Thursday 27 March 2008

Bucolic days


I was slightly incredulous as I sat outside in the sun yesterday and heard bird song and the distant sound of the sea. There was no wind, nor is there any today, there is blue sky, scudding clouds, no doubt it won't last. Daniel thinks we can get out to the Holm of Papay tomorrow morning ... but actually strong gusts are forecast and the wind will be coming from the South East.
When I am trying to work out what I want to write I find myself afflicted by a lot of physical tension, expressed in the need to pace and walk around, do things. Digging the garden, now, that calms me down, releases the mind, helps me to think. But there's only so much digging that one can reasonably do without drawing attention to oneself, as it were ...
I was sorry to read that the Scottish cardinal had been ill and has had a pacemaker fitted. I wonder how much it affected his recent remarks.

Tuesday 25 March 2008

Ben Bulben















There is no reason for posting this except that I was thinking about it after finding the photograph on my computer. This was as close as I got and as much as I saw of it, on the Yeats trail to Drumcliffe Church ...

Should philosophy really only be practised as a form of poetry? But what is poetry in that case? Not the merely decorative word, anyway. Maybe that is the connection with Ben Bulben, and my sense of deracination in the cultural fragmentation between intellect and feeling, poetry and philosophy: how to get them back together again ...

It is snowing up here, a bit of a blizzard at the moment. The big skies remind me of Norfolk. You can see the storm clouds building up in the distance and approaching at leisure. Couldn't see the loch a few minutes ago ....


Here it is late afternoon:


Saturday 22 March 2008

The Cardinal's Chair


I fear that the Scottish Cardinal makes himself ridiculous by invoking Frankenstein and talking about the embryology bill as a 'monstrous attack on human rights'. If I wanted to think up an example of 'a monstrous attack on human rights' I would think of Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or ethnic cleansing in Serbia, or what is happening in Darfur. The Cardinal speaks in a tone of voice that somehow doesn't have the gravity that it might have if we were indeed talking about Sudan, there is something in it that doesn't ring quite true, partly just because he expresses himself in an emotional tone that is borrowed from our reaction to such outrages. In the present case the rest of us just don't see it, in a way that isn't true about our reaction to Darfur, and that is worrying. The emotion in the Cardinal's voice depends upon a particular movement of thought. The natural reaction we feel to violations of human dignity is in this case dependent upon a metaphysical belief, that this embryo is a human being, etc. The Welsh Archbishop talks in similar terms, about how we cannot properly think of the human being as a commodity, and of course we are inclined to agree with the general proposition: it is just the application that is so doubtful, this little cluster of cells. Well, it is not just a little cluster of cells, he will say, but the human being at the earliest stage of its development ... And yet, it seems to me much more obviously a tiny cluster of cells that has the potential under the right conditions, none of which are going to be met, of developing into a human being. There is a doctrine about the arrival (infusion) of the human soul in all this. Aquinas thought that the soul arrived much later, at the 'quickening', forty days, was it, for men, and later for women? On the other hand, critics of the Catholic position argue very badly and play into the Cardinal's hands when they say that these procedures will save lives and help treat people with terrible diseases ... that is only a consideration when we have already established that the experiments are not wrong. They are not wrong in my opinion: a judgment that is not based on the fact that they will save lives. Simply appealing to the benefits of the research is not enough. No one is going to say that it's okay to carry out vivisection on human beings because it will help us in the treatment of terrible diseases. The original act must be morally justified first, and then we can talk about its benefits.

The issue of conscience is independent of all this, though I haven't grasped yet why Gordon Brown has a problem with a free vote so I'm not in a position to say that there should be. If you vote according to your conscience (or against it) you have to accept the consequences.

Friday 21 March 2008

Calling this Friday good


At school we should have been on Retreat for these days of Holy Week, a time to read 'spiritual books' and to listen to sermons and meditations provided by visiting priests, all culminating in the glory of the Easter Vigil, starting with the Chapel in darkness and the celebrant singing out Lumen Christi as the Pascal Candle is lit and the flame passed on from candle to candle. But Christ before Pilate is what always stays in my mind. It is the confrontation between the spiritual and the temporal, and its tension depends upon our knowing that the spiritual will be eclipsed by the temporal, which cannot countenance it, or, rather, does not register it, does not comprehend it because it is not part of its world, it cannot be heard, and its fundamental questions (jesting Pilate) are dismissed with confidence and authority. And there they are, exposed and not exposed in that very confidence and authority. The one is defined in opposition to the other, the spiritual in opposition to the temporal, an opposition and also and therefore a possibility, but only a bare possibility of the heart. What we call the temporal cannot be redeemed by the spiritual but can only be transformed into it.

Well, something can be registered, and then dismissed, but there is also the moment between the one and the other, of recognition, of uneasiness, a faintest echo, something recalled, and this is a kind of spoor for the tracker to follow, a footprint in the mud.

If this is the phenomenology then this is also the epistemological imperative for any philosopher who wants to start talking about 'spirituality' ...

Gusts

Strong winds today, gusts of up to 7omph, so no boat this morning to bring my new PC, but no hurry (am I getting acclimatised?) No mail yesterday, not because of winds but no passengers therefore no plane ... despite the winds the plane has just been this morning and heads off to Kirkwall through banks of rain cloud. Waves are tossed high above the far side of the Holm, a slightly scary sight.

I am trying to get my head around a Wittgensteinian saying: Philosophie dϋrfte man eigentlich nur dichten (Philosophy should really be written as poetry), which appeals to me very strongly, but what does it mean? How can you say that something appeals to you and then ask what it means .... well, you just can, it carries a sense of something vital ... it also reminds me of a comment by a young John Stuart Mill: 'Now one thing not useless to do would be to ... make those who are not poets understand that poetry is higher than logic, and that the union of the two is philosophy' (Reeves p 68), So, Mill, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, of course ...

Impossible to walk into the NNE winds which blow you back whence you came, it reminds me of the west cliffs of Caldy forty years ago when you could lean back on the wind and it would support you like a wall.

The surface of the loch looks the colour of dark, wet straw

Wednesday 19 March 2008


I went out this afternoon, partly to walk off the cake consumed at the coffee morning. The weather was mild and sunny, not too much wind, fulmars sitting around on the banks above the shore, the tide out, a little spray of rain ... a silvery landscape.

I'm looking forward to meeting friends for a big breakfast in Edinburgh in early April









Sunday 16 March 2008


I went for a walk this morning, down to the Knap of Howar and then south along the cliffs trying to clear my head. I have started work again on a paper that I need to finish quite soon for a collection on teaching philosophy.



How one teaches philosophy is partly a function of what philosophy is, or, to put it less baldly, the way one teaches it must be a function of one's conception of philosophy, (and these conceptions are of course contested). But it is also partly a function of what is teachable to those who wish to be taught.



By which I mean that since it is not a matter of 'knowledge transfer', which would be, in Kierkegaardian terms, a matter of 'direct communication', then one must have regard to what a pupil is ready to receive, and even then the communication, to continue with Kierkegaard, would have to be 'indirect'. But our institutions of higher education are adapted entirely now to 'knowledge transfer' and the idea of what a pupil is 'ready to receive' would need to be spelled out in terms of a concept of 'progression' which is entirely alien to the rhythms of 'indirect communication'. Oh dear ...














Friday 14 March 2008

I have just been overwhelmed by listening to Monteverdi's Quinto Libro de Madrigali, I suppose I was very tired after travelling and my physical body was relaxed but it was all so exquisite as though my spiritual body were in the hands of a skilled lover with the lightest touch ...

For a while I have felt uneasy about talk of life having a 'meaning' and I noticed a similar expression being used in an extract from an interview with Tom Stoppard in the Independent: the 'search for meaning'. It seems to me that the search for meaning is already futile (rather like the search for happiness) because meaning (like happiness) looks after itself. The image that occurs to me comes from teaching the other day in a basement room, during the recent storms affecting the North West coast. I had been talking about the metaphor invoked in the notion of 'spirit', that of 'breath' or 'wind', and as I was doing so the wind could be heard whistling around the building, not very loud but quite constant, and you feel it under the door and through the extractor fan in the window, and there we were in our bunker and there was the wind, making its presence felt, something heard, outside the bunker, and we started to listen to the sound it was making, and it seemed that this just was the metaphor of wind, something heard, a sense of something that lies outside our normal awareness ... something that tells us that there is indeed an outside. What is interesting is not that someone finds a meaning in life, it is what they find gives it meaning, and that is more important than the talk of meaning itself.

Persians

The tray-clatter rattle of the pistol shots
Raucous throb of engine, sob of gears

As martyr Motahari falls

And Khomeini weeps into his handkerchief


Oh, how imperturbably Hussein
Awaits his fate unbowed

Pure figure in white funeral shroud
Marks the martial music of hoof beats,

The stallion’s beauty, then serenely meets
Black Shemr’s calmly unresisted blow

Dark sword thrust against the light, its foe


Above the obedient bustle of the crowds
Corpses in rotting suits for shrouds

Bowed heads confessing they have sinned
Sway in meek allegiance to the wind



Eine wichtige Ansage
Für die Damen

An important announcement
For the ladies

It is in your own interest
Says the calm Lufthansa pilot

As we descend towards the terminal
In the small concealing hours

(And he speaks in the same
Courteous but neutral tone

—Courteous, neutral, and, above all
Normalising tone

Which numbs the shock of alien routine
—The same neutral tone, as I say

That he uses to inform us
Of local time, ground temperature

And weather conditions, conventional
Registers, international measures

Of physical, cultural and political facts
It is only prudent to remember)

It is in your own interest
(Notice how a simple emphasis on ‘own’

Anticipates futile protest)
That you follow the dress code

Of the Islamic Republic
And ensure

That your heads are covered

Do I hear a rustling

A sullen frisson
Of resentment among the women

—Is this girl weeping in fury, her father
Urgently consoling next to me—

As headscarves
Are pulled out of handbags

To cover and conceal
All that forbidden glory now

Of coiffured and tinted hair
Of bare throat, and nape and shoulder

And does that elegant pair
Of immaculately robed and turbaned

Ayatollahs, with their trim beards
Who had sat quietly there, in Economy Class

With their wives and daughters
In the nullifying black

Of drab hijab, the chador
Tented round their persons, smile

That under the jurisdiction of the state
And against the disturbances of disordered flesh

A pious man can regulate
So much beguiling female hair

With a modest square of cloth
Fixed in place by vigilante wrath


Your whisper in Isfahan
Is pillow soft and close

As a lover’s kiss that blows
On the ear; I wish as sweet

My whisper back, tender rose
We know the perfumed silence

In the Persian garden waits
For others, as we bend to hear

The heart’s whisper that brings us near
And the scented air our senses sates

Light pulses between extended finger tips
And the smiles of eyes and untouched lips


Only here could I be so calm
In such a garden, where the clamour

Of unquiet flesh and intellect
Is hushed before this glamour

Offered to the senses, air
Dense with scent of stock and roses

In Isfahan, a city like a shrine
Where incense rises, lingers, stills

Mind and body with a healing wine
That disintoxicates our ills

Where well being finds the rhythm of its walk
Strolling in this garden deep in talk

That each to other the soul discloses.


A sweating judge who does not sin
Tightens and secures the noose

Around the neck of a terrified, defiant girl
Whose sexual behaviour was too loose

For the morals of a country town
Whose men offered her a martyr’s crown

To open her legs and let them in


What they call now an iconic picture
Was flashed around the world

And noticed briefly at the breakfast table
A reckless unpremeditated gesture

By the furious youth in the headband
Raising aloft, not as a trophy

But an indictment—a standard, the colours
In the field, the vivid blood-stained shirt

Removed from the body of a fallen friend
Smashed and trampled at the protest rally

Uncontrolled gaolers now hasten his end
The pitilessly exacting fate

When you shame the religion of the State
In the stench of the prison cells, the injured

Animal cries, whimpering
Of the fouled and huddled body

The vigorous bright flash
Of righteous anger extinguished

The fiery flower that blooms
Only in such ransacked gardens plucked

Crushed and discarded, defeated
The brilliant moment rendered vain

No deliverance here, no vindication
Certainly no reward, only annulment,

And the formal contradiction
Of a martyrdom without witnesses

Maybe in that unprepared for crisis
He believed a good man can’t be harmed

And that in this surge of power his life was charmed
How can he not now in his ordeal of leisure

Think it all but futility and waste
Out of a rash act done in stupid haste

How could he hold to any other measure


I needed to see the scene
Of Khomeini weeping

To recall how light and dark
Are latticed like shadows mottled

On a sunlit summer wall, not spread
In blinding Manichaean wholes

All light and darkness at their poles
Of too bright day and too dark night

—As down the centre of this street
In noon density of light and shade

Their lines of demarcation meet


Oh these grave and mirthless mullahs
They have, after all, failed to see

Something slips their gaze:
The unforgiving searchlight of their minds

They do not see
Which sweeps the prison ground and blinds

The fugitive souls its cold beam betrays
So I weep for that ancestor of theirs

The old reflective mullah with his stick
A resolute, well-tempered man

Bowed and half-blind
Paces timelessly outside the city walls

And his calm and measured walk
God’s mercy and eternity recalls

Don’t they see how too immaculately
Their robes are laundered

There are no streaks of sweat and dirt
No weariness or work

To soil their garments with despair
Or hope, when so much certitude

Is theirs to command
And dispense, and expect

Like Princes of the Church
Who walk in assurance of respect

—in a walk, as in a face,
so much revealed

so much effort to conceal—

You walk—with the careful dignity
Of prelates it is imprudent to deride—

As though the strict tempo of your self-control
Could serve as metronome for a nation’s soul


Yes, priests, in black gowns, binding of desire

The shadowed lane winding through the trees
With shafts of sunlight through the stained glass leaves

Amidst the wreck of a demolish’d world

Where I wandered through the dereliction
Climbed the stairs to find an old master's room

Where he kept a meagre fire in the grate,
And we sat and read the German poets

Careless of time, the distant bell ignored:
Darkness used to hang in the corridor

I would feel my way down years of darkness
And fumble for the handle of his door

But now the room is doorless, and unsafe,
Light and rain through the ceiling, rotten floors,

Smashed windows, peeling walls, no books, no fire,
The spirit gone from its habitation



This was the world, its order acted out
By priests vigorous with authority

Once, and these old men, dressed in their vestments,
They have stood their ground, kept the faith, are strong

Still as the old faith of our fathers dies
With the dying close of old Faber's hymn

The sun shines in Orkney and in Qom

Good to be back here and to have talked to friendly and welcoming people at Kirkwall airport, the Islander swooping down over blue water and yellow sand in Moclett Bay, the loch beyond it, then sight of the Holm.



Philosophers rather than philosopher kings, says Mill. A ghastly version of the latter's arbitrary power is found in Iran, which has been holding parliamentary elections. I remember reading some undergraduate essays on Aristiotle's 'mixed polity' and realising with a shock that this is exactly what Iran has had since the Revolution. It is not surprising that the Shia should take such a course since there is a tradition of reverence for the Philosopher. Shia saints have reported their dreams about conversation with Aristotle (see Roy Mottahedeh's impressive The Mantle of the Prophet). Anyway, the mixed polity is precisely a democratic parliament overseen by a small group of the great and the good (the council of guardians) who have a power of veto over proposed legislation. As in the last elections, this body has disqualified reformists from standing on the grounds that they are insufficiently 'Islamic' so the whole thing is skewed by the resulting dominance of conservatives.

Monday 10 March 2008

An apocalyptic mood

An apocalyptic mood in the media in the last few days and weeks; James Lovelock gives us twenty years before inevitable disaster, but he looks on the bright side and recalls the virtues of the war-time spirit. He envisages desertification in Europe and environmental migration into our overcrowded island, drought in Australia and Africa, rising sea levels threatening coastal populations in Asia, along with water shortages elsewhere. Meanwhile EU foreign policy officials warn of tensions in the Arctic over mineral resources between Russia and the West. Then there is the high price of wheat, explained by poor harvests and the increasing demand for grain-intensive meat in developing countries, scarce resources, then, and the ruthless pursuit of control ... It reminds me once again of the prescient last sentence of this remark of Kant's:

"It is only from Providence that man anticipates the education of the human race, taking the species as a whole ... Only from Providence does he expect his species to tend to the civil constitution it envisages, which is to be based on the principle of freedom but at the same time on the principle of constraint in accordance with law. That is, he expects it from a wisdom that is not his, but is yet the Idea of his own reason, an Idea that is impotent (by his own fault). This education from above is salutary, but harsh and stern; nature works it out by great hardships, to the extent of nearly destroying the whole race."

'An Idea that is impotent (by his own fault)': so what are the conditions in which Ideas gain potency, what is the nature of the fault and how is it to be overcome?

It reminds me also of Mill's remark that society needs philosophers (but not philosopher-kings), presumably because philosophers (thinkers) are at least capable of giving expression to ideas and, perhaps, keeping them before the public mind.

'Are at least capable ...' and yet there is a prior impotence of thought which consists in the failure to express and formulate ideas in the first place, an impotence brought about by the absence of the conditions under which thinking and the formation of Ideas can occur at all. I feel this rather personally at the moment since thinking and writing have hardly been possible for me for almost half a year. It is partly a matter of a series of viruses, but also the expenditure of energy on 'time-consuming' and routine tasks, on tasks that have become routine because of the new atmosphere of institutional anxiety within higher education. (I sometimes laugh when I read the motto of my own place of work: haec otia fovent studia: but I like to be reminded that the word for business in Latin is 'neg-otium, non-leisure). The trouble is that this kind of work leaves little energy for philosophy and is profoundly boring. It is a form of emasculation, to stay with the sexual metaphor, a form of social control: do not give them time to think.

The anxiety starts with the thought that our activities must be transparent and that we must be accountable to scrutiny, and then draws as a logical conclusion an obligation to be accountable and transparent in these very specific ways ... and always the promise that in the future there will be a 'lighter touch'. Anyway, although I am ranting, it has its effects, a paralysis of creative thought because there is too much traffic. too much chatter, too much business in the mind. It is almost as though I need early retirement in order to gain the freedom to think and write. Perhaps I need a few weeks in Orkney. I'm off there at the end of the week and hope to write up a couple of papers as well as plant some potatoes ...





Wednesday 5 March 2008

A possibility that had seemed enticing but had then closed down opens up again, and I am mildly disturbed by involuntary thoughts, hopes, imaginary scenarios, calculations ... involuntary and automatic, I suppose, to be swatted away, but interesting how they arise ... and how they subside. One has to ride them, like high winds that will blow themselves out. Such thoughts can of course be completely ruthless, psychopathic even, and some people can be terrified of this aspect of themselves (but think of successful politicians). Perhaps the point of the psychopath is that they are not in possession of countervailing estimations of their calculations. I am sure I am not alone in the swift ruthlessness of my own instinctive thinking when some opportunity or situation arises ... lightning fast to see advantage ... nor alone in being able to override this automatism from an ethical perspective. And then there is a distinction between wishes and wants.

The phrase 'calculative thinking' comes to mind. it's a phrase with a negative gloss in the writing of many of my Wittgensteinian colleagues, perhaps because they assume that calculation is amoral. But everything depends on the terms within which the calculations are conducted, what else ....

But all this has made me think also about the focus of my published writing. Sometimes it seems to be just badly focused because, as I am inclined to think, I am aware of too many audiences that I feel I need to please or satisfy. Is it better simply to have one audience, though? That seems unlikely, because the audiences indicate how many-aspected reality is, to be seen from many perspectives if it is to be seen adequately.

But my friend Tony says that context is all since it determines the centre from which one writes and, indeed, one would probably write differently perched on a rock in the Atlantic, which is what I propose to do, so let us see ...