Short Notes II
Boiling blood, a poem, grounding morality, and more
My first collection of short notes proved quite popular, so here are some more musings I dumped on my Substack Notes stream since then. Have fun!
As far as essay writing goes, I’m not quite clear yet what comes next. Maybe something about the German soul and how different the academic world looked like when Germany dominated it in the 19th and early 20th centuries — until the Nazis suffocated German academia and the Anglos plundered the spoils, dominating intellectual life ever since.
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Short Notes II:
What gets my blood boiling when consuming mainstream media isn't even the lies and spin doctoring.
It's the unbelievable stupidity. The impoverishment of the human spirit, which shrinks the mind to a mouldy pea, forgotten in a pile of rubbish in a devastated corner of existence, inedible even to the vultures.
A forgotten concept: that you can actually think thoughts without agreeing with them.
Somber roots in unseen light Whisper to our souls However we scream and run and try We'll never be truly free A band of us may go quite far Go down another cliff Must fire go on, forever, we ask The whisper now in the ears
Friedrich Schiller nailed two common forms of intellectual pathology:
Man can come into imbalance “either as a savage, when his feelings rule over his principles; or as a barbarian, when his principles destroy his feelings.”
Loads of “savages” and “barbarians” out there these days, if you ask me.
(Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 4. Brief, 1793/94)
What people don't get is that you have to ruthlessly find your own way, your own destiny. We live in a time that desperately needs some boundary explosions.
Go beyond “advice”, data, best practice, convention, average. That's the antidote to “too many words out there”, not cutting words of something that isn't worth much anyway. And if it takes a long time till you find your destiny, so be it.
(Responding to an article decrying “branding advice” for Substack writers)
See also:
Look, I’m not even a classical theist. But there is no doubt that materialist atheism has a problem with grounding morality.
For even accepting the (dubious) claim that genuine altruism/morality could arise under non-teleological Darwinism, this still forces you to accept that had evolution gone slightly differently, torture, rape and child murder would be moral and rational — because that would be what we want in that picture.
Unless, of course, you put rationality above evolution, but this implies that there be some sort of intelligibility, some sort of discernible Logos, which we can access via rationality and which dictates we should override our evolution-conditioned wants and needs.
Not many materialist atheists would accept this, I think.
See also my post:
There’s a weird Twitter battle going on about French cuisine. Here’s my take:
I’m not a snob — I love gobbling up my hamburger as much as the next guy, and I would never want to eat French every day.
BUT. I love French cuisine because
It’s part of my culture and DNA
French cuisine served in a good restaurant (or by a good host) is an experience: you are treated with respect, table manners matter, and the whole thing is a choreography, a dance — from the selection of the apéritif, the amuse-gueule, the chit-chat about the latest hunt for a good wine, to the poetic descriptions on the menu and the lecture about cheese…
It’s literally an eternal quest for the perfect composition, the perfect experience
It’s the opposite of the “grams per dollar” mindset; instead it’s about perfect balance across the whole menu
It is highly creative, finding new, unexpected combinations and tastes, and the visual presentation is part of the art form
It is considered “bland” by modern, globalized standards, but the goal is to hit that sweet spot that lets you taste all the subtle nuances of the fresh ingredients and composition, which is impossible if you slap spicy sauce, tons of salt, curry etc. on everything. (Admittedly, this can easily go wrong, and the line between bland and “balanced” is thin.)
It’s the anti-thesis to entitlement. Instead, you worship the chef and his vision, and he will kick you out if you contradict him, or try to change his vision, or misbehave.
In France, this kind of worship of the eating experience transcends classes, and while globalization has crept up on the French too, they resist it much more than other people: part of it is sticking to their strict food tradition, which brings them together, the world be damned.
Since this tradition is incompatible with many modern ideas and habits, many people are puzzled by it and even actively hate it.
These are “pigeonniers” that people in Southern France used to build in the 19th century — literally pigeon sh*t houses. They are preserved all over the region to this day by enthusiasts.
People put more love, spirit and sense of beauty into these than they put into modern homes and public buildings, which nobody will preserve in the future out of sheer love.
Currently reading Oswald Spengler's Untergang des Abendlands, and as far as overall philosophy of history goes, I much prefer R.G. Collingwood over Spengler:
Collingwood makes history shine from the inside, from the perspective of humans dealing with their own questions and problems at the time, showing great insight into the human soul and the constraints of our thought.
Spengler, it is true, does not fall into the trap of "scientific" thinking about history, postulating laws and such, but rather follows Goethe with a more organic, right-hemisphere view, looking at civilizations as akin to organisms and their morphology. But this also leads to a sort of dispassionate, clinical "view from nowhere" kind of thinking: Spengler is like a zoologist observing animals in a terrarium, except that his animals are cultures and civilizations. So 19th century German of him :) And this approach has its problems IMO. Despite his Goethean underpinning, it makes Spengler underestimate the flowing, interconnected nature of history, where civilizations flow into and depend on one another, and certain "key features" may only appear to us that way in hindsight, depending on available sources, much later interpretations, and somewhat arbitrary selection.
HOWEVER, the book, besides some dubious claims and freewheeling generalizations, delivers many deep, fascinating insights and thoughts, and is still worth reading. Some of Spengler’s observations are certainly eerily prophetic.
If anybody wants to take the plunge, I recommend going straight to chapter "The soul of the city", which packs quite the punch.
You simply cannot understand liberalism—and how the modern concepts of state, nation, rights etc. developed—without understanding the religious conflicts and attempts at religious peace in the 16th century.
This is the book to read (if you read French). Splendid study full of fascinating details and sources.
Olivier Christin, La Paix de religion : L'autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle, Seuil 1997
Struggling with writer’s block? Try this:
1) Let go of the inner pressure completely. Be entirely at ease with the fact that you’re uninspired at the moment. Find that relaxed trust in you that inspiration will strike again, eventually, at exactly the right time, however long this might take.
2) Move away from egoistic considerations about how people perceive you, what they expect from you, what you want to get out of your writing, or any formulas other people tell you will bring you numbers and fame.
Instead, ask yourself (and the Muses) what you can do for others: what kind of idea, what kind of text, will help people - help them grow in whatever way. This doesn’t have to be a purely utilitarian goal at all. Ask for inspiration to be of service. This can dramatically change the whole energy.
3) If it doesn’t work, see 1). Be cool with it. Do something else - take a nap, mow the lawn, fix something, call your mum, whatever.
Rinse and repeat the next day.
A good example of the difference between AI and the human mind is the learning of languages.
While AI can reach almost-total proficiency in an instant, a human being, by learning a language, can literally “tune in” into a whole mind space and sense deep meaning going back millennia. This even works for ancient languages.
Why is this?
Because while AI might be infinitely more efficient in parsing language data in just a few seconds than a human could ever hope to achieve in decades, the experience of the cosmos by a human soul in just a few seconds is infinitely more informationally dense than the product of decades of hardcore machine learning.
What’s up with this nonsense that men shouldn’t cry?
Look, I get it, we have been told for a while now that emotional breakdowns in the face of adversity are OK. This is wrong. It’s weakness.
But show me a man who is deeply touched when he sees goodness, overcoming of obstacles, bravery, real love, growth, and cosmic truth, and I show you a man who knows and feels that there are things worth fighting for.
He is a man who sees and understands the eternal Logos and what life is about, and because he can cry when he sees it embodied, he can defend it when he sees it threatened.
Also, there is a difference between tears running down your cheek and an emotional breakdown.
I like this format. I tried something similar in the past, and might do so again. Sometimes it is good to try to just jot down some things that are on your mind (and also good to read such notes from others). Doesn't go full-bore into the InstaTwitFacebookTube trap of stream-of-pseudo-consciousness fluff. It's the warm soup at the bears' house.
On cuisine: Have you seen "The Menu" with Ralph Fiennes and Joy Taylor? A bit schlocky, but it has moments of reckoning with the art of cuisine that I think are interesting.
Great stuff! What you said about materialism and morality is one of the best-articulated and most succinct expressions of that idea that I've ever seen. Under Darwinian materialism, there just *is* the way things worked out, nothing more, and no way to get any real "ought" from that "is." So morality is ultimately just posited by convention, no more meaningfully than the popular conventions about which styles of clothing are fashionable and which ones aren't. That is the chief problem with materialism: it leaves no room for any real morality. And the results speak for themselves.