Philosophy
photo:Richard Harris
Good to know that my personal view on consciousness actually has a name and a growing credibility: Panpsychism
From Jim Holt (NYT Magazine):
" ...So vexing has the problem of consciousness proved that some of these thinkers have been driven to a hypothesis that sounds desperate, if not downright crazy..."
Click here for the rest.You won't regret it.
Good to know that my personal view on consciousness actually has a name and a growing credibility: Panpsychism
From Jim Holt (NYT Magazine):
" ...So vexing has the problem of consciousness proved that some of these thinkers have been driven to a hypothesis that sounds desperate, if not downright crazy..."
Click here for the rest.You won't regret it.
August 28 2012 | Philosophy | 0 comments
The Real Voyage Of Discovery Consists Not In Seeking New Landscapes, But In Having New Eyes
The Real Voyage Of Discovery Consists Not In Seeking New Landscapes, But In Having New Eyes
photo: Richard Harris
I love views. I always have. Views have always been a major element in any house/apartment searches I've made. The views one is confronted with on a daily basis have a deep effect on one's well-being. I used to ride the trams when I was a kid just to watch the city flow by. I love trains for the same reason. I ride my bike through the forest to enjoy the changing landscape. A hike is really only any good if it results in the access to a view. And, of course, it's always been clear to me that not all views are equally beautiful or attractive or striking. Moving ten feet to the left can make the difference between a so-so view and a great view. Neither do they have to be beautiful in the traditional sense. A landscape of blast furnaces can be as stirring and fulfilling as a perfect bucolic view of stream and mountain. I love drinking in all the elements of a landscape that make it special, the way they are arranged, their relationship to each other. This is what feeds the soul. I'll never forget the few days I spent in Ajijic. Our balcony was at the perfect spot and elevation so I spent hours just looking at the view of Lake Chapala. I didn't need anything else.
I've always thought that all of this is straightforward stuff; views are pleasing to the eye because of scale, arrangement, personal memories. As thinking beings, we perceive the external world aesthetically and we react emotionally and intellectually.
But it seems that I'm just a simple-minded fool. For Summer of Photography 2012, the Bozar had an exhibit called Sense of Place -European Landscape Photography. I was curious to see it, but having been burned enough times by contemporary art, I didn't want to gamble 9 euros so I waited until July 21st when all the museums were free for Belgian National Day. A lot of photos by a lot of photographers, some striking, some much too dependent on the accompanying written texts, some way too photo shopped, none very memorable. What I did walk away with (literally) was a booklet, the visitor's guide.The booklet includes the reprinting of The Philosophy of Landscape by Georg Simmel (1912) which the curators inform us is an "extraordinary essay" which "constitute(s) an ideal reflection on how landscape functions nowadays in the minds of art- and nature-lovers." What is it with Germans and philosophy? Georg takes 6,000 words to explain to us what a landscape is. He starts with:
"On countless occasions we walk through the wilderness and perceive, with the most diverse levels of attention, trees and water, meadows and wheat fields, hills and houses, and the thousands of changes in the light and the clouds, yet because we pay attention to one thing in particular, and although we may also see this and that together, we are still not aware of seeing a “landscape”. On the contrary, precisely such content isolated from the field of vision can no longer engage our cognizance. Our consciousness must have a new unitary whole, above and beyond the elements, not linked to their isolated meaning and not mechanically composed of them: this is landscape. If I am not wrong, it has rarely been made clear that landscape is not a result of the fact that all sorts of things are spread out next to each other over a piece of the earth’s crust and that they are immediately contemplated. I will try to explain, from its forms and some of the assumptions about it, the peculiar spiritual process from which landscape arises for the first time.
In the first place: the fact that the things that are visible are in a “natural” site on land (perchance with human works, but ones that are subordinated to the terrain) and not in streets with shops and automobiles does not make that site a landscape. By “nature” we mean the endless connection of things, the uninterrupted production and negation of forms, the flowing unity of occurrence that is expressed in the continuity of temporal and spatial existence. When we assert that something is as real as nature we are referring either to an internal quality, its difference with respect to art and the artificial, with respect to the ideal and the historical, or to the fact that it must serve as a representative and symbol of that global-being, the fact that we hear the whisper of its current in it. “A piece of nature” is actually an internal contradiction; nature has no pieces, it is the unity of all things, and as soon as something is split from it, it ceases to be nature, for the very reason that it can only be “nature” inside that seamless unity, only as a wave within that total flux..."
He goes on to say
"To conceive of a piece of ground and what is on it as a landscape, this means that one now conceives of a segment of nature itself as a separate unity, which estranges it from the concept of nature...Torn away and standing on its own, a landscape is permeated by an opaque awareness of this infinite interconnectedness...That one part of a whole should become a self-contained whole itself, emerging out of it and claiming from it a right to its own existence, this in itself maybe the fundamental tragedy of spirit...It cannot be denied, however, that landscape only comes into being in a process whereby the Life that pulsates within our perceptions and emotions tears itself away from the homogeneity of nature.The specific object thereby created and transposed onto quite a new level then, so to speak, from within itself opens up again towards that total-Life and re-absorbs the infinite into its still intact boundaries."
I was going to quote more (and there's a lot more), but I think you probably get the picture, so to speak. When I had to read philosophers' works in school, I was expecting to be shown some new and startling insights into Life, but what struck me the most was that they just seemed to point out the obvious. I decided that it was because they had lived a long time ago and what had been daring new understandings in their day had been completely assimilated over the centuries so that we were practically born with those concepts in our minds now. But now I'm not so sure. Maybe they are just a bunch of long-winded individuals with too much time on their hands.
Someone has suggested that Simmel, in this essay, is answering Goethe's question "Is not the core of nature already inside the heart of humankind?" Maybe "Yes" or "Indubitably" would have sufficed?
I love views. I always have. Views have always been a major element in any house/apartment searches I've made. The views one is confronted with on a daily basis have a deep effect on one's well-being. I used to ride the trams when I was a kid just to watch the city flow by. I love trains for the same reason. I ride my bike through the forest to enjoy the changing landscape. A hike is really only any good if it results in the access to a view. And, of course, it's always been clear to me that not all views are equally beautiful or attractive or striking. Moving ten feet to the left can make the difference between a so-so view and a great view. Neither do they have to be beautiful in the traditional sense. A landscape of blast furnaces can be as stirring and fulfilling as a perfect bucolic view of stream and mountain. I love drinking in all the elements of a landscape that make it special, the way they are arranged, their relationship to each other. This is what feeds the soul. I'll never forget the few days I spent in Ajijic. Our balcony was at the perfect spot and elevation so I spent hours just looking at the view of Lake Chapala. I didn't need anything else.
I've always thought that all of this is straightforward stuff; views are pleasing to the eye because of scale, arrangement, personal memories. As thinking beings, we perceive the external world aesthetically and we react emotionally and intellectually.
But it seems that I'm just a simple-minded fool. For Summer of Photography 2012, the Bozar had an exhibit called Sense of Place -European Landscape Photography. I was curious to see it, but having been burned enough times by contemporary art, I didn't want to gamble 9 euros so I waited until July 21st when all the museums were free for Belgian National Day. A lot of photos by a lot of photographers, some striking, some much too dependent on the accompanying written texts, some way too photo shopped, none very memorable. What I did walk away with (literally) was a booklet, the visitor's guide.The booklet includes the reprinting of The Philosophy of Landscape by Georg Simmel (1912) which the curators inform us is an "extraordinary essay" which "constitute(s) an ideal reflection on how landscape functions nowadays in the minds of art- and nature-lovers." What is it with Germans and philosophy? Georg takes 6,000 words to explain to us what a landscape is. He starts with:
"On countless occasions we walk through the wilderness and perceive, with the most diverse levels of attention, trees and water, meadows and wheat fields, hills and houses, and the thousands of changes in the light and the clouds, yet because we pay attention to one thing in particular, and although we may also see this and that together, we are still not aware of seeing a “landscape”. On the contrary, precisely such content isolated from the field of vision can no longer engage our cognizance. Our consciousness must have a new unitary whole, above and beyond the elements, not linked to their isolated meaning and not mechanically composed of them: this is landscape. If I am not wrong, it has rarely been made clear that landscape is not a result of the fact that all sorts of things are spread out next to each other over a piece of the earth’s crust and that they are immediately contemplated. I will try to explain, from its forms and some of the assumptions about it, the peculiar spiritual process from which landscape arises for the first time.
In the first place: the fact that the things that are visible are in a “natural” site on land (perchance with human works, but ones that are subordinated to the terrain) and not in streets with shops and automobiles does not make that site a landscape. By “nature” we mean the endless connection of things, the uninterrupted production and negation of forms, the flowing unity of occurrence that is expressed in the continuity of temporal and spatial existence. When we assert that something is as real as nature we are referring either to an internal quality, its difference with respect to art and the artificial, with respect to the ideal and the historical, or to the fact that it must serve as a representative and symbol of that global-being, the fact that we hear the whisper of its current in it. “A piece of nature” is actually an internal contradiction; nature has no pieces, it is the unity of all things, and as soon as something is split from it, it ceases to be nature, for the very reason that it can only be “nature” inside that seamless unity, only as a wave within that total flux..."
He goes on to say
"To conceive of a piece of ground and what is on it as a landscape, this means that one now conceives of a segment of nature itself as a separate unity, which estranges it from the concept of nature...Torn away and standing on its own, a landscape is permeated by an opaque awareness of this infinite interconnectedness...That one part of a whole should become a self-contained whole itself, emerging out of it and claiming from it a right to its own existence, this in itself maybe the fundamental tragedy of spirit...It cannot be denied, however, that landscape only comes into being in a process whereby the Life that pulsates within our perceptions and emotions tears itself away from the homogeneity of nature.The specific object thereby created and transposed onto quite a new level then, so to speak, from within itself opens up again towards that total-Life and re-absorbs the infinite into its still intact boundaries."
I was going to quote more (and there's a lot more), but I think you probably get the picture, so to speak. When I had to read philosophers' works in school, I was expecting to be shown some new and startling insights into Life, but what struck me the most was that they just seemed to point out the obvious. I decided that it was because they had lived a long time ago and what had been daring new understandings in their day had been completely assimilated over the centuries so that we were practically born with those concepts in our minds now. But now I'm not so sure. Maybe they are just a bunch of long-winded individuals with too much time on their hands.
Someone has suggested that Simmel, in this essay, is answering Goethe's question "Is not the core of nature already inside the heart of humankind?" Maybe "Yes" or "Indubitably" would have sufficed?
Bernard-Henry Lévy, AKA BHL, is one of few French intellectuals who is somewhat known in the US. He is also considered by many many people in Europe as a pretentious and superficial ass.
In 1996 he released an epic film called Le Jour et La Nuit starring Alain Delon and BHL's wife Arielle Dombasle which was supposedly the high point of high points of all the Berlin Film Festivals ever held, so much did people enjoy laughing at it. (If you read French click here for one of the best savage film reviews ever written - sample: "La rigolade découle avant tout d'une exceptionnelle prétention. Se dégage du film une ambiance très particulière où, à chaque instant, le spectateur accablé se demande ce que l'auteur a bien voulu raconter ou signifier : ce qui amène un résultat du type double effet Kiss-Cool, permettant de rire deux fois de chaque scène, à la vision puis au décryptage. Une absence totale de rythme et de sens du récit achèvent de massacrer toutes les prétentions au souffle créatif d'un Bernard-Henri Lévy transi d'admiration pour son propre talent"). BHL, in his typical manner, had done a pre-release hype campaign that had attracted a lot of attention so the ridicule was hard to avoid. But it seems that he cornered almost all of the prints so that the movie would disappear.
To everyone's schadenfreude pleasure, he has once again laid a big one. He just released two books, one a 1344 page doorstop titled Pièces d'identité, and the other a slim volume titled De la guerre en philosophie. The latter is the one where he sticks his foot in it. To make a point in his critique of Kant, he references a series of lectures given in Paraguay to a group of neo-Kantians by the French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul. The only problem is that Botul doesn't exist, he is the creation of distinguished French philosopher and satirist Frédéric Pagès (who wrote the amusing "Vie sexuelle d' Emmanuel Kant" as Jean-Baptiste Botul in which this fictitious Paraguayan group is found).
By not bothering with the slightest bit of fact checking, BHL has once again proved his detractors right.
In 1996 he released an epic film called Le Jour et La Nuit starring Alain Delon and BHL's wife Arielle Dombasle which was supposedly the high point of high points of all the Berlin Film Festivals ever held, so much did people enjoy laughing at it. (If you read French click here for one of the best savage film reviews ever written - sample: "La rigolade découle avant tout d'une exceptionnelle prétention. Se dégage du film une ambiance très particulière où, à chaque instant, le spectateur accablé se demande ce que l'auteur a bien voulu raconter ou signifier : ce qui amène un résultat du type double effet Kiss-Cool, permettant de rire deux fois de chaque scène, à la vision puis au décryptage. Une absence totale de rythme et de sens du récit achèvent de massacrer toutes les prétentions au souffle créatif d'un Bernard-Henri Lévy transi d'admiration pour son propre talent"). BHL, in his typical manner, had done a pre-release hype campaign that had attracted a lot of attention so the ridicule was hard to avoid. But it seems that he cornered almost all of the prints so that the movie would disappear.
To everyone's schadenfreude pleasure, he has once again laid a big one. He just released two books, one a 1344 page doorstop titled Pièces d'identité, and the other a slim volume titled De la guerre en philosophie. The latter is the one where he sticks his foot in it. To make a point in his critique of Kant, he references a series of lectures given in Paraguay to a group of neo-Kantians by the French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul. The only problem is that Botul doesn't exist, he is the creation of distinguished French philosopher and satirist Frédéric Pagès (who wrote the amusing "Vie sexuelle d' Emmanuel Kant" as Jean-Baptiste Botul in which this fictitious Paraguayan group is found).
By not bothering with the slightest bit of fact checking, BHL has once again proved his detractors right.