Nadler on occasionalism

Before leaving Cairo, I had the chance to start digging into Steven Nadler’s new book, Occasionalism. It’s very good, not surprisingly.

The main idea of the book is that occasionalism is a very serious philosophical thesis, not just an ad hoc theological maneuver to deal with the mind-body problem. As Nadler notes, it’s hard even to find any occasionalist arguments that are based on the mind-body problem.

Another point: the body-body problem is no less at stake here, as Leibniz already recognized.

Another point: there are Islamic roots to occasionalism. (In fact, it appears in Europe rather late, though perhaps Nadler will find it earlier than expeced in Europe; I’ve just started the book.)

The only reason I wouldn’t call myself an occasionalist is because, even if I were doing a theology, it would be a heretical theology in which God’s contact with other entities is indirect as well. If there’s a problem in the interaction between things, there’s no reason for God to be an exception to that problem. The problem of how things can make contact at all needs to be solved in a single stroke for all entities, not outsourced to one omnipotent entity.

one sad contrast

Cairo’s airport was nearly empty tonight. Istanbul’s was jam-packed, the most full I’ve ever seen it.

I suppose travelers are still afraid of Egypt a bit, and though I hate it when people blame “the media” for everything, in this case I do blame the media. Much of the coverage of Egypt right now worldwide is absurdly sensationalistic, with the New York Times leading the pack. From reading the Times, you’d think every taxi in the city is getting carjacked and Muslim Brotherhood paramilitaries are out on the street cutting off people’s arms.

Here are the facts:

1. Crime is up a bit in Cairo, it’s fairly clear. But Cairo is still safer than any large American city. And in large American cities, unlike today’s Cairo, you have a small but real statistical chance of being killed in random gun violence on any given day. That’s simply not going to happen to you in Cairo, even now.

2. Yes, the political future of the country is unclear. But that doesn’t make it dangerous to visit.

Hagia Sophia

And in the other direction, viewed still from this room, the Hagia Sophia (see below, and sorry about the weak MacBook camera).

This is one of the most hilarious hotel rooms I’ve ever had. I was just looking for something reasonably good to enjoy Istanbul for one night, and chose the appropriate (not so high) price range for that. But I seem to have lucked into some sort of sale on a completely over-the-top luxury room.

It feels like something halfway between a honeymoon suite and a hotel room from an Istanbul Barbie set. The telephone looks like it would belong on the Titanic, if there had been phones on ships in those days. The ceiling of the room looks fit for the Sultan himself. This is an utterly absurd hotel room, but has a staggering view from two sides and should be great to wake up in tomorrow.

Unfortunately I lost an hour, since Turkey continues to use daylight time while Egypt abolished it, so everything was pretty much closed in Sultanahmet by the time I got here. That’s why I’m blogging rather than out enjoying the city. I did take a bit of a walk, though.

Matisse and Picasso on Jackson Pollock

Here’s my other favorite passage just read on the flight from Gilot’s book (though I’m annoyed to discover that 8 pages from late in the book are missing from my copy, and will have to write to Anchor for a replacement).

Matisse and Picasso met at Matisse’s home and looked at one of the first catalogs of Jackson Pollock’s paintings to come from New York. Gilot was present and recorded the highlights of their conversation.

For those who didn’t know it already, Picasso’s respect for Matisse was profound. He viewed him with admiration, and the 12-year age gap softened Picasso’s usual tendency to be hyper-competitive with all of his friends, including Braque. (Though despite the 12-year age gap, Matisse and Picasso oddly seem to have begun painting in exactly the same year: Picasso at age 8, Matisse as a late bloomer at age 20.)

Matisse on Jackson Pollock: “I have the impression that I’m incapable of judging painting like that, for the simple reason that one is always unable to judge fairly what follows one’s own work. One can judge what has happened before and what comes along at the same time. And even among those who follow, when a painter hasn’t completely forgotten me I understand him a little bit, even though he goes beyond me. But when he gets to the point where he no longer makes any reference to what for me is painting, I can no longer understand him. I can’t judge him either. It’s completely over my head.”

Picasso in response: “I don’t agree with you at all. And I don’t care whether I’m in a good position to judge what comes after me. I’m against that sort of stuff. As far as these new painters are concerned, I think it is a mistake to let oneself go completely and lose oneself in the gesture. Giving oneself up entirely to the action of painting [i.e., Pollock]– there’s something in that which displeases me enormously. It’s not at all that I hold to a rational conception of painting –I have nothing in common, for example, with a man like Poussin– but in any case the unconscious is so strong in us that it expresses itself in one fashion or another… Whatever we may do, it expresses itself in spite of us. So why should we deliberately hand ourselves over to it? During the surrealist period, everyone was doing automatic writing. That was a bit of a joke, at least in part, because when you want to be completely automatic, you never can be. There’s always a moment when you ‘arrange’ things just a little. Even the surrealists’ automatic texts were sometimes corrected. Therefore, since there’s no such thing as complete automatism, why not admit frankly that one is making use of all that substratum of the unconscious but keeping one’s hand on it?”

Tristan Garcia update

Someone in Paris whose judgment I trust (someone other than Meillassoux) says that Garcia’s Forme et objet will be out in September, and that it’s “revolutionary.” I’ve seen not a word of it myself.

But I’m also told that THIS LECTURE gives a preview of it. I won’t have time to watch this video until returning to Cairo, unfortunately, but you’re all invited to beat me to it.

Picasso and Chagall on each other

Best line I read in Gilot’s book during the flight. Each of the artists made these statements to her privately.

Picasso: “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. I’m not crazy about those cocks and asses and flying violinists and all the folklore, but his canvases are really painted, not just thrown together.”

Chagall: “What a genius, that Picasso. It’s a pity he doesn’t paint.”

However, the contrast between these two judgments needs to be put in context. Picasso and Chagall had had a terrible falling-out due to some extremely rude remarks Picasso made over lunch one day. They never met again after that lunch, and Chagall took the conversation a lot harder than Picasso, who often said vicious things to his friends during arguments.

view from the room

That’s the Blue Mosque with the water behind it. If you can see those white dots above the mosque, those are some of the hundreds of seagulls flying above it.

the plane to Istanbul

Just passing the time in F01, Terminal 3, waiting to board.

Palin vs. Caligula & Heliogabalus

As regards my concession the other day that, offended though I am by Palin being treated as a legitimate politician, I’d rather have her in charge than Caligula or Heliogabalus, a friend just wrote to remind me that those guys never had any nuclear codes under their control.

True enough. Though I’d probably still rather have Palin in charge of the nuclear codes than Rome’s most psychotic Emperors.

It’s something I’d never thought of before… To what extent does the existence of weapons capable of destroying the world create pressures to favor mediocre but basically stable rulers over more colorful/entertaining but risky ones?

Ortega y Gasset once had the interesting idea that existing forms of government would not be able to survive advances in psychology. He never really developed the idea, but it’s an interesting one.

protest next door

At the Bahraini Embassy.

Relatively small, but very loud and spirited.

Im afraid Bahrain has earned it.