Short Notes I

Often shorter is better

Jul 31, 2023

I’m currently reading various things, but haven’t experienced the usual inspiration yet—the rush of words forming in my mind waiting to come out, which then assemble and refine themselves once I sit down and type.

So in the meantime, I thought I’d put together some of my latest short posts I shared on Substack Notes for those of you who don’t use the Substack App (or website) where you can follow my ramblings.

Here you go:

Fascinating: the idea of “the true, the good and the beautiful” neither goes back to the Greeks nor the scholastics, but was more or less coined by Diderot, the French Enlightenment figure (with some precursors in Neo-Platonism). Who would have thought?

“The true, the good and the beautiful form, in my eyes, a group of three great figures, around which evil can raise up a storm of dust that may conceal them from the eyes of the majority, but the time passes, the cloud dissipates, and they re-appear as venerable as ever.”

Diderot

Relinquishing desires, paradoxically enough on a surface level, leads to the fulfilment of previously utterly unknown, even inconceivable, desires that we may only come to know by way of their fulfilment as an unexpected gift.

Ernst Jünger, when asked why he is so confident that life after death is real:

“Above a certain intellectual altitude, everybody has basically accepted this, like Leonardo, Plato, Goethe, Schopenhauer … This is actually quite self-evident for me.”

Tomas Kuhn's “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is still a fantastic read.

Studying history always leads to great insights, and he has studied the history of science extensively.

Sometimes rightful anger is more than justified, but getting triggered and self-righteous and angry online has never done anything for me except draining my energy and making me feel miserable, which I need to consciously fight and counter afterwards to stay on track.

Often not worth it at all.

Modernism criticized the religious narrative as wrong.

Postmodernism criticized the modernist narrative as just another narrative, and claimed that everything is just a narrative.

But since postmodernism knew that its own critique is therefore also a narrative, what was left was often just absurdity, irony and cynicism.

Perhaps it’s time we realize that while everything is indeed a narrative, it is not just a narrative.

Because all these narratives can derail us, but they can also bring us closer to reality. We should therefore learn to consciously adopt them and switch between them, while thinking about how they are related historically.

We can then become part of a larger mind, oriented towards a sort of second-order truth that aligns our thought and being, instead of concluding that nothing can ever be true, or alternatively that everything we think we know must be true, and as a consequence, lose even the truth we already have.

From a place of internal harmony we may one day see everything, everywhere, all at once - or at least much more, much further, much deeper.

Jean-Claude Michéa was an early critic of Wokeism from the left before the term existed.

In “La Double Pensée : retour sur la question libérale” (2008), he draws our attention to the link between market liberalism and out-of-control cultural liberalism: once our economy has reached the state of “consumer capitalism”, he argues, this logically goes together with the “transformation of human beings into infantilized consumers - subject only to the laws of desire and whim”.

Hence the complete ideological uniformity that enforces economic globalization and extreme cultural liberalism at the same time.

As he put it, “The Cannes Festival is not the majestic negation of the Davos Forum. On the contrary, it is its philosophical fulfillment.”

The infinite regress of Utilitarianism:

“Something is useful because it leads to something useful which is useful because it leads to something useful which…”

At some point, you will have to acknowledge that something is valuable for its own sake.

It’s a web of things, in fact, sometimes at odds with one another, ever morphing and changing.

Also, it’s where the rubber hits the road.

The kernel of truth in the critique of science as a Western-centric, non-universal concept:

Our Western web of what R.G. Collingwood called "absolute presuppositions" is one advanced system of knowledge, which has grown along certain lines over a long time and makes us powerful in certain specific ways. It has produced the fruit of our current civilization. However, other such systems, including better ones, are conceivable. It’s just that they don’t exist in our reality. And we probably can’t even imagine them: our civilization represents a branch in the tree of possible great knowledge, but we can’t go to another branch without first going back to the root and growing all over again - over millennia.

Now, this observation shouldn’t be abused to deny simple reality or discredit the fruit that is Western science. Even if other fruits are conceivable, our fruit is still tasty, at least if we don’t overindulge.

“…under the destructive energy of barbarism’s first onslaught it may seem dreadful that the monuments of civilisation in brick and mortar, in paint and canvas, in human customs and institutions, should be destroyed. But these things are not civilisation itself, they are only examples of what it can do. What made them once can make them again; their destruction is a challenge to such remaking.”

R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, 1942

History is downstream from mind, broadly speaking.

It's easy to confuse philosophical materialism and Marxian (historical) materialism. The first claims everything is downstream from physics, that is, dead matter.

The second (historical materialism) claims that societies develop and organize around material needs and the resulting dialectic. But "organizing" and "developing" are activities of the mind, not matter: they presuppose humans coming up with solutions, that is, thought and ideas.

Hence even in historical materialism, mind is always primary. So the dispute really comes down to the degree of free will we have in terms of what and how we think.

“The intellect’s ability to do its proper work does not depend solely on its horse-power and on the accuracy with which it is made and assembled. It depends also on the engine’s being so solidly bolted down on so strong a foundation that it cannot shake itself to pieces.”

R. G. Collingwood

One point Roger Scruton made about modern architecture stuck with me:

He said "form follows function" is a stupid idea; rather it's that people will always find new functions for that which is beautiful.

He gave the example of a transformer house from the early days of electrification in England, which was discarded at some point. But it was so beautiful that people turned it into a place for a hip bar and restaurant. A freaking transformer house!

Whereas today's ugly office buildings or parking decks or malls or appartment blocks can only be taken down or left to rut once the original purpose disappears. Nobody will be inspired to find new uses for them.

Somehow this makes the contrast so tangible. Yesterday's crappy utility buildings had infinitely more beauty and depth than today's prestige palaces.

Hegel once quipped that “Schelling completed his philosophical education in public.”

But that’s not such a bad thing, is it? And pretty much sums up the Substack experience, at least for me.

I know we all dream, in our weaker moments, about making a ton of money from writing here. And congrats to those who do. But the biggest benefit for me so far is that I learned a ton, refined my ideas, changed some of my stances, and have grown quite a bit in the way I think and interact with others. Not to mention that I have made some great friends. As with most good things in life, this came completely unexpected.

So yeah, education in public.