Those unhappy few who care that much of what appears in the American papers about Iraq is composed of half truths or outright lies might be interested in the Washington Post’s account of the death of Army Spec. Jesse Buryj. The article goes through the death and the reporting of the death chronologically, so that one can see how one lie is succeeded by another. And in the middle of this is the frat boy whose science project in Iraq – how much pointless blood can one ersatz hero-president spill – got him the majority of votes from a grateful electorate in 2004.
First, the death. Nobody yet knows who shot Jesse Buryj on the night of May 4, 2004. What is known is that he was on night patrol in Karbala. His unit and a unit of Polish troops were coordinated the effort to stifle Sadr’s revolt there.
“Buryj was in the turret of an armored Humvee with a trailer on the east side of the circle, while Polish and U.S. units manned several entrances to the checkpoint.
At 1 a.m. on May 5, a dump truck approached the circle from the south and slowed, as if to stop.
"It just sat there for a few seconds, hesitated, and then it just plowed through," Sgt. Chris DeCloud, a member of Buryj's unit, said in a recent interview. "The engine revved and boom, it was coming through the checkpoint. The Poles were lighting it up from all sides. We lit it up."
The tires blew, and the truck veered to the right but did not slow. Its windshield cracked into a ragged spider web, and the driver slumped, dead. Buryj, seeing the truck coming directly at him, fired several rounds from his M249 machine gun. The truck rammed his vehicle, sending it up on its passenger-side wheels and tossing Buryj to the ground.
"We thought this truck was going to blow up, this is the end. We all did," DeCloud said, adding that he didn't think his unit was taking fire from the Poles. "I thought we were the only ones shooting" when the truck hit the Humvee.”
Buryj broke his back. As he was being choppered back to Baghdad, they discovered a puncture wound in his lower back. He died en route.
The truck? In the official death report, the military described the truck as hostile enemy activity. It was actually a truck filled with sand, and the two Iraqis in it, both shot to death, had no weapons. So much for the hostile.
But the lie of who we are killing in Iraq is old news, and who gives a shit about that. As for the much supported American soldier, well, supposedly the Army has some interest in and loyalty to him or her, so much so that it becomes a matter of interest who, exactly, shot Buryj. But in this case, given that the man could have been shot by our Polish allies – who were nervous and triggerhappy – the Army decided not to stir the pot. The Poles did complete their report, and claimed that, due to Buryj’s position, he was likely killed by an American bullet.
“The Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory in Forest Park, Ga., could have cleared up the mystery. It reported that the bullet and fragments recovered from Buryj's body provided "sufficient individual characteristics for comparison purposes" and suggested collecting all suspect weapons for analysis.
But that didn't happen. DeCloud said the unit offered to turn over its weapons for testing but "they never got back to us."”
The Buryj family wanted to know exactly what happened. Being ardent Ohio Republicans, Mrs. Buryj even got to see the President, along with other mothers and wives of the dead, in 2004. She asked him to find out what happened to her son. He promised to look into it.
Now George Bush, as we know from a constant stream of the guy, is ever fratboyish, irresponsible, ignorant, criminally neglectful commander in chief, and his promise was a joke. If Buryj had been a pioneer, or in any way wealthy, the story would be different. But if Buryj had been a pioneer, or in any way wealthy, he wouldn't be doing trash time in Iraq, would he? Of course not. He'd be busy looting a corporation, like a good Bush associate. However, this isn't the tale of a broken promise. One has to remember that the Bush culture is all about pushing the limits of bad taste. So the Buryj family did sorta hear back from George Bush:
“In July 2004, two months after their son died, Steve and Peggy Buryj met Bush after a rally at the Canton Civic Center and passed him a letter asking for the truth. "I asked him to do what he could," Peggy said. "He appeared concerned and was very sincere. He said that sometimes all it takes is a call from the president."
Nothing happened, and Peggy Buryj doesn't know whether he made that call. In early October, she said, she received a call from the Bush campaign in Ohio. She said Darrin Klinger, then executive director of the Bush-Cheney Ohio campaign, asked her if she would be interested in appearing in a campaign commercial as a grieving mother who was sticking by her president. (Klinger, reached at his office in Columbus, Ohio, said he is familiar with the Buryj family but does not recall that conversation.) She said she refused. "I told them that if he finds out what happened to my son, I'll win him an Academy Award," she said. "I voted for Bush, I was a supporter. But I was just getting strung along, and I knew it at that point.”
At times like these, it is hard to remember that Bush himself, as a young man, voluntarily put himself in harm’s way by defending Alabama from potential communist aggression. One would think that he might have learned something from his hour of peril. But apparently he didn’t. And the Washington Post might be interested that simply taking dictation from the army about “insurgent” casualties might not exactly be the equivalent of conveying the truth – in fact, it could be simply a pack of lies upon more lies. But that would be to expect way too much from D.C.’s proud standardbearer.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Monday, January 16, 2006
the fool vs. the fool of fools -- the mother of all foolishness
In 2004, LI made some predictions (hedged by the disclaimer that they were merely extrapolations from present circumstance) about what would happen if George Bush were re – scratch that re, will you – were elected in 2004. In other words, if the 2004 election legitimized the Bush coup of 2000.
One of the predictions we made – it was made here, on September 19, 2004 – reads like this:
“One thing this [the election of Bush] will certainly mean, given the characteristic bloodthirstiness of this group, is a lot more Iraqi deaths. The Vietnam comparisons are always to the number of Americans killed – not to the number of Iraqis killed. But with the re-installation of an ultra-hawkish wing in D.C. (who will justly take the election as a legitimation of their methods) surely we will see an acceleration of Rumsfeld’s kind of warfare – the terror bombing of Fallujah, the pillage of Najaf, that kind of thing. The Bush people have been pushing a re-definition of the aim in Iraq as ‘working democracy” – which means that they will skew what election process they allow, in January, to put in an American puppet. Allawi is the candidate right now, and he does have one essential quality – he will rubber stamp any terror tactics the U.S. forces take against the Iraqi population. But it is hard to see how an election, no matter how corrupt, could be won by Allawi. Without opposition in Washington, however, there might be no pressure to hold elections at all. Postponing the elections next year would surely be on the Pump house wish list.
What are the constraining factors here? We think the major constraint is the Bush fear of having to resource its war. It has been obvious for some time, in Iraq, that the distance between what Bush says is the goal in Iraq and Iraqi reality could have only been bridged if Iraq were treated as a serious occupation. That would require about two to three times the manpower that is there right now. Instead, this war is being fought like a child playing with the puddles from its bottle of milk on the high chair – American soldiers go into an area, ”pacify” it, then withdraw. Then the insurgents return. Going to war with Iran and/or Syria is going to require a lot more military manpower. We think the fear of that will drive the Bush administration to make threats, and to maybe use its airpower, but not to invade. The worst case scenario would be: seeing that we need a proxy in the Middle East, Wolfowitz et al encourage an Israeli attack on Syria.”
We were, of course, on the money about the use of terror tactics, which came into play majorly after the election in the weeks of U.S. war crimes committed against Fallujah. On the other hand, we grossly underestimated the pump house gang’s own consumption of its kool-aid. They actually thought they would win the elections, via Allawi, after the destruction of a major Sunni city. But even then we were suspicious of the meme that the U.S. was going to attack Iran.
We still think that the U.S. will not attack Iran, and that if an attack comes, it will be a proxy attack via Israel – which, we will be assured, operated on its own, completely and utterly free from American intervention. Right.
However, the interesting thing at the moment is the way that the same forces that got us into Iraq are aligning in the same ways to get us into Iran. Niall Ferguson, who is a very good historian and a very poor pundit, pulls out one of his alternative history tricks and gives us the history of the “nuclear exchanges” between Israel and Iran in 2007 – all of which could have been prevented by a couple of good old surgical strikes in 2006. Riiigght. Sure. That there is no evidence that Iran is even working on nuclear weaponry at the moment is of course irrelevant to this scenario. Similarly, the NYT quotes a Newsweek interview with In an interview with Newsweek magazine, Mohamed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy, which will be quoted to mean that the Iranian nuclear weapons program is a few months from achieving its goal if
“… Iran was possibly pursuing a nuclear weapons program in secret.
"If they have the nuclear material and they have a parallel weaponization program along the way, they are really not very far - a few months - from a weapon," he said. "We still need to assure ourselves through access to documents, individuals and locations that we have seen all that we ought to see and there is nothing fishy, if you like, about the program."
Now, this is really a strange sentence. The claim is that there is a possibility of nuclear material and a possibility of weaponization. And then there is a statement of fact. Something is either wrong with El Baradei’s conditionals or wrong with the way Newsweek quoted him.
So what is ahead? The Washington Post has long been eager to visit Iran with U.S. bombers, and we expect the op ed page and the editorial section to be full of the usual meat driven, gloating cannibal ideology, by the same cannibals who have gorged largely on American and Iraqi blood in the last two years and find themselves craving more – serial war mongering being one of the D.C. clique’s more adorable traits. We especially like it when Krauthammer imitates Hector Lector. And then the hawk Dems will have to start marching, starting with the inexorable Hillary and her to be expected comments about giving serious consideration to a military response. But … we think (putting on our fortuneteller cap) that the D.C. clique won’t get that far, that hawk Dems will stretch their talons in vain, and that this will become an issue over which the EU, the UN, the U.S., Russia and China flutter for the next couple of years. Iran’s contracts with India and China are going to figure largely in keeping the negotiations peaceful, we think. Although who knows – the wild cared is whether the U.S. decides to use Israel.
LI’s position about Iran has taken a battering in the last couple of years. It was obvious that Clinton’s biggest foreign policy fuckup was not establishing détente with Iran when he had the chance. With the election – and it was an election, and it was even one in which the person with the most votes won, unlike, uh, the elections in some countries – of the fool of fools, Ahmadinejad , we can’t imagine that Iran and the U.S. will take the small steps to secure a Middle East peace, much less strengthen the party of sanity in Iran.
One of the predictions we made – it was made here, on September 19, 2004 – reads like this:
“One thing this [the election of Bush] will certainly mean, given the characteristic bloodthirstiness of this group, is a lot more Iraqi deaths. The Vietnam comparisons are always to the number of Americans killed – not to the number of Iraqis killed. But with the re-installation of an ultra-hawkish wing in D.C. (who will justly take the election as a legitimation of their methods) surely we will see an acceleration of Rumsfeld’s kind of warfare – the terror bombing of Fallujah, the pillage of Najaf, that kind of thing. The Bush people have been pushing a re-definition of the aim in Iraq as ‘working democracy” – which means that they will skew what election process they allow, in January, to put in an American puppet. Allawi is the candidate right now, and he does have one essential quality – he will rubber stamp any terror tactics the U.S. forces take against the Iraqi population. But it is hard to see how an election, no matter how corrupt, could be won by Allawi. Without opposition in Washington, however, there might be no pressure to hold elections at all. Postponing the elections next year would surely be on the Pump house wish list.
What are the constraining factors here? We think the major constraint is the Bush fear of having to resource its war. It has been obvious for some time, in Iraq, that the distance between what Bush says is the goal in Iraq and Iraqi reality could have only been bridged if Iraq were treated as a serious occupation. That would require about two to three times the manpower that is there right now. Instead, this war is being fought like a child playing with the puddles from its bottle of milk on the high chair – American soldiers go into an area, ”pacify” it, then withdraw. Then the insurgents return. Going to war with Iran and/or Syria is going to require a lot more military manpower. We think the fear of that will drive the Bush administration to make threats, and to maybe use its airpower, but not to invade. The worst case scenario would be: seeing that we need a proxy in the Middle East, Wolfowitz et al encourage an Israeli attack on Syria.”
We were, of course, on the money about the use of terror tactics, which came into play majorly after the election in the weeks of U.S. war crimes committed against Fallujah. On the other hand, we grossly underestimated the pump house gang’s own consumption of its kool-aid. They actually thought they would win the elections, via Allawi, after the destruction of a major Sunni city. But even then we were suspicious of the meme that the U.S. was going to attack Iran.
We still think that the U.S. will not attack Iran, and that if an attack comes, it will be a proxy attack via Israel – which, we will be assured, operated on its own, completely and utterly free from American intervention. Right.
However, the interesting thing at the moment is the way that the same forces that got us into Iraq are aligning in the same ways to get us into Iran. Niall Ferguson, who is a very good historian and a very poor pundit, pulls out one of his alternative history tricks and gives us the history of the “nuclear exchanges” between Israel and Iran in 2007 – all of which could have been prevented by a couple of good old surgical strikes in 2006. Riiigght. Sure. That there is no evidence that Iran is even working on nuclear weaponry at the moment is of course irrelevant to this scenario. Similarly, the NYT quotes a Newsweek interview with In an interview with Newsweek magazine, Mohamed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy, which will be quoted to mean that the Iranian nuclear weapons program is a few months from achieving its goal if
“… Iran was possibly pursuing a nuclear weapons program in secret.
"If they have the nuclear material and they have a parallel weaponization program along the way, they are really not very far - a few months - from a weapon," he said. "We still need to assure ourselves through access to documents, individuals and locations that we have seen all that we ought to see and there is nothing fishy, if you like, about the program."
Now, this is really a strange sentence. The claim is that there is a possibility of nuclear material and a possibility of weaponization. And then there is a statement of fact. Something is either wrong with El Baradei’s conditionals or wrong with the way Newsweek quoted him.
So what is ahead? The Washington Post has long been eager to visit Iran with U.S. bombers, and we expect the op ed page and the editorial section to be full of the usual meat driven, gloating cannibal ideology, by the same cannibals who have gorged largely on American and Iraqi blood in the last two years and find themselves craving more – serial war mongering being one of the D.C. clique’s more adorable traits. We especially like it when Krauthammer imitates Hector Lector. And then the hawk Dems will have to start marching, starting with the inexorable Hillary and her to be expected comments about giving serious consideration to a military response. But … we think (putting on our fortuneteller cap) that the D.C. clique won’t get that far, that hawk Dems will stretch their talons in vain, and that this will become an issue over which the EU, the UN, the U.S., Russia and China flutter for the next couple of years. Iran’s contracts with India and China are going to figure largely in keeping the negotiations peaceful, we think. Although who knows – the wild cared is whether the U.S. decides to use Israel.
LI’s position about Iran has taken a battering in the last couple of years. It was obvious that Clinton’s biggest foreign policy fuckup was not establishing détente with Iran when he had the chance. With the election – and it was an election, and it was even one in which the person with the most votes won, unlike, uh, the elections in some countries – of the fool of fools, Ahmadinejad , we can’t imagine that Iran and the U.S. will take the small steps to secure a Middle East peace, much less strengthen the party of sanity in Iran.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
the magnetized age
In his entertaining Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s, Timothy Fulford writes:
BY DECEMBER 1795 PRIME MINISTER WILLIAM PITT WAS WELL ON THE way to crushing political dissent in Britain. he had tried reformers for treason, passed laws restricting the right of association and suspended habeas corpus, all without an outcry from British people about their loss of freedom. To one radical, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the people's quietude was an uncanny sign of a new malaise coursing through the body politic:
WILLIAM PITT, the great political Animal Magnetist, ... has most foully worked on the diseased fancy of Englishmen . . . thrown the nation into a feverish slumber, and is now bringing it to a crisis which may convulse mortality!'
Coleridge was not alone in seeing Pitt as an animal magnetist, mesmerizing his countrymen into a trance to be followed by the convulsions of war. According to James Tilly Matthews, returning to London in 1796 after imprisonment by the Jacobins, the Prime Minister had been "actuated" by "magnetic spies" sent from revolutionary France.2 Now controlled "like a mere puppet by the expert-magnetists," Pitt was himself a traitor, part of a Jacobin conspiracy to mesmerize the nation towards its destruction.
Puppet or not, Pitt acted decisively when Matthews repeated his allegations from the gallery of the House of Commons. he had Matthews locked up in Bedlam madhouse. On the ministry's reading, it was Matthews, and not the Prime Minister, whose mind had been "possessed"-Matthews had himself been an enthusiast of mesmerism, and had now been hypnotized by the practice he had gone to France to study.”
In a reactionary time, it does seem to a dissenter like society has fallen into some magnetic sleep. LI has also used the notion of zombies to explain the hypnotized followers of Bush – which is not to imply that the intelligence and character of Bush and Cheney find their natural counterparts in the set of British Prime ministers, like William Pitt. Rather, comparison should be made to the cast of the Dukes of Hazard. Let’s value our own times (die so grossen war) and our governing class with the contempt that both deserve, shall we? But the war of magnetic spies seems somehow appropriate, seems to call up images, that might be useful for looking at the war of drones and mirrors.
I am referencing Fulford’s essay to give us a fuller sense of the scientific image of mesmerism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was blurred, so to speak, across such disciplines as medicine and physics. We pay too little attention to this kind of thing when looking at philosophers – LI’s argument about Schopenhauer is that too great a preoccupation with establishing Schopenhauer’s relation to Kant and Hegel ignores other sources and models of the Will, that eminently 19th century category.
For instance, this anecdote, from Fulford, was just the kind of information that Schopenhauer would seize upon:
It was in this inchoate and contested medical context [of an insufficiently institutionalized medical culture] that Franz Anton Mesmer's therapy proved popular. It did so, in part, because the latest experiments suggested that it might be possible, by an act of will, to detect and transmit to others an imponderable life- giving fluid. When the anatomist John Hunter published his dissections of the torpedo and gymnotus fish (in 1773 and 1775), the anatomical organs for transmitting electricity were laid open. They revealed, Hunter concluded, "that the will of the animal does absolutely control the electric powers of its body; which must depend on the energy of its nerves."6 Joseph Priestley soon incorporated Hunter's demonstration into his theories7-if electricity could be transmitted at a distance through water, perhaps that was formed by a combination of electricity with other vital principles. The power of the fish, the medium through which it passed and the body receiving the shock must all be akin. Hunter noted that the "oscillation" produced by the gymnotus:
may be so strong, as not only to check and overpower those in the part which touches the fish, but also to propagate themselves along the skin and up the nerves, to the brachial ganglion, and even to the spinal marrow and brain; whence the person would first feel the stupefaction ascend along the arm to the shoulder, and then fall into a giddiness.
The very terms, here, are echoed in Schopehauer’s essay, which makes use of the phrase action at a distance in the same way – using it, further, as a scientific basis upon which to combat materialism. Similarly, when Marina Warner, considering the effects of the magic lantern slide show upon Western sensibilities, cites early 19th century classifications of the sleep cycle, we see this so distinctly echoed in Schopenhauer’s text that we can be confident of some influence:
In l825, Samuel Hibbert published a foldout chart about dream states, which he called a ‘Formula of the various comparative Degrees of Faintness, Vividness, or Intensity, supposed to subsist between Sensations and Ideas…’ With scientific method, he tabulated eight transitions in his full cycle, ranging from Perfect Sleep to Somnambulism by way of ‘the common state of Watchfulness’ to ‘the tranquil state’ to ‘extreme mental excitement’, and he graded no less than fifteen different phases in each of them. They start from ‘Degree of vividness at which consciousness begins,’ where it is still possible to impose the will on vision, to ‘Intense excitements of the mind necessary for the production of spectres.’”
Not to brag, but I would guess that LI is the first to point out this similarity – showing how badly the history of philosophy needs to expand its focus of study.
Which brings us to the issue that we started with: ghosts. The specter that has haunted the specter in this essay finally manifests itself in the one passage from the essay that has been extensively quoted – in anthologies of Ghost literature. At least, the first sentence is quoted. I’m translating the whole passage, and that will be the end of LI’s sermons on the Master Grouch of Philosophy. Still, it bears noticing that Schopenhauer seems to treat the Kantian Ding an sich, here, as a ghost. Something which would, of course, flutter the dovecoats if it were suggested in one of Derrida’s essays.
"To explain this explanation, the following general remark may serve. The ghost belief is innate among people. It is found in all times and all places, and perhaps not a single person is completely free of it. The great pile and the people, really of all lands and times, distinguish the natural from the supernatural as two fundamentally different yet equally present to hand orders of things. They prescribe miracles, omens, ghosts and magic unthinking to the supernatural, but also allow that in general nothing is thoroughly, down to its root, natural, but nature itself rests on the supernatural. Therefore the people understand themselves very well when the question is posed, “does that occur naturally or not?” Essentially, this distinction is in synch with the Kantian one between appearance and the thing in itself; only that the affair is treated more precisely and correctly in that the natural and supernatural aren’t two divided and split apart kinds of essences, but one and the same, which taken as it is in itself should be named supernatural, because only then it first appears – that is, enters upon the perception of our intellect and therefore goes into its forms, in which nature represents itself, whose phenomenal lawfulness is just what one understands by “the Natural”. I for my part, to repeat, have only clarified Kant’s expression when I named “Appearance” “Representation”. And if you still take heed that, many times, in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomenon, Kant’s thing in itself only emerges just a bit from out of the darkness in which he keeps it suspended, and lets us know it as the faculty of moral calculation in us, thus as the will – so you will also gain the insight, through referring to the Will as the Thing in Itself, how much I have simply clarified and completed Kant’s thought."
The hidden theatrical scene here, the thing-in-itself that dare not take its position on the stage – I could go on about how connected this is to the early nineteenth century entertainment of the Phantasmagoria, which in turn was connected to the theater of the magnetic sleepwalker. Kant, in this scenario, plays the master of the sonambule -- and Schopenhauer plays the master of Kant. I told you this would end in a wild Caligarian chase, as all the philosophers lure you to the madhouse, strap you down, and mutter, now I know the source of the disease!
Ah, but don’t worry – I’m not going to bore you with this any more! Also Sprach LI.
BY DECEMBER 1795 PRIME MINISTER WILLIAM PITT WAS WELL ON THE way to crushing political dissent in Britain. he had tried reformers for treason, passed laws restricting the right of association and suspended habeas corpus, all without an outcry from British people about their loss of freedom. To one radical, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the people's quietude was an uncanny sign of a new malaise coursing through the body politic:
WILLIAM PITT, the great political Animal Magnetist, ... has most foully worked on the diseased fancy of Englishmen . . . thrown the nation into a feverish slumber, and is now bringing it to a crisis which may convulse mortality!'
Coleridge was not alone in seeing Pitt as an animal magnetist, mesmerizing his countrymen into a trance to be followed by the convulsions of war. According to James Tilly Matthews, returning to London in 1796 after imprisonment by the Jacobins, the Prime Minister had been "actuated" by "magnetic spies" sent from revolutionary France.2 Now controlled "like a mere puppet by the expert-magnetists," Pitt was himself a traitor, part of a Jacobin conspiracy to mesmerize the nation towards its destruction.
Puppet or not, Pitt acted decisively when Matthews repeated his allegations from the gallery of the House of Commons. he had Matthews locked up in Bedlam madhouse. On the ministry's reading, it was Matthews, and not the Prime Minister, whose mind had been "possessed"-Matthews had himself been an enthusiast of mesmerism, and had now been hypnotized by the practice he had gone to France to study.”
In a reactionary time, it does seem to a dissenter like society has fallen into some magnetic sleep. LI has also used the notion of zombies to explain the hypnotized followers of Bush – which is not to imply that the intelligence and character of Bush and Cheney find their natural counterparts in the set of British Prime ministers, like William Pitt. Rather, comparison should be made to the cast of the Dukes of Hazard. Let’s value our own times (die so grossen war) and our governing class with the contempt that both deserve, shall we? But the war of magnetic spies seems somehow appropriate, seems to call up images, that might be useful for looking at the war of drones and mirrors.
I am referencing Fulford’s essay to give us a fuller sense of the scientific image of mesmerism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was blurred, so to speak, across such disciplines as medicine and physics. We pay too little attention to this kind of thing when looking at philosophers – LI’s argument about Schopenhauer is that too great a preoccupation with establishing Schopenhauer’s relation to Kant and Hegel ignores other sources and models of the Will, that eminently 19th century category.
For instance, this anecdote, from Fulford, was just the kind of information that Schopenhauer would seize upon:
It was in this inchoate and contested medical context [of an insufficiently institutionalized medical culture] that Franz Anton Mesmer's therapy proved popular. It did so, in part, because the latest experiments suggested that it might be possible, by an act of will, to detect and transmit to others an imponderable life- giving fluid. When the anatomist John Hunter published his dissections of the torpedo and gymnotus fish (in 1773 and 1775), the anatomical organs for transmitting electricity were laid open. They revealed, Hunter concluded, "that the will of the animal does absolutely control the electric powers of its body; which must depend on the energy of its nerves."6 Joseph Priestley soon incorporated Hunter's demonstration into his theories7-if electricity could be transmitted at a distance through water, perhaps that was formed by a combination of electricity with other vital principles. The power of the fish, the medium through which it passed and the body receiving the shock must all be akin. Hunter noted that the "oscillation" produced by the gymnotus:
may be so strong, as not only to check and overpower those in the part which touches the fish, but also to propagate themselves along the skin and up the nerves, to the brachial ganglion, and even to the spinal marrow and brain; whence the person would first feel the stupefaction ascend along the arm to the shoulder, and then fall into a giddiness.
The very terms, here, are echoed in Schopehauer’s essay, which makes use of the phrase action at a distance in the same way – using it, further, as a scientific basis upon which to combat materialism. Similarly, when Marina Warner, considering the effects of the magic lantern slide show upon Western sensibilities, cites early 19th century classifications of the sleep cycle, we see this so distinctly echoed in Schopenhauer’s text that we can be confident of some influence:
In l825, Samuel Hibbert published a foldout chart about dream states, which he called a ‘Formula of the various comparative Degrees of Faintness, Vividness, or Intensity, supposed to subsist between Sensations and Ideas…’ With scientific method, he tabulated eight transitions in his full cycle, ranging from Perfect Sleep to Somnambulism by way of ‘the common state of Watchfulness’ to ‘the tranquil state’ to ‘extreme mental excitement’, and he graded no less than fifteen different phases in each of them. They start from ‘Degree of vividness at which consciousness begins,’ where it is still possible to impose the will on vision, to ‘Intense excitements of the mind necessary for the production of spectres.’”
Not to brag, but I would guess that LI is the first to point out this similarity – showing how badly the history of philosophy needs to expand its focus of study.
Which brings us to the issue that we started with: ghosts. The specter that has haunted the specter in this essay finally manifests itself in the one passage from the essay that has been extensively quoted – in anthologies of Ghost literature. At least, the first sentence is quoted. I’m translating the whole passage, and that will be the end of LI’s sermons on the Master Grouch of Philosophy. Still, it bears noticing that Schopenhauer seems to treat the Kantian Ding an sich, here, as a ghost. Something which would, of course, flutter the dovecoats if it were suggested in one of Derrida’s essays.
"To explain this explanation, the following general remark may serve. The ghost belief is innate among people. It is found in all times and all places, and perhaps not a single person is completely free of it. The great pile and the people, really of all lands and times, distinguish the natural from the supernatural as two fundamentally different yet equally present to hand orders of things. They prescribe miracles, omens, ghosts and magic unthinking to the supernatural, but also allow that in general nothing is thoroughly, down to its root, natural, but nature itself rests on the supernatural. Therefore the people understand themselves very well when the question is posed, “does that occur naturally or not?” Essentially, this distinction is in synch with the Kantian one between appearance and the thing in itself; only that the affair is treated more precisely and correctly in that the natural and supernatural aren’t two divided and split apart kinds of essences, but one and the same, which taken as it is in itself should be named supernatural, because only then it first appears – that is, enters upon the perception of our intellect and therefore goes into its forms, in which nature represents itself, whose phenomenal lawfulness is just what one understands by “the Natural”. I for my part, to repeat, have only clarified Kant’s expression when I named “Appearance” “Representation”. And if you still take heed that, many times, in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomenon, Kant’s thing in itself only emerges just a bit from out of the darkness in which he keeps it suspended, and lets us know it as the faculty of moral calculation in us, thus as the will – so you will also gain the insight, through referring to the Will as the Thing in Itself, how much I have simply clarified and completed Kant’s thought."
The hidden theatrical scene here, the thing-in-itself that dare not take its position on the stage – I could go on about how connected this is to the early nineteenth century entertainment of the Phantasmagoria, which in turn was connected to the theater of the magnetic sleepwalker. Kant, in this scenario, plays the master of the sonambule -- and Schopenhauer plays the master of Kant. I told you this would end in a wild Caligarian chase, as all the philosophers lure you to the madhouse, strap you down, and mutter, now I know the source of the disease!
Ah, but don’t worry – I’m not going to bore you with this any more! Also Sprach LI.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
there are no accidents
LI was thinking of taking the day off from Schopenhauer’s essay and writing about the J.T. LeRoy hoax that is currently unraveling around a couple of San Francisco situationalists, Laura Albert and her husband, who made up and animated this faux HIV infected, trans-sexual naïf. And, from the accounts of the hoaxed – Susie Bright, Denis Cooper, etc. – it looks like the hook eventually settled in Laura’s mouth, as late night obsessive phone calls to the famous and titillated started growing their own personality.
But then we thought, fuck that. Let others talk literary scandal, at this blog we are all about the bucks and the popularity and the kind of pop stuff that Shirley Mansen and/or Winona Ryder and/or Carrie Fisher just goes crazy for: for instance, the deep probing of Schopenhauer’s more obscure essays .
Let’s put this post under a quote from The World as Will and Representation:
“Thus, although every particular action, under the presupposition of the definite character, necessarily ensues with the presented motive, and although growth, the process of nourishment, and all the changes in the animal body take place according to necessarily lasting causes (stimuli), the whole series of actions, and consequently every individual act and likewise its condition, namely the whole body itself which performs it, and therefore also the process through which and in which the body exists, are nothing but the phenomenal appearance of the will, its becoming visible, the objectivity of the will. On this rests the perfect suitability of the human and animal body to the human and animal will in general, resembling, but far surpassing, the suitability of a purposely made instrument to the will of its maker, and on this account appearing as fitness or appropriateness, i.e., the teleological accountability of the body. Therefore the parts of the body must correspond completely to the chief demands and desires by which the will manifests itself; they must be the visible expression of these desires. Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse; grasping hands and nimble feet correspond to the more indirect strivings of the will which they represent. Just as the general human form corresponds to the general human will, so to the individually modified will, namely the character of the individual, there corresponds the individual bodily structure, which is therefore as a whole and in all its parts characteristic and full of expression.”
Schopenhauer’s Spirit Seer essay, in all its eccentric embrace of magnetic somnambulism, clairvoyance, mesmeric healing and its explanation of ghosts, is logically derived from Schopenhauer’s central philosophical positions, and in particular two principles: a., the application of his Will as a sort of general solvent into which all matter dissolves and b., the Satz von Grund, the principle of sufficient reason. Since “Over the implications of spirit seeing” is too long for us to simply cull quotes to mark our breadcrumb trail through it, let’s drastically summarize the argument and get to the stranger bits about dreams.
This is how Schopenhauer procedes:
1. First, he gives us perhaps the first respectable physiological account of dreams. Schopenhauer sticks with the standard empirical account of sense impressions – intrinsic to the sensing of objects is that they be sensed outside the subject, which means mostly outside the body, or at most located in the body but outside of the terminus of the sense mechanism – the brain. However, dreams present us with the puzzle of sense images that are not derived from outside the body. Schopenhauer’s idea, taken from the physiology of the time, is that the bodies sensing system – its nerves and secretions – fall into two channels, one of which fits the standard empiricist account, and the other of which is interior. This former channel provides us, while we are awake, with a constant “noise” or screen of sensations that effectually mask the inner sensations. However, sleep, by suspending the activities of the senses, allows the ‘echo of the organism’s workshops” to be heard. The brain, then, can now receive, without interference, these weaker signals. But since the brain is oriented to the receiving of outward stimuli, it translates these weaker signals into the language of the senses. Schopenhauer’s theory was revived – without reference, of course, to Schopenhauer – by James Watson in the 90s. LI enjoyed Schopenhauer’s comparison:
“Because at all times it [the brain] will only speak its own speech; and so, into this, it interprets these weak impulses, stemming from the inside, that reach it during sleep, just as the strong and specific ones come from the outside via regular routes during waking. Thus the brain is given the matter to make images completely like those which arise from outer excitements, even though there is hardly a similarity between both kinds of impressions. Their relationship can be compared to that of a deaf person who, from the vocables that reach his ear, composes false phrases, or even with a madman, who brings his own wild, fixed ideas, corresponding to phantasies, to accidentally employed words.”
2. Unlike James Watson, though, Schopenhauer doesn’t take the physiological theory to mean that dreams are as meaningless as the sounds you might get by dropping stuff on a piano keyboard. Dreams weave together into apprehensions and meaningful messages, depending on the dreams origin in one or another part of the dream cycle. Schopenhauer spends a lot of time distinguishing one phase of sleep from another, and then investigating “magnetic somnambulism,” or hypnosis, which he takes to be parallel to sleep. Schopenhauer was very impressed with research into mesmerism, just as Balzac was, and many of the Victorians. Because 19th century philosophy is taught will little reference to 19th century psychology, we tend to miss this kind of thing. This is one of the reasons that this essay of Schopenhauer’s has been studiously avoided. If you stripped Freud and Skinner out of the history of twentieth century philosophy, you would have some puzzling patterns on your hand.
3. Schopenhauer has the idea that the dexterity of magnetized sonambules shows that the “dream organ” has a curiously instinctive sense of the world. If we recall that the world is the objectified will, and that our information about it, via our waking senses, is about surface phenomena – in a sense, is an ornament produced by the experience’s instinctive forms, time and space, which have merely the interactive reality that comes from experience – Schopenhauer has philosophical reasons to justify believing that dreams tell the truth – or foretell the truth. In fact, he “proves” this with a story from his own experience. One day, while writing, he absent mindedly reached out his hand to sprinkle sand on the page he had just penned, but accidently dipped his hand in ink and scattered it on the page and on the floor. One of his maids came in and cleaned it up, and she remarked that she had dreamed that this would happen the night before. Schopenhauer questioned her, and she claimed that she had mentioned this to the other maid earlier in the morning. Schopenhauer being Schopenhauer, he immediately rang for the other maid and demanded to know if she had been told anything by the first maid that morning. Upon the story being confirmed, Schopenhauer drew various satisfying conclusions. Firstly, the seeming accident of scattering ink was foreseen, which meant that it was not an accident. Schopenhauer’s philosophy had already, of course, shown this – everything that happens happens by necessity! One imagines he imparted this important message to the maids. And the second conclusion was that the unitary force of experience was weakened during sleep, so that time’s secondary structure of past, present and future was, in a sense, dissolved.
Okay, one more post and then I’ll have this thing done. We all have our obsessions. What can I say?
But then we thought, fuck that. Let others talk literary scandal, at this blog we are all about the bucks and the popularity and the kind of pop stuff that Shirley Mansen and/or Winona Ryder and/or Carrie Fisher just goes crazy for: for instance, the deep probing of Schopenhauer’s more obscure essays .
Let’s put this post under a quote from The World as Will and Representation:
“Thus, although every particular action, under the presupposition of the definite character, necessarily ensues with the presented motive, and although growth, the process of nourishment, and all the changes in the animal body take place according to necessarily lasting causes (stimuli), the whole series of actions, and consequently every individual act and likewise its condition, namely the whole body itself which performs it, and therefore also the process through which and in which the body exists, are nothing but the phenomenal appearance of the will, its becoming visible, the objectivity of the will. On this rests the perfect suitability of the human and animal body to the human and animal will in general, resembling, but far surpassing, the suitability of a purposely made instrument to the will of its maker, and on this account appearing as fitness or appropriateness, i.e., the teleological accountability of the body. Therefore the parts of the body must correspond completely to the chief demands and desires by which the will manifests itself; they must be the visible expression of these desires. Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse; grasping hands and nimble feet correspond to the more indirect strivings of the will which they represent. Just as the general human form corresponds to the general human will, so to the individually modified will, namely the character of the individual, there corresponds the individual bodily structure, which is therefore as a whole and in all its parts characteristic and full of expression.”
Schopenhauer’s Spirit Seer essay, in all its eccentric embrace of magnetic somnambulism, clairvoyance, mesmeric healing and its explanation of ghosts, is logically derived from Schopenhauer’s central philosophical positions, and in particular two principles: a., the application of his Will as a sort of general solvent into which all matter dissolves and b., the Satz von Grund, the principle of sufficient reason. Since “Over the implications of spirit seeing” is too long for us to simply cull quotes to mark our breadcrumb trail through it, let’s drastically summarize the argument and get to the stranger bits about dreams.
This is how Schopenhauer procedes:
1. First, he gives us perhaps the first respectable physiological account of dreams. Schopenhauer sticks with the standard empirical account of sense impressions – intrinsic to the sensing of objects is that they be sensed outside the subject, which means mostly outside the body, or at most located in the body but outside of the terminus of the sense mechanism – the brain. However, dreams present us with the puzzle of sense images that are not derived from outside the body. Schopenhauer’s idea, taken from the physiology of the time, is that the bodies sensing system – its nerves and secretions – fall into two channels, one of which fits the standard empiricist account, and the other of which is interior. This former channel provides us, while we are awake, with a constant “noise” or screen of sensations that effectually mask the inner sensations. However, sleep, by suspending the activities of the senses, allows the ‘echo of the organism’s workshops” to be heard. The brain, then, can now receive, without interference, these weaker signals. But since the brain is oriented to the receiving of outward stimuli, it translates these weaker signals into the language of the senses. Schopenhauer’s theory was revived – without reference, of course, to Schopenhauer – by James Watson in the 90s. LI enjoyed Schopenhauer’s comparison:
“Because at all times it [the brain] will only speak its own speech; and so, into this, it interprets these weak impulses, stemming from the inside, that reach it during sleep, just as the strong and specific ones come from the outside via regular routes during waking. Thus the brain is given the matter to make images completely like those which arise from outer excitements, even though there is hardly a similarity between both kinds of impressions. Their relationship can be compared to that of a deaf person who, from the vocables that reach his ear, composes false phrases, or even with a madman, who brings his own wild, fixed ideas, corresponding to phantasies, to accidentally employed words.”
2. Unlike James Watson, though, Schopenhauer doesn’t take the physiological theory to mean that dreams are as meaningless as the sounds you might get by dropping stuff on a piano keyboard. Dreams weave together into apprehensions and meaningful messages, depending on the dreams origin in one or another part of the dream cycle. Schopenhauer spends a lot of time distinguishing one phase of sleep from another, and then investigating “magnetic somnambulism,” or hypnosis, which he takes to be parallel to sleep. Schopenhauer was very impressed with research into mesmerism, just as Balzac was, and many of the Victorians. Because 19th century philosophy is taught will little reference to 19th century psychology, we tend to miss this kind of thing. This is one of the reasons that this essay of Schopenhauer’s has been studiously avoided. If you stripped Freud and Skinner out of the history of twentieth century philosophy, you would have some puzzling patterns on your hand.
3. Schopenhauer has the idea that the dexterity of magnetized sonambules shows that the “dream organ” has a curiously instinctive sense of the world. If we recall that the world is the objectified will, and that our information about it, via our waking senses, is about surface phenomena – in a sense, is an ornament produced by the experience’s instinctive forms, time and space, which have merely the interactive reality that comes from experience – Schopenhauer has philosophical reasons to justify believing that dreams tell the truth – or foretell the truth. In fact, he “proves” this with a story from his own experience. One day, while writing, he absent mindedly reached out his hand to sprinkle sand on the page he had just penned, but accidently dipped his hand in ink and scattered it on the page and on the floor. One of his maids came in and cleaned it up, and she remarked that she had dreamed that this would happen the night before. Schopenhauer questioned her, and she claimed that she had mentioned this to the other maid earlier in the morning. Schopenhauer being Schopenhauer, he immediately rang for the other maid and demanded to know if she had been told anything by the first maid that morning. Upon the story being confirmed, Schopenhauer drew various satisfying conclusions. Firstly, the seeming accident of scattering ink was foreseen, which meant that it was not an accident. Schopenhauer’s philosophy had already, of course, shown this – everything that happens happens by necessity! One imagines he imparted this important message to the maids. And the second conclusion was that the unitary force of experience was weakened during sleep, so that time’s secondary structure of past, present and future was, in a sense, dissolved.
Okay, one more post and then I’ll have this thing done. We all have our obsessions. What can I say?
Friday, January 13, 2006
random walks of the old mole
While Schopenhauer’s essay begins with ghosts, ghosts are not the figures that haunt the essay: sleepwalkers are. One believes one is wandering into a production of Hamlet, but it turns out that this is Kleist’s the Prince of Homburg.
All of which is to say that Schopenhauer’s notion that the analysis of spirit seers should be left to the experts – the philosophers and physiologists – gives him the framework for the next move in his essay – a departure from the empiricist tradition that tries to keep faith with the empiricist principle of tracking ideas to the senses.
But LI would be remiss if we didn’t point out that the philosophical topic of ghosts has been, apparently, picked up again by Dennett. George Johnson begins his review of Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the Spell: RELIGION AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON in Scientific American with these finely turned out two grafs:
“If nowhere else, the dead live on in our brain cells, not just as memories but as programs--computer like models compiled over the years capturing how the dearly departed behaved when they were alive. These simulations can be remarkably faithful. In even the craziest dreams the people we know may remain eerily in character, acting as we would expect them to in the real world. Even after the simulation outlasts the simulated, we continue to sense the strong presence of a living being. Sitting beside a gravestone, we might speak and think for a moment that we hear a reply.
In the 21st century, cybernetic metaphors provide a rational grip on what prehistoric people had every reason to think of as ghosts, voices of the dead. And that may have been the beginning of religion. If the deceased was a father or a village elder, it would have been natural to ask for advice--which way to go to find water or the best trails for a hunt. If the answers were not forthcoming, the guiding spirits could be summoned by a shaman. Drop a bundle of sticks onto the ground or heat a clay pot until it cracks: the patterns form a map, a communication from the other side. These random walks the gods prescribed may indeed have formed a sensible strategy. The shamans would gain in stature, the rituals would become liturgies, and centuries later people would fill mosques, cathedrals and synagogues, not really knowing how they got there.”
The origin of religion in the ghost story is an old story itself – reverence for the dead being the kind of ritual that interests both a Durkheimian and a Freudian, and that has had quite an impact on 20th century anthropology.
Oddly enough – and perhaps this oddity shapes the essay – Schopenhauer does not mention the dead with relationship to ghosts in his introductory paragraph. In fact, the dead are sublimated into what is present and what is absent, as if life were a matter of secondary metaphysical import. The random walk Schopenhauer wants us to follow is the somnambulist’s, to whom Schopenhauer attributes a Caligari like ability to navigate obstacles.
But… let’s give you a flowsheet of the essay, and not get ahead of ourselves. In the next post.
All of which is to say that Schopenhauer’s notion that the analysis of spirit seers should be left to the experts – the philosophers and physiologists – gives him the framework for the next move in his essay – a departure from the empiricist tradition that tries to keep faith with the empiricist principle of tracking ideas to the senses.
But LI would be remiss if we didn’t point out that the philosophical topic of ghosts has been, apparently, picked up again by Dennett. George Johnson begins his review of Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the Spell: RELIGION AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON in Scientific American with these finely turned out two grafs:
“If nowhere else, the dead live on in our brain cells, not just as memories but as programs--computer like models compiled over the years capturing how the dearly departed behaved when they were alive. These simulations can be remarkably faithful. In even the craziest dreams the people we know may remain eerily in character, acting as we would expect them to in the real world. Even after the simulation outlasts the simulated, we continue to sense the strong presence of a living being. Sitting beside a gravestone, we might speak and think for a moment that we hear a reply.
In the 21st century, cybernetic metaphors provide a rational grip on what prehistoric people had every reason to think of as ghosts, voices of the dead. And that may have been the beginning of religion. If the deceased was a father or a village elder, it would have been natural to ask for advice--which way to go to find water or the best trails for a hunt. If the answers were not forthcoming, the guiding spirits could be summoned by a shaman. Drop a bundle of sticks onto the ground or heat a clay pot until it cracks: the patterns form a map, a communication from the other side. These random walks the gods prescribed may indeed have formed a sensible strategy. The shamans would gain in stature, the rituals would become liturgies, and centuries later people would fill mosques, cathedrals and synagogues, not really knowing how they got there.”
The origin of religion in the ghost story is an old story itself – reverence for the dead being the kind of ritual that interests both a Durkheimian and a Freudian, and that has had quite an impact on 20th century anthropology.
Oddly enough – and perhaps this oddity shapes the essay – Schopenhauer does not mention the dead with relationship to ghosts in his introductory paragraph. In fact, the dead are sublimated into what is present and what is absent, as if life were a matter of secondary metaphysical import. The random walk Schopenhauer wants us to follow is the somnambulist’s, to whom Schopenhauer attributes a Caligari like ability to navigate obstacles.
But… let’s give you a flowsheet of the essay, and not get ahead of ourselves. In the next post.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
haunting schopenhauer
Schopenhauer’s essay on spirit seeing begins like this
“Ghosts, which in the recently elapsed, superclever century, in spite of tradition, were not so much banned as despised, have been rehabilitated in the last 25 years in Germany, much like magic was before them. Perhaps not unjustly. Because the proofs against their existence were in part metaphysical (which stood on shaky ground) and in part empirical, which only proved, that in those cases where no accidental or intentionally designed delusion was discovered, nothing was present which could have had an effect by means of the reflection of lightrays on the retina or vibrations in the air on the eardrum. But this speaks merely of the presence of bodies, whose presence nobody had observed, and whose manifestation on the aforesaid physical manner would have negated the truth of the spirit phenomenon; since the concept of a spirit actually lies in the fact that its presence is announced in a wholly other way than that of a body. A spiritseer who understood his business and knew how to express it would observe that this is simply the presence of an image in the apperceiving intellect, completely undistinguishable from that which, under the medium of light and the eyes would be left behind by bodies themselves, and yet without the real presence of such bodies. The same thing, in regard to present audible phenomena, noises, tones and sounds in the subject’s ear being brought forth, without the presence or movements of such phenomena. Here lies the source of the misunderstanding which goes through everything that is said for and against the reality of spirit phenomena: that the spirit phenomena presents itself as a bodily phenomena. Yet it is none, and must be none. This difference is perhaps difficult to illustrate and demands technical knowledge of the philosophical and physiological kind. Because it requires that we conceive that an effect from a body doesn’t necessarily presuppose the presence of a body.”
Someone once called mesmerism the materialism of anti-materialists. Something is going on in this essay that has the same pattern. In Schopenhauer’s case, the idealism for which he is known, in the dictionaries of philosophy, doesn’t predict the way in which he deals with these phenomena which simulate the body as to effects upon a subject's body without themselves being a body – in fact, which are necessarily disembodied. The thought intrigued him because, by means of the possibility of the “spirits” he was able to advance to the mechanism, as he thought of it, of dreams, and from there to sleepwalking, and from there to the phenomena of premonition, or second sight.
LI thinks this is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least those having to do with the first half of the nineteenth century’s way of dealing with the super-clever materialism of the eighteenth. The eighteenth century killed a certain kind of argument. This is the argument that supernatural stuff happens. Arguments die for a lot of reasons, only one of which is that they are refuted. I would say that the supernatural argument died from shame. And, indeed, Schopenhauer was so famously an atheist that one imagines that he could not but be scornful of the mass of “paranormal” phenomena thrown out by folk belief and treasured, for various strategic reasons, by the Romantics. So I found this beginning a little unsettling.
More on this tomorrow, I think.
“Ghosts, which in the recently elapsed, superclever century, in spite of tradition, were not so much banned as despised, have been rehabilitated in the last 25 years in Germany, much like magic was before them. Perhaps not unjustly. Because the proofs against their existence were in part metaphysical (which stood on shaky ground) and in part empirical, which only proved, that in those cases where no accidental or intentionally designed delusion was discovered, nothing was present which could have had an effect by means of the reflection of lightrays on the retina or vibrations in the air on the eardrum. But this speaks merely of the presence of bodies, whose presence nobody had observed, and whose manifestation on the aforesaid physical manner would have negated the truth of the spirit phenomenon; since the concept of a spirit actually lies in the fact that its presence is announced in a wholly other way than that of a body. A spiritseer who understood his business and knew how to express it would observe that this is simply the presence of an image in the apperceiving intellect, completely undistinguishable from that which, under the medium of light and the eyes would be left behind by bodies themselves, and yet without the real presence of such bodies. The same thing, in regard to present audible phenomena, noises, tones and sounds in the subject’s ear being brought forth, without the presence or movements of such phenomena. Here lies the source of the misunderstanding which goes through everything that is said for and against the reality of spirit phenomena: that the spirit phenomena presents itself as a bodily phenomena. Yet it is none, and must be none. This difference is perhaps difficult to illustrate and demands technical knowledge of the philosophical and physiological kind. Because it requires that we conceive that an effect from a body doesn’t necessarily presuppose the presence of a body.”
Someone once called mesmerism the materialism of anti-materialists. Something is going on in this essay that has the same pattern. In Schopenhauer’s case, the idealism for which he is known, in the dictionaries of philosophy, doesn’t predict the way in which he deals with these phenomena which simulate the body as to effects upon a subject's body without themselves being a body – in fact, which are necessarily disembodied. The thought intrigued him because, by means of the possibility of the “spirits” he was able to advance to the mechanism, as he thought of it, of dreams, and from there to sleepwalking, and from there to the phenomena of premonition, or second sight.
LI thinks this is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least those having to do with the first half of the nineteenth century’s way of dealing with the super-clever materialism of the eighteenth. The eighteenth century killed a certain kind of argument. This is the argument that supernatural stuff happens. Arguments die for a lot of reasons, only one of which is that they are refuted. I would say that the supernatural argument died from shame. And, indeed, Schopenhauer was so famously an atheist that one imagines that he could not but be scornful of the mass of “paranormal” phenomena thrown out by folk belief and treasured, for various strategic reasons, by the Romantics. So I found this beginning a little unsettling.
More on this tomorrow, I think.
great and anti-schopenhauerian news
Well, I was going to do a post about Schopenhauer today, but I received very anti-Schopenhauerian news this morning from Barcelona. Congratulations, Bernat and Cheryl and welcome to the world, Arlet!
Life on the sofa for Cheryl, reading Middlemarch, is suspended as of today.
Life on the sofa for Cheryl, reading Middlemarch, is suspended as of today.
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