joe's blog

In Leviathan Hobbes wrote:

For commentaries are commonly more subject to cavil than the text, and therefore need other commentaries; and so there will be no end of such interpretation.

If that doesn’t describe and explain flame wars — and perhaps the whole internet, nothing ever will.  It also explains the whole cottage industry of political writers who do nothing but parse other people’s words.  I’m going to write something long on parsing soon.  It’s the scourge of our age.

The day shot by after the long (six-day) snowcapalyse weekend I had. Went from meeting to meeting so fast I couldn’t catch up on the old e-mail until after I was supposed to be gone. Now I’m getting ready to read some of Hobbes’ Leviathan.  I’ve read parts of it before, and the underlining pen got a workout.

Dante's Paradiso

Read some of Dante’s Paradiso for home work.  Only one line really stood out for me.  He has Beatrice, his personification of love (and real girl he never got) say:

You make yourself dull with false imaginings so that you do not see what you would see had you cast it off.

Ain’t it the truth?  In fact, it’s so true it reminds me of a story from The Onion, which maybe isn’t Jon Stewart credible, but is right up there with the opposite of whatever Colbert seems to be saying on the surface.

The biggest false imagining is that we have an inkling of what the hell we’re talking about, of course.  It’s that certainty — especially dogmatic certainty — that closes off our ears.

The rest of it (that I had to read, a couple of cantos), we very nice, but just more stuff to read, really.  Wonderfully written, but it boils down to one guy’s best guess at what heaven would be like.

Reading Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge I was struck that his thought of abstract ideas, of which he seems none too fond so far, is what we now depend on for a good part of our lives: icons. Here’s his definition of abstraction, more or less:

For example, the mind having observed that Peter, James, and John resemble each other in certain common agreements of shape and other qualities, leaves out of the complex or compounded idea it has of Peter, James, and any other particular man, that which is peculiar to each, retaining only what is common to all, and so makes an abstract idea wherein all the particulars equally partake- abstracting entirely from and cutting off all those circumstances and differences which might determine it to any particular existence. And after this manner it is said we come by the abstract idea of man, or, if you please, humanity, or human nature…

Look at the icons on your computer screen.  Somewhere there is an icon of a person, and the more universal the icon — black and white and having no gender — the closer it comes to what Berkeley is taking about.  Look at the old Mac icons here, and you can see where those ultimately generic abstract ideas have been made to stand in for all things under that definition — all documents are one-page documents with lines of type.  Tellingly, the icons with the most particular features are those of the Mac itself, which I’m sure we owe to marketing.

I’m not through with the part of Berkeley I’m reading yet, but he seems to be headed in the same direction as Locke, in that he sees such abstractions as not real. The abstract idea of man is not  any man in particular.  The man exists, but the abstraction does not.  Berkeley seems to be going further to say that these general ideas are the cause of some of our problems.  That by thinking and speaking of that generality we confound ourselves because that generality does not exist — there is no there there.  That we — as I am fond of saying — think we’re so smart we think ourselves up our own asses.

Been busy on the school front and meant to post about it.  Went from one extreme to another and found some new favorite authors (Hobbes, Locke) and some I just need to plow through (Augustine, Aquinas).  I really need to start blogging this stuff to get my thoughts down.

Finished up the Socratic dialogs for this course and am now into Aristotle.  I need to sit down and gather my thoughts about the dialogs and capture it here.  The last one I did, Sophist, was a bear in that they kept going off on tangents about all kinds of things while obstensibly trying to define what a sophist was/is.  And Plato — which is who wrote/wrote down the Socratic dialogs — continued what appears to be his habit of letting his speakers explore every corner of a side issue even though the whole reason to bring it up is to shoot it down.

Luckily, sometimes the asides are as interesting as the main conversation.  But sometimes they’re not.  Anyway, I’ve got to gather my thoughts.  A lot of good stuff in there, and not all of it on my intended topic — leadership communication — which is a bonus.

It’s funny how little nuggets of wisdom are in places you hardly expect to find them.  I mean, I am reading the Great Books, but it’s easy to think you’ve got a piece figured out and then get surprised.

The Socratic dialog Timaeus is basically a run-down of the formation of the universe and everything in it.  There’s a lot of talk about how the the four major elements of creation — fire, water, earth and air — are made up of triangles and how that affects certain things. Here’s a tidbit:

But when the roots of the triangles are loosened by having undergone many conflicts with many things in the course of time, they are no longer able to cut or assimilate the food which enters, but are themselves easily divided by the bodies which come in from without. In this way every animal is overcome and decays, and this affection is called old age.

I started reading at a faster clip, but embedded within to the discredited science I found eternal truths or things that shine light onto the modern world — at least my dim understanding of the modern world.

Here’s one:

That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.

That pretty much describes all political messaging and commentary, as far as I can tell. Also logical versus emotional argument that makes so many relationships so much fun.

And, more to the point of my language studies, there’s this:

Thus, then, as the several elements never present themselves in the same form, how can any one have the assurance to assert positively that any of them, whatever it may be, is one thing rather than the other? No one can.

And this one sums up where I come down in the “lock ‘em up” versus “addiction is a disease” argument:

…and is for the most part of his life deranged, because his pleasures and pains are so very great; his soul is rendered foolish and disordered by his body; yet he is regarded not as one diseased, but as one who is voluntarily bad, which is a mistake.

Which explains why Portugal, which decriminalized drugs, is having more success than we are filling up prisons.

If you want the deep discussion these guys have it. If you want to read it for yourself, here you go.