About | Archive | Best | Blogroll | Feed
Most of our metaphors for knowing and thinking are based on the power of sight; for instance, the ancient Greek word eidenai means "to have seen", i.e., the past perfect of idein (whence our word "idea"). Less commonly, knowing is held to come from hearing what is said - especially hearing the word of god as in the Hebrew tradition. Yet all indications are that music predates language. What depths of wisdom could we sound if we were to base our metaphors on actively and collaboratively making music? Consider some of the primeval phenomena of music: the living pulse of rhythm and its resulting entrainment of the music makers; the importance of harmony, both internal and interpersonal; the striving, movement, and completion of melodies and chord progressions. Beyond these fundamentals there is much more to explore: timbre and coloration in different instruments and keys, consonance and dissonance, the stretching of time in rubato and syncopation, tempo and its relation to human activities and emotions, improvisation and spontaneity, active listening and responding as crucial to cooperative music-making, making music as a form of meditation, and much else besides. I intend to ponder these matters as I delve more deeply into music in the years ahead.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
By my count, I was able to read 95 books this year, not even accounting for the three epic poems I read twice: the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Beowulf. Highlights were the plays of Shakespeare (yes, all of them), George Eliot's magisterial novel Middlemarch, Bach and the Patterns of Invention by Laurence Dreyfus, an intensive re-reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, my friend Dave Jilk's poetic SF novel Epoch, and the aforementioned epic poems. I expect that I'll not read nearly so many books in 2025 while I attempt to finish writing my book about Aristotle's conception of human fulfillment.
P.S. I don't listen to audiobooks, so I've read all of these either as physical books (my preference) or as online books at my Monadnock Valley Press website (which I read on my mobile phone).
General
Literature
Music
Philosophy
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
Before I go deep on Aristotle, I figured I'd mention something I've been thinking about lately, which is aesthetics. Following up on some research I've been doing into the music of J.S. Bach for my "Meditations on Bach" project, I recently read a book about the founders of modern aesthetics during the German Enlightenment (Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, etc.). It turns out that these early thinkers saw aesthetics as a practical discipline; unlike post-Kantian philosophers of art who are interested in purely theoretical questions or, at best, epistemological justification of critical judgment, the originators of aesthetics wanted to spell out principles that would guide artists in the task of bringing more beauty into the world. Immediately I perceived parallels to philosophy as the personal love and practice of wisdom. Consulting my ancient Greek dictionary, I discovered the word φιλοκαλία / philokalia, which I would describe as the personal love and practice of beauty. This is a fascinating topic that I've sketched out in slightly more detail in a work-in-progress essay (I even subtitled it a "manifesto"), but I won't have time to dig into it much further until I complete my Aristotle book. So many projects, so little time...
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
Although I don't make New Year's resolutions, inevitably one does think about priorities as the year winds down. One realization I've come to recently is that I need to finish off more of my long-term projects. Because my Aristotle book is the farthest along (I've been researching it for five years!), I'm recommitting to it in hopes of completing a first draft by the end of 2025. This means that I'll have to cut back somewhat on blogging, pair reading, public-domain publishing at the Monadnock Valley Press, catching up on news and long-form cultural analysis, etc. Instead, I'll be reviewing the book and article summaries I've created, improving the outline, drafting and honing the text, identifying chapter epigraphs, and so on. Where appropriate, I'll continue to use my weblog to work out my thinking on various Aristotelian themes; however, I might be posting less frequently on other topics.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
My publication activity at the Monadnock Valley Press waxes and wanes; 2022 was a busy year, 2023 was relatively quiet, and in 2024 I republished more works from the public domain than in any previous year since founding the site in 2008 (e.g., I published on 118 separate days this year, whereas the average in previous years was 18!). This time around the haul included:
However, 2025 will likely be much less prolific, since I have books of my own to write; I'll probably focus on works that help move my own projects forward, such as ancient Greek drama and history along with a few epic poems.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
In her book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that there is a subtle yet essential difference between value and worth: the concept of value is irreducibly social because it first emerged only within modern market economies where everything can be exchanged for everything else, whereas the worth of a person or artifact or living being is inherent within its own independent existence. Thus, according to Arendt, philosophers made a grave mistake when they imported the concept of value into politics, ethics, and aesthetics (the so-called "value branches" of philosophical inquiry). Consider, for instance, what happens when we speak of the relative value of the life of inquiry and contemplation vs. the life of social and political engagement vs. the life of making money vs. the life of pleasure and enjoyment. In modern times these wildly disparate ways of life are all on an equal footing of "value", which means we need to find a common standard of measurement for them. Just as in the market everything can and must be valued in terms of money, so now in ethics everything can and must be valued in terms of what the psychologists call subjective well-being, i.e., pleasurable feelings. As a result, the concept of value leads inexorably to a lowest-common-denominator utilitarianism. By contrast, the concept of worth helps us keep separate things that should be kept separate; as a result, we can come to understand that these ways of life are far from commensurable and that some of them are fundamentally better than others. Yet deliberating about worth takes more intellectual effort and moral courage (not to mention the fact that it can seem positively undemocratic), which could be why many people prefer to avoid it...
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
About | Archive | Best | Blogroll | Feed
Peter Saint-Andre > Journal