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Cross-pollination is a wondrous thing. Over the last few months I've been reading about two topics that might seem quite far apart: ancient Greek tragedy and American jazz. In the first category, I'm working my way through all the extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and also reading literary and philosophical analysis of tragic drama, such as Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy. In the second category, I've been reading biographies of great jazz musicians and composers (Armstrong, Ellington, Monk, Mingus, Coltrane, etc.) as well as historical and philosophical analysis of the meaning of jazz and blues in American culture, especially some amazing books by Albert Murray and some essays by Ralph Ellison.
Both Murray and Ellison (who happen to have been close friends) touch on similarities and differences between tragedy and the blues. Here's Ellison from his 1945 essay "Richard Wright's Blues"...
Let us close with one final word about the blues: their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self.
In his books Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, and The Blue Devils of Nada, Murray goes even farther: he argues that the purpose of blues music is to stomp on blues feelings in such an earthy yet elegant way that our fears and sorrows are transformed (even if only temporarily) into an aesthetic celebration of resilience and spontaneity. The essence of blues and jazz is, he says, "improvisation in situations of disruption" and "affirmation in the face of adversity" (conditions that any honest reader of American history knows were faced in abundance by the descendents of captive Africans who invented these musics in the first place).
As I reflect more deeply on these topics, I might even write a longer essay for publication. Stay tuned!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
Following up on my post about thinking historically, here are some further reflections on the methodological insights (and, to my mind, shortcomings) of my favorite historian, David Hackett Fischer.
As noted last time, Fischer is an empiricist who is quite leery of philosophizing, moralizing, essentialism, metahistory, the drive for certainty, the holist desire for completeness, attempts at explaining why things happened the way they did, and so on; he is much more comfortable describing a few of the "infinite number" of "factual patterns" that can be "superimposed upon past events" (Fischer 1970, p. 70). He goes on to say: "A historian's task is to find patterns which are more relevant to his problems, and more accurate and more comprehensive than others, but he cannot hope to find that 'essential' pattern..." (ibid.).
I sense a few difficulties here. First, I'm skeptical that there is literally an infinite number of patterns to be found in the facts of the past; instead, it seems to me that at any one time there are only a few patterns under serious consideration to explain a given historical phenomenon (say, the American Revolution or, more concretely, the development among the colonists of a self-perception that they were "Americans"). Second, Fischer's criterion of comprehensiveness sounds rather similar to the habit of holism that he has criticized in others as a fallacy. Third, Fischer's criterion of accuracy sounds rather similar to doing justice to the reality ("essential" or otherwise) of past events.
Indeed, slightly later in his book Historians' Fallacies, Fischer defines history as "an empirical search for external truths, and for the best, most complete, and most profound external truths, in a maximal corresponding relationship with the absolute reality of past events" (Fischer 1970, p. 87).
As I see it, accuracy, completeness, and profundity are aspirational ideals for the working historian (including the historian of ideas, which to some extent I try to be in my books on philosophers like Nietzsche, Epicurus, and Thoreau). Every researcher who is at all realistic knows that no one work can explain past events in a way that is entirely accurate, fully complete, and profoundly meaningful - yet, even so, we can try our best to achieve those ideals in our historical investigations.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Overnight I realized that my post yesterday about Walter Kaufmann's account of love as a virtue could give the impression that my view of life is rather dark. Whereas it seems that Kaufmann had something of a tragic sense of life, my outlook is decidedly sunnier. Since I was quite young, I've wondered at the cosmic improbability of being alive. Several months ago I put it this way to a friend:
Emerging from the endless ocean of eternity,
I am a wave that's crashed by chance upon the shore of time.
Beyond the near miracle of existence in the first place, I've always experienced a deep joy in aliveness and awareness. Yes, life has its shadows, but as Achilles put it in the Odyssey, it's better to be a lowly servant laboring under the sunlight than to be king of the underworld. We find similar sentiments in Euripides, Epicurus, and other ancient Greek thinkers: that the sheer fact of living has an inherent sweetness which nothing can take away.
After all, it's only the light that makes shadows possible in the first place!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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The German-born American philosopher Walter Kaufmann, best known for his translations (and postwar rehabilitation) of Nietzsche, also produced original philosophical works of great worth, as well as a fine collection of poems of which I'm quite fond. In his 1961 book The Faith of a Heretic, among other things Kaufmann attempted to sketch out a personal ethic appropriate for contemporary human beings. Although his accounts of virtues like courage and intellectual honesty span only a few pages each, they are dense with meaning. Here I'll try to summarize his perspective on what Cole Porter famously named "this thing called love".
For Kaufmann, love is not primarily a feeling but an activity: "the lover who is initially overcome by an intense emotion is gradually led to more and more profound concern about the loved one's feelings, thoughts, and welfare". However, Kaufmann observes that this is hard. Indeed, "it is hardest to love those whom we love most", because that very nearness entwines the loved one's concerns and interests so closely with your own that it's difficult to keep your head about you and understand where your responsibilities begin and end. Yet responsibility is what you absolutely must take on as you engage in mutual accomodation and adjustment to satisfy the needs of the one you love. This is perhaps clearest in parental love, but applies equally well to romantic love and friendship, too.
All of this implies that love is not always a fun experience. Kaufmann writes:
That love is pleasant is a fashionable myth, or, to be more charitable about it, the exception. The Buddha knew that love brings "hurt and misery, suffering, grief, and despair"; and he advised detachment. The love I consider a virtue is ... the love that knows what the Buddha knew and still loves, with open eyes.
Yet there are limits, even if Kaufmann doesn't spell them out. Here is one glaring example: since the time when The Faith of a Heretic was published over 60 years ago, we have become increasingly aware that in abusive relationships the hurt and misery can be intentionally imposed by the very person whose actions should instead be suffused with deep consideration and profound concern.
Abuse aside, all loves worth the name necessarily involve loss and grief if you outlive the person who is dear to you, heartache over their disappointments and late-life disabilities, and, yes, sometimes the suffering and despair to which the Buddha drew attention over 2500 years ago.
It can be a great test of character to know and experience all this, yet still love - a test made that much more difficult by the shiftless narcissism in which all too often our culture marinates the human soul. Nevertheless, the kind of love that Kaufmann describes is something we can aspire to, even if it is difficult to achieve.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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With all the Sturm und Drang about so-called artificial intelligence right now, I'd like to make it clear that I don't use these technologies. For me, the primary consideration is not that AI will, on balance, degrade humanity's already weakened ability to engage in independent thinking and humane interaction (although I think evidence is mounting that this will be the case). No, I simply find these technologies uninteresting.
My aspiration in life is to become an excellent human being and to find personal fulfillment: doing right by the people I care about, creating some beautiful works of art, and achieving some measure of sagacity. Based on a few experiments I undertook last year and on my understanding of how large language models work, AI has no role to play in these lifelong pursuits of mine.
I recognize that some people use AI to manage their relationships and work more productively on their projects; perhaps someday (even someday relatively soon) most people in advanced societies will do the same. But I'm not some people or most people: I am myself. And I'm committed to, devoted to, in love with the sheer activities of living: not the product but the process, not the answers but the quest, not the destination but the way.
All of my books, poems, musical compositions, and journal entries are, and will remain, 100% natural and organic - no artificial intelligence added.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
All art is only done by the individual. The individual is all you ever have and all schools only serve to classify their members as failures. ~ Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Anybody can write like somebody else, but it takes a long time to get to write like yourself... ~ Ernest Hemingway, "Notes on Life and Letters"
These propositions, quoted in Albert Murray's book The Blue Devils of Nada, "preclude imitation in favor of individuality", as Murray observes. Here I'm especially interested in Hemingway's statement that schools of art serve to classify their members as failures. What exactly does that mean?
My interpretation is that schools of art - and, I might add, schools of philosophy - set forth theoretical archetypes for what a person is to create or how a person is to live. Too often, the leaders - and sometimes especially the followers - within a school or movement judge others for falling short of the ideal, for building things not defined in the blueprint, for creating and living in ways that aren't according to plan.
Yet the artist, the thinker, the individual human being exists not to follow the rules or paint within the lines, but to experience life completely and then out of that experience to shape something meaningful.
To be clear, this fundamental personalism does not exclude the possibility and often the necessity of collaboration, interaction, and interdependence: writers work with editors and publishers, playwrights work with actors and directors, sculptors work with foundries and gallery owners, composers work with performers, and so on. But at their best all of these folks work together as creative individuals, not as interchangeable representatives or enforcers of some constraining ideology.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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