Gallimaufry of Whits, by Sean B. Palmer

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When I spend a whole day talking enthusiastically about mathematics, people come to the unfortunate conclusion that I enjoy mathematics. They would be closer to the mark if they said also that I don't enjoy mathematics purely for the sake of mathematics.

You can extend this to other fields like phonology, linguistics, logic, languages, computer science, philosophy, poetry, metaphysics, and epistemology. There is a definite sense in which I don't like or enjoy any of these fields.

The problem is this. Though I might spend all day chatting about mathematics, I would only do so to settle an obscure point in philosophy. Even when I explain this, it makes me look like I enjoy philosophy, whereas I might only have got to this point in philosophy because of a certain obscure thing in a book I might have been reading about ethics, say.

So you have a series of connections, almost like resolving a dependency chain, and when you trace it back to what started me getting into it, you'll find that the questions that get me going in the first place on such forays are in the cracks between disciplines.

This is not to say that I don't enjoy products of certain disciplines. What I'm talking about are academic disciplines: the pigeonholing of supposed interests. So I enjoy reading a few poems, yet I don't enjoy talking about poetry. What this means is that if a particular poem strikes me as interesting for some reason, I will try to trace what that reason is. It might get me started on æsthetics, say, and then I might switch to cognitive science, or to the history of the author of the poem, and so on.

You wouldn't, really, in this case say that I'm talking about poetry. It would be æsthetics, or cognitive science, or history. Yet I might also start talking about rhythm and metre and critical theory, and that would be regarded as poetics, as talking about poetry. Yet it would be orthogonal to the reason why I started researching my particular point. It is just as valid, to me, to consider a poem historically as it is poetically, as long as it answers the kind of question that I set out with!

So what I call “interesting” is always in relation to a structure, there is almost nothing which I would say, amongst academic disciplines, is inherently interesting. There may be a few exceptions to this, but I haven't worked out the details yet. You would basically have to make a class of all of the cracks between the disciplines that I allude to.

Incidentally, I think that this might play into the kind of notion that Joe Geldart has of Natural Philosophy; I should talk to him about this. The point would be something like: Nat. Phil. is generally understood in terms of the root of modern sciences, but if you were a Natural Philosopher in the 17th century, how would you understand your own craft then? It would be quite different to how we understand it now.

In other words, Natural Philosophy turned out in this certain direction, and we now define Natural Philosophy partly in terms of its effects. But these effects aren't inherent to the original Natural Philosophy. So our definition is deficient in that respect. Talking about the cracks between disciplines is perhaps a better characterisation of Natural Philosophy, but perhaps not. It's hard to explain how orthogonal this is to thinking about academic disciplines at the moment. A suitable metaphor feels hard to find, here.

― 17th Nov 2008 13:07

“‘Muzak’ is another musical phenomenon that is ubiquitous, yet has received little serious attention from aestheticians, being used primarily as an example to elicit disgust. Whether or not there is anything interesting to say about Muzak philosophically, as opposed to psychologically or sociologically, remains to be seen.”
— from the Stanf. Encyc. Phil.

― 16th Oct 2008 20:38

“That commonplace books (and other personal note-books) can enjoy this special status is supported by the fact that authors frequently treat their notebooks as quasi-works, giving them elaborate titles, compiling them neatly from rough notes, recompiling still neater revisions of them later, and preserving them with a special devotion and care that seems out of proportion to their apparent function as working materials.”
— Wikipedia on Commonplace Books

“They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.”
— Robert Darnton on the same

The main difference between writing on the web and writing a commonplace is that the former is decidedly public. Writing for the public changes your mindset massively, not just in the form of privacy and things that you'd dare to write, but also in experimentation and voice, which seeps into the very mode of thinking.

It's a bit like the old question about what philosophy achieves: Dawkins says somewhere that science has given us many things with obvious utility, but that philosophy gives us nothing concrete at all. But wars are often as ideological as they are economical or based on other motives; ideas must matter to us. Ideas are what gives women the vote now; they're what gives *anybody* the vote now. Juries are an idea, shops are an idea. And on the other hand, technology (which is what Dawkins mainly means when he says that science gives us concrete benefits — what does it profit us to know the diameter of Neptune? we're considering this in Dawkins's view, remember) doesn't have to be necessarily useful, or just useful. Cars are dangerous as well as useful. Antibiotics are making bugs stronger. We're running out of oil and polluting the planet.

So anyway philosophies & mindsets are important, and I think that commonplacing is not being replaced by writing on the web. It's perhaps necessary to say this — I saw Richard Holmes arguing for something like the other point of view recently.

― 14th Oct 2008 11:35

the mother moon
Cf. CL 365 & LP 34

― 13th Oct 2008 10:24

war, poetry, promulgation
cf. Thucydides § 3.82
The question of misleading & poetry is an interesting one: mislead from where to where? Athens would “mislead” towards Hedonism, Sparta would “mislead” towards ascetism.

― 13th Oct 2008 10:08

“In Homer there is a recurring celebration of art, but it is not seen as anything we need to discuss or debate. It is there to celebrate the deeds of great heroes and divinities or as a manifestation of the excellence of the owner of the art (like Menelaus) or to foster enjoyment among those who contemplate it. There is no sense in Homer that poesis is something that needs defining or critical evaluation. What makes a work of art good is self-evident—it moves those who are exposed to it to admiration.”
— Ian Johnston, Lecture on Plato's Republic

But what if Homer discussed it with his compatriots and just didn't include any such discussion in his work? Shakespeare never uses the word “Bible” in his plays or poems, but he surely knew it. (Query: What lost works have been subsequently found and, though adding only a scrap to our complete textual knowledge of a subject, have altered our understanding immensely?)

― 13th Oct 2008 09:30

“Suppose that, instead of saying ‘Bring me the broom’, you said ‘Bring me the broomstick and the brush which is fitted on to it.’! – Isn't the answer: ‘Do you want the broom? Why do you put it so oddly?’ Is he going to understand the further analysed sentence better?”
– fr. PI § 60

I thought this quote stood alone and was from Zettel; perhaps another author quoted it and I had been reading them at about the same time as Zettel. Wittgenstein often uses analogies. What about when his analogies fail? He seems to construct them so that they can't fail.

Consider an æsthetic broom.

― 13th Oct 2008 09:03

“Jimi came in and said to Clapton, ‘well over a million times walking through London, ... I look at girls ... you fall in love a thousand times a day’. The reporter said, ‘this is an immediate hang-up’. To which Jimi said, ‘There’s no pain in falling in love for a second or even three minutes ... it’s so good to indulge the beauty of a girl you’ve never seen before.’ Someone asks him ‘What happens when you meet them?’ Jimi responds: ‘I’m not talking about meeting them, I’m talking about seeing them.’”

Jimi was trippin’ balls when he said this. Does this make it any-the-less interesting? And why are there so many euphemisms for intoxication?

― 13th Oct 2008 08:53