Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Subject: QUOTES FROM OTHER LETTERS

GARY C. MOORE:

I apologize also for not being more responsive. I do this in general because just too many things in my life interfere, and specifically right now computer problems with yahoo mail and yahoo groups. Receiving your letter at gottlos75@mindspring.com has lifted my spirits considerably. ANYONE at the group who wants to do so can add that address if they want to with mail going to art_of_memory@yahoogroups.com if they want to be sure I receive it. I know very little German but do have a translation machine I need to get running again that can poorly translate German to English. I am trying to get it to work on your web site right now. It does a poor job but, with the help of resources I have, I can usually work out a usable rendering.

On the subject of German, you know of a good, big, one volume etymological lexicon for German? I would need title, editor, and publisher if you know one. Heidegger used the Grimm multivolume lexicon but that is too expensive for me right now.

I shall dig out my Apulieus and apply myself. On THE GOLDEN ASS I have a number of commentaries, some on the Latin. I also have his main philosophical treatises that I have not read. They are "On the God of Socrates," "On the Philosophy of Plato," and "Poetical Paraphrase of the Teachings of Diotima." Are you familiar with any of those? They are translated (around 1820) by a self-taught Englishman who did all the Neoplatonics as well as Plato and Aristotle named Thomas Taylor. Strangely, he was possibly the first to translate Greek philosophy into English, and certainly the only one who did so extensively. And he did it so well that modern translators still take his judgments very seriously. He was also an acquaintance of many of the Romantics in England, for instance William Blake. As far as I know he is the only person to translate Apulieus' philosophical works (all short).

I am pursuing trying to get Sorabji's commentary and Aristotle's treatise organized in my mind. Two things that seem to support is that -- A) everyone automatically, "always already" as Heidegger would say intending a philosophically technical point, has a mnemonic system operating within the language as inherited and as they personally use and organize it. It would seem, for any artificial mnemonic system to work, it would have to find the uniquely personal key to each individual's memory in order to work at least on a grand scale which, considering Freud, they actually may not want to do. But I have tried to emphasize a Freudian type psychoanalysis purely as technique

(personally and for his whole system philosophically, I consider Freud a slimy, deceitful son of a bitch, but a very brilliant one) must necessarily accompany any system of remembering and recollecting (the difference between the two is one of the things I am trying to get straight in Aristotle and Plato). I consider memory, as Jacques Derrida said, TO BE THE PYSCHE as such, and therefore understanding it of fundamental importance to any philosophical endeavor -- B) that the relation between remembrance and the factual remembered object is epistemologically extremely questionable on many different grounds. It is primarily based on a correlation theory of knowledge which only validly operates for comparing objects at-hand. Otherwise, it is just based on the success and seeming non-contradiction of results in the present. One can ascertain in books your memory that Kaiser Wilhelm fled Germany to the Netherlands before the Armistice. One cannot validly ascertain one had, on the whole, a happy childhood. In that case, you know very well one has strong motivations to distort memory. And one of the primary and absolutely necessary aspects of distorting memory is that you do not 'remember' doing so. Also, artificial memories can be placed in your mind by techniques of hypnosis (but you have to be a willing partner in the deception in that case) or torture with (the torturer convinces the victim it is in their best interests) or without hypnosis. It has been demonstrated the torturer can destroy the whole human mind down to the point where even sense experience is no longer collated with words and therefore any organizing ideas by which one can interpret sense experience. Supposedly, the mind then can be rebuilt. But mind restructuring usually occurs only on a limited level of destruction with the intended purpose of restructuring memory ("brain washing").

Also, much of Aristotle's thought that relates to mnemonics is to be used in the deliberate process of thinking, the dialectics he thinks is crucial to use in logically working out philosophical problems which is completely different from using mnemonic technique in rhetoric. In dialectic, one needs to remember all the possible logical connections of an idea so as not to trap oneself in an unexamined premise that is invalid. This is one of the things sorely absent in much modern thinking, being able to go up and down the whole logical chain of thought as Aristotle does in his works where the basic axiom is thoroughly related to the final conclusion in a logical manner. Discussions usually start at an unexamined assumption and, though it may proceed logically from that point, any conclusion from that would be at best unstable since it is unrelated to fundamental axioms of thought.

GARY C. MOORE:

All the mystical techniques of the Kaballists revolve around restructuring elements of learning, specifically of the TORAH. They also have an image that automatically operates as a memory system 'tree,' the Sephirot that organizes all the universe, much less the mind of the Kaballist. I need to do more on this, but what I am surprised by so far is that, although everything the Kaballists do MUST depend on a mnemonic technique, there is no mention of memory as such so far. Have you read Gershom Scholem's essay in German on Pico della Mirandola? Another point --- the mystical techniques of the Jesuits (specifically the prayer technique of Ignatius Loyola), St. John of the Cross, and several Indian philosophers operate by deleting absolutely everything that can possibly be considered a creation of God so that when one gets down to that which cannot be deleted, then one has found God. This goes by stages and can be related to "The Way of the Cross" ritual. St. John of the Cross defines a well delineated stairway in his ASCENT TO MOUNT CARMEL. I see an obvious REVERSE resemblance to the memory technique of remembering a street one has gone down, attaching to each place along the street to an image that refers to an idea put in a certain order to be remembered in a temporal consecutive process

Dear Ulrich, The essay is entitled "Zur Geschichte der Anfange der christlichen Kabbala" in ESSAYS PRESENTED TO L. BAECK, London, 1954. Chaim Wirszubski, PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA'S ENCOUNTER WITH JEWISH MYSTICISM, mentions pages 164 note 1 4 times, 167, and 177, six footnotes altogether. Frances Yates also mentions it in GIORDANO BRUNO, pg. 94, note 1. It may be mentioned in ART OF MEMORY but she gives no index reference or bibliography. Of my three books on Scholem, not one seems to give a reference to this article. If anyone knows of an English translation, would you please tell me?

Also, bad news. There is a computer virus spreading around, maybe the same one as mentioned in the news. In the files it puts into your computer it has the words "xupiter" and maybe "orbital search." My daughter found this out.

Also Ulrich, could you translate a motto from Scholem used in Wirszubski's book, pg. 119, "Die Philologie einer mystischen Disziplin wie der Kabbala hat etwas Ironisches an sich," from "Zehn unhistorische Satze uber Kabbala, I. I get "The philology of a mystical discipline, like the Kabbala has, is actually somewhat ironical." Is this correct?

GARY C. MOORE: I think in this regard, and of all the other Renaissance mnemonicists, as well as for my searches in Scholem on the Kabbalists for accounts of memory is the issue of motivation. All these people want to change their world very desperately. Reading books like Scholem's on Sabbati Sevi shows life in the present is generally intolerable for these people. In our modern times, we have progressed from a life that is horribly intolerable to one that is useless, boring, and utterly indifferent in the present. Both of these theses put in clear focus Heidegger's emphasis on the future as the whole meaning of human psyche, the past and the present as "Da-sein," as he originally learned from religious people like Meister Eckhart and Martin Luther but most especially from Paul (which he presented a course on but, as I understand it, is most assesible and brilliantly presented by his friend Rudolf Bultman in THEOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, as well as numerous essays). In essence, one puts the whole thrust and importance of one's life into something that does not exist ontologically in the present ever, logically, under any conditions. It is faith in pure hope one never has reified, made into a presence and therefore an entity. Heidegger found the essential structure of human being in religion and, much as Bultmann did by making God "wholly other," dropped "God" and any "afterlife" out of all rational consideration, much as Hume would say that those words have no real referent. Then, as far as mnemonic systems go, there arises a problem. For does the system actually make available the memories one wants access to, or does the passionate desire to structure those memories into something desirable automatically make one think one is creating a system? Is creating a mnemonic system a subconscious way of justifying something one does not want to fully clarify and understand, knowing in a way, 'subconsciously,' that the memory system distorts the actual memory into something it is not? But, of course, even that is problematic because the whole connection between a memory and a real object or situation is highly questionable because everyday experience shows us we remember what we want to AND we remember it AS we want to. You can refer to objective evidence -- on rare occasions -- but even this evidence is almost certainly slainted to some degree, and most of the time to a great degree. In the United States, for instance, we are going through, once again, what actually happened at the battle of the Alamo in the war for Texas independence, an extremely highly emotional issue. When evidence is put forward, it is denied on certain grounds. Then the evidence is put forward again as partially valid, and then the historians are into infinite nit-picking on something an objective observer can obviously see is NEVER going to be resolved. The same happens with the validity of any memory. It is becoming highly apparant in crimal trials now that what use to be the most highly valued evidence is fast becoming the least reliable -- EYE WITNESS ACCOUNTS!!!! You get together ten witnesses and you get ten different stories. The best an investigator can hope for is the discovery of a thread that leads to "hard evidence."

So the value of memory per se is highly questionable as evidence AND YET IT IS STILL THE MOST IMPORTANT FUNDAMENTAL MODE OF HUMAN BEING! It is imaginary in itself, "ding an sicht (?)." It reminds me of Kant's tripartite structure of human mind, the two foremost and obvious aspects being "understanding" (which includes reason and memory, and "intuition" which is experience automatically formed by our intellectual template of "object X." And yet the even more fundamental basis of BOTH of those two is "imagination." So, actually, the problem of what is imaginary is far more fundamental and comprehensive than just memory. One of my problems with Aristotle is that he says, in DE MEMORIA, an animal has memory and imagination but not intelligence (or rational language) (, although otherwise, as I have mentioned Heidegger discussing Aristotle's METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3, Aristotle does say an animal can have judgment. He says this in DE MEMORIA because there he does not want to associate memory (or imagination) with intelligence. But I think it is all too obvious this is a desparate ploy to avoid considering animals intelligent with all the necessarily attendent consequences.

GARY C MOORE: Aristotle's main emphasis seems to be to use memory as a resource in dialectic which is definitely "a deliberate process of thinking" which is completely contrary to the method necessary for rhetoric which Socrates so well demonstrated with the Sophists. It is very interesting in the GORGIAS that Gorgias himself almost immediately realizes he is out of his league with Socrates. And in the ION Socrates makes the rhetor seems like an imbecile. However, the oral poets had to function much more closely to Aristotle's and Socrates dialectics because they had a specific aim to achieve that had an automatic rationale and even philosophy pragmatically tagged onto it: acceptability by the widest variety of audiences which means universalization and universalism of human thought. The rhetor in ION is a late product of this tradition that, like the late Brahmens in competition with Jainsm and Buddhism that strictly and blindly memorized the Vedas, became trivial and collapsed. Brahmanism only survived by adapting its beliefs to the universal desires of real people like the oral poets of Greece thereby becoming Hinduism, a wholly different world view from Brahmanism. However, in tune with the rest of my Humean skepticism, "a deliberate process of thinking" involves mostly very undeliberate motives and many times gets very undeliberate results. Positively this is called "creativity," negatively this is called "recall of the deliberately buried subconscious." If one is having a real dialectical debate to determine the truth of a matter, one delves back into one's necessary logical axioms, suddenly realize -- as you are seeking the real truth of the matter and not merely trying to win a debate no matter what -- the real implications of that axiom or, worse, it is not a real axiom, and then understand the whole dialectical debate is based on nothing valid, on total bullshit. Embarrasing, yes. And doubtless one's opponent would think one very stupid to bring this out in the open. But isn't that what the debate -- and all of what we are doing -- is about?

GARY C MOORE: And each room in that house has another house in it. And in THAT house, each room, again, has another house in it, ad inifinitum.

GARY C MOORE: I agree. But the "censorship phenomenon" is very complicated. We censor things because we do not want to think of them. That seems obvious, but, supposedly, that only applies to a few things. Most things we forget about because we think they are trivial or useless or not for us or just distasteful. These things "get in the way." They are not something we want to think of as fleeing from but just avoiding as they are nuisances. All of these things are contained in the physical brain. But, if one day we think, "I want to relearn my German again," that may be, more or less, a difficult process. Why "more"? Why "less"? Even with "less" there is difficulty in 're-learning' something one already knows because the original learning process occured through a length of time where other events were happening to you also, both good and bad. All these associations, it would seem, necessarily stay in place, through you may recall few or none of them. They are still there. The fundamental problem is A) you have the desire to recall, B) you know the knowledge is there, but C) it is only brought back, "more or less." through a re-learning that is, "more or less", a real learning per se. French is relatively easy for me, Greek is very hard. There were rewards involved with the French that were not involved with the Greek. There were definitely bad memories connected with the Greek whereas I can think of none with French. I approach French with unwarranted confidence whereas I approach Greek with fear and trembling. It is like pulling up something from a pond where water plants have grown their roots and branches all over it. You pull up the one which has nothing in its nature to connect it to ponds or water plants and you pull up also the other whether you want it or not. It may simply be a practical matter of detaching the object from the weeds. I may be a matter of finding a dead body. There is no way to know beforehand. This may even happen with my French. The sunlight can only be seen because so many things hide from the sunlight.

GARY C MOORE: The problem with being a real, living, personal, unique human being is that you are at the same time the only realistic whole, the only full context inclusive of everything, the same as Heidegger's "Sein," 'Being.' There has always been a great irony to the capitalization of "Being" in Heidegger translations. All he means is "being." "Dasein," the merely adequate translation of which is "being-there", CREATES being as Heidegger says in his lecture "What is Metaphysics?" Reality might be described as a mere pile of meaningless facts because that is all a fact is in and of itself, i. e., meaningless. What makes facts 'meaning-full' is to be included in a context making whole. That is me. That is you. You are part of me in this context. I am part of you in this context. This is one of the reasons why "being-there", though 'inadequate, still serves because one's personal existence is really "already always" . . . . out THERE. There is no here. Personal identity is a construct, a necessary construct so context can exist and THERE can be motivation. In a way of thinking like this, then, 'you' as meaning are behind and explicatory of everything because the only understanding that actually exists and is possessed is uniquely, solipsistically . . . . 'your own.' Therefore no epistemology, just like 'being' itself, can ever be fully conscious. So any model one builds is "always already" WITHIN another present-at-hand model, etc.

GARY C MOORE: Another thing to consider is that there were no vowels in Hebrew until the invention of vowel marks around the time of the establishment of the Masoretic text around 100 CE

(AD). Therefore other words than the priestly, properly memorized words could be substituted. Could this fact possibly have to do with the beginning of Jewish mysticism? Ezechial? Merkabah? Also, all authorities that have ever existed (Mikhail Bakhtin) have had mocking forms establish in mirror likeness. One finds little of this in Judaism . . . or what about how the ZOHAR originally became written as a kind of practical joke? Legends of the Jews like Lilith?

GARY C MOORE: If you are so deeply interested in David Hume, it would seem to be not only a natural step but a very desirable one. In my line of totally boring work, I find people will not endure in techniques they either do not enjoy or do not get immediate perceivable results from or, most often, both. So any mnemonic technique, purely pragmatically, is going to have to somehow be fit to the individual person. And, as I have an extremely radical and consciously contradictory concept of "individual person" -- on the one hand (I love that Greek expression), "existentially solipsistic" as Heidegger says, meaning in real, factual life one really lives solipsistically and can do so no other way -- nd yet on the other hand, though language, every single little tiny bit 'you' are comes absolutely from Other people, then this is a fundamentally ontological matter. Human being is both unique and a blatantly open market place with all secrets exposed and plagerising everyone else's thoughts all at the same exact moment.

If you have not noticed, I have a tendancy to think like Eischer's paintings with all perspectives skewed and twisted into and around each other in an unending labyrinth. I simply think this is the way it is, yet that is also an incredibly stupid statement. Aporia. I have discovered Jorge Luis Borges is the only original American philosopher worth paying attention to (Thomas Sheehan is the most brilliant philosophical scholar and should be mentioned with him. He has his own website with a book and numerous brilliant papers available.). I can to this conclusion since I am an incorrigible footnote reader, He had a footnote to his story "The Approach to Al-mu'tasim" in COLLECTED FICTIONS, trans. Andrew Hurly, Viking/Penguin, 1998, pg. 87 to Plotinus ENNEADS V, 8, 4 which not only fully illuminated Heidegger -- my teacher Alexander von Schoenborn at the University of Texas Austin told me once, "All of Heidegger can be found in Plotinus" -- but explained to me all of Borges' works had a fundamental and all incompassing philosophical structure around them. Then reading his essay "The Nothingness of Personality" and re-readong "A New Refutation of Time" I realized I had underestimated him extremely as a mere literatur because his unresolvability in not just a intellectual trick or a game but is a 'systematic' and logically thorough going analysis of exactly what 'reality' is on the level of any great philosopher. He is so self-effacing, so intellectually retiring, lets other people say his thoughts that we forget he created the character OR THAT HE HAS ARRANGED HIS QUOTES TO FIT TOGETHER IN SUCH A WAY A WHOLE NEW WAY OF THINKING HAS BEEN CREATED!!!! Because the people he quotes so often have no comprehension of the terrifyingly systematic spider's web he has arranged them in. Anyway . . . .

GARY C MOORE: I agree except I opt for a seemingly more simple minded model that may just be a figment of my confusion. There is A) consciousness, and B) language. There is no real difference between consciousness, perception, and awareness as they factually exist in an individual person (preferably dogs, but sometimes human beings). Language is a huge ramshackle inheritance from others with a prearranged structure we must traditionally and morally call rational under pain of legal punishment. A) is an extreme state of simplicity that is incredibly hard to put in words, and when it is made complicated we say such a person has a "mental illness" or a "brain lesion." It has to be simple ontologically to simply 'work' whatever that means. Language is just a bunch of things, mainly, as Heidegger got it from Nietzsche, guilt, i. e., moral responsibility, debt, money. Now, if we ask the question why the animal who does not need human vocal chords to make a great variety of different sounds (the singing of the bird, ) does not learn language (even the chimpanzee and gorilla and porpoise have to be bribed to learn what they do), though the question may seen totally aburd, let us stand back for a moment and see what category or existential it is that it falls into. To me, I have no answer. But, for me, that is a category all of its own or rather one of Heidegger's "existentials." (This, by the way, can be one of the best ways of understanding Heidegger. The beginning of his philosophical endeavor was a study of the nature of "category" as in Scholasticism and how it applies -- or does not apply -- to human nature. And the subject is literally the main subject of BEING AND TIME.)