Log24

"And Windy has stormy eyes…"

The title is that of an essay by Rebecca Goldstein
in Tikkun  (Nov.-Dec. 1997).  An excerpt:

"… And so it was that I became an analytic philosopher.
If my story ended there, it would make sense.
But against logic, I also became a writer of fiction.
My hopeless passion for fiction had seemed to me,
in the days when I hung exclusively with philosophers,
a rather shameful little aberration. Plato had planned to
rid his utopia of the epic poets, who were the novelists
of his day. Fiction writers are enchanters, those who
spread their dreams abroad; and Plato— whom I still revere—
thoroughly disapproved of enchantment."

See also the previous post.

“Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.”

— C. S. Lewis, quoted here during November 2005.

A review of that month was suggested by the following search …

… which itself was suggested by an obituary in tonight’s online
New York Times  and by this morning’s post “Rhyme.”

A check on the source of the Wittgenstein quotations
in the previous post yields …

   Sounds like Verhexung  to me. See also Plotnitsky in this journal.

Stanley Fish reviewed a new book, Steven Smith's The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, in yesterday's online NY Times—

…the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed? By “smuggling,” Smith answers.

. . . the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway— but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.

The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include “notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian ‘final causes’ or a providential design,” all banished from secular discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a direction— to even get started— “we have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversations— to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise.”

And how do we do that?

A Jewish Answer

By the Coen brothers in "A Serious Man"–

"When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies…."

A Christian answer

Disenchantment author Steven Smith is a a professor at the University of San Diego. This suggests a look at the feast day of San Diego himself… Here are Log24 posts that mention that day, November 12 (which is also Grace Kelly's birthday).

Wikipedia on the tesseract:

Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road:

Johnny Cash: “And behold, a white horse.”

On The Last Battle, a book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis:

Lewis said in “The Weight of Glory”—
 

On enchantments that need to be broken:

See the description of the Eater of Souls in Glory Road and of Scientism in

• Mathematics and Narrative,

• The Rhetoric of Scientism,

• and the C. S. Lewis classic,
  That Hideous Strength.

Cartesian Theatre

From aldaily.com today:

"If my mind is a tiny theatre I watch in my brain, then there is a tinier mind and theatre inside that mind to see it, and so on forever… more»"

This leads to the dream (or nightmare) of the Cartesian theatre, as pictured by Daniel Dennett.

From websurfing yesterday and today…

The tiny theatre of Ivor Grattan-Guinness:

"… mathematicians often treat history with contempt (unsullied by any practice or even knowledge of it, of course)."

— The Rainbow of Mathematics

The contempt for history of the Harvard mathematics department (see previous entry) suggests a phrase….

A search on "Harvard sneer" yields, as the first page found, a memorial to an expert practitioner of the Harvard sneer… Robert Harris Chapman, Professor of English Literature, playwright, theatrical consultant, and founding Director of the Loeb Drama Center from 1960 to 1980.

Continuing the Grattan-Guinness rainbow theme in a tinier theatre, we may picture Chapman's reaction to the current Irish Repertory Theatre production of Finian's Rainbow.  Let us hope it is not a Harvard sneer.

In a yet tinier theatre, we may envision a mathematical version of Finian's Rainbow, with Og the leprechaun played by Andrew P. Ogg.  Ogg would, of course, perform a musical version of his remarks on the Jugendtraum:

"Follow the fellow who follows a dream."

Melissa Errico
in Finian's Rainbow

"Give her a song like…. 'Look to the Rainbow,' and her gleaming soprano effortlessly flies it into the stratosphere where such numbers belong. This is the voice of enchantment…."

— Ben Brantley, today's NY Times

For related philosophical remarks on rainbows, infinite regress, and redheads, see

Loretta's Rainbow and

The Leonardo Code.

Hermes and Folded Time

Yesterday’s entry on painter Ward Jackson and the philosopher Gadamer involved what is called hermeneutics, or the art of interpretation.  Gadamer was a leader in this field.  The following passage perhaps belabors the obvious, but it puts hermeneutics clearly in context.

From Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics for Beginners:

“The ‘tightness’ of semiotic codes themselves varies from the rule-bound closure of logical codes (such as computer codes) to the interpretative looseness of poetic codes. Pierre Guiraud notes that ‘signification is more or less codified,‘ and that some systems are so ‘open’ that they ‘scarcely merit the designation ‘code’ but are merely systems of “hermeneutic” interpretation’ (*Guiraud 1975, 24). Guiraud makes the distinction that a code is ‘a system of explicit social conventions’ whilst ‘a hermeneutics’ is ‘a system of implicit, latent and purely contingent signs,’ adding that ‘it is not that the latter are neither conventional nor social, but they are so in a looser, more obscure and often unconscious way’ (*ibid., 41). His claim that (formal) codes are ‘explicit’ seems untenable since few codes would be likely to be widely regarded as wholly explicit. He refers to two ‘levels of signification,’ but it may be more productive to refer to a descriptive spectrum based on relative explicitness, with technical codes veering towards one pole and interpretative practices veering towards the other. At one end of the spectrum are what Guiraud refers to as ‘explicit, socialized codes in which the meaning is a datum of the message as a result of a formal convention between participants’ (*ibid., 43-4). In such cases, he argues, ‘the code of a message is explicitly given by the sender’ (*ibid., 65). At the other end of the spectrum are ‘the individual and more or less implicit hermeneutics in which meaning is the result of an interpretation on the part of the receiver’ (*ibid., 43-4). Guiraud refers to interpretative practices as more ‘poetic,’ being ‘engendered by the receiver using a system or systems of implicit interpretation which, by virtue of usage, are more or less socialized and conventionalized’ (*ibid., 41). Later he adds that ‘a hermeneutics is a grid supplied by the receiver; a philosophical, aesthetic, or cultural grid which he applies to the text’ (*ibid., 65).”

* Pierre Guiraud, Semiology (trans. George Gross), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975

Related material:

From Michalinos Zembylas on Michel Serres:

“Serres’ use of Hermes is reminiscent of hermeneutics. The word derives from Hermes and implies that the idea of hermeneutics as a theory of interpretation (and consequently of communication) is necessary when there is a possibility for misunderstanding. Hermes translated the ‘word of Gods’; an interpreter translates the written text, and a teacher ‘translates’ the literature….  Understanding then is aided by the mediation of a hermeneut…. According to Gadamer (1975), the pleasure such understanding elicits is the joy of knowledge (which does not operate as an enchantment but as a kind of transformation). It is worth exploring this idea a bit more since there are interesting connections with Serres’ work.”

There is also an interesting connection with Guiraud’s work.  As quoted above, Guiraud wrote that

“…a hermeneutics is a grid supplied by the receiver; a philosophical, aesthetic, or cultural grid which he applies to the text.”

Serres describes Hermes as passing through “folded time.”  Precisely how time can be folded into a grid is the subject of my note The Grid of Time, which gives the context for the Serres phrase “folded time.”

For more on hermeneutics and Gadamer’s “joy of knowledge,” see Ian Lee in The Third Word War on “understanding the J.O.K.E.” (the Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia).