The Craft of Thought, Reviewed

I just finished Mary Carruthers' book The Craft of Thought. It is a fascinating account of medieval monastic "memory" techniques, and how these techniques actually were much more about "invention" and creativity than a mere regurgitating another culture (which is usually the story from historians, scientists who don't like the fact monks preserved European culture, and a host of other people with axes to grind).

There are a number of extremely interesting things in the book, from the use of the "planned cities and buildings" of the Bible (the Tabernacle of Moses, Solomon's temple, Ezekial's temple, and John's temple) as forms of "locational" memory, to the use of illuminated texts for reading. Yet what struck me the most was the central metaphor for "memory" and thinking in monastic culture, the machina memorialis.

The notion of a "machine" in ancient and medieval culture is what Isidore of Seville identified as a hoist that architects or masons (masiones) would use to lift up the "fabric" of a building, setting this superstructure on a foundation. Extending this metaphor (using 1 Corinthians 8), monastic culture thought of a "memory machine" as constructing a building on the "foundation" of the Bible. Thus, memory was not a "faculty" that we have, allowing us to regurgitate information (although, it is true, the foundation must be able to be regurgitated - this is why all monks learned the Psalms by heart), but rather to creatively play with the foundation.

The best analogy would be a jazz musician: s/he learns "turns", phrases, scales, and other melodic and harmonic devices, and finally "standards", practicing hours and hours so that when they "improvise" they have something to say, and they don't need to think about it. Jazz is very formulaic in this sense, but it is free precisely because "memory" functions not as a mere iteration of previous learned material, but instead a building, an erecting of architectures of harmony and melody that out-strip, but do not overcome, the foundation in scales and basic harmony.

There were many devices monks (and the ancients) would use in order to use memory in this way. E.g., they would make "fables" in order to remember the stars. One of the most short-sighted and narrow-viewed modern people think is the Greeks and Romans thought that stories of Orion and other constellations were meant to "explain" what we now know "scientifically." Yet the entire point of these stories was to enable a sailor to remember that in the autumn Orion and his dogs 'chase' Pleiades, thus enabling him to locate the stars quickly. Fables, etymologies (which philologists really hate), actual buildings, and art, all help in the memory work.

Another aspect of the "machine" of memory is an ethical point. John Cassian (one of the founders, along with Augustine, of western monasticism) used the metaphor of machine in connection with a "mill". One has the grain one wishes to produce flour with, so you put the grain in the hopper, it goes down onto the stones, and is crushed and refined so as to produce flour. However, in order to produce usable flour, you must have good grain to begin with. Analogously, with memory, it depends on the ethical intentions of the person "remembering". We have a phrase for this: 'garbage in, garbage out.'

So what's the point of all this? For monks, it was so you could have meditative experiences, and ultimately to arrive at the beatific vision that is God. There are many examples of texts where this is attempted. E.g., Hugh of St. Victor describes the Ark using an "allegorical" method. This method - which means much more than a mere "non-literal" reading of the Bible - is almost a meditative performance, where he's taken his entire memorial foundation, and then, interlacing seemingly incongruous texts and images, he sets out to explain a very boring (to our minds) part of the Bible as one of the most glorious and spiritually expansive parts. Hugh and others were trying to "hoist" themselves beyond where they were.

Carruthers does a fantastic job of bringing this world into ours, of showing how the monastic view of memory was much more expansive and interesting than ours. Of course, I think most people would recognize that, in many ways, human memory does not function like a computer. Even if our brain maybe more "powerful" than a computer, it is not a computer; our memories are all flawed. We fill in lots of lacunae in order to have a coherent narrative of our life, fill-ins that are most likely "wrong" and "un-factual." Seriously though, who would want to read a memoir that was just a re-counting of every detail of our life, accurate to the T? That would be beyond boring, because it would not tell us anything beyond mere details. While this may be "real," in a very restricted, lab-induced, narrow sense, it isn't imaginatively real.

Just like monks, we remember our life in order to get somewhere, somewhere beyond where we are now.

"...Train like an athlete.."

I was considering what to post this evening, when I realized I haven't explained the title of this blog, nor have I explained the epithet.

I have been thinking about "practices" an aweful lot as of late. Nietzsche used this term "Gewissensbisse" to describe the "pangs of consciousness" (which, by the way, Joyce has the best translation of this word: the agenbite of inwit) that ascetics in Christianity attempted to produce in themselves. In addition, he thought they eventually even enjoyed such "pangs," and traced this long genealogy from the Desert Fathers to modern scientists.

I think there is a great deal of truth in this, although I do not think of it in negative terms. In other words, I actually think "exercise" (one translation of the greek word askesis, i.e. ascetic) is the primary way in which we come up with "truth."

Now, some I'm sure don't like this: isn't truth supposed to be "absolute", i.e. indisputable? It is clear, or rather it is something you just have to agree with, or else you're "wrong." If this isn't the case, what about murder? How could you always condemn it if there weren't absolute standards with which to judge?

The big problem for this absolutist positions is that of "verification." We just have to figure out some way, among all the opinions floating around, to "verify" which one is true (let's not get into the circulatiry here - i.e. how is it possible to verify that something is true unless you already know the truth?). This is where Nietzsche's (and indeed, almost the entire ancient philosophical traditions, including Christians) notion of "training" fits: there is no access to truth without first a change in one's being. Or, another way to put it: one must become an ascetic in order to access the truth.

I can still be objected, however, that this is elitist. The problem I have now is just this: how does one have an ascetic practice that is at once actually transformative, but at the same time somehow available to everyone?

The necessity of waste.

Bataille once said, "humanity recognizes the right to acquire, conserve, and to consume rationally, but it excludes in principle nonproductive expernditure." Today, my wife was attempting to put Microsoft XP on her new Mac, the software she acquired with the purchase of her last computer. She called about the "product key", and asked if it was alright to "roll over" the software from her last computer. The service associate said, "the software lives and dies with the computer itself."

Now think about this. Software, which by definition "floats" around, above and through hardware, something like a word floats around the definition the dictionary gives it, lasts longer than hardware, if one chooses to use it. Software requires an agent to initialize it, to give it body and form. It needs hardware in order to be used, but of course, this hardware can be any old machine. The software-machine is the tide of the ebb and flow of the sea, needing any old beach in order to bring down its white, frothy caps.

But Microsoft, in our wonderful capitalistic system, is much more concern about money than about products themselves. The products are merely means to an end, an end which is an abstract thing, the almighty dollar. This dollar can be exchanged for other things, things one needs or wants. Yet what would be the best way in order to procure said money? The creation of waste.

Yes, waste is one of the most essential categories in our economy, because without sufficient waste, money would be impossible. You see, waste allows for expansion, and expansion is the only way for money to grow, and for capitalist exchange to be possible. Waste is the silent partner in the growth of our social machine.

Hegel points this out well. In his discussions of poverty in his Philosophy or Right, he tries to help us understand just how the wealth of a society is directly related to its poverty in capitalist societies. You see, there is something of a dilemma when it comes to what to do with the poor. If you support them (in charity), you immediately devalue their humanity, because they would be dependent on the wealthy. We can see how the English poor laws helped both deal with poverty, while at the same time create a group of people who did not see themselves as equals to the wealthy, and conversely, the wealthy believed themselves superior to the poor. On the other hand, if you helped provide work for them, there would be too much production. Hegel puts it like this: "it is precisely in overproduction that the lack of a proporitionate number of consumers who are themselves productive that the evil consists, and this is merely exacerbated by the two expedients in question. This shows that, despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough - it.e., its own distinct resources are not sufficient - to prevent an excess of poverty and the formation of a rabble [i.e., the poor]."

What is the way out of this capitalist dilemma? I mean, needing a group of people to be poor in order to stop overproduction is pretty harsh, don't you think? One small solution is waste: don't worry about overproduction, because what you produce shall last for such a limited amount of time, and so the consumer will continually consume. Admittedly, this does not solve the full problem; if we had zero unemployment in this country, overproduction would be rampant, and everyone would suffer. Instead, if we displace the "lack" here from people to things, we can still be capitalists and have our cake too.

What is the consequence of making waste necessary to the growth and survival of a system? Especially when so little can be recycled, it seems to me, at least, there is no incentive to treat our world like a place that should be sustained. Eventually, waste creates a desert.

Belief, the mighty State, the new Priests

"Scientific knowledge as nonbelief is truly the last refuge of belief, and as Nietzsche put it, there never was but one psychology, that of the priest" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 111).

This point makes me think about Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. All four have had books out in the last couple of years about the delusion, danger, and absurdity of religion, arguing that a much better explanation can be provided by evolutionary biology and other sciences as to how the world works.
I must admit, I haven't quite been able to stomach all their writing quite yet. I've read snippets, here and there (introductions, various chapters, etc.). For instance, I was reading about one of Richard Dawkins pet peeves, which is calling a child a "Catholic" child, or a "Muslim" child. Why would you do something so stupid, Dawkins asks us - they haven't had a chance to know whether or not they believe in God! They haven't made the decision, haven't justified their belief, so no one is justified in calling them by any religious appellation.
This is pretty representative of these thinkers and their analysis (although, one might say Dennett probably the least of these). For these thinkers, religion turns on the problem of belief, and more specifically, belief construed as what philosophers call "correspondence." What this means is that belief is understand as an equation or identification between what someone thinks, and the "state of the things."
The mighty State, yes indeed. If I believe the world is round, well well, science has the proof that the "state of things" is in my corner, like a boxing coach encouraging me in a ten rounder with Mr. Truth. Mr. Truth will not get the best of me, because my concept, my idea of the world, is in accordance with that "objective" thing we call the world. "Science" can help, using its particular method, and with its particular communities' approval. If I can provide evidence that the state of things and is the same as what I think, then I have a "justification" for what I think, and this would be a legitimate belief.
Now, what's wrong with this picture in regards religion? Heck, what's wrong with this picture in regards everyday life? In my mind, something very basic: no one actually lives their life justifying their beliefs. I suppose everyone has "moments" where they do, but in actual fact, religious people certainly don't, and neither do scientist (except regards their work). How many scientist have you ever met who asked whether or not one needs science? It's assumed that the veil should be torn from Isis, and nature should be rent and analyzed for "knowledge's sake." Religion on its part is not so much about belief as about communities (hence the root, re-ligere, meaning to "bind together," used for the old Roman door hinges) and practices, and in general, religious people actually view themselves in relation to these, rather than in relation to "belief."
First of all, communities are essential to most religions because, as Aristotle said, humans are political animals, and empirically, communities have enabled people to form associations which in some way provide for them. In the first century of our era, for instance, the Hellenistic world was full of communities for religious purposes. These communities created space for collective action (in any number of ways) that couldn't be found in other channels within the repressive Roman empire (for instance, wealthy women, who's political positions were devalued, helped finance many religious movements, including one famous missionary, St. Paul).
More basic, religions are defined by their practices, not so much by their beliefs. This is why Dawkins is completely wrong to require a "decision" on the part of children about their beliefs (one might even say this shows that Dawkins is the product of a Protestant environment). Religions are not generally about "belief", but about practices that help form certain types of persons. All religions are concerned with the formation of a certain type of person, and they do this in a number of ways. Muslims, for instance, require prayer five times a day. The physicality of this prayer, with the bend to the knees, bend to the floor, and then prostration, does more than just "symbolically" represent a person's dependence on God. Through physical practice one feels dependence, one works at subordination in one's own muscles. We can reflect and say that this represents the "Muslim" (i.e., one who submits to God), but for a Muslim, this is a practice and discipline of the body, before it is a "representation" of anything.
One can also see how focus on belief distorts how religious people understand why they are religious. The argument from people like Sam Harris, Hitchens, or Dawkins, is that evolution explains the world much better, and that religion misrepresents the origins of the world. Yet, the only people who actually care about "explanations" for the world are either scientists or creationists (who, by the way, are perfect caricatures for evolutionary thinkers to sink their teeth into). The "origins" of the world don't really have any cash value when you are a poor Ecuadorian farmer struggling to survive, or a single mother with no support network working two jobs. These are the kinds of questions most important to religions (although many counter-examples can be provided, no doubt), and when you just get down to it, not that many people care about origins. They mostly care about their friend they attend church with, the discussions they have about their sufferings and their triumphs, and the joy in hearing Psalms that have meant consolation in struggling times. Explanations are good for professors who make their livings trying to show their professions they are exceptional, but for everyone else, they really don't do a lot.
This all brings me back to the quote I started with. These atheists are actually rather bland and trite in their condemnations of religion, because they are the other side of the religious coin. They high-priest is no longer the pope or Billy Graham, but the evolutionary biologist, or the neurobiologist. They are the courts who declare this or that individual's experience as delusional, or this or that argument 'absurd according to the data science now has.' Nietzsche was right about them.

from "Voyages"

-And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love...

Hart Crane, from "Voyages"

Gotta' Serve Somebody

Epictetus said, "it is you who know yourself, how much you are worth to yourself, and at what price you sell yourself; for men sell themselves at various prices" (Discourses, 1.2).

...there are economies everywhere. Every moment, the Stoics say, is a decision within one's economy, where one type of life is exchanged for another. For the Stoic, that was why you disciplined your body- by doing so, you learned which economies would sustain you best. You learned the role of hunger and want for lowering the price of satisfaction; the role of attentiveness to death in order to lower the price of actual death; the role of pain in order to lower the price of pleasure. The Stoic economy was a minimalist economy, an economy at a lower frequency...

...there are other economies. There is the Epicurean economy, where one takes pleasure in everything, because one recognizes the role of fate, and thus one is amor fati. One also learns the role of distance, and thus serenity, that allows even the most banal thing to be enjoyable...

...there is the capitalist economy, where one learns the negative role of freedom. Freedom in this economy means the restriction that comes with "unlimited" growth; the disruption of "upward mobility"; the heavy weight of the impersonal "market"; the paralysis of "infinite possibility"; Hume's fork, that-all-too important separation of what something "is" from what it "ought" to be (the "is" is merely what we make of something in it's exchange); the restriction (on some) of the unequal exchange (for which a "profit" is only possible)...

...is there a democratic economy? This is the economy I'm interested in. A democratic economy would be an exchange of equality, perhaps a radical equality, were the reasons one gives are acceptalbe in themselves; where the entry fee is merely being a person; where my exchange is the same as yours...but of course that's a utopia. Everyone sells themselves, and everyone has different prices.

The Agenbite of Inwit

Nietzsche asked what our conscience tells us...there's a sting to it, yes, but why? A sting...like a yellowjacket that we've angered, come too close to its nest, crossed over some invisible line that separates its world from ours...there is something like this in Nietzsche's assesment. There are conditions for our preservation wrapped up in the movement of our bodies, the judgments and thoughts we engage in, the things we eat, and the people we love and hate. When we cross the boarder of these conditions the sting is harsh, but we can overcome it. That is what the 'over-man' is, the over-coming of these boarders, the creation or formation of conditions for life...the problem is when we are reactive to the conditions, rather than actively forming them.

But "objectively" we really can't create our own conditions, because even our need for creation is a condition for the preservation of life. What is Nietzsche's answer? The Eternal Recurrance of the Same. The Gay Science, section 341:

The heaviest weight. -What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'this life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...the eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'

To affirm every moment as if (one can sense a little of the Saint Paul as if here) one were to live it over and over and over. This isn't about getting rid of guilt. For Nietzsche, the problem is that we are too innocent, since we do everything because of the conditions for the preservation of life. No, the problem is: how can I be responsible.

Historical Belief/Religious Belief

Wittgenstein says:
"Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through think and thin, which you can do only as a result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don't take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.- There is nothing paradoxical about that!" (Culture and Value, 32e)

Does belief encounter a 'historical truth' in the same way it encounters an everyday truth (like, the garbage truck comes on Tuesday)? Wittgenstein seems to be saying the encounter is very similar, insofar as it is only a result of 'a life'. But what's 'a life'? Elsewhere he says, "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? -In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? -Or is the use its life?" (PI, 432). This is a fascinating idea: a narrative is 'true' in its use- the 'way' it is used, the place where it is heard, spoken. The historian reads the inconsistent gospels, and says, 'ah, one of these accounts must be false, because they couldn't all have happened.' But St. Irenaeus of Lyon reads four gospels that indicate the four zones of the world (east/west, north/south), and thought four manifested everything about Jesus, 'breathing out immortality on every side.'
This doesn't deal with any type of "objectivism" as such, and that's probably not in Wittgenstein's concern. Really, what is the point of such "objectivism"? Most likely it is to give your reasons for action justification to others, but the only people who would care are those who already somehow hold your poistion (or life, as it were).

The question to me is this: how much is "given" to us (where we don't partake in the forming) and how much do we (consciously or not) form this life? It's this dialectic (if it is a dialectic) that's fascinating.