On Traversing the Excluded Middle

Andrew Weir: Excluded Middle (2019)

Acrylic paint on paper, 36 x 48 cm
saatchiart.com

 

Logicians to the left of me, Derrideans to the right, 

here I am, stuck in the excluded middle with you ... [1]

 

 

I. 

 

In classical logic, the law of the excluded middle (p ∨ ¬ p) states that either a proposition or its negation has to be true.

 

It is the third of the three great laws of thought upon which rational discourse is based; the other two being the law of identity - each thing is identical with itself - and the law of non-contradiction - propositions cannot both be true and false at the same time.

 

But such axiomatic rules don't really mean a great deal to me as someone who is happy to do their thinking in the moral no-go zone that is the excluded middle; i.e., the evil realm of fuzzy logic, dark limpidity, and what Nietzsche terms dangerous knowledge.

 

 

II. 

 

Similarly, as someone who privileges difference over identity and refuses to be haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction, I'm prepared also to cheerfully transgress the other two laws. For as I wrote in a post from a few years ago:

 

'Whether our analytic philosophers like to admit it or not, some forms of thinking rely upon daimonic inspiration and so are not regulated by reason alone. Our very greatest poets, for example, creatively affirm paradox and ambiguity; they are unafraid of appearing inconsistent or irrational and are proud to proclaim that if, like Whitman, they contradict themselves, that's because they contain multitudes.' [2]

  

One suspects that a good deal of the continued hostility aimed towards those who take a more continental approach to philosophy is that we see the latter as more of an art than a science (unless it be a gay science). Nothing enrages the Anglo-American mindset more than logical inconsistency and the idea that some feel free in the excluded middle to affirm the neither/nor and defy the spirit of gravity so that thinking becomes pleasurable.      

 

 

III. 

 

In sum: without wishing to explicity reject the law of the excluded middle, I don't support its rigid enforcement and, like Deleuze, see le milieu exclu as a zone in which becoming is stamped with the character of being and where not only do new possibilities emerge, but it is reasonable to demand the impossible.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm paraphrasing a lyric from the well-known song by the Scottish folk rock band Stealers Wheel entitled. 'Stuck in the Middle With You', written by Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan. It can be found on their eponymous debut album Stealers Wheel (A&M Records, 1972) - or played by clicking here. 

 

[2] See the post entitled 'Hello Darkness My Old Friend ...' (1 Oct 2021): click here. 

 

This post is for Bryan Kam who probably cares more - and certainly knows more - about this topic (and many others) than I do. London-based for the last 20 years, Kam studied English and Russian literature at Princeton and Cambridge, but is also widely read in both Western and Eastern philosophy. He regularly publishes work on Substack: click here. 

      According to Kam, the law of the excluded middle, born in Athens c. 350 BC, died in Amsterdam in 1908 at the hands of L. E. J. Brouwer. That might be true, but, unfortunately, even dead concepts can still retain an icy grip on our thinking.  

 

 

In Praise of Skipping

Vivienne Westood photographed by Michael Roberts 

for Vogue (August 1987) [1]

 

 

The other day, walking in a westerly direction along Piccadilly, accompanied by one of the country's leading figures in the field of developmental genetics, an attractive and stylish young woman with blonde hair suddenly came skipping past, to the amusement (and bemusement) of onlookers.

 

And when I say skipped, I mean skipped; she wasn't jogging or power walking past us, but literally skipping, like a child, with joy, in a bilateral manner (i.e., with an alternating lead foot). 

 

It's a vision that powerfully affected me - much as Zarathustra was once seduced by the sight of young girls dancing in the woods by moonlight [2]. 

 

My heart stood still with delight to see someone exorcising the spirit of gravity on the streets of London as Big Ben struck noon; someone who instinctively understood the importance of movement and the crucial role that the body plays in what D. H. Lawrence terms the sane revolution:

 

If you make a revolution, make it for fun, 

don't make it in ghastly seriousness, 

don't do it in deadly earnest, 

do it for fun. [3]

 

I may have certain issues with Vivienne Westwood, but I think she would - in her more lighthearted moments at least, when not banging on about climate change or human rights - share this sentiment and actively encourage those wearing her clothes to hop, skip, and jump their way into the future (as she seems to be doing in the above photo by Michael Roberts).  

 

Notes

 

[1] This charming photo of Westwood by Michael Roberts, along with 54 others, can be found in the Vivienne Westwood Style File on the British Vogue website: click here.

 

[2] See Nietzsche, 'The Dance Song', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Sane Revolution', Pansies (Martin Secker, 1929), p. 108. 

 

 

This post is in memory of my mother, who enjoyed nothing more than skipping along the seafront at Whitley Bay as a child in the 1930s.

 

On Lightness of Being (In Memory of Milan Kundera)

 

'Life which disappears once and for all, which does not return is without weight 

and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime means nothing at all.'

 

I. 

 

Milan Kundera, the Czech-French novelist who died earlier this month, aged 94, was one of those writers whom I tried (but failed) to read and to love - Umberto Eco would be another such author. 

 

And so it is that the only work of his to which I ever returned was the philosophical novel for which he is best remembered, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) [1]. And it's this work about which I'd like to make some brief remarks ...

 

 

II.   

 

Set in the late 1960s and early '70s - i.e., during and just after the so-called Prague Spring period - it is the tale of a sex-obsessed surgeon, Tomáš, who eventually learns how to love and remain faithful to his wife, Tereza, an animal-loving photographer with hang-ups about her body. 

 

It is the story also of Tomáš's mistress and confidante, Sabina, an artist who has declared war on kitsch and puritanism and wishes to lead a life of extreme lightness [2].

 

Essentially, the novel challenges Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence; an idea which, were it true - or were we to take it seriously and act as if it were true - would lie upon our actions as the greatest weight. 

 

Kundera obliges his characters (and readers) to ask themselves how they would live were they to know for sure that they only have one life to live and that which occurs in life does so once and once only - would this lightness of being bring freedom and happiness, or become unbearable: for without weight (i.e. existential meaning), do not all our actions become trivial and worthless? [3]

 

 

III.

 

Einmal ist keinmal, as our German friends like to say - i.e., once is never enough; indeed, once is as good as never having happened at all. If a human life, for example, fails to forever return, then once it is over it is truly over and the universe can simply carry on in utter indifference.

 

Obviously, as a floraphile - that is to say, as one who loves flowers and locates their beauty precisely in the fact that they bloom and then fade with no sense of shame, or responsibility, or significance - I am not particularly troubled by such a thought, nor do I accept the logic. 

 

And whilst I don't think we can ever become soulless like the flowers - or that this would be desirable - that doesn't mean that men and women should forever live as beasts of burden, weighed down by moral seriousness.      

 

Similarly, as a lover of birds, I approve of young women like Sabina learning how to fly in defiance of the spirit of gravity - even if that means they must first hollow out their bones; it is better to live in freedom with nothing to eat, than un-free and over-stuffed, as someone once wrote [4]. 

 

However, like Nietzsche, I would also counsel taking things slowly, cautiously. 

 

For if, like Sabina, you want to learn how to fly, then you must first learn how to stand and to walk and to run and to climb. And to do that, you need to develop strong legs and that means remaining true to the earth and practicing a little weight training.     

     

 

Notes

 

[1] Written in 1982, in Czech, as Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, it was first published in a French translation as L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être (Gallimard, 1984). That same year, it was also translated into English from Czech by Michael Henry Heim and published by Harper & Row in the US and Faber and Faber in the UK. 

 

[2] The novel also introduces us to Sabina's other lover, Franz - a kindly academic and idealist who might have been better advised to stick to his books and not get mixed up with women like Sabina - and a smiling, cancer-ridden dog belonging to Tomáš and Tereza who, for all their flaws, love this poor mutt and so pass what for Kundera is the true moral test of mankind; namely, whether one can or cannot display kindness for those creatures at one's mercy.

 

[3] Kundera is aware that this debate within philosophy between those who favour weight and those who champion lightness is as old as the Greek hills and can be traced back to the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides (who thought the latter positive and the former negative).

 

[4] See the post entitled 'On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird' (10 Oct 2015): click here.  

With thanks to Thomas Bonneville for providing the insight into Kundera's animal-based ethics.

 

 

Jump! On Defying the Spirit of Gravity (With Reference to the Work of Philippe Halsman)

If there's one thing to which Zarathustra makes himself supremely hostile above all other things, it's der Geist der Schwere - what in English is termed the Spirit of Gravity. 

He prides himself on all that is light-footed and light-hearted in his nature and says that the revaluation of all values begins only when man learns how to love himself and how to fly like a bird, rather than living like a beast of burden weighed down with morality and bad conscience.        

In order to fly, however, man must first learn how to stand upright on his own two feet; and then how to walk, naked and light, before running, dancing, skipping and jumping for joy - no longer taking life seriously and refusing to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. 

We find some of this Nietzschean defiance of the Spirit of Gravity in the marvellous series of 178 pictures taken by American portrait photographer Philippe Halsman and published collectively in his Jump Book (1959), along with his humorous essay on the aesthetics of jumpology.

Starting in the early 1950s, Halsman asked every celebrity or VIP that he photographed to jump in the air for him. His hope was that he might momentarily glimpse and capture on film the spontaneous and carefree individual beneath the formal, self-conscious public persona.

Amazingly, Halsman not only convinced many of the great comics and movie stars of the period to jump for him, he also persuaded many well-known politicians, scientists, artists and members of the House of Windsor to briefly forget themselves and dare to defy gravity.

Arguably, these are amongst his more arresting images. But, for Zarathustra, there's nothing lovelier than nimble young women with fine ankles. And so, above are Halsman's joyous photos of B.B., Marilyn and Audrey leaping barefoot into the future and the Dionysian imagination ... 

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969).

Philippe Halsman's Jump Book, (Damiani, 2015).

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In Defence of Trivia

Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: 

through spacious streets conduct thy bard along

  John Gay (1716)

This just in by email, with reference to a recently published post:

"It's bad enough when writers like you try to persuade us that superficial and boring phenomena, such as fashion, have great import or interest. But what is worse is that when you do decide to discuss serious topics, such as cultural appropriation, which involve issues of class and race, you invariably reduce them to questions of style or semantics in a manner that is disingenuous, disrespectful and disappointing. Surely philosophy - even of a postmodern variety - should do more than trivialise everything with an ironic smirk; particularly things that have real consequences for real people in the real world." 

There's obviously quite a lot here to which I might respond. But it's the idea of trivia that I think I'd like to address (briefly and obviously not in depth; nor with the appropriate gravitas that my critic seems to expect).

It's clear, is it not, that those who hate trivia do so from a moral position that is thought superior, but is in fact only snobbish and judgemental.

For what constitutes trivia after all other than forms of knowledge believed to be of lesser value or commonplace; fine for those of limited education or intelligence (and postmodernists), but not for those who have greater intellectual gifts and who, like my critic, prefer to discuss important issues from a serious perspective and not waste time playing language games or worrying about aesthetics.   

The Romans used the word triviae to describe where one road forked into two. And this too provides a vital clue as to why people such as my critic hate trivialisation.

For rather than being a reductive process, it's one that adds complexity and ambiguity; multiplying alternatives and proliferating difference; demonstrating that there is no single, super-smooth highway to truth, just a network of minor roads and what Heidegger terms Holzwege - paths that might very well lead nowhere and cause the seeker after wisdom to get lost. Ultimately, my critic is frightened of losing their way by leaving the straight and narrow. But I'm more like Little Red Riding Hood and prepared to take a risk; I might miss the point - but, on the other hand, I might meet a wolf (and there's nothing inconsequential about that).

Alternatively, I just might encounter a deity ...

For Trivia refers not only to fun-facts about popular culture or the minutiae of everyday life, but is the name of a goddess who, in Roman mythology, haunted crossroads and graveyards and was the mother of witchcraft and queen of ghosts, wandering about at night beneath the harvest moon visible only to the barking dogs who told of her approach. Again, one suspects all this rather frightens and repulses my critic, who would doubtless dismiss it as superstitious nonsense. But as the former editor of Pagan Magazine, the thought of encountering such a figure continues to secretly enchant.   

And so, in a nutshell, it's better to trivialise than to moralise and be forever bound by the spirit of gravity.
          

In Praise of the Swan Princess

Like Zarathustra, I have always been a fan of girls who choose to devote themselves to the harsh discipline of classical dance: how could I be an enemy of the blessed feet and fair ankles of ballerinas?

And, like Zarathustra, I have always loathed the Spirit of Gravity; that which weighs life down and stops us learning how to fly like birds and love ourselves with a degree of supersensual coldness that the all-contented know nothing of as they hurriedly gobble-up and digest anything that is placed before them like swine.

Honour should be given only to those who are fastidious in their tastes and have learned how to say No to a soft existence of lard-arsed laziness, spreading everywhere, but leading nowhere. As Plectrude comes to realise: "Putting one's health on the line meant nothing at all as long as one could know the incredible sensation of taking flight." Ultimately, nothing tastes as good as playing Odette feels.