Boo Freud. Yay Jung.
Ernest T. fell in love with Miss Crump, so Barney told him he wasn’t really in love, it was just that Miss Crump was a mother figure because she was a teacher. Ernest thanked him for explaining that.
In the next scene Andy is walking down the sidewalk holding Miss Crump’s hand, and Ernest T. comes sailing through the air from behind screaming, “Take your hands off my mother figure!”
Are you willing to debate it? 
It’s on like Donkey Kong.
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Jung’s final words to Freud:
“I accede to your wish that we abandon our personal relations, for I never thrust my friendship on anyone. You yourself are the best judge of what this moment means to you. ‘The rest is silence.’”
My last words to Fred
(although not final because I’ll see him tonight):
“Who’s a good boy?”
I reread Eco’s The Name of the Rose, now knowing the history and philosophy of the period better. It seems to me the critical reception has been rather stifled by a lack of familiarity, at least in English and as I had the book taught to me years ago, and what I have read this time around.
The detective monk hero, William of Baskerville, is a stand-in for modern ideas and the then “New Science” and nominalism, that much is obvious. Ockham and Bacon show up hovering over the hero. However, as a philosophical argument in favor of these modern views, the book would be quite weak, simply because all other positions are represented exclusively by extremely dogmatic, fanatical figures, most of whom are engaged in vicious crimes or false prosecutions. I don’t think Eco’s intent was so simple though, although it is read that way often, and comes across that way in film.
I know from his philosophical works that Eco is sympathetic to medieval thought. I don’t think William is supposed to be a flawless hero (although he is surely the hero), and the narrator does seem to suggest at times how his philosophical position slips towards being unable to say much about anything, or even to delineate good from evil. That is, any modern is likely to side heavily with William on moral issues (and probably any medieval, the other characters tend to be somewhat vile), yet none of his nominalism or naturalistic methodology actually secures his superior moral footing; if anything these commitments continually, but subtlety undermine his superior morality. It struck me that this mimics how he solved the mystery largely through error and mistakes. Actually, Eco praises the Sherlock Holmes style empirical method entirely. It is the nominalism that gets spotlighted, because it turns out that nothing is there to anchor the pattern finding.
One sign of this is when Adso, the narrator, remarks that William seems to love possibilities and patterns of his own making more than things and truth.
Without revealing to much, I think the big tell that a triumphal pro-Enlightenment message is too simple is when Adso considers William and the antagonist(s) big show down and has the insight that their lust for cleverness is best compared to instances of illicit carnal lust throughout the book. The self and its patterns come to displace everything, and something of the sin of pride hangs over both sides.
Also, Adso’s Thomistic reflections on his romantic are the most sustained philosophical line in the entire book (as opposed to more historical monologues elsewhere) and leans heavily into the Augustinian, Dantean rightly ordered loves paradigm, not an Enlightenment utilitarian or deontic reading, so that the good is said to be present even in illicit carnal acts (and even good of itself), but also why the event is not good (or good to repeat) in respect of higher goods. I suppose the flatter reading would be that this is just Adso being unable to shake his dogmatism and coping with bad philosophy, but I really don’t think Eco sees it that way; he has more respect for the narrator as old man.
So, it’s not a simple allegory. It points to the dangers of fantacism and fideism, and overall has a very dismal view of the epoch politically and even within the monastery spiritually. But it also points to what is lost and deficient in what comes next.
I would contrast this with Vodolazkin’s Laurus, which is another great fiction work by a medieval scholar that really captures the period (Russian not Italian in that one), but is much more positive despite depicting a much more brutal and sad landscape, because of how its main character responds, embracing suffering and transfiguring it.
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I’m trying, again, to read House of Leaves. I have finished the book twice before.
Am i crazy, or it this just not good?
Ascesis: The Saviors of God by Nikos Kazantzakis.
It is the first time I read a personal diary from K. I have decided to read a few pages each night before I go to sleep.
I can feel his spiritual and personal struggle in these pages. However, the big difference is that here K opens up in a personal way; the rest of his works are novels where the characters are a representation of his belief crisis.
Probably, I have been reading Kazantzakis for almost 3 or 4 years. It was Alkis Piskas, in the old PF, who recommended this wonderful author to me. It is fascinating the amount of knowledge you can acquire here.
Hum by Helen Phillips
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~Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton
~Modernism and Madness by Louis A Saas
~The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
~On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ by St. Maximus the Cofessor
The Master and His Emissary is a must read in my opinion.
Children of Time and its sequels. Its an epic history spanning milions of years of genetically programmed Spiders on a terraformed planet. Think Planet of the Apes and 2001 A Space Odyssey.
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Also, the nameless girl who occupies a center role in the narrative of the Name of the Rose seems particularly instructive. All of the servants and peasants, “the simple” are namelessness and given no interiority (we as modern liberals are meant to agree with how bad it is that they are looked down upon, and yet most critical readers seem to ignore that they are only present as labor in the narrative itself). But one point openly acknowledged by early Enlightenment theorists is that, under liberalism, it is precisely the “great individual” who is empowered. Without custom or values (or with the right-Nietzchean creation of values by the strong) the weak are just instruments of power.
The only time we see any consideration of the simple as good for their own sake, in any thick way (William largely mentions them in economic and political terms, in relation to power) is Adso’s extended reflection on love.
Hence, we’re obviously supposed to prefer William to the antagonists, but his Wittgenstein quote at the end is obviously not supposed to be positive I think. The whole narrative is shot through with power struggles, from the petty to the civilization shaping, and William is always on the right side of these. Yet, according to his own philosophy, he cannot justify his own position more than any other. If truth is just a ladder to get what you want, even the truth about goodness and justice, then you’re looking at nothing but desire ordered to other desires, power struggles.
But I’ve moved on to Eco’s less well known Baudolino, which I would say is better in every way because it’s simply hilarious and a very clever, yet also an informative look at Italy around the time of Barbarossa and the Fourth Crusade.
I thought it was an interesting idea, much less interesting as an actual book.
Full of quotable quotes! Although sometimes I feel like Chesterton is too clever for his own good. His biographies on Saint Thomas and Saint Francis become a bit too much “Chesterton doing Chesterton” for that reason. Orthodoxy has some great and prescient stuff. The whole thing on the madman thinking in a circle anticipates Quine on the web of belief in much the same way Lewis anticipated Kuhn and Newman the post-modern criticism of the Enlightenment. It’s too bad that whole British camp doesn’t get much attention.
I think that ends with the Jonah commentary. That’s a great one. Von Balthasar’s book on Maximos is really great for a deeper dive, or Jordan Woods’, although I didn’t get around to finishing that one.
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England, England by Julian Barnes.
The Pedant in the Kitchen by Julian Barnes.
Kritik und Krise by Reinhart Koselleck (Critique and Crisis) in which he examines the relationship between Absolutism and the Enlightenment (both thought of as derived from the separation of politics from morality), in doing so offering a (conservative? reactionary? He was a student of Carl Schmitt) critique of ‘enlightened’ (i.e. critical) thought.
The Sources of Normativity by Christine Korsgaard, where she (among many other things) argues against (substantive) moral realism (Normativity as derived from certain moral facts) and in favor of a “procedural” moral realism (Normativity as derived from practical reason and reflective endorsement).
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. Have only read the first chapter so far, where he proposes the “disquieting suggestion” that our modern moral framework, derived from the Ancients, might be fragmented, (irrecoverably?) separated from its original practical and social context, and thus incoherent and meaningless.
The Tunnel by William H. Gass
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
Expriring Loans by Petros Márkaris.
I’m not a big fan of noir fiction, but sometimes I like to give it a try…
Excellent so far. Describes America’s civil religion/mythology. Dog head to the left cat ear to right.
Yeah, that’s a good one. Admirable spiders. I keep thinking about them from time to time.
I also read Service Model, by the same author.
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