Create the Fact

… There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.

This is from ‘The Will to Believe’ found in William James: Writings 1878-1899 (1992):

… A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before anyone else backs him up.

[line break added] If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.

[line break added] And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, it would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the “lowest kind of immorality” into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic in which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!

My most recent previous post from James’s book is here.

-Julie

The Space Between Two Persons

… the coronavirus has only accelerated a long-term process of eliminating and bracketing the body …

This is from Crowds: The Stadium as a Ritual of Intensity by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2021):

… I believe that crowds may serve as a core case in understanding a type of sociability that sociology, for complex historical reasons, has never concentrated upon: that is, a relationship among humans that integrates their bodies, their presence, and the space that both require, instead of being exclusively based on meanings and on the human mind.

… as Hannah Arendt stated, the space between two persons is not only occupied by a joint focus of two minds on a shared object of attention. Once they start constituting such an “intentional object” together, as Edmund Husserl called it, a more physical “in between” that consists of bodily gestures in their mutual dependence inevitably emerges.

… In coronavirus times we sense — however vaguely — that we increasingly miss this in-between and we thus hope to return to interactions without social distance. But we may also speculate that the coronavirus has only accelerated a long-term process of eliminating and bracketing the body from the social dimension of human existence and interaction, a process that has been going on since the emergence of early modern technology …

-Julie

Outside Meaning

… The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning.

This is from Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics by Christopher Cox (2018):

… Noise is nonsense: the absence of sense, interference with sense, or the proliferation of sense beyond the point of intelligibility.

… [Jacques] Attali writes:

“A network can be destroyed by noises that attack and transform it if the codes in place are unable to normalize and repress them. Although the new order is not contained in the structure of the old, it is nonetheless not a product of chance. It is created by the substitution of new differences for the old differences. Noise is the source of these mutations in the structuring codes.

[line break added] “For despite the death it contains, noise carries order with itself; it carries new information. This may seem strange. But noise does in fact create meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination.

[line break added] “The absence of meaning is, in this case, the presence of all meanings, absolute ambiguity, a construction outside meaning. The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning. It makes possible the creation of a new order on another level of organization, of a new code in another network.”

My most recent previous post from Cox’s book is here.

-Julie

Organisms in Action

… that ecological niche was assumed to exist …

This is from The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment by Richard Lewontin (2000, 1998):

… There is a confusion between the correct assertion that there is a physical world outside of an organism that would continue to exist in the absence of the species, and the incorrect claim that environments exist without species.

… A practical example of the problem posed by arbitrarily defined ecological niches in the absence of organisms was given by the search for life on Mars.

… The designers of the Mars lander believed that ecological niches already exist in the absence of organisms, so that when the organisms evolved on Mars, they would come to occupy those empty niches. What could be more reasonable than to suppose that such a basic ecological niche as a carbon source for energy metabolism and some oxygen would be present on Mars? But that ecological niche was assumed to exist by the scientists on the basis of their knowledge of terrestrial life.

If niches do not preexist organisms but come into existence as a consequence of the nature of the organisms themselves, then we will not have the faintest idea of what Martian niches will be until we have seen some Martian organisms in action. For all we know, Martian life traps energy by an entirely different mechanism — or perhaps it is just allergic to sugar!

My most recent previous post from Lewontin’s book is here.

-Julie

The Ripe Pollen Grain

… This structure has the remarkable ability to digest its way through the cells of the style tissue in case there is no clear path …

This is from Insects and Flowers: The Biology of a Partnership by Friedrich G. Barth (1991):

… Is there any other plant product that serves so many sciences as the pollen grain? In the special construction of its nearly indestructible wall lies information of interest not only to the systematist but also to the paleobotanist, the archaeologist, the geologist in search of oil, the climatologist, the allergy researcher, the beekeeper.

[line break added] All of them make use of the pollen grain, learning from its form and surface structure something about the plants to which the pollen belongs — plants that inhabited the land in prehistoric times, plants that tell us about the climate in times past, plants with allergy-causing pollen, and plants at which the bees carry out the business of collecting.

… the pollen grain adheres to the stigma; the surface of the stigma is covered with hairlike papillae and is sticky in addition. The transfer or the male genetic material from the pollen grain to the egg cell in the ovary at the base of the pistil can begin. It takes place as follows:

First the so-called pollen tube grows out through a special pore in the pollen grain. This structure has the remarkable ability to digest its way through the cells of the style tissue in case there is no clear path; sometimes the style already has loose, easily penetrated tissue or even a hollow channel.

[line break added] The pollen tube grows very rapidly as much as one to three millimeters per hour. Even if the style is long, like that of the meadow saffron (15 mm), the goal — the opposite sex — is reached after only half a day.

The ripe pollen grain contains two or three nuclei. Within each are threadlike chromosomes, the male (in this case) genetic material. Having moved down the pollen tube to the ovary, one nuclei fuses with the egg cell.

My most recent previous post from Barth’s book is here.

-Julie

Relationality

… Technologies can be the means by which “consciousness itself” is mediated.

This is from ‘What Is Postphenomenology?’ found in The Critical Ihde, edited by Robert Rosenberg (2023):

… the human experience is to be found ontologically related to an environment or a world, but the interrelation is such that both are transformed within this relationality. In the Husserlian context, this is, of course, intentionality.

[line break added] In the context of his Ideas and Cartesian Meditations this is the famous “consciousness of ____,” or all consciousness is consciousness of “something.” I contend that the inclusion of technologies introduces something quite different into this relationality. Technologies can be the means by which “consciousness itself” is mediated. Technologies may occupy the “of” and not just be some object domain.

My most recent previous post from Ihde’s book is here.

-Julie

Discriminations

… When you’re angry, you should allow yourself nothing. Why? Because then you want to allow yourself everything.

This is from Anger, Mercy, Revenge by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated by Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum (2010):

… It’s certainly recorded in the history books that when a drunken dinner guest offered a long critique of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus’ cruelty, and there was no lack of those willing to lend a hand in vengeance — with men on every side trying to light a fire under Pisistratus’ anger — he bore it calmly and said to those who were trying to stir him up that he was no more furious than if a blindfolded man had run into him.

… Whenever you want to know the character of a thing, entrust the job to time: no careful discriminations are made in flux.

… When you’re angry, you should allow yourself nothing. Why? Because then you want to allow yourself everything.

My most recent previous post from Seneca’s book is here.

-Julie

On This Moonlit and Dream-visited Planet

… The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.

This is from ‘The Will to Believe’ found in William James: Writings 1878-1899 (1992):

… The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; whilst the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another.

… “Other philosophies are collections of opinions, mostly false; my philosophy gives standing-ground forever” — who does not recognize in this the keynote of every system worthy of the name?

… Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.

… But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact? Shall we espouse and endorse it? Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our nature from which we must free ourselves if we can?

I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can follow as reflective men. Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they to be found?

My most recent previous post from James’s book is here.

-Julie

To Delight in Me

… I can’t do it if I know I’m looking.

This is from The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy by Bernard De Koven (2013):

… I like seeing myself doing something well even as much as I like seeing myself being funny.

But I can’t do it if I know I’m looking. I like losing myself in something so that I can find it again — newer, bigger, more excellent than I thought.

So, I give one of me something to do that it can take seriously. But it has to be something that the other of me can stay out of. Because I want it to be a good surprise, I make sure, to the best of my ability, that what I give myself to do is something that either self can do well — the self that wishes to accomplish, the self that wishes to enjoy. I occupy one so that the other can remain far enough away to delight in me.

And when I play a game, both of my selves can take turns being surprised.

… When we’re playing, we’re not thinking about how well we’re playing. We’re just playing. We’re not even thinking about playing.

But we’ve discovered that there are times during which we can play well. We observe, we experience a certain fineness in our way of playing. We are experiencing mastery.

This mastery isn’t over anything in particular. It’s like the mastery of the artist who, having completed the painting, stands back in awe. A mastery in. A union of mastery with mystery.

My most recent previous post from De Koven’s book is here.

-Julie

Not Reducible to Them

… it is a mechanism for contracting forces and preserving them in this contracted state.

This is from Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics by Christopher Cox (2018):

… In his [Deleuze’s] view, works of art are never representations and never signify. They present rather than represent. … Deleuze endows the work of art with a fundamental independence from the world of subjects, objects, and states of affairs.

[line break added] As a sensual compound with its own consistency or composition, the work of art is independent of its creator, whom it often outlives and in the absence of whom it is able to circulate in the world and produce effects. For the same reason, it is also independent of any determinate viewer or listener and operates anew on each audience that encounters it. Finally, the work of art is independent of its model. A painted still life is not a vase of flowers; a photograph is not a city street.

… A novel, film, painting, or sculpture, for example, does not represent actual objects, persons, or states of affairs, nor does it render the qualities of actual objects or portray the emotions of actual persons. Rather, it is a mechanism for contracting forces and preserving them in this contracted state.

[line break added] It detaches sensations from objects and subjects, presenting them as pure intensive forces that inhere in things but are not reducible to them, having the power to act and affect as sensations independently of the subjects and objects who might bear or undergo them.

My most recent previous post from Cox’s book is here.

-Julie