Tuesday 28 April 2015

Werner Heisenberg (1958) - Physics and Philosophy


Heisenberg covers a broad range of topics from Greek philosophy through the development of Western philosophies regarding our understanding of the world around us.

"
The difficulty of metaphysical realism was felt soon after Descartes and became the starting point for the empiristic philosophy, for sensualism and positivism.

The three philosophers who can be taken as representatives for early empiristic philosophy are Locke, Berkeley and Hume.  Locke holds, contrary to Descartes, that all knowledge is ultimately founded in experience.  This experience may be sensation or perception of the operation of our own mind.  Knowledge, so Locke states, is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas.  The next step was taken by Berkeley.  If actually all our knowledge is derived from perception, there is no meaning in the statement that the things really exist; because if the perception is given it cannot possibly make any difference whether the things exist or do not exist.  Therefore, to be perceived is identical with existence.  This line of argument then was extended to an extreme skepticism by Hume, who denied induction and causation and thereby arrived at a conclusion which if taken seriously would destroy the basis of all empirical science.

The criticism of metaphysical realism which has been expressed in empiristic philosophy is certainly justified in so far as it is a warning against the naïve use of the term, 'existence'.  The positive statements of this philosophy can be criticized on similar lines.  Our perceptions are not primarily bundles of color or sounds; what we perceive is already perceived as something, the accent here being on the word 'thing', and therefore it is doubtful whether we gain anything by taking the perceptions instead of the things as the ultimate elements of reality.

The underlying difficulty has been clearly recognized by modern positivism.  This line of thought expresses criticism against the naïve use of certain terms like 'thing', 'perception', 'existence' by the general postulate that the question whether a given sentence has any meaning at all should always be thoroughly and critically examined.  This postulate and its underlying attitude are derived from mathematical logic.  The procedure of natural science is pictured as an attachment of symbols to the phenomena.  The symbols can, as in mathematics, be combined according to certain rules, and in this way statements about the phenomena can be represented by combinations of symbols.

However, a combination of symbols that does not comply with the rules is not wrong but conveys no meaning.
"

Thursday 23 April 2015

Kenneth Kushner (1988) - One Arrow, One Life

Zen, Archery, and Daily Life
"
[Mushin]

Much of our internal dialogue involves thoughts about ourselves.  In mushin one loses this sense of self-awareness and self-reflection.  If one is doing something, for example looking at a sunset, one loses the sense that it is 'I' who is looking at the sunset just as one loses the internal dialogue telling him how beautiful it is.  In mushin, one simply experiences the sunset.

The practice of zazen provides a context which facilitates the student's ability to notice when he is distracted by his internal dialogue.  Zazen is usually practiced in a quiet environment in which distracting external stimuli are kept to a minimum.  Yet, even without distractions from external sources, the student is easily distracted by the chain of associations going on in his mind.  The stillness of the setting makes it easier for him to identify when he becomes attached to delusions.  As the student sits, his mind will eventually dwell on extraneous thoughts.  At some point, however, he will notice that the thoughts are clouding his perception; they will stand out as unnecessary images on a larger screen of awareness.  The recognition that he is dwelling on these thoughts is the cue to adjust his breathing and posture and to focus his attention on counting his breath.  Eventually the student can concentrate fully on each breath, allowing him to treat each respiration as an entity in itself.  In that way, zazen becomes a vehicle to attain mushin.

The process of kyudo can also be seen as a method to attain mushin through the integration of breathing, posture and concentration.  In kyudo, attachment to delusive thoughts is a constant temptation.  Any number of delusive thoughts can distract us from full concentration in kyudo.  Events or problems in our lives - such as our jobs, financial situations, family lives - can all intrude on concentration.  However, the thoughts most difficult to keep from following when one is shooting are those relating to our performance in kyudo itself.  Each arrow should be shot without regard to one's past performance or to one's performance in the future, just as Tanzen was able to keep from being distracted by the vision of the girl.  To do so, one must adjust one's breathing and posture in order to regain one's concentration.
"
issha zetsumei = 一射絶命 = "one shot - end of life" - to put everything one has into an action
mushin = 無心 = no mind;
zazen = 座禅 = sitting meditation
kyudo = 弓道 = way of the bow / Japanese archery

'One shot - end of life' reminds me of Hagakure (as quoted in the film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)):
"
There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the present moment. 
Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else. No one seems to have noticed this fact. But grasping this firmly, one must pile experience upon experience. And once one has come to this understanding he will be a different person from that point on, though he may not always bear it in mind. 
Hagakure
"

Erwin Schrödinger (1944) - What is Life?


"
The Timoféëff report contains a practical hint which I cannot refrain from mentioning here, though it has, of course, no bearing on our present investigation.  There are plenty of occasions in modern life when a human being has to be exposed to X-rays.  The direct dangers involved, as burns, X-ray cancer, sterilization, are well known, and protection by lead screens, lead-loaded aprons, etc., is provided, especially for nurses and doctors who have to handle the rays regularly.  The point is, that even when these imminent dangers to the indirect danger of small detrimental mutations being produced in germ cells - mutations of the kind envisaged when we spoke of the unfavourable results of close-breeding.  To put it drastically, though perhaps a little naïvely, the injuriousness of a marriage between first cousins might very well be increased by the fact that their grandmother had served for a long period as an X-ray nurse.  It is not a point that need worry any individual personally.  But any possibility of gradually infecting the human race with unwanted latent mutations ought to be a matter of concern to the community.
"
This is quite a statement from Schrödinger regarding X-rays.  I wonder what X-ray machines at airports are adding to the human gene pool...  All those unnecessary X-rays gradually infecting our germ-line cells with unwanted latent mutations.

Tuesday 21 April 2015

Jean-Paul Sartre (1938) - Nausea


 "
Thursday, 11.30

I have spent two hours working in the reading room.  I have come down into the cour des Hypothéques to smoke a pipe.  A square paved with pink bricks.  The people of Bouville are proud of it because it dates from the eighteenth century.  At the entrance to the rue Chamade and the rue Suspédard, some old chains bar the way to vehicles.  These ladies in black, taking their dogs for a walk, glide beneath the arcade, hugging the walls.  They rarely come right out into the daylight but they cast furtive, satisfied, girlish glances at the statue of Gustave Impétraz.  They can't know the name of that bronze giant, but they can see from his frock coat and top hat that he was somebody in high society.  He holds his hat in his left hand and rests his right hand on a pile of folio volumes : it is rather as if their grandfather were there on that pedestal, cast in bronze.  They don't need to look at him for long to understand that he thought as they do, exactly as they do, on all subjects.  At the service of their narrow, firm little ideas he has placed his authority and the immense erudition drawn from the folio volumes crushed under his heavy hand.  The ladies in black feel relieved, they can attend peacefully to their household tasks, take their dogs out : they no longer have the responsibility of defending the sacred ideas, the worthy concepts which they derive from their fathers; a man of bronze has made himself their guardian.
"
This passage makes me wonder about my great great aunt, Pepita Texidor.  There is a statue of her in the Parc de la Cuitadella in Barcelona.  Many people will wander past her statue, glancing at her face glancing back at them...  how many will know her name or that her statue stands as a memory to her feminist principles 100 yrs ago.  (2014 marked the Centenary of her death.)

This is a video of an exhibition about Pepita:


Friday 17 April 2015

Cormac McCarthy (1973) - child of god



"
When Ballard came out onto the porch there was a thin man with a collapsed jaw squatting in the yard waiting for him. 
What say Darfuzzle, said Ballard
What say Lester. 
He sounded like a man with a mouthful of marbles, articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away. 
Ballard squatted on his heels in the yard opposite the visitor.  They looked like constipated gargoyles. 
Say you found that old gal up on the turnaround?
Ballard sniffed.  What gal? he said.
Thatn was left up yonder.  Had on a nightgown. 
Ballard pulled at the loose sole of his shoe.  I seen her, he said. 
She's went to the sheriff.
She has? 
The other man turned and spat and looked back toward Ballard.  They done arrested Pless. 
That's your all's lookout.  I didn't have nothin to do with her.
She says you did.
She's a lyin sack of green shit. 
The visitor rose.  I just thought I'd tell ye, he said.  You do what you want.
"

The Epic of Gilgamesh (~2800 BC)


"
Gilgamesh said to him, 'Why should not my cheeks be starved and my face drawn?  Despair is in my heart and my face is the face of one who has made a long journey.  It was burned with heat and cold.  Why should I not wander over the pastures?  My friend, my younger brother who seized and killed the Bull of Heaven and overthrew Humbaba in the cedar forest, my friend who was very dear to me and endured dangers beside me, Enkidu, my brother whom I loved, the end of mortality has overtaken him.  I wept for him seven days and nights till the worm fastened on him.  Because of my brother I am afraid of death; because of my brother I stray through the wilderness.  His fate lies heavy upon me.  How can I be silent, how can I rest?  He is dust and I shall die also and be laid in the earth for ever.'  Again Gilgamesh said, speaking to Utnapishtim, 'It is to see Utnapishtim whom we call the Faraway that I have come this journey.  For this I have wandered over the world, I have crossed many difficult ranges, I have crossed the seas, I have wearied myself with travelling; my joints are aching, and I have lost acquaintance with sleep which is sweet.  My clothes were worn out before I came to the house of Siduri.  I have killed the bear and hyena, the lion and panther, the tiger, the stag and the ibex, all sorts of wild game and the small creatures of the pastures.  I ate their flesh and I wore their skins; and that was how I came to the gate of the young woman, the maker of wine, who barred her gate of pitch and bitumen against me.  But from her I had news of the journey; so then I came to Urshanabi the ferryman, and with him I crossed over the waters of death.  Oh, father Utnapishtim, you who have entered the assembly of the gods, I wish to question you concerning the living and the dead, how shall I find the life for which I am searching?'

Utnapishtim said, 'There is no permanence.  Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time?  Do brothers divide an inheritance to keep for ever, does the flood-time of rivers endure?  It is only the nymph of the dragonfly who sheds her larva and sees the sun in his glory....
"

Lao Tzu (~500 BC?) - Tao Te Ching

Book II - Te Ching - XLV:

"
Great perfection seems chipped,
Yet use will not wear it out;
Great fullness seems empty,
Yet use will not drain it;
Great straightness seems bent;
Great skill seems awkward;
Great eloquence seems tongue-tied.

Restlessness overcomes cold; stillness overcomes heat.

Limpid and still,
One can be a leader in the empire.
"

Samuel Beckett (1934) - MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS

DING-DONG:

Early Beckett in prose... to be content to be drunk and to wait...
"
Sitting in this crapulent den, drinking his drink, he gradually ceased to see its furnishings with pleasure, the bottles, representing centuries of loving research, the stools, the counter, the powerful screws, the shining phalanx of the pulls of the beer-engines, all cunningly devised and elaborated to further the relations between purveyor and consumer in this domain.  The bottles drawn and emptied in a twinkling, the casks responding to the slightest pressure on their joysticks, the weary proletarians at rest on arse and elbow, the cash-register that never complains, the graceful curates flying from customer to customer, all this made up a spectacle in which Belacqua was used to take delight and chose to see a pleasant instance of machinery decently subservient to appetite.  A great major symphony of supply and demand, effect and cause, fulcrate on the middle C of the counter and waxing, as it proceeded, in the charming harmonies of blasphemy and broken glass and all the aliquots of fatigue and ebriety.  So that he would say that the only place where he could come to anchor and be happy was a low public-house and that all the wearisome tactics of gress and dud Beethoven would be done away with if only he could spend his life in such a place.  But as they closed at ten, and as residence and good faith were viewed as incompatible, and as in any case he had not the means to consecrate his life to stasis, even in the meanest bar, he supposed he must be content to indulge this whim from time to time, and return thanks for such sporadic mercy.

All this and much more he laboured to make clear.  He seemed to derive considerable satisfaction from his failure to do so.

But on this particular occasion the cat failed to jump, with the result that he became as despondent as though he were sitting at home in his own great armchair, as anxious to get on the move and quite as hard put to it to do so.  Why this was he could not make out.  Whether the trituration of the child in Pearse Street had upset him without his knowing it, or whether (and he put forward this alternative with a truly insufferable complacency) he had come to some parting of the ways, he did not know at all.  All he could say was that the objects in which he was used to find such recreation and repose lost gradually their hold upon him, he became insensible to them little by little, the old itch and algos crept back into his mind.  He had come briskly all the way from Tommy Moore, and now he suddenly found himself sitting paralysed and grieving in a pub of all places, good for nothing but to stare at his spoiling porter and wait for a sign.
"

Hermann Hesse (1914) - Rosshalde


"
He showed him pictures of houses, streets, villages, and temples, of fantastic Batu caves near Kuala Lumpur, and of the jagged, wildly beautiful limestone and marble mountains near Ipoh, and when Veraguth asked if there were no pictures of natives, he dug out photographs of Malays, Chinese, Tamils, Arabs, and Javanese, naked athletic harbor coolies, wizened old fishermen, hunters, peasants, weavers, merchants, beautiful women with gold ornaments, dark naked groups of children, fishermen with nets, ear-ringed Sakai playing the nose flute, and Javanese dancing girls bristling with silver baubles.  He had photographs showing palms of every kind, lush broad-leafed pisang trees, patches of rain forest traversed by thousandfold creepers, sacred temple groves and turtle ponds, water buffalo in rice paddies, tame elephants at work and wild elephants playing in the water and stretching their trumpeting trunks heavenward.

The painter picked up photograph after photograph.  Some he thrust aside after a brief glance, some he placed side by side for comparison, some figures and heads he examined carefully through the cup of his hand.  Several times he asked at what time of day the picture had been taken, measured shadows, and became more and more deeply immersed.

Once he muttered absently.  "One might paint all that."

"Enough!" he finally cried out, and heaved a sigh.  "You must tell me much more.  It's wonderful having you here!  Everything looks different to me now.  Come, we'll walk for an hour.  I want to show you something."
"
Yes! Mr Hesse... please tell me much more... it IS wonderful having you here in my library... everything looked different after reading Hesse...

Angela Carter (1972) - The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

"
The rest of the machines contained the following items.

Exhibit Two:  THE ETERNAL VISTAS OF LOVE
When I looked through the windows of the machine, all I could see were two eyes looking back at me.  Each eye was a full three feet from end to end, complete with a lid and a tear duct, and was suspended in the air without any visible support.  Like the pubic hair in the previous model, the lashes had been scrupulously set one by one in narrow hems of rosy wax but this time the craftsmen had achieved a disturbing degree of life-likeness which uncannily added to the synthetic quality of the image.  The rounded whites were delicately veined with crimson to produce an effect like that of the extremely precious marble used in Italy during the late baroque period to make altars for the chapels of potentates and the irises were simple rings of deep brown bottle glass while in the pupils I could see, reflected in two discs of mirror, my own eyes, very greatly magnified by the lenses of the machine.  Since my own pupils, in turn, reflected the false eyes before me while these reflections again reflected those reflections, I soon realized I was watching a model of eternal regression.

Exhibit Three:  THE MEETING PLACE OF LOVE AND HUNGER
Upon a cut-glass dish of the kind in which desserts are served lay two perfectly spherical portions of vanilla ice-cream, each topped with a single cherry so that the resemblance to a pair of female breasts was almost perfect.

Exhibit Four:  EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT THE NIGHT IS FOR
Here, a wax figure of the headless body of a mutilated woman lay in a pool of painted blood.  She wore only the remains of a pair of black stockings and a ripped suspender belt of shiny black rubber.  Her arms stuck out stiffly on either side of her and once again I noticed the loving care with which the craftsmen who manufactured her had simulated the growth of underarm hair.  The right breast had been partially segmented and hung open to reveal two surfaces of meat as bright and false as the plaster sirloins which hang in toy butcher's shops while her belly was covered with some kind of paint that always contrived to look wet and, from the paint, emerged the handle of an enormous knife which was kept always a-quiver by the action (probably) of a spring.
"