Memoir, Appearance, and Reality

Saturday

---

I‘ve just finished listening to Augusten Burrough’s memoir of his father, A Wolf at the Table. It is pretty gripping stuff. It is, in a way, more an experience than a book. The author’s ability to reproduce the minutiae of childhood gives the book a realism and believability that many memoirs lack. And, despite of, or perhaps because of, the book’s horrific description of his childhood, it has resonated with readers. I am but one of millions to share the author’s impressions of his childhood.

Because of the spectacular character of the account of the horrors of his childhood, the book has inevitably drawn criticism from those who doubt the events took place as described in the book. The author has an interesting comment about this on his web page:

To be a journalist with a major American newspaper or magazine, you have to have an A-list college education. And to get into that A-list college, you had to do very well in the right high school. So the chances are, you were not being fucked up the ass at age twelve by a pedophile. The facts of my life are generally questioned by extremely privileged and well-educated people who, more likely than not, learned most of what they know about life’s dangerous, shocking and sometimes unbelievable underbelly from books, television and the occasional Quentin Tarrantino film. The reason my books continue to sell, despite frequently being dismissed as “unbelievable,” is because the people who read my books recognize the truth that is in them. They know the scent. They have smelled it. The very details the media view with such suspicion are the same details that prove to my reader, this guy was there. I remember that, too.

I have no reason to doubt the author’s memories, and no reason to believe them other than the author’s apparent veracity. Certainly the temporal details of the memoir gave it a feeling of authenticity to me, as the author is close to my age and we thus experienced formative years in the context of the same popular culture.

The author, who now goes by the name of Augusten Burroughs, was born Christopher Robison to Margaret Robison and John G. Robison. He has an older brother, John Elder Robison, who interestingly has also written a memoir of his early years, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s, though the latter has not the sensational character of his more famous brother’s memoirs. Burrough’s other memoirs of his life have been incredibly successful, and his Running with Scissors was made into an A-list film. However marginal the author’s beginnings, he has the ear of the establishment at present as a consequence of his literary success.

The success of Burroughs’ books have not gone unnoticed by those who have appeared in his works. He has been sued for Running with Scissors, and his mother, so devastatingly portrayed in that book, has been interviewed. Since we know from A Wolf at the Table that his father has already passed away, there will be no interviews with his father.

It is remarkable in a sense that one of the most horrific villains in the contemporary memoir genre should be a professor of philosophy, as was John Robison. If you search on the name, you will find several references to Mr. Robison serving on committees that reviewed doctoral theses in philosophy. One of Robison’s best friends (according to accounts on the internet) was Edmund Gettier. Gettier, while not known to the wider public, is a sensation within philosophy for his eponymously named paradox. It could almost be said that the Gettier paradox is the second half of the twentieth century what the Russell paradox was to the first half of twentieth century philosophy. This schematic comparison also points out an interesting contrast: Russell’s paradox is essentially logical; Gettier’s paradox is essentially linguistic.

The Gettier paradox stems from the definition of knowledge as justified true belief. Thus I part company right at the beginning, because I would never define knowledge as justified true belief. Aquinas defined knowledge and belief in contradistinction to each other, and while I am nothing of a Thomist, I do agree with Aquinas on this point: once something is known, it can no longer be an object of belief. But many contemporary philosophers do define knowledge as justified true belief, and thus the Gettier paradox thrives.

The problem, the paradox, that Gettier pointed out with knowledge defined in terms of justified true belief is that there are cases of belief that are both true and justified but in which there is a profound disconnect between the truth and the justification. Here’s how Blackwell’s reference online describes it:

Since Plato’s Theaetetus, propositional knowledge has been standardly defined as justified true belief, whose analysis is as follows: A knows P if and only if (1) p is true, (2) A believes P, and (3) A is justified in believing P. This traditional tripartite analysis is challenged by Gettier in a paper entitled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” (Analysis, 1963). Gettier constructs counter-examples to this definition. One of them is as follows. Smith applied for the same job as Jones. He believes that Jones will get the job and also that Jones has ten coins in his pocket. He is thus justified in deducing the belief that the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. As it turns out, Smith himself gets the job and he happens to have ten coins in his pocket. Thus the belief that the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket is true, and Smith is justified in believing it. But he does not know it. It shows that the traditional analysis of knowledge is problematic, for A does not know P even though all three conditions are met. Gettier’s problem has caused a long-standing debate about the nature of propositional knowledge and has changed the course of epistemology to a considerable extent.

Here’s another example, I think due to Bertrand Russell, that pre-dates Gettier’s formulation: suppose you have a watch that is stopped at noon. If you look at your watch exactly at noon, and come to the conclusion that it is noon, then you have a Gettier paradox. Your belief is both true and justified, but it isn’t what we would really like to call knowledge. From so simple a beginning has followed an entire philosophical vocabulary of non-defeasibility conditions and other arcana in the attempt to explicate the paradox.

As I mentioned above, I reject the idea of defining knowledge in terms of justified true belief. However, if I were to do so, it seems to me that one obvious strategy would be to insist upon some kind of robust connection between the truth and the justification, such that the truth follows from the justification and the justification follows from the truth: in other words, a relation of mutual implication.

The Gettier problem ought to be seen in the context of a whole class of problems that have emerged from the logical and linguistic analysis of scientific knowledge. The Scientific Revolution began on the basis of a faith in the intrinsic comprehensibility of nature. It was only in the twentieth century that philosophical inquiry began to catch up with the explosive growth in scientific knowledge. Philosophy of science began to become systematic, and many interesting problems emerged. In addition to the aforementioned Russell paradox and the Gettier paradox, there are many paradoxes of inductive reasoning. We should not be surprised by the paradoxes that have been thrown up by the subtlety and sophistication of contemporary scientific knowledge, because science is predicated upon a distinction of appearance and reality. In this sense, science is the empirical parallel of the metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality that extends from Plato to F. H. Bradley and beyond.

When we take experience seriously, whether metaphysically or empirically, and try to get to the bottom of things, we find ourselves confronted by equally serious problems. One can’t get serious about knowledge without running into serious problems. And a memoir such as Burroughs’ A Wolf at the Table poses many such problems. Burroughs himself presents the dichotomy of appearance and reality in his father’s behavior, and makes of it something sinister. While colleagues of the elder John Robison, who was chair of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Massachusetts, have praised him in statements since A Wolf at the Table was released, Edmund Gettier, who reportedly knew him for 45 years, said of John Robison that the latter “…puzzled me in a way. He was my best friend. We spent hours and hours together and yet I knew nothing about his home life.”

Perhaps every man is a mystery, and some more than others. Of those men who have left contradictory accounts, or have had contradictory accounts left of them, the mystery deepens and, as we say, the plot thickens.

. . . . .

Deselective Exaptation

Thursday

---

This illustration of exaptation only considers proselective exaptations, specifically the exaptation of a fin for a limb that allowed for the colonization of the land, which opened up great possibilities.

Biology online defines an exaptation thus: “An exaptation is a biological adaptation where the biological function currently performed by the adaptation was not the function performed while the adaptation evolved under earlier pressures of natural selection.” I have written about exaptation several times in Social Exaptation, Exaptation of the Law, and several other posts. Yesterday another aspect of exaptation occurred to me last night.

I have also previously discussed the distinction between proselection and deselection, which are the two ways in which natural selection does its selecting: by selecting for a given trait, individual, or species or selecting against a given trait, individual, or species. When exaptation is discussed it is always (so far as my experience extends, which isn’t that far) in terms of proselection. Exaptation is employed to explain structures that do not seem to be straight-forward adaptations that incrementally transformed structures along a continuum of development.

What occurred to me yesterday was the possibility of deselective exaptation, that is to say, an adaptation where the biological function currently performed by the adaptation was not the function performed while the adaptation evolved under earlier pressures of natural selection, though acting against the interests of the organism (or its fitness to its environment) rather than for the interests of the organism.

The examples of deselective exaptation that occurred to me are all instances of behavioral adaptations, but it is standard fare in evolutionary theory to recognize the role of behavior as no less significant than actual physical structures of the organism. The most obvious example is the moth’s attraction to a candle flame.

Another example of deselective adaptation may be the way in which many species of animal cross roads. Cats will wait on the side of the road as an oncoming car approaches, only to dash across at the last moment. Squirrels will change their mind part way across the road and turn back. Deer will usually keep going in the same direction, but will sometimes become transfixed by headlights and not move at all. All of these behaviors result in deaths that would otherwise be avoidable through different behaviors.

It is difficult for animals to avoid ingesting plastics when they are pervasively present throughout the biosphere, but an animal that has an aversion to plastic is more likely to survive and thus to pass along its genetic heritage.

The class of behaviors that result in animals consuming pollutants and garbage, or becoming entangled in plastic wrappers or old fishing nets, or dolphins and turtles being trapped in fishing nets in current use, are not so clear cut at the case of the moth and the candle flame, though it is clear that behavioral changes could result in the avoidance of such dangers. A change in animal behavior that involved a aversion to plastics and similar dangers would constitute what I called industrial selection in Salmon and Industrial Selection.

Perhaps one of the clearest cases of deselective exaptation is that of baby turtles that hatch out from their nests in the sand and, instead of running toward the shoreline, attracted by the celestial illumination, run inland, toward the brighter lights of civilization. In some areas this unfortunate adaptation has significantly impacted sea turtle populations.

. . . . .

Skepticism as Critique of Knowledge

Wednesday

---

Some weeks ago in A Note on Skepticism I wrote, “Rigorously critical thinking requires an intellectual framework, a framework that must employ abstract concepts and principles, and any intellectual framework is vulnerable to nihilistic skepticism. Thus the best thinking may well be rejected by the same skeptical instinct that rejects the worse thinking.” I remain very interested in the misuses of skepticism both in contemporary philosophy and in ordinary experience. I believe that the misapplication and misunderstanding of skepticism, as well as a failure to make the appropriate distinctions, has compromised contemporary intellectual life.

The oft-conflated distinction that I have in mind is that between skepticism based upon ignorance and skepticism based upon knowledge. Skepticism based upon ignorance questions everything because it cannot distinguish valid knowledge from any pretense to knowledge. The skeptic who — implicitly or explicitly — bases his argument upon a presumption to ignorance is egalitarian in his rejection of all knowledge. Now, the presumption of ignorance is so close to the Socratic presumption that I know that I know nothing that this is another distinction that risks conflation. But the Socratic project is entirely constructed around a critique of knowledge claims.

The Socratic attempt to expose and unmask false pretenses to knowledge is ultimately based upon a respect for knowledge that recognizes the value and possibility of knowledge. Socrates was humble, but he was not ignorant. On the contrary, Socrates was the one who saw through pretense to knowledge and therefore unique possessed genuine knowledge. Those who professed knowledge, however, and were found wanting, had their claims of knowledge revealed as ignorance.

Skepticism based upon ignorance is simply the epistemological formulation of nihilism. Nietzsche never tired of pointing out that nihilism is the great problem of our time. It is still a problem. Conflicting claims to knowledge have given prima facie support to epistemic nihilism, and the level of knowledge required to make an educated assessment of knowledge claims grows more with each passing day.

Recently on russell-l, the Bertrand Russell listserv that I have previously mentioned, there was an extended discussion of Plantinga, who is well known in the contemporary Anglo-American philosophical milieu as a defender of theism. John Lenz wrote of Plantinga and those who share his perspective: “They take refuge in the failure to provide complete proofs — if you can’t prove you exist, how can you prove anything about God, that kind of thing. That is, he uses modern philosophy against itself, it seems.” (Lenz also went on to make the revealing statement that, “…he was a god in Texas and students wielded his name and books against me.”)

While I can sympathize with the problematic character of turning philosophy against itself, turning philosophy back on itself like a snake swallowing its own tail, this seems to me, in the abstract, like a classic philosophical strategy. I say “in the abstract” because I can easily see how in the actual practice of turning philosophy against itself that the higher goal of knowledge can become lost in the shuffle. The task of a philosophical critique of philosophical knowledge can as easily slip into apologetics for irrationalism as Socratic humility before knowledge can pass into nihilism. A substantial background of knowledge is a necessary requisite to keep one from sliding into the other, but it is precisely knowledge that is at issue. The plot thickens.

When I was thinking about skepticism a few days ago, a novel formulation came to me: skepticism is (or ought to be) a critique of knowledge. Skepticism conceived as a critique of knowledge is something very different from skepticism conceived as a nihilistic rejection of all knowledge, or even of the possibility of knowledge. A critique of knowledge presupposes a theoretical basis for the critique, like Kant’s critique of pure reason, which presupposes an entire philosophical system in order to make a rigorous assessment of pure reason.

Put in the context of the critique of knowledge, the distinction between skepticism based on ignorance and skepticism based on knowledge becomes sharper: the critique of knowledge based on ignorance simply has nothing to offer, no basis for its criticism, nothing more than condemnation, which is a form of bare assertion. The critique of knowledge based on knowledge will be able to give an account of itself, will be able to state outright its operative principles and methods.

That the critique of knowledge is always an auto-critique is certainly problematic, but also as certainly no more problematic than nihilism.

. . . . .

The Columbia Quiescent

Tuesday

---

Matthew Arnold began Dover Beach, his well-known poem set against the perpetual churning of the tide, with the line, “The sea is calm to-night…” I thought of this when I saw the river this morning. I cannot remember another time when I have seen the Columbia so quiescent. The river was sufficiently still that one could take a photograph of the bank of the river mirrored in the water of the river. The waters of this great river are so still on this beautiful November day in Portland that one can see individual rocks and slender branches of bushes on the water’s edge reflected in the water. Whether roiled by currents or stirred by the wind or struck by the rain in kind of climatological pointillism, the waters of the Columbia are usually in motion, and that is why I noticed its stillness immediately today.

T. S. Eliot, more fittingly to our present concern, beautifully evoked the image of the river in the opening lines of “The Dry Salvages”, the third of his Four Quartets:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

Just a few days ago, in The Fungibility of the Biome, I had occasion to quote from the same poem in reference to Eliot’s mentioning the horseshoe crab. In fact, the above first stanza of the poem immediately precede the lines I quoted previously, which latter constitute the second stanza.

Eliot reminds us that, however quiescent a river appears at the moment, that this is one mood among many, and that we will, in time, see the other moods of the river. In Oregon we sometimes say that, if you don’t like the weather, wait fifteen minutes and it will change. So too with the river: wait and it will change. In other words, we can say of the river’s quiescence or its rages this too shall pass.

Below is a picture of the Columbia River taken from space. The picture is of eastern Oregon and Washington, with Spokane in the upper right corner of the photograph.

In this photograph, the Columbia and its surrounding watershed resembles nothing so much as living tissue, and what are rivers but the veins of the earth? The images we see of rivers from space so perfectly resemble blood vessels that it is difficult to imagine that the classic theme of microcosm and macrocosm, which was a perennial theme of human civilization prior to the Scientific Revolution, knew nothing of these images.

It is appropriate that the Columbia as seen from space should look like the living tissue of a macrocosmic body, so like our own bodies. The river is alive, and it is connected to the living ocean. Even as far up the river as Portland the enormity of the Columbia can be reversed in its relentless flow by the enormity of the tides of the ocean. If one swims across the Columbia in the fullness of its flow it is impossible to swim straight across; the pull of the water will drag you downstream so that you cross the river in a diagonal line, even if you try to swim upstream. But when the flood tide comes up the river, all the water draining from Oregon and Washington cannot hold back the ocean, and one can swim a straight path across the river from bank to bank, lazily, scarcely without effort.

. . . . .

An Existentialist Philosophy of History

Sunday

---

On the flights from Tampa to Portland I started reading Herbert Marcuse’s essay on Sartre, “Sartre’s Existentialism” from 1948, collected in Marcuse’s Studies in Critical Philosophy.

Herbert Marcuse (19 July1898 – 29 July1979) had difficulty suppressing his contempt for Sartre's early existentialism.

In reading Marcuse on Sartre (with the subtle, sublimated hostility of a Marxist to the early Sartre, who went out of his way to distance himself from Marx and Marxists), it occurred to me that what we could call historical existentialism or historical naturalism are the heirs and continuators of historical materialism. That is to say, they are (or would be, if they were systematically formulated) the philosophical development of Marx’s historical materialism in the light of subsequent philosophical developments.

An existentialist philosophy of history begins from the premiss that existence precedes and creates essence — thus every conception of history that has recognized that individuals and societies are shaped by geography, topography, landscape, and earlier history is history understood in terms of existence preceding essence. Earlier history is, in its turn, a function of earlier naturalistic forces that have shaped that history. Ultimately we must trace this chain of earlier histories backward to the point that human history disappears imperceptibly into natural history.

This idea of an existentialist philosophy of history is very much in the same spirit of what I recently wrote in A Formulation of Naturalism, and, in fact, is not only in the same spirit but may be considered an extension of that post. In that post I argued that contemporary philosophical naturalism could be considered a conservative extension of materialism: naturalism is materialism wherever materialism was adequate, and only goes beyond materialism where materialism fails. Just above I suggested that historical naturalism and historical existentialism are synonymous. In so far as historical existentialism — in which historical existence precedes historical essence — is simply another formulation of historical naturalism, and in so far as naturalism is a conservative extension of materialism, historical naturalism “naturally” becomes a conservative extension of historical materialism.

I make no claim for the novelty of the position stated above; it is nothing but an alternative way to formulate the geopolitical perspective that current events must be seen in the context of history, and history must be seen in the context in which history is made, and that context is geography. I have only cast the net a little wider, and the more comprehensive nature of the thesis makes it appear that much more radical. This is one of the virtues of abstract and general thinking: once particular issues are framed in these terms, matters otherwise only implicit become explicit.

Perhaps more problematic yet is that I should burden the above formulation with the tag “existentialist”, since existentialism suffered from the irredeemable fate of becoming a briefly popular sensation in the middle of the twentieth century, so that it now sounds terribly dated. On the one hand, I should not allow popular taste to prejudice a valid philosophical position. On the other hand, it could be argued, in a similar spirit to the argument in made in A Formulation of Naturalism that the essential conceptions of existentialism have been superseded by more recent, and more accurate, philosophical formulations. For the moment, I will allow the label to stand.

I have, in this forum, several times quoted Ortega y Gasset’s famous line that man has not an essence but a history. This is also in the spirit of an existentialist philosophy of history. One might take Ortega y Gasset’s bon mot as an alternative formulation of Sartre’s famous dictum that existence preceding essence. In both, the emphasis falls upon man’s historical, temporal, actual existence and denies that there is any eternal, essential nature of man. In so far as Ortega y Gasset’s formulation sharpens the point by denying the essence that Sartre delayed and subordinated, he sharpens it to a point that an existentialist philosophy of history so conceived comes into conflict with other conceptions of history.

Recently in The Incommensurability of Civilizations and Addendum on Incommensurable Civilizations I wrote, “Each civilization is not only distinct, but each is based on a distinct idea of civilization.” And, citing a particular example, “We can explain both the continuity and the periodizations of Western civilization by reference to a basal ideal that changes over time.” Now, in so far as the idea of a civilization is similar to the essence of man (and, while the two are clearly distinct, I think it is fair to say that each conception is integral with the other), and in so far as an existentialist conception of history requires that we abandon any essence of man, then an existentialist conception of history, it would seem, must abandon all pretense of history that makes reference to idea, ideal, and essence.

This is the dilemma that faces me now. I do not say that these two approaches cannot be reconciled and rationalized, but I do say that some effort at conceptual clarification is necessary to that reconciliation and rationalization.

. . . . .

Tampa to Portland

Saturday

---

Waiting in the jet way for the plane to load.

When I arrived in Florida last Tuesday I didn’t bother to change the time on my wrist watch, so I was continually reminded of Oregon time each time I happened to glance at my watch. Not changing the time on my watch was as thoughtless as continuing to wear the watch despite being reminded every time I looked at it that I had to adjust its reading for Florida time. But the benefit came with my return to Oregon.

The joys of contemporary air travel: fitting everyone on board.

During my several flights home — Tampa to Charlotte, Charlotte to Phoenix, Phoenix to Portland — I could check the time in Oregon and watch my transit time slowly converge into Oregon time. While I napped on and off during the longest leg from Charlotte to Phoenix, during the last leg to Portland I was wide awake and filled with ideas that I was able to write down during the leisure of the flight. Some of these ideas will soon find their home in this forum when I get around to formulating the appropriate posts.

Sunset as seen from inside the Phoenix airport.

I arrived back in Portland to the relentless rain for which the region is known. The air was sweet and cool and not at all tropical. I added layers of clothing and still felt the chill of the air, and was glad to know that I was home.

. . . . .

. . . . .

The Master of Surrealism

Friday

---

Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1954

As it happens, the second most comprehensive Salvador Dalí museum in the world, The Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, is only about fifteen minutes drive from the corner of Sunshine Drive and Friendly Way where I am currently staying. I went to the Dalí museum today and spent some time with the works of the Master of Surrealism. The museum has a great collection, only part of which is displayed. I was told that they own about 1,300 pieces, which is obviously more than can be displayed at once. A new and larger museum is currently under construction nearby. Although the present museum is not large, the collection is nicely shown and very accessible to the visitor. My only complaint is with the lighting, which glares on the large canvases and which could easily be adjusted to shine less directly on the paintings.

Dalí's Basket of Bread (1926) shows his talent and his early mastery of technique, but his distinctive aesthetic imagination is notably absent.

The earliest paintings of Dalí show him experimenting with the styles of art familiar in his time. There is a canvas that is indistinguishable from Monet, and another that could pass for Cezanne. I can’t imagine a better technique for a painter to gain experience and knowledge of both the medium and the tradition than by imitating the most advanced works of his time, and Dalí shows the technical precision of his talent right from the beginning. Probably everyone knows someone with artistic talent, who has a natural knack for drawing or painting. Obviously Dalí had talent. Beyond talent, one must acquire technique. These early canvases show Dalí working through his technique. Beyond talent and technique, the true genius will have the aesthetic imagination to employ his talent and technique in unique works of art. When Dalí passes into his definitively surrealistic maturity, he reveals at the same time his aesthetic imagination — at it is an imagination of the first order.`

Dalí's Cadaqués of 1923 owes more than a little to Cézanne; it is an essay in the style of Cézanne.

What is surrealism? There are, of course, many answers to this question, and the very idea of attempting to capture something as resistant to rational formulation as surrealism is problematic. Nevertheless, surrealism does have its locus classicus, and its locus classicus is as surreal and as hallucinogenic as any later productions of the genre. This is Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, a truly bizarre and unclassifiable prose poem novel that contains, among other unlikely passages, this paean to beauty in the form of a litany (first in the original French):

La somme des jours ne compte plus, quand il s’agit d’apprécier la capacité intellectuelle d’une figure sérieuse. Je me connais à lire l’âge dans les lignes physiognomoniques du front: il a seize ans et quatre mois! Il est beau comme la rétractilité des serres des oiseaux rapaces; ou encore, comme l’incertitude des mouvements musculaires dans les plaies des parties molles de la région cervicale postérieure; ou plutôt, comme ce piège à rats perpétuel, toujours retendu par l’animal pris, qui peut prendre seul des rongeurs indéfiniment, et fonctionner même caché sous la paille; et surtout, comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie!

And in English translation:

The total number of days no longer counts when it is a matter of appreciating the intellectual capacity of a serious face. I am an expert at judging age from the physiognomic lines of the brow: he is sixteen years and four months of age. He is as beautiful as the retractility of the claws of birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft part of the posterior cervical region; or, rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and which can go on catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is hidden under straw; and, above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

The last entry of this litany — the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table — was taken up by later surrealists as something of a one-line slogan and manifesto. André Breton, the surrealist’s surrealist, said that Maldoror was “The expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.”

Dalí's Morphological Echo of 1936 is a classic surrealist juxtaposition of unlikely objects found together in a shared space.

Dalí exemplified this conception of surrealism, though he did not merely exemplify a pre-existing tradition. Dalí was, to be sure, a surrealist, but he transcended, exceeded, and over-determined surrealism, as all great artists go beyond the cultural context that was their own conditio sine qua non. For the mediocre artist, one’s conditio sine qua non becomes conflated with one’s raison d’être; in the superior artist, there is always a profound disconnect between the two.

Earlier in the month, in Claude Lévi-Strauss, R.I.P., I wrote:

Freud and Marx, those twin fascinations of twentieth century European thought, are often credited with being structuralists, or, at least, following a structuralist method, and this is, in my estimation, a fair way to put it, despite the distaste most people have for using a label that ends with an “ism”. But if “isms” tend to over-simplification and schematism, and are often rejected for these reasons, the rejection of an “ism”, i.e., the rejection of a school of thought, can become as much of an intellectual fetish as the naming and labeling of a school of thought. Lévi-Strauss made structuralism explicit, he identified his work as structuralist, and he did not shy away from using the term not only in his writing but even in the titles of his books. Lévi-Strauss was not afraid of the label, and for that reason he rose above it.

Much of this applies, mutatis mutandis, to Salvador Dalí and surrealism. Dalí was a surrealist, to be sure, but he rose above the schematism of any label, he transcended and surmounted the label, and never attempted to limit himself to any particular school of thought. Dalí created his own motifs, symbols, and themes so that one recognizes internal references within the body of his work, the corpus dalícum, as it were.

One of Dalí's themes is his wife Gala, who appears throughout his work in many guises. This particular portrait at the St. Petersburg museum is quite small, less than 3 by 4 inches.

Dalí was no more merely a surrealist than his fellow (though adopted) Iberian El Greco was merely a mannerist — for artists of genius a particular style is never a container that limits creativity, but a springboard to greater things. Surrealism for Dalí was a point of departure (as I said Aristotle should have been for the Scholastics in Seeing the World for What It Is), just as the aesthetic traditions Dalí surveyed in his earliest works were a point of departure. He was not limited by the tradition any more than he was limited by the surrealist label.

In his Three Young Surrealistic Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra of 1936, as well as the titles of other works, Dalí did not scruple to employ the 'surrealist' label.

Dalí transcended the genre conventions of every style he adopted and made his own, and this holds in spades for surrealism. Dalí’s innovations in surrealism are profound, and worth considering in some detail. The Lautréamont passage cited above became a point of departure for Dalí as he not only employs a juxtaposition of individual objects, but (like a cubist) deconstructs individual objects and juxtaposes the parts of things. This is a mereological surrealism that surpasses the surrealism of Lautréamont’s sewing machine, umbrella, and dissecting table. In the mature Dalí one would expect to see, perhaps, parts of the sewing machine exchanged with parts of the umbrella, with both grafted in different ways on to the dissecting table.

The Hallucinogenic Toreador is a large canvas of great detail that repays careful study. No reproduction can go it justice: you must go to Florida and see it for yourself if you want to understand it.

Another extrapolation of surrealism made by Dalí involves an inversion of the surrealist juxtaposition. By this I mean the severing of conventional connections, the disconnection of that which is usually connected (in contradistinction to the connection of that which is not conventionally connected). This is seen, for example, in The Hallucinogenic Toreador, perhaps the pièce de résistance of the St. Petersburg museum, coming at the end as it does and forming the focus of the final exposition of Dalí’s works by both of the museum guides to whom I listened. The toreador that Dalí claimed to see in the Venus de Milo wears a traditional hat decorated around the brim with black balls of thread. These balls are transformed into the flies of St. Narrciso, but the flies are flying in an orderly geometrical formation. Dalí has taken the traditional elaborate decoration of the bullfighter’s costume and disconnected it from these origins in order to re-introduce it as a non-naturalistic invocation of a Spanish legend that makes a non-naturalistic use of nature. Here the world has been bent back on itself so many times that it scarcely makes any sense to invoke “convention” any more, since all conventions have either disappeared or have been iterated to a point beyond recognition.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Seeing the World for What It Is

Thursday

---

Roosting birds at Pass-a-Grille Beach, Florida; the natural world is a fitting point of departure not only for understanding nature through science, but also of understanding science through the philosophy of science.

Yesterday’s meditation upon The Fungibility of the Biome led me to think in very general terms about scientific knowledge. It is one of the remarkable things about contemporary natural science — following rigorously, as it does, the methodological naturalism toward which it has struggled over the past several hundred years since the advent of the Scientific Revolution — that the more complex and sophisticated it becomes, the more closely science is in touch with the details of ordinary experience. This is almost precisely the opposite of what one finds with most intellectual traditions. As an intellectual tradition develops it often becomes involuted and self-involved, veering off in oddball directions and taking unpredictable tangents that take us away from the world and our immediate experience of it, not closer to it. The history of human reason is mostly a history of wild goose chases.

Detail of a pelican from the above photograph.

In fact, Western science began exactly in this way, and in so doing gave us the most obvious example of an involuted, self-referential intellectual tradition that was more interested in building on a particular cluster of ideas than of learning about the world. This we now know as scholasticism, when the clerics and monks of medieval Europe read and re-read, studied and commented upon, the works of Aristotle. For a thousand years, Aristotle was synonymous with natural science.

The scholastics constructed a science upon the basis of Aristotle, rather than upon the world with Aristotle as a point of departure.

Aristotle is not to be held responsible for the non-science that was done in his name and, to add insult to injury, was called science. If Aristotle had been treated as a point of departure rather than as dogma to be defended and upheld as doctrine, medieval history would have been very different. But at that time Western history was not yet prepared for the wrenching change that science, when properly pursued, forces upon us, both in terms of our understanding of the world and the technology it makes possible (and the industry made possible in turn by technology).

Science forces wrenching change upon us because it plays havoc with some of the more absurd notions that we have inherited from our earlier, pre-scientific history. Pre-scientific beliefs suffer catastrophic failure when confronted with their scientific alternatives, however gently the science is presented in the attempt to spare the feelings of those still wedded to the beliefs of the past.

Once we get past our inherited absurdities, as I implied above, we can see the world for what it is, and science puts us always more closely in touch with what the world it is. Allow me to mention two examples of things that I have recently learned.

Example 1) We know now that not only does the earth circle the sun, and the sun spins with the Milky Way, but we know that this circling and spinning is irregular and imperfect. The earth wobbles in its orbit, and in fact the sun bobs up and down in the plane of the Milky Way as the galaxy spins. This wobbling and bobbing has consequences for life on earth because it changes the climate, sometimes predictably and sometimes unpredictably. But regularity is at least partly a function of the length of time we consider. The impact of extraterrestrial objects on the earth seems like a paradigmatic instance of catastrophism, and the asteroid impact that likely contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs is thought of as a catastrophic punctuation in the history of life, but we now also know that the earth is subject to periods of greater bombardment by extraterrestrial bodies when it is passing through the galactic plane. Viewed from a perspective of cosmological time, asteroid impacts and regular and statistically predictable. And it happens that about 65 million years ago we were passing through the galactic plane and we caught a collision as a result. All of this makes eminently good sense. Matter is present at greater density in the galactic plane, so we are far more likely to experience collisions at this time. All of this accords with ordinary experience.

Example 2) We have had several decades to get used to the idea that the continents and oceans of the earth are not static and unchanging, but dynamic and dramatically different over time. A great many things that remain consistent during the course of one human lifetime have been mistakenly thought to be eternal and unchanging. Now we know that the earth changes and in fact the whole cosmos changes. Even Einstein had to correct himself on this account. His first formulation of general relativity included the cosmological constant in order to maintain the cosmos according to its presently visible structure. Now cosmological evolution is recognized and we detail the lives of stars as carefully as we detail the natural history of a species. Now that we know something of the natural history of our planet, and we know that it changes, we find that it changes according to our ordinary experience. In the midst of an ice age, when much of the world’s water is frozen as ice and is burdening the continental plates as ice, it turns out that the weight of the ice forces the continents lower as they float in the magma beneath them. During the interglacial periods, when much or most of the ice melts, unburdened of the weight the continents bob up again and rise relative to the oceanic plates that have not been been weighted down with ice. And, in fact, this is how things behave in our ordinary experience. It is perhaps also possible (though I don’t know if this is the case) that the weight of ice, melted and now run into the oceans, becomes additional water weight pressing down on the oceanic plates, which could sink a little as a result.

Last night I was reading A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science by John Losee (an excellent book, by the way, that I heartily recommend) and happened across this quote from Larry Laudan (p. 213):

…the degree of adequacy of any theory of scientific appraisal is proportional to how many of the [preferred intuitions] it can do justice to. The more of our deep intuitions a model of rationality can reconstruct, the more confident we will be that it is a sound explication of what we mean by ‘rationality’.

Contemporary Anglo-American analytical philosophers seem to love to employ the locution “deep intuitions” and similar formulations in the way that a few years ago (or a few decades ago) phenomenologists never tired of writing about the richness of experience. Certainly experience is rich, and certainly there are deep intuitions, but to have to call attention to either by way of awkward locutions like these points to a weakness in formulating exactly what it is that is rich about experience, and exactly what it is that is deep about a deep intuition.

And this, of course, is the whole problem in a nutshell: what exactly is a deep intuition? What intuitions ought to be considered to be preferred intuitions? I suggest that our preferred intuitions ought to be those most common and ordinary intuitions that we derive from our common and ordinary experience, things like the fact that floating bodies, when weighted down, float a little lower in the water, or whatever medium in which they happen to float. It is in this spirit that we recall the words that Robert Green Ingersoll attributed to Ferdinand Magellan:

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church”

The quote bears exposition. Almost certainly Magellan never said it, or even anything like it. Nevertheless, we ought to be skeptical for reasons other than those cited by the most familiar skeptics, who like to point out that the church never argued for the flatness of the earth. We ought to be skeptical because Magellan was a deeply pious man, who lost his life before the completion of his circumnavigation by his crew because Magellan was so intent upon the conversion to Catholicism of the many peoples he encountered. Eventually he encountered peoples who did not want to be converted, and they eventually took up arms and killed him in an entirely unnecessary engagement. But what remains interesting in the quote, and its implied reference to Galileo’s early observations of the moon, is not so much about flatness as about perfection. Aristotle in particular, and ancient Greek philosophy in general, held that the heavens were a realm of perfection in which all bodies were perfectly spherical and moved in perfectly circular motions through the sky. We now know this to be false, and Galileo was among the first to graphically demonstrate this with his sketches of superlunary mountains.

What does the word “superlunary” refer to? It is a term that derives from pre-Copernican (or, if you will, Ptolemaic) astronomy. When it was believed that the earth was the center of the universe, the closest extraterrestrial body was believed to be the moon (this happened to be correct, even if much in Ptolemaic astronomy was not correct). Everything below the moon, i.e., everything sublunary, was believed to be tainted and imperfect, contaminated with the dirt of lowly things and the stain of Original Sin, while everything above the moon, i.e., everything superlunary, including all other known extraterrestrial bodies, were believed to be free of this taint and therefore to be perfect, therefore unblemished. Thus it was deeply radical to observe an “imperfection” on the supposedly perfect spheres beyond the earth, as it was equally radical to discover “new” extraterrestrial bodies that had never been seen before, like the moons of Jupiter.

Both of these heresies point to our previous tendency to attribute an eternal and unchanging status to things beyond the earth. It was believed impossible to discover “new” extraterrestrial bodies because the heavens, after all, were complete, perfect, and unchanging. For the same reason, one should not be able to view anything as irregular as mountains or shadows on extraterrestrial bodies. Once we get beyond the absurd postulate of extraterrestrial perfection, we can see the world with our own eyes, and for what it is. And when we begin to do so, we do not negate the properties of perfection once attributed to the superlunary world as much as we find them to be simply irrelevant. The heavens, like the earth, are neither perfect nor imperfect. They simply are, and they are what they are. To attribute evaluative or normative content or significance to them, such as believing in their perfection, is only to send us off on one of those oddball directions or unpredictable tangents that I mentioned in the first paragraph.

. . . . .

The Fungibility of the Biome

Wednesday

---

What could be more cheerful that finding oneself at the corner of Sunshine Drive and Friendly Way? That is exactly where I find myself now, just steps away from the Gulf Coast of Florida. I find myself immediately struck by the biological differences with that which is familiar to me, the essential novelty of all that I see around me. I have never seen a horseshoe crab, but no sooner did I walk to the waterfront than I happened upon a shell, and then another, and another. The sight of a horseshoe crab brings to mind the lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” (one of the Four Quartets):

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite,
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.

Eliot has here captured with a poet’s sensibility and sensitivity the essential otherness and alienness of an “earlier and other creation” — and the horseshoe crab resembles nothing so much as a trilobite, that is, the horseshoe crab suggests life so ancient as to be long extinct.

Biology Online defines a biome as, “A major ecological community of organisms adapted to a particular climatic or environmental condition on a large geographic area in which they occur.” A biome is thus one of the most comprehensive of biological concepts, a primary subdivision of the ecosystem (a kind of ecosystem), though “biome” is sometimes used interchangeably with “ecosystem” while “biosphere” is reserved for the more comprehensive concept of the totality of all living things on earth. (We require yet another more comprehensive concept to identity all living things in the universe, which may or may not be identical with all living things on the earth.)

The picturesque moss that one sees hanging on trees also hangs on eletrical lines.

There is more than one way to divide the biosphere into biomes, and more than one scheme of biome classification. The Wikipedia entry on biomes places Florida in the “subtroptical rainforest” biome and Oregon in the “temperate coniferous forest” biome. However we choose to name and classify these distinct ecosystems, they are distinct. In Oregon, apple trees grow wild and drop their produce upon the ground; in Florida, orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees drop their produce upon the ground. The difference in climate means a difference in biome, and a difference in biome means a difference in life.

A map from Wikipedia detailing terrestrial biomes.

As one moves from place to place the vegetation changes gradually and overlaps substantially from one location to another, but the cumulative effect over distance is that the surrounding biomass is entirely, albeit incrementally, replaced. It is like the living equivalent of the process of fossilization, when the tissue of a bone is incrementally replaced with minerals that ultimately turn flesh into stone. When flesh turns to stone in moments, we know that we are in a fairy tale, but when flesh turns to stone over aeons, we are in the realm of natural history. But it is no less fantastic for being natural history instead of a fairy tale.

The Gulf Coast of Florida, only steps away from the corner of Sunshine Drive and Friendly Way.

It is perhaps equally fantastic that, despite this replacement of a biome over time and distance, that we are able to move continuously from one to the other. There is a sense in which it is truly remarkable that the biomass that surrounds us, envelops us, embodied in vegetation and wildlife, can be entirely changed (or nearly entirely changed) and we remain virtually unaffected by the change. We might call this the fungibility of the biome. We note the change of the smell of the air, the different colors and textures that surround us, the differences in temperature and humidity, and in the taste of the water, but it continues to support us, and, in fact, without that surrounding biomass we would perish.

On the corner of Sunshine Drive and Friendly Way.

. . . . .

. . . . .

An Expedition to Florida

Tuesday

---

Last month in The Landscape of Late Fall and again in Autumn’s Splendid Sublime I wrote about the dramatic changes to the landscape that we see in the fall, and as we move later into the fall more aspects of the season reveal themselves to us. Wind, for instance.

Yesterday it was quite windy in Portland, and though the wind itself was uncomfortable it was a pleasure to see the leaves blown around the streets in clouds and drifts, not unlike snow. What leaves had not yet been brought down by the season so far were largely stripped from the trees yesterday by the wind. And then in the night it rained, a relentless Oregon rain that fell all night long. This nearly completed the process of stripping the trees of their leaves, leaving denuded trees and mushy piles of former leaves beneath them.

Today I flew out of Portland headed for Florida, and the rain-soaked city had a fascinating aspect from the air. When we took off from the Portland airport the sun occasionally slanting down through the breaks in the clouds lit up the saturated ground. The city had a silvery look as the sun glinted on standing water in roads, parking lots, lawns, and fields. The effect was so blinding that it left a spot in my vision for several minutes since I allowed my eyes to linger over the spectacularly ethereal vision of a city in silver and black, like an old photographic print.

Further aloft, it was equally interesting to see the plane pass through one layer of clouds close to the ground, with another layer of clouds higher in the sky. As we lost sight of the ground, glimpsing only small views through openings in the lower cloud layer, we were sheathed in a cloudy realm with clouds above and more clouds below, a complete landscape of clouds. For several minutes we enjoyed the spectacle of a world without ground below or sky above but still a distant horizon and the feeling of great open space, until we passed up and through the upper cloud layer.

And so I pass from the sharply defined and delineated seasons of the Pacific Northwest to the very different climate of sub-tropical Florida, where the seasons are not so much the spring, summer, fall, and winter of the temperate zone, but rather a rainy season, or a storm season. I found a description of Florida’s seasons online:

When Floridians talk about seasons, it is typically Hurricane Season or Rainy Season or Dry Season! And while we may not share the same seasonal changes that northerners share, our seasons are just as important.

The same website gave a colorful list of other Florida seasons including Hurricane Season (June 1st – November 30th), Turtle nesting season (March 1st – October 31st), Tree planting season (December through February), Snowbird Season (Northerners start flocking to Florida typically from October/November through April/May), Spiny Lobster Season (Regular season is August 6 through March 31), Manatee Season (officially October 15th through March 31st but Manatees stay in some areas all year long), and Tornado Season (June through September and February through April).

The seasons of the temperate zone are framed in the regularity of uniformitarianism, whereas the sub-tropical “seasons” of Florida, especially those that emphasize storms, imply nature conceived in terms of catastrophism. Is natural history a regular round of familiar states of nature, or a series of unfortunate events and unpredictable outcomes? Or is nature some kind of synthesis of the two, revealing itself in a kind of punctuated equilibrium of predictable states interrupted by catastrophic events?

Departing for Florida I found myself reminded of a contemporary idiom that one hears frequently today, and I would be interested to know how old exactly it is and where it comes from. I am speaking of the idiom of “getting one’s head around” something, usually an unfamiliar thought. November, I am told, it a very nice month in Florida, and I had trouble getting my head around the idea of traveling somewhere in November and bringing shorts and T-shirts instead of jackets, scarves, and gloves.

This contemporary idiom of getting one’s head around an idea constitutes a metaphor of the mind as a container — though a container of a particular size and shape that easily accommodates the familiar but which must be stretched to accommodate the novel and the unfamiliar. It is an image of flexibility but also of resistance, and that is an apt metaphor for the human mind.

. . . . .

Sorry to say that I didn’t get any pictures of today as I absent-mindedly packed my camera.

. . . . .

. . . . .