Composition of Philosophy. July 16 A.

In a post coming very soon, I’ll have some things to say about the beneficial effects of word-limits on style. If “brevity is the soul of wit,” it is even more the soul of style. You all know the constraints of length that this project must observe; I’ve never had to observe such constraints before, but am already glad for it.

Before I forget, here’s one simple example.

The first draft of one particular sentence read:

“Each of these objects has numerous qualities, and can be turned in my hands to reveal different surfaces and uses.”

(Actually, there was an even longer draft of this sentence initially, but I didn’t think to save it for this post.)

Facing immense pressure to cut many words from a couple of paragraphs, as the next post will explain, I simply cut the words “objects” and “in my hands”. Yielding:

“Each of these has numerous qualities, and can be turned to reveal different surfaces and uses.”

That may seem like a minor alteration, but it cut the number of words from 20 to 16 (a 20% decrease), and also has a crisper, cleaner feel. And note: I never would have considered doing this unless forced to do so by word-count considerations.

More in a minute.

“instruments of music”

Thousands of pages of sparkling prose by Gibbon, seemingly almost without effort. This passage is on the opposition of the Church Fathers to sensual delights:

“The acquisition of knowledge, the exercise of our reason or fancy, and the cheerful flow of unguarded conversation, may employ the leisure of a liberal mind. Such amusements, however, were rejected with abhorrence, or admitted with the utmost caution, by the severity of the fathers, who despised all knowledge that was not useful to salvation, and who considered all levity of discourse as a criminal abuse of the gift of speech…

The unfeeling candidate for Heaven was instructed, not only to resist the grosser allurements of the taste or smell, but even to shut his ears against the profane harmony of sounds, and to view with indifference the most finished productions of human art…

In their censures of luxury, the fathers are extremely minute and circumstantial; and among the various articles which excite their pious indignation, we may enumerate false hair, garments of any colour except white, instruments of music, vases of gold or silver, downy pillows (as Jacob reposed his head on a stone), white bread, foreign wines, public salutations, the use of warm baths, and the practice of shaving the beard, which, according to the expression of Tertullian, is a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator. When Christianity was introduced among the rich and the polite, the observation of these singular laws was left, as it would be at present, to the few who are ambitious of superior sanctity.”

Souriau’s book coming back into print

Readers of Prince of Networks will recall my reference to the “later work” of Latour. The later Latour was not later in the biographical sense, but only in terms of order of publication, since he actually began working on his “later” system in 1987.

He kept this project secret, though I was not the only one to get a sneak peak of it in his former office at the Ecole des Mines (I no longer remember what year that was; it could have been on one of several visits to Latour beginning in November 1999).

In 2007 in Cerisy-la-Salle, Normandy, there was a colloquium in honor of Latour’s 60th birthday. Distributed to the Cerisy participants was the draft of a new book by Latour, potentially linkable to a far vaster series of writings too large to fit in a printed book, but perfectly suited for hyperlinked documents on a website or CD-ROM.

Much critical feedback about this book draft was provided in Cerisy, and I think Latour is still trying to decide how to incorporate that feedback before publishing the book. But there was already a publisher’s representative in Cerisy, and a publication deal must already be in place.

In any case, the half-forgotten French philosopher Etienne Souriau (1892-1979) is the major influence on the later Latour. If you haven’t heard of him, there’s no need to feel ignorant, since hardly anyone knows of Souriau (though Delueze, with his flawless antennae, mentions Souriau once; or perhaps it was both Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?; I no longer remember where the reference occurred). He’s remained an exciting figure for people working intensely on aesthetics, but has entered oblivion for specialists in all other fields.

Souriau’s major book of first philosophy is entitled Les différents modes d’existence, and the concept of “modes of existence” is pivotal for the “later Latour.” I don’t quite get the modes yet, I must admit. But the version circulated in Cerisy involved 14 modes of existence (12 specific modes, and 2 overarching modes that the others must all employ). Also, Latour does not treat them as permanent categories of the human mind. They are produced historically, so that their number might be augmented or even diminished, and he makes no claim to the validity of his own list beyond the compass of Western civilization. (I will say no more until his book is eventually published, since there’s no way of knowing what the final version might look like. He really took the feedback in Cerisy seriously.)

But only now do I come to the main point of this post… PUF is re-issuing Souriau’s book, with an introduction jointly authored by Latour and Isabelle Stengers. If anything, Stengers is even more of a Souriau devotee than Latour is; reportedly she’s read everything he ever wrote.

Keep an eye on this. I have so little sense of what Latour’s new direction might look like that it could contain some tremendous surprises.

Gibbon on the tradition of Hell

He’s so good:

“The description of the infernal regions had been abandoned to the fancy of painters and poets, who peopled them with so many phantoms and monsters, who dispensed their rewards and punishments with so little equity, that a solemn truth, the most congenial to the human heart, was oppressed and disgraced by the absurd mixture of the wildest fictions.”

Gibbon on Tertullian

This line made me laugh aloud:

“Tertullian, the severe reformer, shows no more indulgence to a tragedy of Euripides than to a combat of gladiators. The dress of the actors particularly offends him.”

Gibbon on the Gnostics

All right, I’m back to Gibbon after an interlude of several weeks. In the middle of the chapters on Constantine, Gibbon finds it necessary to go back and spend about 100 pages telling the history of Christianity in the Roman Empire from the beginning up to the point where Constantine finally legitimized it.

Here’s a nice passage on the Gnostics:

“The Gnostics blended with the faith of Christ many obscure tenets which they derived from oriental philosophy, and even from the religion of Zoroaster, concerning the eternity of matter, the existence of two principles, and the mysterious hierarchy of the invisible world. As soon as they launched out into that vast abyss, they delivered themselves to the guidance of a disordered imagination; and, as the paths of error are various and infinite, the Gnostics were imperceptibly divided into more than fifty particular sects, of whom the most celebrated appear to have been the Basilidians, the Valentinians, the Marcionites, and, in a still later period, the Manichaeans. Each of these sects could boast of its bishops and congregations, of its doctrines and martyrs, and, instead of the four gospels adopted by the church, the heretics produced a multitude of histories, in which the actions and discourses of Christ and of his apostles were adapted to their respective tenets.”

the hut

Speaking of Ian, he also tweeted a link to PAUL ENNIS’ BRIEF POST ON HEIDEGGER’S HUT. (And of course, a full-length book exists if the topic interests you.)

Bogost again

Here’s HIS LATEST POST ON THE TERM “OBJECT-ORIENTED.”

He’s probably right that the similarities between OOP in programming and philosophy lie at the surface of the two disciplines. I’m simply not the person to dig much deeper in that part of the yard.

I’d forgotten the interesting point that Ian took “unit operations” from the chemical field. I like the term.

on schedules

This is actually another “Composition of Philosophy” post, and will be filed as such.

A few people said they liked my point that all the plans I make surrounding the book manuscript can be changed as new situations arise. Oh, definitely. Of course. I don’t mean to sound like a rigid bore with all the stuff about outlines and hard work. Over the next month you will see that I always improvise a lot, and in fact enjoy being impulsive despite the façade of systematic planning.I simply think it’s very helpful to have a structure in place that can be resisted, adapted, but also straightforwardly followed in many cases.

For instance, you’ll remember my plan to go to the Embassy this morning and handle the new passport issues; the concept of today as a mere half-day of work was based on that Embassy plan.

In reality, I ended up in a nice Skype talk until very late, and slept until 10 in the morning. The maids actually woke me up, or I would have slept a bit later. The Embassy only admits passport-seekers early in the morning, so there was no point trying to rush down to the Embassy. Unless I can get there by 8 A.M., I don’t even bother, because the wait simply becomes too long.

Today’s original schedule, then, is gone, but as a result I have even more time to write today, and will merely have an unplanned disruption some time early next week. I’m also a day ahead of schedule, having finished the introduction tonight.

Chapter One is next. I already gave it a detailed outline while in Serbia in late June. As it turns out, it needs four sections to do the job, so I will shoot for a 300-word chapter Intro and four sections of 1,000 words each. That can be modified if some sections seem to deserve more space than others, but for now they look to be of equal importance.

Being a full day ahead of schedule, I feel no pressure to write the whole thing today, but may try to do so anyway.