What did I read (and finish and record) in 2016?

Jan 5.  The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood.
Jan 9.  Purity, Jonathan Franzen
Jan 14. A Thousand Naked Strangers, Kevin Hazzard
Jan 25. The Taming of a Shrew, Shakespeare
Feb. 2 Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare
Feb. 15 A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare
Mar. 6  The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly
June 3 The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen
June 20 The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
June 26 Euphoria, Lily King
June 26 The Flick, Annie Baker
July 8 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
July 10 The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard
Sept 3 The Quincunx, Charles Palliser (781 dense pages)
Oct 11 The Man of Property, vol 1 Forsyte Sage, John Galsworthy
Oct 28 Silas Marner, George Eliot
Nov 2 The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin

Tenui musam metitamur avena

Or, "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal." Ref. in Richardson's biography of William James, p.59. Coined by Sydney Smith, a founding editor of The Edinburgh Review. 

From Richardson:

"Smith was an ardent believer in the association of ideas, in the notion, first given its full form by David Hartley, that "complex mental phenomena are formed from simple elements derived ultimately from sensation." The belief that everything mental has a physical explanation and origin--one of the rocks on which positivism is built--is put forward by Smith by way of an attack on metaphysics, " word of dire sound and horrible import," says Smith. "A great philosopher," he says, "may sit in his study and deny the existence of matter: but if he takes a walk in the street he must take care to leave his theory behind him."

Notes on Nietzsche

Just re-reading my old notes on Nietzsche.

Tuesday October 7th, 2014

My Presentation on "On Truth hand Lying in a Non Moral Sense"

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--Revaluation of all values

--Philosophy with a hammer. A tuning fork. Sounding out what doesn't ring true.

---Use Epigrams from Twilight of the Idols

15: "Posthumous human beings--like me, for example--are understood worse than timely ones, but they are listened to better. More accurately: we are never understood--and that's the source of our authority…

26: I distrust all systematizers and stay out of their way. The will to  a system is a lack of integrity.

Did he read Whitman? Or viceversa: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

----"Judgements, value judgments about life, for or against, can in the final analysis never be true they have value only as symptoms….the value of life cannot be assessed.

Idol #1: SOCRATES: Poor Socrates. Nietzsche thinks he's absolute shit! Nietzsche has a taste for the preSocratics as we noticed last reading. Greek philosophy before Socrates didn't infect it with his dialectics ie an investigation of truths in philosophy etc. by systematic reasoning.

"Socrates was the clown who got people to take him seriously: what really happened there?--" aka WTF Socrates?! (Twilight, 14)

Read about Socrates Section 11 and 12

"Reason" in language: oh, what a tricky old woman she is! I'm afraid we're not rid of God because we still believe in grammar…  (Twilight 21)

On Truth and Lying in a Non Moral Sense

--a touchstone for 20th century Deconstruction/Poststructuralism. Really for anyone ever who wondered if language and reality don't quite line up. Always a bit of ambiguity.

--Perhaps this is philosophical skepticism (Kant or Descartes. But even earlier pre Socratics like Pyrrho and Eastern philosophy.

--Truth as a comfortable lie.

--We the "clever animals [who] invented cognition"

--Human on earth "the most arrogant and most mendacious minute in the 'history of the world;"

-There have been ETERNITIES where the human intellect did not exist! Actually quite a humble philosophy. PULL DOWN THY VANITY via Pound

--The ideological target of this essay: the western commitment to seek fixed and solid truths. We are always under the influence of our own subjectivity, "truth" as such can never be found.

--"…[T]he intellect is human, and only its own possessor and progenitor regards it with such pathos, as if it housed the axis around which the entire world revolved." (874)

--illusion  as dream influences Freud (875)

--We only like pretty truth, pleasant truth

You want the truth?! You can't HANDle the truth!! We're not ready to let go of illusions. Truth could be painful. "If they will not content themselves with truth in the form of tautology, i.e. with empty husks, they will for ever exhange illusions for truth."

--"Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities?"

--Pure truth/"the thing in itself" is both impossible for language to grasp, but also undesirable. You don't even know you don't want it.

--Concepts are made by dropping what is individual and real. Plato's forms one of the earliest concepts in western philosophy.

"Like form, a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an 'x' which is inaccesible to us and indefinable by us." (878)

Emerson's influence on Nietzsche: "All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not."

Philosophy as a calling forth to find out who this thing you call yourself really is.

I think I have always found Nietzsche fun to read, as do many intelligent people (I think Kaufmann said this). You get that picture of the 15 year old with bad skin and no friends who reads Nietzsche for the first time and is like: Yes! Everything is stupid, and I have realized it and am now going to be cool and ironic about everything. I see the void now, no one else is authentically living. He’s been labeled a nihilist by people who haven’t read him. The great thing about his author’s not in Birth of Tragedy is that he realizes his own folly, as a kind of juvenile philosopher. It’s early work. He was too broody! That he learned to laugh in his later work is what is fun to read. I was thinking about your question Tim, would you rather be a nihilist or a hypocrite. Now my reading--you can correct all of this in just a sec if I’ve bungled it all--but my sense isn’t nihilism at all, or anyway it must be a qualified nihilism. Why did he hate Christianity. Because Christians are nihilists. Christians have seen this world and given up on it. They see it fallen and evil, and dismiss it for the real world to come. They don’t trust the senses anymore. The senses are all fallen, all subject to the devil in a way. They’ve lost human will. This is what he calls nihilism. He’s a hypocrite, but he revels in being a hypocrite because he can’t not be, and so to admit being a hypocrite is in some convoluted way to get out of it if only for a second or two. The will to a system is a lack of integrity. Nietzsche contradicts himself. I think a great way to understand his affinity for Emerson. Emerson understood that the Self is under constant, neverending revision. That the books you love today will not be the books you love tomorrow. That what you say today will be different tomorrow and this is what it means to philosophize. To try to find out what is the thing you call yourself. Philosophy with a tuning fork--sound out the discord.