Log24

(Continued)

Continues.

From today's print version of the New York Times —

“He eliminates anything that’s not essential
from the face of this little rabbit until it’s really
reduced to the absolute minimum,”
Mr. Dibbits said. “And he does the same for
the text of his children’s books. He uses a
language that’s not simple or stupid, but he
reduces to the bare essentials.”

About his own work, Mr. Bruna once said,
“I spend a long time making my drawings
as simple as possible, throwing lots away,
before I reach that moment of recognition.”
He added, “I leave plenty of space for children’s
imagination.”

The result is a series of “Zen-like” tales,
Ms. Vogt said, “and that’s also part of the
universal appeal.”

The passage above is from an obituary for an artist who
reportedly died on Feb. 16.

See also, in this journal, "How deep the rabbit hole goes."

Robert M. Pirsig,  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ,
Ch. 6 (italics are mine):

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form  itself.
A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance .”

Illustration —

Zen and the Art

From earlier this month —

Related material —

"… they didn't really know
what was good
and was not good…."

— The late Bernard Stollman,
     who reportedly died at 85
     on Monday, April 20, 2015

"And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"

— Epigraph to
    Zen and the Art of
    Motorcyle Maintenance

The New York Times  top online front page story this morning—

   more »

"A version of this article appeared in print 
on November 9, 2012, on page B1 of
the New York edition with the headline: 
An Innovator vs. a Follower." — The Times

Some related material from this  journal—

The Quality of Diamond,
Log24 entries from Feb. 2004:

The Quality
with No Name

And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?

— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance

A Sermon from Christchurch
in The New York Times

Related material:

Zen and the Art
and
For the Burning Man

“In chapters 19 and 20 of LILA there is a discussion about the possibility of making Zen and the Art into a movie. It opens with a scene where Robert Redford, who ‘really would like to have the film rights,’ comes to meet and negotiate with Phaedrus in his New York City hotel room. Phaedrus tells the famous actor that he can have the rights to the book, but maybe that’s just because he’s star-struck and doesn’t like to haggle. Under his excitement, Phaedrus has a bad feeling about it. He tells us that he’s been warned by several different people not to allow such a film to be made. Even Redford warned him not to do it. So what’s the problem? As it’s put at the end of that discussion, ‘Films are social media; his book was largely intellectual. That was the center of the problem.'”

— David Buchanan at robertpirsig.org

“The insight is constituted precisely by ‘seeing’ the idea in the image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the particular, the abstract in the concrete.”

— Fr. Brian Cronin‘s Foundations of Philosophy, Ch. 2, “Identifying Direct Insights,” quoted in Ideas and Art

See also Smiles of a Summer Evening, the current issue of TIME, the time of this entry (7:20:11 PM ET), and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

 Best Wishes for a
C. S. Lewis
Christmas

 

Image of Lewis from Into the Wardrobe

“What on earth   is a concrete   universal?” — Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance For one approach to an answer, click on the picture at left.

Update of 4:23 PM:

The Lewis link above deals with the separation of Heaven from Hell.  The emphasis is on Heaven.  A mysterious visitor to this website, “United States,” seems to be seeking equal time for Hell.  And so…

"Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame." —Robert M. Pirsig

"How should we define goodness?"

— Title of an article (pdf) available online from Harvard.

This article (Journal of Theoretical Biology 231 (2004) 107–120), examines goodness in the light of evolutionary dynamics as it involves altruism and social reputation, and concludes that goodness as an evolved social trait has two characteristics: those with good reputations are helped, those with bad reputations are not helped.  This is expressed as follows. (English is apparently not the native language of the authors, from Kyushu University in Japan.)

"One [feature of goodness] is that a player interacting with good persons are assessed by what he does. Cooperation with good individuals should be good and defection against good ones should be bad. The second feature should we consider with much emphasis: a good player who refused to help a bad person must be labeled good. This enables players facing cheaters to refuse help without worrying about the influence of the action on their own good reputation."

In other words,

"… a person in good standing falls into bad if and only if he fails to cooperate with an opponent in good standing. Even if he refuses to help an individual in bad standing, he does not lose his good standing. This is because the refusal is interpreted as punishment against a selfish individual (for studies on punishment, see Brandt and Sigmund (2003), Fehr and Gachter (2000), Fehr and Rockenbach (2003), and Henrich and Boyd (2001))."

See also Harry Truman and Hiroshima, on this date in 1945.

Related material:

Hitler's Still Point:
A Hate Speech for Harvard

The 5 Log24 entries ending
with "Three in One" on
December 30, 2002

Satori at Pearl Harbor

The Line

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 6 (italics are mine):

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.”

The Sophist, by Plato:

STRANGER – We are far from having exhausted the more exact thinkers who treat of being and not-being. But let us be content to leave them, and proceed to view those who speak less precisely; and we shall find as the result of all, that the nature of being is quite as difficult to comprehend as that of not-being.

THEAETETUS – Then now we will go to the others.

STRANGER – There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence.

THEAETETUS – How is that?

STRANGER – Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body.

THEAETETUS – I have often met with such men, and terrible fellows they are.

STRANGER – And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.

THEAETETUS – True.

— Translated by Benjamin Jowett

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 18:

“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…

The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane

hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”

What Pirsig means by “quality” is close to what Yagoda means, in the previous entry, by “style.”

Government by Crackpots

Morning briefing:

Paul Krugman on Laurie Mylroie in today’s New York Times…

Get Me Rewrite!,

Peter Bergen in the Washington Monthly…

Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’
Favorite Conspiracy Theorist,

and Cecil Adams in the Chicago Reader on…

Leo Strauss and
the Neocon Crackpots.

Strauss lectured on Plato at the University of Chicago.  For more on Plato and philosophy at the University of Chicago, see the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

The Quality with No Name

And what is good, Phædrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

— Epigraph to
   Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance

Brad Appleton discusses a phrase of Christopher Alexander:

“The ‘Quality Without A Name‘ (abbreviated as the acronym QWAN) is the quality that imparts incommunicable beauty and immeasurable value to a structure….

Alexander proposes the existence of an objective quality of aesthetic beauty that is universally recognizable. He claims there are certain timeless attributes and properties which are considered beautiful and aesthetically pleasing to all people in all cultures (not just ‘in the eye of the beholder’). It is these fundamental properties which combine to generate the QWAN….”

See, too, The Alexander-Pirsig Connection.

Meditation for the High Holy Days:

Noble Lies or Criminal Fraud?

On Noble Lies:

“Leo Strauss, who for many years taught an esoteric reading of Plato at the University of Chicago, believed that an educated elite could rule through deception. A circle of his former students, now in appointed public office, are in a position to make Strauss’s teaching national practice.”

— America, the Jesuit weekly, July 7, 2003

(“Words are events.”– Walter J. Ong, S.J.) 

On Criminal Fraud:

“There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas…. This whole thing was a fraud.”

— Sen. Ted Kennedy on the Iraq war, Sept. 18, 2003

“Nothing could be a more serious violation of public trust than to consciously make a war based on false claims…. [The Bush administration’s] handling of intelligence and its retaliation against its critics may have been criminal.”

— Gen. Wesley Clark, Oct. 3, 2003

On the Good versus the True

According to one reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance– a book that deals with, among other things, the reading of Plato at the University of Chicago (see the Jesuit remarks above)– the Good is the enemy of the True.  This is a reading that may well appeal to Bush supporters, who would of course like to be on the side of the Good.  Let them recall two Middle Eastern sayings:

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,”
 
 and

“Satan is the father of lies.” 

Phaedrus Lives!

Fans of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance may recall that it is a sort of elegy for an earlier self named Phaedrus who vanished with the recovery of mental health.  Since this is Mental Health Month, the following observations seem relevant.

Reading another weblog’s comments today, I found the following remark:

“…the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and interconnections among things all day it you let it, regardless of whether they are real connections.”
 – sejanus

This, of course, prompted me to look for patterns and interconnections.   The first thing I thought of was the fictional mathematician in “A Beautiful Mind” establishing an amazing — and, within the fiction, real — connection between the pattern on a colleague’s tie and the reflections from a glass.  A web search led to a really real connection…. i.e., to a lengthy listserver letter from an author named Christopher Locke, whose work is new to me but also strangely familiar…. I recognize in his writing both some of my own less-than-mentally-healthy preoccupations and also what might be called the spirit of Phaedrus, from Zen and the Art.

Here is a link to a cache I made of the Locke letter and a follow-up he wrote detailing his sources:

Christopher Locke as Phaedrus

One part of Locke’s letter seems particularly relevant in light of yesterday’s entries related to the death of June Carter Cash:

“Will the circle be unbroken?
  As if some southern congregation
  is praying we will come to understand.”

                            Amen.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), quoting Socrates’s remarks to the original Phaedrus:

‘By Hera,’ says Socrates, ‘a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus castus in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I think this spot must be sacred to Acheloüs and the Nymphs. 

This quotation illustrates a connection between Jesus (College) — from my entry of 3:33 PM Thursday — and a Nymph — from my entry of 11:44 PM Friday.  See, too, Q’s quoting of Socrates’s prayer to Pan, as well as the cover of the May 19, 2003, New Yorker:

For a discussion of the music
that Pan is playing (today’s site music),
see my entry of Sept. 10, 2002,
“The Sound of Hanging Rock.”