Category Archives: Humanities

Humanities, Weather +Climate

The Sun! The Sun!

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Imbolc                                        Waning Wild Moon

On these days I often think of Fantasy Island, when Tatto would say, The plane!  The plane!  I want to run outside in the street and yell, The sun!  The sun!  After a long run of dreary weather the sight of the sun climbing higher and higher in the sky bucks us up and makes us eager for the end of winter.  By now we have earned our spring and the joys of the cold and snow have begun to fade when weighed against the possibility of flowers and vegetables and outdoor walks.

Most of us do not come to this place without some regret and I’m among them, a part of me yearning for the depths of winter with its ascetic cold and its spare landscape, but the gardener in me has begun to awaken, thinking of which vegetable to put in which plot, how much, what new flowers might look good.

Another 1,300 words in before Kate and I began to check our work chapter 6 of Wheelock.  She’s improving fast, as I knew she would.  Working together does make a difference, a major positive difference.  And just think how surprised the natives will be when we start using our newly acquired Latin on them.

What’s that?  All dead?  Really?  Whoa, that’s a pity, all this language and no place to speak it.

Sierra Club legcom tonight.  7:00 pm sharp.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters

Pragmatically Speaking

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Imbolc                                     Full Wild Moon

“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” – William James

William James helped found and expand the American philosophical tradition of Pragmatism.  This is not a publicly well known school of philosophy, partly because it does not lend itself well to sound bites like dialectical reasoning, theory of forms, Occam’s razor, cogito ergo sum.

His quote teases us toward an important element of pragmatic thought, namely that truth is something we live into or toward rather than an absolute.  In fact, as this quote suggests, we can even change our own truth by changing our minds, our ways of thinking and the directions of our thoughts and in so doing, change our lives.

Pragmatism is a very American philosophical system, relying on the rough and tumble of human interaction with the world to get at what other systems find through deductive logic.  It’s messy and inexact, but it binds itself tightly to the human experience.

Here’s a nice paragraph from the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy that will give you the flavor of James’ thought.  Pay special attention to the last sentence.

“James’s chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism” sets out his voluntaristic epistemology. “We carve out everything,” James states, “just as we carve out constellations, to serve our human purposes” (P, 100). Nevertheless, he recognizes “resisting factors in every experience of truth-making” (P, 117), including not only our present sensations or experiences but the whole body of our prior beliefs. James holds neither that we create our truths out of nothing, nor that truth is entirely independent of humanity. He embraces “the humanistic principle: you can’t weed out the human contribution” (P, 122). He also embraces a metaphysics of process in the claim that “for pragmatism [reality] is still in the making,” whereas for “rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity” (P 123). Pragmatism’s final chapter on “Pragmatism and Religion” follows James’s line in Varieties in attacking “transcendental absolutism” for its unverifiable account of God, and in defending a “pluralistic and moralistic religion” (144)based on human experience. “On pragmatistic principles,” James writes, “if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true” (143).”

Cooking, Humanities, Sport

Food and Philosophy

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Imbolc                                    Waxing Wild Moon

There and back.  To the grocery store.  Where, as I wandered the aisles, I got a feeling of wanting to eat a better diet.  Again.  This is not new.  It comes and goes.  Sometimes I eat great, other times I just eat.  Today I picked up some Cara Cara Navel Oranges.  I discovered them last week by accident. Boy are they good.  They look sort of like grapefruit (big chunks in the pieces), but taste almost like sweet tangerines.

On the way and back I listened to a lecture on Aristotle.  I know, I said I was fed up with this stuff, but, apparently not. Aristotle was hard for me when I studied him back in 1965.  He seems clearer to me now, more reachable.  His stuff makes more sense, but it isn’t as beautiful as Plato, nor as thought provoking.  At least to me.

The US lost to Canada in the gold medal hockey game.  Good.  When we rack up too many medals in either the summer or winter olympics, I don’t think it does our international reputation any favors.  Losing a few big ones, while devastating to the individual athletes, or team in hockey’s case, perhaps, the resulting good will is better for us.  Still, I’m proud we did well.

Humanities, Letters, Writing

Books

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Imbolc                                Waxing Wild Moon

Bill Schmidt made me aware of this video:  Muslim Demographics.  He included the link to it within the Snopes website: http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/demographics.asp.

If you’re not familiar with Snopes, it tracks down information on claims made in videos, e-mails, the news and attempts to determine the truth or error in them.  In the case of this video, apparently by an evangelical Christian group, Muslims take over the world due to superior birth rates.  If you know anything about demographics, you would distrust the claims in the video on face value, but Snopes makes clear why the claims are alarmist rather than accurate.

Not to steal a march on them, but the biggest error is the assumption that high birthrates in the Muslim community, where they exist, will remain the same.  Increased income and the education of women depress birth rates, for example.

Books.  Gotta love’em.  Can’t live without’em, even with the Kindle.  I had some money saved and our mutual budget kicked in a third and I bought the entire Grove Dictionary of Art on sale.  It came yesterday in five boxes, each of which weighed 36 pounds.  Heavy, man.  They now have pride of place on the top shelf of a three tier bookshelf to the left of my desk.  I feel smarter already, just having them close by.

As I moved books around to accommodate them, I took note of those areas in which I have long term interest:  the enlightenment and its affects on contemporary life, especially politics and religion; our relationship with the planet and our particular places in it; poetry, China, Japan, India, mythology, fairy tales, art history, philosophy, transcendentalism and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the history of religion, water, war, American history, especially the Northwest territory, Asian art, magic, gardening, the Renaissance, spirituality, travel, Jungian psychology, the intelligence agencies, science, especially the history of science and ways we celebrate the apparent flow of time.

OK.  It’s broad, I admit.  But it’s not everything in the world.  I do have specific interests.  Just a number of them.

Some day I’ll explore those areas in depth, greater depth than I’ve achieved so far, anyhow.


Art and Culture, Cooking, Humanities, Letters, Sport

An Andover Olypmics?

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Wild Moon

The winter olympics could have been held in Andover this year.  If we had any mountains.  We’ve had snow and cold, the key ingredients.  Also, Lindsey Vonn and her husband could have stayed in Burnsville instead of Olympic Village, maybe gotten a few runs in at her home hill, Buck Hill.

Well, it’s the olympic world’s loss.

(Yayoi Kusama
Untitled, 1967
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York)

Kate made my/our favorite cookies today.  She also made chicken schnitzel and a warm potato salad with sweet onions last night.  Boy was that good.  All that and she cooks, too.

Chapter 6 of Wheelock is under my belt and Kate’s working on it right now.  We’re skipping this week so she can catch up.

I don’t have a tour this Friday, but I do have a Legcom meeting on Wednesday and the docent discussion group tomorrow, focusing on how to discuss contemporary art.  This conversation will be led by an educator from the Walker, a connection made by Allison.  Should be a big help for the contemporary art exhibition:  Up Until Now, coming later this spring.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Humanities, Letters

Whee!

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Imbolc                                    Waxing Wild Moon

Here’s a revelation it’s strange to have this late in life:  I enjoy learning for its own sake.  Now I knew that at one level or another before, it’s true, but here’s what I’ve just learned.  After I finished my workout this evening, I went back to working on Latin translation.  At first I approached the Latin like school, do the work, get it right, then do more work, get it right.  So on.

But tonight as I sat there puzzling out the meaning of the sentences and the word endings, I realized I was having fun.  This was no longer a goal oriented, hoop-jumping exercise, but something I simply enjoyed.  Like, I don’t know, playing checkers or basketball or chess or dancing.  Strange, huh?

Maybe it’s always been this way for me, I don’t know.  It feels like a secret, something I shouldn’t tell, but there it is anyhow.  At 63.  There’s always something new around the corner.

Kate and I had an African evening.  We finished the first season of the HBO series, The First Ladies Detective Agency.  We read all these quite a while ago.  The casting for the series is spot on and seeing the Botswana setting makes the stories come alive even more strongly than in the books themselves.  After we finished the last episode, we watched Duma, a story of a South African boy and a cheetah he raises from a cub.  It has the usual boy reluctantly returns animal to the wild, the animal comes back for one last hug sort of plot line, but with some unusual depth added by his long journey from Capetown back into the bush with Duma, the cheetah and a man he meets in the bush.  Both of them are well worth  watching.  Not my usual dark fare, but good anyhow.

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.