pieces of orson

This is what contemporary philosophy is like:

Say the great Orson Welles just died and a lot of odd necrophilic actors and directors have access to his corpse. One group cuts off a finger; one gets his head; others, respectively, get his organs, feet, etc.

Then they all argue and compete about who Has Orson. "But we have his head that he thought with!", "But I have his finger that he directed with!", "But us, over here, we have his liver for crying out loud!!" You get the idea.

But isn't it true that none of them Has Orson? Orson is dead. His life is gone. Only his corpse remains, and these lunatics are all running around with pieces of that corpse, saying that their piece is the right piece. And all the while, the pieces rot.

Substitute philosophy for Orson Welles, and contemporary "philosophers" for the necrophilic thespians (I can't decide whether this or "theatrical necrophiles" sounds better), and you have the state of contemporary philosophy.

Every one of them thinks (or believes? or knows?) they have the philosophers' stone, but they're all dealing in cement dust.

Oh much-lamented O.

The things about O. that I liked most were so simple. I don't think I was truly ever "in love" with her (whatever that means), and our relationship was as far as can be from romantic. It was almost more like a friendship between two males. But she stimulated me a great deal because her ways were so charming. And I don't know whether I am in denial, or whether I truly don't know what it is that I did to make her cut me off so successfully, so circumspectly.

These simple things often present themselves to me in the form of memories. She was a central figure of two of the most important years of my life thusfar, and these were nearly a decade ago now. I remember one night she, her sister, and I were riding around Conyers. A storm was brewing, and O. said (what we never did) we ought to "get some Sprites and sit in the car watching the thunderstorm." Not everyone would appreciate the genius of this. I mean, Sprite. Not just any soft drink, not any illicit substance -- Sprite.

And she introduced me to so much new music. It wasn't so much new artists, but a different kind of listenability, as it were, that she showed me via a few artists.

And there was the time we rode to my first college's theater to see that wretched play. She drove so fast. I don't think I've ever known anyone drive so fast, not even among notoriously fast drivers. She was dyslexic, so she couldn't take directions like left and right worth a damn, which was hilarious to me.

And one night, on the "Main" street of an historic district of a nearby city, she and I, and L. and D. had a fabulous dinner for O.'s birthday. It is one of the most significant moments of my life, one of the few times I have ever truly lived in the moment. There was nothing about this event which should have made it more significant than a thousand other moments, but memory presents it as significant. Not formatively significant: significant the way a work of art is significant the first time you really understand it.

And yet, this person who I would have traded ten run-of-the-mill friends for, at some point found me miserably disagreeable to be around. And maybe she was right. Indeed, the time when our contact began to wane was one of the most miserable periods of my life, and a time when she seemed to be changing rapidly. Who knows? Perhaps who I am now and who she is now would not harmonize at all; maybe (I'd never considered it till the beginning of this paragraph) she is a totally different person, alien to the person I knew Back When. Nonetheless our brief friendship represents a classic specimen of one of those dreaded "Things I Would Do Differently Now If I Could Go Back..."

And as I sit here reflecting, I remember other occasions. I remember once when I went out with her and R. and he made me so fucking angry about something or other and she was laughing hysterically about it, and then how that occasion made me think about, and horribly miss -- more than I ever had before or have since -- Someone Else, who at that time I loved more than anyone. As for O., my point here is simply that it baffles me that someone I knew for so short a time and who I never really knew terribly well -- and who evidently now regards me as some sort of human vermin -- could have had such an impact. The memories are few, but they have the odd advantage -- suspiciously unlike a thousand other occasions with dozens of other people -- of being memorable.

ars gratia artis

While in the past I had no great interest in aesthetics or the philosophy of art (that's right! they are two different subjects!), of late it has been of great interest. In the past, when my main haunt was ontology, my appreciation of beauty could really go only as far as calology, which studies the beautiful, not qua beauty, but as a transcendental of being (the transcendentals of being, i.e., are the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful); in this case, beauty is simply one of many revelations of ipsum esse. The closest, back then, that I came to an appreciation of ars gratia artis was reading Oscar Wilde. This led to a pursuit, in fiction, that led ultimately to my beloved Dashiell Hammett, whose artistry pleases me infinitely.

But some newer experiences have opened me up to a whole new range of appreciation and philosophy of art, and below is a list of these influences. Right now I simply list them; perhaps at a later date I'll make some annotations. I make here no distinction between literature and film.

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

"The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot

The Arts of the Beautiful by Etienne Gilson

Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino

Citizen Kane by Orson Welles

I should also say that the entire corpus of film noir is pivotal as well. I first began watching noir films because of their underlying Weltanschauung, but they soon led me to a way of viewing art qua art -- and, of course, film especially -- which I hadn't anticipated. Color looks different, the whole world looks different, once you've resurfaced from an immersion in the realm of noir.

on fr. john a. hardon, s.j.

For the longest time I found immense consolation--intellectual and emotional--from the Modern Catholic Dictionary by Fr. Hardon. I'd always assumed it was just the facts and not the mind arranging them that was so gracious. Upon beginning the same Fr. Hardon's Catholic Catechism--and being able to distinguish it from other catechisms in my mind--I can say now that Hardon's mind is largely the conduit for this spiritual satisfaction. True, he presents the most orthodox of doctrines and the most erudite of opinions, but his particular way of writing, reasoning, and being I find very stimulating and compatible to my own temperament, much as I find with my few favorite authors.

But this is all derived from Fr. Hardon's true humility and sanctity, his respect and devotion to Truth. As old Jacksie said, try to be "Original" and you will never be original; but tell the truth without giving a damn about originality, and, nine out of ten times, everyone will perceive you as "original" or "daring" anyway. The ever-ancient is the ever-new.

A Canon for Right Thinking

The Science of Correct Thinking: Logic by Celestine Bittle

The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Etienne Gilson

Mere Christianity;
The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas;
Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

willssonhearsts

It just occurred to me, upon beginning my umpteenth re-reading of Red Harvest, that the fictional Willssons may be loosely based on the real-life Hearsts. The mining magnate father (George/Elihu) gives his son (William Randolph/Donald) a newspaper, bent on reform campaigns. Wow.

ambition

I wonder why I'm considered depraved because I have no ambition. Isn't ambition a sin? I'm blamed for having a vice that is in fact, not a virtue, but the absence of a vice. I've been ambitious, but for me ambition is like math. The harder I try the worse it gets. The only way I could live ambitiously is in a lawless society; e.g., I could have been ambitious in an old mining town because I could have simply resorted to cutting throats to get what I want.

I would be a criminal or a monk before being an employer or an employee. And I would be homeless before being a bureaucrat.

c.s. v. t.s.

The more I read about T. S. Eliot -- his thought, not his poetry -- the more sense he makes, and the more I can see why, for a long time, he made no appeal to me at all, then a vehement dislike, then a fleeting love followed by disappointment, then the view that he was just a preening culture-monger without any real respect for logic. And I think the reasons I didn't like him so much before was because I just didn't have a comprehensive enough view of him. It never occurred to me, for instance, that his literary criticism is also social criticism; i.e., that literature, being a by-product of culture, must be discussed in tandem with the cultural tradition from which any given literature has emerged.

But what is really interesting is the debate going on in my mind between C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot. As Lewis said, they are so much in agreement on the really important things that their disagreements on lesser things hardly seem to matter. But there is a definite tension. Where they disagree I naturally tend to agree with Lewis; not just because I am more familiar with him and that I owe him so much, but also because Lewis seems to me far more logical than Eliot (in fact, Eliot does not seem to care much for logical consistency). Many of Lewis's conclusions are Eliot's assumptions; thus Eliot is certainly bold in his adventures, but the price is that he is more often blazing trails than finally settling an issue. Lewis is more of a settler of issues. Where Eliot is a man of social conscience, Lewis is a man of personal conscience; Eliot talks much of "culture" -- Lewis thinks the invocation of "Culture" tends to precede confusion.

In a word, Lewis and Eliot are agnostic about opposite things: things Eliot seems to have an answer for, Lewis not only does not believe there is an answer for, but thinks it's pointless to even seek an answer. Similarly, there are areas common to Lewis's thought that I think Eliot would not dare to tread, probably out of humility. But here is the really interesting point: each in doing what he is doing is superbly orthodox. Eliot and Lewis both hail from the same tradition, but they are sort of working on different elements within that tradition; kind of like, say, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure.

In any case, I'm coming to learn that Eliot is just a hard nut to crack; which is why he is widely acclaimed by people who, if they knew the "other things he said," would immediately repudiate him. It explains why it's taken me so long to get this close to him, to begin to trust him. I just needed to get some sea-legs first.

moral chaos

It just occurred to me that we do indeed live in a morally chaotic universe. Only my understanding of "moral chaos" differs from the typical secular critic, e.g., the popular critics of Hammett, and perhaps Hammett himself. They would say that we live in a morally chaotic universe because there is no natural law, because we can be wiped out by random forces at any moment.

But I say that moral chaos is only intelligible against the presupposition of moral order. The natural law is real. And events are caused by minds, whether by God, angels, or humans. But sometimes angels, and all the time humans, are fallen creatures: they adopt a standard that diverges from the natural law, and there is no way of knowing where their ultimate loyalties lie. In that respect, and in that respect only, can one accurately speak of moral chaos. The fact that there are different moralities does not prove that there is no objective morality. The fact that there are different moralities proves that we have fallen short of the demands Reality makes on us. We are rebels that must lay down their arms.

So, yes, we do live in a morally chaotic universe; but that chaos is parasitic on an originary morality of pure righteousness. We live in a morally chaotic universe precisely because we can never finally count on anyone to abide by the natural law.

infinite comprehensibility

I wrote the following somewhere else originally as a reply to an argument that, since God, if He existed, created everything, including human consciousness, we should know intuitively -- i.e., without anyone telling us -- that God existed. But since we have no such intuition -- since everyone is "born an atheist" (that's what this person said) -- it's obvious that God doesn't exist.

On the contrary, Chesterton said: "If there were no God, there would be no atheists."

Christians never claimed that the human race wasn't flawed; hence the doctrine about Fallen Nature and Original Sin. If humanity were perfect, each human would indeed know of God's existence by direct intuition. If God exists, and if humanity is not what it ought to be, mightn't most of humanity (except for your rare Socrates) completely reject God from the outset, in favor of self? For God, so our parents "indoctrinate" us to believe, wants us to participate in the natural law. Why assume that it is on account of the non-existence of God, rather than the imperfection of Man, that Man does not achieve this perfect intuition of the Divine?

Christians believe that, given the fact of fallenness, God resorted to a more direct means, by revealing Himself in history first to the Jews, and then by the Incarnation of His Word, Christ Himself. To demand that the ways and means of God revealing Himself be limited to something strictly "spiritual" or "immaterial" is to assume alot about The Way God Ought To Be. Whence does anyone derive this assumption? It seems to presuppose that God is merely a human invention, and results in unsound argument; viz., "If God existed, then X would happen," but one must first establish that the existence of God would necessitate the occurrence of X.

In any case, how can one expect that God can be completely known and determined by the finitude of human thought when even such this-worldly sciences as quantum mechanics are considered beyond the pale for most? Something that comes crashing in from outside has to be at least as unlike anything we expected than the most rigorous of the natural sciences. Rather than alot of spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, the records that we have in fact show that it is more than a mere matter of dialectic: it is a matter of history and biography as well. Consequently, once again because of human fallenness, even many Christians (e.g., Evangelical Protestants) do not accept the glories of the material world such as you find in the originary and ancient faiths of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, which believe that God manifests Himself everyday by material means in the Sacraments, and in the very activity of the life of the Church. If God invented matter as a means for humans to communicate with one another, why shouldn't He use matter to communicate with humans?

But such is the Platonico-Cartesio-Kantianism of our epoch...