LOCKE ON LIGHT & FAIRYLAND TENNIS

From today's perspective John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding beats an entire team of dead and decaying horses, regaling the reader ad nauseam about relatively simple empirical concepts. Witness my relief when I am greeted with the following:

Those who tell us that light is a great number of little globules, striking briskly on the bottom of the eye, speak more intelligibly than the Schools: but yet these words never so well understood would make the idea the word light stands for no more known to a man that understands it not before, than if one should tell him that light was nothing but a company of little tennis-balls, which fairies all day long struck with rackets against some men's foreheads, whilst they passed by others.

Locke was no Richard Feynman, but I'll take my bizarre physical metaphors where I can find them.

ROBINSON CRUSOE, SUFI MYSTIC

Peter Adamson's aforementioned History of Philosophy podcast just introduced me to a particularly delightful gem: Ibn Tufail's Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, a sort of 12th century Islamic gospel of sufist autodidactism.

It apparently involves a feral child (either released in a basket à la Moses or "spontaneously generated" from the earth, the story allows for either) growing up on a deserted island under the tutelage of a recently bereaved mother gazelle. After learning rudimentary anatomy in an ill-fated attempt to cure his ailing gazelle mother with open-chest surgery, the child (Hayy) derives a number of complicated Aristotelian principles from his everyday observations. He explores the island just  long enough for Tufail to propound philosophical theories filched from Avicenna, then retreats to a cave, contemplates, and eventually emerges to experience a vaguely-described ecstatic union with God.

So basically, it's the Jungle Book as Sufi mystical tract and Aristotelian treatise. Prime Choplogic material.

The first Latin translation — entitled Philosophus autodidactus — caused something of a sensation when it appeared in the 17th century. Besides presaging a number of later isolation narratives (most famously Defoe's Crusoe and Kipling's Jungle Book), the text informed Locke's tabula rasa concept and laid the groundwork for much of the "nurture"-oriented epistemology of the Enlightenment. It also makes me wonder if Hesse was purely inspired by Buddhist imagery when he wrote Siddhartha.

The only other Sufi text I've read is Farid ud-Din Attar's enchanting narrative poem the Conference of the Birds. The only real parallel that I can identify here (not having actually read Tufail's little exercise in proto-bildungsroman, mind) is the eventual ecstatic union with God.

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT ANY GAPS

Buster Keaton fan folks.

For a while now I've been enjoying the incredible podcast made available by Peter Adamson at The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.

It's thorough, well-narrated, replete with corny jokes, and the creator is a die-hard Buster Keaton fan. What's not to like? I'm on episode 134 right now, going through Islamic philosophy (about which I know nothing). Think the podcast itself is around the 237-episode mark. He's also apparently launched a side project on Indian philosophy. So check it out pronto.

Spem in Alium

Interesting synchronicity of the day #1, a passage from Fitzie's This Side of Paradise:

So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the "Dark Lady of the Sonnets," and how little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live ... and now we have no real interest in her ... The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it after twenty years...

Synchronous, I say, because I had just been arguing that the best literature is grounded in something other than itself, and the author accepts the fact that he is reworking material rather than producing art out of thin air (i.e. Michelangelo cutting down from a block of clay, rather than lumping it together.) Creation (technically, "sub-creation") necessarily entails deletion, since it requires delineation and exclusion of that which is not ("sub-")created. To be expounded in the literary criticism section of my Hegelian knock-off literometaphilolinguoreligiosophical magnum opus "Spem in Alium,"* publication TBA. Anyway, above quotation anecdote.

*Extrinsicism v solipsism, love is all, meaning as connection / connection as meaning.

Music, Life, the Universe and Everything

Having just finished George Steiner's Real Presences, and then having stumbled across R. Browning's Abt Vogler (via a YouTube comment quoting the same, no less), I am reminded of my longtime vow to actually write down some sort of tract-cum-testimony at some pt. G. Steiner's 237-page essay essentially argues that the "otherness" or "deja-entendu" of art (something like Joyce's epiphany) is an indication of the divine, &co., & co. Steiner often refers to music in this argument, since its extra-lingual emotionality suggests (acc. to Steiner) the extra-logical nature of emotionality. Then, we have Browning's Abt Vogler, which takes the form of an organist's monologue and, in addition to producing a spectacular approximation to music, manages to combine man's existential longing/a hope for a new creation with the tonic key. I need to read more Browning.

This comes on top of another recent kertwang moment, when I discovered the label of "fideistic skepticism" in reference to Montaigne, Rabelais and Cervantes (and, I argued in a paper for class a few days later, Shakespeare). Essentially: recognizing the limits of reason, one recognizes the need for faith (a common line among Christians I have heard). Thus it is a positive, optimistic skepticism and not wholly negative or deconstructive. I found a paper using the term in reference to Tristram Shandy/Laurence Sterne, oddly (but fittingly) enough -- it argued that Shandyism =  creative or regenerative chaos (again, a positive, rather than a nullifying aspect).

I now have backers. And material to rip off of.