Book Anxiety

I’ve blogged before “Too much to read, too little time” noting references picked-up during the reading I do manage to achieve – a reading list growing faster than the pace of possible reading. Not uncommon apparently – here a 1989 paper from David Lavery – “How to Gut a Book“.

Here quoting Thomas Wolfe’s, Eugene Gant

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad; the more he read, the less he seemed to know—the greater the number of books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be.

Here, Lavery’s concluding paragraphs …

Book gutters, I would suggest, understand the book as an evolutionary phenomenon; we see them as repositories of memes. We crack them open in search of the memes encapsulated within.

When asked how it was that Native Americans were able to discover—without the aid of modern science—the medicinal properties of hundreds of indigenous herbs and plants, the Shoshone healer Rolling Thunder explained that the secret was quite simple: a medicine man addressed the plant and asked it, in the “I and thou” dialogue of his “concrete science,” what it was good for, what power it contained. We must learn, without embarrassment, to do the same with books.

Andrei Codrescu has suggested that we need to learn to

“use books as oracles.
Ask them a question: open them up.”

The same David Lavery, Owen Barfield scholar,  recommended by Pirsig for his Descartes “Evil Genius” project. Though that project blogged earlier, seems to have disappeared from his Mid Tennessee State Uni pages (He is currently at Brunel, London.) Here is the Descartes Evil Genius project on his current site. 

Anyway, back to the “book anxiety” piece … it has everything. American Indians, immediate experience, memes, Nietzsche, Borges, Escher, Voltaire, Mortimer Adler’s University of Chicago “Aristotelian pontifications” to add to the Pirsig and Barfield connections. Excellent read, to get reading in perspective. I may never sneer again at those “airport bookstall” summaries of the latest “essential reading”. 

Interestingly, different experiences but similar circumstances in reading Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” and “Investigations” recently, both in an effort to read, in the original, people about who’m I’d already formed the opinion I needed, yet felt the guilt of not having read. As I already suspected, Rand had nothing worth saying; I already “knew” what Wittgenstein had to say, great though he was. Not so arrogant after all ?

In a similar vein after quoting Mark Twain

“School keeps getting in the way of my education”

and Voltaire

“The multitude of books, is making us ignorant.”

and Barthes

“After all, no author can choose to write what will not be read. It is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives; has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.)”

Thinking about writing myself, I have often wondered about a “tiered book”

The essential messages in a few paragraphs / pages, preceeding a longer treatise developing the arguments on the subject, preceeding a narrative / novel incorporating the message and its arguments. Why insult the reader’s intelligence ? I guess Pirsig was following the same line in making his “Chautauqua” (public lecture) explicit rather than unnecessarily hidden within ZMM and Lila. (Of course the flaw is that I may never have the skills to write the third part … but as a joint venture ? Love to do that with Lavery’s Evil Genius plot idea in fact.)

Another aspect Lavery discusses is scanning texts for epigraphic quotations … something I also do, in many cases as potential book or chapter sub-titles … though I gather so many that I long since stopped explicitly blogging them all. Perhaps I should re-start ? Actually, Lavery cites Owen Barfield as the source of his book gutting concept. If Pirsig’s Phaedrus was outflanking the entire body of western thought, Barfield’s Burgeon was raiding it in “Unancestral Voice”.

Who says you need to read all relevant philosophers in order to have a valid philosophic opinion ? Pirsig’s idea of the philosophologist as “critic”, but not philosopher seems validated.

Ah, and of course, in the footnotes a reference to Stanislaw Lem. Taking the “forget writing the book, just write your own review” idea to new Hofstadterian, Quinish proportions; write a book of collected reviews of imagined books. Summaries of the books you haven’t the time to write, let alone read. Make the book the subject of the book. A book-sized Quine. Brilliant. I already knew I liked Lem.

David Lavery’s “How to Gut a Book” is the most though-provoking read I’ve come across in a long time.

Fox Soccer on Comcast

Here in Alabama we live in a subdivision where the cable provider is Comcast, and unlike their local competitor Knology, they have not (until recently) been able to provide the Fox Soccer Channel.

We’ve been following the English Premiership progress of Reading FC mainly through their Premier TV MatchLive Console which carries the live commentary from www.Reading107FM.com. It’s been an excellent audio-only service. Various attempts at internet TV broadcasts, usually streamed from far-east transmissions have been very unsatisfactory, mainly due to lousy synching with any worthwhile commentary.

Imagine our delight to find Comcast now carrying Fox Soccer Channel from about 10 days ago. We subscribed immediately. Disappointing to find only one Reading FC game scheduled to be broadcast in the first two months (with 8 to 10 Premiership or FA Cup matches per week). Imagine our frustration as we settled down to watch that one and only game yesterday, to have the Comcast service cut out at precisely the kick-off time of that transmission, to be restored only when the second half was under way !

At least Leroy Lita did us the favour of saving his two match-winning goals until the final 10 minutes. 6th in the Premiership. Who’d a thought it ?

Constructivism …

… holds that

… there is no capital-T Truth or capital-R Reality aside from, say, physical existence that can be objectively known. Instead, we interpret events based on our individual and/or collective experiences and the effects of those interpretations have real consequences in our lives that comprise little-t truth and little-r reality.

Sounds familiar. An aside from Mark Federman‘s “Easy, Easy, Easy (222)”

Also from Mark, here’s one for Sam, and another one for me.

And one from Jon Husband via Johnnie Moore on “openness in business“.

More Pearls of Wisdom

Shortly after I started blogging, I stopped to capture some references to / reviews of the few books I’d read that had made an impression before I’d started the psybertron research quest (see header). T. E. Lawrence “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” was one of those. The review I posted then has never been more than a holding page, and the link to pictures of my TEL pilgrimage to Jordan has since died. (Must re-post the pictures to the live gallery location.)

From the previous post it will be apparent I’m re-reading “SPOW” and making some relevant notes. In fact, although it made a lasting impression, I’d never actually noticed any overtly philosophical content until this time around. Below are extracts from a passage in Chapter XXXIII that starts on p197 and runs through to p201. He is considering strategy and tactics and “immaterial factors”, planning what next, whilst recuperating on his sick-bed in Wejh. After a passage on the comparative merits of Napoleon, Clausewitz, Saxe and Guilbert, Cammerer and Moltke, Jomini and Willisen, Kuhne and Foch in which he concludes Clausewitz has all the generic bases for action covered, he continues …

My argument preened itself […]

The first confusion was the false antithesis between strategy, the aim in war, the synoptic regard seeing each part relative to the whole, and tactics, the means towards a strategic end, the particular steps of its staircase. They seemd only points of view from which to ponder the elements of war, the Algebraic element of things, a Biological element of lives, and the Psychological element of ideas.

The Algebraic element looked to me a pure science, subject to mathematical law, inhuman. It dealt with known variables, fixed conditions, space and time, inorganic things like hills and climates and railways, with mankind in type-masses too great for individual variety, with all artificial aids and the extensions given our faculties by mechanical invention. It was essentially formulable.

Here was a pompous professorial beginning. My wits, hostile to the abstract took refuge in Arabia again. Translated into Arabic, the algebraic factor would first take practical account of [….]

[….] This was enough of the concrete; so I sheered off “episteme”, the mathematical element, and plunged into the nature of the biological factor. Its crisis seemed to be the breaking point, life and death, or less finally, wear and tear. The war-philosophers had propertly made an art of it [….] A line of variability. Man, persisted like leaven through its estimates, making them irregular.

The components were sensitive and illogical, and generals guard themselves by the device of [margin for uncertainty ….]

The “felt” element in troops, not expressible in figures, had to be guessed at by the equivalent of Plato’s “doxa”, and the greatest commander of men was he whose intuitions most nearly happened. Nine-tenths of tactics were certain enough to be teachable in schools; but the irrational tenth was like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and in it lay the test of generals. It could be ensued only by instinct (sharpened by thought practising the stroke) until at the crisis it came naturally, a reflex. There had been men whose “doxa” so nearly approached  perfection that by its road they reached the certainty of “episteme”. The Greeks might have called such genius for command “noesis” had they bothered to rationalise revolt.

[….]

I was getting through my subject. […. the algebraic …. the biological ….]

There remained the psychological element to build up an apt shape. I went to Xenophon and stole, to name it, his word “diathetics”, which had been the art of Cyrus before he struck.

Of this our propaganda was the stained and ignoble offspring. It was the “pathic”, almost the ethical, in war. [….]

There were so many humiliating material limits, but no moral impossibilities; so that the scope of our diathetical activities was unbounded. [….] The printing press, and each newly discovered method of communication favoured the intellectual above the physical, civilization paying the mind always from the body’s funds. We kindergarten soldiers …. without prejudice. The regular officer …. traditions of generations … the antique, the most honoured.

As we had seldom to concern ourselves with what men did, but always with what they thought, the “diathetic” for us would be half the command. In Europe it was set a little aside and entrusted to men outside the general staff. In Asia the regular elements were so weak that irregulars could not let the metaphysical weapon rust unused.

So, not just philosophical and metaphysical, but distinctly layered; intellect over the biological and phsyical, with an emphasis on the Asian distinction from the European.

Who’da thought it ?

Etymology of Wisdom

Re-reading T. E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” for the umpteenth time, I was struck by something that I’m sure occurred to me before, but I’ve never followed-up.

In Chapter XXI (page 135 of my Cape 1940 edition) he is recounting arguments concerning different possible attacks and advances to progress their objectives.

“[He] took me up sharply, saying that it was in no wise proper for [the allies] to take [the town].”

Reading that I mentally summarised the opinion that the course of action was not “wise” in the adjectival “wisdom” sense, whereas in fact Lawrence had used “wise” in the “way of proceeding” noun manner. The relationship between the two forms seem obvious.

-wise / -weise must be closely related to wisdom / wise via the way

Wisdom is the way, in the Taoist sense of the way. Wisdom is about the way of knowing, not the known. Obvious. In fact this etymology of “wise” reinforces this with a Lao Tsu quote from the “Tao Te Ching” – “A wise man has no extensive knowledge; He who has extensive knowledge is not a wise man.” Also wisdom as seeing (in the knowing, wissen sense), as in “vision” – Latin “vid” Greek “eid”, and without even reference to the Taoist concept of “way”. Interestingly, not only the Old-English and Germanic derivations, but the Proto-Indo-European origins too. Only a small step back to common Sanskrit origins of the Buddhist Vedas as well as PIE surely ? Why can you never find an archaeologist when you need one Indie ?

Talking of seeing. He also makes endless generalisations of various national and cultural traits, which sound arrogant, chauvinistic and politically incorrect, but of course part of my interest here is in the east-west cultural differences in viewing reality. TEL provides plenty of Middle-East vs Western Europe examples, with a great deal of additional detail of the cultural history of the different specific peoples.

On page 136, after an iterview with Colonel Bremond he makes a reference to a trait

“Even in situations of poetry, the [French] remained incorrigible prose writers, seeing by the directly-thrown light of reason and understanding, not through the half-closed eye, mistily, by things essential radiance, in the manner of the imaginative [British]”

Whether that is a typical French vs British difference or not, it certainly, epitomises the dualistic, objective view distinct from the qualitative. I’ve used the metaphors of sneaking up on truth or squinting sideways to see the truth, and was certainly reminded of Rory Remer’s “Blinded by the Light” analogy of the pitfalls of purely objective thinking.

[Post Note May 2008 – from the dictionary.com “online etymology dictionary” entry
(The Whewell reference struck a chord ….
Whewell coined “consilience” if I recall correctly
…. what a tangled web.)

Usage: Wisdom, Prudence, Knowledge. Wisdom has been defined to be “the use of the best means for attaining the best ends.” “We conceive,” says Whewell, ” prudence as the virtue by which we select right means for given ends, while wisdom implies the selection of right ends as well as of right means.” Hence, wisdom implies the union of high mental and moral excellence. Prudence (that is, providence, or forecast) is of a more negative character; it rather consists in avoiding danger than in taking decisive measures for the accomplishment of an object. Sir Robert Walpole was in many respects a prudent statesman, but he was far from being a wise one. Burke has said that prudence, when carried too far, degenerates into a “reptile virtue,” which is the more dangerous for its plausible appearance. Knowledge, a more comprehensive term, signifies the simple apprehension of facts or relations. “In strictness of language,” says Paley, ” there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom; wisdom always supposing action, and action directed by it.”

Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one, have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells In heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom, in minds attentive to their own. Knowledge, a rude, unprofitable mass, The mere materials with which wisdom builds, Till smoothed, and squared, and fitted to its place, does but encumber whom it seems to enrich. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more. – Cowper.

(Very close to the Lao Tsu sense above) ]