I like to read the assignments out loud, in strings of ten or fifteen, in random order. It's fun. Also, I hope to reprogramme my subconscious with a sI like to read the assignments out loud, in strings of ten or fifteen, in random order. It's fun. Also, I hope to reprogramme my subconscious with a solid collection of life hacks. ...more
The stars roam, But no one grants this book its highest rating. I do. I don't need to understand it all. Maybe I don't get any of it. But for once, it's notThe stars roam, But no one grants this book its highest rating. I do. I don't need to understand it all. Maybe I don't get any of it. But for once, it's not about knowing— it's about movement, about being moved by something that, almost successfully, eludes our comprehension.
PS. De vertalingen van Peter Nijmeijer (1947-2016) zijn heel goed....more
In this micro-essay, Le Guin sets out her approach to the novel. Her bag is the antithesis of the myth of modern technology as a heroic, Promethean anIn this micro-essay, Le Guin sets out her approach to the novel. Her bag is the antithesis of the myth of modern technology as a heroic, Promethean and inevitably tragic enterprise. It is a "bag of stars", perhaps a womb, full of "wimps and klutzes". Stories emerge from an utterly non-linear process "of initiations, losses, transformations and translations", so different from the ballistic trajectory of the spear that ends in the hairy flank of a mammoth. The bag is more than a metaphor. It is metaphysics. As Donna Haraway suggests in her opening essay, the story that emerges from the bag is "the life story". It encapsulates the generative forces of life. It is the sediment of a genuine process of 'poiesis'. It is magic! ...more
I would like to see this essay republished, in larger type, with double spaced lines and blank pages in between, and a few colouring plates (particulaI would like to see this essay republished, in larger type, with double spaced lines and blank pages in between, and a few colouring plates (particularly of Modigliani faces) here and there....more
I've stationed this literary treasure in the loo, of all places. No disrespect intended. In fact, Blake's phantasmagorical scenes have turned my bathrI've stationed this literary treasure in the loo, of all places. No disrespect intended. In fact, Blake's phantasmagorical scenes have turned my bathroom breaks into something of an adventure. I crack it open to a random page and, in a grand oration, read aloud anywhere from a few paragraphs to a couple of pages. Dune is child's play compared to the infernal blaze of these darkly romantic visions....more
Undoubtedly, Richard Holmes's monumental biography of Coleridge stood out as the highlight of my reading year. Delving into this sprawling tale, brimmUndoubtedly, Richard Holmes's monumental biography of Coleridge stood out as the highlight of my reading year. Delving into this sprawling tale, brimming with unexpected developments and filled with striking moments of poetry and captivating ideas, was a genuine delight.
For the longest time Coleridge has been known as a crackpot who squandered his poetic gifts for a raft of misguided, speculative ideas. He was also accused of financial mismanagement, political opportunism, plagiarism and a very cavalier conception of his role as husband and father of three children.
There will be more or less truth in all these accusations. But these less laudable facets of a life should not obscure a fascinating talent for embodying a quintessentially Romantic type of genius. Coleridge thrived in a force field at the intersection of two realms: a 'worldly' encompassing creative empirical observation and action, and a 'wordly' where poetic expression and metaphysical speculation bounce off each other “like two correspondent concave mirrors, having a common focus, while each reflects and magnifies the other” (to borrow an image here that Coleridge used to characterise the relationship between the lovers in 'Romeo and Juliet'). Imagination is the engine that drives this metabolism. It extracts its fuel from the generative processes that are deeply embedded in natura naturans.
It strikes me that this framework offers a lens through which to study the lives and works of a select group of other philosopher-poets in whom I have an abiding interest: Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Jünger, Walter Benjamin.
What connects all these writers, including Coleridge, is their unique style. Their work offers itself to the reader as a disorienting mix of fragments, paratactic shifts, and palimpsestic intertextuality. Very postmodern, in a way. But what lifts it out of the casually multi-perspectival is an ontological shift away from a dualist worldview that pits humans against the rest of the cosmos. These writers insert themselves into the creative matrix of life and allow themselves to experience it from the inside. Hence, technè makes way for poiesis. “Being alive” becomes a generative category of critical thought and artistic expression. A deeper empirical subjectivity gives way to poetic objectivity....more
A gripping psychological portrait on a tightrope between
"Das All war für ihn in Wunden" ('For him, the universe was in wounds')
and
"Ich verlange in A gripping psychological portrait on a tightrope between
"Das All war für ihn in Wunden" ('For him, the universe was in wounds')
and
"Ich verlange in allem Leben, Möglichkeit des Daseins, und dann ist's gut ..." ('I demand life, the possibility of existence, in everything and then it's all right ...')....more
This slim volume of three Alexander Lectures by Kathleen Coburn was published in 1979. By then she had been working on a scholarly edition of Samuel TThis slim volume of three Alexander Lectures by Kathleen Coburn was published in 1979. By then she had been working on a scholarly edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notebooks for a good thirty years. The final volume of the five-volume Bollingen Edition was published in 2002, eleven years after her death. The notebooks, six dozen in all, are exactly what their generic title suggests: a miscellaneous jumble of thoughts and diary-like snippets collected by the philosopher-poet over a period of 40 years. Despite their informal and private nature, the Notebooks have been described as "perhaps the unacknowledged prose masterpiece of the age" (to quote Seamus Perry in his introduction to the one-volume selection of the Notebooks published by OUP). Incidentally, similar praise has been directed at Leopardi's Zibaldone, an almost contemporaneous Italian counterpart to Coleridge's diaries. While the Leopardi work is easily accessible to English readers via the complete edition published in 2013, few mortals will have direct access to the annotated Coleridge edition. Most copies have disappeared into the vaults of university libraries. And they are prohibitively expensive. The book edited by Perry (a mere 290 pages, about half of which are devoted to notes) offers a sort of halfway house for readers curious about the actual shape of the notebooks' raw material. A filtered view is available via Richard Holmes's 1000-page biography, which weaves directly quoted notebook material into the texture and narrative of the poet's life. Coburn's compact set of three lectures offers an even more oblique view on Coleridge's stream of consciousness.
The first lecture is a general introduction. It situates Coleridge in the early 18th-century English intellectual and literary landscape, and goes on to discuss the first steps in the editing of his complicated legacy by his in-laws and descendants. What follows is a loosely sketched psychological portrait, centred on a tension "between outward appearance and living reality", which, Coburn argues, created a distrust that served as a source for his poetry and philosophy. I find this assessment puzzling. On the basis of my reading of Holmes's biography, I would draw exactly the opposite conclusion, namely that Coleridge's foundational experience is one of alignment between the generative processes of nature and his own creative powers. His is indeed an 'art of recognition'. Coburn quotes a notebook entry from 1805 that makes this point: "– In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new." My hunch is that this process of anamnesis, this felt mirroring of life's creativity in his own consciousness, was a source of joy and curiosity for Coleridge, and later in his life also an explicit source of faith. As a result I find it hard to concur with Coburn in her assessment that "the sense of contradiction then, between the world within him and the world without, was there from earliest days and seems to have fostered a capacity for asking questions that went on developing throughout his life."
But maybe I didn't get the point of the first lecture. For in the next part, Kathleen Coburn zooms in on like-minded souls, intellectual mavericks, who appear in Coleridge's notebooks as sources of inspiration: Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno. These three marginal thinkers are foregrounded as models of the kind of intellectual and imaginative daring that was all too often lacking in the Age of Enlightenment. She quotes Coleridge musing that "whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy during the last two or three centuries, cannot but admit, that there appears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science." What Coleridge seems to be suggesting here is a kind of conspiracy by representatives of the intellectual mainstream to sideline certain ways of thinking. I think this is a fair assessment. And Coburn unwittingly confirms it by focusing on three 16th and 17th century thinkers who belong to a distinctive and resilient, but marginalised, esotericist tradition. Wouter Hanegraaf has written an incisive essay on the correspondence between the intellectual tenets underpinning the Romantic movement (organicism, the role of the imagination and temporalism, each of which is a crucial feature of Coleridge's philosophical and artistic project) and how these are congruent with key features of esotericism. All of this is confirmed by Coburn's discussion, but she refrains from connecting the dots. Instead, she stubbornly returns to the key point of the first lecture, but reframes it with a sleight of hand from a metaphysical (or phenomenological) consideration to a matter of politics: "We are back to the conflict between appearance and reality again, and Coleridge’s distrust of the ‘mere Facts’ men over against the metaphysicians, of the professionals as against the imaginative amateurs."
The third and final lecture focuses on the relationship between lived experience, philosophical reflection and poetic expression. The orthodox view is that metaphysics stood in the way of the unfolding of Coleridge's poetic genius. Coburn disagrees, seeing both as intellectual and creative endeavours, mutually illuminating and grounded in empirical observation. Again, she confirms the fundamental alignment between the principles of natura naturans and artistic creation: "For a dynamic vitalism like his, the basic principle of all life was a mysterious energy behind all creation not to be sufficiently explained by any material science. The same initiative energy was the mental and emotional antecedent necessary to the creation of a poem, or any work of art." So vital energy is both a metaphysical principle, a phenomenological datum and a poetic substrate. The second part of the lecture deals with the fragmentary nature of Coleridge's philosophical legacy. It was his lifelong, unfulfilled ambition to bring his ideas together in a grand synthesis. At the time of Coburn's lecture, the Opus Maximum had not yet been published. This did not happen until 2002, as part of the Bollingen edition. Coburn considered the search for a closed Coleridgean system to be elusive: "I doubt if it can be shown from any fusion of the various fragmentary drafts that Coleridge left a systematic philosophy in the commonly accepted sense". It now seems that a systematic philosophy, drawing together key ideas from German Naturphilosophie, Kant's transcendental philosophy, and Trinitarian Christianity, might be constructed from elements found in three late works, the Biographia Literaria, the Logic, and the Opus Maximum. I won't speculate on this as I haven't read any of the primary sources or any of the philosophical commentaries published after the publication of the Opus Maximum. Bypassing this lifetime commitment, however, I do think it would be a tantalising exercise to subject the raw data contained in the notebooks to syntactic and semantic analysis using advanced natural language processing and generative AI tools. From this primordial soup, would the contours of a key idea emerge, one that fuses the Many into the One?
Postscript: Kathleen Coburn's basic aim was laudable and necessary. At the time of delivering these lectures, Coleridge was still widely known as a crackpot. Coburn's contribution was an early step in the progressive rehabilitation of a wayward genius. ...more
"Yet for all its originality, Coleridge's poetry also reflects a distinct and beautiful literary tradition. It is deeply English, bucolic, and tenderl"Yet for all its originality, Coleridge's poetry also reflects a distinct and beautiful literary tradition. It is deeply English, bucolic, and tenderly observant, with a strong idealising, religious or neo-Platonic strain. His characteristic imagery is drawn from sun, moon, and stars; rivers, lakes and seas; woods, wild animals and birds; gardens, villages and harbours. One can never forget that his father (who died when Coleridge was only nine) was a country parson. It is recognisably the same world as that of Constable, Turner and Samuel Palmer. Even its more exotic elements are drawn from sources deep within the popular eighteenth-century culture: Gothic romance, folk ballads, travellers tales, scientific lectures, church hymns, and of course the Bible. What Coleridge did as a poet was to make this familiar world seem suddenly strange and perilous; and as we now can see, distinctively modern."
This quote from Richard Holmes' introduction captures the poet's Romantic genius in a single, eloquent paragraph. Here's a short 'fell walking' poem, composed as a plein air sketch in 1800 during Coleridge's first year in the Lake District, that reflects that spirit in its vivid contrasts and torrential energy (Note: Blencathra, or Saddleback peak, is spelled Blencartha in the poem):
On stern Blencartha's perilous height The winds are tyrannous and strong; And flashing forth unsteady light From stern Blencartha's skiey height, As loud the torrents throng! Beneath the moon, in gentle weather, They bind the earth and sky together. But oh! the sky and all its forms, how quiet! The things that seek the earth, how full of noise and riot!
This Penguin Classics volume is an ideal introduction to Coleridge's art and the perfect companion to Holmes's mammoth biography. The poems are conveniently grouped under various headings, the order of which roughly mirrors the chronology of the poet's life. Each section is prefaced by a short introduction, and at the back there is a section of notes to situate each poem in the collection. Holmes' also, and thankfully, includes some of the prose poems that were scattered through Coleridge's correspondence and private notebooks.
[image] Samuel Palmer, The White Cloud (ca. 1833)...more
The two volumes of Holmes's biography of Coleridge run to nearly 1,000 well-filled pages, not counting the copious notes. It's an enchanting journey fThe two volumes of Holmes's biography of Coleridge run to nearly 1,000 well-filled pages, not counting the copious notes. It's an enchanting journey for the reader interested in grasping the mind and life of this protean genius.
I extract a quote from Kathleen Coburn's Experience into Thought: Perspectives in the Coleridge Notebooks that succinctly outlines the scope of this vast intellectual and artistic project, driven by unbridled curiosity, extraordinary powers of observation and a profound respect for the intelligence of life.
There are therefore many Coleridges. (...) First the poet (but known chiefly for only three miraculous poems and about three others); then the literary critic, without whom the history of English literary criticism as we know it is inconceivable; the critic of science, the ‘so-so chemist’ as he called himself, whose rôle in sharing the struggle of Davy and others over the concepts and terminology of modern chemistry and biology is just beginning to be appreciated; the logician, whose hitherto unpublished Logic, edited by Professor Robin Jackson, is in the hands of the printers; the journalist, the top leader-writer of his day in the Morning Post and the Courier, whose three volumes of newspaper contributions will reappear any day now; the social and political critic, who wrote the first analysis in English of a post-war economic depression at the close of the Napoleonic wars, a work admired by Maynard Keynes; the psychologist, who grasped the notion of a subconscious mental life and of varying levels of consciousness, who coined the words psycho-analytical and psycho-somatic (as well as hundreds of other words now in our dictionaries), who anticipated the twentieth century on dreams; the educationist, who believed in cultivating the initiative in children and attacked the conventional negative controls by punishment; in theology the ‘higher critic,’ who ploughed methodically through dozens of the heavy German volumes of Eichhorn, Michaelis, and their ilk, and advocated an historical approach to Judaism and Christianity, denouncing what he called the ‘superstitious’ reading of the Scriptures; and one of the most influential of all Coleridges, the analyst of the church as both a spiritual and a temporal society, and of the obligations of both church and state to the national culture; and there is Coleridge the Englishman who was a determined ‘cosmopolite’ (to use another word he coined), who drew up a plan for a league of nations (admittedly with a proviso – although the Napoleonic wars were over–that no Frenchman be allowed to settle outside France or her colonies). And I see I had almost forgotten the philosopher! Yet he delivered possibly the first course of public lectures by an Englishman on the history of that subject – for money (not much money)."
Holmes succeeds where many other biographers fail. (I am thinking here of Rüdiger Safranski's deadpan portrait of Coleridge's contemporary Friedrich Hölderlin). The panoramic vision, the granular chronology, the extensive quotations from Coleridge's notebooks and letters make for an unusually vivid portrait that inspires enthusiasm and love for a brilliant and fallible man. ...more
Early German Romanticism is an exceptionally exciting interval in the history of Western literature and philosophy. Already then, a handful of brilliaEarly German Romanticism is an exceptionally exciting interval in the history of Western literature and philosophy. Already then, a handful of brilliant minds were able to envision the philosophical and spiritual horizon of the 21st century, fuelled by an explosive mix of conservative Lutheran protestantism, the Eureka moment of Kant's 'Copernican revolution', the semi-authoritarianism of the German absolutist courts, emerging German nationalism, French and Haitian revolutionary ferment, the shockwaves brought about by the Napoleonic wars, and the rapidly encroaching sense of alienation from industrialising and rationalising societies. The young Friedrich von Hardenberg, alias Novalis, was a member of this small circle of thinkers and dreamers. Gerhard Schulz does a commendable job of presenting a balanced, coherent picture of this enigmatic representative of this intellectual movement. von Hardenberg died very young, so there is relatively little biographical substance. The narrative is built around the process of Novalis's artistic and philosophical development, as revealed by the key works in his relatively modest oeuvre, the general intellectual climate of the time, and the verifiable sensitivities of the young poet's personality, namely a heightened attraction to the fundamental tension between Eros and Thanatos. The discussion of four major works occupy a significant part of the book: the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the Hymnen an die Nacht, the late poems, a compact body of work in which Das Lied der Todten occupies a liminal position. Inevitably, much remains lacunar and sketchy, and Schulz is careful to restrain a speculative impulse to fill these gaps. The one chapter that left me somewhat dissatisfied deals with von Hardenberg's Das Allgemeine Brouillon, an incomplete 'encyclopaedic' work that provides a foil for his philosophical ideas. Personally, I also think that a meaningful connection could be made with the hermetic and mystical current in Pietism. Schulz doesn't touch on this, although Novalis explicitly refers to Jakob Böhme in one of his late poems (An Tieck). Nevertheless, I wouldn't know where to turn for a better introduction to the life and work of this exceptional poet....more
A faithful traveling companion, this light and compact volume. Never fails to reinforce resonances of heart and mind when rambling over peaks and valeA faithful traveling companion, this light and compact volume. Never fails to reinforce resonances of heart and mind when rambling over peaks and vales. Bly’s translations strike me as very idiomatic. Thank you Tomas, Robert and Penguin....more
What a stirring read ... This not standard academic fare, but a scintillating, 130-page long prose poem that revolves around one big, touchingly beautWhat a stirring read ... This not standard academic fare, but a scintillating, 130-page long prose poem that revolves around one big, touchingly beautiful idea: the pluriverse. By and large this concept foregrounds a view that reality is fundamentally plural and diverse, rather than singular and unified.
Google's n-gram viewer situates the emergence of this concept somewhere around the start of World War I. There's a mysterious spike in frequency in 1963. And from the late 1990s onward it shoots up exponentially. Walter Mignolo situates its emergence in the Zapatista uprising in the mid-1990s. The connection with the Zapatista call for "a world where many worlds fit" has been acknowledged by most authors. Recently Arturo Escobar mainstreamed the notion through his influental book Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. As a result is has become a household term in decolonial critical theory.
It is very likely that there is a dominant conception of the pluriverse which seeks to rescue cosmopolitan ideals - say, the given of global citizenship, the celebration of cultural diversity, and respect for universal human rights - from the Western discourses in which they are inscribed. It envisions an aspirational pluriversal project "of deracialization and depatriarchization, food sovereignty, reciprocal economic organization and definancialization, spiritual liberation and aesthetic decolonization" in the name of a revitalised planetary democracy that is able to counter the modernist and capitalist monification of the world.
However, this book proposes another take on the issue. Because isn't there a dangerous paradox embedded in a way of thinking that fixates the pluriverse "under the tight grip of a categorical imperative", even if that imperative is nominally pluralist? Savransky steers away from this catch-22 by invoking a radical ontological pluralism.
Savransky sees the Western imperalist project of the past 500 years rooted in and supported by an impoverished monist metaphysics that saw (and sees) the world as fundamentally orderly, and offered a licence to align the laws of nations with the laws of nature. The modern realism that trails in the wake of this "metaphysics of the one-world world" (John Law) functions as a 'massive disqualification' machine that relegates everything that doesn't fit in this picture - the extraordinary, the implausible and the fantastic - to the domain of the superstitious and the symbolic.
The texture of the world that is conjured by Savransky is thoroughly pluralist, and as a result necessarily unfinished, lacunar, hesitant, fleeting, frayed, improvisatory. His version of the pluriverse is one that diverges with itself all the way down, and renders differences irreducible and uncontainable. Which doesn't mean that it's all chaos. This pluriverse connects the "one" and "many" through divergence, "... its ongoing insistence is in the form of partial stories, of loosely connected and disconnected realities, of eighty or a thousand “little hangings-together” in continuous processes of unification here, and pluralization there, without amounting to an encompassing unification yet, or perhaps ever."
This view anchors a philosophical and political project (a "politics of the possible") that challenges the anti-realism of deconstructivist critique and goes beyond the analytical stratagems of other contemporary ontological pluralisms (such as object-oriented ontology). It is a "pluriverse against all odds" that asks us to yield to a trust in the generative capacity of the world. But that trust, that belief "is not for all that a matter of instantaneous conversion. It is instead more akin to the piecemeal, experimental, and situated process of cultivating an art—curiously noticing, errantly looking for signs, developing an entire new mode of appreciation for that which, generously and generatively, is in the process of making itself felt."
Barring the transcendental horizon there is something of the Kierkegaardian leap in Savransky's thinking. Or perhaps we need to reference the dry-eyed and ecstatic flavour of Nietzsche's amor fati and eternal return. Here is a somewhat longer citation that speaks to the groundless, precipitous and potentially futile nature of this polyversal venture (and gives a feel for the supple texture of the author's prose):
" ... trusting the possibility of another world underway and yet-to-be-made is vital, perhaps even the most vital function that our lives in this world might have to perform. But it also makes present that doing so authorizes nothing. It provides no definition of how the good common world ought to be, and it warns us against giving in to the temptation of dreaming of a world that, once made, would bring the facts of struggle to an end. The pluriverse must be made, even when it won’t get made. Indeed, it is almost as if the vital task of composing other worlds in the wake of what has happened to us would only succeed, as sheer activity, by espousing as a political vocation the indefinite failure that simultaneously upends and subtends its project. As if taking the risk of setting out to fail might one day, by apposition rather than opposition, turn failure into its opposite, linking the imperative of struggling for another possible world with the very insistence on staying alive to an ongoing experimentation with worlds in the making. Such is the insistence of the pluriverse in the still of the night, gaping open the world on the edges of every world-vision, drawing it into the hold of perhaps."
Savransky unfolds his argument by triangulating with the pragmatist philosophy of William James, who, early in the 20th century already defended the idea of a pluralistic universe, and a series of contemporary 'cases' or stories that give a flavour of where these pluralistic adventures might lead us. The locales are exotic but the worlds conjured by them are real.
The Belgian novelist and poet Stefan Hertmans recently published a collection of essays on the theme of "Transitions" (Verschuivingen). At one point a sentence leaps out: "Nothing is more delicate than the institutionalisation of hope." In my review of the book I characterised this as "a dazzlingly beautiful, and tragic task". It seems Savransky picks up where Hertmans stops and gives voice and texture to this critical work....more
This book thoroughly knocked me of my feet. It goes to the heart of the matter in making our existence on Earth fathomable and it does so with such a This book thoroughly knocked me of my feet. It goes to the heart of the matter in making our existence on Earth fathomable and it does so with such a grand sweep! The clarity and erudition of Berque's argument are quite simply breathtaking. Although barely 200 pages, this tome has a very high specific weight. It feels like I traversed a really vast intellectual landscape.
I won't try to summarise the argument within the scope of this review. What Berque basically does is to bring our understanding and experience of 'milieu', 'meaning', 'history' and 'evolution' in conceptual alignment. This short online article picks out salient elements of Berque's mesological project in a clear way.
I sense that this work forms a milestone in my personal development in that it seems to offer a synthetic backdrop to, and ontological foundation for the trail of breadcrumbs that I have been following this past decade - with Ingold's Making, Bateson's Mind and Nature, Durham Peters' Marvelous Clouds, Spuybroek's Sympathy of Things, White's Wanderer and his Charts, Hillman's Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, Rajagopalan's Immersive Systemic Knowing, Weber's Enlivenment and Jullien's Silent Transformations as some of the key reference points. The experience is in a way diametrically opposed to the sense of disorientation I experienced when I started to read Nietzsche as an adolescent. Then it felt like bulldozers were making a giant clearing in my brain. Berque's work, on the other hand, feels like it allows me to knit together the rubble that has gradually accumulated in my ganglia. It's exhilarating. But also intimidating. Because I really don't know whether I am up to the challenge.
There is no doubt that Berque's mesology is going to keep me busy for a long time. I also hope to use my doctoral research in urbanism as an opportunity to weave his bio-hermeneutic approach into a coherent and generative action research approach. How to turn that desire into rigorous, lived experience. I don't know. But I sense that behind this challenge there hides a very mundane practice. At bottom, mesology is all about re-concretisation anyway! But how to engage with the territory, its living beings and its non-living things scientifically, but steering clear of both dualism and mysticism? A fascinating question.
By the way, this seems to be the only of Berque's works that is translated in English. I salute Anne Marie Feenberg-Dibon for her heart-warming diligence. This translation is quite obviously a labour of love. Amazingly, I couldn't find any book by Berque in a German translation. It is a mystery why these profound and essential ideas have not gained wider circulation....more
There is something in analytic psychology that is fundamentally congenial to my way of thinking. I discovered it when reading Jung's (quasi-)autobiogrThere is something in analytic psychology that is fundamentally congenial to my way of thinking. I discovered it when reading Jung's (quasi-)autobiography, which includes his reflections on 'life after death' (or the 'hereafter'). Jung starts with the observation that nowadays the mythic side of man is given short shrift. He can no longer create fables. “As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutory to speak also of incomprehensible things. (…) We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a ‘going beyond all that,’ but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all mythologising is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives a existence a glamour which we would not like to do without."
In this book, Hillman takes a similar line of thought, but then applied to our present lives in the here and now. In the final paragraph of 'The Soul's Code' he writes: " ... this theory is meant to inspire and revolutionize, and also to excite a fresh erotic attachment to its subject: your subjective and personal autobiography, the way you imagine your life, because how you imagine life strongly impinges upon the raising of children, the attitudes toward the symptoms and disturbances of adolescents, your individuality in a democracy, the strangeness of old age and the duties of dying—in fact, upon the professions of education, psychotherapy, the writing of biography, and the life of the citizen."
We inquire not per se to find the truth, but to charge our existence with meaning and energy, to awaken the creative power of Eros, to expand our power to resonate and communicate with the world. It seems to me this is a reflection of a pre-scientific, magical way of thinking that has led an undercover existence since empirical science assumed its monopoly position as the legitimate way to acquire knowledge.
In her monumental book on 16th century hermetic thought Frances Yates describes a captivating episode that reveals the clash between the two worldviews in an emblematic way. In the 1580s the magus Giordano Bruno found himself debating Copernicus' heliocentric model of the solar system with scholars at Oxford. Both parties in the debate supported the Polish astronomer's findings but based on a radically different way of thinking. For the scholars the famous concentric circle diagram with the Sun at its center was a reflection of mathematical relationships. For Bruno it was a chiffre, a symbol that expressed the magical philosophy of universal animation. The Earth's movement was simply a manifestation of life's divine energy.
Who's to say that Bruno was wrong and only the Oxford scholars had the truth on their side? Maybe their visions did not exclude one another? Maybe there is a place for empiricism and magic to work side by side and complement each other? Analytic psychologists as Jung and Hillman are not the only ones who are thinking along those lines. Anthropologist Tim Ingold has devoted his life to the development and articulation of a way of thinking that could be called 'sympathetic', in the sense that it "both answers to the call of the subject and is in turn answerable to it." It seeks resonance rather than truth, hints at and hunts for dynamic 'Correspondences' between our ideas and the animate and inanimate world around us.
Or take a philosopher such as Michel Serres, who sees a return to science's mythic origins as an imminent and necessary phase of cultural rejuvenation: "By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’s first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously." (from Biogea)
Ingold says: "This means, if you will, not taking literal truths metaphorically, but taking metaphorical truths literally. The theorist can be a poet." This is what Hillman does and is when he approaches our sense of self. Sure, both nature and nurture play a role in our personal makeup. But is that all? And are these even the more decisive influences in shaping our fate? Enter 'the acorn theory'. As the fruit of an oak tree an acorn lends itself naturally to an organicist metaphor of self development unfolding in time. But that kind of metaphorical elaboration of a literal truth is precisely what Hillman is not interested in. Instead, the acorn is imagined as an archetypal idea: "The acorn is also a mythical symbol; it is a shape; and it is a word with ancestries, tangents and implications, and suggestive power. By amplifying “acorn” in these different directions, (...), we will be carried beyond the naturalistic strictures of its standard meaning. And by turning the sense of “acorn” and expanding its potential we shall be demonstrating how to turn the biology of the human beyond its organic setting."
The acorn theory says that we are embodiments of an essence that has chosen us as its vehicle to express itself. This is our sense of calling, or our daimon as the Greeks understood it. We can't see it and we can't measure it. But reading up on the lives of exceptional people yields abundant (albeit anecdotal) evidence of this call and how it manifests itself through our biographies. Paying heed to our daimon poeticises our lives. Indeed, by paying only attention to the power of genes, parental influence and social mores as shapers of our destinies we unintentionally dull our lives and deny them any sort of romance, any fictional flair. As a result we become less curious, creative, courageous and reflexive about our lives. Less tolerant also about deviations from a consensus, consumerist norm. So why wouldn't we take this hypothesis playfully serious and start to inquire ourselves about what tries to express itself through our unique presence in this world? Because it's not verifiably 'true'? Good luck with your truth then. I'm siding with Hillman and those other thinkers who are trying to re-enchant our world, and charge us with a feeling of destiny, responsibility and beauty. ...more
Damion Searls, translator of several of Fosse's novels into English, sees Knausgaard and Fosse, Norway's two preeminent writers, as polar opposites:
"Damion Searls, translator of several of Fosse's novels into English, sees Knausgaard and Fosse, Norway's two preeminent writers, as polar opposites:
"... this intimacy, this directness of contact, is what readers of My Struggle love. Somehow his writing, the total opposite of Fosse’s, was just as pure. Fosse’s is pure poetry, Knausgaard’s is pure prose. (...) Poetry, I came to see, is visionary world-creation, an eruption of transcendence; prose is communication, interpersonal, horizontal. (In Norwegian, fittingly, fosse means “waterfall” and knausgård means “hillside farm”) ..."
I would like to construct an alternative opposition between these two writers, based on a distinction made by James Hillman between the confession and the recitation. Knausgaard is an archetypal postmodern confessionalist, Fosse the archaic reciter. I am quoting here from Hillman's The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. The Corbin referred to is the Islamist Henri Corbin (1903-1978).
"The heart can be disentangled from confessional personalism. We can be moved powerfully without confessing these movements to be our own. Empedocles, Aristotle, and Sophocles provide examples of the tragic, mythic mode of affective detachment. Another mode is the récit, or recitation, such as we find collected in Corbin’s writings. The difference between the confession and the recitation lies precisely in coming to a new realization of “experience.” Confession confines experience to “my” experience—what is registered in my nature. As long as experience means personal-felt experience, it requires the genre of confession, whether in depth psychology or in the arts, as subjectivism, expressionism, and personal romanticism. Feelings become crucial: my feelings are my heart. To discover its thought, I must reveal just what I feel.
The récit, however, is an account of events experienced rather than of my experiencing. It was then unfolded; the angel then said; a mountain, a room, a colored light, a figure shone in splendor. Like a walk through the world, there is this and this and this; the colors and shapes of the things illumined, their faces, are the confession—it is their coming to light, their testament, and their individuation, as Corbin said, not mine. The angel before the feeling he brings. Feelings are accessories to them, received from them. They are “divine influxes,” as Blake said, moving through the heart in the company of images.
The récit also breaks up that identification with experience that confession reinforces: confession as possession, my sins. What I confess to, I must believe as truth, as history. “I did this, felt that, wished and wanted.” But ever since Freud we know that what goes on in the heart is neither truth nor history; it is desire and imagination. So, confession raises the problem of Wahrheit and Dichtung. Whenever we attempt to tell our feelings—what I really feel, what was my true motive—a certain duplicity starts up. Truth or Fiction? We are in the midst of Harvey’s cor duplex: we waver at the very moment we own up. Again the problem is rhetorical: the first-person singular implies a single feeling. The reporter is singular whereas the feelings are multiple. So, to get to the heart’s core, we become fanatically confessional, intensely personal, letting it all show forth in order to get to this fictional, rhetorical “true inside real feeling me.
Confession supports one of our most cherished Western dogmas, as Gilbert Durand and David Miller have both said: the idea of a unified experiencing subject vis-à-vis a world that is multiple, disunited, chaotic. The first-person singular, that little devil of an I—who, as psychoanalysis long ago has seen, is neither first, nor a person, nor singular—is the confessional voice, imagining itself to be the unifier of experience. But experience can also be unified by the style in which it is enacted, by the images that form it, by its repetitive thematics, and by the relations amid which it unfolds. It does not have to be owned to be held. The heart in the breast is not your heart only; it is a microcosmic sun, a cosmos of all possible experiences that no one can own."
Hertervig's I in Melancholy is not Knausgaard's I in My Struggle. Fosse's novel is not a confessional but visionary world-creation indeed. It brings things to light. As painters are wont to do. ...more
Ian Cheng is an artist who writes code. Code that blooms into virtual worlds. Worlds that harbour the intelligence to go on and on, constantly reinvenIan Cheng is an artist who writes code. Code that blooms into virtual worlds. Worlds that harbour the intelligence to go on and on, constantly reinventing themselves. Cheng's code simulates worlds that are rife with emergence. Bringing these worlds to life and serving them in their unpredictable ongoingness equals the practice of Worlding. Worlding is a metaphor for life authentically and humbly lived at the service of a particular kind of vitality. It is shorthand for the capacity to create complexity, and the courage to live with the indeterminacy inherent in complexity. Engaging in the practice of Worlding has a moral, civilising import.
Cheng: "In Worlding the human mind can expressively extend itself to be at home nowhere, everywhere and anywhere. (...) Imagine a culture in which Worlding makes Worlds as prolific and mundane as publishing a book is today. And imagine the fluency for Worlds this ease and proliferation would create (...) Imagine how the art of creating infinite games might open a way to an even greater art: the art of choosing better futures, thus expressively steering the medium of spacetime and sculpting our agency in it. (...) To create infinite games as an act of agency. To live to World, and World to live."
In this book Cheng reveals his logic of worlding, the meta-algorithm that provides a foil for his coded simulation algorithms. That meta-algorithm includes four functional modules. Cheng labels them as artist 'masks'. They stand for four different roles, and associated sets of activities, that interact in the practice of Worlding. The first three roles are:
The Director creates a structuring container for the World in the form of an overall guiding narrative. The Director wants to make meaning from the complexity that seeps in from base reality.
The Cartoonist magnifies emotions and reduces complexity by externalising belief orientations and defining tribal boundaries. The Cartoonist's language is visual and its logic is psychological; it turns ideas into distinctive characters.
The Hacker strips down existing worlds to their underlying systems and rules and activates their potential to spawn novelty. Meaning is not important for the Hacker; the mask revels in the fleeting feeling of delight and in the shock of the new.
The combined efforts of these three masks are able to bring a new world to life, but they cannot sustain it. Because each of these role leads to different forms of closure: the world is oversaturated with meaning or stifled through the Director's control; or it spins out of orbit through the colliding emotions unleashed by the Cartoonist; or it runs aground in the Hacker's meaningless search for novelty and disruption.
Cheng: "To create a World from nothing, we've assembled the unique talents of each of the artist's masks. The Director has created structure, a team, and back stories. The Cartoonist has created characters who are simple but truthful with a look and feel we love. The Hacker has created artificial agents, systems and rules to power a simulation engine. Now we must betray the finite goals of each mask, for we are about to birth a World, and a World asks for more. (...) A World wants to emerge as an infinite game: one that keeps on going, invites to new agents to keep it in play, is fertile with surprises, and continues to generate unexpected meanings."
The role of the fourth mask, the Emissary, is to imaginatively serve the world that has been brought to life. The Emissary cannot contain the World. The World must contain the Emissary.
"For the Emissary, the act of Worlding is about wilfully heading towards an unending frontier and being open to perceiving new meaning at every turn. Most of all, Worlding asks the Emissary to protect these open-ended qualities of the World when a resolution is near. (...) The Emissary must stay with the trouble of Worlding."
And when the Emissary feels it is unable to maintain this openness and exercise the unnatural feeling of worlding "it must wilfully exit itself, not risk the World, and let other emissaries carry it on. In this way, the Emissary is always and mundanely 'caught between unravelling old realities and emerging weird ones' in service of the ongoing health of the World. This is the texture of Emissary life."
The Emissary is the heart of Cheng's vision. It occupies what Michel Serres (in The Troubadour of Knowledge) metaphorically brought into relief as the position blanche of the goalkeeper, the position from which the body is able to move in any direction. It is the position of the true learner who is respectfully in resonance with the contingencies - miracles and tragedies - that the eddies of life throw at his/her feet....more
This book offers an extended, layered and courageous reflection on the role of imagination and poiesis in our lives. Poiesis is "the capacity to respoThis book offers an extended, layered and courageous reflection on the role of imagination and poiesis in our lives. Poiesis is "the capacity to respond to what is given and to shape it creatively, using a sense of beauty as our guide." The volume is absolutely recommended in and of itself. But for me the great bonus was that it presented me with access to the work of James Hillman, eminent post-Jungian psychologist, whose work has been a revelation. So thank you, Mr. Levine. ...more
Ik heb dit boek initieel en in zijn geheel genomen met veel plezier gelezen. Nadien is mijn enthousiasme ervoor wel wat bekoeld. Het mooiste is dat heIk heb dit boek initieel en in zijn geheel genomen met veel plezier gelezen. Nadien is mijn enthousiasme ervoor wel wat bekoeld. Het mooiste is dat het Rilke doet verschijnen in een facettenrijke, maar benaderbare gestalte. De lezer krijgt een gevoel voor de mens achter het scherm van poëtische vervoering en verfijnde briefwisseling. Sinds de lectuur van dit boek ervaar ik een ander sentiment als ik de naam Rilke hoor. Zijn kunstenaarschap heeft niets aan gloed verloren, maar de mens is me een stuk nader gekomen. Daar ben ik dit boek dankbaar voor.
Los van de inhoud van Oegema's betoog, is zijn schrijftrant hier een factor van betekenis. De stijl is heel verzorgd en toch losjes, quasi-epistolair. Het is alsof de auteur je meeneemt in zijn denken doorheen een lange reeks persoonlijke brieven. Maar bijwijlen gaat de toon van ouwe-jongens-krentenbrood wel op de zenuwen werken. Dat is één reden waarom mijn aanvankelijke geestdrift wat getemperd is.
De andere heeft te maken met de inhoud. Over Oegema's opvatting van leraarschap is veel te zeggen. In zijn geheel genomen vind ik het niet erg samenhangend. Me dunkt dat de auteur wat teveel garen wil spinnen rond een gegeven dat in de kern heel uitlegbaar is. Naar mijn gevoel kom je al heel ver met een duiding van leraarschap als je drie elementen in rekening brengt: het bovengemiddelde vakmanschap van een leraar, de passie die door zijn/haar manier van leven en communiceren wordt gereflecteerd, en de kwaliteit van de aandacht die de leraar in relatie met de leerling te berde brengt. De auteur hangt zijn opvatting op aan tien stellingen die de natuur willen duiden van de 'transmissie' tussen leerling en leraar. Ik denk dat Oegema daarmee de zaak nodeloos gecompliceerd maakt.
Ik heb één nadrukkelijk probleem met zijn theorie. Naar mijn gevoel gaat hij wat te laks om met de morele dimensie van leraarschap. In één van zijn minder fortuinlijke zinswendingen stelt de auteur dat 'leraarschap sociaal wenselijke profielen frustreert'. We kunnen ons inderdaad indenken dat leraren heel wisselend scoren op gangbare maatstaven qua communicatievaardigheden. Ze kunnen psychologisch labiel zijn. Het zijn geen heiligen. Maar ze mogen hun leraarspositie in geen geval willen gebruiken als een machtspositie. Ze moeten hun status van leraar niet willen verzilveren in de klinkende munt van seksuele of emotionele bevrediging, ten koste van hun leerlingen. Oegema schijnt daar niet zo zwaar aan te tillen wanneer hij de 'luchtige levenswandel' van mensen zoals Rodin voor het voetlicht plaatst. Ook Freud schijnt zijn kwaliteitszegel van bewonderenswaardige leraar' te verdienen, terwijl die toch ongemeen zwaar gewogen heeft op het leven van enkele van zijn leerlingen. Rilke zelf is ook niet helemaal vrij te pleiten van destructieve neigingen, met name in relatie met 'zijn' vrouwen: Clara Westhoff en Paula Becker. Jan Oegema heeft wel twee heel mooie vignetten aan deze vrouwen gewijd die de ambivalentie van hun driehoeksverhouding met Rilke evoceren.
Ik wil tot slot nog kort wijzen op enkele markante conceptuele naden in het narratief. Het lijkt er sterk op dat Oegema zijn boek geconcipieerd heeft vanuit zijn opvatting van Rilke als 'rouwdichter'. Dat is nu het derde en laatste deel van het boek. De contextualisering van die rol heeft dan de notie van 'leraarschap' naar de voorgrond getrokken waardoor het boek in een nieuwe plooi is gevallen. Tenminste, dat is de indruk die ik aan de lectuur overhoud. Echt storen doet dat niet, maar als lezer merk je wel dat die twee redeneerlijnen niet naadloos op elkaar aansluiten.
Bijkomend is het leerling zijn voor Rilke even belangrijk als zijn leraarschap. Zijn relaties met Rodin en Lou Salomé zijn tekenend hiervoor. En Oegema besteedt daar ook veel aandacht aan. Maar vergeet naar mijn gevoel om de hechte band tussen leerlingschap en leraarschap te duiden. Het is met name de eigen ervaring als leerling die de leraar in staat stelt om empathisch in de relatie met haar/zijn leerlingen te staan.
Samengevat kan ik het boek zeker aanbevelen. Liefhebbers van Rilke en lezers die geboeid zijn door de complexiteit van de relatie tussen kunstenaar/leraar en een sociale omgeving, vinden hier veel het overdenken waard. Ook de hoofdstukken over het generatief omgaan met rouw kunnen erg behulpzaam zijn. Maar ik geef de raad om zich niet te laten inpakken door de beminnelijke toon van Oegema's proza en een kritische afstand te bewaren ten opzichte van de gepresenteerde ideeën....more
The Natural Contract opens with a typical Serresian flourish: a description of a harrowing scene painted by Francisco Goya (1746-1829). Two men are fiThe Natural Contract opens with a typical Serresian flourish: a description of a harrowing scene painted by Francisco Goya (1746-1829). Two men are fighting each other with clubs, knee-deep in a quagmire of mud. The outcome of the brawl seems clear: both antagonists will perish. The more violently they clash, the more quickly they will be swallowed by the quicksand.
In Serres' reading this scene becomes a layered allegory for the relationship between humankind and its planetary habitat. Armed conflict has been the engine of history. However, war is not merely a 'primitive' state of men going down by the hand of other men. War is a (de jure) process that takes place within a legal framework: declaration, conflict, armistice. This framework was born from necessity as it put the lid on an endless cycle of vengeance. Serres hypothesises that there lies the origin of the social contracts that regulate societies. He then proceeds, characteristically, by zooming out and bringing into focus the silent, unnoticed background against which armed conflict has always taken place. The mud in Goya's painting symbolises this background. This is quite simply the world which now makes itself felt in response to the increasing weight of human presence on earth. Foreground and background are swept up in reinforcing feedback mechanisms: the more fiercely we compete, the more assertively earth makes itself felt. 'Subjective violence' engenders 'objective violence'. A new condition announces itself for humanity, a limit state of history. Serres: "We must therefore, once again, under threat of collective death, invent a law for objective violence. We find ourselves in the same position as our unimaginable ancestors when they invented the oldest laws, which transformed their subjective violence, through a contract, into what we call wars. We must make a new pact, a new preliminary agreement with the objective enemy of the human world: the world as such." This is the natural contract. Indeed, "we must decide on peace amongst ourselves to protect the world, and peace with the world to protect ourselves."
In the second part of the book Serres builds on this opening gambit. Contracts are systemically distinctive artefacts. They have a homeostatic function. Contracts canonize, thingify and stabilize relationships. They acknowledge an essential equality between signatories, codify obligations, and seek to balance interests of the parties. Similarly, "the natural contract recognises and acknowledges an equilibrium between our current power and the forces of the world."
The third essay reframes the envisioned equilibrium as a new stage in the relationship between science and law, reason and judgment. The project of scientific reason seeks limitless freedom to deploy itself. Human laws, at the service of various powers that be, have tried to curb this expansionist drive. The trial against Galilei was just one telltale flashpoint in a long conflictual relationship. However, the growing power and efficacy of the exact sciences were able to overrule this situation. Reason rose above judgment. Today, in the context of a global pandemic, we acquiesce when scientists advise politicians to sidestep constitutional rights. Serres suggests that our predicament invites us to think differently here. Rather than one dominating the other, reason and judgment have to enter into a positive cycle. "Thus it is better to make peace by a new contract between the sciences, which deal relevantly with the things of the world and their relations, and judgment, which decides on humans and their relations. It is better to make peace between the two types of reason in conflict today, because their fates are henceforth crossed and blended and because our own fate depends on their alliance. Through a new call to globality, we need to invent a reason that is both rational and steady, one that thinks truthfully while judging prudently."
At this point Serres introduces a new character, The Troubadour of Knowledge, which will turn to be the protagonist in his next book, Le Tiers-Instruit, published in 1991. The Troubadour models this hybrid reason with courage and wisdom. (S)he is the product of a process of education that gave her the courage to expose herself, to cast herself off. Listen how eloquently Serres brings the third essay of the Natural Contract to a close:
"We must learn our finitude: reach the limits of a non-infinite being. Necessarily we will have to suffer, from illnesses, unforeseeable accidents or lacks; we must set a term to our desires, ambitions, wills, freedoms. We must prepare our solitude, in the face of great decisions, responsibilities, growing numbers of other people; in the face of the world, the fragility of things and of loved ones to protect, in the face of happiness, unhappiness, death. To deny this finitude, starting in childhood, is to nurture unhappy people and foster their resentment of inevitable adversity. We must learn, at the same time, our true infinity. Nothing, or almost nothing, resists training. The body can do more than we believe, intelligence adapts to everything. To awaken the unquenchable thirst for learning, in order to live as much as possible of the total human experience and the beauties of the world, and to persevere, sometimes, through invention: this is the meaning of equipping someone to cast off."
This might have been a fitting conclusion to Serres' ruminations on the contract with Nature. But he presses on with a moving meditation on the experience of 'casting off' and the role of cordiality, concord, contract in navigating that transition into a new world. The philosopher conjures unforgettable images: a ship that unmoors in the port of Brest while a couple - woman on the quay, man on the departing vessel - continue to be connected by the graceful parabolas traced by an apple exchanged between them; the launch of spacecraft Ariane from its base in a rainforest; the pre-dawn departure of a party of mountaineers from a high hut in the Alps. The cord that ties the climbers together becomes a powerful simile for the relational import of the contract: "The term contract originally means the tract or trait or draft that tightens and pulls: a set of cords assures, without language, the subtle system of constraints and freedoms through which each linked element receives information about every other and about the system, and draws security from all."
Today our technologies offer a system of cords, of exchanges of forces and information with the Earth. We ceaselessly inform with our movements and energies, and the Earth, in return, informs us of its global change. For better of for worse, we are doomed to live contractually with the Earth. This demands vigilance and diligence, a decisive break with our contemporary negligence. It also demands a rekindling of love, for our mother. In the book's final pages, the philosopher bursts into a paean to the painfully beautiful manifestation of pure potentiality: "Indescribable emotion: mother, my faithful mother, our mother who has been a cenobite for as long as the world has existed, the heaviest, the most fecund, the holiest of material dwellings, chaste because always alone, and always pregnant, virgin and mother of all living things, better than alive, irreproducable universal womb of all possible life, mirror of ice floes, seat of snows, vessel of the seas, rose of the winds, tower of ivory, house of gold, Ark of the Covenant, gate of heaven, health, refuge, queen surrounded by clouds, who will be able to move her, who will be able to take her in their arms, who will protect her, if she risks dying and when she begins her mortal agony? Is it true that she is moved? What have we not destroyed with our scientific virtuosity?"...more
![Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) [Paperback] [2000] (Author) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Richard Holmes](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1697767692l/134618381._SY75_.jpg)
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