouth,” he informed me. I thought he was asking whether I had been forbidden to eat, which I felt I hadn’t, except technically I had, because of this procedure. You’re not allowed any food for four hours before the MRI, though the instructions they sent were contradictory; some said you could drink water, others said you couldn’t drink anything. The nurse really wanted to know whether I’d eaten today, and I hadn’t, so that was fine.

He asked me a lot of questions (which I’d already answered on a form) about metal implants, piercings, shrapnel and bullets, and some about other ailments—including the bizarre-sounding “megacolon”—that related to their plan to inject me with buscopan. This seems to be one of the few drugs the NHS loves to give out, probably because it doesn’t do anything. I’ve had it orally and intramuscularly, when they suspected me of IBS; today I had it intravenously. Apart from blurring my vision it had no apparent effect. It did, however, give them the chance to put a canula into my arm, which UCLH loves to do at every opportunity. Despite being diabetic, and therefore obliged perpetually to prick and puncture myself just to stay alive, I have a paradoxical terror of other people doing so, presumably from a childhood scarred by hospitals. The practitioner was proficient, and the procedure painless, however, so my fear of needles proved needless.

There was a bit of kerfuffle over my insulin pump site. They wanted me to remove it, even though it has no metal. This would have disrupted my day and deprived me of insulin until I could get home to re-insert a new site, as it had not occurred to me to bring one. In the end, in a rare turn of events, I won, and was relieved to find, during the scan, that I was right: there is no metal in the infusion site. Or at least the magnets caused nothing to tear through my body.

The procedure took about half an hour. I did not find it claustrophobic or unpleasant; if anything, by the end, I was in danger of falling asleep. I credit this partly to my knowledge of how to insert earplugs; without them securely in the ear, the noise might have been overwhelming, and I might have looked as dazed and distraught as the elderly woman rubbing her temples outside as I went in. Halfway through a nurse came into the room to inject the buscopan, telling me that it might make my mouth dry. I’d just downed litres of water so I was not too worried about this eventuality.

The experience itself reminded me of nothing so much as 2001, perhaps because of the enclosed space (reminding me of the astronauts’ hibernation chambers) and the excessive noise, as well as the strange pneumatic tubes, and the 60s futuristic feel of the whole affair. After we left the IMAX screening of the film last week, my partner and a few others had complained about the volume of 2001; but in my opinion it was exactly right. Voices were audible, the music was sometimes uncomfortably loud, and the sirens were utterly unbearable, just as Kubrick had intended. A perfect use of the vast dynamic range of a cinema.

The MRI was likewise a productive cacophony. They moved me backwards and forwards as I lay prone, trying not to disturb my canula, with earplugs in and headphones over them. The noises were still, as they were reputed to be, extremely loud, but to me they were not wholly unpleasant. There is a sort of pumping noise that sounds musical, and the noises when they scan, during which they make you hold your breath, vary in pitch, tone, volume, and frequency. As surreal as 2001.

Afterwards they released me and left me to retrieve my belongings from the two lockers they had instructed me to use. I dressed there rather than in the changing room. In typical fashion there was no explanation of what had happened, or what to expect. After I’d dressed, I walked into their little cockpit, adjacent to the scary magnet room. “Just wanted to ask, do you have a rough idea of when…” I paused. I was a bit dizzy, and my vision blurry, presumably from the useless buscopan. The nurse got idea. “Two weeks,” she said dismissively. I doubted it, but the nurses had been kind, so I wandered out of the hospital in a daze.

The pub is now, at 16:25, beginning to fill, as if anticipation of an increasingly dissolute December.

Dry November: Day 28

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 23:48:49 GMT

Let me explain.

This morning I attended a session on starting a business, kindly provided by St. Luke’s Community Centre. These sessions—ranging from market research, to branding, to contract law—are invariably interesting, and occasionally even useful, though I’ve done little enough to get a business started so far. Most sessions are interactive, but today was exhausting, because the purpose was to perfect pitches of various lengths. It began with a waffling minute-and-a-half which we had to whittle down, over four hours, to a no-nonsense elevator pitch. This meant repeating the pitch over and over to new people, whilst appearing sufficiently enthusiastic and perky to be persuasive throughout.

With the best business plan in the world this would require great energy, but I am far from clear about what I’m doing, so I had to come up with something more or less fictional. I went with the simplest of the jobs I‘m considering and said I wanted to be a freelance writer and sub-editor. This seemed a strange thing to do after financial tech, to my partners, as indeed it is. But I stuck to my guns and pretended this was my one true narrative, though in reality I haven’t the foggiest what I’ll end up doing. So I mostly tried to improve my partners’ pitches, which they seemed to appreciate.

The exercise was not without benefits; thinking about who you are, what you’re doing, and what action you want the other person to take is effective even if you’re not pitching a business. In interviews, for example, or even in small-talk, this is something I could stand to improve. “I’m funemployed” or “Nothing, at the moment” both lead to winding discussions of my many bizarre little projects. I enjoy instilling this uncertainty, and sometimes jealousy, in my employed conversational counter-parties. But if I want to convince anyone to actually employ me, to accept my applications, or merely to take me seriously, I need to streamline my narrative. So I left tired but inspired to do better at this task.

From this vast expenditure of energy I walked to the Onfido offices in Liverpool Street, to attend another event, to which my friend had invited me. This involved five hours of (of all things) ”ultraworking”. This is apparently a thing, and I may have heard of it either through the Complice Goal-Crafting Intensive I did in February, or possibly at the Effective Altruism Careers Week I did in August. It’s been a weird year.

My friend was three minutes late and therefore, I later learned, not allowed to attend. So there I sat, ensconced in hours of inordinately intense work. It was massively useful. I applied to stay on Ingmar Bergman’s remote island estate, set up a profile for some tutoring jobs, and requested to write for the upcoming Tortoise Media publication. No idea whether anything will come of any of that, but all three were things I’d been putting off for ages: I finished them and had them sent by the time the session was over, which is a testament to the method’s efficiency.

So what is ultraworking? It would be unfair to say that it’s “just” five pomodoros in a row, because it has reflection structured into it that keeps up the momentum. Since I did it in a room full of strangers, there was also the accountability element of not wanting to appear as if I were slacking off. But I was more or less in a flow state the whole time. Whether this magic will persist over time remains to be seen, but in an afternoon I may have become a devotee.

But back to my initial admission: after ten hours of real work, I wanted a beer. Maybe it was the familiar mix of intense social interactions, the perpetual pitches of the first event and the deep work of the second, but something Pavlovian in me told me to go to a pub. Reader, I abstained. But it was interesting to observe the desire welling up in me like it had done so many times before. It made me look forward to Friday, when I’ll have a drink at midnight.

And tomorrow, after my MRI, I may try this ultraworking business again.

Dry November: Day 27

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 01:05:26 GMT

Tonight was my monthly book club. The discussion was on Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, which I enjoyed. The book takes a number of unexpected turns, and while the characters are not the most developed, the story is compelling, and they are after all figures in a tragedy. The discussion was polarized; some people found the writing cliché, the characters flat, the story melodramatic, while others found many of the scenes (including the radicalisation and the events in Karachi) quite plausible, the topic timely and interesting, and the writing engaging. There are provocative parallels with current politics, and a few others examined the book’s interesting re-interpretation of Antigone.

I didn’t drink at book club, though I’d started to avoid that this year after a few rants (one after Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, which I loved, but in part it’s about Warhol, whom I don’t). At this point my longing for alcohol has gone. Even when we’re out, the desire for it is minimal, just a slight twinge when someone asks if I want anything from the bar. I’ve gotten used to the feeling now, and for the first time I can imagine a life completely without it. I think I’d be a better, wiser person. It’s good to know that it’s a mere month’s perseverence to break a fairly strong habit, though in fairness I had already mostly restricted myself to weekends this year.

Otherwise, I’m excited to have a site for my new endeavour to increase engagement, Through a Glass Darkly. Our new thinking is that we’ll spend a month or two on a broad question or topic, with people treating it from different angles and different areas of expertise. I’m looking forward to getting more people involved, and to the conversations to come.

Dry November: Day 26

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 02:01:15 GMT

It’s late so I’ll not say much tonight. It was the first meeting of the Monday evening face-to-face intellectual conversations to which I’ve been alluding. I’ve named them Through a Glass Darkly, though this met with some dissent. I enjoyed the conversation although participants have requested that I add more structure.

At the moment, I‘m thinking this will mean asking people to bring questions and recommendations, but I‘m also open to setting a theme ahead of time, with optional reading. To that end I‘ve set up a website, which I‘ll link to soon, and a mailing list which you can subscribe to if you’re in London and interested.

We discussed our visions of utopia, how to gain an appreciation for film, whether modernity is damaging relationships, gratitude and grace, and my half-formed idea about the aesthetic nature of consciousness.

I look forward to doing it again next week, and I‘m grateful to those who came.

Dry November: Day 25

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 22:35:45 GMT

Yesterday evening, during an invigorating and exhilarating exploration of Kew Gardens with a dozen of London’s best and brightest, after steaming chestnuts in the cold, I was thinking about that old impenetrable chestnut: consciousness. We had in tow enough provisions for a small army, lugged through the laserlit pines and before the aqueous projections, and onto fairground rides amidst bewildered children.

Pattern recognition

Three things struck me. The first was the infinite detail of reality, at every level, from the microscopic to the cosmos. It has patterns which hold up to infinite scrutiny, and the patterns repeat from the smallest drop of water to the largest galactic sprawl. We, of course, made of matter ourselves, partake of these patterns, and embody them as much as things much bigger and smaller than ourselves. The feeling of being one part of a pattern, but one that can appreciate the pattern itself, is a strange and disorientating blessing.

Who exactly is conscious?

This relates to the second strangeness, which is the question, in consciousness, of who is watching. In meditation, one can see, for example, physical pain, not only as a signal, but also the reception of the signal. One can witness both the object and the subject of the experience, as it were. When this happens, a question arises: if the subject and the object, taken together, can become the object of consciousness, of meta-cognitive awareness, then who exactly is doing the watching? Who is the subject?

A friend and I discussed it; consciousness requires a differentiation of qualities. Undifferentiated input could not be called consciousness. It seems, therefore, that consciousness itself is inherently aesthetic, because for consciousness to arise, there must exist differentiated objects of consciousness, as well as an observer to experience this differentiation. That experience is aesthetic, and almost immediately (possibly concomitantly) arises the judgment of better or worse. (“The Tao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, Three gives birth to all things” might refer to this judgment of better/worse leading to reality, and almost certainly eating of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is about this.)

This differentiation seems itself to tied to subjectivity, which is why I can’t dismiss out of hand the idea that matter could be conscious. But even if you think only humans have consciousness, the question of exactly who, in a human, is conscious remains mysterious. The obvious answer (“me?”) is unsatisfying, because as the Buddhists have long pointed out, we cannot reliably point to any single stable entity that represents this “me,” and even if we arbitrarily choose some shifting aspect or attribute to consider to be our “true” selves, we can, in our mind, also observe that self from another vantage point. So in that case, who exactly is the observer? I have various thoughts and experiences that could point to an answer, but they are probably too strange to discuss here.

The show of force

The third also arises from this differentiation between subject and object, self and world. The idea relates to something that Sam Harris has pointed out, which is that human communication can only really be conducted in two ways: through conversation or through force. We have two ways of interacting with the world or achieving anything, and those are to speak to others, or to physically manipulate the world (or people) with our bodies.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.

The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. — Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”

I’ve long thought that, in terms of physical activity, there’s little enough difference between Hitler and Gandhi. They mostly impacted the world by standing around and talking. Hitler may have killed a few French soldiers in the First World War, and Gandhi may have stood in some inconvenient places, but mostly they did not directly, personally, physically enact their consequential “actions.” Instead, they compelled change through words, and indirectly through the threat of force.

It occurred to me last night that this latter “show of force” is almost always more show than force. Force is expensive and dangerous, and is, as it ought to be, a last resort. It therefore requires a “show”. But any show of force risks becoming a farce. There is something inherently funny about people doing their utmost to look powerful. This is why dictators sometimes veer from fearsome to comic or pathetic, and military parades have the faint ridiculousness of children dressing up, right until the violence starts. Maybe it’s also why the funniest jokes often push into grim territory, or why it can be extremely menacing if one cannot tell whether someone else is joking.

I was thinking that maybe there’s always a fine line between the camp and the deathcamp, and that is an aspect of what is so disturbing, for example, about the arbitrary nature of sending people to the right, to work, or to the left, to be killed, as Viktor Frankl described in Auschwitz. It reminds us that every confrontation, and perhaps even life itself, has this arbitrary nature. Most of the time, missed by a bus, we laugh it off. But eventually the joke will not land, but become a matter of life and death, leaving no time for laughter, nor for any appeal or explanation. Even if a heated argument no longer leads to a duel like it once did, there’s something that links confrontation, jokes, deadly seriousness, threats, and force. There may also be something linking the show of force to art as a fitness display.

Kew was beautiful, and in the evanescence of its luminous beauty one could see the nature of life’s multitudinous pains and pleasures: first consciousness, then object of consciousness, then the dualistic illusion, and instantaneously the clinging to the beauty—which is always fleeting—but rarely as palpably so as in the vacillations of tissue flowers in the night breeze. And yet, since consciousness is aesthetic, there is a sense in which beauty is not something out there to be grasped, but some fundamental aspect of having the lights of awareness on, so to speak. The lights were on last night.

Dry November: Day 24

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 16:31:39 GMT

A major realisation I’ve had this month, mentioned in passing in previous posts, is that even without beer, I adore pubs. This should not have come a surprise; my mother, a lifelong teetotaler, also loved pubs when she came to visit me in London. One thing she observed is that no one rushes you. You could buy a single soft drink and sit for hours, and no perky waiter will come to check on you even once, much less once per mouthful. You can comfortably have a business meeting, a rowdy rant with friends, or just read on your own. They are less regimented than a restaurant, less lonely (and less loud) than a bar, and less sterile than a Starbucks.

They also have a daily rhythm that is something like a home. You can come for a lazy lunch, an afternoon coffee, a stodgy dinner, or a late night revel, and at every moment of the day, a good pub will match the languor or tenor of the time. You can while away the hours in this way, and I must have clocked enough time in pubs to amount to a part-time job for much of my life in London.

A few years ago, an excellent article in the Guardian got me thinking about the role of pubs in British life. In lamenting their waning numbers, it invokes the toughest type of nostalgia, which is the nostalgia for a thing that has not quite gone, but remains precipitously endangered. The danger in the article may be slightly exaggerated, but it is still well-worth reading. This passage particularly stuck with me:

Try describing a pub for yourself, without resorting to cultural shortcuts—Marlowe, Moll Flanders, Peggy Mitchell, Withnail, Shaun of the Dead— and likely you will wind up describing what it isn’t.

A pub is not a bar. It is not a restaurant. It is not a social club. It is not a shop. It is not a bench in a park. It is not a surgery or psychiatrists’ office. It is not a gig venue, a football stadium, a fighting pit, a staff room, a piano room. It is not the house you grew up in, nor the atrocious digs you moved to in your 20s. It is not your present-day living room. It is not a bus shelter. And in some way it is all those things. It is a pub.

Of course the term is short for “public house”, and people used to receive deliveries there, or turn up to hear the latest gossip. I suppose what I’ve been thinking is that the pub is an extension of the domestic space. Real estate pressure has pushed the better half of the home into the community. On a small island, a pub becomes a living room for those who can’t afford living rooms, which is virtually everyone in Central London. Most people who have enough space to entertain a large group live sufficiently distantly to be impractical meeting points. Though this wouldn’t account for the excellent British pubs in the rest of the country, where there’s more space than there is in London, I still think this is part of the explanation for the atmosphere of pubs in the capital.

Thinking of the pub as a home extension has also led me to a new idea about interaction with people. I have envied, over the years, those artists and intellectuals of the past, with their stately homes, enormous flats, clubs, and dinner parties fostering perpetual engagement of thought. It’s only occurred to me recently, that maybe a pub could become a surrogate salon for this type of discussion. 18th Century coffee houses acted as offices and meeting places as well, I think, if I remember my Habermas. My new idea is to fix a date in time and space—naturally, a pub—to meet, discuss, and encourage one another. There seems to be a demand for participation of this nature, as internet connections supplant physical ones.

Dry November: Day 23

Sat, 24 Nov 2018 01:46:19 GMT

A week left of November and it’s been going well. I’ve done some interviews this week, with the cycles of anxiety, relief, and regret that follow. I’m once again looking forward to the weekend. Despite not working, I seem to have settled into a seven-day cycle. By Friday I’m more social and less productive. Perhaps this is conditioning from years of working and schooling, or perhaps there’s something more fundamental. The Israelites appear to have come up with the seven-day week, whereas other civilisations used eight-day weeks. In either case, the unit would represent roughly one quarter of a lunar month, but I wonder whether there isn’t something more fundamentally human than that going on.

Otherwise I’m carrying on with Empires of the Word and The Sense of Style, so it’s been a linguistic week. The former has sent me to many wikipedia pages to learn anew of long dead civilisations. The latter has led me to prioritise reading good prose, though I have not yet so far sought exemplars. Pinker seems to love his wife’s writing, which is quite sweet.

I’ve spent the past few days thinking about how to improve intellectual engagement. Ideally, I’d like to have face-to-face discussions with friends and their interesting friends, with minimal admin. My current thinking is that I might best set a regular day and time each week during which I’ll reside and write (but not drink) in a pub. I’ll put an invitation out but not stress too much about who does or doesn’t come. I want there to be a no-phone, pen-and-paper-only rule. Otherwise it would be an open discussion, or possibly one around a film, article, exhibition, or whatever else might come up in the open discussion. I would encourage friends to invite anyone they thought would find it interesting. The beauty of this is in its regularity; people can come and go as they like, there’s no hassle around planning, because if people miss it they can just turn up the next week.

Tonight has reaffirmed for me that I needn’t drink for invigoration. Much of the energy for which drink takes credit in fact comes from the places, the hours, the people, the ideas. Pubs can be a delight dry, and there’s much to be said for seeing friendly faces lucidly.

Dry November: Day 22

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 13:56:18 GMT

I’m whelmed. Both over- and under-, the former by a slew of nascent endeavours, the latter by their fruit and lack thereof, by the talk earlier this week, and by 2001 last night. Not that the film was underwhelming, but maybe Kubrick’s disdain for the follies of man has rubbed off on me in a sort of misanthropic mimesis. “To whelm” once meant “to overturn or capsize”, according to the OED, but it cites no such usage since the sixteenth century. In the sense of overturning a dish, it was used as late as 1854. In 1894 it still meant “to throw (something) over violently or in a heap upon something else, esp. so as to cover or to crush or smother it,” or to “bury under earth, snow or the like,” with an example from 1883. There are no twentieth century usages cited. The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

whelm (v.).

early 14c., probably from a parallel form of Old English -hwielfan (West Saxon), -hwelfan (Mercian), in ahwelfan “cover over;” probably altered by association with Old English helmian “to cover,” from Proto-Germanic *hwalbjan, from PIE *kuolp- “to bend, turn” (see gulf (n.)).

“Overwhelm” seems to mean something more physical and closer to “overturn” than I had thought. I imagined it meant something more like “overcome” or “outnumber” than it does (though maybe this comes figuratively from the “burying” sense). Its facetious twin, “underwhelm,” doesn’t make literal sense, then, as it would mean something like “undercapsize” or “underturn,” or perhaps “underbury”? Surprisingly the Etymology dictionary attests usage as early as 1953, though it does not give an example, and the OED as early as 1956:

T.

K. Quinn Giant Corporations viii. 61 He wrote..commending the action of one of the giant corporations for a..price reduction at a time when prices were rising. I was underwhelmed, and investigated.

2001 was not underwhelming, nor was it exactly overwhelming, beautiful though it is. I appreciated it more than I did the first and last time I’d seen it, on 35mm at the BFI, in July 2009. I had waited several years after seeing the rest of Kubrick’s work, at the advice of my uncle, who’d said not to see 2001 except on the big screen. Last night we watched it on 70mm at the Science Museum’s IMAX, an experience worth having. The first time I’d seen it, alone, in the afternoon as I recall, the third act seemed to take an era, and I was dying to get out by the time it finished.

This time I went with eight friends, and I had much more patience. I credit this to age, and to the equanimity-enhancing effects of meditation. The final act, though somewhat slow, was not insufferably so, and I felt it was much more meaningful and less pretentious than I had thought a decade ago. Its lasting effect on science fiction seemed somehow clearer, and I thought about a claim I heard at uni, which was something like: “Every Kubrick film is a meta-film, in that each is both a genre film and a film about that genre.” What it says about science fiction I am not sure, but the cold isolation of Alien(s) and the “This means something”-ness of Close Encounters of the Third Kind came to mind. I wondered whether the HAL sightreading/jettisoning episode wasn’t referencing one of the renditions of The Mutiny on the Bounty (“Keelhaul him”?). The film’s presentation of hibernating humans as mere numbers and graphs, the sentience and suffering of our digital counterparts, and the fraught relationship between man and machine remain as prescient and powerful as ever, perhaps more so in our age of increasing existential AI risk.

The visions of the post-Cold War future are charming, compared to what’s happening now, and I couldn’t help wondering what the students of 1968 would have thought of this vision of the future. Superficially it’s utopian, and yet it also stresses that refinement never really cures the Hobbesian state of nature, as presented in the film’s iconic “Dawn of Man” beginning. The lack of nature throughout is also striking: from the desert desolation of the start, to the sterility of space, to the lifeless visions of Jupiter in the third act, man lacks real connection with nature. His perhaps most vital connection to it—food—is unnatural, from the apes eating meat, to the liquid meals, to the boxed sludge, to disappointing-looking sandwiches. The opulent eighteenth-century meal at the end looks least nutritionally distressing, but the man eats utterly alone, unlike the film’s other meals, all of which are communal. The film gives no glimpse of any other physical pleasure, nor any search for meaning. There is no sex, no intimacy; the family calls (to the daughter, from the parents) are bizarre.

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The digital game of chess lost to HAL had me thinking of The Waste Land. I’m not much of a chess player but the mate coming on-screen seemed comically obvious even to a neophyte. The second act really is like a drawn-out game of chess, though this time Dave checkmates HAL. I thought a lot about HAL’s red light in these scenes. I thought of Kubrick’s interested in eyes, in Eyes Wide Shut and the eye-opening scenes from A Clockwork Orange. Last night we discussed whether it might be the sun, or whether it might not be the solo Cyclops eye, if we are really to read this as an Odyssey. In that case, would the Monolith represent the beam used to put it out? Or might it represent the beam obscuring our eye, of which Jesus preached?

I also thought about the question, asked by the BBC 12 reporter, whether HAL has feelings, and the response that “I don’t think anyone can truthfully answer”. HAL passes the Turing test but the opacity of consciousness never allows us real insight into the internal states of others, which must always be interpolated and assumed. This question seems to be at the heart of this film, and of Eyes Wide Shut, in a way, another instance of acting oddly under threat of surveillance. The film gives hardly any hint of any character’s interior states, except for fear and aggression at the start. The implication is that not much has changed since those Darwinian days, and I think this is what makes the film seem so misanthropic.

The Shining has many parallels, with the Overlook Hotel acting as a character in the drama, the environment itself being an agent, just as HAL’s control of the ship gives Dave’s environment agency. I thought as well of the excellent Room 237, in which Kubrick enthusiasts present their views (ranging from persuasive to perverse) of what The Shining actually means. I suppose I’m interested in why 2001 doesn’t seem to get the same attention, because it has a powerful momentousness in every moment, and an overwhelming feeling of meaning even though the meaning is never clear. On the one hand, it seems to be a rather banal investigation of the progress of technology. On the other, as the odd people in Room 237 felt about The Shining, the symbolism in every scene seems to point to much more. I was also struck by the bathroom scene at the end, which reminded me of the one in The Shining. My partner pointed out that this is mirrored by the zero-gravity bathroom sign, and possibly by the grooming habits of our distant forebears.

I thought a lot about whether the three stages might represent something like pre-linguistic, linguistic, and post-linguistic, or subconscious, conscious, and supra-conscious aspects of human nature. The final sequences do seem to imply a universal consciousness, a disconnection or liberation from the single focus of consciousness to which we are by flesh bound. This individual consciousness is absent from the communal first act, but powerfully present in the survival narrative of the second. One could read the film along the lines set out by Robin Carhart-Harris in his mind-bending neuroscience paper The Entropic Brain, and think about whether increasing entropy might not be another way to read the film.

Today I’m recording some sort of educational video, and will be in front of a green screen for the first time. Wish me luck.

Dry November: Day 21

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 17:48:24 GMT

On Tuesday I saw Jonathan Haidt speak at intelligence². Emily Maitlis moderated the discussion with Kehinde Andrews, Eleanor Penny, and Rabbi Lord Sacks. Though the topic was interesting the debate itself was disjointed. The book he wrote with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, however, is well-worth reading.

The book contends that there’s a demographic divide between Millennials and a new generation he calls “Generation Z” or “iGen”, drawing the dividing line at 1995. Those born after that year are victims of two trends: one towards increasing and excessive safety, and the other related to ever-increasing screentime. The former is a longer trend, dating back to some high-profile murders and kidnappings in the late 70s and early 80s that caused parents to restrict children’s unsupervised play, just before crime rates began to plummet. The latter relates to the same problems we older generations face with regard to smartphones and the internet, but these are the first kids whose formative years were plagued by social media. He argues rather persuasively that these trends, along with a slower rate of maturation (discussed in the unrelated and rather lacklustre 100 Year Life), have led to a generation with worse mental illness and an increase in suicide, especially among girls. Gen Z also has different attitudes towards “safety” than older generations, and seems less keen on free speech. Importantly, these are big shifts from millennials proper, born from 1981 to 1995, who do not report feeling unsafe merely from exposure to ideas, and they tend (like generations before them) to be proponents of free speech.

He believes that related to these problematic trends, there are three lessons today’s kids are learning which are contrary to ancient wisdom (whether religious or philosophical). He calls them the “three untruths”:

Untruth of fragility: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”

Untruth of emotional reasoning: “Your emotions are right and you ought always to trust them.”

Untruth of us versus them: “There are good and bad people in the world, and the world is ultimately a zero-sum game.”

I think he’s right that these attitudes are both damaging and increasingly common, and that education should address them, or, at a minimum, strive not to make them worse. He draws comparisons with allergies—it turns out that eliminating peanuts from schools has led to fatal peanut allergies—as well as with PTSD. Eliminating all reminders of the source of suffering is a bad strategy for treating PTSD, he reports, not just because it’s impossible, but because it tends to make the problem worse. The best approach, one used in cognitive behavioural therapy, is a controlled, gradual re-acclimation to sources of anguish. To avoid stimulus at all costs is a symptom of PTSD, not a cure for it, and the avoidance approach (content warnings and so on) may set kids up for anxiety. I think injury would also make a good analogy: if you’ve broken your foot, it would be a bad idea to go for a run immediately. But if you instead obtain a wheelchair and resolve never to walk again for fear of further injury, you’re creating far worse problems down the line.

So far so good. I recommend the book. The talk, however, was less illuminating. Part of this was structural: each speaker had only a few minutes to have their say, and they often spoke at cross-purposes. The topics were complex and emotionally charged, with no shortage of equivocations and distractions. Sometimes the speakers themselves, perhaps assuming more familiarity with the issues than the audience (or at least I) actually had, lapsed into incoherence. I’ll try nonetheless to summarise their debate.

Haidt began with the statistics: in the last three or four years, in the US, depression is up 30% for boys and 40% for girls, and suicide is up 25% for boys and 70% for girls. Girls are also self-harming more, though boys are not. Trends in the rest of the “anglosphere” (a word I’d not heard), i.e., the UK, Canada, and Australia, are similar, though by some measures they are not as bad as the States. The two factors of interest to him are social media and overprotection. For this attitude of “safetyism” he blames the media’s relentless coverage of high-profile kidnappings or murders, which gives an illusion of persistent danger despite the fact that kidnappings (and every other violent crime) have been on the decline for decades.

He is (as am I) particularly concerned about the application of the word “safety” when it comes to ideas. This word once applied only to physical safety, so its expansion to include ideas is unlikely to be a good idea at a university, which after all should challenge and train minds. He points out that Socrates explicitly tried to make people uncomfortable as an educational method. Neither are the Buddhists known for taking a kind view of comfort when in pursuit of the truth, and I think it’s likely that comfort, or at least perfect comfort, impedes spiritual and intellectual development. Testing is an effective way to learn, for example, and although I along with every other student of course dreaded them, I’m now glad that I took them. (The book discusses the related problem of students being treated as high-paying customers who must be pleased, at least in American unis, which also contributes to the coddling.)

Haidt conceives of students and people as “anti-fragile,” i.e., a certain amount of stress does not break them, but causes them to improve. He quickly ran through the immunological example, arguing that diseases (allergies, diabetes, asthma, Crohn’s) rise in countries as they become richer in part because too cleanly a childhood prevents children’s immune systems from properly developing—the so-called ”hygiene hypothesis“—and sets their immune systems up to wreak havoc on their own bodies by massively overreacting to harmless triggers. In diabetes, for example, the immune system may accidentally kill islet cells which produce insulin as a result of a lack of exposure to certain contaminants; in Crohn’s, the debilitating bowel inflammation, it is hypothesized, results from some mis-calibration of immunity. Likewise, a mind shielded from all disagreement and forms of bad thinking might fail to develop properly. He draws a parallel with physical fitness: to remove civil debate from universities would be like removing weights from the gym. Just as muscles atrophy in the absence of stressors, the mind will atrophy in the absence of dissent.

Eleanor Penny argued that portraying the bleakness that faces the younger generation as primarily a problem of personal development is to ignore their sociopolitical origins. She believes that there is a genuine problem, and a risk to free speech, but the older generation is responsible for this, not by their shortcomings in bringing up the younger generation, but by giving a platform to those who explicitly oppose freedom of speech. The trappings of free discourse, she said, are used to allow far-right speakers to wage war against free speech without challenge. Free speech is disingenuously used as an excuse for the powerful to consolidate power and use it to repress opposition.

Rabbi Lord Sacks came down broadly on the side of anti-fragility, in a society which he compared to a choral harmony requiring a multiplicity of voices. The marginalised must be heard, and the university must be a safe space in the sense that all views should treated respectfully. Universities and societies must not disaggregate into siloed groups, or real hatred of other groups will begin.

Kehinde Andrews contended that it is powerful white men who are fragile, and that they are terrified of the minority voices that are becoming more prevalent at universities. In 1965, he said, uni attendance was 5%, and they were dominated by white men. He believed that these men should have to adapt, and that it is reasonable for minorities to ask for and expect safe spaces, in places that had traditionally been racist and, until relatively recently, would not even considered him (as a black man) human, or capable of rational thought. At this point Emily Maitlis interjected, pointing out provocatively that Lord Sacks had also faced the “gentleman’s club” of British education as a Jew from the lower classes, and that he had found a way to enter constructive dialogue.

From here the cycle repeated, then questions came in from the audience. Lest this go on forever I’ll halt the summaries of each round. Various viewpoints garnered applause, from Haidt’s assertion that “A mind prepared for battle is not a mind prepared for learning” or his admonition to “Stop seeing oppression everywhere, because it will cause you to fail”. Sacks proposed that “If you are confident you are right, you will welcome any challenge.” Penny said that it was “patronising to tell people that oppression is not oppression”, arguing that this is an age-old way to stifle dissent. A white male in the audience received applause for objecting to his perception that Penny was grouping him together with other white males, and claimed that she wanted to be arbiter for who was allowed to speak (to be fair to her, she neither harped particularly on the homogeneity of white viewpoints, nor did she seem to be condemning anything other than hate speech). Sacks said that he was “sympathetic to the anger of the younger generation,” but that “this anger must be put into open conversation.” Andrews received applause for saying that “To not talk about race is to collude.” Two audience members of colour in succession claimed not to see race, nor to have let their ambition be affected by their race or gender.

As you might gather, it was not the most insightful debate, but neither was it without its merits. I have sympathy for Andrews’ contention that minorities deserve a space in which to prepare for encounters with difficult ideas; powerful men have always formed exclusive social groups, and groups are critical for effecting change. On the other hand I’m wary, like Haidt, of a generation increasingly glued to screens and afraid of being challenged. Then again, I may just be getting old; every generation from the first syllable of recorded time has complained about the frailty of the generation to follow.

Dry November: Day 20

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 00:36:15 GMT

Two-thirds of the way through the month. I spent the past three hours in a pub, conveniently one of the closest to my house, for an Effective Altruism social. The people in attendance were strikingly intelligent, thoughtful, and engaged, as I usually find them to be, and I greatly enjoyed their company. Some there had been involved at uni but not known it was such a thing in London, or had found out about EA itself through its excellent career guide, called 80,000 Hours, which you should check out.

Topics included:

San Francisco in 1860, 1960, and now,
the wage increase resulting from the Black Plague,
at what point English GDP per capita passed Chinese (I got it wrong but it‘s around 1750),
two views of Jonathan Haidt‘s work (from human sciences and from philosophy),
a critique of his studies on intuitionism,
radical epistemic relativism,
whether to address factory farms via meat substitutes or pressure on large retailers’ supply chain,
how studies of well-being have improved funding for mental illness,
and how EA will position itself in China.

Otherwise today was spent lifting before my gym begins refurbishment tomorrow, listening to Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, reading a summary of the First World War, speaking to my mother and doing some Christmas planning, reading Empires of the Word, and, for some reason, attempting to translate part of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra before seeing 2001 tomorrow.

Until then…

Dry November: Day 19

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 00:23:06 GMT

Tonight I saw Jonathan Haidt speak at intelligence². Although I quite liked the book he wrote with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, the discussion was a bit disjointed and did not come to any conclusive answers. I’ll write about it at greater length tomorrow.

So what’s different? She says I’m more lucid when I get home from a night out, and I think I take less time to get going on an average morning. I am more productive, but how much more remains to be seen; I may try to do an analysis at the end of this month, as I do track what I do each day, and I could compare it to last month.

But the biggest difference is that I’m happier. I routinely measure my happiness, or rather unhappiness, with the Beck Depression Inventory (AKA BDI-II), having had periods of depression and low mood throughout most of my adult life, though lately I’ve more or less cured myself of this malady. (How would be a much longer post, but ask me if you’re interested.) This week I scored as low a score as I ever have, falling into the range for non-depressed normals. This number does seem to vary with alcohol consumption, and for longer than you might think; a heavy night can (mildly) affect the number for up to a few weeks.

Dry November: Day 18

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 19:11:53 GMT

Our spiritual rapport pervaded the party, to support the commencement of a third, our host of honour. His citizenship was the culmination of years of obedience in a financial labour camp. Subservience to the whims of a waningly wise nation state, the concept in which he had never believed, had led him and me a few weeks ago to the same Town Hall where the same two men had bequeathed to me the selfsame ambivalent merit. Afterwards he had given thumbs-up to a picture of our ever-regal ageing regina, and the band played a song to save her, and not the Waltzing Matilda that may someday come again. But it was a hard day’s night he appreciated above all, which ended his decades’ slog of suspicion and paperwork, detainment at airports, and so on. He was not emotionally unmoved, as he feels at least some allegiance to London, if less than to Lahore.

On the night of his party she and I stayed united. If not in chemistry then in kind we became a strong rear guard. First the left flank then the right, joyousness til morning light. The atmosphere was one of optimism, endearment, and above all, embrace. Song and dance left many tired or voiceless by the end, but the attendance was impressive, an illustrious and energetic crowd, beautiful, talented, and vivacious, punctuated by the excitement at each new arrival, staggered as they were over the hours, staggering breathlessly at the top of countless stairs. As they gasped they were clasped to the bosom of the night, later to be encircled, entranced, and enveloped, in stillness and in dance.

The mood was unbridledly good, at times intemperately so, with no divisiveness or cliques to emerge. The spark of a first acquaintance or the blaze of a decade of decadence each conspired to burn the heady fuel of fondness. It was a conflagration of camaraderie, a starburst of affection, visible to the naked eye of new friends and old. “A rockstar,” a word the host often repeated in introductions, was what he himself was, and although it captures the ebullience of the crowd, it does little justice to his irreproachable character, his inerrant generosity, his steadfast loyalty or impressive virtue. “A paragon of life” would be closer, consoling in existence’s ebbs and revelling in its flows. He tried to describe the honesty of which he himself is an avatar, but in the end, could not, nor did he need to. He had honoured the past, commemorated its successes and laughed at its follies, and sown the seeds of friends to come, budding acquaintances amidst entwined stalwarts, in blossoming youth and full bloom of maturity. It was a group gleaming brighter than the sun that they by the dawn reflected, saturated with an irrepressible love for life. And he as a citizen is the envy of any nation state, whatever his beliefs about the necessity of their existence.

Twenty years hence, said the host, towards the end, he has no doubt that we will not be old familiar faces, but present, as we were tonight, for each other.

Dry November: Day 17

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 18:12:31 GMT

I’m in the BFI bar, surrounded by booze. A family near me, or rather families, a gaggle, had gotten four pints for the price of two due to ineptitude behind the bar. As if by karma for their ungainly glee, one of their children has promptly knocked a full pint over. A British man on my other side is trying to convince Spaniards to drink. They seem like colleagues though it’s a Saturday afternoon.

I’ve just seen The Awful Truth (1937), in which they drink in every scene, sometimes falsely substituting ginger ale for sherry, at others using eggnog as a threat and nutmeg as a form of aggression, but above all, luxuriating in champagne. They drink it from coupes, as today’s flutes were not in vogue until the ’50s. As that article says, Napoleon is said to have said of champagne something like “In victory we deserve it; in defeat, we need it,” and in the film the couple’s first and final days are carbonated by it. It’s a film about infidelity and divorce, though it’s no Kramer vs. Kramer, and certainly no A Separation or Viaggio in Italia, it nonetheless has its moving moments. Much is the same today as it was eighty years ago, the suspicious minds, half-hearted breaks, petty hypocritical jealousies, though the frequency of unexpected visits is drastically higher than it is today, at least in my life, at least in London. That joke, so cliché in the film that it’s joked about, to quote the Smiths, isn’t funny anymore:

“Who’s that lady I saw you with?”

“That’s no lady, that’s my wife!”

The animal gags and typical screwball situational antics are consistently hilarious, and, though it loses momentum in its final third, it has aged remarkably well. Nor is it without its points of poignancy:

“You said, ‘Lend an ear, I implore you.

This comes from my heart: I’ll always adore you. Til death do us part…’ Remember?”

The biggest difference to films today, as audiences of the time would have been well aware, but which today provides only a puzzlingly long denouement, is the Hays Code, introduced in 1934, which is the reason why after midnight, when their marriage has officially ended, there’s all this tension over whether they will get in bed—the code made it illegal for unmarried men and women to appear in the same bed. It is also possible that the bizarre clock with the human puppets, presumably filmed on an enormous purpose-built cuckoo clock, also appears in The Clock—though I can’t be sure of this.

Last night the dinner party was a pleasure, with great conversation. My abstention from the plentiful wine posed no problem, once again once we’d settled in. At 2am we were still speaking, to the chagrin of my exhausted partner (and possibly our gracious hosts). In the Uber home, she compared me to the Energizer Bunny; apparently alcohol is not the only fuel for my incessant speech, cannot be solely culpable.

Dry November: Day 16

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 17:41:17 GMT

I’ve also begun Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word, which I’ve been meaning to read for years. It begins with an account of the dramatic 1519 meeting of the Old World and the New, which is recorded in much more detail than I had imagined. From Nahuatl to Yucatec Mayan to Spanish through interpreters, Motecuhzoma (more commonly rendered in the corrupted form “Montezuma,” and apparently pronounced “motēukzoma”) welcomed Cortés:

“You have graciously come on earth, you have approached your water, your high place of Mexico, you have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have briefly kept for you, I who used to keep it for you.”

A bizarre thing to come from the ruler of the largest empire in the Americas, at the height of its power, in his own city, which was larger than any in Europe. And strangely prescient, given the millions dead to come. “This exchange in Nahuatl and Spanish records a moment of destiny when the pattern was set for the irruption of one language community into another.”

It’s a brilliant device to open book which argues that a history of languages can give different insight from political or military histories. For example, though the Germanic tribes succeeded in replacing all rulers in the western Roman empire in the 5th Century AD, they left Spain, France, and northern Italy speaking versions of Latin, which they continue to speak to this day. So it could be argued that whatever happened to the nominal heads of state, as a cultural conquest it was a failure. Ostler argues that there is more to language than mere communicative expediency, that there is a shared cultural worldview that arises from it:

“A language community is not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language: it is an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition.

A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements, and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people’s view of the world must also be changing.”

Fascinating stuff.

It’s Friday and I’m looking forward to seeing people this weekend. Tonight we have a dinner party, and tomorrow my friend is celebrating getting his British citizenship. Not only did I attend his citizenship ceremony earlier this month, but when I got my own British citizenship in April 2016, the celebration wound up at his house. My first vote was for mayor of London; my second was for the referendum. When I got my citizenship I felt proud. That’s all I’ll say here.

Dry November: Day 15

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 10:10:07 GMT

Halfway there. It’s been a good few weeks and productive, though what to do next with my life is not yet clear. But one day at a time. Today I’ll be writing on The Clock, Bergman’s Dreams, and General Magic.

Lately I‘ve been wondering whether writing isn’t always, to some extent, synesthetic. I don’t mean seeing numbers as colours or dates as spatial distance (though these phenomena are fascinating). I mean that writing seeks to represent one sense with another, with which it ought, by rights, to be incompatible. If I watch a film or performance, which has occupied the majority of my recent writing, there is a sense in which words, which are sounds reduced into visual symbols, should not be able to capture any of the experience. And yet there is something that words can capture.

On the other hand, perhaps I fixate on the narrative elements of what I am seeing. If that’s the case, then the synesthesia might happen earlier. I see a film, from the sights and sounds I form a narrative in my mind, and the writing I do later refers to this narrative rather than anything actually seen or heard. So the jump from visual to verbal had already happened at the time of the experience, and everything subsequent is verbal.

That could be partially true, but often the notes I take later call imagery to mind. I am not merely re-working the words from notes into other words. Those notes are pointers to memories which are often visual or auditory. They are also usually impressionistic. These jumps too—making a note, recalling from notes—feel synesthetic.

The process seems to me to be: See a film, which is light and sound. The mind processes those experiences in real-time, with almost no conscious control, into concepts and snapshots, that the memory imperfectly stores. Making a note means labelling this snapshot with symbols, as a reminder. Re-reading notes helps to call back the instant at which one took the note. This snapshot can be further reflected upon, or combined with other snapshots, to create a narrative structure, which one can then render back into words. Or perhaps these were already rendered into words by thinking itself, and writing is an act of translation.

The question remains whether this narrative retains any of its original visual or auditory content. I’m aware that Wittgenstein wrote about colour. I believe this was partially about the inability of language to say anything about colour in the absence of experience. I suspect language is too distant to contain the stimulus itself; maybe it can only summarise the writer’s response to the stimulus.

The artifice of cinema is partly what provokes the question. Lived experience also comes in mostly through sound and vision, but because it has a stronger illusion of having “really” happened, our irrepressible narrative-making mechanism does not seem so strange. It’s probable that seeing a film is the same thing our mind is always doing with lived experience, which is abstracting concepts from sensory input, then narratives from these concepts.

This has nothing to do with drinking, except possibly that abstention changes the nature of one’s thoughts. For the worse, one might argue, if my thoughts here are any indication.

Dry November: Day 14

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 21:01:42 GMT

After fourteen days dry, I’m feeling suspiciously fantastic. It would be churlish not to give credit to my sobriety, though my diet and exercise have also been above average. I’ve been sleeping well and in a positive mood most days. As I’m not working, I’m also not subject to the physical constraints and psychological violence inflicted by certain offices. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy. Besides writing I have been applying for jobs, applying myself to figuring out what I’m doing next. It’s an awkward time to look for jobs in London as I’ll be leaving for California for Christmas, though I suppose it‘s not exactly prime hiring time anywhere. Even interviews seem not to have dampened my spirits, strangely enough. Maybe it takes two weeks dry to feel great, and I rarely got this far previously.

Dry November: Day 13

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 09:23:38 GMT

Last night, after a day at the British Library, a doctor’s appointment, and a catch-up meal with a friend, I took two buses home. I could have walked the roughly two miles, but as I’d been rained on at some point during the day, I was feeling wet and lazy. En route, standing at the bus stop at King’s Cross Station, after digging through my pockets and bag, I realised I had lost a notebook. It was a moleskine cahier (e.g.) which I’d started a week or two ago. Actually, I can tell you exactly when I started it: it was one week ago, the 6th of November, and it was my 62nd notebook. I know this because the cover of the previous one is labelled: 2018-10-10 to 2018-11-06, with the number 61.

This was not the first time I’d lost a notebook, but I think only two were ever really lost forever. Since they’re pocket-sized, if I’m writing at a reasonable pace, then I would typically only lose a few weeks or a month. In less cerebral days, I might lose several months, as it has sometimes taken ages to fill the paltry 64 pages, 128 sides.

That leaves the street, the hospital, or the restaurant, though on the street it would have gotten wet, maybe illegible. Nonetheless it is not yet beyond hope. I’ve neglected notebooks in pubs before, on occasion, and I’ve normally been able to retrieve them. Occasionally staff or friends have handed them back, and once, many years ago, a stranger returned one. I write not only my name, phone number, email in the front, but also an entreaty to return it, sometimes even offer a reward, after a particularly painful loss at Cambridge. More often it is a friend who recognises my name when I’m nearby, but in this case, my scribbling was saved by the kindness of a stranger, who’d picked it up, and emailed me. We met in the pub where I’d lost it, which was the Charles Lamb, near Angel. She worked for the BBC, and confessed to having read it. She had found my writing amusing and engaging, liked the “character I’d constructed,” though of course the only character I’d constructed was my own innermost thoughts and feelings. Or so I thought at the time.

There is a different tone one takes, and quality, when one writes something for others to read. On the other hand, even the most secretive of diaries is always an act of communication, even if only with one’s future self. If they were as devoid of value as notes or a used todo list, we would not care about losing or discarding them. Moreover it is quite difficult to write without a sort of phantom audience in mind, a potential reader, a jealous lover, or just some future family or executor, however inconsequential the writing might be.

My feelings at having lost writing seem to have developed. I may even have matured. A decade ago, with less perspective and less equanimity, I would probably today be deeply distraught. The fact that it’s only a single week of writing helps. It means that I’ve only lost a couple of hours, since I typically write about half an hour a day, and lately less due to writing here. But more importantly, it was writing that I had not re-read. I often feel, in the act of writing, that the thoughts are expendable, worthless even. Later, when I revisit it, I come to strange insights or revelations. I become attached. I can’t quite say whether this is because of the slight mismatch between past and present self, because the writing represents the form of a question asked in the past and answered in the present, or whether I just like reading someone whose thinking is akin to mine.

The act of writing is also cathartic, and may also represent permission to forget. So perhaps it is like encountering an external reservoir of one’s own memory, thoughts unremembered precisely because they were written down. For that reason they would seem, as they do, unfamiliar, and furthermore their loss would represent a destruction of a part of one’s mind. But as long as one has no sense of what was destroyed, it may be easier to remain tranquil in the face of such destruction.

Dry November: Day 12

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 16:56:48 GMT

On Thursday night I went to a contemporary dance performance called MK Ultra at the Southbank Centre. Since then I’ve learned that this is an almost impossible thing to talk about without sounding mad, as its creator Rosie Kay herself found out when she started research on the topic in 2015. Named after a twenty year illegal mind mind control program conducted by the CIA (yes, a real thing), the piece looks partly at that program itself, and partly at later conspiracy theories that arose from it.

The piece was a collaboration with Adam Curtis, a director whose documentaries The Century of the Self (2002), All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011), and Hypernormalisation, in addition to all being freely available online, are brilliantly provocative pieces that I highly recommend.

The association with Curtis featured his trademark video and voiceover, which added indispensable framing and background to the piece. Dance, for all its virtues, is not an ideal medium for expressing complex political narratives. I found this out the hard way, years ago, when I utterly failed to absorb any aspect of the plot of Mayerling, which attempts to portray, through ballet, a 19th century Austrian murder-suicide whose wikipedia page is hard enough to follow.

The story in MK Ultra, insofar as I understood it, was that the Discordians, a (real) fake religion started in 1963, decided, through their control of Playboy and other media outlets, to sow a conspiracy theory about the Illuminati running the world. The Illuminati was a real covert group in 18th Century Bavaria, but the 20th century Discordians sowed a story, more or less as a joke, that this group had somehow persisted and now controlled the world. People on the 21st century internet began to confuse this prank Illuminati with reality, conflating it with the MK Ultra project, and thereby came to believe that the Illuminati (via the CIA and Disney) was using mind control on celebrities, along with subliminal messaging, to control the population and to create spies and assassins. But the brainwashing was imperfect, and tended to wear off after seven years, leading to the erratic behaviour, for example, of Britney Spears. I don’t know the story but evidently something happened, which the theorists took as proof that her brainwashing was wearing off.

Got it? Doesn’t matter. Because the show opens with a disclaimer that not all of its content is true. So even if I’ve given a correct account of the piece’s reality, it does not necessarily have anything to do with actual events. The piece does, however, capture something of today’s mood of distrust, paranoia, and bizarre media events; if it is not factually true, it is still an interesting commentary. This is itself a sort of meta-commentary on the fact that even though the conspiracy theories it examines might not be true, they do capture the pervasive distrust of discourse, and sense that much of media is propaganda, that is increasingly common in the wake of recent events. With Curtis’ ruminations on conspiracy theories acting as intertitles to the action, the dance proceeded. Seven dancers in neon psychedelic catsuits enact the power dynamics, conspiracy theories, and brainwashing that Curtis describes.

Given this description, and how little I know about contemporary dance, it may not sound like a promising start. I probably had not seen any contemporary dance since university, and never at this level. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find the performance compelling and, at times, quite moving. It has more of the energy of flamenco than the ardour of ballet, and as complex as the topic was, it still made more sense than Mayerling. It tended to showcase the strength of the dancers, including seriously impressive acrobatics, and combined a sense of intense deliberateness with sudden jerky accidents and falls. It used novel motions (to me at least), with several bodies in unconventional configurations, sometimes making the dancers seem like a single organism. It was at times vulnerable, at times sexual, at others mechanical, and often all three.

All this was intentional, as we learned in the fascinating Q&A with Adam Curtis and Rosie Kay that followed the performance. The work was influenced by 90s pop videos—whose familiarity might account for my relative appreciation of the work—but also more recent trap music videos—about which I know nothing. Adam Curtis remarked on the sexually-charged, mechanical nature of these videos. Rosie Kay pointed out that these characteristics came largely from porn, and she wanted to engage with the challenges faced by a generation who had grown up in the internet porn era. Although she said that her feminism sometimes made this task emotionally difficult, she felt she could not be truly subversive without engaging deeply with the material. “It’s quite subversive just twerking on this hallowed ground,” she quipped. This was true; it was pretty much the polar opposite of the last thing I’d seen on that stage, which was a production of the Ring Cycle.

Adam Curtis had shared her fascination with the conspiracy theories, and with a generation who has grown up in a post-truth era. Millions believed insane stories, he said, and now, with fake news, further millions believe even stranger things. He was careful to point out that although they may believe conspiracy theories, they are not stupid. In the wake of the Iraq war, they distrusted the media, whom they rightly felt had lied to them. This led them to come up with their own fantasies and narratives. They may not believe that Britney Spears was literally brainwashed by the CIA; but this is at least an entertaining fabrication, as opposed to the lies told by the mainstream media. When an audience member asked about Kanye West, Curtis joked, “Has it been seven years? Maybe the brainwashing is wearing off.”

MK Ultra is the third part of a trilogy, which started with 5 Soldiers (2010) and There Is Hope (2012). In the first, Kay tried to make sense of experiences she had while attached to a British Army battalion. The second was a piece on religion, apparently combined with elements of 1984. MK Ultra, which completed the trilogy, was never intended to be about real politics, but about the rising popularity of conspiracy theories. So in 2015, as she began research, she became shocked at the false narratives that were circulating social media.

She herself was in danger of being grouped in with this fringe. When she tried to speak to anthropology professors at Oxford, they largely refused, worried that she was a believer. She persisted, saying that she was only interested in the phenomenon itself. When she finally managed to speak to someone, apparently in cautious whispers, she was told that any perceived acknowledgement of this phenomenon was career suicide. The problem is that one starts to sound mad just talking about it. I found this out the hard way the next day, when I tried to explain the performance. If you speak about the Britney Spears, the CIA, and LSD mind control in a single sentence, you tend to get strange looks, regardless of what you actually say. Depressingly, Kay found that most conspiracy theories, whether from the far left or the alt-right, tended to end in antisemitism and Holocaust denial if you had the nerve or bad sense to follow them far enough.

Kay also elucidated why I might have found the work challenging, but still approachable. At first she had asked the dancers to improvise, but she was not satisfied by the results. “It either looked like pastiche or it looked like contemporary dance,” she said, and she did not want it to look like either. Instead, after two straight years of listening to trap and watching its music videos, she tried improvising herself. It seems she danced the whole piece in one furious burst, which she recorded, then had the dancers learn the footage by heart. “It’s quite extraordinary,” said Curtis. “I’ve seen videos of her dancing all the dancers’ parts, start to finish.” Given that the performance lasted a few hours, and that there were seven dancers, this must have been a marathon. “They’re all mini-mes,” said Kay. But the end result is a physical amalgamation of pop videos, paranoia, surveillance, and fake news. As she writes in the programme:

Explaining my new work, MK Ultra, has become a lot easier in recent months.

Even a year ago, mentioning my work looking at conspiracy theory would have draw a snort from many over the age of 25. But it is different now—‘Fake News’, ‘Alternative Facts’, ‘Deep State’ and ‘Conspiracy Theory’ have become the news and the fragile balance of trust between truth, the news, our leaders, and the media has been fractured. The lid has been lifted, and the widespread belief and knowledge of conspiracy theory is now being looked at seriously—something I’ve been advocating for several years as I researched and watched the gulf between the mainstream, the alternative and how young people were navigating their way in this confused world of distrust. Most of us have been in a state of stasis, but young people have long known and felt the disintegration of belief in our leaders and the stories they tell us.

Curtis explained the political views behind his side of the collaboration. Projected in an enormous triangle shape behind the stage, and reflected on its golden floor, he presented the images of MK Ultra’s victims as well as footage of celebrity meltdowns. “The ‘being on your own’ of individualism is beginning to wear thin,” he said. He believes that Thatcher was the last politician with a persuasive narrative, and that this narrative told everyone to act as an individual. The message was so successful that it destroyed the population’s ability to collectivise. It also changed the nature of politics: rather than political parties engaging in persuasive narratives to garner popular support, they became more like corporate management systems.

“A management system can’t give you a story.” He went on to argue that in the absence of political narratives, the conspiracy theory, or fantasy, is one option; nationalism, or fascism, is another. “Progressives hate to answer the question: Can populism be good? Or must it always end as it did in the twentieth century?” If politicians refuse to present a persuasive narrative, one that emotionally galvanises a movement, then non-politicians, some of whom are experts in emotive messaging, will come to fill the gap. “You can create anything,” he claimed, emphasising that we must not be afraid of this act of creation, or the world will fall victim to more cynical forces.

Afterwards, I was lucky enough to speak with Curtis briefly, and offered to buy him a drink. He refused, but the brief conversation was provocative, continuing along the same lines as the Q&A. Someone remarked on the fact that most of the people at a contemporary dance performance at the Southbank were not members of the populace to which populists must appeal. Curtis agreed, but said: “The people in this room are educated, have every advantage, and have leisure time. They should be creating the popular narratives, rather than engaging in self-expression without content.” I’ve thought a lot about this as I’ve written solipsistically about my November.

Dry November: Day 11

Sun, 11 Nov 2018 22:38:10 GMT

After brunch we discussed the crisis of meaning in work, one recently mentioned in the Harvard Business Review, whose survey found that 90% of people would take a paycut for more meaningful work. My friend, without having read Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs, had independently observed the inverse relationship between meaning in a job and compensation. Carers, for example, are paid poorly in part because there’s a feeling that they “get” to do more meaningful work, and executives are overcompensated in part because their work is so soul-destroying. This is deeply problematic, morally, of course.

There is also a relationship between working and drinking. The artificial stress of office work (I think Graeber goes so far as to call it something like “arbitrary violence”) rarely correlates with actual lives on the line, or even anything remotely serious. Drinking seems both to relieve the stress as well as the lack of meaning.

We all felt a need for increased intellectual engagement. She said that our monthly book club was maybe her favourite part of London life. So why not try to increase the intellectual aspect of our lives, foster engagement rather than the disengagement of drinking? We were thinking of hosting more events around art, music, articles, etc, a sort of more multimedia book club, or even a series of speakers. I’m not sure how well this would work, but I think it’s worth trying.

Dry November: Day 10

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 23:59:14 GMT

Yesterday, I went to a screening of a pretty remarkable documentary called General Magic. It premiered at Tribeca in July, and has not yet been released. The first I’d heard of it was from the friend that invited me, and I believe he had learned of it on Twitter. It was screened at Picturehouse Central, as one of the final events of Silicon Valley Comes to the UK, an annual event that apparently started in 2006 but about which I’d also not heard.

The film begins in 1989, when a project to create a new pocket computer began within Apple. What is striking from the beginning is the prescience of Marc Porat’s vision:

A tiny computer, a phone, a very personal object […] It must be beautiful.

It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewellery brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used […] Once you use it you won’t be able to live without it.

It was to be wireless, have a touchscreen, keep one constantly connected, and be able to do things like send messages or book flights. They wanted it to be as indispensable as one’s keys or wallet were when leaving the house. In short, in 1989, Porat had written a book that not only predicted today’s smartphones, but drew detailed diagrams of them, and presumed to make them a reality within the next few years.

Porat convinced Apple’s CEO John Sculley to allow him to spin this off into an independent company, with the “rock stars” of Silicon Valley, backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital. The team devoted their hearts, souls, and considerable intelligence to the project for the next several years. They called it a “joyride,” and their camaraderie and energy is palpable throughout the film. The vision was powerful enough to galvanise their talent: “We’re gonna create what comes after the personal computer.”

It was a catastrophic failure. You can read the wikipedia article for how it all panned out, but gist is that they ignored competition and the arrival of the internet, and most of the hardware technologies either didn’t exist at all or were nowhere near portable enough yet. And yet despite the failure, virtually everything they envisioned is now a reality. While some of the most brilliant people on the team never fully recovered from the experience, some unlikely subordinates (including Tony Faddell and Andy Rubin) went on to create things like the iPhone and Android. I say “unlikely” because they were extremely junior, and not the most obviously exceptional people on the team at the time. But they were the ones who persisted through to the delivery of the reality decades later.

It is a film explicitly about failure, which is a rarity, and its treatment of the subject is inspirational enough that I would recommend the film to anyone, regardless of their interest in technology. The fact that Kerruish got many of the key figures to revisit these memories today, and to reflect publicly on the intense pain of the failure, is what makes it so profound. Afterwards, director Sarah Kerruish and one of the key figures in the story, Megan Smith (former CTO of the USA) gave a Q&A, in which they discussed human failure modes and the power of vulnerability.

But I’m meant to be writing, at least tangentially, about booze. We had not been to the events preceding the film, so we paid £10 for the tickets, which went to a charity. This was a reasonably good deal considering the screening included not just the film and an intimate Q&A, but a reception with free drinks. There were also a sufficient quantity of canapés that the waiters were ultimately reduced to begging us to take them off their tired trays as they endlessly circumambulated. An open bar is a fairly difficult place to be during a dry month, a dry spell. But I persevered and was rewarded with some exciting introductions, scintillating conversations, and even an enjoyable dinner with some excellent people we met, undiluted by drink.

If the above, by the way, is not enough to persuade you that this was a beautiful and moving film, I might also mention that at the very start of the reception, a British businessman in his fifties literally wept in front of my friend and I, complete strangers, as he reflected on how the film related to his own experiences.

I realise that I said today I’d write about MK Ultra, but upon reading my notes I decided I have too much to say to say it today, so I’ll write a longer piece elsewhere, and link to it when it’s done.

Dry November: Day 9

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 13:57:31 GMT

Another is that reflection involves the act of recollection, and memory itself seems to have an elegiac effect on my writing. It is not that I am nostalgic; it is more like a sense that respect must be shown for the irremediable nature of the past. My partner said the past need not be sad, it is merely what has happened, but to me, that is like saying a funeral need not be sad. Of course one may try to celebrate the dead, but there is something inherently troubling, for me, about the indelible, the unchangeable nature of either type of passage.

Then there is the potential dreariness of alcohol withdrawal, that can cause all sorts of delirious and deleterious effects, not least of them death, which is not true of more famously addictive substances, for example cocaine. When in contact with medical professionals, as I unfortunately have been, the drink question often comes up. I’ve found that what they really want to know is whether you drink every day, and maybe secondarily whether or not you binge drink. So they ask you how many units, but, at least in the UK, they’re not really interested in the answer, provided it’s some fairly reasonable number daily, or even a number like 20 units, but not every day. Of course you’d probably get told off for that. But it seems like most of them drink as well, and I’ve not found medical professionals unduly judgmental, in the UK, at least on this point.

The NHS page on withdrawal has some interesting info on this:

Your withdrawal symptoms will be at their worst for the first 48 hours.

They should gradually start to improve as your body begins to adjust to being without alcohol. This usually takes 3 to 7 days from the time of your last drink.

So as I’m on day nine, I evidently can’t blame alcohol for whatever mood I happen to be in.

You’ll also find your sleep is disturbed.

You may wake up several times during the night or have problems getting to sleep. This is to be expected, and your sleep patterns should return to normal within a month.

It also specifies that even >20 units per day can be detoxed at home, with tranquillisers. It does not sound fun. I don’t think the intermittent drunken weekends I’ve had this year have caused me anything like the issues they describe. Any despondency is more likely to come from other sources. At times this year, I’ve thought: “This is, far and away, the best year of my life.” And yet now I seem somehow to be paying for that, though it’s not totally clear why.

I considered putting a content warning at the top, telling you that my reflection on why my posts have been a bit depressing might itself be depressing. But I’m reading Jonathan Haidt’s excellent new book The Coddling of the American Mind, in which he posits (amidst a fascinating look at many facets of American political history) that such warnings and their implicit message that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” are dangerous, and tend to promote people’s thinking of themselves as fragile. I knew you could take it, and now you’re stronger.

I also got to see Adam Curtis last night, at a contemporary dance collaboration he’s done with Rosie Kay, called MK Ultra at the Southbank Centre. I’ve run out of time today so I shall have to write about that tomorrow.

Dry November: Day 8

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 10:55:23 GMT

I awoke today with a song from a decade-old album stuck in my head. A noteworthy album, for me at least, by Of Montreal, and memorably titled: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? It’s the first song on the album. “We just want to emote ‘til we’re dead,” it opens. “I know we suffer for fashion or whatever.”

It was an album I first encountered at the end of uni, as I planned to move from the US to the UK. Once here, doing my masters, I spent most of my time alone, and this meant that I was able to listen to a lot of music. Podcasting was not yet really a thing, so I made it a point to always have a queue of excellent albums, on whatever strange mp3 player I happened to have at the time. I listened to many, many albums.

In my teenage years, in the first wave of Napster, I’d tired of listening to individual low-quality mp3s—though of course this first exploratory phase was indispensable to whatever paltry musical development was to come later. By the time I arrived in England, I was reading eighteenth and nineteenth century novels, and I suppose I regarded singles as being like reading a serialised snippet from some loose, baggy masterpiece, rather than the book itself. I was listening to sixties, seventies, and eighties music, lots of Dylan, Neil Young, Springsteen, Bowie, some punk, and a lot of new wave. Of Montreal was unusually current.

I was also 22 at the time, which may also be the last time we really soak up new music. That’s mostly been true for me. Even my mention of podcasts is a sign that some part of me believes that, were I to commit myself to new music, I would fall in love to the same depth that I had in my youth. Another part of me fears that it’s too late for that. Though on balance, and based on anecdotal evidence, I believe that it can, with more effort, be done.

We don’t want these days to ever end.

We just want to emasculate them forever.

The song also concisely, in just two short verses, manages to capture how intimately alcohol is related to longing. One longs for a drink, then one longs for another, then for different company, more company, a different bar, or food, and after a while one simply longs. For attention, for instance:

Vicissitudes are boxing our heads.

Please call to say you miss me, feel me or whatever.

If we’ve got to burn it out, let’s do it together.

Let’s all melt down together…

My sister has mentioned that these sound like rough days, though honestly they have not been. I’ve felt productive and mostly happy. Tomorrow I’ll write about why the writing may come off a bit sad.

Dry November: Day 7

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 10:58:03 GMT

I dreamt I had a drink. I don’t mean that I dreamt of drinking; in the dream, it had been inadvertent, had already happened. In my fitful sleep I was somewhere on the Southbank, where I’ve been spending a lot of time, in some concrete cleft, and I had drunk some beer with friends. In the dream, I do not remember ordering it, but merely “coming to” and realising that I’d failed in my resolution not to drink. My first feeling was fear of how my friend, with whom I’d agreed to do this dry month, would feel. My second was about how I would explain the lapse here, in writing.

It was a relief, then, to wake and still find myself sober. Not the powerful relief that comes when one has awoken from a dream of something truly terrible, the feared death or imagined tragedy, but a subtle, satisfying loss of anxiety. It easily gave way to new anxiety about how late it was. I’d overslept.

I had hoped that alcohol cessation would slow down time, not just that it would give me more time by neglecting to occupy it, but rather that the clarity of sobriety, the lack of distortion and hangover, would give the illusion that time itself had slowed down. If the last week is any indication—that is, if I am not still in the grips of even earlier excesses—then time, unfortunately, still flies. It may well be an unavoidable byproduct of age, and it may even be magnified by writing like this every day. I normally write each day, but in an analogue scrawl that slowly fills notebooks rather than discrete, ritualistic posts like this one. It’s possible that posting feels more like the tick of a clock.

It makes me wonder whether alcohol is not the accelerant I had always assumed it to be. In some way I blamed booze for the loss of my twenties. Those weeks and months of leaving work with excitement, waking up with a start, not always knowing what’s happened in between. The hours burned in pleasant conflagrations, whose embers are only forgettable conversations. Above all, the sense that anything could happen, though it rarely does. Maybe as one ages, the years always begin to blur, and it is the mind itself, not beer, that blears. And even when sober I’m a bit clueless in the morning.

I suppose I’d assumed that the newfound clarity would have, if not slowed time, at least caused me to recollect more of it. This has not really happened. I record a reasonable amount, here and elsewhere, but can feel no difference in how much I recollect of the last week compared to those weeks less crystalline, more blunted, or even smashed. It is interesting to learn that, while time spent drunk can, in the cold light of morning, feel like time wasted, time spent sober does not feel like time regained.

Dry November: Day 6

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 09:36:18 GMT

Last night I saw a dear friend from my teenage years, and her mother whom I had not seen since then. They had finished a ten day cruise, Pisa, Marseilles, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, are the cities I remember, then they had done three days in Rome, one night only in London, then my friend flew back today to Boston, while her mother stopped in Amsterdam before returning to Cincinnati.

We ate at Brasserie Zedel, that somehow most-authentic, least-authentic gem in the heart of Piccadilly, not far from where they were staying in Mayfair. I got the tube from the Barbican where I’d been working. I love Zedel; it feels not just like another century, but another country, like one might be in nineteenth-century Vienna or Brussels.

“Is it really old or does it just look old?” they asked. I wasn’t sure. It was built in the 1930s, apparently. It somehow feels more nineteenth-century than its more “real” counterparts. I have in mind Brasserie Georges in Lyon, I suppose, built in 1836. Though it is grander and more authentic, on the one time I went, it felt a bit empty and dated, not quite shabby but certainly past its prime. Much of this must have been due to the deficit, on that day, of patrons in comparison to its size. Brasserie Zedel, when it is packed, somehow feels like it is at its best, the past at the height of its powers. It transports one to the fin de siècle, even though it was built in the wrong city, in the wrong century. Last night it was quite busy, so could be a bit difficult to get attention from the servers, but the atmosphere was beautiful.

In short it feels like that prewar idyll, the time that Stefan Zweig longed for so badly that it eventually killed him. “If I try to find some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security.” Or more darkly: “Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.” That World of Yesterday, at the apex of intellect and culture, when one could traipse slowly across Europe without any documents or impediments, before the twentieth century brought it all crashing down. Of course, that’s a very one-sided view of history; but maybe views of history are always one-sided.

The conversation was good, though they were somewhat tired by their travels. The cruise of course was the lap of leisure but Rome had taken its toll. Her mother had lived in Italy, and knew Europe exceptionally well. My friend and I reminisced, and tried to recollect our intermittent meetings over the past few years, in London, Boston, New York, California. We like to joke that we met on a runway, which is true—when we were teenagers we were in an absurd fashion show to raise money for diabetes research—but that didn’t come up last night.

She drinks less than she had, she said, in part because her partner does not really drink. This is true for me as well. We did not go into detail as to why I was dry; her mother doesn’t drink, so we all stuck to water. The only difference it really made was that at the end of the meal, rather than feeling eager to join her to meet her friend for drinks, as I might well have done after wine, I felt tired, and wanted to see my partner, and felt compelled to write a bit more.

Alcohol, for all its depressant properties, has a way of accelerating things, invigorating them, pulling out the stops. Perhaps above all, it makes the promises of the future glisten. Plans can flower in such a haze, though the grayness the next day can press these dry. And the future, if it comes, always dwindles to the present. Not that we ought, like Zweig, to remain immured in the past. Maybe life is just the process of coming to terms with the middle ground.

Dry November: Day 5

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 11:17:38 GMT

Somewhere it is said that man cannot exist without sleep for more than a stated number of hours.

Quite wrong! I had been convinced that there were certain things I just could not do: I could not sleep without this or I could not live with that or the other. The first night in Auschwitz we slept in beds which were constructed in tiers. On each tier (measuring about six-and-a-half to eight feet) slept nine men, directly on the boards. Two blankets were shared by each nine men. We could, of course, lie only on our sides, crowded and huddled against each other, which had some advantages because of the bitter cold. Though it was forbidden to take shoes up to the bunks, some people did use them secretly as pillows in spite of the fact that they were caked with mud. Otherwise one’s head had to rest on the crook of an almost dislocated arm. And yet sleep came and brought oblivion and relief from pain for a few hours.

Later in Man’s Search for Meaning he concludes:

The fear of sleeplessness is, in the majority of cases, due to the patient’s ignorance of the fact that the organism provides itself by itself with the minimum amount of sleep really needed.

As a result he advises insomniacs to set out to stay up all night. This of course never works, but it relieves the anxiety about being unable to fall asleep. I’ve tried this logic: “Since I know I won’t sleep tonight, I’ll try to finish this book.” Inevitably I fall asleep faster than if I lie there worrying about sleeplessness. I also find that having the attitude he recommends, which is to assume that the body knows better than the mind, removes some of the secondary suffering caused by anxiety that one will be tired, which exists beyond the mere physical fact that one is tired.

Yesterday, then, I didn’t leave the house until 4pm, having slept around 7am. After six hours of The Clock, and sleeping into the day, I had bizarre fever dreams. They were stranger than morphine visions and nearly as rapid. Dreams are said to be a time for the brain to make sense of the day’s experiences; what it does after staying up all night to watch a thousand cuts of unrelated film, therefore, is quite interesting. The dreams themselves changed rapidly, and the scenes were totally unfamiliar. There was no sense, as one often has, of being in a place or situation that is familiar but different, or with people one knows in an unlikely circumstance. This was more like being in another person’s dreams, or rather other peoples’ dreams, shifting not just the content of the dream but one’s own identity every minute or so. I cannot recall any situation precisely, but I remember that the scenes were intense, melodramatic, that I was fully inhabiting other lives.

It was emerging from this muddled state that I met with someone whose acquaintance I’d made in exceptionally inebriated circumstances, but our intuitions proved better than our intelligence (impaired as it was at the time) because we got along very well. After an obligatory hour of The Clock we had dinner, where the conversation was scintillating, and I hope that our intoxicated introduction will give way to friendship. In other words, another instance of alcohol’s frustratingly positive binding qualities, and the conflicts and temptations these present. Were it a siren song that led invariably to ruin, it would be easier to resist. As it is, however ill-advised the first meeting may be, it can lead one to meet genuinely good people. But perhaps I’m once again ascribing to alcohol some of the benefits of socialising itself.

We went to a Mexican restaurant, oddly out of place in the Southbank’s stark concrete brutality, next to the BFI. He had a Pacifico Clara, which I ordered for him, because it seems to me slightly superior to the other Mexican lagers, and because it reminds me of my friends who surreptitiously drank it in high school, at Newport Beach parties, and of my father, who drank it at home. The brightness of the word clara and of its yellow label also contrasts with the darkness of the bottle in a way that I find compelling. I was not tempted, but I did have to explain why I was not drinking. He rightly guessed that I might be writing about it, though of course this idea came after the decision to go dry, as a way of shoring up support. I explained my motives, and also my sense that most rationalisations are post-hoc justifications for what the body, having already succumbed to temptation before the mind is aware that it has, is about to do. Despite the fact that we had met in the presence of copious alcohol in a houseparty, he understood.

Dry November: Day 4

Sun, 04 Nov 2018 21:49:12 GMT

After waking late yesterday, I met the friend with whom I am undertaking Dry November. Because we’d not seen each other for ages, the conversation was mostly a life catch-up, about jobs and living situations, though there was some chat about how the dry month was going. I’m lucky in that I have the support of my partner, and most of my friends have been relatively understanding. She’s had a bit of a harder time with certain friends considering it a bit of a killjoy thing to do. “Being boring” is the way that she put it, and perhaps at another point “not being fun.” I’ve worried about this aspect myself at times, but mostly decided that it is an addicted part of my brain trying to rationalise its way into getting alcohol. Having to face it as an explicit accusation must be much harder.

She had also made the day harder on herself than I had, in that she had tickets to Printworks, a massive industrial nightclub, and she intended to keep this appointment. In the end she made it through without a drop, no mean feat, and was home in bed by a sensible hour. I, however, stayed up all night, getting home after 6am, though I did not drink either. Both this and my late awakening were intentional, for reasons I’ll explain.

I set out to meet friends at 8pm at an achingly cool cocktail bar on the Southbank, Dandeylan, evidently set to shut soon, in the Mondrian Hotel. I won’t attempt to describe the hotel’s copper curves, but I will say that its Thames-height view of St. Paul’s is impressive. The tube was in some way disrupted yesterday, delaying my friends and leading to jokes about German punctuality. I’d arrived early. This meant a long stretch of sitting alone next to hot dates downing drinks, and before bartenders enacting their art and artifice.

In a way this suited me; I ordered a coffee and wrote. I am obnoxiously pleased writing letters or notebooks in front of strangers; it makes me feel productive, anachronistic, distinguished. In another way it was a bit strange; the staff clearly thought it was odd for me to order coffee, which though had to be obtained from the main hotel, and to write on the bar, amidst the hubbub, music, and occasional splash from the stainless-steel shakers. The patrons were likewise puzzled. And of course the cocktails were tempting. Their price tag (£13) assisted me in my attempt to remain, at least in one narrow sense, virtuous.

When my friends arrived I wound up with some sort of ginger mocktail, which was good if sweet. Once we were chatting, once again, drinking didn’t matter. After an enjoyable conversation we walked to the Tate, for the main even: to watch The Clock. We arrived around 10pm to a surprisingly snaking queue. It was one of three nights that The Clock was to play in its twenty-four hour entirety, and there were maybe a few hundred waiting. We weren’t able to enter until 11:23pm.

Since I’m writing about The Clock elsewhere I won’t say much more here. My friends left around 1am, but I managed to stick it out until 5:30am, after which I had the privilege of walking through a deserted Borough Market on my way to London Bridge. I had made it through my first Friday and Saturday.

Dry November: Day 3

Sat, 03 Nov 2018 12:56:27 GMT

Yesterday I took the easy way out. I don’t mean that I drank, for I’ve done several things to ensure that this way would be hard, telling friends, for example, and committing to writing about it here. What I mean is that I was alone. For me, much as I love the taste of beer or the effects of spirits, I never had the strong temptation to go it alone, to drink alone. I might not be able to resist a good beer in the fridge, but as I rarely replenished them, this never became a habit. I know of people who get into the habit of a glass of wine while cooking, which becomes a bottle or two with dinner. I drew a line in the sand on this point, and only drank in the house on special occasions. Like if the hangover was truly the stuff of nightmares.

Partly this tendency comes from the nature of my drunkenness. After even one or two drinks I become more social. Some people think that I am always social; mostly they have not seen me sober. Alcohol makes me more outgoing. This is a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing in the sense that I’m typically fairly friendly and easygoing when drinking, as well as in that I’m not tempted to get smashed alone. It is a curse in the sense that a social pint after work can wind up with me drinking and talking until all hours, derailing the best laid plans of my sober self. If I am alone (coming home for instance) and tipsy, I notice that I send more messages than I would otherwise; in my sobriety I am more flaky and reticent, less likely to respond, more likely to be grumpy.

And so today, with coffees and cokes, I’ll see close friends and brook their jokes about what I’ve become, how I used to be fun—though even in this I am joking. I’ll be seeing my friend with whom I set out on this mission, and a few others, and they are supportive as all true friends are on resolutions of self-improvement.

Dry November: Day 2

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 14:02:33 GMT

Yesterday was the first real challenge, in a way. It came down to the social question, maybe one more unavoidable in London than in other parts of the world: If not drink, what do we do? I met a friend in the afternoon. The stated intention was to discuss philosophy, as he has just finished a dissertation thereon, but our conversation was wide-ranging. If the discussion had focal points they were consciousness and unconsciousness, mastery and ignorance.

We started off in a bookstore coffee shop, then wandered the streets in a walking dialectic. “Peripeteia,” I joked, but really I meant “peripatetic”; the former, I learned, means to “fall around,” i.e., a sudden change in fortune, while the latter means to “walk around” in discussion, as we were doing. This worked for four or five hours, but as London was to reach 2°C yesterday, this was not sustainable indefinitely. Around 19:30 we decided to eat, and wound up in a Hawaiian poke place in Soho.

I mostly failed to explain how poke—which despite its former popularity in my fatherland of California, I had never tried—compared to more traditional Hawaiian cuisine, my father’s fatherland being Oahu. (My father’s ancestral fatherland was Canton, so maybe Americans ought not to speak of homelands, since they change so often. Then again, Heimat didn’t do much good for the more stationary Europeans either.) This failure was borne of my inability to describe the elements of Hawaiian traditional cuisine, like poi, taro, or laulau, being, for me, childhood flavour memories rather than adult ingredients which might be purchased and prepared in the real world. It would have been easier to describe loco moco, but this tends to disgust Europeans. Though poke is not hot, as we learned, it was healthy and satisfying. Then came the crux of the day: what to do once it was too cold to be outside, that didn’t involve drinking? We could no longer walk languorously, talking, taking the quick photos to which he was prone; it was getting dark.

In the end we walked across the street into the Soho Theatre. He had a König pilsner, I had a diet coke. Of course I was tempted, in the trendy theatre bar, to dispense with resolutions. He compared the look of the interior to Berlin, probably on the back of its shabby chic. Once we were ensconced again in cloistered conversation, in a booth by the window, though, I neither missed the alcohol nor envied him his German beer.

The crux of the day’s conversation, for me, was that mastery involves a process by which the unfamiliar becomes increasingly conscious as skill increases, through focused attention, but that past a certain point, the skill becomes unconscious and automatic. This seems somehow opposite to the unconscious and automatic actions that arise when attention is shattered, as modern technology tends to do in all the ways we wring our hands about. Had I been drinking, the conversation likely would have ranged more widely, but it would have been less memorable.

Dry November: Day 1

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 23:30:32 GMT

First day of Dry November and I’m slightly hungover. Not much, but enough that I woke at 4:37 and 6:37 with some stomach pains and sleeplessness. This happens more as I age; I wake up earlier when I drink, and hangovers are worse. Throughout my twenties everyone in their thirties told me this would happen, but I regarded their warnings with indifferent scepticism. Not that last night was anything mad. I drank three bottles of leftover craft beer at home, figuring I’d have a little clear-out before starting the experiment with my friend. “Drink up baby,” I texted her, thinking of Elliott Smith, “Last chance.” She didn’t respond until the morning, and I felt proud when I learned that she hadn’t touched a drink since Saturday.

I guess my primary goals are to lose weight, save money, and express my solidarity for my friend. I’ve had some mystery illness this year and lost a bunch of weight anyway. In fact I’d started to get a bit emaciated, so I figured in my recovery I’d double down and try to get ripped, which has been a mild success. The money goal is because I am unemployed, so it feels a bit unjustifiable to spend hundreds of pounds on booze each month. It was already far lower than what I was spending when I was working. Round followed round like work followed sleep, and there was always a rationalising voice in my brain that told me that drinking is social, that it’s worth it for those rare, magical, booze-blurred moments of bliss, with friends or strangers, in situations that seem inconceivable without beer or gin removing the brakes.

But I know that it’s a rationalisation. Partly I know because I had several dry weeks earlier this year, when I’d just returned to London from a few months in the States. Determined not to get myself into the same destructive pattern I’d had in December, I told my friends I’d come out but not drink. I stuck to this for roughly a month, which was easier since I had drunk a lot less in California. This meant that my physical dependence was already reduced, which made resisting temptations easier. My friends were quite supportive, and, having not seen me for months, weren’t going to forego meeting just because I was trying some new thing. This allowed for a simultaneous social readjustment. But the most important thing was that I went out, and realised that a lot of the fun and energy of socialising had come not from alcohol, to which I’d always partly attributed it, but from the people themselves. My friends were great, with or without booze, and it was possible to have a very fun night completely sober. It usually meant leaving before things got too incoherent and waking up feeling fresh the next day as well.

“I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour, but heaven knows I’m miserable now” was the more common experience after “fun” nights.

So here starts a new attempt for a month sober before the predictable carnage of December. Who knows, maybe November will mark my Damascene moment, and I’ll never look back.