A History of the World in 6 Glasses

A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Tom Standage

This was a really fun little history book that shows the development of human history through six beverages: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Coca-Cola. For a history book it really keeps the pages turning and would be a good read for just about anyone. It's not so lofty that only history nerds would like and understand it; but, it isn't so simple that those same nerds would turn their nose up at it.

Here are just some of my highlights from the book.

"To Neolithic drinkers, beer's ability to intoxicate and induce a state of altered consciousness seemed magical" (Standage, 19). - The obvious inference here is that beer is a gift from the gods, which played a central role in many ancient peoples' religions.

An interesting Egyptian myth that would be worth further study and possibly a short story:

"The Egyptians, for example, believed that beer was accidentally discovered by Osiris, the god of agriculture and king of the afterlife. One day he prepared a mixture of water and sprouted grain, but forgot about it and left it in the sun. He later returned to find the gruel had fermented, decided to drink it, and was so pleased with the result that he passed his knowledge on to humankind. (This tale seems to tally closely with the way beer was probably discovered in the stone age)." (Standage, 19).

It is better to be a beer drinker than a non-beer drinker.

"In other words, beer helped to make up for the decline in food quality as people took up farming, provided a safe form of liquid nourishment, and gave groups of beer-drinking farmers a comparative advantage over non-beer drinkers" (Standage, 22).

Philosophy of Religion and History of Religion: An interesting theory on how temples emerged to play a role in society:

"Keeping surplus food in the storehouse was one way to ward off future food shortages; ritual and religious activity, in which the gods were called upon to ensure a good harvest, was another. As these two activities became intertwined, deposits of surplus food came to be seen as offerings to the gods, and the storehouses became temples." (Standage, 22).

"The Mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer.
-Egyptian Proverb, c. 2200 BC."(Standage, 23)

The very definition of civilization is beer.

"The Mesopotamians regarded the consumption of bread and beer as one of the things that distinguished them from savages and made them fully human. Interestingly, this belief seems to echo beer's association with a settled, orderly lifestyle, rather than the haphazard existence of hunter-gatherers in prehistoric times" (Standage, 27).

Another Egyptian Myth worth retelling in short story form:

"One Egyptian tale even credits beer with saving humankind from destruction. Ra, the sun god, learned that humankind was plotting against him, and dispatched the goddess Hathor to exact punishment. But such was her ferocity that Ra feared there would soon be nobody left to worship him, and he took pity on humankind. He prepared a vast amount of beer - seven thousand jars of it, in some versions of the story - dyed it red to resemble blood, and spread it over the fields, where it shone like a vast mirror. Hathor paused to admire her reflection and then stooped to drink some of the mixture. She became intoxicated, fell asleep, and forgot about her bloody mission. Humankind was saved, and Hathor became the goddess of beer and brewing. Versions of this story have been found inscribed of Egyptian kings, including Tutankhamen, Seti I, and Ramses the Great" (Standage, 28-29).

"Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever"
-Aristophanes, Greek comic poet (c. 450-385 BCE)." (Standage, 43).

Plato's wine experiment and "fear drink" to test someone's character:

"Wine could be used in everyday life to reveal truth: It could expose the true nature of those drinking it. While he objected to the hedonistic reality of actual symposia, Plato saw no reason why the practice could not, in theory, be put to good use as a test of personality. Speaking through one of the characters in his book Laws, Plato argues that drinking with someone at a symposium is in fact the simplest, fastest, and most reliable test of someone's character" (Standage, 63-64).

"Baths, wine and sex ruin our bodies. But what makes life worth living except baths, wine and sex?
-Corpus Inscriptions VI, 15258" (Standage, 69).

Another short story that would be worth writing - This might be good as a story of disembodied heads relating their final moments on earth at a party in the afterlife:

"It is not often that choosing one wine over another is a matter of life or death. Yet that is what determined the fate of Marcus Antonius, a Roman politician and a renowned orator. In 87 BCE, he found himself on the wrong side of one of Rome's many interminable power struggles. Gains Marius, an elderly general, had seized power and was ruthlessly hunting down supporters of his rival, Sulla. Marcus Antonius sought refuge in the house of an associate of far lower social status, hoping that nobody would think of looking for him in such a poor man's house. His host, however, unwittingly gave him away by sending his servant out to buy wine worthy of such a distinguished guest. The servant went to the neighborhood wine shop and, after tasting what was on offer, asked for a far better and more expensive wine than usual. When the vintner asked why, the servant revealed the identity of his master's guest. The vintner went straight to Marius, who dispatched a handful of soldiers to kill Marcus Antonius. Yet having burst into his room, the soldiers could not bring themselves to kill him, such was the power of his oratory. Eventually, their commanding officer, who was waiting outside, went in to see what was happening. Denouncing his men as cowards, he drew his sword and beheaded Marcus Antonius himself" (Standage, 75).

A funny account of early English settlers to the New World:

"In 1613 a Spanish observer reported that the three hundred colonists had nothing but water to drink, 'which is contrary to the nature of the English - on account of which they all wish to return and would have done so if they had been at liberty'" (Standage, 113-114).

The Early American Drink:

Rum starts out as the colonial and American drink, but it is supplanted by whiskey with even George Washington getting in on the game. Jefferson however laments this as both a statesman, and a wine aficionado - calling wine, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey. "No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage" (Standage, 127).

A fascinating account of the origin of coffee

"One tells of an Ethiopian goatherd who noticed that is flock became particularly frisky after consuming the brownish purple cherries from a particular tree. He then tried eating them himself, noted their stimulating powers, and passed his discovery on to a local imam. The imam, in turn, devised a new way to prepare the berries, drying them and then boiling them in water to produce a hot drink, which he used to keep himself awake during overnight religious ceremonies. Another story tells of a man named Omar who was condemned to die of starvation in the desert outside Mocha, a city in Yemen, on the southwestern corner of the Arabian peninsula. A vision guided him to a coffee tree, whereupon he ate some of its berries. This gave him sufficient strength to return to Mocha, where his survival was taken as a sign that God had spared him in order to pass along to humankind knowledge of coffee, which then became a popular drink in Mocha" (Standage, 137).

Might be a funny short story:

Not everyone in the arabic world was thrilled with discovery of coffee. "Religious leaders invoked this rule in Mecca in June 1511, the earliest known of several attempts to ban the consumption of coffee. The local governor, a man named Kha'ir Beg, who was responsible for maintaining public morality, literally put coffee on trial. He convened a council of legal experts and placed the accused - a large vessel of coffee - before them. After discussion of its intoxicating effects, the council agreed with Kha'ir Beg that the sale and consumption of coffee should be prohibited... Within a few months, however, higher authorities in Cairo overturned Kha'ir Beg's ruling, and coffee was soon being openly consumed again. His authority undermined, Kha'ir Beg was replaced as governor the following year" (Standage, 138).

Another funny short story surrounding coffee, might be one reported in the Spectator (London paper) in 1712. 

"There was a fellow in town some years ago, who used to divert himself by telling a lye at Charing Cross in the morning at eight of the clock, and then following it through all parts of town until eight at night: at which time he came to a club of his friends, and diverted them with an account of what censure it had drawn at Will's in Covent Garden, how dangerous it was believed at Child's and what inference they drew from it with relation to stocks at Jonathon's" (Standage, 154).

This was a well-written and well-researched book that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Catching up with CS Lewis

I'm still not hitting the everyday goal with A Year With C.S. Lewis. But, I'm going to play catch up before I'm too far behind.

January 5

Lewis hits hard when he writes of people "playing with religion". I know that I'm saved, but I still like to tread the middle ground and dabble in religion. C.S. Lewis is not messing around and playing with religion. His theology is severe and rightfully so.

January 6

Lewis continues to pound against those that are playing with religion and only half-heartedly accepting God as some impersonal force. He sees those who look at God as something as a great mysterious force behind the universe trying to create a tame God that gives all the benefits of religion with none of its costs.

January 7

Christianity is not pantheistic in its worldview. "It thinks God made the world - that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again" (Lewis, 9). C.S. Lewis calls Christianity a 'fighting religion'. It has solid beliefs that one cannot play with, accepting the benefits without the cost or accepting them some of the time and not the other based on what is personally convenience. Christianity demands adhering to solid beliefs and what is more, those solid beliefs demand action on our part. Christianity is not some passive religion.

January 8

Christians can see past the basics of our religion. At first it seems to only be about morality and duty. But, as a Christian delves deeper into his or her faith they realize that there is something beyond this where moral beauty exists without ever having to think about it.

January 9

The Moral Law that God has put into the heads of man reveals more about God than does the universe in general. Listening to and becoming in tune with that innate idea of morality will reveal more and more about the nature of God.

January 10

Many people want a heavenly Grandfather rather than a heavenly Father. Once again, Lewis' faith demands correct belief and correct theology. We all (including Christians) want a grandfather in Heaven that smiles down with benevolence and hopes that a good time will be had by all. But, as Christians we must believe that God is Love and we know through his Word that He is our Heavenly Father and not some Heavenly Grandfather hoping that we will all get along all right. We need to correct our faith and force ourselves not to see God as such.

January 11

God is love and this means God is more than merely kindness. Kindness hopes that one will escape suffering and achieve happiness at any level. This is a weird form of contempt. One who is kind to animals will often kill animals so they avoid suffering. This is not the love of God. "If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense" (Lewis, 13).

Lewis reminds me in every single portion so far that faith in God is serious business. Yes, there is joy and happiness in God, but it isn't just warm fuzzies all day long. It is a serious relationship that one cannot simply just play at. I struggle with this. I play with the relationship and the religion.

January 12

Lewis again reminds us that God's love is not just Him trying to make us happy. It is a passionate love, a jealous love from the "consuming fire Himself". It is not something to be taken lightly.

January 14

"When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows more of Himself to some people than to others - not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be rejected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one" (Lewis, 16). There is a lot packed into that little section. First, it's a reminder that knowing God comes from Him, not from anything we are doing. Second, it reminds us that we must get ourselves into the right condition to receive the blessing of knowledge of God. He pours out his light like the sun pours out its light, but if we are dusty mirrors we won't reflect and absorb that light the way we were intended to.

January 15

A good point on the philosophy of religion - "If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed" (Lewis, 17).

"Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being" (Lewis, 17).

It is hard to wait on God. It is hard to be only responsive. It takes a submissiveness and a breaking of pride to admit that I must respond to God and not that God will respond to me. It takes humility that I sorely need. Grant me this humility so that I can achieve the highest activity I was made for - responding to you.

CS Lewis and the Limpets

Not a very good start - I've already missed two days of the 365 day devotional. Here are the make up days for the 2nd and 3rd.

On January 2nd's reading, Lewis imagines a mystical limpet in describing man. This limpet has some sort of direct experience with man and his followers gain from this mystical experience. But, the philosophers of the limpet race disconnect the mystical experience and give pure philosophical analysis of man. This is how we treat God if we're not careful. We disregard what we see as the primitive notion of God and follow some cold, intellectual model rather than the living, breathing God of Christianity.

We, as rational beings can only describe God negatively. He is not finite, he is not material, etc., etc. But, we as beings who have the possibility of intuiting God can experience the concrete realness of Him. By relying too much of our own rationality we lose the realness God offers to us. We are blinded by our own rationality. The mystical is necessary to truly experience God.

"As long as we remain Erudite Limpets we are forgetting that if no one had ever seen more of God than we, we should have no reason even to believe Him immaterial, immutable, impassible and all the rest of it. Even that negative knowledge which seems to us so enlightened is only a relic left over from the positive knowledge of better men - only the pattern which that heavenly wave left on the sand when it retreated" (Lewis, 6). Our reason as men does not lead us to the totality of God. But, our reason invites us to experience. "When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers, 'Go and look. This is not my job: it is a matter for the sense" (Lewis, 6). Lewis says it is the same with God. Reason cannot get us all the way; but, it is reason itself that says go and experience God. Mystical experience is a necessary function of a experiencing God.

Plato's aesthetics and religion

(Originally written November 7, 2016 in Book 26)

The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones

Chapter 5: Plato - The Special Sciences

Theory of Art

There is an eternal form "Beauty". Things are beautiful in proportion to their participation in the form beauty.

For Plato, order was beauty. "To the degree that any physical object possess order, it is beautiful (Jones, 192).

Mathematics, because of its orderliness is more beautiful than any object.

Natural objects are more beautiful than objects of art because natural objects are copies of the eternal form and objects of art are copies of copies (shadows of shadows).

The artist is a liar and a deceiver.

Plato treated art cognitively, but recognized the emotive and conative aspects as well. Thus he treated artists as cognitively inferior to scientists, but dangerous magicians for the power they held over people's emotions.

"Meanings can be communicated without words, by a kind of intellectual osmosis. In fact, this is the way all really important things are in life are communicated - not formally via lectures or books, but gradually over long periods of time" (Jones, 194). Plato used myth as a short cut to convey deep knowledge that would otherwise require a long-term relationship between teacher and pupil.

Art stands between two types of knowledge - the direct experiential knowledge and conceptual knowledge.

Religion

Plato often used myth to convey the deep truths of religion as they shortcut to teaching.

Plato argues certain aspects of the nature of God can be discovered via natural theology.
1. God is good and thus not the author of hurtful things
2. God is not the author of all things, not even the author of many things experienced by man because man experiences more evil than good
3. God does punish the wicked
4. God is unchangeable
5. God does not lie or make false representations of himself

Plato advocated a first-cause movement argument. This first cause is a self-mover. This self-mover is soul. The soul is more ancient than all other motions.

"The gods are good, yea, exceeding good" (Jones, 198).

"The gods exist, and that they are careful and that they are wholly incapable of being seduced to transgress justice" (Jones, 199).

Plato housed his religious views in the language of myth which he intended for readers to take seriously, but not literally.

Timaeus -
God is a creator
What God creates is the cosmos

Plato believed the universe is a purposive whole. The universe is well ordered and ordered for the best. It satisfied not merely our intellectual curiosity but also our moral demands.

Plato (opposite of Christianity) is more interested in the creation than the creator.

Plato's theology served two purposes:
1) The discoverable attributes of god shed light on the nature of the cosmos
2) A reminder of our limitations concerning our finite understandings

Plato's religion compared to Christianity

Plato had a profound impact on Christian theology because of similarities with Christianity.

But Plato's god is not an object of worship. His god is good, but not a loving Father.

Xenophanes

Xenophanes

The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones
1980

Like Heraclitus, Xenophanes attacked the old Greek theology, calling it immoral and untrue. He attacked its anthropomorphic qualities. His famous quote about the anthropomorphic qualities of Greek religion is as follows, "Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds" (Jones, 19).

Xenophanes, while attacking the old gods, was not atheistic. He had one God, which was neither like man in form or thought. While this seems to be a monotheistic notion, it was probably pantheistic like Heraclitus' religion.

The reason that the populace never took up the religions of Heraclitus or Xenophanes was that it was too abstract to replace the common religion. It didn't offer the necessary emotional connection to replace the old religion. It left a void.

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1972

-Xenophanes falls between Pythagoras and Heraclitus. Xenophanes references Pythagoras and Heraclitus references Xenophanes.
-Xenophanes was an Ionian but lived in Southern Italy
-He believed that all things were made of earth and water
-He believed in one God, unlike man in thought or form
-He mocked the Pythagorean theological notion of the transmigration of the soul
-He believed that any theological knowledge was impossible. Even if man happened to say something correct about God, it was by accident.

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

-Xenophanes was a peripatetic poet from Colophon in Ionia.
-Despite being a typical poet, writing on drink, love, war and games, he was considered a philosopher and the teacher of Parmenides
-wrote against Hesiod and Homer for their teachings about the gods
-Stobaeus, quotes Xenophanes stating that the gods did not reveal things to mortals, but through inquiry man makes discoveries
-Xenophanes criticized Homer and Hesiod for ascribing to the gods shameful and blameworthy things like theft and adultery
-Claimed that one and all is god
-believed that the one god governed everything by thought
-believed that nothing comes into being or is destroyed or changes
According to Hippolytus, Xenophanes said "All men are destroyed when the earth is carried down into the sea and turns into mud; then they begin to be born again. And this is how all the worlds begin" (Barnes, 47).

Notes on Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut

I finished Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut the other day, probably the first time I have finished a book by him. I think there was a time I picked up Slaughterhouse Five in the previous century but I'm not sure if I finished it. If I did, it left no lasting impact on me - which, speaks more to my maturity in the previous century than any thing Vonnegut did or did not do with his masterpiece. I enjoyed Timequake very much. I gave it a four-star on my goodreads account. I loved the cynicism and the style. I think it played a part in my short-story entitled The Trade, at least in the tone of the story. I didn't mean to copy his style but it definitely bled through my subconscious. But that is neither here nor there. These are some of the things I really liked about the book:

"Hooray for fireman!
Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.
Hooray for fireman" (Vonnegut, 7).

First, of this sentence is funny. Second, it points out the fact that as horrible as people can be, they have the capacity to be good, and even better than good.

"People so smart you can't believe it, and people so dumb you can't believe it. People so nice you can't believe it, and people so mean you can't believe it" (Vonnegut, 14).  I just really liked the double emphasis in this passage.

"He commented unfavorably on the camouflage suits our own generals wear nowadays on TV, when they describe blasting the bejesus out of some Third World country because of petroleum. 'I can't imagine,' he said, 'any part of the world where such garish pajamas would make a soldier less rather than more visible. We are evidently preparing.' he said, 'to fight World War Three in the midst of an enormous Spanish omelet" (Vonnegut, 27). That's just hysterical to me. Subversive, cynical and distrustful of the government, but hysterical.

This is a long passage, but it's a good one: "'God created the heaven and the earth,' the old, long out-of-print science fiction writer went on. 'And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn't say anything at first. But Satan began to worry about God when He said, let there be light and there was light. She had to wonder, What in the heck does he think he's doing? How far does he intend to go, and does he expect me to help him take care of all this crazy stuff? And then the shit really hit the fan. God made man and woman, beautiful little miniatures of Him and her and turned them loose to see what might become of them. The Garden of Eden' said Trout, 'might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games'" (Vonnegut, 29). A fascinating retelling of the Genesis account.

Chapter 14 might be my favorite chapter in the whole book. I won't quote the whole thing, but Trout's explanation of 'ting-a-ling' is hysterical and sad all at once. "It was nothing but a dirty joke, but this poor, sick man had come to believe it a parable about the awful blows that life had dealt him" (Vonnegut, 58). Ting-a-ling indeed.

"Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful" (Vonnegut, 121). Vonnegut, being a humanist recognizes some of the flaws that a purely naturalistic viewpoint has. He presents it in his gallows humor type of way, but he recognizes the flaws. The problem here is his pride. His pride in himself and his pride in the humans who can achieve happiness without religion. Somewhere else in the book he praises his ex-wife who died without losing faith. He seems genuinely happy about that. I'm not sure if he was mocking her or not. It felt a bit more sincere. But, earlier on this page he lets his feelings be known about religion by relating a story about Isaac Newton. "That Newton was advised by those who were his nominal supervisors to take time out of the hard truths of science to brush up on theology. I like to think they did this not because they were foolish, but to remind him of how comforting and encouraging the make-believe of religion can be for common folk" (Vonnegut, 121). First, I reject out of hand the false dichotomy set up between religion and science. Second, I find this sad. Lastly, I sense a bit of elitism from Vonnegut when dealing with the common folk who still hold religious sentiments. I disagree with his philosophy of religion.

While I disagree with Vonnegut on his philosophy of religion, I found myself nodding my head to his amusing and simplified aesthetic theory. "I was pleased to reply with an epistle which was frankly vengeful, since he and Father had screwed me out of a liberal arts college education: 'Dear Brother: This is almost like telling you about the birds and the bees,' I began. 'There are many good people who are beneficially stimulated by some, but not all, manmade arrangements of colors and shapes on flat surfaces, essentially nonsense. You yourself are gratified by some music, arrangements of noises, and again essentially nonsense. If I were to kick a bucket down the cellar stairs, and then say to you that the racket I had made was philosophically on a par with The Magic Flute, this would not be the beginning of a long and upsetting debate. An utterly satisfactory and complete response on your part would be, 'I like what Mozart did, and I hate what the bucket did'. Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why afterward. You don't have to say anything. You are a justly revered experimentalist, dear Brother. If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, 'art or not,' you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know what happens. I went on: 'People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?" (Vonnegut, 167-168). Art as a conversation between two or more people. A simplified definition of what art is. I can dig it.

Overall, I loved this book. I can't wait to pick up another Vonnegut book in the near future.

Notes from The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

More. I need more. I need more Douglas Adams. While not as good as the Hitchhiker's Guide, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was a wonderful and fantastical read. I haven't read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency yet, but I listened to the BBC radio version of it. I think I liked this one more, although I reserve the right to switch once I've actually read the book. That being said, I find that although I love reading his books, the endings always seem to leave me unsatisfied. I don't know if that is because they end so abruptly and neatly and that is somehow unsatisfying or if it is merely that I don't want the story to end. But, as with Hitchhiker's Guide, there are a number of things I want to write down to use later in my own writing.

I love the way Adams describes ordinary things and makes them monstrous. Some of the best descriptions in this book are about airports, pizza and windshield wipers. For instance, the book opens with the line "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'" (Adams, 1). And then the notion continues on about the purposefulness of the architect in creating a certain aesthetic quality about every airport, "They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not" (Adams, 1). I love it. On the first page of the book, he has made the airport a villain and exposed the whole of airport architecture as a sinister plot to shield the airlines from their unfortunate record of departing on time.

As for the pizza notion, he described some of the best nostalgia for an ex-pat and it really struck a chord with me. Its truth and humor are inextricable. "She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them to. That was the only real pizza (Adams, 3). I think this simple notion of nostalgia would play somewhere well in Future Modern Ancient Greeks. Take something that seems mundane, like flipping channels on a TV or the emergency broadcast system interrupting an exciting live sporting event at exactly the inopportune moment and describe it this way.

The final mundane and ordinary that Adams turns into the extraordinary and imaginative that I wish to highlight is the description of windshield wipers on Dirk's elderly Jaguar. "Furthermore it came on to rain a little, which should have helped... Dirk turned on the car wipers which grumbled because they didn't have quite enough rain to wipe away, so he turned them off again. Rain quickly speckled the windscreen. He turned on the wipers again, but they still refused to feel that the exercise was worthwhile, and scraped and squeaked in protest" (Adams, 157).

Adams, as a "radical atheist" obviously has a slightly different take on religion than I do, but his skewering of it is still a fascinating read. Again, describing the absolute horrors of airport existence for travelers, Adams notes "This, she reflected, in a continuation of her earlier train of thought, was presumably how religions got started, and must be the reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts. They know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance" (Adams, 5). Another little section reflects Adams (and a fundamental atheistic value) that religion was created by man for man, but in his style, he turns it into a farce. "If she could have been transported to where she might see her secretive patient enthroned, warrior father of the warrior Gods of Asgard, she would not have been surprised. That is not quite true, in fact. She would have been startled quite out of her wits. But she would at least have recognised that it was consistent with the qualities she perceived in him, once she had recovered from the shock of discovering that virtually everything the human race had ever chosen to believe in was true. Or that it continued to be true long after the human race particularly needed it to be true any more" (Adams, 62).

There's a lot in that last bit. First, it assumes that religion is man-made and that the gods are anthropomorphic. Second, because Adams is writing comedy it throws out there that what humans believe is true becomes true. That's an interesting philosophical notion about rationalism in and of itself. But, the consequence of this is that the gods continue to exist even after humanity has no longer deemed it necessary for them to exist. That's a funny concept. But, also the fact that Sister Bailey would have been startled out of her wits to see the existence of such beings is an interesting indictment of faith.

Moving on to other things, the description of how Dirk Gently wakes up had me laughing out loud. "The sheets and blankets were pulled up tightly around his head, but from somewhere half-way down the length of the bed a hand slowly emerged from under the bedclothes and its fingers felt their way in little tapping movements along the floor. Working from experience, they neatly circumvented a bowl of something very nasty that had been sitting there since Michaelmas, and eventually happened upon a half-empty pack of untipped Gauloises and a box of matches. The fingers shook a crumpled white tube free of the pack, seized it and the box of matches, and then started to poke a way through the sheets tangled together at the top of the bed, like a magician prodding at a handkerchief from which he intends to release a flock of doves. The cigarette was at last inserted into the hole. The cigarette was lit. For a while the bed itself appeared to be smoking the cigarette in great heaving drags. It coughed long, loud and shudderingly and then began to breathe in a more measured rhythm. In this way, Dirk Gently achieved consciousness" (Adams, 21). What an introduction of a character. Magnificent.

Lastly, upon describing how the airport accident occurred I found something that might work well as an homage to Adams in the Future Modern Ancient Greeks. A politician described the accident as the airport check-in desk was "fundamentally fed up with being where it was". I thought that the traveler and the doctor in Future Modern Ancient Greeks could fit this description as to how their bodies and souls got separated. And, since the soul is the form of the body the separation caused the body to lose its shape and become mushy mass. It also would explain why the traveler looked an awful lot like a human stencil before the reconciliation.

Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides & Proverbs

(Originally Written February 11, 2014 on scrap paper now lost)

History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
Book I - Ancient Philosophy
Chapter 4 - Heraclitus

Xenophanes taught that gods were made up through anthropomorphic tendencies. He believed in only one God, but that God was not like man in either thought or form.

He also believed knowledge of God and gods to be impossible, "even if a man should chance to say something utterly right, still himself knows it not. There is nowhere anything but guessing (Russell, 40).

Xenophanes was a rationalist who disliked the mystical elements of Pythagorean thought.

Heraclitus lived around 511 BC in Ephesus. He was a mystic, believing the fundamental substance to be fire. He believed that everything was born by something else's death.

Heraclitus had a very negative view of mankind. He believed it was only force that compelled man to be good.

He believed war was not only a fact of life, but necessary to maintain existence. War brings death. Death brings life to the better things.

He was ascetic and proud of his asceticism.

The soul was made of fire and water. The better the soul, the more fire it had. The "dryer" the soul, the better it was.

He believed the world to be uncreated and eternal.

He believed that everything was in flux.

The constant flux produced strife. Strife produced conflict and that conflict proved to create the balance that exists in life. The flux had the effect of creating the cosmic justice that kept everything in its place and from one thing or one man from attaining too much power.

"The way of man has no wisdom, but that of God has. The wisest man is an ape to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man" (Russell, 44).

Heraclitus' metaphysical notion of the endless flux is the stated by Plato to be: nothing ever is, everything is becoming. Aristotle described it as 'nothing steadfastly is'.

The doctrine of perpetual flux is a horrifying thing to men who seek something permanent. Science and philosophy have been trying to escape Heraclitus for thousands of years.

Chapter V - Parmenides

Parmenides countered Heraclitus' notion that everything is always changing by stating nothing ever changes.

Parmenides lived around 450 BC in southern Italy.

Parmenides taught that both thought and language require objects outside of themselves. You can't think of an object if that object doesn't exist.

Parmenides believed that in order for words to have meaning they must be attached to an object. If that object existed in the past it maintains some existence, otherwise we could not use the word meaningfully.

Chapter VI - Empedocles

Empedocles lived around 440 BC in Sicily. He claimed to be a god.

Empedocles was an old combination of science, religion and philosophy. His science and religion were often times at odds with one another.

Empedocles discovered properties of air and centrifugal force by experiment. He had a scientific belief in an odd version of survival of the fittest type of evolutionary theory.

Empedocles believed not in one primordial substance, but four: earth, fire, wind and water. However, love and strife were on equal footing with the aforementioned substances. Love brought about the combination of the elements. Strife brought about the dissolution of the elements.

Love and strife fought one another. There were periods of time when one mastered the other. Chance and necessity brought about the changes in the universe, not some overarching purpose.

Chapter VII - Athens in relation to culture

The greatness of Athens began when they defeated the Persians at Marathon (490 BC) and defeated Xerxes (480 BC).

Athens grew rich and prosperous after this under the guidance of Pericles until about 430 BC.

During this time Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished.

Proverbs 8

8:9 - "To the discerning all of them are right. They are faultless to those who have knowledge".

The wisdom of the Lord is known to the discerning. It is faultless to those who have knowledge. THen do the unbelieving have no knowledge, no discernment?

Help me to seek you that I may find your wisdom. Help me to seek you God.

Proverbs 9

9:10 - "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding"

Proverbs 10

"The way of the Lord is a refuge for the righteouss"

Lord, may you be my refuge. Put in me a desire to seek you always. Light my heart on fire so that it burns for you. Help me to turn from folly and wickedness. Keep my paths straight. Bless this request my God, my King.

The Milesians & Pythagorus according to Russell

(Originally written February 6, 2014 on scrap paper)

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
Book I
Chapter II - The Milesian School

Thales, circa 585 BC, believed that water was the original substance out of which all other things were formed, magnets had a soul because they moved iron and that all things were full of gods.

Anaximander, born circa 610 BC, slightly younger than Thales, also believed that all things came from an original substance. Unlike Thales, who thought this was water, Anaximander taught that the original substance was an eternal, infinite substance.

Anaximander believed that this original substance was transformed into empirical substances (i.e. fire, water, etc.) and then transformed back again. Each of the empirically observable substances wished to enlarge itself at the expense of others, but a cosmic justice superseded the elements and kept them in check.

Justice - a profound Greek belief, taught that each thing had an eternally fixed proportion and that when things began to overstep their bounds a correction would take place. This justice bound both the natural and supernatural, man and god alike. However, this justice, though being supreme over man and god, was not a supreme god.

Anaximander taught a sort of evolutionary theory. "Man, like every other animal, was descended from fishes" (Russell, 27). Unlike Darwinian reasoning though, Anaximander used a rational argument to support his theory. The length of human infancy is too long for it to have been the original state; otherwise, man would have not survived.

Anaximenes, the third of the Milesians, held that the fundamental substance was air.

The soul is air. Fire is rarefied air. Water is condensed air. Very condensed air is earth.

The Milesian school was, though crude, very scientific in nature. There was limited religious nature in it.

Miletus was a cultural melting pot. Greek religion and thought mixed with successful commercial activity brought in by both Egyptian and Babylonian and fused with the thinking. This blending of culture provided the spark for philosophical thinking to begin.

Chapter III - Pythagorus

"Pythagorus was intellectually one of the most important men that ever lived, both when he was wise and when he was unwise" (Russell, 29).

Pythagorus combined mysticism and mathematics. He was a reformer of Orphic traditions, itself a reformed worship of Bacchus. In this way, Pythagorus took an already mystical transformation of Bacchic rites and made it even more intellectually bent.

Pythagorus put more stock in the otherworldly, relegated the physical world to the illusionary. He taught the transmigration of souls and taught that the soul was immortal.

The body is a tomb of the soul. However, suicide is not an option without permission of God.

There are three classes of men: those who buy and sell (the lowest), the participants, like those at the Olympics and the spectators who simply think on the doings of the participants. These are the philosophers and by doing this, they can achieve release from the wheel of birth.

In Pythagorean thought, because the contemplative life was the achievement of all that is worth achievement, mathematics took on a sort of ecstatic context. Discovery in mathematics was sort of an intoxicating experience - a oneness with god.

Pythagorus embodies two diverging views of religion. Personal religion is derived from ecstasy - union with God; theology is derived from mathematics. Theology is derived from mathematics as it takes the shape of geometry. Geometry (Euclidian) starts with axioms deemed to be self-evident and then derives theorems from deductive reasoning. Theology proceeds in a similar fashion. Pythagorus embodied both personal religion (mystical nature) and theology (a system based on deductive reasoning).

Russell seems to be doing a bit of this geometry when he states "But for him (Pythagorus), Christians would not have thought of Christ as the Word; but for him, theologians would not have sought a logical proof of God and immortality. But, in him all this is implicit. How it became explicit will appear" (Russell, 37). And now from the axiom that Pythagorus began the long tradition of mathematical theology (an axiom deemed self-evident by Russell we shall see the theorems...)

Kingdom Triangle - JP Moreland

(Originally Written August 15, 2009 in the Journal)

Kingdom Triangle
JP Moreland
Zondervan Publishing, 2007

Religion cannot be a hobby.

Moreland pushes for Christians to have a deeper understanding of Christianity so that we can speak of it intelligently.

A secular worldview is thin, lacking the framework to make sense of value. An ethical monotheistic worldview is thick. In ethical monotheistic views the value of human beings is intrinsic. When we hear of "people of the week" in naturalistic settings they are borrowing from a thick worldview to comprehend it. They have to abandon their worldview to understand what they are showing.

Scientific Naturalism:
1. A theory of limited knowledge
2. A creation story based on the atomic theory of matter and evolutionary biology.
3. A physical view of reality, all that exists is physical or depends upon physical existence.

These three work together. A limited theory of knowledge justifies a creation story based on the atomic theory of matter and biology. And, the biology creation story justifies the physical view of reality.

What is real in a naturalist worldview depends on three things.
1. It is knowable in their theory of knowledge.
2. Its origin can be accounted for in evolution
3. It can be described by the language of chemistry and physics

Two forms of scienticism:
Strong - scientific knowledge exhausts what can be known
Weak - other knowledge can be had (i.e. ethics) but scientific knowledge is vastly superior

This is self-defeating as the definition does not meet its own standards

The natural view of reality is reductionism. It reduces things to identify with it and eliminates what it cannot reduce.

Physicalism (the reduction of everything to physical) however fails to account for what the world is as it is now, consider consciousness, secondary qualities, normative properties and the entire evolutionary framework (the Big Bang and natural laws are taken as brute fact).

Naturalism is doubly determined, the state of the universe is fixed by laws and the actions of things are set by their atomic and subatomic parts.

Life loses all meaning in this view of reality.

To explain the meaning of life a naturalist approaches it in three flawed ways:
1. Superficially: life is meaningless
2. Circular: the meaning of life is to find the meaning of life
3. Repugnant: hedonistic, life is meaningful so long as it is enjoyed

Six keys to a rich, objective meaning of life:

1. Free Will to ground responsibility, creativity, praise and blame
-William Provine stated, "Free will as traditionally conceived... simply does not exist. There is no way the evolutionary process as correctly conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make choices." Many times naturalism employs utilitarian justification in ethics that can lead to horrific moral implications.

2. Real intrinsic value that can be known and factored into our lives.
-In order for objective meaning to exist value must have three things true of it: There are things that are intrinsically good, things that must be ends of themselves. Two, human beings must be capable of knowing what is intrinsically valuable and what is not. Three, human beings, their products, actions and relationships must be intrinsically valuable. The naturalist view denies, necessarily, any intrinsic value. But they call morals and ethics either subjective or another simple evolutionary event.

3. The ability to acknowledge the reality of evil, provide an explanation of its origin and offer hope that it is ultimately redeemed and defeated.
-Naturalism fails to explain the reality of evil and is hopeless in offering hope in the midst of it.

4. Human beings must have equally intrinsic value simply as such.

5. There must be teleology and purpose in the cosmos relevant to human life.
-The Aristotelian notion of final cause is obsolete in naturalism. Living without teleology is utterly existentially repugnant. Nothing makes sense without teleology. Language itself implies teleology.

6. There must be a satisfying answer to the question, "Why should I be moral?"

The Artist and His Time (1953)

(Originally written October 14, 2008 in The Journal)

The Artist and His Time (1953) by Albert Camus

The artist accepts his time as it is. He minds his own business.

Word, though perverted, provisionally keep their meaning.

Marxism is religious in nature.

The end of history cannot have any definable significance to us in our present condition. It is only knowable by faith.

Artists have no need to interfere in the affairs of the world, but men do. The artist however does not need to sacrifice his nature to some social preaching.

The ivory tower and the social church are two points of the resignation of life.

The artist must simultaneously serve suffering and beauty.

The artist is to give voice to the sorrows and joys of all.

Art justifies itself by proving it is no one's enemy.

Art gives form, not content to justice and liberty.
Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Helen's Exile (1948)

(Originally Written October 14, 2008 in the Journal)

Helen's Exile (1948) by Albert Camus

Despair can be known through the stifling effect of Beauty. Tragedy reaches its fulfillment in stifling beauty.

Greek thought negated nothing, but practiced balance. It never went to extremes. Modern thought negates whatever it does not glorify. It is extreme. It glorifies one thing and leads to the eventual total ruin of reason.

The execution of God has left man only to think of power and history. It has left man to not think of nature, but only what man can or has built.

The artist wishes to remake the world. He aims at freedom. Beauty cannot exist apart from men nor can man exist apart from beauty.

We cannot live hating ourselves. We may dislike our era, but this is our only time.

Admit of ignorance, reject fanaticism, accept the limits of this world and of man, this is the Greek reasoning.

The Minotaur (1939)

(Originally written October 14, 2008 in the Journal)

The Minotaur, by Albert Camus

The citizens of Oran have accepted their fate - being eaten by the Minotaur (boredom) and yet thrive.

Spiritual hunger is fed by the bread of memory. Spiritual hunger (future) is fed by memory (past).

The mind profits from occasionally focusing on something of no importance.

Stone lasts longer than the men who use it.

"Moving things about is the work of men; one must choose doing that or nothing" (Camus)

The world says one thing only; at first this excites man, then bores him. Regardless the world wins. Men die, the world continues on.

The absurd life cannot be shared (explained); it must be lived (experienced).

When the mind recollects itself it is like the Mount of Olives. The sleeping of Apostles is approved, not reproved.

There is a drive in man to be nothingness - but this is futile. One can be neither nothingness nor absolute.

Summer in Algiers (1936)

(Originally Written October 14, 2008 in the Journal)

Summer in Algiers (1936)

The openness and abundance of Algiers gives pleasure without remedy and joy without hope. It gives man his splendor and his misery.

Truth carries with it a bitterness.

It is ridiculous not to live by the body. To deny its impulses is to deny it life. Rather, drink when you are thirsty, bed a woman you desire, marry a woman you love and afterwards (as Camus' friend Vincent) say I feel better.

Algiers offers two contrasting pleasures; the abundance of the beach and the silence of the city. The key here is experiencing it, of living it.

Life, as joys, in Algiers are merciless and sudden. Life is not to be built up, but to be burned up.

Virtue is meaningless, but that does not mean that men lack principles.

There is nothing sacred in death; it is abhorred.

"The contrary of a civilized nation is a creative nation" (Camus)

The greatness of man as culture is one cast fully in the present (no past/future) and without myth or solace.

Relative truths are the only truths that stir individual men.

Spirituality is solely confined to this lifetime. Eternity is solely what survives us.

What exalts life increases the absurdity of life.

To sin is to sin against life, which is to elude life in the hope of another one.

Hope is resignation, to live is not to resign oneself.

Notes on Sisyphus (The Myth of Sisyphus)

(Originally Written October 14, 2008 in the Journal)

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Sisyphus is an absurd hero. He has contempt for the gods and a passion for life.

His punishment was eternal labor to a futile end. "This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth" (Camus).

Sisyphus had to push a rock up a hill only to have the rock roll back down when it reached the top. Camus admires Sisyphus on the way down the hill. He leaves the heights and goes back to the valley. He marches to his torment and in that moment, he is stronger than his rock.

The walk to the rock from the top is his conscious moment. To be conscious is to overcome the torment.

Scorn your fate and you overcome the depth of it.

The absurd man is the master of his days.

Appendix

(Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka)

The human heart only labels as fate that which crushes it.

It is through humility that hope enters in. (These are detestable to Camus. The philosophers who leap by deifying the absurd, i.e. Kierkegaard, Kafka, or Chestov).

To the philosophers like Kierkegaard, Kafka and Chestov the absurd of their existence assures them of a supernatural reality. The absurd leads them to God.

The Absurd man seeks what is true, not what is universal

Notes on the Absurd Creation (The Myth of Sisyphus)

(Originally written October 13, 2008 in the Journal)

Notes on Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus

Absurd Creation

To create is to live doubly. They know to begin with and work to enrich and enlarge through examination of what they know.

The absurd man concerns himself with experiencing and describing - not explaining and solving.

Does the Christian explain and solve? Does he do this as an apologist or as a believer? Or does the Christian resolve the conflict through faith (creating a paradox out of an inconsistency) and merely experience and describe?

The universe is attractive, not for its depth but for its diversity (quantity not quality). Explanation is futile, but sensation (experience) remains.

"The idea of an art detached from its creator is not only outmoded, it is false... the artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work" (Camus)

"The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete" (Camus)

Art is carnal.

Thought provokes art but the creation of art is the repudiation of the provoking thought.

Art cannot be the end, the meaning, or the consolation of life.

Art is bad when it tries to explain existence in total. Art is good when it is a slice of experience.

"If the world were clear, art would not exist" and "expression begins where thought ends".

To think is to create a world (or to limit one's world, which is the same thing)

Camus desires to liberate his universe of phantoms and focus on flesh-and-blood truths, of which he cannot deny (This sounds a bit Cartesian).

The heart of man is full of stubborn hope.

Kirilov

In Dostoevsky, existence is either illusionary or eternal.

Dostoevsky is convinced that life is an utter absurdity for anyone without faith in immortality.

The independence which Kirilov gains (Dostoevsky's The Possessed) is the independence of serving God, of being god himself - this is a painful independence for him.

Ivan Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov), like the great assassain of God, Nietzsche end their lives in madness. Camus praises this: "But this is a risk worth running, and faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask - what does that prove?" (Camus).

All is well, everything is permitted, nothing is hateful, dreadful freedom - these are the mantras of the absurd mind.

Dostoevsky, like Kierkegaard, follows out the absurd logic only to metaphysically reverse at the end (there is a God, necessarily). Thus, hope in the eternal, an abandonment of the temporal.

Dostoevsky's works deal with the absurd problem, but are not absurd works. His works offer a reply (the leap); whereas, true absurd works offer descriptions, not replies.

"It is possible to be Christian and absurd. There are examples of Christians who do not believe in a future life" (Camus). [What? Who? This is a contradiction. The entire thrust of Christianity is the eternal life].

Ephemeral creation

The art and artist are inseparable. The entire body of work by the artist is his one creation. Each piece complements, chastises, or corrects one another. (Experience is emphasized in this, a lifetime of experience infused in a lifetime of work).

"From death, for instance, they (the art) derive their definitive significance. At the moment of death, the succession of his works is but a collection of failures. But if those failures all have the same resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own conditions to make the air echo with the sterile secret he possesses" (Camus).

Art finds its importance in the demands it makes on the creator and the opportunity it affords him of getting closer to his naked self.

Diversity is the home of art.

There is no barrier between being and appearing.

The illusion of another world binds man; hope binds man.

Notes on the Absurd Man (B) (The Myth of Sisyphus)

(Originally Written October 12, 2008 in the Journal)

Notes on Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and other essays

The Absurd Man

The absurd man is assured of temporally limited freedom.

The absurd man lives his existence in his lifetime.

The absurd man does nothing for the eternal.

The absurd man lives by courage and reasoning.

He is assured of his temporally limited freedom. (Contrast with the Christian who is assured of his absolute freedom in Christ).

"The absurd does not liberate, it binds" (Camus)

"In the absurd world the value of a notion or a life is measured by its sterility" (Camus)

Don Juanism

Genius is intelligence that knows its frontiers.

Those who live on hope are called either a weakling, an idealist or a saint - each insulting.

Ethic is quantitative for the absurd man, the saint sees ethic qualitatively.

Regret is another form of hope.

Love, like that of a passionate wife or a mother necessarily closes its heart to the world. Those who turn away from all personal life through a great love are certainly enriched, but the object of that great love becomes impoverished.

Love can only be defined subjectively based on our experiences. "I do not have the right to cover all those experiences with the same name" (Camus).

Love is noble when it recognizes its short-lived and exceptional nature.

Again, the absurd man quantifies his experiences of love and doesn't base it on any qualitative experience (This is what Camus calls Don Juanism). [This is a truly detestable notion]

A fate is not a punishment - a natural consequence of a consciously chosen act is not a punishment. The absurd man chooses his direction and accepts the reality of his choice.

It is the absurd way to knowledge without illusion.

Drama

The thoughtless man continues to hasten from hope to hope.

There is a profound nobility in indifference. Indifference directs us to the most important concern: the immediate.

"Preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each much play his part" (Camus). Obviously, the absurd man chooses oneself over losing oneself in any way - especially to something atemporal or eternal. (The absurd man lives in time, his adventure lasts from birth until death).

Conquest

The conqueror can thoroughly define what they believe. Beware of those who say 'I know this too well to express it' because they either do not know it or were too lazy to pursue it. (This is a condemnation of mysticism).

Given the choice between history or eternal Camus chooses history because it is certain and he likes certainties.

A proud heart cannot compromise. "There is God or time, that cross or this sword. This world has a higher meaning that transcends its worries, or nothing is true but those worries. One must live with time and die with it, or else elude it for a greater life. I know that one can compromise and live in this world while believing in the eternal. That is called accepting. But I loathe this term and want all or nothing" (Camus).

Flesh is struggle, but flesh is my only certainty.

Man is his own end; he is his only end.

Life is both the conquerors' destitution and wealth. It is in this tension that he thrives, exalting and crushing man, the individual.

True riches are riches because they are transitory.

Knowing the limits constitutes the freedom, the liberation.

"The truths that come within my scope can be touched with the hand" (Camus)

Pity is the only acceptable form of compassion for the absurd man.

"Being deprived of hope is not despairing" (Camus)

The absurd, godless world is full of thinking men without hope.

Notes on An Absurd Reasoning & Absurd Freedom (The Myth of Sisyphus)

(Originally Written October 10, 2008 in the Journal)

Notes on Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and other essays

Myth of Sisyphus

An Absurd Reasoning

"Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to human, stamping it with his real" (Camus)

This is pure subjectivism - all thought is anthropomorphic. A thought then, What of Imago Dei? If we, created in the image of God reflect on the world out of this sense aren't we reflecting on the world from a universal standpoint, albeit imperfectly due to our limitations?

Camus is an absolute empiricist. I feel my heart, it exists. I feel the world, I touch it. Therefore, it exists. "There ends all my knowledge, the rest is construction" (Camus). But he states even his own heart is and will remain indefinable to him.

The gap between certainty of existence and defining the content of existence is so wide it cannot be filled.

The irrational (existence's paradoxes and inconsistencies), the human nostalgia (our deepest desire for unity familiarity, and obsession with clarity), and the absurd (the abyss we stare at when we attempt of true knowledge and find none) converge to create in our minds a desert which we ought not attempt to escape by suicide (literal or the act of giving up thought or reason) or attempt to transcend by hope (a process of leaving knowledge to enter into pure construction). This is the point that demands action - suicide or recovery.

Philosophical suicide is the abdication of duty in pursuing knowledge either by giving up or by giving into hope.

The absurd is "the divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints" (Camus).

The absurd is to be both impossible and contradictory.

The absurd is a disproportion between intentions and reality of consequences. "The absurd, which is a metaphysical state of the conscious man does not lead to God. Perhaps the notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking statement: the absurd is sin without God" (Camus).

Absurdity springs from comparison. It is essentially a divorce; it does not lie within the two things being compared but in the actual confrontation of the two things. The absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in the meeting of the two.

The absurd is the fundamental truth - the one thing that cannot be disposed of.

Now, it is the absurd that crushes man - the force that drives man to a broken point. The thing that crushes us we must fight to preserve. The absurd is an unceasing struggle - which implies "a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest)" (Camus).

So Camus' way is thus:

1. Break from the monotony of life to discover life is meaningless.
2. This shock demands action, either suicide or recovery
3. The recovery is acceptance of the absurd as ceaseless struggle
4. Ceaseless struggle brings to the mind three realizations
  - There is no hope
  - There is continual rejection
  - We must be dissatisfied

The existentialists (Chestov, Kierkegaard and Jaspers) came to the truth of the absurd and offered their reaction to it as escape. They did so out of forced hope - creating religion.

The absurd man, the existentialist, recognizes the absurd and the limited value of reason - but, rather than abandoning reason for religion, he in his awareness, simply knows there is no longer a place for hope.

The absurd man seeks to live with his ailments, while the man who has seen the absurd and turned to religion has become frantic and frenzied, seeking to be cured.

Kierkegaard views despair not as a fact, but as a state of existence - the state of sin. Now, Kierkegaard in his final dealings with the absurd sacrificed the intellect (reason) to the belief in God for he sacrificed his pride (sin) to God. Camus recognizes the limitations of reason, but states that if this is pride he sees no sufficient cause to sacrifice it.

The absurd man, the absurd mind seeks what is true at all costs. It seeks what is true, not what is desirable. If Kierkegaard warns that there is nothing but despair then the absurd man takes truth and despair.

Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl) - the making of structures of consciousness and the phenomena which appears in acts of consciousness - objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Husserl used this to provide a firm basis for all human knowledge.

Phenomenology seeks to describe actual experience - not explain the world.

Phenomenology claims truths but that there is no Truth.

Husserl's method was "the intention":
1. Negate classical reasoning (thinking as a unifying/familiarizing procedure). Thinking is actually a relearning how to see again and to direct consciousness.
2. Directing consciousness illuminates every little truth.
3. It isolates events from one another to represent an incoherent-ness in experience; thus, every isolated object of consciousness is its own "magical appearance".

The absurd spirit wishes to enumerate experience, not transcend it.

Husserl's methodology would be acceptable to the absurd man if it simply stopped at the enumeration of experience, but Husserl jumps from the psychological truth of his theory to the metaphysical. Thus, he reintroduces a rationalism akin to Plato. Unlike Kierkegaard who returns to God - Husserl returns to a form of truth as polytheism - flattening all hierarchy and making all truth equal little gods.

The difference between Husserl's abstract god and the dazzling God of Kierkegaard is minimal and only one on how to arrive at the conclusion. Kierkegaard, like other religious philosophers deified the absurd and called it God. The abstract philosophers like Husserl rationalized the absurd to the point of creating standard reasons. They began at the nausea of recognizing the absurd but go to one extreme (rationalizing/abstract) or irrationalizing (deifying/religious escapism).

Nausea is looking into the face of the absurd. There are then three paths to follow. Religion is the path of deifying the absurd. It is an escape or a reconciliation to avoid the divorce. The abstract is the pat of rationalizing the absurd. It is an escape or a reconciliation to avoid the divorce. The absurd man does neither. He takes the divorce. This is the path of acceptance.

The absurd man knows that existence is unreasonable - neither too rational nor too irrational. He accepts the limits of reason and does not give it limitless power as Husserl or abandon it as sin (pride) like Kierkegaard.

Absurd Freedom

What is known (that what is certain) cannot be denied or rejected. One can negate all, but one's desire for unity. One can refute all the world but chaos.

One can only understand a thing in human terms (thus cannot transcend). "What I touch, what resists me - that is what I understand" (Camus).

The break - the divorce of mind (reason) and the world is caused by awareness of it.

The absurd man lives in the certainty of this divorce and does nothing except on the basis of certain knowledge. The only certainty is the absurd and thus he cannot escape it in good conscious through religion. He hears that this is the sin of pride but he does not know what sin is.

Life is better lived because it does not have a meaning.

Hope in transcendence (religion) is to escape the reality of the absurd - to abolish the intellect is to elude, not solve the problem.

The absurd man lives in constant revolt against the world and against his desire for unity (escape/hope). It is in this revolt that gives life its value.

Camus really loves the pride of man. He focuses all of his energy on praising the absurd man and abhors any type of degradation.

To the absurd man the notion of the metaphysical freedom or determinism is not important - the absurd man is only certain of his own freedom.

Camus denies the paradox of God and freedom has been solved or laid to waste, it remains. Either god is all-powerful and the author of all evil or we are free and God is not all-powerful. But, none of this is important because we only experience our own freedom and the eradication of hope and future makes us more free.

The absurd tells me this: there is no future. Freedom in the classical sense is based on hope, hope based on future. Our hope in the future actually makes us slaves to the conventions of thinking.

The Ideal of the absurd man: to live with a constantly conscious soul in a ceaseless procession of presents (no pasts/no future)/

Three consequences of absurd reasoning:
1. Revolt
2. Freedom
3. The ideal (passion)

Notes on Tolstoy, What is Art? Ch. 16 (B)

(Originally Written March 7, 2008 in the Journal)

What is Art?
Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 16

History has shown that only religion has aided in the progress of humanity.

"The great evil is not that men do not know God, but they have set up instead of God, that which is not God" (Maude, 235). So it is with art today.

"Christian perception gave another, a new direction to all human feelings, and therefore completely altered both the content and significance of art" (Maude, 237).

"The essence of the Christian perception consists in the recognition by every man of his sonship to God and of the consequent union of men with God and with one another" (Maude, 238).

True art has the characteristic of uniting all men, not just a few. Non-Christian art may unite a few people, but in uniting those few they divide them from the many. Patriotic art is a prime example of this. Church art is another example. Good Christian art must transmit a feeling to all men regardless of their demographics.

Only two feelings unite all men:

1. Feeling stemming from the universal sonship of God and universal brotherhood.
2. Feelings of common life accessible to all men.

Only two objects for art can be considered good:

1. That which flows from love of God and the relationship of God to man and man to man.
2. That which flows from the most basic feelings felt by every human being.

The first is religious art; the second is universal art.

Religious art is manifested best in words, but can also be manifested in sculpture and painting. Universal art is best manifested in music, but can be manifested in dance, architecture, words, painting and sculpture as well.

The overburdening of the viewer with details of the producer blocks the transmission of feelings. The simpler, the better. In true art, feelings are expressed without superfluous extras.

The more detailed a story becomes, the more provincial it becomes and thus, the less universal it is.

In music, the melody is accessible to every one, but when extremely complex harmonies are added, the melody is lost and the piece loses universality.

Whether I like a thing or not, if it fails to be religious or universal art, I must consider it bad art. Only by judging first if a work transmits feelings or not and then deciding whether the thing unites or divides people can we decide if the work is real or counterfeit and if it is real, we can then decide if it is good or bad.

Art is spiritual food.

Notes on Tolstoy, What is Art? Chapter 10

(Originally Written Mar. 2, 2008 in the Journal)

When a person creates art for all mankind then he strives to make it intelligible to all men, but when one is hired by a single person he strives only to make it intelligible to that man. The latter is enormously easier and by doing so makes the piece either obscure or utterly incomprehensible to outsiders; and thus, is not art. This practice has become so rampant that cloudiness, obscurity and indefiniteness of expression have actually become esteemend.

Baudelaire banished eloquence, passion and truth from poetry. Mallarmé said that the charm of poetry is that one must guess its meaning.

The artist of this age relies on the teachings of Wagner and Nietzsche claiming they need not make their work comprehensible to the vulgar.

Baudelaire transmits feelings that are evil and base. He purposefully shrouds them in obscurity. Even if one works to comprehend the meaning, one is not rewarded, but perverted by the work. Verlaine, when he decides to actually make his work comprehensible produces works that are bade in both form and content. Both Baudelaire and Verlaine lacked sincerity and simplicity but possessed, abundantly so, artificiality, forced originality and self-assurance. How these two became leading artists shows how art had ceased to be important in their society and how art sunk to mere amusement.

The subject matter of this 'high art' has become severely limited so they invent new, poor forms to mold their subject matter.

Mallarmé and Maeterlinck produced poetry with absolutely no meaning and it is probably this utter meaninglessness that led them to being published. "To avoid the reproach of having selected the worst verses, I have copied out of each volume whatever poem happened to stand on page twenty-eight" (Maude, 169). That's funny!!

Millions and millions of working hours have been spent on the production of these unintelligible works of high art in turning them into books and plays, etc.

Painting far surpasses writing in its obscurity, especially of the Symbolists, Impressionists, and Neo-Impressionists. Drama has likewise become obscure and meaningless. In the music today, all a aman can do in transmitting his feelings can transmit the weariness of his incomprehensible song. Novels are too absolutely unintelligible in both form and substance.

Some problems with judging art in Tolstoy's way: If I have a right to say that the masses do not understand my art it is because they are underdeveloped then those who fancy the new art have the right to say I do not understand their art because I am underdeveloped. If I have the right to say that me and my cronies can say that the new art is bad because it says nothing then the masses who do not understand my art (and are more mass then my crowd) can call my art bad because it says nothing to them.

Tolstoy states that as a man of the early part of the century does not have the authority or right to say that the new art is bad, but only that it is incomprehensible. The consolation that Tolstoy then has is that what he considers to be art is incomprehensible to far fewer than the new art is. The only conclusion that then can be made is that as art becomes more and more exclusive it becomes more and more incomprehensible to an ever increasing number of people

Art has been subjected to this situation that eventually only the producer will understand his production gand then he will say I understand my art and all who don't are worse because of their incomprehension... 

Any assertion that states art can be good and yet incomprehensible to large swathes of the masses is completely unjust, "Perverted art may not please the majority of men, but good art always pleases everyone" (Maude, 176).

Some men claim that art that is difficult to understand is good art and can be understood by all by viewing that same incomprehensible art over and over again. In reality though this does not educate anyone. It only habituates them to it. One can often habituate themselves to many bad things: bad food, alcohol, tobacco and opium. The same is true with art; one can habituate themselves to bad art.

The difference between art and speech is that there are no language barriers. I do not need to know a specific language to understand why a piece is a great piece of artwork. "Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone" (Maude, 177).

If something does not move many people it is not because these people lack understanding but that thing is either bad art, or not art at all.

Art is differentiated from all other mental activities in that there is no prerequisite knowledge necessary. Art infects the observer, whatever his place of development is.

Now, good art may be incomprehensible to some people but that is because those individuals have been perverted and are destitute of all religion. (Religion is man's relation to God.)