Blame it on Toby
-- Defense Secretary THE WEST WING WRITTEN BY Original Airdate: |
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Month: January 2004
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TOBY: Well... How about when we, instead of blowing Iraq back to the seventh century for harbouring terrorists and trying to develop nuclear weapons, we just imposed economic sanctions....
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Misunderstanding
in the Theory of Design
"Whether or not we can follow the theorist in his demonstrations, there is one misunderstanding we must avoid at all cost. We must not confuse the analyses of geometrical symmetries with the mathematics of combination and permutation....
The earliest (and perhaps the rarest) treatise on the theory of design drives home this insight with marvellous precision."
-- E. H. Gombrich, 1979, in
The Sense of Order
This is perhaps the stupidest remark I have ever read. The "treatise on the theory of design" that Gombrich refers to is
- Dominique Douat, Méthode Pour Faire une Infinité de Desseins Differents.... Paris, 1722.
For some background, see
Truchet & Types:
Tiling Systems and Ornaments, and
Certain of the Truchet/Douat patterns have rather intriguing mathematical properties, sketched in my website Diamond Theory. These properties become clear if and only if we we do what Gombrich declares that we must not do: "confuse the analyses of geometrical symmetries with the mathematics of combination and permutation." (The verb "confuse" should, of course, be replaced by the verb "combine.")
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Axis of Flim-Flam
Recommended reading from Axis of Logic --
On outgoing weapons-of-mass-destruction hunter David Kay:
"... instead of drawing the logical conclusion that he's been duped and played for a fool, he chose instead to launch the latest salvo in the Bush administration's undeclared war on the rank and file US intelligence community."
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The Subject Par Excellence
The previous entry connected the mad Marxist Althusser with Mount Sinai; this connection is not as whimsical as it may seem.
From Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (La Pensée, 1970):
" 'And the Lord spoke to Moses and said to him, "I am that I am".'
God thus defines himself as the Subject par excellence, he who is through himself and for himself ('I am that I am'), and he who interpellates [Althusser's jargon for "hails"] his subject, the individual subjected to him by his very interpellation, i.e. the individual named Moses."
This is from page 179 of Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
The connection of the Althusser disciple Sprinker with the Trinity in Taking Lucifer Seriously is also not as whimsical as it may seem.
See Althusser's note (p. 180, op. cit.) stating that
"The dogma of the Trinity is precisely the theory of the duplication of the Subject (the Father) into a subject (the Son) and of their mirror-connexion (the Holy Spirit)."
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Language Game
More on "selving," a word coined by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. (See Saturday's Taking Lucifer Seriously.)
"... through the calibrated truths of temporal discipline such as timetabling, serialization, and the imposition of clock-time, the subject is accorded a moment to speak in."
Framing
Intelligibility, Identity, and Selfhood:
A Reconsideration of
Spatio-Temporal Models.
The "moment to speak in" of today's previous entry, 11:29 AM, is a reference to the date 11/29 of last year's entry
That entry contains, in turn, a reference to the journal Subaltern Studies. According to a review of Reading Subaltern Studies,
"... the Subaltern Studies collective drew upon the Althusser who questioned the primacy of the subject...."
Munt also has something to say on "the primacy of the subject" --
"Poststructuralism, following particularly Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, has ensured that 'the subject' is a cardinal category of contemporary thought; in any number of disciplines, it is one of the first concepts we teach to our undergraduates. But are we best served by continuing to insist on the intellectual primacy of the 'subject,' formulated as it has been within the negative paradigm of subjectivity as subjection?"
How about objectivity as objection?
I, for one, object strongly to "the Althusser who questioned the primacy of the subject."
This Althusser, a French Marxist philosopher by whom the late Michael Sprinker (Taking Lucifer Seriously) was strongly influenced, murdered his wife in 1980 and died ten years later in a lunatic asylum.
For details, see
For details of Althusser's philosophy, see the oeuvre of Michael Sprinker.
For another notable French tribute to Marxism, click on the picture at left.
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Taking Lucifer Seriously:
Michael Sprinker
versus
The Society of Jesus
As the previous entry indicates, I do not take Christian poetry too seriously. The Prince of Darkness is another matter. I encountered him this morning in a book on the Christian poet Hopkins by the late Michael Sprinker.
"You were never on the debating team when you were in high school, were you, ace? When you're in a debate, you don't try to convince the other side; they're never going to agree with you. You try to convince the judges and the audience."
-- Michael Sprinker, quoted in The Minnesota Review, 2003
"For Hopkins, poetry was the act of producing the self, one version of that selving which he associated not only with Christ but with Lucifer."
-- Michael Sprinker, "A Counterpoint of Dissonance" -- The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 95
A counterbalance to Sprinker on Hopkins and Lucifer is Hopkins, the Self, and God, by Walter J. Ong, S. J. (University of Toronto Press, 1986). From p. 119:
"The interior dynamism of the Three Persons in One God was not for Hopkins some sort of formula for theological juggling acts but was rather the centre of his personal devotional life and thus of his own 'selving.' .... He writes to Bridges 24 October 1883...
'For if the Trinity... is to be explained by grammar and by tropes... where wd. be the mystery? the true mystery, the incomprehensible
one.' "
For the dynamics of the Trinity, see the Jan. 22 entry, Perichoresis, or Coinherence. Another word for coinherence is "indwelling," as expressed in what might be called the
Song of Lucifer:
Me into you,
You into me,
Me into you...
For a Christian version of this "indwelling," see
Coinherence,
Interpenetration,
Mutual Indwelling
See also last year's entries of 9/09.
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Perichoresis, or Coinherence
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI --
Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as
"... the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ....
59 ... The
or 'circumincessio,' is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss."
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann
Perichoresis does NOT mean "dancing around" ....
From a mailing list message:
If [a correspondent] will but open a lexicon, she will see that perichoresis (with a long o, omega) has nothing to do with "the Greek word for dance," which is spelt with a short o (omicron). As a technical term in trinitarian theology, perichoresis means "interpenetration."
Interpenetration in Arthur Machen
Interpenetration in T. S. Eliot:
"Between two worlds
become much like each other...."
On the Novels of Charles Williams
Coinherence in Charles Williams
The Per Speculum link is to a discussion of coinherence and the four last films of Kieslowski --
La Double Vie de Veronique (1991),
Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993),
Trois Couleurs: Blanc (1993), and
Trois Couleurs: Rouge (1994).
See, too, previous log24 entries related to Kieslowski's work and to coinherence:
Moulin Bleu (12/16/03),
Quarter to Three (12/20/03), and
White, Geometric, and Eternal (12/20/03).
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