lundi 29 décembre 2008
FRAGMENTS 8
What is unspeakable is perceived as absolute.
Language is the domain of the contingent; it can only imply the absolute by pointing to what is not itself.
Breaks in simple symmetries can imply higher ones.
Energy breaks symmetry towards higher complexity.
vendredi 26 décembre 2008
QUOTES
MATHEMATICS
When it comes to Mathematics there are only three kinds of people, those who can count and those who can't. (Thomas Cathcart)
GREAT INSULTS
"A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity" (Mark Twain.)
ON THE LEBANESE
The Lebanese commit suicide by jumping from their ego towards their IQ.
(Anonymous)
ON THE ABYSS
- If you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare back into you.
(Nietzsche)
- All meaning comes from the edge of death, whether in the attempt to negate, accept or embrace it, without the threat of the void giving meaning to life is impossible.
(Lupo il Pellegrino)
- Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy afternoon.
(Susan Ertz)
MYSTICISM
- World without end...
(The Magnificat)
- Let us realise our limitation. We are something and we are not everything...the smalness of our being hides infinity from our sight.
(Blaise Pascal)
- The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
(Blaise Pascal)
ON THE EROS OF THE INFINITE
- He watched her for a very long time and she knew that he was watching her and he knew that she knew that he was watching her, and she knew that he knew that she knew; in a kind of regression of images that you get when two mirrors face each other and the images go on and on in some kind of infinity.
(Robert Pirsig)
OF BEAUTY AND MATHEMATICS
- This result is too beautiful to be false; it is more important to have beauty in one's equations then to have them fit experiment.
(Paul Dirac)
OF WONDER
- The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. (Einstein)
(...) whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.(Wittgenstein)
OF LEGITIMATE DOUBT
"Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?"
(Epicurus)
OF IRREVERENCE
- When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized the Lord does'nt work that way. So I stole one and asked him to forgive me. (Emo Philips)
- Creator: A comedian whose audience is affraid to laugh. (H. L. Mencken)
- Forgive, O Lord my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me. (Robert Frost)
- Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the creator of human intelligence. (Anonymous)
- Sire, je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse!
(de Laplace)
mercredi 24 décembre 2008
FAILURES OF UTOPIAS
My brief response was that this was a period of utopian thinking, where many people believed religiously in communism, liberalism or nationalism. I also pointed out that this utopian thinking has caused hundreds of millions of deaths – including victims of the Lebanese war whose fate was decided by belief in failed utopias.
Back home, I remembered a book I have recently read by John Gray. It is called Black Mass, Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. John Gray demonstrates that fascism, communism and liberalism are derived from Christian apocalyptic expectations. Just like their religious predecessor, these 20th century movements view history as a narrative with a given direction and predictable sequence of events. Thus they see struggles of the present as part of “a partially realized drama” where the forces of good – whether they call themselves Socialists, Nazis or Liberals – are locked in mortal struggle against forces of evil. Each view this struggle as an apocalyptic war that will end in the triumph of good – themselves - followed by a period of eternal harmony. In neo-liberalism, harmony can take the form of Fukuyama’s “end of history”, in Marxism it is universal communism and the dictatorship of the people, in Fascism the thousand year rule of the Aryan semi-gods.
According to Gray such narratives give meaning to the otherwise meaningless “meanderings” of history and provide believers with the faith that they are part of universal and dramatic unfolding of predictable and partially realized events. Gray describes the devastating effects such millennial views have had on the 20th century, resulting in the death of hundreds of millions. He also shows how these myths legitimize violence as the price for an eschatological future of eternal bliss and organic harmony. Whether it is Communist accepting and defending the Gulags or Neo-Liberals defending the American war on Iraq, both see violence as a necessary prelude to an end of history and the birth of a universal golden age. Thus populations are unwillingly and violently thrust into narratives that are not their own:
“Those who are crushed or broken in order to create a higher humanity, who are killed or mutilated in acts of spectacular terror or ravaged in wars for universal freedom may have ideas about their place in the world altogether different from those they are assigned in the dramas that are being enacted. Universal narratives create meaning for those who live by them, they also destroy it in the lives of others.”
So what solution does Gray propose? According to him: “The need for narrative can be a burden and if we want to be rid of it we should seek the company of mystics, poets and pleasure lovers rather than utopian dreamers. Though they look to the future these dreamers nearly always recall an idealized period of innocence – Marx’s primitive communism, or the lost world of bourgeois virtue cherished by neo-conservatives. As the writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, “Clearly, apocalyptic thinking is nostalgia at its very worst.” The effect of seeking refuge in an imaginary future harmony is to bind us to the past.”
A sub- group of these failed utopias is in the contemporary art world. That the art world is in a state of failed utopia is visible by its fragmentation and its inability to produce coherent collective narratives – a fragmentation seen in the works themselves; in their critical tendency and in the current of self-reflexivity found in them; a self-reflexivity concerned with the relationship between work, context and viewer, where the subject is disbelief either explored or induced by the artworks themselves. Whereas Modernism was able to project utopias and make people believe in them, some currents of Contemporary Art - although enthusiastically willing - seem totally unable to do so. This death of utopia is not a negative, that the Utopias of Modernity have failed catastrophically can be seen in Modernist architecture and the devestation it has wrought on the Lebanese landscape.
But abandonning utopias is never easy. Their loss can be both bewildering and dispiriting, with artists seeing themselves as working in a vacuum of meaning. This feeling of crisis I have often experienced. But beyond this internal crisis, if successfully navigated, the disappearance of utopia implies the value of the present in the sense that the artwork is not in the service of some idealized past or future but is meant to signify and give value to an eternal present - the only eternity there is. This is the Epicureanism that the author describes when he talks of “pleasure seekers and mystics.” Mysticism, when it does not turn to hatred of life and punishment of the body is the intensification of pleasure seeking, the spirituality of the body.
My brothers the Epicureans.
lundi 15 décembre 2008
Fragments 6
- All being presupposes being.
- Whatever explains existence must first exist.
- Being is part of itself.
- Being is not part of itself.
- We are limited and circumscribed by the unthinkable.
- All presence is the presence of an absence.
- I am searching for adapted manners.
- Does truth depend on itself?
- Being is an infinite regression of resistance.
- The universe is infinitely true.
- I hear sounds too loudly.
- The real lesson of nihilism is the infinite value of life.
- The unthinkable constantly recreates us.
- Je ne pense pas, “je” est pensé.
- I am escaping the responsibility of the sacred.
- I transform absence into cosmology.
- The absolute is unspeakable.
- I perceive a new order vaguely.
- I don’t know how I know.
- "The origin of life is in volcanoes." (Heraclites would approve.)
- Le paraitre est une forme d’être qui rejette de ses facettes vers un autre hypothétique.
- Aesthetics are manners.
- My greatest regret is that I don’t have enough time.
- Avec les autres, faites parler vos silences.
dimanche 14 décembre 2008
FRAGMENTS 3
- This slow thing we call self.
- Merging with our own disappearance.
- Its what’s thinking but is what’s thinking thought? Its what’s talking but is what’s talking talk?
- Its all made up of voids and the edges of voids.
- Alors si c'est comme ça, il y a un silence parfait autour de moi.
- Things happen to me and things happen as me.
- We are part of the totality of what is not us. (The materialist view.)
A variation on Augustines' paradox of time:
To be conscious is to be unconscious of the present moment. If you are conscious of the present then it is already past; the present is thus the limits of consciousness. It is also its condition of possibility since it is the presupposition of the existence of consciousness. Given that past and future as objects of consciousness presuppose the present then if I am to exist as consciousness it must be in the now. (Even if the present is only indirectly visible as the presupposition of past and present.)
Consciousness is the coincidence of being present – both in the sense of being present and of time of presence.
The present is eternal, unchanging.
The present is before and after change.
The present is aware of change.
Awareness is present, having as its fundamental object the past and the future.
The eternal present is nothing more than space.
Is the nature of reality spatial?
Consciousness negates the present as time.
Consciousness perceives the present as space.
Fragments
- My inability to represent needs to be represented.
- The dimension of something is a function of how much you are concentrating on it.
- Perhaps we are not only the center but also the limits of the world.
- Your debt to life is joy.
- The fundamental affirmation of reality is that I am.
- It is not not itself.
- Life is coagulated energy.
- On contemporary art: Once it extended itself so much into the world the artwork disappeared.
- Only the present exists. (The Stoics)
Fragments 2
There is no outside.
A matter not of words but of silence.
The self is an activity.
Through absorption in the action of self: a unity of watcher and watched.
I am absorbed in being myself.
Infinity is where all points are centers.
Everything is simultaneous even time.
Fragments in no particular order or language
- We are limited and circumscribed by the unthinkable.
- All presence is the presence of an absence.
- I am searching for adapted manners.
- Does truth depend on itself?
- Being is an infinite regression of resistance.
- What exist is what can actually or potentially resist something. So for existence to exist, something must resist something. But the latter thing must already exist in order to give resistance. Why does it exist? Because of prior resistance. Infinite regression is the paradox founding existence.
- The universe is entirely true!
- The universe is infinitely true.
- I hear sounds too loudly.
- Perhaps the real lesson of nihilism is the infinite value of life.
- The unthinkable constantly recreates us.
- Je ne pense pas, “je” est pensé.
- I am escaping the responsibility of the sacred.
- I transform absence into cosmology.
- The absolute is unspeakable.
- I perceive a new order vaguely.
- I don’t know how I know.
- Les êtres humains transforment les choses en conscience. Les transforment pour qu’ils entrent dans la conscience d’autrui. Transforment les choses pour transformer leurs conscience d’eux.
- The origin of life is in volcanoes. (Something Heraclites would enjoy.)
- Le paraitre est une forme d’être qui rejette de ses facettes vers un autre hypothétique.
- Aesthetics are manners.
- My greatest regret is that I don’t have enough time.
- Avec les autres, faites parler vos silences.
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