Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen."

("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7.)

Elan Vital

Swallow your own death in the morning

Over easy with salt and pepper.

By nightfall, you'll have digested it fully

Death in every cell, a vital nutrient.

Links

1. The real Mongolian barbecue: cook an animal in its own skin. 

2. Journalistic cliches avoided at the Washington Post's Outlook section.

3. Derrida as intellectual outcast.

4. Explosives artist Cai Guo Qiang. "[H]is great influence was Chinese Taoist spirituality."

Hat tips to Arts & Letters Daily and The Browser.

Links

1. Eating zoo animals, cats, dogs, rats, and donkeys in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war.

2. Adam Gopnik on the Mechanical Turk, a (fraudulent) 18th-century chess-playing automaton. According to Gopnik, Charles Babbage was inspired by the Turk to develop the concept of the difference engine, and Edgar Allan Poe was among those who realized the Turk had to be a fraud.

3. Myanmar gets daily newspapers (formerly banned by the government). 

Hat-tips to The Browser and Marginal Revolution.

No Human Can Fully Grasp the Complexity of Our Computers

A Google employee on the mind-boggling complexity of our computers. Corollaries include an explanation for the popularity of Steve Jobs, why computers are so frustrating, and why the patent system is broken.

Reflections

When all else is taken away, what remains is the relationship you have with being itself. If this relationship is sound, though you lose everything, at bottom you will be well. If this relationship is not sound, though you gain the entire world, you will not be well. Your relationship with being unfolds each moment, in ways you may not even be aware of. The magic power of attention can transform your relationship with being. In addition to the clear, well-lit parts of the mind, this attention must be applied to the dark, the silent, the hidden parts.

The Law of Karma

Sin is not just a demon crouching at the door;
It's a stain on your soul, treasured
By zealous memory, a captive longing
To be consumed by the chemical burn
Of enlightenment.

A Dream of the Beloved

The transcendent rapture of cleaning the dishes
Together. Holding hands, we enjoyed
The supreme bliss of aimless chatter
And shared soft kisses as the neighbors pulled into the drive.

Such was my one dream of the beloved.

Love, a Ghost

The first time I saw her, it was too early. 

The second time, too late. 

How could I be so inspired 

By love's hungry shadow?

Thoughts on Plato's Cave

Plato, in his Cave Allegory, taught that the sun of awakening rises high above the murky depths of ignorance. His peers, the authors of the Upanishads, held rather that the shining sun of the Self lies hidden in the innermost cavern of the heart. As far as I can tell, the Upanishads had it right. It is precisely those who insist on seeing by the clear light of day who end up knowing least. Coming to know requires an ever deeper exploration of the self's, of the world's, many shadow-strewn ways.

The Greatest Loves

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Beata Beatrix. 1864-1870. 

The ancients knew that the greatest loves are unrequited; or, if requited, unconsummated; or, if consummated, profoundly unhappy. Dante and Beatrice; Romeo and Juliette; Lancelot and Guinevere; et multa alia. It seems to be a decree of Fate that the greatest loves end in great disappointment or utter wretchedness.

D.I.Y.

Laundry de-odorizer: add 1/2 cup baking soda to a load before running a cycle.

Links

1. Times Literary Supplement review of David Foster Wallace's posthumously published The Pale King.

2. Onion AV Club interview with writer Neal Pollack. (What it means to be a writer today.)

3. Five Books interview with atheist Susan Jacoby.

4. Decline of the German bookseller business.

5. Tyler Cowen on the egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and civil libertarian core of economics.

As usual, hat tips to The Browser, Marginal Revolution, and Arts & Letters Daily.

The Book of Oghams

A page from the Book of Ballymote (Royal Irish Academy MS 23 P 12) containing ogham scripts.

Edit: This page from the Book of Ballymote is used by Andrew West at BabelStone to help interpret a peculiar bit of ogham found in a manuscript composed by a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon monk named Byrhtferth.

Links

1. John Nye on the war in Iraq.

2. Terry Eagleton's book-review-as-essay on the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.

3. Toronto's Monkey Paw bookshop: curators of printed curios and curiosities. A future for bricks and mortar book stores?

What Is the Point of Philosophy (by Way of the Jewish State)?

Joseph Levine, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has a well-written blog post at the New York Times about whether or not "Israel has a right to exist." Levine's thesis is that no people, including the Jewish people, has a right to a nation-state; nation-states do not exist for the sake of any particular people (in the sense of an ethnic group), but rather exist (or should exist) for the sake of all of the peoples who are their citizens.

This article is a great illustration of what the point of philosophy is. It's true that philosophers have often addressed questions which are of mainly theoretical interest, that they have (especially historically) attempted to answer questions which are best left to the empirical sciences, and that philosophy does not produce empirically verified or mathematically proven theories in the same way that the special sciences or mathematics do. So one may be forgiven for wondering what the purpose of philosophy is or if it even has one.

In a word, the point of philosophy is to think carefully and critically about thorny questions having to do with values or with the first principles of science, mathematics, or other disciplines. The tools of the philosophers in their quest for clarity are not microscopes and chemical assays, but rather logical and conceptual analyses.

A big part of both of these tools is the ability to make crucial distinctions (such as that between the ethnic and the civic sense of the term 'people'), which Levine aptly illustrates in his blog post about the Jews and Israel. Conceptual and logical clarity are not sufficient for resolving difficult questions of value or foundations, but they are necessary, and all too often lacking in debates about morality, politics, the arts, scientific methodology, and the like.

I am not hereby endorsing Levine's thesis or his arguments (though they are worth considering seriously), but as soon as I started reading his blog post, I could tell that he was a philosopher or had philosophical training, because of the obvious care he was taking to get conceptual and logical clarity before reaching his conclusion. Most non-philosophers regrettably do not sufficiently distinguish between related issues or concepts as carefully as Levine has done in this piece. I hope that Levine's work serves as a helpful illustration of the value of philosophy, even for such practical, political, "blood and soil" issues as the relations between Jews and Palestinians in the state of Israel.

Jeffrey Sachs' Great Paul Krugman Smackdown

Self-styled "progressive" economist Jeffrey Sachs delivers an energetic smackdown of economist Paul Krugman's over at the Huffington Post. Among Sachs' main points: the CBO's projections GDP growth in the wake of the stimulus have not been met; it matters quite a bit not just how much money the government spends, but what it spends it on; the interest payments on the debt will become uncomfortably large within ten years. Recommended reading for all citizens, not just policy wonks.

David Lynch

"I used to go to Bob's Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I'd have a milk shake and sit and think.

"There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner."

(David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 39.)

I wonder which Bob's he went to.

Dark Illumination

For Masters Kong and Lao

The clever-tongued thief of virtue

Grabs you with his rhinestone coat

A rich beggar snatching coins from passers-by.

His light is outshone by the hidden virtue

Of a hooded lantern, invisible from without

Grown brighter and brighter from within.

America's Biggest Foreign Policy Blunder?

Peter van Buren, a former state department official who worked in Iraq, paints a vivid portrait of the failures of the United States' invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, arguing that it constitutes the nation's worst foreign policy failure ever.