Bataille 3 (Proust and Sade)

Do you actually read multiple new entries in the order in which they were added as opposed to in the order in which they appear? I suppose it would be good to create a style in which order of ideas doesn't matter... but, to continue with 'Literature and Evil', Bataille remarks that Proust is one of the least naive writers imaginable, and yet if you take the unpublished writings of his youth, some ten years before 'la recherche', you can find assertions that Bataille calls 'aggressively naive'. He includes the following quote, "it is this that moves us in 'the Phaedo'; when following Socrates' argument we suddenly have the extraordinary feeling of hearing a line of reasoning whose purity is unaltered by any personal desire, as though Truth is superior to everything else, because, in effect, we perceive that the conclusion Socrates will draw from this reasoning is that he must die." This is coming from a man whose later work will form one of the most adamant arguments ever made against the existence of a disinterested will to truth - who expounds at length on the fact that only desire can drive a search for the truth, and it is never just a desire for Truth for it's own sake (which, as I've already pointed out, is an idea that can be extracted from 'the Symposium' as well). Proust's naivete, by the way, comes as no surprise to anyone that has read any part of 'Remembrance of things past' (well, unless it was just the final volume maybe), since throughout, the narrator is constantly at great pains to show just how naive he once was, how the path to his final revelation was anything but straight, how it was built on the formation, loss and reformation of countless illusions and dead ends, how there is no direct or economical ways to learn the things he learns (as Deleuze explains, t is all a giant lesson in semiotics - things in themselves are not accessible, only signs which tell us about them. Those signs are like a language and you must go through a long grueling process in order to learn to read them). The particular sort of advocacy of falsehoods that the older Proust embraces makes no sense without the earlier aggressively naive devotion to the Truth (think in this regard of the young Nietzsche, devoted as he was to Schopenhauer).... at least this is, as I understand i, Bataille's reason for including this quote at the beginning of his Proust chapter. His entire discussion of Proust centers around a relatively minor event in 'Swann's Way'. A father is devoted to his daughter - is practically his only concern in life. The daughter is a lesbian, and had her lover living with her in her father's house. Though the father's devotion to his daughter was undiminished, sadness and worry about his daughter's position/ behavior sent him to an early grave. The father is shown in an extremely positive light - his devotion is thoroughly selfless, and we eventual discover that he is the greatest artist in the whole of Proust's work. After the father's death, the daughter and her lover profane the father's picture while making love. The explanation given is that because of the ban relating to the daughter's desires, she felt a constant guilt attached to pleasure, and it seemed that only the guilty and the wicked had access to pleasure. THough the daughter continued to love and admire her father, in order not to have guilt toward him ruin her enjoyment of the relationship she was having, it was necessary to embrace her guilt and think of Evil as itself pleasurable. She no doubt reproached herself for the act afterwards - had she not cared about her father the symbolic act of profanation would have had no interest for her... and of course, Proust himself had a mother who worshipped him and was deeply upset by the gay lover he had living at home with him or her - Proust's father being already dead at that point.
I think I've recounted all of that to you before... in a sense, that discussion doesn't relate so well to Sade, as I can't imagine him being a pure young idealist before going bad - though maybe I'm wrong. In a sense it very much does, as a genuine denial of the existence of Good and Evil, which is admittedly sometimes found in Sade, makes everything else he writes senseless. Have I said all this before in this blog? I fear I might have. I should also point out that in Sade it isn't 'Evil' so much as 'crime' that is prayed, and the existence of laws (divine, human and natural) that is generally discussed. As Bataille points out (so does Blanchot), it is extremely odd to speak of, or think of Sade's books as dangerous, since in order to be dangerous they would have to make crime seem attractive, and invite emulation, whereas in general Sade's books are calculated to awake disgust in the reader. For a person to be turned on and excited by all the mutilations killing, necrophilia and so forth that fills Sade's books, they would have to be unusually sick... (entry breaks off here, unfinished - perhaps to be finished one day?)

More on evil

Martin Amis, who I don't have much respect for or interest in as a writer, wrote a book called 'Time's arrow' in which the soul of a Nazi officer of some sort ends up having to relive the life it has just lived backwards after the moment of death - not remembering or recognizing the life its lived and not really understanding what it is seeing. Killing appears to be giving life - an experience which the soul finds thrilling. Relationships begin with recriminations, and sometimes violence, then they get sweeter and closer, and then the people involved finish by drifting apart and slowly forgetting one another. I only think of this because it is the way blogs are set up - what comes last is the first thing visible. As you scroll down and read them, the authors move from experiencing something to anticipating it - moving steadily from knowledge to ignorance as the writers unlearn the things they've learned, forget their conclusions, etc. There ought to be a better way to set them up.
Anyway, one of your last posts you asked about Evil as the opposite of bourgeois... I would guard against saying 'Bataille and Blanchot and co.', partly because Blanchot isn't really the best example of that tendency (which I hope to have an entry about very soon), partly because I was thinking about older and more straightforward, or literary rather than theoretical writers like Baudelaire (who Bataille has an early chapter on in 'Literature and Evil'), and partly because, especially in a forum like this, I have such an unhealthy tendency to take the ideas of better men and make something else out of them. I feel better when we're talking about stuff we've both read where I know I won't leave you with a mistaken idea of the writer in question. Anyway, in response to the question of what Evil is here - dictionary definition, what is generally understood by 'Evil', etc. (and it is funny you mentioned the possibility of Evil as a metaphysical category that people haven't properly understood - either in this post or the next I think I'll touch on Sade as a sort of Evil Socrates, looking for the ideal form of Evil, knowing that individual manifestations of evil, being finite can never give genuine satisfaction, and are necessarily found lacking). Contrary to what you said I was talking about how Evil is generally understood - at least by those who claim to take the side of Evil (when you claim to reject evil, you are no doubt thinking in terms of Nazis, serial killers, rapists and the like - for most people this is unattractive, genuine evil, as opposed to the fun, attractive pretend evil of conmen, rogues, bank robbers and scoundrels you can identify with in the movies). I mentioned the idea that intensity in life was, if not exactly opposed to longevity, at least necessarily linked to an idea of danger (how this would explain the joy of creation, success in major projects, the rush of good music, etc., I don't know - it keeps me from finding the idea entirely convincing). Those who do things like extreme sports (If I understand the concept properly), partake in a totally non-political form of embracing danger, and this has little or nothing to do with Evil, which I imagine is always a somewhat political concept. The punk kids who write things like 'Anarchy' or 'Satan' on public walls, assuming they still do that, are doing something different - and note that 'Satan' and 'anarchy' are slogans that can be associated as can often appeal to the same demographic in the same way. The sort of punk-ish adolescent-angst types often fall into a sort of uniform anti-conformity, that's very different from genuine, independent non-conformity (and the reactionaries are often inspired in a similar way to react against anti-conformist uniformity by irritating the leftists any way possible and asserting their own imaginary higher individualism)... which is a large digression to say that whatever safe collections most of these punk kids might fall into, they generally are inspired by a genuine desire for subversion, understood as a challenge to the safe, stability posited by the society they are making little symbolic gestures against. A society with an essentially bourgeois value system (which is not a particularly martial value system) pushes people along the surest path to a secure job, with a minimum of shock or uncertainty - keep in mind that guilt and reprimand are attached to failing to live up to the responsibilities attached to keeping this social system going. Neglecting work for the sake of parties and amusement, or simply failing to be successful within the system gets you treated not as Good, but the opposite - an attitude which is often internalized - in order to enjoy yourself and not suffer too much from your guilt, you have to embrace the role of 'Evil' (which is a less banal and more romantic term than simply 'faulty', 'defective', 'talentless' or 'lazy'). The safest path is the least intense, and the teenage rebel, should he write 'hail Satan!' on the wall or wear some silly death metal t-shirt with graffic pictures of demonic violence on it (its the heavy metal types rather than the punks have the most exagerated, un-ironic expressions of teen angst), the demons on their t-shirts identify themselves as attracted to, interested in, and basically siding with 'Evil', which is being put in opposition with 'Good' defined as a bourgeois concern with safety and stability - keeping death, hunger and disease at bay with insufficient concern for danger, excitement and intensity within the long and comfortable life on offer - there are just some rare unsettled few who take a conflation of evil and intensity to an unhealthy extreme where some sort of real human suffering or genuinely destructive act becomes attractive - though most people, and not just rebellious teens do like to have some sort of occasional contact with real risk of some sort - though it's teens who are most likely to take this too far and play with a less controlled risk, possibly doing real damage to themselves or someone else. The fifties, and especially fifties-style sitcom and advertising images are of continuing fascination in American culture - it's constantly parodied, 'exposed' and dismantled, precisely because it is seen as a social projection of 'Good', which is found wanting. By introducing disfunction into it, people, mostly bad would-be artists, often miss there intention - the ideal itself remains unscathed, and society can be seen as left condemned for not having really lived up to that ideal. When what is normally repressed from that image is introduced, when blacks or gays or whatever else is brought in and that fifties nuclear family image fails to cope with it - showing itself bigoted and small-minded, once again it isn't condemned for the order and stability promised, instead the order is shown to have been founded on disorder, the violence excluded from the image is not really dispelled, but just hidden away in ghettoes and foreign sweatshops. The safety and security on offer will only be Good when they have been made available to everyone. Nietzsche says something very similar when he talks about 'the last man', when he claims that society's aim is to make the individual non-threatening and what creates danger is defined as Evil - his mistrust of 'altruism' and 'selflessness' comes from precisely this. People generally don't define Good and Evil, they think of the words in terms of images and associations. You may say the image of Good will a person who will do anything to help others, even at his own expense and that Evil is doing anything to hurt others, and I wouldn't disagree... when I talk about Blanchot's Lautreamont I'll actual come closer to that sort of definition in dealing with someone who sides with Evil - but generally when someone gets the urge to say 'hail Satan' or 'up with Evil' or anything of the like, the motivation is a provocation of the bland, safe and orderly and a yearning for the dangerous and disordely. When people watch painfully gory movies or get fascinated with books about serial killers, it is because the nearness of death and all that society banishes provides a necessary testing of the limits of our own mortality. The most cutting thing Hannah Arendt could say about the Nazis was that their evil was banal - which totally robs it of the thrill and excitement Evil is supposed to have.

Another Response Post

It's shocking how rarely I do the things I intend to - even when there really is enough time and no worldly reason not to. When you tell yourself over and over that this time you will be more disciplined and stick with your work and you always fall through - does that mean the discipline simply isn't there and no decision you make can change that? The answer would seem to be yes, but I have to live in hope that it isn't. All this to say the entries I planned to make last weekend and didn't fit in with a number of more important responsibilities I've been neglecting. There are plenty of things I hope to write here in the next few days simply because they'll naturally accompany things I"m doing otherwise (plus I would kind of like to make an extra entry as aside on Medea and maybe Aristotles poetics which I worked with a certain amount over the past week, even though those are subjects I don't really have to continue thinking about now)
I don't know what you mean when you say the dichotomy between inspiration and craft is bogus. That the dichotomy has been made and has been taken up as an important topic in various times and places, especially during the renaissance is indisputable and there is clearly plenty to be said about it. If you mean that the two things can't really be separated, that in anything worthwhile one isn't separate from the other - I agree and I think I said as much in my last post. It doesn't amount to much more than saying that behind every worthwhile product of intellectual labor is something innate and something acquired, or to be more accurate, there's part of the creative process that you do have control of and part that you don't have control of - it's as logically evident as talking about nature and nurture - clearly who we are is determined in part by biology, who we are and are programmed to be when we pop out of the womb and partly the external circumstances of our lives and who our experiences make us - what other option could there be. If by saying the distinction is bogus you mean it isn't worth talking about, either because it is so evident or because not much definite can be said about it... I don't really agree. It isn't something I would want to take as a central topic for reflection - I don't find it interesting enough for that, but sometimes stating simple things as clearly as possible can be helpful in not getting muddled when you talk about things that are less obvious - and I do think that interesting things can come out when the dichotomy is looked at more closely and breaks down into other less obvious things. Do we really have no control over inspiration? Is it entirely innate, and innate in what way? What is it that is accessed? I think it is obvious why those questions present themselves forcefully to so many people - especially artists who want to have a greater deal of control over their own inspiration - want to be able to provoke it, fuel it, make it last and increase its intensity. It IS kind of interesting to look at what makes a person a great writer/ thinker/ actor whatever, and to what extent that ties in with other aspects of a personality and the way a life is lived. For myself I think I kind of fetishize craft, because I'm lazy, and want to stop being lazy. It is a dream of being rigorous and disciplined and of having control of the things that can be learned and controlled. It's funny - growing up, I always had a thing for the figure of the scholar or the monk, cloistered away from the world and selflessly devoted to some object of study or other - the word 'archive' gives me a little thrill, though I don't actually have the patience to spend all that much time digging through archives. We are attracted by our opposites- some of us at any rate... In Yeats' little scheme of things - the opposite phase of the moon.
As to Plato and Phaedrus - after I write what I'm about to write, I'll have to go back and double check what exactly you wrote, to see that this response makes sense. When condemning sophistry, Plato writes that a sailor will speak better about sailing than a poet whose characters sail to war, that a doctor will speak better about medicine than a poet whose characters are wounded and needing mending, trying to say it is knowledge of the contents of a speech rather than the craft of making a speech that should be of preeminent concern... I'm just trying to put this together with what you said. To some extent division of labor seems to me more relevant than literacy when talking about whether or not a poem or something of the sort can be used as a repository of public knowledge. In a culture where different members of a society need to be competent in the same things, that sort of transmission seems natural enough to me - or on subjects that are of concern to everyone, such as morality, religion, politics and history. For specialized skills that sort of transmission makes no sense. Anything of sufficient length and specificity to be of use to a specialized trade would be too long and uninteresting for other members of society to want in the middle of their epic poems. Maybe cobblers had rhyming pneumonic devises that only spread among cobblers, and so forth, but would those have been heard or known by the general public. I recognize that we are talking about the fact that Plato would be living at the time when this system would have clearly outlived its usefulness and been dying off - and it is impossible to ignore how often he has Socrates quoting poets to aid him in serious discussion, and all of this argues for the idea that this was by no means unusual and that it must have been normal to consult homer on various topics - the fact that doing so no longer made much sense for most practical subjects is part of what the argument seems to me to be... and this would mean that in attacking poets as authorities, in a sense Plato's Socrates would be taking the side or reading and writing AGAINST oral transmission. Rhyme and repetition are the opposite of dialogue. Words must be fixed in their places for a rhyme to work, for meter to persist. Nothing an be changed. Authority would be harder to shake and challenged when everyone knows something by heart. Perhaps you are right in saying that a written text cannot stand up and defend itself - but it can be analyzed and altered, and opens itself up to closer scrutiny than the long-winded speeches that Plato wants to pin on Gorgias and his ilk. The question and answer practiced by Socrates seems to invite the slow examination of each line of something, which I can more easily associate with writing, than acting on general impression, on the sort of emotional signals that can be given in the performance of a speech regardless of it's contents (if you read out the dictionary as though it were an impassioned speech, people would recognize what you were doing with out having to be told - showing just how much of public speaking relies on something other than analytical thought). Can a mathematical proof stand up and defend itself? Some would say it carries its own defense around with it. These are just my first thoughts reading what you wrote...

Plato and literacy

So the only other post I think I'll find time for this evening has to do with Plato, a dear friend of yours. For a reading group, I read the Phaedrus last week, and intended to read Derrida's essay on the Phaedrus as well but then ran out of time. What I read of it made it seem to me more accessible than anything else of Derrida's I've read. I think I'll give it another go in the spring when I try to write a thesis chapter on Derrida.

So instead of having lots of deep thoughts about speech and writing from my new reading of Derrida, I wound up being reminded of other thoughts I'd come across a few years ago, in Eric A. Havelock's Preface to Plato. Do you know it? Essentially, it's a book-length argument to the effect that Plato's banishment of the poets from his Republic is the response of a literate culture trying to move beyond the confines of orality. Let me explain.

Literacy only became widespread in the Greek world toward the end of the 5th century (says Havelock--I certainly don't have the historical knowledge to question this claim), so that, even though there were written texts long before then, they played only a marginal role in what was still a predominantly oral culture. An oral culture can only preserve of itself what its members can memorize. As a result, memorization was a crucial skill in the transmission of culture (Havelock argues that the muses are better understood as spirits of memorization than of inspiration), and what was to be transmitted needed to be easily memorized. Two tricks that make for easy memorization are rhythm and emotional salience. Thus, a great deal of culture is preserved orally in the form of epic poems. Havelock calls the Homeric epics an "encyclopedia" of Greek knowledge, remarking on how Homer slips in tips about how to steer a ship, how to govern a state, how to ride a horse, and everything in between, all in the form of an engaging narrative told rhythmically, so that people would remember it easily. He also notes that it's easiest to memorize something when you don't distance yourself from it but engage with it emotionally. The mimesis of the poets that Plato disparages is their way of fully becoming the narrative that they recount in order not to forget it.

Along with widespread literacy comes a number of changes in the very nature of thought. No longer relying on emotional identification in order to memorize texts, people can step back from them and think about them, analyze them. Socrates' dialectic consists heavily of him asking his interlocutors to think about what they've just said, interrupting the flow that would be necessary for the repetition of familiar truisms. A number of other consequences follow from literacy's freeing of the mind from the act of memorization. One is that it makes possible a great deal more abstract and systematic thinking. Another is that it separates the subject from the things it thinks about, creating a notion of a self distinct from the world that it perceives.

In essence, Havelock argues, Plato's major cultural contribution is that he was the first to come squarely to grips with the fact that literacy had ushered in a new way of thinking, and that, for it to flourish, it would have to vanquish the old way. Read from our modern perspective, Plato's banishment of the poets can seem bizarre, but in the context of 4th century Athens, Havelock claims, we should see it as an attempt to establish philosophy and rational thought as the only game in town.

I don't have enough background in classical scholarship to find Havelock's argument unconvincing. For my own part, I find it fascinating. Though it does raise a couple of questions about the relationship between orality and literacy in Plato. In the context of the Phaedrus, the obvious one is how we explain the valuation of speech over writing. My best guess is that Plato's interested in establishing individual rational reflection as superior to a mythical group-think based on passing on established truths, and he thinks that kind of rational engagement requires active interlocutors. His criticism of writing is that it can't speak up for itself and defend itself: it can't engage in the dialectic necessary for rational thought. For this point to stand, it's important to note that the importance of literacy for Plato isn't based on the material importance of written texts, but rather the kind of thinking that written texts make available to us. That kind of thinking can be exhibited in oral discussion, as long as that discussion takes place between literate men.

I believe there's also some stuff in Havelock's work that I've not read about Plato's concern regarding the undifferentiated diffusion of writing and its attendant dangers, so maybe I shouldn't speculate what Havelock would say about the writing/speech thing in Phaedrus since I've not read what Havelock has said on the topic.

This, though, raised another question for me: what if Socrates never wrote anything because he himself was illiterate? Unlike Plato, he didn't come from aristocratic stock, so it seems entirely plausible that he couldn't read or write. And speaking of literacy, I wonder if calling the legendary poet Homer blind was a way of signifying his illiteracy? A blind man can't read or write, after all.

inspiration vs. craft

There are I think four separate posts I feel I now owe you. I'm not sure how many I'll get around to writing. I do have a spare hour at the moment, so we'll see how much I manage to churn out. First I want to say a couple short things in response to the two posts you've written since I last wrote. For the record, in case I don't get around to any or all of them, the other three things I wanted to write on were Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato; a paper my supervisor wrote, and in particular my objection to a certain way of reading philosophy's place in intellectual life; and some reflections on the declining prospects for anyone who wants to make a living off their wits.

But first, just two short things about your two posts. The first is that I think really this contrast between inspiration and craft is bogus to start with. As you rightly point out, there's a great deal of craft and discipline in the creative output of improvisers, and the same goes for Breton, Kerouac, Rilke, Nietzsche, Coleridge, or anyone else who's ever claimed to put pen to paper in a burst of spontaneity. I think it helps here to draw an analogy to sport. On one hand, virtuosity in any sport relies on--exemplifies, even--a spontaneity and a creativity that delights us by moving faster than the speed of thought. On the other hand, this virtuosity is only possible through intense and rigorous training. No one claims that everyone has a magnificent end-to-end run culminating in a magnificent slam dunk in them, waiting to get out if only they can shed their inhibitions. Why should we make an equivalent claim about writing?

I suppose the main difference is that you can revise writing and you can't revise your moments of sporting genius. But even revision, if it's going to make any improvements, has to be inspired. You have to be "in the zone" or else you're not going to see the changes that can turn your lacklustre prose into something beautiful.

The second thing I wanted to say was really more a question about evil as you discuss it with regard to Blanchot and Bataille and that lot. You talk about them identifying good with bourgeois values and evil with spontaneity of a sort. How would you characterize this characterization of evil? For instance, it's clearly not meant as a dictionary definition, or some description of how we use these terms (who would call a saint "evil"?). Is it meant to be prescriptive, telling us how we ought to use the word? That sounds a little odd too. Or is it a metaphysically tinged use, relying on the assumption that with the word "evil," we pick out a metaphysically real category, and that most people who use the term (in its traditional sense) are mistaken about the nature of that category, and their redescription of evil is meant to give a more accurate account of a cateogry that others are misdescribing? Or is it something else?

Bataille 2 (approaching Sade)

I shouldn’t make promises about what I’ll write or when I’ll write it, since I’m so incredibly bad at keeping such promises. I would be too ashamed to admit how I’ve spent most of the past week – suffice to say, very little of it went to reading or writing. My lapses of discipline become more and more frequent and last longer and longer. I keep hoping that this time I’ll recover my discipline and my will will hold, but perhaps I’m an inherently weak willed creature. Well, nothing for it but to write what I can and when I can. I’m going to use this entry to start getting thoughts on Sade in order for a paper I have to write – was supposed to finish months ago… actually one of two papers on Blanchot, though I’m bringing Bataille into this one (and it’s the other one that makes the project sort of unpalatable and keeps getting me desperate to procrastinate). Anyway… I wrote a little on the first two essays in ‘literature and evil’, and introduced some of the main dichotomies – present verse future, self-indulgence verse discipline, etc. There are long passages in Bataille that seems so concisely and intelligently formulated that there seems to be little or no point in writing about it – it can’t be paraphrased without some loss – everything is equally important, nothing is repeated and the economy of language is admirable. It already is analysis and doesn’t need to be analyzed and at times it seems so evidently elegant, simple and true that I couldn’t possibly take issue with it (at times and in passages). I mentioned that he associates love and death. For Blanchot two general human imperatives often come into conflict – the desire to extend life and the desire to make it more intense. He claims that that making life more intense does not necessarily oppose lengthening it, though it can’t be done without an element of danger. For him the safe, the practical and the orderly (which he generally seems to equate with the Good – no discussions of selflessness or sainthood here. These apologists of evil, especially in that generation explicitly or implicitly make the Good the same as the Bourgeois [an admittedly vague concept itself] and want to claim saints in the same category as artists and madmen. They are excessive, and therefore, in a sense, evil. They seem, though Bataille doesn’t discuss them, on the side of intensity rather moderation). The social order, in trying to create longevity equally opposes death and the individual moment. People who try to explain humor and laughter always make asses of themselves – Bataille sees them as a toying with destruction in order to make light of them, master or withdraw from them, temporarily take away their sting (I think Bergson writes something like that as well – I forget his theory). This is clearly applicable, if at all, only to very specific instances of humor and totally unsatisfying. Likewise, Bataille talks somewhat unconvincingly about human sacrifices. He cites the theory that the purpose of a sacrifice is to bind a society together (he doesn’t name specific people who hold or defend this theory, but I think I remember Durkheim’s theory of religion being along these lines – in a religion what is always worshipped, in a sense, is the community… sacred fear is partly fear of falling outside the collective which gives the individual strength, meaning and protection. The more extreme the collective experience – the tighter the bonds created – group fear and collective enemies create cohesion, as I suppose, would extraordinary collective accomplishments). For Bataille cohesion created by human sacrifice would be an after effect rather than the purpose. The purpose would be to test the limits of endurance (he points out that some people had to sacrifice their own children – think of Iphigenia). The greatest counter to death is to experience it, or as the French say, to ‘live it’. I don’t think Bataille ever uses the term catharsis, but he does mention the theater as an ancestor of the human sacrifice. Human life being limited, the problem of evil for Bataille consists of brushing up against, testing and crossing the limits. It is a desire for the impossible. Which still doesn’t bring me to Sade or Blanchot…

Response

I have done little reading or anything else this week… I always feel a little uncomfortable when you respond to things I’ve said involving Proust, because he’s often implicated in the various supplements, interpretations and tangents I’ve hung on to him before he got to you. I think intensity of thought and experience was more central to him than time – true intensity only came about in solitude. That said, time does interest me, as does a goal of perfection. I realize that live performance is all about moment and experience, that a live performance is not supposed to stand as a monument – it is moving rather than static, and it makes sense to say that in an experience like that is, in a sense, lived rather than examined ‘perfection’ seems like a less relevant concept. Still… (and I’ll digress before saying what I was about to say, with aside about perfection, and our blog which is conceived of as a conversation, where I write down ideas I would usually never write down in such a half-baked form, where amidst all sorts of nonsense come things that are headed in the right direction but still wrong because of the formulation, because they seeds of ideas and unprocessed observations that haven’t really been checked or analyzed. This blog is a rejection of perfection for the sake of exchange. If we each waited until we had something polished and convincing to send, we wouldn’t get nearly as much insight into each other’s thought development as I think and hope we will this way. The downside is that I do already often feel embarrassed about what I’ve written, am writing or even am about to write – I’ll have to stop talking about that though… and just come back to stuff like my comment on Plato which I feel have to be lifted out of the half-idiot state they’re now in)… I think in talking about time and improvisation, you are also party touching on the difference between craft and inspiration – which is not to say that there is no craft in live performance and in improvisation, quite the contrary, but when people praise immediacy, movement and unreflected creation in art, there usually is some lingering background thought of the divine breath entering the body, of some sacred space being tapped and our highest selves being released. I think of renaissance debates on the relative merits of ‘nature’, meaning talent, and ‘art’ or artifice, meaning work and carefully acquired skill. I think of surrealist automatic writing, and Breton being ashamed of his initial desire to correct or polish lines in ‘magnetic fields’, which sort of went against the point of the experiment, and I think of Jack Kerouac claiming that he taped countless sheets of paper together so that while writing ‘On the Road’ in a mad continuous fit he wouldn’t have to pause to change sheets in the typewriter (did he claim to have written it in a day or something like that?). This is linked in too many people’s minds far too often to things like altered states, drugs and so forth, and sometimes a belief that brilliance is all in the unconscious and can express itself without thought. Of course there is such a thing as talent, of course over-analyzing what you are writing often ruins it, makes it contrived and unnatural, and of course when you are in the middle of creating something worthwhile often, though not always, you do feel almost like you are on things, what you are working on starts taking form and you don’t feel that it is entirely of your own doing, it can seem necessary, natural – but still, I have an almost protestant devotion to the idea of craft, of work, of revision. I think this is in part because I put too much stock in romantic notions of genius when I was very young, and not believing that there was such a thing as craft in writing kept me from actively learning it when it would have come quickest and easiest – and when I didn’t have other responsibilities to distract me from it. In performance the hard work of the craft comes through repetition – drilling into yourself gestures, ideas and structures that you can always fall back on, and also cultivating a certain style and rhythm of thought. Repetition, like revision is a circling back, revisiting, and each revisiting leads to refinement towards impossible and unreachable perfection – which is a necessary thought even if its realization is an absurd thought, as undesirable as it is impossible. Though mystical inspiration would seem to be more closely linked to speed or the moment and humble craft to taking time and proceeding with care – an ideal of perfection is linked to them both and never attained by either. I’m not going to talk about perfection just yet – it will involve another equally long tangent and there is something else I planned to write about…

But now that I’ve already composed something so long, I don’t think I’m going to start writing about Sade just now as I planned to. I’ll do that tomorrow and then maybe perfection or Plato on the weekend.

improvisation vs. permanence

I've not really read much this week, as I'm trying to finish a paper instead, and I haven't finished the paper either, so I don't have much to say on that front. But I thought I should make a few brief remarks before the week catches me in its whirlwind.

It seems the theme connecting Proust to your discussion of Socrates here are the circumstances for creation, and their relation to conversation. One point of comparison that leaped to mind was improvisation in theatre, which requires spontaneity and also a group, much like conversation. And like a Socratic dialogue, it also needs strict rules in order to function. Unlike a Socratic dialogue, fruitful improvisation relies on a back-and-forth between all the players, rather than having one dominant player who directs all the proceedings. Improv takes off when no one person assumes control over the creation, so that all participants surrender themselves to the possibility that things will spin off in a direction they didn't anticipate, while all assume responsibility for making that direction as interesting as possible. One of the things that's always fascinated me about improvisation is that it seems to me to be creativity in its purest form. Giving people time to think things through might give greater polish to what they come out with, but it also allows for tremendous self-censorship. What the great gurus of improvisation, like Keith Johnstone, train in their performers is the graceful art of letting go of that intellection and self-censorship so that gifted improvisers can surprise even themselves with what comes out of their mouths, but they have a strong enough instinct for cooperative storytelling that even the unexpected contributes productively to the story being told.

One reason I think improvisation brings people closer to the act of creation than most things is that it removes the element of thought. That might sound odd. But I think too much reflection can be a great hindrance to creativity. From the ancients to today, people talk about inspiration, about the muses, about spirits entering and moving them, and so on. There's a sense that true creativity is a gift that comes from without rather than a talent one extracts from within. Being a great artist isn't simply a matter of being talented, but also being open to that inspiration. What I envy in improvisers is their innocent capacity to be open to that inspiration. To use a word that's sadly fallen from common English usage, they're unsoulclogged.

That said, I do think that getting ideas straight does involve a lot of thought on one's own time. Rumination can be as much hindrance as help, and I think the history of philosophy bears all too much of the evidence of how abstract thinking can lead us astray. But I find, for instance, that the Oxford tutorial system relies very heavily on the cut-and-thrust of quick-witted debate, which can often be a helpful way of mooting ideas, but I far too often wish people could give me a day before I get back to them. I'm no Socrates.

On the side of taking your time is the dream of perfection. My brother, who's quite a chess wizard, plays a lot of correspondence chess, partly for lack of good opponents nearby, and partly because he finds the form fascinating. In tournament chess, you'll have less than a couple of hours to complete all your moves. In correspondence chess, you can take a week or two over each move. The result is that the best chess players could presumably play much closer to a perfect game by correspondence than they could in tournament. In a similar vein, Glenn Gould gave up giving concerts after a while and devoted himself to studio recording in the hope of capturing a performance that was closer to perfection than any live performance.

Part of the beauty of improvisation, to my mind, is that it rejects the idea of perfection altogether. What they're giving us isn't a spontaneous idea that could be improved through greater refinement. What makes what they give us worthwhile in the first place is its spontaneity. You find this mentality much more frequently in eastern traditions, I think. The sand mandala, for instance, is destroyed as soon as it's completed. I suppose that's in keeping with a spiritual tradition that takes "this, too, shall pass" as one of its fundamental tenets. I wonder to what extent our obsession with permanence and perfection and our resistance to spontaneity is related to our culture's monotheism?

Protagoras

Protagoras

I had insomnia last night, and today I was a zombie… I read about two thirds of the Protagoras and nothing else, but I wanted to write a little all the same. You asked who Proust was writing for if not for others… there’s a Derrida text I want to revisit and use to address that question – on the nature of writing as something always addressed to posterity – something on fixity of form and an awareness of death – words coming from beyond the grave even when the writer is alive. Proust never really addressed the subject one way or another… his contentions were about how real thought functioned, and he found it incompatible with society. When you say he had no right to speak for everyone, you have to understand he wasn’t describing a personality. For him when writing, reading or thinking the outside world vanishes. The sort of interiority required for creation abolishes time and does not allow attention to be divided and turned towards people or objects. There are of course contradictions – objects of contemplation come from the outside, experience must precede thought, and I never claimed to believe or support Proust on the relative value of conversing, but his ideas are less problaematic than you make them out to be. There are lots of things I’d like to get around to talking about from the comments you made, but my eyes are heavy and my memory is foggy, so I’ll talk about Plato and be done with it.

I have said that in Platonic dialogues Socrates generally does not have a genuine back and forth with his interlocutor… h steers the conversation ably and seems to know exactly where he is heading – he gives the person he is talking to opportunities to take back things they have said, to start again and to elaborate. It does often seem that because he knows where he is going, and because he is so practiced on the subjects that interest him, a certain amount of improvisation is not difficult. The dialogues in which the second person largely just punctuates Socrates’ argument with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are the clearest cases in which it doesn’t matter at all who Socrates is speaking to. In the Gorgias you get the sense that Socrates’ insistence that the other person keep their responses short is justified – he is obliged to guard against long-winded speeches that change the subject, give very little solid content and in no way really address the questions initially asked. In Protagorus you get the sense that insistence on short responses can be a bar to nuance – the first demand that answers be kept short comes after a straightforward claim on the part of Protagoras that good is relational – that the same thing can be good or bad depending on circumstance – Protagoras is bothered both by Socrates readiness to conflate what seem to him essentially different concepts and makes no serious attempt to seek out what distinctions could theoretically be made between, for example, temperance, justice and wisdom, or what relation could exist between the three apart from absolute identity. How would it affect the language if on e word, say ‘wise’ were kept while temperate, just and good were dismissed as synonymous and therefore superfluous? Some of this goes back to the distinction between thought and conversation – ideas being developed alone and ideas being developed socially – the pace is different in the second case. There is less room for rumination and careful consideration… it would be nice to occasionally have dialogues where Socrates’ partner came back a day after the first dialogue and said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and the problem I have with the analogy you made there is…” Also think of the passage in the Gorgias where Socrates gets his conversation partner (Callicles, maybe?) to take over asking questions for a while, and almost immediately Socrates reproaches him for not asking the right sort of questions – everything always has to be done his way, according to his rules, which clearly puts everyone else at a disadvantage, and means Socrates isn’t challenged as much as he ought to be. I realize characters resurface (soon I want to look at the Phaedrus and figure out whether Phaedrus carries something he got from Socrates in the first dialogue over into the Symposium – does he in any way respond to Socrates or show he has an inkling of what to expect later in the dialogue?), I also realize that Socrates’ little circle is constantly continuing their dialogues and ideas are getting revisited and refined, but so many of the dialogues feel a bit like chess matches – self-contained contests with a clear winner. In fact, Socrates sometimes comes across a bit like a pool shark, luring an unsuspecting partner in, pleading his ignorance and innocence, making sure that they commit to the conversation before he shows his absolutely mastery in the exchange.

The particularity of proper names

As for my own reading, I read two unrelated things this last week that seemed to share a fair bit in common. I'll see if I can flesh that out.

The first was a paper by Cora Diamond dealing with Wittgenstein's Lectures on Religious Belief. I find Diamond frustrating, because she's brilliant, insightful, and sometimes immaculately clear, but then sometimes seems to decide not to bother explaining what seems to me to be the crucial point. But that's neither here nor there.

In the paper, she talks (among other things) about a view she ascribes to Franz Rosenzweig, Kornelius Miskotte, Helmut Gollwitzer, and in a less academic way, Flannery O'Connor. This is a view opposed to the position that any mature thinker has outgrown an anthropomorphic conception of God, a position best exemplified by Norman Kemp Smith, who refers to God as "the Divine" in order to de-anthropomorphize divinity. These theologians that interest Diamond counter this position by insisting on the importance of God's having a name, and of His presence as not just an all-pervading divinity, but as being able to manifest itself in particular places at particular times in particular ways so that the Hebrews, for instance, could rightly talk about God's presence among their people as not just an instance of God's omnipresence.

This insistence that God have a name is closely tied to the particularity that proper names bestow: in calling my friend "Kevin," I associate him not just with a role or a set of qualities, but with his particular self, and if Kevin were to die, it would be no comfort if I were to befriend someone else with similar qualities because that someone else, no matter how similar to Kevin, wouldn't be the particular person that Kevin was.

One thing, Diamond claims, that the particularity of a name makes possible is that the named person can change us at the level of our concepts. She uses the example of George Eliot, who was famously ugly. If one got to know Eliot, saw her lively wit in conversation or read her books, one would come to see her as beautiful, and knowing this particular person as beautiful, despite her ostensibly ugly appearance, would have the effect of shifting our conception of beauty. Similarly, she claims, the idea that God has a name--has particularity--makes it so that God is not simply the word we associate with our concept of divinity, but that witnessing and contemplating God's actions--by considering the ways in which the Hebrew or Christian or whatever God manifests Himself to his people--actively shapes our conception of divinity. And, Rosenzweig and Miskotte claim, only by understanding God in terms of his actions can we understand what kind of responsiveness those actions call for in us.

The other thing I read, totally unrelated, and for unrelated reasons, was a short story by Peter Carey called "The Chance." It imagines a futuristic world in which a race of aliens called the Fastalogians have come to earth and mingled with us. Like the Americans before them, what they bring to the people that they come to dominate is superior technology, canny business acumen, and the ability to promise a better life. Their great product--or swindle--is called the Genetic Lottery, known colloquially as The Chance. For several thousand dollars, you can take a Chance, where your body and face are randomly changed, so that you may come out looking older or younger, prettier or uglier, but with most of your memories and the like intact.

The Chance has a devastating impact on the unnamed society our narrator lives in, though we're only given hints about just how it plays itself out. It's clear enough, though, that The Chance is like opium in China, becoming a universally addictive drug that becomes the most important thing in people's lives. People cease to take any interest in their present role, and are constantly saving for a Change that will thrust them into a new life. We get a sense of a crumbling city, where institutions are left to rot because everyone's too caught up in pursuing their next Chance and aren't connected to the present. (I'm doing a terrible job of relating this story).

Our narrator--a middle-aged man who's unable to raise the money for his next Chance because he spends all his meagre salary on booze to numb the pain of his downcast position--falls in with a beautiful young woman from a well-off family, who he can tell has never taken a Chance because of the comfort and ease with which she inhabits her body. Soon after they become lovers, he learns that she's a Hup, part of a revolutionary organization that wants to overthrow and kick out the Fastalogians, and that is disgusted with bourgeois ideals of beauty. Like senior members of the Hups, Carla wants to take a Chance as soon as she can so that she can make herself ugly and rebel against the societal standards that judge her beautiful. Our narrator is horrified at the thought, and we follow their relationship in the months and weeks leading up to her Chance, as he tries to persuade her to stay the way she is. I find the ending heartbreaking; I don't want to ruin it.

One of the things that the story captured quite well for me was this notion of particularity, this time coming not with a name but with a face and physiognomy. The cliché that beauty is only skin deep fails to appreciate just how much of our expressiveness is uniquely our own, and that cliché in a way does violence against our particularity in insisting that a different physiognomy could just as well express the same person. The Hup mentality, with a few alterations, could be the mentality of Norman Kemp Smith, the view that the essential thing--about people, about God, about life--lies in concepts, abstractions, universals. What I find interesting about Carey's story, as well as the theologians Diamond discusses, is the fierce insistence upon particularity, however superficial or superstitious it may seem.

And like Diamond's example of Eliot's particularity being able not just to instantiate a pre-conceived concept of beauty, but to effect a shift in that concept, what I find moving about the story is that the two main characters effect a shift in one another's concept of what love is, so that what's threatened by Carla's intention to take a Chance is the love that they've discovered by sharing in one another's particularity.

I think there's a lot more to be said about particularity, though I think I've typed enough for now, and I'm not sure what more I might say. One thing to remark upon in closing is a thought a professor articulated for me some years ago, that only language, through the use of proper names, opens up a world of particulars for us. Here he distinguishes between particularity and specificity. I can hone in on identifying Kevin with greater or lesser degrees of specificity by picking out various qualities that attach to him--American, student of French literature, frequently unshaven, etc.--and while sufficient specificity may pick him out uniquely, that uniqueness is merely contingent, as it relies on the fact that it just so happens that no one else shares just that set of properties. The particularity that proper names gives us allows for an entirely different way of picking out uniqueness.

Some responses

So, here’s my first post. You seem to lament that yours wasn’t as good as you’d hoped. I think that’s a good thing. If you’d set the bar too high, both of us would have been afraid to jump in. Without trying to, I expect my first contribution might also have that dubious virtue.

I should hasten to add that I found both your posts quite stimulating, as you’ll infer from the fact that I find a lot in them to respond to. What I’ll do is write two separate posts, one responding to the two you’ve put up so far, and a second one reflecting on a couple of readings I’ve done recently. I figure it makes for more interesting blogging not to use the comments to respond to a post unless the response really is just a few sentences. Anything longer, I think, belongs on the main page.

I share your sentiment about lectures, conferences, and even seminars. I try to attend these things occasionally, because I do find that I’ll get things out of them that I wouldn’t get otherwise, but little enough that I try to minimize the time I spend on them. What I find I get that’s of most benefit is the provocation of something that comes from something entirely external to me: I’ll encounter ideas and forms of reasoning that never would have come to me on my own because I didn’t start or frame the conversation even to the extent that I do when I’m selecting what books to read. It’s a good learning experience to watch intelligent people thinking, especially if they’re quite unlike me.

On the flip side, I have great trouble participating. I think I go slower than most people. In conversation, I can slow things down and get my interlocutor to go at the pace that I need to follow him or her. But even in seminars, I usually timidly assume that the whole seminar shouldn’t slow down for my sake, so I just follow along, pick up as much as I can, and rarely feel on the ball enough to make a contribution of my own.

So one thing I do like about conversation with intimates is that I cease to be a spectator and can actually be carried along in someone’s train of thought. It’s like the difference between watching a car race and sitting in the passenger seat, perhaps even making suggestions and giving directions, and steering every once in a while.

On the topic of lectures, I’m reminded of a remark by Popper, explaining why he chose to use his invitation to speak at the Wittgenstein-dominated Moral Science Club to launch an attack on the Club’s chairman. The one thing, he said, that a lecture can do that a written article can’t, is spark debate, and so he aims to choose the most provocative topics when he gives talks.

I was interested to read about Proust’s disdain for conversation (something you’ve mentioned before), because it seems like conversation is so universally praised by thinkers of all stripes. I’m attracted to people who develop and defend the thought that goes against conventional wisdom, but I’m at least a bit sceptical of Proust’s claim. The scepticism comes from the fact that all language, and not just conversation, is a public phenomenon: we learn language from others, we use language to speak to others, and our words have meanings only to the extent that we can use them to make sense to others. Maybe that puts it a bit too strongly, but only a bit too strongly, I think. When Proust writes, who’s he writing for? The same people he can’t share his private self with in conversation? If anything, the public that buys his books is more of a stranger, less intimate, than those he speaks with. The self that writes has less of a sense of its audience, and so presumably has to find a language that’s less intimate than the language that friends share. Maybe the distance of not having to face your interlocutors allows for greater honesty? At any rate, Proust was clearly influenced by reading books, and wrote them himself, so perhaps the most he should say is that the conversations he prefers are the ones where he gets to control the pace of the conversation, where he never gets interrupted, and where his interlocutor will continue speaking until he chooses to intervene.

On a related note, one of my pet peeves is where thinkers (and this is true of the cleverest) generalize about human experience when really they’re just speaking of their own experience. At least the way you transcribed him, Proust says not just that he becomes more superficial, lazy, etc., in conversation, but that people in general do. How should he know? Maybe he feels that way. What if someone else says that all his best thoughts come from dialogue with others: does Proust really have any basis to claim that this person is lying, or deceived, or simply shallow?

All that said, I think I’m probably assuming too much about Proust, especially since I’m not reading him at first hand. I thought what you said about Socrates was really interesting, that though we often take the dialogues as the prime example of how thought evolves through conversations, Socrates’ thought doesn’t seem to be particularly shaped or shifted by his interlocutors. The one counter-example you gave, that of Diotima, comes as a story Socrates tells of his youth. We don’t see the Socrates of the dialogues being shaken in his views at all.

I was also charmed by the polar bear story. It raises some interesting questions about what we take for granted and what we deem to require evidence. It reminds me of a passage in the Philosophical Investigations, section 52: “If I am inclined to suppose that a mouse has come into being by spontaneous generation out of grey rags and dust, I shall do well to examine those rags very closely to see how a mouse may have hidden in them, how it may have got there and so on. But if I am convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these things, then this investigation will perhaps be superfluous. But first we must learn to understand what it is that opposes such an examination of details in philosophy.”

Gosh, and those are just responses to your first post. Regarding the second, I imagine there’s a fascinating history to be written (or perhaps it’s already been written?) on the ways in which different people at different times have conceived of childhood. Bataille’s association of childhood with evil seems to me to be one side of a dichotomy, the other of which associates childhood with innocence. I think what both of these views pick up on is the sense that children haven’t fully been initiated into our moral world, they don’t yet have a sense of responsibility, which makes them chaotic and unpredictable, but also not subject to the same sanctions as adults.

I was also interested in your suggestion that evil is something transgressive but necessary, like the spooks at Hallowe’en (I know Bakhtin has things to say about this that I haven’t read). Hopefully by summer I’ll be working out in more detail what I want to say about play in my thesis, but I think it has a lot to do with just this: play seems to require a space in which the ordinary rules of conduct are suspended, and this space is both necessary for those ordinary rules to exist, but also has to be bounded in space and time.

Bataille

Of what I wrote in my last entry, the thing I feel the most foolish about is the claim that in his dialogues, Plato has Socrates reacting to important thinkers or bodies of thought more as books than as people (despite their personification in dialogue partners)… I don’t know if there’s any truth to that. For the comment to have any value I would have to explain what I mean by that… and to do that would or will take time and I’ll have to go back and look over relevant dialogues. I wanted to read the Protagorus today, but I didn’t have time. Anyway,
Of the books I spent some time with today, the one I’ll make some notes on is Georges Bataille’s ‘la literature et le mal’ (literature and evil – should that require translation). The book makes the claim that literature is in its essence intimately linked to Evil – it is basically an expression of Evil (he also links it to childhood, implying at the outset that there is a close connection between Evil and childhood as well). For the claim to make any sense, Bataille has to define Evil, which he sets out to do using a series of authors almost as case studies – the book is clearly largely meant to counter Sartre (who he talks about most in the chapters on Baudelaire and Genet – each of whom Sartre had written books on), each chapter/ author introduces a slightly different definition of evil, distinct from, but not incompatible with the others, mostly expressed through various dichotomies (for example: good = work and privileging the future, while evil = idleness and privileging the present, which is the similar to saying good is gathering or saving while evil is expenditure and release, or creation verse destruction), gradually adding nuance to the term (also discussing the problematic attempt to ‘embrace’ Evil in writers in his chapters on Sade, Kafka and Proust – by embracing something, you generally are defining it as a sort of good – in order for a person to define what something as evil, he must have already embraced and taken to heart an opposing set of values against which it would be judged… an amoral individual will likely do things that others would define as evil, but they will not be evil to him and he will certainly not do them BECAUSE they are evil). In the final chapter on Genet, all of the previous thoughts on Evil sort of combine… the chapters are sketches, devoted more to advancing the reflection on Evil than trying to understanding the authors involved. I‘ve read the book in its entirety before, and I once left a copy on a plane by accident, but I’m going to have to reread it this week for something I’ll be writing. This evening I just reread the first chapter on Emily Bronte. Bataille begins by positing a connection between death and love or sexuality. The first definitions of good seem to be reason, and the conventions or order necessary for society to remain stable and coherent – evil seems to be on the side of passion and the freedom of childhood – not only is the connection between childhood and Evil clear, but it is also clear that Evil, which can never have an extremely clear definition, is not conceived of as bad, or undesirable- it is both transgressive and necessary. It belongs to the space that society officially excludes but must also make space for (in the same way we have days set aside, like New Years’ and Halloween, when you are actually supposed to get drunk, Thanksgiving when you are supposed to eat too much, and Christmas when you are supposed to spend to much – I realize I’m banalizing, but those examples seem close at hand). Evil is more or less the originary state from against which Good defines itself, but from which Good can never really separate (reason trying to assert itself against chance, order against chaos).

Symposium

It kind of goes against the whole point of this blog to think about what to put into it. This should be impromptu notes on whatever comes to hand - nonetheless, I've been planning to start this thing for a while, and I had various ideas about what would be discussed in the first post - lately I had been assuming it would be Nietzsche, probably 'the WIll to Power' - maybe a religious book, a book on religion, Tacitus, Suetonius, or some sort of pulp fiction. It just so happens that at the moment I'm obliged to read a book of essays on Plato's 'Symposium', which couldn't be more fitting. Ideally this blog should be the next best thing to the sort of drinking parties we can no longer have, now that all the authors here live in different countries. I rarely get much out of academic conferences. I generally find it much more productive to sit at home and read for myself than to sit and listen to lectures, maybe because I'm a bad listener, maybe because I'm slow and like to be able to linger over a sentence for a while until I'm sure I understand it (not that I don't occasionally breeze through a text without understanding much of anything)... but I also think that few people speak as well as they write, that conversations don't bring much in overloud groups and with monologues as opposed to dialogues, there's no real advantage to having a speaker physically present. In the university I rarely, is ever, find myself in a situation as intellectually stimulating and fruitful as sitting in a wine bar in Berlin 'til all hours with a few people I like and respect, whose reading habits and interests overlap with while differing considerably from mine.
Proust felt that friends and the institution of friendship were thoroughly worthless for intellectual development - you never think as intensively as when you are alone with book, pen and paper, or even just thoughts. A superficial self comes forward whenever you talk to others - you are always aware of the impression you are making, you always tailor your thoughts and words to the situation. You can never be as honest with others as you are with yourself, and in order to keep a conversation going you must formulate thoughts quickly - move from one thing to the next rather than ruminating over ideas, slowly crafting ideas. A private self is a completely different person from a public self - the former comes out on a page while the latter is the only one present in conversation, even with the closest of friends. Of course Proust had plenty of friends and no doubt vastly underestimated how much he learned from them - and not just in the ways he imagined. His narrator extracts many of his rules of existence discovering the inconstancy of others, the images that come out as one illusion after another about the people he knows is shattered. He also learns watching himself - seeing his own inconstancy, seeing the illusions and dreams he builds up around friends as well as lovers, the desire to connect on an impossible level - to know and possess other people, and he discovers it isn't possible. What he doesn't write about is being surprised and contradicted - being forced to add to or amend his own thoughts - coming across stray subjects and insights that he never would have come to on his own, having facile assumptions shown up and destroyed, consciously and intentionally by an intelligent friend... being given a useful book, or having an alien topic brought to life and made interesting. We are all lazy when we think in a vacuum - and while you, hopefully, bump against things that challenge you and change the direction of your thoughts in the books you read, sometimes you won't happen across the book you ought to be reading if no one is there to suggest it to you. Proust is, oddly enough, a platonist who has no faith in dialogue and nothing but contempt for philosophers (he believes that philosophers believe in their own philosophic good will, their disinterested love of truth, while he believes that a search for truth is always interested, that it is always driven by desire and meant to serve a purpose - an idea he probably took from Nietzsche, but which has its place in the Symposium as well - at least in my reading of the Symposium). Oddly enough, Plato isn't really all that great on dialogue either... apart from Diotima, what dialogue partner ever taught Socrates anything? When is Socrates ever not in control of a conversation - when is he genuinely surprised, thrown off or forced to change his ideas? Socrates can have no true friends because he has no equals... in a way he supports Proust's ideas in arguing against generic representatives of various schools of thought - each time dealing with a set of ideas he must have encountered in the past and ruminated on before each dialogue begins - granted it would probably be an unreadable and interminable dialogue if Plato had tried to present the whole long process of reading and thinking, giving the skepticism and enthusiasm that should go along with coming to fully understand a complex set of ideas, slowly adopting and adapting the best parts of them.

But I've very much lost my way, and started talking wishy-washy nonsense. I got too general in talking about Plato and Socrates, which, I must admit, I haven't yet really read enough to do (plus I disagree with a fair amount of what I just said. I didn't want to write an encomium of Friendship amongst intellectuals - nor do I wish to suggest that the only purpose of friends is to advance you in your thinking. This is first entry is all still just on the use of drinking parties - and the need for virtual drinking parties, where, not being able to all be physically preset, we have to settle for speaking in turns, barely less constrained than the characters in Plato's symposium.
At the rate I'm going, it would take me a lifetime to deliver any proper discussion of the Symposium - not having mentioned a single character, scene, or idea from the book yet - and I imagine I will write on it off and on for quite a while. I feel I've made a bad start and would have almost done better to do nothing more than record a couple of nice lines or statements from a book I was reading or write down an interesting factoid - for instance:
in two different sixteenth century books I read that polar bears are born little balls and the mothers form the babies by licking them into shape - fashioning arms and legs and heads, etc. I wonder how that idea arose and when it disappeared.
two sentence entries are fine. As are five page responses to two sentence entries. I hope this blog will be as varied as possible and often amended.