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.

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:

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.

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

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

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 ...