mysterbey

Mark Edmundson remembers Richard Rorty (from Slate)

I was a colleague of Richard Rorty's for 15 or so years at the University of Virginia. We taught three classes together: one on Freud; one on Romanticism and pragmatism; and one on the sublime and the beautiful. We shared a lot of meals and also a fair amount of gossip—though a diffident person in some ways, Dick dearly loved to talk. He took an interest in my children—a mark of a true friend—and often came back from trips with gifts for them. I remember a number of stuffed animals and books about birds, which were a passion of Dick's. It was funny to see my 3- and 5-year-olds tickled and teased by the most famous philosopher in the world.

The passage reminded me of this introduction to Peter Wilson's A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern World

In the mid 1980s, on assignment for the London Observer, I was shown around Harvard University by Willard van Orman Quine. It was February, and the ground was covered in ice and snow. We both fell over. Having the world's greatest living philosopher all to myself for a few hours was a rare privilege.

From Dieter Petzina's 'Germany and the Great Depression', in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Oct. 1969);

It is hard to find a common denominator for the contradictions of these years. And yet there is a dialectical connection of apathy and excitement, hopelessness and activism, present misery and a visionary future, anarchic dissolution of society and the flight into disciplined Kampfverbände: linking them all was the feeling that the existing state of affairs could not last, a theme with manifold versions varying from the anti-technology complaints of the cultural critics to visions of the future - nationalist, anti-western, or socialist. It was Germany's particular tragedy that a correct insight into the necessary changes found a false answer: not that of a future to be formed rationally in the interests of the majority, but the intoxicated irrationality of counter-revolutionary fascism, whose methods of overcoming the crisis ended in gross exploitation and the second world war.

From Roderick Stackelberg's Hitler's Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies;

All interpretations are bound to generate some controversy as they provide a particular perspective that not everyone may share. That perspective is determined by the historian’s values, particularly political values, which are usually, but not always, the values of the society or subgroup he or she lives in or identifies with. If the disagreement is about facts, it can usually be readily resolved. But more often the disagreements between historians involve the meaning and importance of those facts. The same facts may be evaluated quite differently by different historians. That is why there are still many historical issues on which serious historians disagree, even though the basic facts are known and accepted on all sides and the contending historians are genuinely committed to sound scholarly practices and the objective evaluation of the evidence.

Two passages from J. M. Roberts' The New Penguin History of the World that I enjoyed reading; firstly - on the lack of philosophical rigour in ancient Egypt;

Yet the creative quality of Egyptian civilization seems, in the end, strangely to miscarry. Colossal resources of labour are massed under the direction of men who, by the standards of any age, must have been outstanding civil servants, and the end is the creation of the greatest tombstones the world has ever seen. Craftsmanship of exquisite quality is employed, and its masterpieces are grave-goods. A highly literate élite, utilizing a complex and subtle language and a material of unsurpassed convenience, uses them copiously, but has no philosophical or religious idea comparable to those of Greek or Jew to give the world. It is difficult not to sense an ultimate sterility, a nothingness, at the heart of this glittering tour de force.

And secondly, on ancient Egyptian semiotics;

Another distinction lacking to ancient Egypt was the one most of us make automatically between the name and the thing. For the ancient Egyptian, the name was the thing; the real object we separate from its designation was identical with it. So might be other images. The Egyptians lived in symbolism as fishes do in water, taking it for granted, and we have to break through the assumptions of a profoundly unsymbolic culture to understand them.

Here is a nice followup to the previous passage, from Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Ideas That Changed The World;

What did the Egyptians mean when they said their king was a god? He could bear the name and exercise the functions of many gods, so there was no exact identity-overlap with any one of them. A possible aid to understanding is the habit of making images and erecting shrines as places of opportunity for the gods to make themselves manifest. The image "was" the god only when the god inhabited the image. The Pharaoh could provide a similar function.

Bardaisan is really growing on me - an intriguing Edessan local, and a man who brewed his own blend of early Christianity, paganism, neoplatonism, and anthropology. From F. W. Norris' entry on Bardaisan, in the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity;

The teaching of Bardaisan has Gnostic elements, such as a dualism of darkness and light and the view that the material world was created by beings lesser than the one God. Yet he seems to have been a convinced monotheist who avoided a physical dualism. Bardaisan evidently was much interested in astrology and the ways that customs and tradition influenced people’s thoughts, but he had some sense of the importance of human freedom. Although good and evil beset men and women, each person who is in Christ can choose, because Christ countermands the force of the planets. Little is known, however, of Bardaisan’s doctrines concerning the body and the soul, positions that would clearly specify how much he represented Gnostic views.

From Timothy Barnes' Cosntantine and Eusebius, a brief summation of the life of Saint Antony, the forefather of Christian monasticism...

When his parents died, the young Antony gave away his patrimony and entrusted his only sister to a community of virgins. When he began the ascetic life, he copied an old hermit from a neighbouring village who had spent many years in a solitary existence. Antony, too, took up his abode just outside the village. He cut all ties with his family. He labored with his hands to earn enough to buy his daily bread, and he gave any surplus to the needy. He lived alone, practicing self-discipline and praying incessantly. At the age of almost thirty-five, Antony withdrew to the edge of the desert, where he lived in an abandoned fort in total isolation. After nearly twenty years - about 305, on the chronology of the Life of Antony - the door was broken down and Antony emerged like an initiate from the Shrine, full of God. He healed the sick, cast out demons, comforted the sorrowing, reconciled enemies, and urged all to put the love of Christ before anything in this world".

I love the almost superhero feel to this story - Antony spends 20 years in a dilapidated old fort, alone, refining his powers, before breaking down his door and emerging into the light. It was a trying time for Christians, who were being tortured and killed for their religion. Antony takes up the campaign to end persecution.

When the persecution ended, Antony returned to his monastery, where crowds of visitors, among them a Roman army commander, thronged his door seeking cures for their ills. Antony decided to escape, fell in with a Saracen caravan, and came to the remote mountain near the Red Sea where he spent the rest of his life.

And so, after Antony had so dramatically emerged from his solitude, he slipped back into it under cover of nomadic travelers, before spending the rest of his life in the remote mountains. He died, apparently, at the age of 105.

From Timothy Barnes' 'Constantine and the Christian Church', in Samuel Lieu & Dominic Montserrat (eds.), Constantine: History, Historiography and Legend.

Whether Constantine also in the years after 324 bestowed on Christianity the priveleged standing of which he deprived paganism is a question on which my views are well known and controversial. In this chapter, however, I do not wish to traverse this boggy terrain again.

This is a handy line to use when discussions turn to controversial matters - ie. "Whether we should buy the shiraz or the merlot is a question on which my views are well known and controversial". It can even be followed up with "I do not wish to traverse this boggy terrain again".

From “Early Christianity And Edessan Culture”, chapter 6 of Steven K. Ross’ Roman Edessa, a nice summation of Gnosticism which highlights its Neoplatonic influence;

Gnosticism (or ‘Gnosis’) as a philosophy remains ill defined, as is to be expected of an esoteric movement that, until the discovery in this century of a secret cache of texts, was known primarily through the writings of its detractors. Although it is misleading to speak of a unitary ‘Gnostic religion’, it can in general be said that the Gnostics stressed salvation from the evils of existence but de-emphasized both ‘faith’ and moral behaviour, or good works, as paths to it, putting their trust instead in insight, or the knowledge of certain mysteries known to an elect few who would uniquely be saved. Along with this soteriology went a dualistic cosmology and theology that, like Marcion (himself often counted among the Gnostics), tended to deprecate the world and even the heavenly bodies as the work of an inferior Demiurge. The Gnostics spoke instead of an invisible or 'stranger' God, indescibable and in the unseen heaven, as the true source of all good, and the one with which the adherents of gnosis - trapped in a world of darkness and matter - must strive to be reunited.

For the Gnostics, salvation came through escaping Plato's metaphorical cave, where they had been mistakenly imprisoned by a lesser, clumsy God.

Julian's sarcasmJulian the Apostate, Roman Emperor of the Constantinian dynasty from 361 to 363, wrote a letter to the city of Edessa, where the Arians had been harassing the Gnostics. Here is an excerpt, in which Julian's sarcastic take on asceticism displays his sharp, dry wit.

Therefore, since by a most admirable law they have been advised to prefer poverty, in order to journey by the easier way to the kingdom of heaven; in order that we may assist their people to this, we have ordered all the money belonging to the church of the Edessenes to be taken away, so that it may be given to the soldiers. I have also ordered that their possessions are to be added to our private domain; in order that being in poverty they may be prudent and not be deprived of the heavenly kingdom, which they still hope for.

From the Historiae Auguste, on Philip the Arab's murder of Timesitheus;

Philip, they say, was mightily in fear of him for many reasons and on this account plotted with the doctors against his life. He did it in this way: Timesitheus, as it happened, was suffering from diarrhoea and was told by the doctors to take a portion to check it. And then, they say, they changed what had been prepared and gave him something which loosened him all the more; and thus he died.

The Scriptores Historiae Augustae on Herodes, son of Odeanathus…

…he was the most effeminate of men, wholly oriental and given over to Grecian luxury, for he had embroidered tents and pavilions made out of cloth of gold and everything in the manner of the Persians. In fact Odeanathus, complying with his ways and moved by the promptings of a father’s indulgence, gave him all the king’s concubines and riches and jewels that he captured. Zenobia, indeed, treated him in a step-mother’s way, and this made him all the more dear to his father. Nothing more remains to be said converning Herodes.

Miriades, a crooked Syrian, killed his father and stole his fortunes, before siding with the enemy Persian army (c. 253 AD). He convinced Shapur, the Persian king, to attack Antioch, Miriades' home town. Ammianus Marcellinus describes the attack;

For it happened one day at Antioch, when the city was in perfect tranquility, a comic actor being on the stage with his wife, acting some common scene from daily life, while the people were delighted with his acting, his wife suddenly exclaimed: 'Am I dreaming or are there Persians here?' The audience immediately turned round and then fled in every direction while trying to avoid the missiles which were showered upon them.

Libanius, Greek sophist and "one of the most influential pagans of the fourth century", continues;

[The people of Antioch] were attacked as they sat in the theatre by archers who had occupied the mountain top.

An anonymous contributor to Cassius Dio's history sinks the boot into the working class;

The respectable classes fled the city but the majority of the populace remained: partly because they were well disposed towards Mariades and partly because they were glad of any revolution; such as is customary with ignorant people.

Antioch was attacked, plundered, then destroyed. The Persians repaid Miriades by decapitating him for betraying his own people.

Sherlock Holmes explains the brain-attic, in A Study in Scarlet

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."