Category Archives: Letters

Humanities, Letters

What Good Is Philosophy?

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Imbolc                            Waxing Wild Moon

“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.” – Bertrand Russell

In spite of what I said yesterday I have listened to the opening lectures on of a history of philosophy course.  In the first lecture the professor teased out three notions of what philosophy is:  1.  A search for answers to the perennial questions, 2. A love of wisdom and 3. A quest aimed toward the unknown.

Each of these makes sense to me in their own way, but it is the 3rd idea I want to explore.  Russell’s quote nails it so well.  In this understanding of philosophy the discipline performs the early thought experiments, theorizing and critique out of which grow many others.  Science and the scientific method grew out of early philosophical speculations about the nature of reality, such speculation goes back to the very beginning of Western philosophy in the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece.  Once regular methodology and empirical data begin to define a new discipline it pulls away from philosophical thought into its own domain.  Psychology is another example.  Theology put philosophical rigor in service to Christian faith.

The ongoing rhythm of philosophical investigation leads to many answers to the same problem.  This in turn leads to skeptical thinking which observes that many answers to the same question does not make sense.  Then a consolidation occurs which often develops into a cohesive new line of thought.

A good example of this process going on right now involves the philosophy of mind.  At issue is the nature of consciousness, the existence or non-existence of free will and the nature of the self or the individual.  Pretty fundamental matters, especially when we consider what it means to be human.  The back and forth of philosophical speculation in these areas courses past the limited tools we have for empirical investigation into the brain.  Some people say we will never solve the problem of consciousness because the investigation requires consciousness  itself.  I’m in this latter camp.

All I wanted to observe here is the interesting result of philosophical speculation:  disciplines develop and move away from home, leaving philosophers once again wrestling with the unknown.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters

Back Into the World of Art

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Imbolc                                   Waxing Wild Moon

Kate and I didn’t get a chance to check our work before getting on line with Greg, the Latin tutor.  It showed.  Turns out doing this together has a great learning benefit for both of us.  Makes me think retirement with this gal’s gonna be fun.

The continuing ed at the MIA has left something to be desired lately.  It used to feature art historians, visiting curators, folks like that, now it’s often education staff or something related to process not content.  There’s nothing wrong with the education staff, but they did the docent training.  At the continuing ed events I like to hear outside perspectives, other modes of scholarship, punchy ideas.

Matthew Welch, the Japanese curator and the head of a curators at the museum, has those scholarly credentials and he takes great care to make his material useful for docents.  He was to give a lecture today on a piece of Japanese armor the museum purchased.  I drove in to hear him because I respect his work.  A lot.  Problem is, they canceled the event by e-mail at 10:45.  I used that time to prep for my tours tomorrow, got on the phone with Greg, then took off for the museum.

No lecture.  Turns out they had some leakage in the admin wing.  Not such a big deal in some ways, but the leaked happened onto Matthew’s computer.  He’s such a meticulous speaker and uses so many good slides that it wasn’t possible to do the lecture.  A shame.  We’ll pick it up some other time.

Spent three hours getting ready for my first tours since mid-December.  A group from St. Francis high school, just up Round Lake Boulevard about 7 or 8 miles from home.  They want Spanish art.  As it happens, I got assigned to start on the third floor on the east side of the building which means our Goya is the first painting I can use.  That means I move from Goya to the cubists and from the cubists to the surrealists, then onto the mannerists and, if I get that far, end in the baroque.

(El Greco’s Burial of Lord Orgaz)

Going that direction I discovered (for me) an interesting relationship between cubism and surrealism, major art movements at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, and the mannerists, a style situated between the high renaissance and the baroque.  The two more modern movements used Cezanne and African masks to jump away from illusionistic realism, that is, realism with perspective that attempts to fool the eye into thinking a 2-d image is 3-d.  Cubists took reality apart and put it back together from different perspectives, often using geometric shapes.  Surrealists wanted to peak inside the unconscious and  splay it out on the canvas.  Turns out the mannerists pushed off against the high polish and perspective of the High Renaissance, such masters as Raphael, Michelangelo and Da Vinci.  They turned away from vanishing point perspective, went for spiritual intensity (the unconscious?) and used elongated figures and asymmetrical composition to distinguish their work from the preceding period.

Someone else noticed this a long time ago, I’m sure, but it was fun to put it together.

Dogs, Family, Humanities, Letters, Writing

The Week So Far

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Imbolc                                       Waxing Wild Moon

Another day in the world of ancient Rome.  Translation continues to be fairly easy for me, though there are certain cases that give some trouble.  So far my learning has kept pace with the chapters.  I hope that continues.

Kate got pretty weary at work on Monday.  She saw too many patients.  She’s rebounded today, though and I think that’s a good sign for the future.

Kona, our largest whippet, has a fancy yellow bandage on her right rear leg after having what we believe is a benign growth removed yesterday.   She also has a water resistant sleeve over it, the Medi-Paw, that allows her to go outside.  A good thing.  Like most dogs I’ve known she simply ignores whatever discomfort she’s experiencing and does most of what she did before.  I was laid up for two months plus after my achilles surgery.

Now a bit on the novel.  Decided I had to start writing again, even though I’m revising, too.  I feel too disconnected from its flow.  Revising is important, but it doesn’t feel like an organic part of the process for me, at least not yet.

Friends, Humanities, Letters, Woolly Mammoths

Sunny Beaches. hmmm. what would that be in latin?

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Imbolc                             Waning Cold Moon

Kate and I have gone through Chapter 4 in Wheelock.  Onto Chapter 5 with the future and imperfect tenses and their conjugation.  Doing this makes me wonder what other layers of knowledge I have tucked away, not called upon, yet ready to return to duty if asked.  As Greg, our tutor, said, “You learned this already.”  We’ll move out of zone of previous learning, but right now, the auld tongue has come back pretty well.

Got back in the study today for the novel after the nap.  We do our sessions with Greg at noon on Thursdays, so we spent this morning on review, then in conversation with him.

The novel has not gone anywhere.  It has not gotten longer while I slept or while I was at Blue Cloud Abbey.  I read much of what I had written, trying to get back in the groove and that took up my writing time for the afternoon.  Tomorrow morning I’ll put fingers to keyboard again.

Buddy Mark has pics from the beach outside Puerta Vallerta.  The one below of an Aztec dancer has an interesting rattle.

Holidays, Letters, Weather +Climate

Monkish

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Imbolc                                 Waning Cold Moon

Boy.  3 this morning.  The cold moon has almost winked out and it’s still cold here.

We have at least 2 feet of snow in our orchard.  The goose berry and currant plants have only a foot of cane showing.  In the way snow has stayed on the ground, this has reminded me of an old fashioned Minnesota winter.

It’s great learning weather.  Nothing like sitting next to the green metal gas stove in the study, Wheelock on the book stand,  the snow covered boulder wall outside.  Just like a monk in a scriptorium.

Humanities, Letters

Latin, more Latin

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Imbolc                                    Waning Cold Moon

Another Latin day.  Started out with a review of vocabulary cards.  I had a number to put firmly into memory so that took some time.  After that I began translating sentences.  With the vocabulary on board the translating went fairly smoothly.  I also had to do the English to Latin translation, too.  That’s still harder, but I hope it will get easier as we go along.

Doing the Latin puts a concrete accomplishment in the day and that feels good.  With the retreat, our Monday usual business, yesterday’s time at the capitol and today’s Latin, I’ve fallen behind on my words per day on the new novel.  That should pick back up starting tomorrow.  Of course, there will be chapter 5 in Wheelock, too.  And that tour a week from Friday.  Tonight the Sierra Club’s legislative committee.

Off to workout.

Humanities, Letters

Critiquing Salvation

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Imbolc                                     Waning Cold Moon

OK.  To finish up the thought that got strangled as Morpheus took over my body last night.

Salvation through technology has infected our thinking, a direct consequence of the relentless application of reason to larger and larger spheres of knowledge.  Astronomy, physics and chemistry, geology, later biology all have had their mystery peeled away to reveal orderly, predictable processes.  As mystery drained away from the natural world–though note that mystery is not gone.  It lurks still behind quantum mechanics, life, consciousness, unified field theory–a slow build of an irrational hubris grew in inverse relation.  Because we knew some, we believed we knew enough.

Salvation through economics has infected our thinking, a direct consequence of the relentless application of reason to the idea of value and its diverse manifestations.  The ancien regime has been replaced by capitalism in many flavors, Marxism, socialism and even state socialism.  Again, as mystery drained away from the field of economics–though note that mystery is not gone.  It lurks still behind market crashes, the failure of planned states and the strange amalgam called socialism with Chinese elements–an irrational hubris grew in inverse relation.  Because we knew some, we believe we knew enough.

Salvation through religious dogma has infected our thinking, a direct consequence of an aversion to the application of reason to matters of faith.  The axial age faiths continue and have split, many claiming exclusive paths to human redemption.  They have not been replaced and  the mystery is why?  The strong brew of metaphysics, gods and goddesses and an answer to the perennial question of death keeps reason at bay when it comes to matters of faith and belief.  Because we believe we know enough, we believe.

The only way to examine these outsized claims lies in the disciplines that fall under the broad rubric of the humanities.  Only by going deep into the ways humans have lived their lives and responded to it through the arts and through historical reflection can we critique those splinters of our humanness that clamor for our attention.  Technology, economics and religion seem to offer hope for the future if only we can subjugate ourselves to their demands.  The unexamined aspect(s) of our lives poses the greatest threat to control us.

It is to this project that I have donated my life, the project of never taking anything for granted, of trying to see as many sides as possible of a claim, of using unexpected tools.  Poetry as a defense against the outsized claims of economics.  Music as a foil to the reach of technology.  History as a way to place religious systems within their proper context.

In that sense, then, yes, knowledge is the fuel and I do know where I’m going.  I also know I will never find the end of this ancientrail.  Its end lies beyond all of us, perhaps beyond the gates of death itself.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

Not Known To Self

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Imbolc                             Waning Cold Moon

“It is clear Charles, you know where you are going, and knowledge is the fuel.”   a fellow Woolly

Have you ever heard of the Johari window?  Here’s a graphic that illustrates it.  The white or open box represents common information shared between yourself and others who know you. The reddish brown box contains the stuff of which you are aware, but have shared with no one.  The third box is the one I’m interested in here, the green box.  It contains material not known to you, but known to others.  This is information to which you are blind for one reason or another, yet is apparent to at least one other.

This comment from a Woolly falls in the blind box for me.  Or maybe not.  A bit hard to tell.

It did make me reflect.  If someone else thinks where I’m going is clear, why would they think that?  Do I really know where I’m going?  Why is knowledge the fuel?

Here’s what came to me, after rolling the idea around for a week or so.

Long ago, perhaps in adolescence, the notion of a liberal arts education became central to my personal project.  How did it get there? It may have been my parents, could have been teachers, might even have been a minister, perhaps all of these plus things I read. The notion of a broad and deep education in the humanities, an education that began at least by the time of college.  There exposure to the great ideas, to the breadth of the human experience, to literature, art, music, theatre would open up a way of perception.  Perception that would inform life, even create a life.

There’s a lot more to this, but I’m tired.  Later.

Aging, Humanities, Letters, Weather +Climate

Latin at Home with Snow

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Imbolc                                     Waning Cold Moon

If any of you want to hear about Blue Cloud Abbey, you need to know that I have experienced technical difficulties.  If and when I resolve them, I’ll post the retreat notes.

I let the snow going fast past my window and the MNDOT warnings and the weather predictions convince me driving in to St. Paul was not wise.  My eyes and I don’t find night driving compatible in snowy weather.  Headed out to Blue Cloud we drove for about an hour in the dark.  The snow coming straight at the headlights hypnotizes me, not a good state for driving.

Instead I worked out, ate supper, played with the dogs and got through the vocabulary in chapter 4 of Wheelock.  This chapter has second declension neuter nouns, predicate nouns and adjectives and the irregular verb sum.  This verb, whose infinitive is esse=to be, is irregular, just like in English and has to be memorized.

That was a full evening anyhow.

Aging, Humanities, Letters, Writing

Back To School

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Imbolc                                  Waning Cold Moon

The snow has stopped.  Our neighbors, the Perlich’s, had relatives visiting today with snowmobiles which they happily drove on the Perlich’s lot.  I hope it was to make Greg feel better.   By city ordinance snowmobiles cannot come below a street about a mile north of us, but in this situation I won’t complain.

Chapters 2 and 3 in Wheelock completed.  That means I’ve copied declensions for 1st and second declension nouns, taken a shot at learning them, but count on repetition over time to cement the case endings.  I’ve also read about grammar, syntax and word order.   Then Wheelock has sentences from Latin writers like Horace, Catullus, Phaedres.  My job is to translate them.  At the end of the Latin sentences are sentences in English to be translated into Latin.  After this, once for each chapter, there is a paragraph, again from a Latin man of letters.  Today it was Horace.  I don’t recall yesterday’s.

This work demands nose to the grind stone type studying.  Create flash cards.  Review flash cards.  Copy declensions.  Use declensions.  Learn grammar.  Use grammar.  Translate from and into.  It feels like real studying, which it is, I guess.

So far, I like it.  A lot, actually.  In fact I’m a little surprised at how much I like it.

The novel  keeps on spooling out, nearing mid-way or somewhere close.  I plan to write on it during the retreat using my handy net book and my take along keyboard.  I suppose I’ll study some Latin there, too.  Very appropriate at a Benedictine monastery where Latin is still a living language.  Sort of.