Networks of Ideas

        Recently I have been thinking about the nature of ideas. What generates an idea. I watched a talk about what starts an idea. The speaker spoke about the myths of the Eureka moment, how we have a rhetoric that is lurid and rich in metaphors to describe ideas that come in a sudden moment. Yet, he says that reality often defies this description. Ideas come from networks. He uses the historical example of English Coffee houses in the eighteenth century as evidence of this. That stimulation through new drinks and the juxtaposition of ideas made for a fertile environment in which ideas jostled and fused with each other. THe marriage of various divergant ideas was made possible by the environment that allowed people to discuss, debate, in an area that was not bound within one area. Everyone at this time was a polymath and this plurality of disciplines created a climate where ideas could interact in new and dynamic ways. I would argue that we have lost a lot of this interconnectivity. C.P Snow in his lectures on the two cultures showed how we had divided knowledge up, so that there are two worlds: the world of science and the world of the arts. This still exists and the two bodies are impoverished as a result of this. Because they have no area in which they can interact they do not. Yet, there is much that can be learnt from each other, in fact the differant ways of viewing the world enriches and refines ideas. The scientific background can expose flaws in the historians arguement and the historian can point out conceptual flaws in the others. The reality is that every discipiline draws upon each other for ideas and methodology. Yet, we seem to be making this more difficult. The fetishisation of science and technology, and utilitarian subjects that have a pragmatic benefit has meant that we focus on them to the detriment of other subjects. The arts are seen as self-indulgance, and capable of offering little to humanity. So it they divide and carve up knowledge into these two worlds rather then trying to harmonise them. C.P Snow called for the two cultures or worlds to be unified. I think a discipline that shows this is the history of science, in theory this is an arena that would encourage such meeting of science and art. Yet, scientists seem to have little interest in their own history, and if they do they only want a narrative of progress and development, whereas the historian wants a more nuanced and accurate picture of the past that exposes the flaws as well as the successes.
        I think that part of the problem is that the structure of our education system divides rather then unites. From the age of 16 we are already started to be focused, the blinkers are on, and the boundaries of what we are to spend our timr studying focused. We look at three areas only, at a time when we should be experiencing academic freedom, being exposed to a giant melting pot of ideas, that liberate us, that allow us to discover and refine our interests. I was fortunate enough to mix arts and science, but had I not I would have limited my view of the world and my options for the future. We may havea depth of study, but we also need a breadth in order for balance. Indeed this questions the very nature of study, why is it that we educate? What is the purpose of university? Is it to provide training for jobs, if so then why is the university needed, surely we could just have on-job training, apprenticships as they did back in the victorian age. An education should prepare us for the future. It should give us the skills that will help us throughout our life. The reality is that our system is failing us, people go to university to get a degree not to become educated. The subject is irrelevant as many go on to jobs far removed from their subject, we need a system that encourages exposure to many differant worlds. If we want to have fresh creative thinkers that generate new ideas, then we need an environment that brings together the best minds in such a way that they can make a mixing pot of ideas. This comes only when people from differant disciplines are mixed. When sitting in a seminar a economic students insight into the development of the English Civil War could provide a viewpoint historians have missed. Likewise when considering an economic policy the historian, or english student able to think in abstract ideas can see the way in which the policy would fail if applied as they imagine the reality of it. This is just a few ways, the reality is that it is more dynamic and harder to quanitify then abstract or theoretical interactions. It will cause each area to focus on the ability to communicate their knowledge, knowing that non-specialists may be there will cause them to express their ideas in forms that enable all to comprehend them. It is true wisdom to be able to express a complex idea in such a way that anyone can understand them, this will force us to become better teachers and better listeners.
        It is interesting that even if someone specialises and goes into academic research and teaching they never use but a tiny fraction of the knowledge that they gain at university. If people who make full use of their degree do not use it all, then why do we bother going to such a depth? I am not argueing that we should not have depth, but that depth should be linked to the big picture, and limited, students should if they desire look into depth the area they are majoring in, but they should be able to connect this to the big picture, the general body of knowledge, so that they can orientate what they learn to the great resevoir of knowledge that mankind is creating. This will help us to keep ourselves and our knowledge in perspective. We may be anchored to the bed of the existing knowledge as we search the remaining depths of discovery.
        I think a fundamental part of unifying the disparaged units of learning is to reestablish philosophy. Philosophy is the core of all knowledge it is what provides the conceptual framework from which we study. It is the philosophy of science that evaluates the methodology of science, what constitutes what science is, and also the implications of science. The philosophy of science would be impossible without an evaluation and knowledge of general epistemological issues, or an understanding the problems of knowledge, and the claims of knowledge. But it is not the philosophy of science that is relevant but the philosophy of any discipline. Philosophy encouragesa self awareness and reflection on the state of a discipline, the problems that it faces, and the flaws that are inherant in it. For the most part we ignore the contradictions and flaws of our discipline, yet an awareness of the issues we face allows us to avoid falling into them and to analyise how we can rectify and solve them.
        Further it is a liberal art. This means that it liberates the individual. It opens up ways of thinking, it allows one to discuss, to understand the nature of arguement, the ability to compare ideas, to think critically, and to research and evaluate the claims, it involves the abilty to cope with contradiction, unsurety. The world of the past is riddled with uncertainity, and philosophy never is able to objectvely prove anything, it helps to develop negative capabilty. The ability to live in a world that is plagued with chaos and uncertainty without having to invent satisfying falsehoods, and illusions of certainty to mask the contradictions and uncertainty. It is this state that helps to create genius. We all lie to ourselves in order to preserve the unity of the world, for our world is one in which we like certainty and consistency when confronted with something that contradicts our world-view we just dismiss or alter what we see, we lie to ourselves in order to preserve the world we live in, how much better would it be if we learned to live in contradiction to know that we are not consistent all the time, and that it doesn’t all fit perfectly together, but thats alright. The liberal arts enable us to do this, to have a multuplicity of view points at the same time, and be able to know that they can coexist without only one being the only one that can or is the true or correct view or opinion.
        Philosophy helps to develop the intellect. To borrow a tired metaphor to broaden ones horizons, and enlarge the ability of the mind to think in new and creative ways. I love this quote:

The study of philosophy serves to develop intellectual abilities important for life as a whole, beyond the knowledge and skills required for any particular profession. Properly pursued, it enhances analytical, critical and interpretive capacities that are applicable to any subject-matter, and in any human context. It cultivates the capacities and appetite for self-expression and reflection, for exchange and debate of ideas, for life-long learning, and for dealing with problems for which there are no easy answers. It also helps to prepare one for the tasks of citizenship. Participation in political and community affairs today is all too often insufficiently informed, manipulable and vulnerable to demagoguery. A good philosophical education enhances the capacity to participate responsibly and intelligently in public life.

(Philosophy Major (1992)) At some point I would love to dissect this quote to fully elucidate on the many principles that it contains. It has given me greater reason as to why philosophy is both relevant and important. It gives tools that allow one to learn faster then specialised practical skills from a degree in a superficially more practical subject. The fact is that it is intellectually demanding and academically difficult, means that it refines the mind and the ability to think and digest information. To engage with the world, philosophy leads to action and we need to awaken people from their slumber.

“The great virtue of philosophy is that it teaches not what to think, but how to think. It is the study of meaning, of the principles underlying conduct, thought and knowledge. The skills it hones are the ability to analyse, to question orthodoxies and to express things clearly. “ Agust 15 1998 The times
I think that ultimately we need a liberal education. One that does not restrict and confine us but opens up the options for us. Philosophy should be taught in every school. One of the problems that we face is that our university system has no clear concept of its purpose. Is it a professional training facility or an educational facility. I think the diabolical state of our graduate schools further highlights this. To go on to graduate study which I feel is when one should specialise is not possible.
An interesting article on this appeared in the New York Times called "To Beat the Market, Hire a Philosopher” It basically told the story of Bill Miller and how he applied philosophical thought experiments to the financial market in order to help develop a a billion pound company. He used his philosophical training to enable him to connect dots that woudl have escaped him had he not refined his ability to think comparatively and link ideas together in novel and interesting ways.
Further in a world saturated with information and messages the ability to judge between them is more important then ever. This involves the ability to understand a text, and then compare it and critically engage with it, something that philosophy encourages and helps to refine the skill. In a world of so many websites and claims to knowledge it is vital that we give our children a philosophical background to prevent them from being deceived or brainwashed by the media, by politicians, by anything that purports to be knowledge or a claim. This is a vital skill that in a world full of information our children need to be able to orientate themselves in the vast seas of knowledge and information.

Michael Morpurgo - singing for mrs pettigrew

A mark of a great story teller is their ability to take you away into magical worlds. They have an ability to breathe a sense of the extraordinairy in the ordinairy world. To remystify the world that has stripped the world of all that is mysterious. Michael Morpurgo is a master story teller, able to reinvigorate the impoverished world with wonder and awe, and transport the reader into worlds that ache with beauty.

singing for mrs pettigrew, is in essence a reflection on the story-makers journey. Morpurgo wants not only to transport readers into his fictional worlds, but in this book he wants to give us an insight into the way in which he sees the world, and what an experience it is to see the world through his eyes, we are taken through a nostagic vision of the past, where everything in the world has a story, a tale waiting to be told. It is a fantastic journey that both inspires, edifies, and brings a fresh view of the world. This is a deeply personal book, and one can feel Morpurgo’s soul in the pages, as he shares stories drawn from his past, and his explaination of them in terms of his writers craft. Reading it one feels like they are getting to know some fairy tale story-teller who wanders the world sprinkling the magic of his words to inspire others. You get a real sense of the love that he has for words, and for stories, you feel the richness of his imagery that entices with metaphors that are subtle yet potent, you feel a real sense that he has brought everything into the story, the characters, the landscape, the situation, the plot all forming a recipe carefully developed organically. It is as if the story has a life of its own which Morpurgo has carefully caught and transposed onto paper, and still it is kicking and breathing on the pages, trying to escape into fertile minds to invoke a magical sense of awe.

The stories are very well crafted. One feels a deep connection to the story, the characters are those that are meaningful, and the treatment Morpurgo gives them reflects his respect and love for them. This is in part due to the autobiographical basis for many of the stories in the collection. He treats themes such as death, loss and tragedy with a sympathetic manner. The giants necklace the story of a girl who gets caught by the sea as she collects shells for her necklace, is both haunting and beautiful. In the mozart question he delves into the past and how we should be truthful about the past through a jewish violinist. Other themes such as that of alienation and loss are treated, yet to look at the themes is to miss the beauty of the writing, each is a gem that is about the story not about a moral or theme, these come along naturally as the story evolves. I believe in unicorns is a story that reveals the authors love of literature, as the town save the books from a burning library in order to keep a treasury of literature. Half a man treats the story of a man deformed from a war, and his coming to terms with his estranged family, through a child’s wonder and lack of repulsion. War and the effects of war feature a lot in his stories in this volume a token of the things that Morpurgo himself understood. The result of his excellent craftsmanship in his writing, and his wonderful ability to conjur eup vivid worlds, results in a book that is both readable, magical and spellbinding. It inspires wonder, and to want to see the world as Morpurgo describes the world.

Franz Kafka - The Castle

Everyone has experienced that infuriating feeling when you call a customer helpline and the never ending series of ‘press one if you want this’ ‘press two if you want that’ and none of them have what you are looking for as an option. So then you start pressing random buttons before finally talking to a human voice who has no idea what you are talking about and starts a series of never ending series of transfers, speaking to one person to explain the problem only to be told you need to speak to the manager, who then says its the wrong department, and so it all starts again. This nightmare of beauracracy and legislation is essentially what Kafka’s castle is about. Except it is more confusing. K. The protaganist has no idea why he even needs to call the helpline, and the phone he has no buttons, and the buttons change, and doesn’t even make sense.

The essential basis of the plot is that K. has been summoned to the castle and once he gets there has to try and make contact with the authorities in the castle. Yet, he is constantly thrawted in his attempts, as K. is situated in the village beneath the castle it we have a forboding image, the castle looming constantly over K. a powerful symbol of authority. Protected with a never ending complex system of beauracy with multiple secretaries and paperwork that has K. stumbling to try and gain access. the system is seen as flawless yet it was a flaw that brought K. to the village in the first place. It is the story of alienation, the frustration of modern beaucracy and mans frustrated attempts to fight the system.

The style of the book is very fragmented, the characters shift and change, events break up, in a dream like fashion. The events are often illogical and meaningless, and what was insignificant latter becomes crucial. All these creates an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty. We become as confused as K. is in the situation. The dream seems more like a broken nightmare.

The bizare world that K is subjected to he freely participates in, K. is always free to leave the village and never forced or compelled to follow the castles strange laws. K. could leave the village but instead engages and adheres to the strange and crazy protocols and rules of the castle. K. sees himself fighting against the system but in his fight he follows the rules dictates to him by the system and in so doing he creates and sustains the system. The message is that each of us finds ourself in a a bewildering world full of rules that make no sense to us, K. in the end subjects himself to them, in order to gain acceptance in the village. Sadly, kafka died before completing the book, yet MAx Brod said that he had intended that K. was to die in the village as he finally was granted permission to live there. This for me makes the point that a theme of the book is that K. was buying into the beaurocracy in order to gain acceptance, his original quest became secondary and all that mattered was for him to follow the rules. The Castle is as much a thought experiment, where K. is presented with situations rather then a clear narrative and character development. The result is a book that makes one think but can also be difficult to follow with its fractured development.

Thomasso Campenella - The City of the Sun

Thomasso Campenella was a big thinker in the seventeenth-century. He had grandiose plans for the reformation of society. Campenella like his contemporarys Johanne Andreae and Francis Bacon articulated his aspirations through the emerging medium of utopian dreaming. Like Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and Christianopolis the city of sun is an attempt to reconcile the emerging new knowledge that was being generated. It hoped to show how science could function in a society. For this reason City of the Sun gives a fascinating insight into the mind-set of seventeenth century thinkers, and the hopes and fears they saw the future held.

The book is delivered through a dialogue between a sea-captain who has visited the CIty of the Sun, and the grandmaster who wishes to learn more about this city. The sea-captain takes the grandmaster on a detailed description of the city, taking him through the series of circles that educate the city through the paintings on the wall. followed by an a description of the customs, procedures and rituals of the municipality. The book is a fascinating insight into seventeenth-century idealised values, as this was what it attempted to achieve. It is notable for the influence it had upon Andreae's Christianopolis and Bacon's New Atlantis, which would be two crucial texts. Whilst not the most engaging utopian work, it is worth reading to understand how it interacted and compared to comparable utopias.

Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity

The control that we have over our destiny and fate is something that has always been a concern of humans. Philosophers and writers have expended thousands of pages exploring the extent that we are able to determine our destiny. In Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity we have an excellent work that explores this theme of free will and destiny. Asimov writes a tale that at its heart is about how what we chose determines what our reality is, and who should have control over our destiny, this is delivered in an fascinating plot that revolves around the paradoxes of time travel.

The writing for the most part is clear and engaging, and whilst he never fully develops the characters beyond the one dimensional images we get a glimpse at, the strength of the philosophically dense plot is sufficient to maintain interest in the story. Asimov allows the complexity of the narrative to unfold out in an unexpected series of revelations concerning the nature of Eternity and reality. The crux of the book is the organisation called Eternity, a group of time-travellors who observe the course of history and intervene in its path in order to improve the end result in a utilitarian manner and reduce the suffering in the universe as a whole, however manipulating the past through the myriad of cause and effect relationships is a complex procedure and in the end has serious repercussions for humanity and its future existence.

The central tension in the book is that between the desires of the individual and the desires of the organisation. Harlan a product of the system, who is indoctrinated in the dogma of the group starts to struggle to reconcile his allegiance to Eternity when it starts to conflict with his own personal desires. This conflict arises when he meets a female from the outside called Noys, and the dispassionate Harlan finds himself victim to the phenomena of love, when Harlan discovers Noys existence is in threat, he then starts to violate the code of practice to save Noys and his love.

The narration throughout is tight and controlled with Asimov laying out the parameters of the problem with sufficient clues to guide but withholding enough to keep the fascination of the reader. We are guided through the story via the eyes of Harlan, who seems to driven without sufficient motive to be believable. Likewise his companion Noys is presented as a non-entity and never fully developed yet turns out to be crucial to the plot, making it difficult for the final revelation to have the potency it needs. Whilst the weak characters, the precision and depth in the analysis and exploration of the philosophical issues of time travel more then makes up for this. The End of Eternity is a thought provoking work, with a powerful enough idea to drive home its point that in the end each of us our masters of our own destiny.

Joseph Conrad - Short Stories

In this collection are four of Conrad’s short stories. Of the four only two really stood out to me and made me think: An Outpost of Progress and The Heart of Darkness. Both of them have themes of obsession and the depths of cruelty that man can stoop to.

The first story An Oupost of Progress is a very cynical look at imperialism. It is based around two people who live at an outpost of the British Empire. The two white men stationed at a trading post are viewed very cynically. The place that is meant to be a symbol of western ideals and of progress, in the end is run by two people unable to think for themselves. They as white men feel that they are both safe and superior from those around them. Who they are Conrad states is just a manifestation of the people not them. As a result they are incapable of making decisions and thinking for themselves. All independant thought is taken away from them and they have no initiative. It is in essence almost if they have simply jumped on the bandwagon, they see the Empire as a means to make a name for themselves and have enlisted themselves yet they have no drive, it is the safety that comes from the association with the trading station that the hold onto, the prestige that they have endowed the location with. The chief two protaganists are Kayerts and Carlier. Both of whom are portrayed as having spent so long together that they despise each other as they both are searching for a way to escape and move out from the outpost of progress. The implication is that civilization is hollow at the core like the two men, they are just a manifestation of a system of deceptive innistutions and social conventions that sustain the illusion of progress. The emissaries of progress have become isolated alienated in the wilderness of the Congo, they are only there as a commercial enterprise and as a result they are unable to cling to their motives and become the ghosts of society. The illusions can’t be sustained in isolation, and out their in the Outpost they can not maintain the dillusion as there is no one who will participate in the act outside of them and it has hard to maintain a superficial stance all the time. The final result is that the locals, who fail to buy into western europes ideals and illusion and betray the two traders, thus when the manager comes to look on the trading post he encounters Carlier dead and Kayert hanging from a cross, the ideals and valies of progress when isolated in two people who have been deadened of their individuality leads them to kill themself.

The second one I liked was a Heart of Darkness. This is Conrad’s most famous story, I found it hard going to read, and wasn’t a big fan of his style. I think partly because it was long winded at times. It was famously adapted in the film Apocolypse Now. I think it is interesting but not as much as it is hyped up to be. For me it is all about how we build up things, goals, ideals and spend our life pursueing them, although we are never fully sure about why we are chasing them, that when we find them we are always disappointed in them . Marlow is sent to go bring Mr Kurtz back from his post, and the voyage is seen as one of self discovery where he is able to look inside himself and reveal his inner thoughts and feelings. I think that it is very much the case as his view of the world causes him to look inside himself. THis feeling of isolation is a theme that runs throughout the books. The concept being that western man when put into an alien environment discovers that the world is an isolated place, the objective is to spread colonialism but in the end they discover how alone they really are. This is echoed in the passage ‘It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence - that which makes its truth, itsmeaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone..’ Here Conrad through Marlow wants to describe the phyronnian scepticism the idea that we only can understand shadows of external reality, our perception of the world is ours alone and no one else can understand it. This can clearly be seen to be a product of his experience in the Congo when surrounded by that which is unfamiliar it is easy to assume that only you understand yourself, the others external of you seem alien and incapable of understanding each other, you can’t comprehend them thus they must be unable to understand you. Marlow goes on to build upon this idea of the solitary man, of mankind isolated when he discusses work ‘I don’t like work - no man does - but i like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know. They only see the mere show, and never what it really means.’ Here we see that Marlow through his voyage has seen the intrinsic laziness of man, the traders and colonial generals have been seen as lazy, money grabbers who just want an easy life. Here Marlow uses this to make the point that he himself is like them against work but he sees the need of work. To find his own meaning, and the same theme of the isolated reality that no man bt yoruself can ever know what it means. These were the points that I really got from the work it is easy to look deeper and find an extended metaphor for life, how when th boat is broken, and our purpose in life, the idea that we stumble along finding our own meaning, informed by our own stereotypes and prejudices, we make the world mean what we want it to mean.

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations

I read this book today by the self proclaimed philosopher king Marcus Aurelius. He tried to emulate the platonic ideal that a leader should also be a philosopher. The meditations were wrote whilst he was preparing for military campaigns and were very much for self reflection and meditation and were not intended to be published. Thus, like St Augustnes Confessions, you end up with a very confessional set of reflections. I found them interesting but not particularly ground breaking. I think the greatest theme that I got from it was how the world is in a state of mutability and the role that change plays. Aurelius points out that change is what allows us to do everything, if we did not change from one state to another from inaction to action then the world would fall apart. Change is the blood of existence. I think this is an nice concept.

T. S Eliot - The Waste Land

This poem is seen as one of the greatest contributions of Modernist literature in 20th century. When I first read it what struck out to mea was the incoherant structure of the poem, their seem to be a plurality of voices juxtaposed in a choatic narrativeless poem. There seems to be no grand metanarrative that underlies the whole poem, we never get to see the big picture but we get a mosaic of glimpses that seem to be worlds apart. THe fact that their is no grand unifying story behind the incoherant voices, is often taken to reflect Eliot’s belief that modernity had lost a unifying meaning itself. Throughout the poem is contradictions this invite the reader to try and reconcile them in a paradoxical world that fails to make sense of itself. The opening section introduces this with its reconfiguration of April as not a month of regeneration, but instead a painful period in which old memories are brought back. In this state, even the cold winter is preferred to remembering, the snow bringing a blanket of forgetfullness that is able to eclipse the world in white. The current political turmoil that Marie recollects is juxtaposed on her childhood memory of sledding. She claims that through escape into the mountains freedom is possible. Eliot thus sees the need to try and escape from the troubles of the past, this fleeing to the mountains is why winter is preferred. Yet the idealisation of winter is undermined in the next line when Marie says that she reads through the winter, escaping once more into a literary world where the narrative is clear, and the world makes sense, and heads south. It is almost a message that saying the refuge that the winter offered from remembering the dire condition she is in, is not even as much of a refuge, that she has to keep heading further out in order to find the same solace from the world.

I find it interesting that the whole text is a giant palimpsest. It is a giant collage of quotes, allusions and references. It invokes myths, legends, and archetypal figures to both try and oriantate and disoriantate. Because of the multiplictity of refereences all going on at once, it opens up so many readings and ways to interpret the dots, yet the dots are their to draw attention and give a series of hints into the meaning of the text. It is almost like no matter how much you try and find meaning in the world in the end, the real meaning of the text is always going to escape you. This resounds with the lines “I can connect/ Nothing with nothing” THe whole poem is about trying to connect the nothing sto try and make something. In the end we should humble ourselves and letgo of our presumptions that the world can all be explained by some grand theory and expect nothing as the people on Margate sand expect. THe broken fingernails and dirty hands of people who have waded through the pile of broken images to find that such an attempt to reconstruct the images is futile and that in the end they hold nothing.

Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead

This play is really really good. It takes place in the midst of Hamlet and brings two characters from the edge intp the forefront of th eaction. Whilst also blurring the roles that they both have. I love the themes of uncertainty and the vivid images, like th start with them tossing the coin and speculating the meaning of an chain of heads a row and the final scene which alters the way in which hamlet can be read an understood. I love the way questions are used in a game, how in the choas of the juxtaposistion of the two characters they enact. I love how they are so preoccupied with trying to find meaning that they often miss the real meaning and significance of what is happening around them. I love the post-modern way in which it fragments before all coming back together again. The way in which it explores profound questions in a midst of what seems like chaotic questions, the witty ramblings that go on between them, that expose philosophical issues.

“All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it's like being ambushed by a grotesque.”

“If this is our destiny, then that was his, and if there are no explanations for us, let there be none for him.”

Plato -Euthyphro

I have decided to read plato, partly as I think that the neo-platonists from the seventeenth century were fascinating and I think that in order to understand them that I need to be able to know a little about what plato said initially to see ho wthey reinterpreted him in their time. Euthyphro also interests me theologically, however much i may disagree due to the metaphysical background that informs plato’s, or Socrates thought, as represented by Plato. The core of this text is the question of holiness. What is the standard by which one can determine if one is being Holy. It starts of with a mythcal exlaination, whereby Euthyphro uses Zeus to show how what he is doing is holy as it is what the Gods have done, but the Gods have contradicted each other, this is where I lose a bit of PLato. as he is working from a polytheiestic context rather then a montheism such as Christianity, this makes his points not so pertinant to a western christian reader, such as myself, as they would have in Greece in his time. For instance his point about the agreement of the Gods, doesn’t really work outside of the greek deities. However this is not to say the work is not without merit due to its context, as it brings the problems of finding the essence of holiness to the mind of the reader, and fails to come to a satisfactory conclusion, leaving the reader to decide and make their own decision over what holiness is comprised of, wether it is what God says is holy, whether it is a form of justice or if it is what brings divine approval. Plato at points says that things are both holy and unholy depending upon the God, I would say that this point could be applied to context and circumstance, what was right once, is not right always, and what is right most of the time may be wrong in others. This makes holiness and piety a complicated and difficult problem.

Other ways of solving it are holiness as a form of knowledge, or a science of prayer and sacrifice, the ability to understand and know how to communicate with the gods. The issues seem to revolve around where holiness originates and for what purpose does it serve. Does it benefit the gods, and if so how, and if not then why do we have it? Further, hoe can we be sure that what we decide is holy, is in fact holy? These questions which the work provokes is far more powerfull then the unsatisfactory conclusion that it arrives at, with Euthyphro walking away without satisfying Socrates initial question to provide the standard whereby we can know what is holy and unholy.

existentialism and humanism - Jean Paul Sartre

This book is Jean Paul Sartre’s manifesto of what he saw existentialism as being. THe broader implications of what he saw existentialism had to other areas. In it he refers to phenomenology and Edmond Husserl and the concept that what is perceived is not an objective reality duplicated by the mind but a subjective experience that is the result of our minds own percipient activity. He argues for a very atheistic form of existentialism over Kierkegaard’s more christian form of it. The crux of it is that existence preceeds essence, rather then the ideal providing existence. But what does Sartre mean when he says existence preceeds essence, he argues that man exists and prior to existence there is nothing that defines who he is, dictates his character, goals, aspirations and personality.

“Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards’

Thus, the defing of the self is something that is always done in retrospect. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. This is a very liberating doctrine, one however that I think places a huge burden upon the individual to be a judge of their own self and the responsibility for them to live and be the correct person, as they bear the whole burdon for who they are, they have nothing to blame for what they are. Yet, this for me whilst I think is true to some extent, I think Sartre over states the role it plays, as we are not fully free, as he would have us to believe, to become who we want to be. His paper-knife theory holds that an object is created in essence as a theoretical entity prior to its construction, this he says is reversed for man. Man is created and then constructs his meaning. A point that I am struggling to comprehend is what he means when he says that what he chooses for himself he chooses for all mankind. I think that this refers to the concept that we can only be sure of our own existence and thus we project ourselves into the rest of mankind, so what we chose for ourselves in turn becomes our template for mankind. Sartre thus thinks that in fashioning himself he is fashioning the world, or at least, mankind. We therefore have responsibility not just for ourselves but for all mankind. This seems very similiar to Kants univseral ethics, what we choose must be what could be chosen universally in our situation. However this could be the point he makes later using Descartes cogito which is the initial stage for self awareness of our abandonment. I think therfore I am is the absulate truth of conciousness, and ones sense of self

Sartre quotes Dosteivosky when he said that “if God did not exist everything would be permitted.” THis statement is erronous as it assumes that mrality is derived only from God, and that it is God that imposes restrictions upon mankind, I would argue that Man imposes upon themselves their own limitations and prisons of their own perceptions. We want to limit ourselves through constructs and restrictions as it justifies us not acting to a fullness of our potential. As I was reading this it mad me think of Plato’s Euthyphro and his attempt to discover what holiness is and how one becomes holy. However Sartre uses the concept that man devoid of divinity finds himself with nothing to depend upon but himself and is confronted with an infinite number of choices through which he has to decide. It is this anguish of being confronted with so many choices of which we bear sole responsibility for the repercussions that he sees as the essence of existentialism, if essence could be used, perhaps the word core or fundamental feature would be more fitting.

Another term he tries to define in an existential context is abandonment. We alone our the judges that interpret the meaning of the events of our life. He uses the examples of a jesuit who interprets his life as a divine message being unraveled in front of his eyes, and the Kierkgaardian ‘Anguish of abraham’ to demonstrate this concept. This made me thing of the difficulty that we have in identfying the spirit in our own lives. I love his phrase Manpaints his own portrait and that is all he has. In the end who we are is all that we take with us, and in being.It is in in creating and inventing that man becomes as their is no pre-existing image of what man can become, or so Sartre says. Yet, in the light of the gospel we can see that this is not the case, we know both what the meaning of man is, and what he is to become, the image is given yet the practical way in which we become that is existential. I think that existential ideas work in light of our mortal existence but crumble in the eternal light of the gospel. The best thing about the book is the doctrine of freedom, action, and choice. It is these three areas which are its strengths its flaws are in the consistency and way in which they are applied and understood, the premises are true, but the conclusion is flawed.

“Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yourss to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing but the sense that you choose.” (p. 54)

The name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco is the master of intertextuality, the depth of his reading and knowledge exudes from every page of this work. The influences so vast as the library in which it is based, the text reflects the fragmented narrative that it gives a palimpsest of texts, myths, and ideas woven together in a narrative that is original in its hybridity and synthesis of influences yet has borrowed its imagery and symbolism from other sources. As I read it I was profoundly moved and made to consider th function of a text and an author. What is the purpose of a book and library, is it to preserve knowledge or is it to reatrict and moderate the way in which we have access to knowledge. This book for me is like a collection of glimpses of textx from the past, present and future fused together and woven into an incredibe story that makes you think about the relationship between symbols, books and explaination. The allussions to William Ockham I found most interesting, the concept that the simplest solution more often then not is the best solution. The use of scholasticism and reason is fascinating and the way that William has to balance the semiotics and reason of the event and happeneings that mist be placed into the releveant contexts, the narrative itself fits into multiple contexts as it is Adso’s narrative of his growing understanding of the mystery as it is revealed to him through William. The text has multiple layers that over a plethora of interpretations that spiral into the depths of both scripture and literary theory. The text reveals an complex internal structure comprised of many elements fused together which all in turn reflect out into a broader context. The murder mystery itself becomes a metaphor of the readers journey into the text. The imposition of their own meaning on the ambiguity that confronts them as they read the text. "books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told." This refers to a postmodern ideal that all texts perpetually refer to other texts, rather than external reality. I love the book in its post modern semiotic glory that as a reader causes one to construct meaning, i love the way in which as various meanings are attached to events they become the driving force for events, whilst the truth escapes all those that are involved in the mystery. The very murder mystery becomes truth which is always beyod humans grasp we try to discover it using reason but in the end the only order to the world is beyond our ability to understand and in the end we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that their is no order so to speak. It also explores the role of theories in describing the world, they may not be true to reality but if they fit reality if not the true way then pragmatically speaking they are true.

Joseph Smith as Scientist - John A Widstoe

This book was fascionating for the way in which it tried to reconcile theology with science. I loved the way in which he compared the two and demonstrated that both were reliant upon faith. He looks at the teachings of Joseph Smith regarding the eternal nature of matter, energy which he sees as coming from the Holy Spirit, which he likens to the great ether, which was a dominent scientific idea during his time, which states that the universe is permeated in a ether that peervades through everything, this he says is the Holy Spirit that supplies life, light and governs the world, it is God’s presence through all of creation. An interesting chapter is when he talks about plato’s cave and how all we see is the shadows of the reality as nature in its ultimate form is unknowable; our minds cannot comprehend the relation of cause and effect, this makes me think of David Hume who looked at this fact and the limitations of the human mind in what we can know. “Laws of Nature are, therefore, man’s simplest and most comprehensive expression of his knowledge of certain groups of natural phenomena.” (p.34)

Two chapters I really enjoyed were the ones in which he talks about geological time and evolution. Two areas I have been pondering recently. The first he points out the fact that nature is a means through which God can speak to us, it is the second book of scripture, the stars, clouds, mountains and soil are a form of divine revelation of the history of the world. He reconciles this to an interpretation of the creation whereby the days are symbolic of periods of unspecified time, not literal 24 hour periods. He as part of this looks at organised intellgences and that eternity of life, is the eternity of organisation, which is intellegience.

Another great section is the one in which he applies the gospel to science, thereby showing that the gospel is scientific, or science derives from eternal rinciples of the gospel. He starts of with Faith. People often when they lose faith or start to doubt turn to science as a more sure form of knowledge due to its derivation from experiements which comes from the senses and s more tangible and thus has no need for faith. Yet, Widtsoe shows that faith is needed in science, for much of science speaks of worlds far removed from our senses and is beyond that which we can know. He cites molecules and atoms, as an example of that, things which we cannot obersve with our own eyes. They are far removed from the real world, yet, we believe in their existence, despite the fact that most of us have never seen them, and that they seem to contradict our own personal experience. He then points out that as faith in a scientific practice grows it causes scientist to repent, to alter theories and practices to be in harmony with the new principle, such as antiseptic surgery. “In the spiritual life, it is impossible for the person who desires the greatest joy to remain passive in the presence of new principles. He must embrace them; live them; make them his own.” (p. 81) This he says brings obedience to law which he likens to baptism, which is obedience to spiritual law although we may not understand why it is baptism and not anything else. Likewise we may not understand why a coil of wire must be coiled to emit light. “All theoloy and all science contain laws that must be obeyed in order to obtain certain results, although the full reasons for the required combinations are not understood.” If scientists exert faith, change ways, and obey laws then they recieve knowledge or intellegience, which Jospeh Smith said is what the holy ghost is. “the holy ghost has no other effect than pure intelligence it is powerfull in expanding the mind, enlightening understanding, and storing the intellect with present knowledge.” Thus, a sciemtist recieves a gift from the holy ghost as a reward for their obedience.

In the section on the theory of evolution he uses Herbert Spencer to guide his thinking. “ Man seeks the law of laws, by the operation of which, things have become what they are, and by which their destiny is controlled.” Spencer says that everything is in a state of flux and changes from instant to instant. Everything is either progressing or regressing as it is changing in one direction or the other. This is the law of evolution that things are evolving into a progressive state. The next move hemakes is to draw ths distinction between natural selection and evolution. Darwinian notions of the struggle for existence he rejects and states evolution is true but natural selection does not, and may not be true. He states that one form of life can not change into another form of life but remains in the sphere in which God has created it.

A brief history of Madness - Roy Porter

This very short book gives a glance into the changing perspective on madness. The product of a lifelong of study it demonstrates a vast body of knowledge in the history of science.

To ‘define true madness, is’t but to be nothing else but mad’ Insanity then seems to be the mysteries of mysteries. Szasz controversiallu claimed that ‘there is no such thing as mental illness’ and that it is a myth fabricated by psychiatrists to consolidate their professional posistion, and sanction and legitimize easy solutions for problem people. This was the manufacture of madness through psychiatric labels to social pests, odd or challanging members of society. Along with Szasz, Michel Foucault argues that mental illness is not a natural fact but a cultural construct, madness is a disease of society, sustained by the mental medico-psychiatric infrastructure. The history of madness is not a story of diseas but manipulation of reason, power, freedom and control. In contrast Martin Roth argued that the stability and prevelence of mental illness shows that it is not merely a scape goating device, but a real psychopathological entity, with an organic basis.

Religious Madness

Porter first treats the biblical understanding of madness, wherby madness is seen as punishment from God, as seen in Deut 6:5. The greek tragedies feature madness as the result of the conflict between man and the gods. Shakespeare saw madness as a path of resolution, the madness of king leah and his self-alienation in the end lead to self-knowledge. Madness was a pathway to understanding the self. Christian Madness revolved around the fact that reason was the essence of man, in apocolyptic narrative in which mankind is outnumbered by supernatural beings, the Holy Spirit and devil battling for possession of the soul. This view is seen in the Anatomy of Melancholy, and Richard Napier who saw those of ‘unquiet mind’ were the result of religious despair. Diabolical possession was the sign of a lost soul. Reason was in harmony with God, failure to conform was unreasonable and lead to derengement, madness was a phase in redemption, bringing the sinner to a state of crisis, and preclude to recovery. This also saw the rise of demonic possession and witchcraft with Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft and King James’ Daemonologie. Anglicans were cautious about labeling demonic possession for fear of playing into the hands of papists and puritans, and said that they were self-deluding fancies of zealots, who had unhinged their own mind.

The shift in opinion occured after the thirty year war. This was intense religio-political division and as a result the extrem puritans and fringe movements such as Anabaptists, and Ranters were denounced as being brain-sick puffed-up prophets. Doctors started to point out the fact that reigious fringe and lunatics had an affinity; both displayed glossolalia (tongues), convulsions, weepings and wailing. ‘Enthusiasm’ was seen as psychological dillusions. Thomas Willis coined the phrase ‘neurologie’ this excluded the devil, possession now was defects of the brain and nerves. The pathologisation of religious madness lead ENlightenment thinkers to pathologise religiosity as a whole.

Madness Rationalised

Plato and the greek philosophies polarised rationality and irrationality, enshrining the mind over matter. Hippocratic medicine aimed to aid nature in creating and preserving a healthy mind in a healthy body. The galenic theory of humours meant that health was an equilibrium between extremes. Mania was opposed to melancholy. The first work on Melancholy was Timothy Bright, yet it was Robert Burton who provided the conclusive study, which demonstrated that there are as many theories of insanity as there are mad people. The next step in Porter is the role of Descartes, and his glorification of rationality. It was reason alone that would redeem and save mankind from ignorance, confusion and error. Descartes equated mind with incorporeal spirit, he had the problem with locating the mind in space and had to use the pineal gland which linked the body and mind

. Mental disorder accordingly was a problem between the interaction of mind and body. The result was that mental illness was now safely removed from religion and an object for philosophy and medicine

Fools and Folly

All societies judge people as mad, irrespective of any clinical judgement distinguished for devience or danger. This stigmatizing of those who are disqualified from social acceptance, projects social values. This demonised them, whilst excluding any demonic influence. It possible that this demarcation comes from a deep anthropological desire to order the world by catagorising the world and sepereting the self from others. The construction of ‘them and us’ reinforces our fragile sense of self-identity, and self-worth. Thus the creation of the insane at the same time constructs what it is to be sane, the two concepts reinforce each other in mutrally exclusive catagories. It also saw the depiction of madness as a part of genius, it was an attribute and natural part of poet. John Evelyn in his diary saw an inmate of Bedlam reciting verse. Porter observes that ‘ Madness thus donned many disguises and acted out a bewildering multiplicity of parts in early modern times: moral and medical, negative and positive, religious and secular. Bedlam was the new hospital for the mentally ill, that brought the sane and insane into great proximity. ‘the world is a great Bedlam, where those who are more mad, lock up those that are less.’ Folly started to be medicalised. the mad poet or artist was no longer romanticised. Swift saw lunacy as something that could infect dissenters and free-thinkers.

Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, saw creativity as part of a healthy psyche. This was the Romanticised version where the poet was not pyschologically peculiar but the embodiment of health. The avent-garde of Baudelaire, Flaubert saw that the works of genius were hammered out of the anvil of pain, and the sickness of madness. Likewise, Mary Wollstonecraft depicted the gothic image of the mad, with the popularised image of Ophelia.

Locking up the mad

In this chapter Porter looks at the way in which the mad moved from being treated at home, to religious institutions, through to the creation of Asylums to house the mentally ill. First Plato had said that the mad were the responsibility of the family, this was deeply shamefull due to its diabolical connotations. Michel Foucault argued that the 1660’s in Paris saw the start of the great confinement, and the locking up of the insane in asylums such as Paris’ Hopital General. This was both therapeautic and police oriantated. It cured both the patient and society of the burdon of the mentally ill. A consequence of this Foucault said was that MAdness loss its humanity. It placed the mad poor into bourgeois work ethic. Foucault over simplifies when he casts the rise of psychiatry in functional power relationships, the new witch-hunt for the social deviants. The drive to confine was not the mechanisms of power, or the sovereign, but families and local bodies all sent them to the Asylum. Why did people send patients to Asylums? I think this would be interesting, to study the reasons for confinement.

Psychiatry did not pre-exist Asylums but was instituted in order to manage its inmates. The rise of psychiatry classified insanity into original and consequential, that which was incurable and innate, and that which was triggered by events, this was curable. In the cure most famous was the reforms in Bicetre and Salpetriere by Dr Philippe PInel. He took upon him Enlightenment ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity, and unshackled the inmates, mentally illness was to be relived through mental approaches not physical restraint. A lot of Asylums were criticized, Bedlam was notorious for the treatment, and abuse of its inmates, with many inmates releasing expose’s of malpractice. This criticism did not abolish but reformed the Asylum. These reforms were seen to be through arcitecture. The correct building was a way to reform the mind of the patients, the buildings were in countryside, in order to help reconfigure their natural mental state. Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. The new reforms meant meticulous classification of the inmates into levels and types of madness.

In sum Porter gives an excellent overview of major elements in psychiatry, in a thematic way that shows the changes. It is an excellent, well written spring board into the vibrant and disturbing history of psychiatry.

Power - Bertrand Russell

This was one of Bertrand Russell’s final books, in which he tried to summerise his grand theory. Marx explained human behaviour as a economic, ot was the will to money that directed human behaviour, Freud saw it as sex being the motive, for Russell he saw it in Power. It was the manipulation and management of power that he saw guiding human behaviour, and in this work he seeks to understand and explain the various interactions of power in the world. He argues that every man would like to be a God and that of the infinite desires that mankind has its power that is the chief of all of them.

Power Russell claims is like energy to physics. The Laws of social dynamics are capable of being explained with reference to it. Inorder to do so it must be stated in terms of various forms and manifestations of power. For me what is interesting about it, is that his arguements for a power matrix can also be applied to my theory of the history and ideological power of ideas. Russell states that there are two forms implicit and explicit. The leaders and the followers. Leaders have explicit power, and followers imlicit. People follow a leader with the aim of gaining or asurping some of the power that his help by the leader of the group. Likewise, an idea is accepted to assocate oneslef with others who hold the idea and the figure head of the intellectual movement. I then as I read the book will see if I can relate his anthropological theories of power to abstract conceptual notions of ideas, yet, it will not be so simple as ideas are connected to those who hold them, and do not occupy some ahistocal deconetxtualised space, but are tied both to the time and person who holds them for their ideological potency. (p.8-9)

Submission is the result of fear for ‘the members of a group hang together for fear of hanging seperately. It is vital to group together to produce homogenity and the illusion of strength in numbers. This is the same with ideas. If one person has an idea, then he is tied to the idea, if the idea is wrong then so is he. Yet, if many people hold it, then the idea is diffused amongst the group so the attachment is not as strong as the common sense of being together ties them all to an idea. This leads to Russells discussion of group mentality (p14-18), in which he looks at the intoxicating effect of the collective in which they reinforce each others believes and opinions, they serve to validate each other. He says that it is so powerfull that the aftermouth leds them to apathy and seeking stronger sources for the collective surge. In this collective he says there are two layers a superficial one, which is maintained against a common enemy who is magnified against which they establish themself. In the ideological matrix this would be the competing idea, the false, unreasonable, mad, unlogical idea that must be defeated. The second is the deeper conviction that the believe that they hold is correct, It is this deep loyalty confiction that leads people to fight for their believes, they gain a confidence that they are right in so much that they are convinced that the idea, or group can defeat anything that is posed against it. This if replicated through enough people becomes a conviction and confidence that is contagious and gives the appearance of a greater dominance and strength then they really have. He also brings up the point that they who are able to control matter can use this technology to control people (p. 20).

In chapter three Russell looks at the forms of power. He sees this as traditional, revolutionary, and naked power. Traditional power has the power and force of habit and the past. It does not have to prove its case, but has a wealth of history to support its posistion. It needs no justification at every moment, nor does it need to constantly try and erode the power of its compition as it is teh dominant power. Naked power for me is the intrinsic power that it has. Revolutionary power, depends upon a large group of people united by an emerging idea, sentiment, programme or creed. It is the result of power loving individuals grouping together. In this the group has a relationship between the individuals and the organisarion. It is a mutual relationship between them both. THe form of organisation will alter the way in which power is distributed amongst it. There is also layers of power in the organisation that behind the scenes supports that which is seen on the surface.

Revolutionary power. Russell sees the formation of this in the break up of traditional power. This happens when creeds and mental habits give way to scepticism, and a new creed arises to replace it and gains a new hold over men. If they are successfull in this then it becomes the new traditional power or dominant idea. After any revlution there is a post-justification. It must established that what it was doing was right and good, and that the previous tradition was wicked and all future revlutions are also wicked. It thus has to reconfigure the history and meaning of the past, to valourise the plight of the revolutionaries. A great example of this is the revolution f the English Reformation, this shows how they transformed the meaning by creating new icons and narratives of the past.

Power over opinion. At first a new idea has no power other then that of persuassion, this leads to a minority with the idea, this gives it greater powr which increases the force it can have over the minds over other people, who adopt it and become propoganda, who they are sells the idea. this then becomes through popularoty genuine belief in the majority. Russel said that ‘Reason prevailed over prejudice because it provided a means of realising existing purposes, and because the proof that it did was so convincing.’ (p.111) The appeal of reason is that it gives an objective location from which to judge the claims of someone. It was evidence which would be convincing to every sane man who takes the trouble to examine it, if then it can appeal to reason then it can invoke confidence that people can and will believe in it. Rational evidence provides things that can be conclusive and then iterated to others. The potency of iteration is that as holders of ideas aquire power they have a capacityof influencing believe. He sees that power over opinion like all power tends to coalescence and concntration. This happens because ideas tend to gather together to increase the power over opinions. This organises the ideas and opinions, this can be seen in the case of Newtonian physics. Initially the idea was weak, but as it gained power and popularity it was organised and refined into more potent and simplified forms that would be more potent. If this new conecntrate dcreed is held as orthodixy by all members of the collective then they an increase in power. Adherence to the doctrine is vital. The uniformity of the doctrine in the group impacts upon its strength as a creed.

It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be

It has always stuck out to me the way that creativity involves thinking in a dynamic way that is unconventional. Paul Arden in It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to be gives an insight into the creative mind of a director of one of the leading advertising companies. In this work he inspires and writes to encourage people to think outside of the box, to use their imagination and to reject the same old solutions to new problems and situations. A lot of what he says is common-sense yet its something that we fail to apply to our own lives a lot of the time. It has inspired me and made me want to improve my life. It’s difficult to summerise the book, mostly because it has no real structure but a series of inspirational quote and thrown together. Each sentence feels like it should be on a poster complete with a photo of a landscape and placed in an office.

In some ways that is his weakness is that there are so many ideas thrown together that none of them are ever developed fully. For instance he makes a great point about the fact that ‘all creative people need something to rebel against, it’s what gives their lives excitement’ (p11) and that it is precisely because of this opposition that allows creativity. He points out that the concept of the impossible is something to inspire not cause despair for ‘when it can’t be done, do it. If you don’t do it it doesn’t exist’ (p.46) He uses the example of Citizen Kane and Benjamin Frankin to show that failure and mistakes are the preconditions for success, it is the learning and development out of error and mistakes that allows for dynamic thinking. He also brings this need for opposition when he talks about being fashionable. Arden says that ‘originality can’t be fashionable, because it hasn’t had the approval of the committee yet.’ Fashions are what hinder creativity and originality because they are based on past success they aren’t forward looking but are safe and proven. It is in working against fashion and popularity that artistic freedom and development is fostered.

The limitations are often what we impose upon ourselves. Hence is title, often it is self believe and the desire to be great, the ambition that drives us, very rarely is it down to our actually competence, most of the time it is our passion for success that creates greatness. Arden says that ‘you need to aim beyond what you are capable of.’ This myth of what we think we can do is the opposition we must fight and rebel against. We must rebel against our own self doubt and fear of failure and the unknown. Rebel against knowledge, for knowledge is based only upon the past it is provable we must embrace uncertainty and be happy with being wrong, for when we are in the wrong we are in the unknown and it is at moments when we are in the unknown that we are forced to look for new answers and think outside of the box. The Comfort zone is not so much as a refuge but a prison that can shackle the soul into mediocrity and uncreativity. When we fight against this then we will have the amibtion. I love his phrase ‘Everybody wants to be good, but not many are prepared to make the sacrifices it takes to be great,’ (p.14)

The other theme that is mentioned in a few places is the source of creative and novel ideas and influences. He first brings this up when he talks about intellectual hoarding. When we have a good idea we are tempted sometimes to keep it to ourselves. We see them as our own intellectual property something that we should keep and use just for our own benefit. Yet, in doing so we live of only our own reserves of idea which are limited and only from our own narrow perspective of life, further, they are not seen critically from the eyes of others. Something that we might think is great in the eyes of another is deeply flawed and not as fresh as we first thought. By keeping the idea to ourselves we never analyise the idea and subject it to critical scrutiny which will only improve the idea. When we share we contribute to a greater pool of knowledge and ideas, which can help us to draw greater links and perspectives to improve it. When we develop this attitude of sharing all our ideas it also causes us to look for ideas. If we give all our ideas away we then have to look for new solutions and ideas from which to draw upon.

In looking for new ideas it is important that we look to the right source. In most areas 90% of inspiration is internal. In advertising they draw upon other adverts for ideas, historians look at historians, and so forth. Yet the problem with this is that an error can be perpetuated with in the group and never knowledge it is just repeated over and over again. It also makes the inspiration boring and repetitive. In the social sciences everything seems to be drawn upon from Foucault this tends then to make everything else all blend together. It is in the melting pot and synthesis of ideas from differant cultures, disciplines and sectors of society that vitality is injected into our ideas. There is something for us to learn from everyone in every position and if we look we can find from it something to develop our own position. If we all had this attitude to life, to search for truth and ideas from the dustbin man through to the sultan of India we would all learn much in life. ‘To be original, seek inspiration from unexpected sources.’ (p. 88) This cross-disciplinary approach to creative thinking applies to our methodology. It is very easy to stick to the accepted and fashionable way of writing an essay or study or any product or text. The historian has their way, the social scientist approaches it in a standardised way, and in the sciences it is even more rigid, the myth of the universal scientific method is the dogma which all would-be scientists must adhere to. Yet. we then limit our way of solving problems and finding solutions and answers to the set limited way. If we were to look across outside of the blinkered view of our discipline we would see that every intellectual and creative pursuit has something to offer and help us in our pursuit. ‘Change your tools, it may set free your thinking.’ (p. 82) If we set down the academic tools and try and look at a problem using a different manner and set of tools we will think differently and thus see new vistas of ideas. We can even go back to play from when we were a child, and try and use those fun filled creative games we used to do to think about an idea.

In this review and synopsis of the book. I have tried to embellish upon the germs of ideas that were presented in the book. It was good in that it cause me to think and expand upon what he presented.

Bertrand Russell - Power

I have started to read this so far it has been interesting.

Power, Control, and Manipulation

The other day I read Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley. This was a collection of essays that he wrote 20 years after he wrote Brave New World. I loved that book so I was expecting some wonderful insights as he reflected on developments in the world since he wrote it. I was not disappointed by it. Whilst I may not agree with his views on birth control, which verged on eugenics (Huxley saw overpopulation as a threat to Democracy) he had a lot of important points to make about the, what he perceived as, threats to democracy.

One of the interesting points he makes is that large populations requires large governments to control them. He thus sees overpopulation as a danger to society as it requires punishment to control the people. This was the vision of the future presented by Orwell in 1984. Huxley in contrast saw reinforcement as the best way to control behaviour. Punishment only stopped behaviour and didn't rectify and stop the motives that drive the behaviour, along with this punishment as negative byproducts the system of discipline as Zimbardo has shown with the Stanford Prison experiment corrupts those that manage it. Huxley then looked at the extreme form of positive reinforcement to manipulate society.

Something that I reflected on as I read it was that large society and large numbers reduce the individual to a number a statistic. Large scale markets cause monopolisation and concentrate power in the few. The economy of a nation is then dependant on a handful of large businesses then if a problem develops it requires intervention by the government which increases the influence and size of the government. As power becomes concentrated the numbers and economies of scale make it impossible for a local or independant producer to enter the market for they lack both the funding, influence, and scale needed to compete with the large ogliarchies that dominant the market. Huxley elaborated on this view in an excellent chapter called 'over-organisation' in which he looked at the role of increasing technology. In this he takes a Marxist stance seeing technology as a tool for the capitalist bourgeoisie. Technology reduced labor making people unemployed giving more money to the capitalist. Further, technology is complex and expensive and only the large-scale capitalist can afford it eliminating the prospective enterpriser from entering the market.

A quote from Huxley that I liked was 'Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.' This made me think of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, in which she argues that in the wake of war and catastrophe it gives governments a force to legitimize social control and intervention. In the aftermath of 9/11 numerous policies and laws were passed that allowed greater surveillance and monitoring of society in the name of protection and defence. Crisis was the doorway into the erosion of civil liberty.

However, the best chapter for me was the section when he talks about the 'Will to Order' and conformity. He starts by stating that Western society despite its economic, political, and intellectual progress has damaged humanity in other ways. It turns man into an Automaton unable to develop security, happiness, reason, and the capacity to love, as a result he pays for this failure with mental sickness, which is masked by a frantic drive for work and pleasure. This concept of a social mental sickness is what I find fascinating. I tend to agree with Huxley and since 1958 since this was published it has only got worse, we have a work culture that drives society, along with a never satisfied thirst for pleasure. This brings him to an interesting point. Neurotic symptoms are not necessarily bad, they show that there is a conflict between the forces of life. The hopeless are those that seem most normal for the are so well adjusted to a abnormal and distorted form of existence, their human voice silenced that they never develop symptoms of the neurotic he concludes that 'they are normal only for the profoundly abnormal society' this brings up many questions about what is normality and how does one define normality. In a abnormal society the perfect adjustment to its values and roles is a measure of their mental sickness for uniformity and freedom are incompatible. If man is made to conform and replicate the lifes of every other person then freedom is gone, along with mental health. The standardisation of the human individual is a crime against our biological and spiritual nature. It ignores the diversity of life. It concentrates on the common denominator, and abstracts from ths perceived universailty into an abstract law. Underlying this is the wish to impose order upon confusion. To bring harmony out of dissonance. This desire to reduce the chaos into simplified systems Huxley calls 'Will to Order.' This quest for neat explainations and tidy answers jsutifies despotism and dogmatism. 'In order to fit into these orginisations, individuals have had to de-individualise themselves, have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern.' (p31) In this incorporation into a social ideal the ideal man is one then who has dynamic conformity, who meets the requirements to a remarkable degree and plays by all the rules of the Power Elite.

I shall conclude now by bringing up in passing some of the other pertinant points Huxley makes. That is the power of distraction. If the mind is distracted then it is unable to concentrate on the most important thing, this was something he showed in Brave New World the people were so busy having pleasure they never had time to think. Chomsky in his book on propaganda echoed Huxley when he said that keep the people distracted and you control them. He looks at brainwashing, and propaganda, a great quote about symbols was 'irrational propaganda depends for its effectiveness upon a failure to understand the nature of symbols' and that misleading symbols which link to Jungian archetypes and unconscious myths of society such as feminine desire to be attractive to males is a skillful method of marketing. The solution Huxley concludes is through eduction to teach children how to judge between proper and improper use of symbols. He seems then to justify media studies, which I think is no bad thing. Children should study philosophy in order to learn how to think systematically and to distinguish from true and false, meaningful and meaningless statements. This then would be a secure foundation for freedom, democracy and a life worth living.

Solomon's Houses

Today I have been working on my essay and doing some research on it. This has focused on the mid-seventeenth century obsession with recreating Francis Bacon's Solomon's House as contained in the New Atlantis. As part of this I read the Chapter 'The Spiritual Brotherhood' from Charles Webster's The Great Instauration. I have been quite surprise by how much I have enjoyed reading it, I was expecting a lot more puritanism and an obsession with millenialism, which I had expected from the synopsis of it by a group in a seminar (I guess this shows that nothing can compensate for reading a book firsthand). What stuck out to me most is that science in this period is more multi-dimensional then is portrayed in the course. The course tends to be Royal Society centric, yet the College of Physicians, and other local centres of learning had relevant things to contribute. It seems that there was a polyphony of competing designs for a society or new seat of learning that would be the nations Solomon's House. I haven't quite worked out what was the prime motive for the desire to create Solomon's House but I hope one day to uncover it.

From this it lead me to some primary sources. The first was a book published by Thomas Bushell called An Extract by Mr Bushell to his late abridgement of the Lord Chancellor Bacon's philosophical theory in mineral prosecutions, (1660) This is an interesting book partly because Thomas Bushell is a neglected figure he was very popular and cited in his time, he had a rock which the King had ordered him to preserve and his mining endeavours were very famous throughout the nation. He attempts many mines, and aims to get parlimentary funding to develop them, and over the years uses Bacon as a legitimizing force. This work seems to be the pinnicle of his prostetution of Bacon's name when he invokes Solomon's House as a model to which he is working towards. He aims to recruit convicts to help him build Solomon's House and develop mining industry as part of this process as he says 'I intend to begin the foundation of that philosophical fabrick (modell'd in my New Atlantis) by placing a select society of aforesaid philosophers in the city of Wells.' A further point to be noted from this work is the way he sells it to the prisoners, by building Solomon's House they would enter the school of Christ and help to become part of the New Jerusalem in the millenium. I think this point brings me back to my ideas on the prevelance of the millennium and need to read Webster's section on it in the above.

The second book I read today was a book called The Immortality of the Human Soul by the light of nature in two dialogues by Walter Charleton (1657). This book is of interest to me in two ways. The primary way was my purpose and that is it describes the College of Physicians what is notable about this is that he says that it 'in the colledge of Physicians... you may behold Solomon's House in reality.' It is this depiction of it as Solomon's House that interests me, however, as I continued to read his description I was intrigued by his mention of Tycho Brahe and astronomy, who he called Hercules the second and one of the three key figures that supports the heavens. This ties into my work on symbolic figures of traditions and how ideological change causes a shift in what they represent. It is also interesting that he refers to them as heros. This is a bit whiggish but I think it may be significant later.

Genesis and purpose

So the idea of this blog is to keep track of the books I read and the ideas that they generate. I guess its like an online workbook. I feel that I can type faster then I can write by hand so it gives me a quick way of jotting down my ideas and a few views on the books that I have been reading. Hopefully by keeping track like this it will make it easier to keep track of it all. It will also allow me to see how my interests fluctuate and develop over time and space. So here goes.