“white horses or strange animals”

The exchange of gifts at Theodoric’s court in Ravenna, after the Ostrogoth conquest of Italy:

“The ambassadors who resorted to Ravenna from the most distant countries of Europe, admired [Theodoric’s] wisdom, magnificence, and courtesy; and, if he sometimes accepted either slaves or arms, white horses or strange animals, the gift of a sundial, a water-clock, or a musician, admonished even the princes of Gaul, of the superior art and industry of his Italian subjects.”

Of course, his “wisdom, magnificence, and courtesy” did not prevent him from ordering the brutal death of BOETHIUS.

And by the way, if you click the link to the Boethius article, don’t fail to the follow the early link there to the RITHMOMACHY article.

on the Saxons

Gibbon on the early government of seven Saxon kings in England:

“It has been pretended that this republic of kings was moderated by a general council and a supreme magistrate. But such an artificial scheme of policy is repugnant to the crude and turbulent spirit of the Saxons; their laws are silent; and their imperfect annals afford only a dark and bloody prospect of intestine discord.”

And by the way, since making my recent post about Gibbon’s use of the word “insensibly,” I’ve seen him do it four additional times. The slow occurrence of gradual, unnoticed reversals is really his favorite theme, I’d say.

For example, here’s the most recent case:

“Under the long dominion of the emperors, Britain had been insensibly moulded into the elegant and servile form of a Roman province, whose safety was entrusted to a foreign power.”

on pet words

Along with every great thinker having one great thought, perhaps every author in every genre has one great pet word that teaches us a lot about what is most important to them.

In Tool-Being I noted that Heidegger’s key pet word is definitely bloß, which is the German for “mere” or “merely.” I was aware of that little quirk of Heidegger’s even before I started on the Gesamtausgabe project, and hence I made a point of marking each and every case where he uses it. I think there must be several thousand of them.

In a way, you could even say that bloß is Heidegger’s key technical term. It appears whenever he wants to mock some “present-at-hand” answer to any question. So in Being and Time we have Heidegger saying that “things are not a mere sum of realia that serve to fill up a room.” When referring to Sophocles’ famous Antigone chorus, he alerts us that “polla ta deina does not refer to a mere present-at-hand piling up of uncanny things,” or something of that sort. And there are literally a few thousand more examples. Heidegger never tires of sneering at Vorhandenheit, and this is one of the factors that led me to put the tool-analysis at the center of my interpretation of him.

In Gibbon’s case, the pet word is “insensibly,” though I realized this too late to keep count. And for Gibbon as for Heidegger, the pet word gives great insight into his thinking as a whole. Gibbon always uses “insensibly” to refer to a complete turnabout in the character of a province, nation, or person, that happened so gradually that no one noticed while it was in progress. And of course, this is Gibbon’s basic point about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in general: i.e., instead of blaming the fall of the Empire on this or that battle, this or that bad emperor, or this or that sacking of Rome, we should look instead at the gradual and therefore “insensible” decline of the Roman people from intrepid civic-minded soldiers into a race of soft and decadent pleasure-lovers who outsourced defense matters to barbarian auxiliaries.

This may be more universally the case, that every great author has one pet word that recurs precisely because it does a special and necessary theoretical labor for that author. The only other example I can think of at the moment is “eldritch” for Lovecraft, which also recurs continually at key moments.

Shakespeare statistics

I’ve always been interested in the work of Michael Witmore of the University of Wisconsin, author of (among other books), Shakespearean Metaphysics.

One of the things he does is use computerized statistical studies to group Shakespeare’s plays together according to the frequency of various grammatical structures and other properties. This generally groups together those plays that one would group together anyway. But occasionally it yields fascinating surprises. For instance:

“Shakespeare, that is, built some of his tragedies — Othello in particular – on structures that would ordinarily be employed in comedy, and in doing so heightened the emotional effect of downturn in the plays when things deteriorate. There is thus a certain, almost structural irony to Othello. Some of what you see happening on stage seems to evoke the expectations of comedy (and its happy conclusions), but what eventually transpires is the opposite. While this may sound emotionally perverse, I think it is exactly what Shakespeare was up to in Othello, and I’m not surprised that a reader as careful and informed as Snyder was able to figure this out.”

I wonder if there could be a philosophy equivalent of this. Are there certain features typical of classic works of metaphysics, ethics, Islamic phlosophy, or Neoplatonism, that might successfully be mimicked by a different genre that then undermines our expectations? Maybe not. Maybe what Shakespeare does in Othello requires the subversion of an emotional engagement that isn’t quite as present when reading philosophy texts, so that the same tricks might not work.

But I suspect that it would work. In fact, since the world is probably made of simple structures despite its great complexity of detail, there are probably a finite number of strategies for innovating in any genre, and this would be one of them: “adopt the conventions of an opposite genre, then undermine the usual results at the end.” Most likely this happens even in the animal kingdom in some fashion.

Another possible strategy: take peripheral background considerations of an existing genre and make them the center of the action. I once heard a good musicologist explain that Claude Debussy simply takes chords from existing tonal music that usually appear only briefly to point to the concluding chord, and makes them free-floating, standalone chords that are never resolved in the expected manner of Western tonal music.

Maybe there are seven or eight other basic ways to innovate, holding good for all fields.

In any case, I should have been following Witmore’s blog sooner, because his statistical approach always makes me think harder.

bribes for doctorates

A current SCANDAL IN GERMANY, in the Time magazine version.

Since German university professors are civil servants, this falls under public corruption law.

Clovis

Why this has got to be the cutest little thing a barbarian king ever did say… Clovis after his baptism:

“The mind of Clovis was susceptible of transient fervour: he was exasperated by the pathetic tale of the passion and death of Christ; and, instead of weighing the salutary consequences of that mysterious sacrifice, he exclaimed, with indiscreet fury, ‘Had I been present at the head of my valiant Franks, I would have revenged his injuries.'”

more Egyptian monks

Gibbon is quite open about his dislike for monks (he says they deserve only the contempt and pity of philosophers). Yet he writes quite beautifully about them:

“According to their faith and zeal, they might employ the day which they passed in their cells, either in vocal or mental prayer; they assembled in the evening, and they were awakened in the night, for the public worship of the monastery. The precise moment was determined by the stars, which are seldom clouded in the serene sky of Egypt; and a rustic horn or trumpet, the signal of devotion, twice interrupted the vast silence of the desert. Even sleep, the last refuge of the unhappy, was rigorously measured; the vacant hours of the monk heavily rolled along, without business or pleasure; and, before the close of each day, he had repeatedly accused the tedious progress of the Sun….

They sunk under the painful weight of crosses and chains; and their emaciated limbs were confined by collars, bracelets, gauntlets, and greaves, of massy and rigid iron. All superfluous incumbrance of dress they contemptuously cast away; and some savage saints of both sexes have been admired, whose naked bodies were only covered by their long hair. They aspired to reduce themselves to the rude and miserable state in which the human brute is scarcely distinguished above his kindred animals; and a numerous sect of Anachorets derived their name from their humble practice of grazing in the fields of Mesopotamia with the common herd. They often usurped the den of some wild beast whom they affected to resemble; they buried themselves in some gloomy cavern which art or nature had scooped out of the rock; and the marble quarries of Thebais are still inscribed with the monuments of their penance.”

more digitization from Harvard

Found this via a Bogost tweet.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=528604

Things are going to look very different a decade from now. Quite often I wish that I’d been born 10 or 15 years later than I was.

parent of superstition

This is nicely done:

“Egypt, the fruitful parent of superstition, afforded the first example of the monastic life. Antony, an illiterate youth of the lower parts of Thebais, distributed his patrimony, deserted his family and native home, and executed his monastic penance with original and intrepid fanaticism. After a long and painful novitiate among the tombs and in a ruined tower, he boldly advanced into the desert three days’ journey to the east of the Nile; discovered a lonely spot, which possessed the advantage of shade and water; and fixed his last residence on Mount Colzim near the Red Sea, where an ancient monastery still preserves the name and memory of the saint.”

I’ve not visited that monastery, though I’ve been to the one at the foot of Mt. Sinai, which oddly enough is Greek Orthodox in orientation.

a hypothesis stemming from the previous post

What is interesting about the previous post is that the phenomenon it describes seems counterintuitive.

If you hear the phrase “Oh, you have to read Author X in the original”… wouldn’t that normally sound like a compliment? It would sound roughly like “Author X is so stylistically brilliant that no translation can do it justice.”

But the previous post suggests that the opposite might be the case. It suggests that the best writers are the ones who are so powerful that they are able to shape any language into which they are translated– just as the strongest football clubs can win on the road as easily as at home.

As a control, who do I prefer in German rather than in English? Heidegger, who is not remotely in Nietzsche’s league in terms of literary talent.

In other words, contrary to the usual opinion, it might turn out to be the highest sign of stylistic greatness if it doesn’t matter what language an author is read in.

I’m not sure exactly what that would mean, but do have a vague idea. There seems to be a notion that good style means capitalizing on the idiosyncracies of one’s native tongue. But that’s probably not true; that’s probably the sign of a mid-level writer rather than a truly great one (just as table manners are more an obsession of the middle class than of the rich). I happen to think that style is more a matter of organizing thoughts than of exploiting the resources of a given language. Surely there’s no way to translate all of Shakespeare’s idiosyncracies, yet he’s enjoyed in every language. Obviously, something comes across in those translations.