Wittgenstein and Berkeley

Berkeley – “Surely it is a work well deserving our pains to make a strict inquiry concerning the First Principles of Human Knowledge, to sift and examine them on all sides, especially since there may be some grounds to suspect that those lets and difficulties, which stay and embarrass the mind in its search after truth, do not spring from any darkness and intricacy in the objects, or natural defect in the understanding, so much as from false Principles which have been insisted on, and might have been avoided.”

Wittgenstein – “The proper task of philosophy, he says, is to make the nature of our thought and talk clear, for then the traditional problems of philosophy will be recognized as spurious and will accordingly vanish.”  (from Wittengenstein, a Very Short Introduction, by A. C. Grayling)

The Diary of a Superfluous Man

from “The Diary of a Superfluous Man“, by Ivan Turgenev (1850) .. I read this and thought “how utterly modern” .  It seems as if it could have been written by Woody Allen, or Jerry Seinfeld, with all the problems, blaming parents, family dynamics, and unhealthy introspection:

“I was born thirty years ago, the son of fairly well-to-do landowners. My father had a passion for gambling; my mother was a woman of character . . . a very virtuous woman. Only, I have known no woman whose moral excellence was less productive of happiness. She was crushed beneath the weight of her own virtues, and was a source of misery to every one, from herself upwards. In all the fifty years of her life, she never once took rest, or sat with her hands in her lap; she was for ever fussing and bustling about like an ant, and to absolutely no good purpose, which cannot be said of the ant. The worm of restlessness fretted her night and day. Only once I saw her perfectly tranquil, and that was the day after her death, in her coffin. Looking at her, it positively seemed to me that her face wore an expression of subdued amazement; with the half-open lips, the sunken cheeks, and meekly-staring eyes, it seemed expressing, all over, the words, ‘How good to be at rest!’ Yes, it is good, good to be rid, at last, of the wearing sense of life, of the persistent, restless consciousness of existence! But that’s neither here nor there.

I was brought up badly and not happily. My father and mother both loved me; but that made things no better for me. My father was not, even in his own house, of the slightest authority or consequence, being a man openly abandoned to a shameful and ruinous vice; he was conscious of his degradation, and not having the strength of will to give up his darling passion, he tried at least, by his invariably amiable and humble demeanour and his unswerving submissiveness, to win the condescending consideration of his exemplary wife…”

So good, so good, so very, very good.

Covering their assets

Before signing up for iTunes Genius I had to read and sign the terms and conditions.  Who does that?  Well, this time I did.  And here’s what I found.  Seems as if you can get some serious symptoms from too much iTunes – beware!

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

To avoid muscle, joint, or eye strain during video game play, you should always take frequent breaks from playing, and take a longer rest if you experience any soreness, fatigue, or discomfort. A very small percentage of people may experience seizures or blackouts when exposed to flashing lights or patterns, including while playing video games or watching videos. Symptoms may include dizziness, nausea, involuntary movements, loss of awareness, altered vision, tingling, numbness, or other discomforts. Consult a doctor before playing video games if you have ever suffered these or similar symptoms, and stop playing immediately and see a doctor if they occur during game play. Parents should monitor their children’s video game play for signs of symptoms.

High Solitude Quotient

For me, being alone is about staying sane in a noisy and cluttered world – I have what the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould called a ‘high solitude quotient’ — but it is also a way of opening out a creative space, to give myself a chance to be quiet enough to see or hear what happens next.

John Burnside, on solitude

Our Bullying Curriculum

Our bullying curriculum consisted of this dictum:

“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you.”

I don’t recall feeling especially cheerful after hearing it.

a whole mental mansion trip-wired against invasion

Brilliant:

“Where Obama projected the calm consciousness of a grave but unnamed mission, Ryan’s self-love is more recognisably American-boyish. He radiates ambition, healthy ambition, as if ambition were one of those permitted substances you could take at the gym to enhance performance. He has a lean and hungry look even when he smiles; and a relentless eagerness also, which will wear on people over time. His constant demeanour is cocksure; his face never registers reflection. Listening to other people is a formality, for Ryan, to be endured before he springs his answers. And how the answers pour out! There is an attractive, efficient speed in the way he works, but also a kind of deadness. And the deadness is there in his eyes – the hard eyes of the self-fulfilled and self-justified, clean of mind and clean of body, a whole mental mansion trip-wired against invasion by entities seeking pity and bearing excuses.”

Makes me think of this, from The Kinks:

cause hes oh, so good,
And hes oh, so fine,
And hes oh, so healthy,
In his body and his mind.
Hes a well respected man about town,
Doing the best things so conservatively

Bad Stories

The great Katha Pollitt, over at The Nation, has this to say about the almost unapproachable topic of gun control:

The trouble is, as with so many aspects of conservatism—the anti-choice movement, the Tea Party, Ron Paul—“gun rights” supporters win on intensity and single-mindedness. We have common sense, but they have a master narrative: rugged individualism, patriotism and self-defense (which includes paranoid fantasies about threats from ordinary people in turbans whom they are too ignorant to realize are Sikhs, not Muslims…and obviously I’m not saying it would have been less horrific and more “understandable” if Page had attacked a mosque).

Oh, God.  She’s right.  There’s no reasoning going on here, just knee-jerk fear of the unknown.  God help us.