Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

Adam Eget, Super Dave (Bob Einstein), and Norm Macdonald 

in the first episode of Norm Macdonald Live 

 (26 March, 2013): click here.   

 

 

I. 

 

Adam, who wishes to start a blog, writes to ask where I get my ideas for posts from. 

 

To be fair, although this is not an original question, it isn't as dumb as some people think and deserves an answer, rather than a snort of derision or a look of disdain. In fact, to enquire after the origin of ideas and the creative process is to ask something philosophically important.

 

And so, Adam, let me try to say something that might help ...

 

 

II. 

 

An idea - from the Greek term ἰδέα, meaning a visible pattern - is now more commonly defined as an abstract concept or (after Descartes) as a mental representation of an object. Many philosophers, being forever caught up in the realm of ideas, have considered them ontologically to be the fundamental category of being. Further, they consider the capacity to form, comprehend, and exchange ideas as an essential (and defining) feature of mankind [1].

 

Some people like to believe that ideas spontaneously generate from out of nowhere; that no real effort or serious thinking is required. Artists, for example, will often speak of inspiration. But whilst I don't wish to deny eureka moments or the divine influence of a muse, I think we all know that inspiration is usually born of hard work. 

 

Similarly, I'm sceptical of the idea of innate ideas believed to be universal, i.e., something which all people are born knowing (intuitively), rather than something they have learned through experience - what D. H. Lawrence, for example, terms blood knowledge. If you want to have ideas - particularly new ideas - then you need not only work hard, but get out into the world and encounter things. 

 

Having said that, I'm not advocating any and all forms of experience and by hard work, I do not mean mere toil. As Heidegger says, sometimes the most vital form of activity is waiting patiently and preparing for the future and allowing one's work to become an inner illumination of the heart [2]. 

 

Ultimately, good ideas cannot be compelled and, ironically, may often result from those times when work seems to go slowly or badly; i.e., those moments of failure.                      

 

 

Notes

[1] Plato, for example, argued that there is a mind-independent realm of unchanging and universal ideas or forms. Real knowledge is knowledge of these ideas; knowledge of the material world (which is subject to change) doesn't count for much in his view. 

 

[2] I take this phrase (and idea) from section 150 of Heidegger's 'Ponderings IV', in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 186. 

Post 1750: The Rambler

Portrait of Samuel Johnson 

by Joshua Reynolds (1775)

 

 

I.

 

1750 is something of a lucky number for me as the sum of its digits adds up to 13; a star number of great significance within many cultures, as well as the day of the month on which I was born. 

 

As a date, 1750 is often used to indicate the end of the pre-industrial era, so I suppose one might say that the modern world as we understand it - fully enframed by technology and powered by great machines - begins here. 

 

But 1750 also saw the first edition of Samuel Johnson's The Rambler ... [1] 

 

 

II.

 

For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is one of the most distinguished men of letters in English history. A poet, playwright, essayist, critic, biographer, and editor, he began his writing career on The Gentleman's Magazine, in 1737 [2]. 

 

His famous dictionary - which took him almost nine years to complete - was published in 1755 to great acclaim, but it's the series of tuppenny essays which he published twice weekly under the title of The Rambler, that most excite my interest here (I'll explain why below).

 

Between 1750 and 1752, Johnson (anonymously) wrote over 200 Rambler articles. Often on moral and religious topics, the essays tended to be more serious than the title of the series might suggest and Johnson adopted an elevated style of neoclassical prose that was in stark contrast with the colloquial language that most popular publications of the day favoured.

 

However, whilst sometimes sounding a bit like sermons, Johnson maintained a speculative approach to his subject matter and the essays mostly avoided being too didactic in character. It was always his hope, he said - echoing Ben Jonson - to mix profit with pleasure [3]. 

 

Other subjects discussed in The Rambler included literature, society and politics and Johnson liked to supplement his own thoughts with quotes from Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus and Descartes. Taken as a whole, these essays constitute Johnson's most consistent and sustained body of work.     

 

Alas, the publication was not a great success; as its author lamented in the final essay, 'I have never been much a favourite to the publick'. Having said that, there was a small band of devoted readers and The Rambler was critically respected for the quality and power of the writing [4]. 

 

 

III. 

 

So, why does all this interest me ...

 

Well, without wishing to blow my own trumpet - or compare myself to Samuel Johnson - it seems to me that Torpedo the Ark is in the tradition of The Rambler. 

 

The 1,750 published posts - which might be seen as micro-essays - are composed on an equally wide variety of topics and constitute a sustained body of work. Further, the blog also has a small but loyal readership and manages, I hope, to entertain as well as inform. 

 

The only real difference is that I don't charge readers anything - not even tuppence - to access the work on Torpedo the Ark; something which makes me foolish in Johnson's opinion: No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money ...    

  

 

Notes

 

[1] It's an amusing title in its ambiguity: does Johnson want his readers to imagine him as one who roams in the countryside of ideas, wandering from one topic to the next; or is he self-mockingly referring to himsef as one who writes at length in a slightly confused manner, blathering on about subjects almost unparalleled in range and variety, but never telling us anything of substance ...? 

 

[2] Founded in London, in 1731, by Edward Cave, The Gentleman's Magazine was a monthly publication which ran uninterrupted for almost 200 years, until 1922. It was the first to use the term magazine for a periodical and included commentary on any topic the educated public might be interested in, from commodity prices to Latin poetry (rather, one might say, like Torpedo the Ark, which also aims to produce numerous pieces of such variety that it becomes impossible to provide an overview).   

 

[3] See the Prologue to Ben Jonson's play Volpone (1606). 

      This ideal has continued to unfold in our own times; the BBC, for example, declare a desire "to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain".

[4] Further, when issues of The Rambler were collected in book form (1753), the essays became more widely read and appreciated, particularly amongst members of the newly emerging middle-class who hoped to improve their knowledge in a manner that would enable them to converse more easily with the highly educated members of the aristocracy. 

      Contemporary readers can purchase a facsimile reprint of The Rambler (Kessinger Publishing, 2010) on Amazon: click here. Alternatively, Johnson's essays from The Rambler can be read on the Samuel Johnson blog published by Matt Kirkland: click here. 

 

 

The Study of Myth is an Occupation for Imbeciles

Pop art prints by Amazon

I.

It's always worth remembering to whom Nietzsche dedicated the first edition of Human, All Too Human (1878): it wasn't Schopenhauer and it wasn't Wagner; it was Voltaire. 

And whilst there are very few references to Voltaire in Nietzsche's writings after this date, he always remained well-disposed towards this giant of the Enlightenment, describing him in Ecce Homo (1888) as a grand seigneur of the spirit in whom he sees a crucial aspect of himself.   

II.

Perhaps even more surprising than the dedication in Human, All Too Human to Voltaire was the inclusion of a passage - in lieu of a preface - taken from Descartes's Discourse on Method (1637) in praise of reason. 

All of which indicates that it's lazy and mistaken to characterise Nietzsche as an irrationalist, as many of his opponents (and, indeed, many of his supporters) have done. He wasn't - even if there are many passages in his work that lend themselves to an irrationalist interpretation.

Nor, having realised the error of his ways in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was Nietzsche a mythologist.

If, in this dubious work, he asserted that "without myth all culture loses its healthy and natural creative power" [1], by 1876 he understood that the conditions no longer existed for myth to function in this way; not least because its narratives were no longer considered to have any significant truth content:    

"If an epoch has thought beyond the realm of myths, a breach has occurred which fundamentally alters a society's relationship to myths. Their value dwindles and is perhaps replaced by aesthetic value. However, myths considered from an aesthetic point of view cannot maintain the impact required to consolidate a 'cultural movement' into a state of unity." [2]

Safranski continues:

"Nietzsche grew aware that [...] eras of the past could be conjured up in the mind, but that their renaissance could be enacted only at the cost of self-deception. A modern mythical consciousness is hollow; it represents systematized insincerity." [3]

It becomes, in other words, a will to aesthetic self-enchantment; or, in a word, Wagnerian. And Nietzsche had already begun to recognise what lay behind this word even before the shock and disappointment he experienced at Bayreuth in 1876, where he saw for himself how even supposedly sacred art rests on cheap scenery and costumes.

Whereas Nietzsche had once shared Wagner's goal of overcoming modernity and bringing about a rebirth of tragedy from out of the spirit of music, he now regarded this as an impossible - and undesirable - fantasy; an attempt to lie one's way into madness.

From 1876 on, Nietzsche refuses to employ philosophy to "nullify reason and dream his way into an aesthetic myth" [4]. And from this date on, he agreed with Voltaire that l'étude du mythe est une occupation pour les imbéciles ...

Notes

[1] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Michael Tanner, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (Penguin Books, 1993), p. 109. 

[2] Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche, trans. Shelley Frisch, (Granta Books, 2002), p. 140.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 141. 

This post is a revised extract from 'On the Abuses and Disadvantages of Mythology for Life: A Timely Meditation', in Stephen Alexander, Visions of Excess and Other Essays, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 219-253.  

For a related post (also extracted from the above essay) on myth and literary criticism, click here.

Reflections on a Crane Fly

Tipulidae

I.

There's a higher than usual number of crane flies coming into the house this autumn.

But that's ok with me, because, after dragonflies and butterflies, daddy longlegs are my favourite flies; even though, in reminding me of my childhood, these harmless creatures remind me also of the acts of wanton cruelty carried out against their number of which I'm now a little ashamed. 

Who knows, perhaps in some future hell, demons will pull my limbs off and throw me into a giant web for some enormous spider to devour.

II.

There are over 15,000 different species of crane flies, making them the largest family of all flies. Amazingly, the majority of these were identified by just one man - Charles P. Alexander (no relation).

Clearly, here was someone in love with these long-legged, slender-bodied insects which seem to have such trouble navigating when in flight and often just bump along as if a bit tipsy. 

To describe these alien beings - as one poet describes them - as tiny non-sentient biological automatons, is profoundly objectionable; one might have hoped that this anthropocentrically conceited notion of the bête machine (famously found in Descartes) was long discredited.  

Reflections on Brains in Jars

Dr. Hfuhruhurr meets Miss Uumellmahaye in

The Man with Two Brains (dir. Carl Reiner, 1983)

I.

Readers with knowledge of analytic philosophy will know of the brain in a vat idea that is deployed as an updated version of Descartes's concept of the evil demon in thought experiments concerning mind and meaning, or the relationship between consciousness and reality.

Typically, a brain in a vat scenario is used to support an argument for philosophical skepticism and solipsism. In brief, this argument goes as follows: since a brain in a vat transmits and receives exactly the same impulses as a brain in a skull - and since these impulses are its only way of interacting with the world - it's impossible for that brain ever to know for sure its own location and this has serious implications for the truth or falsity of a subject's beliefs.

In other words, because it's impossible to completely rule out that one is not simply a disembodied brain in a vat, there cannot be firm grounds for believing the things that one believes to be true (or real) with any certainty. As might be imagined, there are objections raised from within philosophy and biology that suggest this thought experiment is fundamentally absurd, but, unfortunately, I don't have time to go into these here.


II.

Readers without knowledge of analytic philosophy - but who know their sci-fi literature and films - will be more familiar with a scenario in which a mad scientist or advanced alien being removes a person's brain and suspends it in a jar containing some kind of life-sustaining fluid that is connected up with electrodes to a machine that simulates reality for the disembodied brain, thus allowing it to continue to have thoughts and feelings without these being related to objects or events in the actual world.

Think, for example, of Anne Uumellmahaye in The Man with Two Brains (1983), starring Steve Martin as pioneering neurosurgeon Dr. Hfuhruhurr, famous for his method of cranial screw-top surgery. Whilst at a conference in Vienna, Hfuhruhurr encounters Dr. Necessiter (played by David Warner), who has invented a radical new technique enabling him to (briefly) preserve living brains in jars (the plan being to eventually transplant them into new bodies, beginning with that of a gorilla). 

Of course, this is just a movie. But, apparently, it is medically possible to keep an isolated brain alive in vitro before one places it into a new body, or, as in the case of Mr. Spock, returns it to its rightful owner. This requires a method of perfusion, or the use of an oxygenated solution of various salts (i.e. a blood substitute).

Any reader thinking of playing Dr. Necessiter, however, should note that they would probably have greater success attaching a whole head to the body of another organism, rather than simply attempting to pop a brain into an empty skull. It might also be noted that so far most of the experimental research in this field has been carried out using guinea pigs and not human test subjects; certainly no such procedures using people have been reported in a peer reviewed scientific journal that I'm aware of.

Click here to watch the scene in The Man with Two Brains in which Steve Martin as Dr. Hfuhruhurr meets Anne Uumellmahaye (voiced by Sissy Spacek, although she was uncredited in the movie). 

For a follow up post to this one on the theft of famous brains, click here.  

On the Nine Lives of Cats and Two Methods for Ending Them

I. On the Nine Lives of Cats

The myth of cats having multiple lives is one found in many countries and cultures ...

In England, for example, which is presently home to around eight million cats, they are believed to have nine lives, divided equally between playing, straying, and staying curled up by the fireplace on a comfy chair. In some European nations, however, such as Greece, cats are said to have seven lives; this number falling to just six within the Arab world.   

No one really knows why (or where) this myth originated, but probably it has something to do with the fact that cats are instinctively good at extricating themselves from potentially life-threatening situations. Naturally supple and almost supernaturally sensitive to danger, cats - unlike clumsy human beings - invariably land on their feet and not flat on their faces.  

II. Cat Throwing

Of course, no matter how many lives they possess, cats can be killed if they fall from a significant height; or, indeed, if they are thrown from a belfry, as they used to be by the good people of Ypres during the Middle Ages and early modern period.*

There are various local legends about how this festival of animal cruelty originated; some suggest it was designed to protect the city from evil spirits (cats often being associated in the popular imagination with witchcraft); other sources say the cats were rounded up and killed each spring simply in order to control their numbers.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it was an annual source of great amusement for the townsfolk - as was the craze for cat burning that swept neighbouring France in this period ...


III. Cat Burning     

Cat burning was a gruesome form of popular entertainment in France prior to the 1800s, in which people stuffed dozens of cats into a basket or sack, hoisted them high into the air, and then lit a large bonfire beneath.

According to one historian, the assembled masses "shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized". The remains were often collected as souvenirs and taken home for luck.**

Although the practice varied from place to place, the suffering and ensuing hilarity remained the same; it was said that wherever the scent and sound of burning felines filled the air, laughter was guaranteed.  

Interestingly, Jean Meslier - a French priest (who privately held atheist views) - partly blamed the rise of Cartesian philosophy in which animals were viewed as automata, possessing neither soul nor sentience, for the practice of cat burning. He argued that such thinking inhibited natural feelings of kindness and compassion that man would otherwise have for living creatures.***

Notes

* In fact, the last recorded event of this kind happened as recently as 1817 and is commemorated in the so-called Kattenstoet, held regularly since 1955 on the second Sunday of May. Thankfully, a jester now merely throws stuffed toy cats from the Cloth Hall belfry to the crowd below, who eagerly await with outstretched arms hoping to catch them. For more details, visit the official Kattenstoet website by clicking here.    

** See Norman Davies, Europe: A History, (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 543.

*** See Jean Meslier, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier, trans. Michael Shreve, (Prometheus Books, 2009), pp. 562-63.

True Lies

For those who adhere to moral-rationalism, truth is the highest virtue. And all forms of deception inherently diabolical. Such sincere souls live in fear of being lied to, or led astray into falsehood; they hate ambiguity, concealment, illusion. 

This may make them good parents, good people, or good policemen. But, unfortunately, it means they'll never be great poets.

For it's not simply the case that deception is an art, but, more radically, all art is deception; a game of creative immorality and evil genius which not only delights in untruth, but regards the truth itself to be metaphorical in character and all too human in origin.

Something, in other words, that has been enhanced, transposed, and embellished; something which after long years of obligatory usage seems firm, fixed, and authentic - the veritable Word of God.    

(It's worth recalling at this point that before Nietzsche finally pronounced him dead, God was brilliantly conceived by Descartes as not only omnipotent but malevolent and mendacious: the Deus deceptor.)  


See:

Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense', essay in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin Books, 1976).

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, (Cambridge University Press, 1996).