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Daniel Silliman
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| 28.2.03 |
Indelible Collapse
Reading a book, I’m slowly seized by the fear—almost unconscious, almost receding into the once-dreamed as I focus—the text will collapse.
The little black words will lose their footing, falling from the page. First one, in a descent like Lucifer’s. Flaming tragedy and finality going unnoticed, the word leaving the page. The word will crash, without sound, an indelible puff of powder rising from the end.
Then another will slip and the lines will slide, slopping downwards, slurring into each other like a drunken marching band.
The text will collapse into a small pile of black dust, looking like the powder of burnt-out ashes once the form is gone.
by Daniel Silliman @
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The Price of Blogger
The Blog*spot guys still aren't answering the question we all really want to ask. How much did you make in the deal, guys? Come on. How much? Really, how much?
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A man of typewriters, Martin Tytell was a repairman, historian and high priest of typewriters for over 70 years.
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| 27.2.03 |
Calling it Home
From an obituary in the British satirical novel Who's who in hell:
'To say he was on the road to madness would be to invite ridicule. He was not on the road to madness: he had arrived there, bought a house, and was renting out rooms.'
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| 26.2.03 |
Mithering:
To encumber, burden, bother, worry, be delirious.
Slang from South Cheshire, often used as a description of speach. Like nagging. Seems to hold a smiliar usage and tone as drooling.
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Cursed and blessed by the tears of sorrow.
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| 25.2.03 |
Colorist and Cubist
A grand fight between the titans of modern art is now on display in the Museum of Modern Art. The struggle between Picasso and Matisse is the stuff of legends. It's these little flairs that make the artist human in striving.
This story is one of Picasso puncturing Matisse's rising fame, one of Matisse raging that he would destroy Picasso, naming his stuff Cubism. The two collided, neither ever becoming triumphant and yet better for the fighting.
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On Suiting
'You know what?' she said. 'You suit me.'
The last phrase didn't strike him as the most significant of remarks at the time and yet, an hour later, walking down the traffic-bound streets to pick up a case of oranges from the local greengrocer, her words came back to him like a blessing. He became aware of an unfamiliar sensation, which he could only describe as a surge of pleasure at being alive. Struggling back into the bar with the box of fruit, he began to have an intoxicating sense of belonging, of the kindd that some people experience when the pull on a uniform.
Who's who in hell, By Robert Chalmers
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The internet can be seen in its maturity with Google, Blogger
It was a time of passion, tycoons and lots of money.
And then the internet grew up.
Today the internet is coming of age, and the beginnings are passing. We are moving out of the violence of development and into the solid, stolid and sturdily usable internet of information.
The internet we’ve known—the internet of the 90s when the thing became an institution and when most of us came of age—was the early internet winning the fight of establishment with all the exploding opportunity newness.
Reaching the public in the 90s, the internet was an economic boom. The military was out and the business of internet was huge.
It was the time of millionaires at 30. It was the time of dropping out of school and starting a company online. It was the time to think hard and make money tapping what hadn’t been tapped.
We called it the revolution. We were hyperbolic, to be sure, but it was a revolution of sorts. The internet was the information revolution, we said, the dawning information age.
Being exciting by the explosion of the thing, we were really into the revolution part of the information revolution. It was about information, sure, but that’s not what happened in the daily business. This was like the oil boom—it was about transportation, yeah, but mostly it was wildcatting and striking it rich and cash.
And that was good. All beginning industries have that time of craziness, when men become rich in a day and an idea marks an age and creates a world. Then the thing grows, quiets and develops. The wildness subsides and becomes established. One forgets that eventually everyone will have a car, that plastics will be common. The violence and shouting pass into the colorful tales of old men, and even Bill Gates becomes old.
In the last few years, we’ve seen the internet growing into a normal, stable thing. We’ve seen it gradually move from that violence and indicate the maturity that will come to this increasingly normal thing we call the internet.
This year, two internet words are joining the dictionary: blog and google.
Google, the name of the world’s premier internet search engine, has become a verb meaning “to search for on the internet.” Google is a solid company not really about fast earnings that figured how to search the vast collection of the online.
Blog, the word produced in the coupling of web and log, is both a noun and a verb. A blog is a thing where a series of posts, logged entries on whatever topic, are put out, collected and archived. To blog is to write one of the series of posts. The most popular blog server is Blogger, with 1.1 million users.
Both words still speak of the zany creativity propelling us all into the information age, but now they’ve entered the dictionary and your children will them common words like plastic, calculator and automobile.
Both Blogger and Google have filled rather technical niches—one archiving bits of internet writing and the other searching the internet—and are but solid and reliable companies. Both companies—and now Blogger has been purchased by Google, guaranteeing reliability and continuing service—are about information.
The cash is fairly limited. There’s money, but no boom and no mansions and no piles of green stuff. Google and Blogger aren’t creatures of the economy; they aren’t the madness of the 90s.
It’s not about money anymore.
Google has virtually given us the greatest library ever, dwarfing the legendary shelves of Ancient Alexandria. Anyone wanting information can turn to the search engine. Like a library, we turn to Google for knowledge, primarily.
Blogging is mostly a profit-free enterprise, the work of people interested in talking about whatever. The analogies are the coffee houses of Addison and Steele. Blogs are just people using the technology to talk, form communities, gather and distribute information for the enjoyment of it all.
Roughly between 12 and 20 Hillsdale students and recent graduates—it’s difficult to tell how many lurk unknown—run personal blogs. That number includes three of the five editors here at the Collegian. Hillsdale students and grads are using this technology to comment on philosophical, social, political, theological and linguistic things. Call it the virtual snack bar. Call it that table at Saga, without the food.
This has nothing to do with fame, money or even business. It’s a hobby and a pastime and a thing educated people do—talk and listen and consider.
The world of the online has calmed down and is calming down. We’re moving past the insane and the strange and the interesting. Recent moves have indicated the growth of the internet into the information technology we always said it was supposed to be.
by Daniel Silliman @
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The Christian Necessity of Dualism
Philosophy 410, Philosophy of Mind
In a materialist’s objections to Rene Descartes’ dualism they point, to his Christianity as a reason for his dualism. Dualism is said to necessarily be the Christian’s answer to the philosophical questions of mind and body. Dualism was foregone conclusion clouding Descartes judgment because he was a Christian. Oftentimes this is said uncharitably, with the materialist sarcastically saying this is another example of Christianity leading men to stupidity. Sometimes this is said charitably, with one sympathetically saying Descartes was an honest man attempting rectify the necessary conclusions of the Christian faith with the direction of his philosophy.
Descartes is called by biographers a good Christian philosopher and a “diligent student” of Christianity. He was a life-long Catholic, a good Christian and it is alleged that, as a Christian, he needed his dualism and was necessarily driven to dualism. But whether charitable or uncharitable, both are wrong. For dualism is not a necessary Christian idea. It is not specifically a Christian concept and certainly not something required by the faith.
Descartes’ dualism is said to be a defense of the immortality of the soul. Cartesian biographer Richard Watson describes this as the primary reason for the bifurcation of the human. “A prime motive behind Descartes’s (sic) dualism is summed up in a saying of his times: If immaterial, then immortal,” Watson wrote. A theory dividing the human into material and nonmaterial substances allows for the human—at least the nonmaterial part of the human that is the really real part—to exist beyond the physical and biological limitations that are the nature of material. Things fall apart, and for one to continue existing after the death that is the decay of the material that is man, one must escape material. Dualism saves the Christian hope of immortality by allowing the human to transcend things falling apart.
“This is a powerful doctrine,” Watson writes. “It is the primary promise and main attraction of Christianity. Descartes’s dualism of soul separate from body supports the Christian belief in survival after death.” Thus Dualism is needed for Christianity and is a philosophical theory defending the idea of soul, from the evil materialists. If humans have the nonmaterial soul of Cartesian dualism, then the human soul can exist outside of the material and not partake of the decay and dissipation of the material that is body. If this can be accomplished—if one can run a good and solid theory of dualism—then immortality can be shored up and Christianity can be saved in this philosophical assurance.
In the essential battle of the age, a fight between Christianity and the mechanical materialism of science and mathematics, Descartes philosophy of dualism was then a significant support. This was the battle to save humanity, and to save humanity the existence of souls had to be guaranteed. It had to be delivered from the impending “crucifixion” of mathematical physics.
Yet the link between Christianity and dualism is not a necessary one. Christianity is not, in essence, a dualistic faith. While dualism may be present and while Descartes and modern physicalists may see Christianity as necessarily on the side of the bifurcation of man into two substances, the Christian scripture and the Christian fathers specifically oppose substance dualism.
For the first five centuries the Church—including the fathers Jerome, Ireneaus, and Tertullian—taught that humanity was all material. In early Christian thought there was no non-material soul, there was no non-extended, non-physical, non-spatial thing that allows man to exist forever. The hope of the church is not immortality by transcending the material, but life eternal by physical resurrection. The hope of the church is resurrection of the body; it is an acutely physical hope. The Apostles and the Church Fathers that followed them preached not the escape from the material, but the conquering over it with the physical body of the faithful rising up from the dead on the last day.
Tertullian argues that even God must have a body, because all that is, is material. “All that is real is body. The corporeality of God does not detract from his sublimity, nor that of the soul from its immortality. Everything that is, is body after its own kind. What is not body is nothing.” This concept played into the importance of the material in Christian salvation. The bifurcation of substance dualism leads to the material/physical man being disregarded while the non-material physical is faced with questions of immortal eternity. Yet Christianity did not seek to make claims on partial man, but on the whole. Jerome asks how damnation is supposed to happen to a non-physical thing. “If the dead be not raised with flesh and bones, how can the damned after judgment gnash their teeth in hell?” This only becomes more strange when questions about spatial existence come into play. Dualism was a soteriological heresy of the Gnostics. Speaking of the salvation of man, Irenaeus opposes dualism, insisting on the delivery of the material man. “For the Gnostic view of salvation does not include the flesh; but if the flesh is not saved, nothing of man is saved.”
The ghost-soul—the non-physical, non-spatial, non-material spark of life defended by Descartes and connected so securely with Christian thought—is an idea of the Platonists, defended by the Stoics, and joining the Christian tradition only in the 12th century with the scholastics exploration of Aristotle. With the exception of the western Augustine, early fathers held dualism to be heresy. The dualistic tradition in Christianity is a tradition of heresy, beginning with the Gnostics and continuing with the Manicheans. Far from necessarily answering the mind body questions of philosophy with Cartesian dualism, the Christian church sought to defend the physical. The Christian emphasis on physicalism can be seen by the attention and care give to liturgy, the passion of Christ, the dedication of the martyrs, and the material salvation of men. The tradition of dualism is not one necessary for a faithful Christian. Descartes did not need to be a dualist because of Christian theology; indeed, he would have better maintained the pure faith of the Church by separating himself from dualism.
by Daniel Silliman @
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Derrida taken seriously in Credenda
Credenda Agenda seems to have put out a piece on Derrida taking him seriously. I'm shocked. The first being their trend of not mentioning philosophers by name and only making generalizations about "those guys." I'm also shcked because the piece doesn't trash Derrida or pretend to refute him in 300 words. The man actually says we should consider D.'s thoughts. Wow. Just when you thought they'd never get it. Must have been an accident.
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| 24.2.03 |
Between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre
On the days when you don't know if other people are history, or hell.
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 23.2.03 |
The SF Examiner seems to be dead, basically. Which is too bad, both because I enjoyed the zaniness of the paper and because two town papers are better.
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Blues Notes
The Anglican preist in the front of the room can't not dance. Being from the south. Those with souls couldn't sit still. We felt the music and it filled our bodies. Girls wandered in from the prom-like thing the College puts on, looked around, poured grape punch. Feeling out of place, in their dresses and wanting to dance without knowing how. Luke sits next to me leaning backwards in his shades and half grown chops. Every once in awhile he smiles and nods his head. Wearing blue jeans and a suit coat, "I just came for the blues." Hard and slow. I remember my father at the festival. The guy with crazy long hair smoking cigarettes at the knobs of the sound system. The lead singer looks like music, personified. Like a modern Pablo. Pablo would play Blues if he hadn't been in another time. He'd have been more honest if he'd played the blues because they don't deny pain. Filled with the sound of the guitar doing its best impersonation of Jimi. He wears a hat, and fills the voice of the Delta. Of humanity in Blue. The bass player wanders around. Fender P. Moves off the stage, with the riff of the bass. The jazz and the dance are just annoyances. Why are you here? Who Dat? Next weekend in Coldwater. If only the women cared. Too many women, pretty women in prom dresses who don't have any idea. Red, pink, black. And all the songs are about love and none of the dresses are blue. Jesus left Chicago and went down to New Orleans. Rising up from the Delta. I just like to say Delta. The Delta and all that means. A house in New Orleans. Huddie Ledbetter was a hell of a man. The king of the 12 string sang his way out of jail. Just the ones who really feel it. Cigarettes and sahdes and jeans. Poets and madmen and philosophers. Like Roman Candles, raving hysterical naked. On the rooftop, forget embarassment and feel the humanity. Pain. Life. Blue.
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