ON THE STRANGE DISJUNCTEDNESS.


GARY C. MOORE:
The poetry of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop among many others, and the short stories, letters, and essays of Flannery OConnor, show the off-centered self-centeredness of the modern mind in a living way modern philosophy, at best, can only do in obscure principles and generalities made self-consistent in themselves but completely contradicting practical living experience.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Gary, I agree. Philosophy lives and breathes the stuff of *obscure principles and generalities.*

GARY C. MOORE:
Better yet, in accordance with NATURE NEVER RESTS, *living principles*, *principles becoming and never being*, *principles on the way*, *principles always incomplete because their end is never attained*, and better yet, *principles as telos* whose material goal, SKOPOS, turn out to be completely perverted from Idealized intent such as Idealized Nazism in 1933 compared Nazism in the buff in 1945.

     After all, like my Fascist Youth friend told me in Italy, they only taught telling the truth, being loyal to the end, being strong and facing up to adversity, take the battle to enemy instead of passively receiving his attacks, to endure in what you know to be true and ever waver, etc. *Living principle* in fact ceases to be principle because the whole idea of *principle* confuses means with end OR end with means. *Living according to virtue*, living according to nature*, living according to reason* cannot be principles because they are mere empty FORMS of intent. You can put anything into them as Aristotle did.

     But most of us would agree - GENERALLY AND FOR THE MOST PART - more with Aristotle's choices of SUBSTANTIAL moral ACTS than we would with a Nazi like Heidegger. But here is the kicker. You always have to start from where you are now - either in judging your own moral *principles* or even someone else's moral *principles*. You start from what is closest to you - unfortunately you have not read the book - and THEN search out the general principles - *general* having two distinct meanings here that are not always compatible. As you search out more and more the most basic *principles*, the more abstract they become. They more abstract they become, the more ALIKE they become. Both Heidegger and Aristotle would say it is good to tell the truth - GENERALLY.

     Only Kant, and I really know very little of his REAL moral theory, says you should tell the truth all the time regardless. Virtue *in general* depends PURELY on circumstance. As I have said elsewhere, only an *insane* person would not desire to act virtuously, or against nature, or irrationally. But what do those words *virtue*, *nature* and *rational* means without content? *Something* since you can be legally insane without them, and everybody agrees on that. Only when you specifically define those words do you get disagreement and the more particularly you define, the more particularly you disagree. So if we all just believed in the meaningfulness of empty FORMS of principles, then we all could have sworn allegiance to Our Führer Adolf Hitler.

RICHARD SANSOM:
What lies behind those *concepts* is the tangle of human truth, which is the meat and bones of [good] poetry.

GARY C. MOORE:
True, but poets are concerned primarily, maybe only, with how people, in fact live - or even How they should live. If they are good poets, like you say, then they have to say what the results are - also in fact. *Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace . . .* But here Shakespeare is attacking one of the bed rock fundamentals of the average human being -- wanting to be remembered after their death. But Marcus Aurelius said you should not be good for how people remember you, and the SUBSTANTIAL interpretation of that empty FORM led to RATIONAL but disastrous results - another book . . .

RICHARD SANSOM:
Philosophy, for the most part is didactic; good poetry is never, or seldom, didactic.

GARY C. MOORE:
I disagree. I find Shakespeare thoroughly didactic. His sonnets are even rigidly didactic, the sonnet form actually performing like a syllogism. But, first, that is not what we MODERNS read him for - but what about Lincoln - how much of his political theory came from Shakespeare? - but in his day poetry was explicitly intended to be didactic. But it never suppose to be stupid and boring as it became in the nineteenth century.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Thinkers like Camus, Sartre and Kafka, like good poets, come at things obliquely, with shadows of meaning, nooks and crannies of human elements that philosophers try to grab through something like formulaic pronouncements - it seldom works.

GARY C. MOORE:
Maybe it becomes noticeable when it is clumsy and wrong. We grow up, as moderns, with the assumption there is an answer to every question. This is a inheritance from traditional Christianity. But Shakespeare - and therefore his inspired distant pupils Camus, Sartre and Kafka - had the - *advantage* - of having Christianity and its culture legally imposed on him on penalty of death, so that any clear headed person knew *there is something rotten in the state of Denmark* from the word GO! Whereas we - have the freedom to be - a Nazi - if we want to! So in the end you have *being moral type A* and *being immoral type B*, but when you consider their material results, you might well call A immoral and B moral. But this can only be a matter of time and circumstance. It is morality itself that necessitates *coming to things obliquely*, shadows of meaning*, nooks and crannies of human elements*. I am preaching and should stop. But a good formulaic pronouncement that, as a formula is paradoxical, is Sartre’s *Hell is other people* [NO EXIT] where the only real joy in our lives is other people, and yet these same *other people* are the fundamental source of our misery also.

RICHARD SANSOM:
And I agree about Shakespeare; he was never didactic, or when he was [Polonius *desideratum* to Laertes] he used it indirectly or sarcastically. Good poetry, that has at its base some core fact about humanity, is only philosophical in the end result of one's settled take on the matter. T. S. Eliot was a philosophical poet in this sense, but, IMO, too contrived to be *great,* at least in my feelings about Prufrock.

GARY C. MOORE::
Considering how I just manipulated *didacticism*, I agree with you. But condemning Polonius can ONLY come about from the point of view of Hamlet’s *To be or not to be* nihilism or Macbeth's despair with historical memory. It is more,

Polonius was smart, but Hamlet was much smarter. Once I said Claudius was the only person in HAMLET that understood Hamlet - and then Lincoln chooses Claudius - not Hamlet - as one of his favorite characters!!! As to T. S. Eliot, he is not one of my favorite reads. But, on the other hand as Jud has pointed out several times, he can say something far too unpleasantly apt. *It is the times, they are out of joint!* Where is that from in Shakespeare?

     While in practice accepting, *Nothing is certain, everything must be doubted*, they in no way accept the solid rock grounding of the cogito but rather question the mode of existence of their own identity and acknowledge the fragmented and multi, contradictorily motivated starting points of their thinking. To them this is not a deficit but is the modern stuff of poetry which is not well seen in the poetry of the nineteenth century, and hardly at all in the poetry of the eighteenth century and can really only be found in the plays of Shakespeare fully and explicitly. This was brought home to me with a shock when, starting a biography of Lincoln, I read his favorite Shakespearean characters were Macbeth, Richard III, and Claudius. Lincoln in many ways is a powerful exemplification of how a truly thoughtful and individual human being must in fact develop in the modern world. His Shakespeare - and to many others of his generation - was his *ancient philosophy* of thinking about how to live which makes Lincoln an enigma to modern scholars who seem to be thinking more and more in stereotypes of what a person *should* be and then are pleasantly surprised with their lack of understanding of a titanic figure like Lincoln. He was *All things to all men* which should give us second thoughts about another truly enigmatic and contradictory figure, Paul.

RICHARD SANSOM:
You mentioned Shakespeare, but I would include some of the Metaphysical poets - especially Donne - prior to his getting religion. See his Song: *Goe and catche a falling star* Interesting that you are reading a history of Lincoln. My father left me a six volume biography of Lincoln by Carl Sandberg and it is a wonderful treat to read, Sandberg having a poets sense, and an obvious love of his subject. This is a rare set and I am thinking about sending it to President Obama!

GARY C. MOORE:
It is great. And I can assuredly bet you hard cash Obama has it! Sandberg is the quintessential Chicagioan and Lincoln the quintessential Illinoisean. Not only would the people of Illinois consider it treason for him to not have Sandberg, but have you not noticed how Obama is modeling himself on Lincoln? But he is not nearly as good.

Modern poetry does not proceed in supplying normal expectations of what one *should* think, but piles up, sometimes, things that seem disjointed until, coming to the last line, the whole actually somehow seems to be summed up. But it is not easily said at all *How?*

RICHARD SANSOM:
I believe that the *shoulds* emerge and enter parts of the brain that are not readily accessible. It is hard to imagine any poet who does not have some kind of agenda; perhaps one they themselves are not aware of.

GARY C. MOORE:
*Should* is an emotional word. However much reason one might try to put into *should* is easily crowded out by the savage dinosaur brain of the limbic system. *Morality* always has teeth in it.

JUD EVANS:
Very true Gary. But there is more to observing, feeling, smelling, tasting and hearing an object than the simple act of seeing or beholding that which is visible. In my opinion this was Husserl's greatest mistake, for to *bracket out* all a priori, experiential, noetic provenance of a matergic causal object and rely entirely on the sensorial results of the moment in an act of a single observation may well deliver a fleeting, arrogated, artificially contemplative *spiritual* relationship with such an object, but it rejects a wealth of historical data, some of which has been antecedently accrued by mankind over thousands of years of observing a given object in relation to other objects. (compare folk medicine and animal husbandry as examples.)

As far as I know, Husserl and company ignored phenomenological objects with respect to the interconnectivity of all things, which for me is the locus of all understanding.


GARY C MOORE:
Very True Jud. Michael Creighton was upset about the very same thing. It was even in his screenplay for Jurassic Park. This is also what fractals and chaos theory are about. At the very least, if you do not know the history of science, you do not know science. But what you say includes so much more, especially the political, legal, and economic. But most people, including scientists, would say, *So what?*’

JUD EVANS:
For me the thinking man is a neurologically acting man and therefore a changing man. By thinking (planning) a man changes himself (his own neuro-corporeality. ) The neuro-corporeal changes of the human agent or beaver are reflected in the physical changes he causes to the environment. Whether the *intent* generated is hard-wired and instinctively purposeful, as it may well be in the case of the dam-building animal, or is an anticipated outcome intended as part of some more complicated human design) the teleological *target* does not exist - only the targeting organism exists.

GARY C MOORE:
         ** The teleological *target* does not exist - only the targeting organism exists.*

This is perfect! If we had not been raised in a Christian culture, but a Buddhist or Hindu one – even Islamic – this would not be depressing as it undoubtedly was not for Aristotle and the Stoics – all of whom did not believe in individual human immortality [your mere material atoms do not count]. But we were raised in an overwhelmingly Christian culture and expect a reward – or punishment – for simply living! – whereas a Greek would say *The best of all things is not to have been born, and the next best to die young.* My NOT dying in Vietnam in April 0f 1967 was NOT a blessing.

JUD EVANS:
In the sense that teleology is a human doctrine explaining phenomena by their ends or purposes often controlled by *God,* and neither *God* nor: *ends or purposes* exist, then the *telos* and the *goal.* are actually descriptions of the neurological condition of the *teleologisor. * In my ontology man teleologically supposes and *the existential imperator* (uncaring nature) disposes. For me existential outcomes are deterministically unavoidable but there are no *ends* and no *purposes* involved.

GARY C MOORE:
Maybe this is just a quibble – and I certainly have not thought about it – but would not having a *telos* [not even considering *SKOPOS*, a *real* goal – even thinking of what a *real* goal is twists the mind God, heaven, devil, damnation – one one even stops to think how ontologically self-contradictory the term *supernatural* is just by itself] – Would not having a *telos* change the meaning of *determined* since there never would be a point in time that can actually be rationally judged finished or perfect?

JUD EVANS:
Change is seamless and constant. If objects, matergy, fields (call them what you will) are never in a state of being something, but ceaselessly becoming something - then there will never be an end in much the same way that there has never been a beginning. Beginnings are all relative to what has begun as a natural corollary of the existential imperative - *that which is unchanging* does not qualify as *a that* for such *thats* could never exist in the first place.

GARY C MOORE:
*Predicates [KATEGOREMATA] which lie alongside [PARAKEIMENA] the things good* [p. 27-28], that is, in the imagination something LIKE a thing [THEREFORE the LEKTON, the *sayable*] but not a thing itself is used to qualify a material object by *mapping* the quality as IF *next to* the thing itself

JUD EVANS:
At least the thought that a *property* lies alongside a material object rather than is spookily inherent within it, is an improvement on the Platonic version. After all in a sentential sense, it does lie alongside it in that the subject lies to the left and the predicate lies to the right.

GARY C MOORE:
Yes. On the one hand PARAKEIMENA seems crude and childish like a child's first attempt at drawing. But on the other hand that figure of speech is going in the opposite direction from Plato. I wish you were on the Stoics list. There is such a field of naďve self-important people who think they are perfect altruists and have but the slightest knowledge of Stoicism – not all. For instance, this point – which is inherently anti-theological.

JUD EVANS:
For me any human claim about a anthropocentric *perfect good* that differs from the perfect way in which all cosmic objects naturally exist as the only possible perfect objects they are (it being impossible for them to exist in any other way) is spurious, inauthentic and self-deceptive.

GARY C MOORE:
That is exactly Aristotle's *theology* in the METAPHYSICS.

JUD EVANS:
I believe there is an existential modality of every object in the cosmos which is unique to that object irrespective of the sensorial manner in which such an object is observed by various sentient objects such as man, animals or insects etc. My position is that we do not rely entirely on words alone in order to sensorially *know* objects.

GARY C MOORE:
I, maybe, disagree. We have sense knowledge which is completely different from defining things as objects, a process of words. A chair belongs in a room. There is a defining difference between the room and the chair, yet are they not in the same sensorium? And only separated by our intent, for instance, to sit down? But I have not thought about this much

JUD EVANS:
We only use words when we wish to communicate our conclusions regarding what we perceive to be the characteristics of observed objects to others. I can *know* an object wordlessly (albeit sensorially imperfectly.) As *knowers* we humans are all the evolved outcomes of a survivalist *knowing* achieved via a sensorium which fulfils an observational process which is both compliant with and in strict accordance with nature's unremittingly pragmatic, goalless unintentionally. Thus our evolved sensorium and the data it provides for our survival can be described as existentially and deterministically  *perfect.* Surely after millennia of use in an unremittingly hostile environmental field we can describe our sensorium as being at least *adequate* and *effective* as having been favourably  selected by evolution over millions of years to *work.*


Regards, Gary