Grown Beyond All Measure

… you can’t retrace your steps for the better …

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

… The wish to rage about should cease before there ceases to be cause for rage. Otherwise, just as trees that have been pruned send forth the most branches, and many kinds of plants are cut back so that they’ll sprout more thickly, so a king’s cruelty swells his enemy’s ranks by destroying them: for every one who’s killed, there are parents and children and kinsmen and friends to take his place.

… The tyrant is caught in a vicious cycle: given that he’s hated because he’s feared, he wants to be feared because he’s hated. And so he has recourse to that loathsome verse which has ruined many — “let them hate, provided they fear” —though he’s unaware of the ravening fury that arises when hatred has grown beyond all measure.

… For among all of cruelty’s other bad features, this is surely the worst: you can’t retrace your steps for the better but have got to keep at it, using fresh crimes to ward off the consequences of your old ones.

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

-Julie

But Those Times Are Past

… There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wigs could compose Theodicies …

This is from ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ found in William James: Writings 1878-1899 (1992):

… [For] Every phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the mind.

[line break added] Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom.

… There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a “Moral and Intelligent Contriver of the World.”

[line break added] But those times are past; and we of the nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate expression.

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

-Julie

In the Innermost

… we are surrounded by other bodies …

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

… We belong to a crowd with our bodies and become in it a part of a relationship to other bodies — a relationship which does not have anything to do with common interests, or with solidarity, or with consensus, but only with bodies.

… No one can move freely in a mass, nor in the standing bleachers, where the bodies almost touch each other without it being a matter of touch at all. No one speaks unnecessarily; everyone focuses exclusively on the playing field, open for whatever unexpected event might happen there. We are alone with our concentration in a mass, yet we presume that our individual reaction to the events of the game will be accompanied by thousands of analogous reactions.

… Being in a crowd means, finally, to be inside in two respects: firstly, because we are surrounded by other bodies, and secondly because of our nearness to the playing field, in the innermost center of the stadium.

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

-Julie

A Connector of Things

“… What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things.”

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

… the peculiar uncanniness of audio recording (the voice of a dead friend, recordings of the wind from 1935) testifies to a difference: audio recording extracts a sonorous surface from a segment of the past and gives it an untimely existence.

… the boundaries between the roles of “composer,” performer,” and “recording engineer” have become increasingly blurred.

… “Neither the artist nor the remixer is the ‘creator’ in the traditional sense,” notes the producer Kevin Martin. “It’s more the case that both the artist and the remixer act as ‘filters’ for a sort of cultural flow.” Martin’s assessment is echoed by the producer Brian Eno, who notes that “an artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention and says What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things.”

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

-Julie

What We Cannot Do

… “The environment” does not exist to be saved.

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

… the environment is constantly changing so that adaptation to yesterday’s environment does not improve the chance of survival tomorrow.

… The constructionist view is that the world is changing because the organisms are changing. The Red Queen’s running only makes the problem worse.

… There is an immediate political consequence of the appreciation that there are no environments without organisms. The growing environmentalist movement to prevent alterations in the natural world that will be, at best, unpleasant and, at worst, catastrophic for human existence cannot proceed rationally under the false slogan “Save the Environment.” “The environment” does not exist to be saved.

[line break added] The world inhabited by living organisms is constantly being changed and reconstructed by activities of all of those organisms, not just by human activity. Neither can the movement proceed under the banner of “Stop Extinctions!” Of all species that have ever existed, 99.9 percent are extinct, and all species that currently exist will one day be extinct.

… What we can do is to try to affect the rate of extinction and direction of environmental change in such a way as to make a decent life for human beings possible. What we cannot do is to keep things as they are.

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

-Julie

The Mouth Opening

… The fly can employ its labella …

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

… In the middle is the tongue (glossa). This is covered with long hairs and has a spoon-shaped end. With the tongue the bee reaches the nectar and licks it up, very like a cat licking milk.

[line break added] This is what happens: the nectar rises in the narrow spaces between the hairs of the extended tongue by capillary action, a passive process. Then the bee pulls its tongue back into the actual suction tube formed by the other four elements of the proboscis, which are grouped around the tongue.

… This suction tube is joined by an airtight connection to a pump in the head, which allows the fluid that has risen passively between the tongue hairs and between the tongue and the tube wall to be actively pumped higher.

… The mosquitoes and flies present us with [another] variant of proboscis construction…. There are no less than three tubes, one within the next. The innermost is the actual food-sucking tube. Outside it is the saliva tube through which saliva flows out to dissolve food such as the coffee drinker’s sugar cube or to prevent coagulation of the host’s blood where the mosquito has bitten.

[line break added] These two tubes are enclosed by a third. The comparative anatomy of the mouthparts has revealed that the feeding tube is a modification of the labrum (an “upper lip” above the mandibles), whereas the saliva tube is an elongation of the pharynx, and the third tube is formed by the labium.

… The fly labellum is covered with sense organs which provide information about the food — its mechanical consistency and in particular its chemical composition. About two hundred and fifty long hairs are especially conspicuous. All of them are innervated; they tell the fly, for example, how concentrated is the nectar into which it has just dipped its proboscis.

On the inner surfaces of the labella, around the mouth opening, are little teeth. These are used to scrape pollen out of a flower and by grating movements they can break down large food particles. And that is not all. The fly can employ its labella in quite different ways. Depending on how they are spread apart, they can filter fluid food, soak it up with the tube system described above, or assist direct sucking through the mouth opening.

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

-Julie

The Enabling Background

… The “image size” of galaxy or amoeba is the same.

This is from ‘Human Technology Relations’ found in The Critical Ihde, edited by Robert Rosenberg (2023):

… my seeing without instrumentation is a full bodily seeing — I see not just with my eyes but with my whole body in a unified sensory experience of things.

… But the optical instrument cannot so easily transform the entire sensory gestalt. The focal sense that is magnified through the instrument is monodimensioned.

… the telephone in use falls into an auditory embodiment relation. If the technology is good, I hear you through the telephone and the apparatus “withdraws” into the enabling background.

… This telephonic distance is different both from immediate face-to-face encounters and from visual or geographical distance as normally taken. Its distance is a mediated distance with its own identifiable significations.

… All lenses and optical technologies of the sort being described bring what is to be seen into a normal bodily space and distance. Both the macroscopic and the microscopic appear within the same near-distance. The “image size” of galaxy or amoeba is the same.

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

-Julie

Our Own Brief Life

… Why not rather cause all others to love you while you live, and miss you when you’ve gone?

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

… Each person should say to himself and to the other: what good does it do to proclaim our feuds, as though we were born to live forever, and to waste the very brief time of life that we have? What good does it do to take the days we could spend on honorable pleasure and devote them instead to another’s anguished torment?

… Why not rather take stock of our own brief life and make sure it’s peaceful for yourself and everyone else? Why not rather cause all others to love you while you live, and miss you when you’ve gone?

… Bear with it a bit and — lo and behold — here’s death to make you equals.

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

-Julie

Taking Our Life in Our Hands

… If we had an infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively …

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

… The freedom to “believe what we will” you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, “Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true.” I can only repeat that this is misapprehension.

[line break added] In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider. When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts and courage, and wait — acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true — till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough — this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave.

[line break added] Were we scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell. Indeed, we may wait if we will — I hope you do not think that I am denying that — but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we believed. In either case we act, taking our life in our hands.

[line break added] No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom — then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism’s glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.

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

-Julie

For a Limited Span

… where a condensed form of earthly existence is played out …

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

… It’s noteworthy that the most famous stadiums are hardly ever to be found on the periphery of cities, as one would expect for practical reasons.

[line break added] Instead, they have often been overtaken, quite literally, by the development of their cities; during the past few decades a tendency has even emerged to bring new stadiums right into the urban centers despite the high cost of real estate. There, the unceasing animation of everyday life surrounds spaces which remain closed and silent except on game days.

[line break added] They have become a secular variation of the sacral space, set apart (this is the exact meaning of the Latin word sacer) and reserved for the relatively brief moments when rituals are consummated within them — such as and above all, in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the Catholic churches of today, during the production of “God’s real presence” in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist.

… During the game, however — and here lies the truly decisive contrast with religions and places of worship — the interior of the stadium becomes a compact stage, where a condensed form of earthly existence is played out; nothing could be less transcendental.

… Everything, all of life, including we ourselves, seems congregated in the stadium, and for a limited span the fullness of life and Being stands in irremovable opposition to the emptiness of the stadium during the week.

My previous post from Gumbrecht’s book is here.

-Julie