Journeys of the Mind

Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History runs to 698 pages, not counting introduction and index. Occasionally in the course of reading it, I wondered whether all those pages were needed. Yet I can't say where Brown would have cut.

I knew of Brown because of his first book, Augustine of Hippo. I finished Journeys of the Mind with the notion that I should find the revised edition of Augustine, which includes insights drawn from recently discovered letters of St. Augustine's, and should probably read two or three more of Brown's books. At least I should read The World of Late Antiquity, and Body and Society. And probably I should read the works of some of the other authors mentioned: the footnotes make for an intriguing bibliography, and a program of further reading, if only one had the tongues and the time.

As an autobiography, it is curious. One reads early and late of Brown's family, mother, father, aunts, and cousins. On the other hand, "my wife Pat" appears first on page 591 and thereafter only on page 631. We learn she wrote her dissertation on "the art and social setting of that most Venetian of Venetian painters, Vittorio Carpaccio", we learn the name of the book that resulted, and we learn that she received a tenure-track position in the Art History Department at Princeton. Comparable memoirs, it seems to me, have given spouses a bit more room.

Princeton University Press will bring out a paperback edition in late October for $28, about two-thirds the price of the hardback. (The date and price are for the US.) The book is not for everyone, but those with an interest in the history of late antiquity will likely find it of  interest. I might buy a copy or two as Christmas presents.

Webs

 There was mist, maybe a light drizzle, last night, and this morning the spider webs on shrubs showed it:

out front,

and a few blocks away.

Gluten Free and Vegan

A reminder from the dermatologist sent me to the store for some sunblock. I came away with a tube of SPF 70 sunscreen lotion. This morning, in going to put it on, I noticed that the tube states that the product is Gluten Free and Vegan, answering  a question I'd not have asked.

I can understand someone objecting to animal products for ethical reasons, or the products of some animals for religious reasons. The interest in a gluten free sun block I suppose derives from the notions some have that gluten can affect one through even brief contact of bread with the skin. I think this most improbable, but evidently you needn't travel far to find someone who holds the notion.

 

More MacIntyre

 This week I finished a first reading of Alasdair MacIntyre's Three Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Encyclopedia is the late 19th Century liberal consensus, as embodied in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Genealogy is Nietzche's and the Nietzcheans' project of subverting that consensus, unmasking its claims as expressions of the will to power, in The Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere. Tradition is preeminently Aquinas's synthesis of the Augustinian and Aristotelian/Averroist traditions in the 13th Century.

 The sub-subtitle of the book is "being Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1988." I found the book slow going: the sentences are long, and often punctuated more lightly than I am used to. I  wonder whether those who heard them, with the lecturer's spoken emphases and rhythms, would have followed them more readily. The prose is very clear, but to careful reading.

(I believe that the only other set of Gifford Lectures I have read are those that make up Whitehead's Process and Reality. Those made slow reading for very different reasons.)

 MacIntyre's prescription for the university is to make it a place of encouraged and lightly controlled confrontations, so that radically different understandings can confront each other rather than talking past each other as they now do. He does address the improbability of this:

.... The charge of utopianism, so it must appear, cannot be evaded.

This I am not disposed to deny but only if it is understood that the charge of utopianism, sometimes at least, has a very different import from that which is conventionally ascribed to it. Those most prone to accuse others of utopianism are generally those men and women of affairs who pride themselves upon their pragmatic realism, who look for immediate results, who want the relationship between present input and future output to be predictable and measurable,  and that is to say, a matter of the shorter, indeed the shortest run. They are the enemies of the incalculable, the skeptics of all expectations which outrun what they take to be hard evidence, the deliberately shortsighted who congratulate themselves upon the limits of their vision.

Who were their predecessors? They included the fourth-century magistrates of the disordered city which Plato described in Book VIII of the Republic, ....

Projects of academic reform have come and gone since 1988. None that I remember has had much effect, and none that I remember was in the direction that MacIntyre had in mind.

I will read the book again, but probably will re-read his Whose Justice? Which Rationality first.

MacIntyre died this May. The New York Times published an obituary. 

  

Reading Midgley, Again

 The Little Free Library at Midgley Corner yielded Man and Beast: The Roots of Human Nature some weeks back. I have by now read through it, and am grateful to have done so. Some of the book I had previously read in The Essential Mary Midgley, selections from various of her works. Most was new to me.

Broadly, the themes of Man and Beast are those of The Essential Mary Midgley. There is a great deal more about animal behavior: the mental abilities of primates, the family bonds of such as wolves and wild dogs. She quotes Kant, but also Konrad Lorenz and Jane Goodall, and others working in ethology, and also, with respect but with considerable reservations, Edward O. Wilson.

I have always liked books that suggest or compel more reading. I can tell from Man and Beast that I really should read Wilson, Lorenz, Goodall, and Bishop Butler. But I think that the others will have to wait on Butler, though for his sermons I will probably have to go to Alibris. They may also have to wait on Anthony Powell, since Midgley quotes from novels of his I haven't read.

Translated From the German

 Having just finished a book stated to have been translated from the German, I find myself with the question that occurred to me on page 4: from the German, into what?

For Adorno, this turbulent panorama [of the Gulf of Naples], imbued with a diffuse revolutionary bent, was distilled into a core group of thinkers ignited by Naples's atmosphere, where everyday life spurred even the most pensive of participants to train their gaze on the superficial elements of their era and discern the potential in those elements.

 The way that "imbued", "bent", "distilled", "ignited" have come unstuck from any original meaning bothers me. And why should "even" the most pensive of the participants pay special attention? My best guess at the author's meaning is

Naples had many more or less leftist foreign visitors, and Adorno collected around himself those that most interested him. The quality of  everyday life in Naples was such as to impress itself even on the most introverted and blinkered visitor, and to offer scope for over-interpretation of minor details.

(The last clause may have more to do with my temper, and less with the author's intention. But in fairness to me, I read through 140 pages of this.)

 There is also the odd phrases, within quotation marks,

eccentric structure of this landscape, in which every point is equidistant from the center

In a plane, a figure with every point equidistant from a center is a circle; in three dimensions, a sphere. But a landscape with every point equidistant from the center is simply unimaginable. And how "eccentric"?

 

Production Values

 Yale University Press publishes a series named "Rethinking the Western Tradition". The bulk of a volume will be some classic of the Western tradition, followed by essays by scholars now active. The usual proportion of classic to commentary seems to be between two to one and three to one. I first noticed the series for its edition of Newman's The Idea of a University, in which I thought that some of the essays could have been spared for more Newman.

 I have just finished reading the series edition of Leviathan. Here the first essay I read was definitely worth the time, an attempt to emphasize Hobbes's reliance on natural law. I don't know that the author made his case. But I will have a look at other essays when time allows.

Hobbes will occasionally occasionally give a term in Greek, mostly later in the book. Here in a few places the production process let Yale down. There are a couple of sigmas where omicrons should be, and a nu replaces an upsilon. These are not especially important, but they introduce a doubt: how accurately rendered are the four hundred pages of 17th Century English, with different spellings, capitalization, and punctuation? Cross-checking against an old Pelican paperback edition shows that the Pelican edition does not have these particular errors.

 Well, I bought the book in part to encourage Kramerbooks to carry more works of philosophy. I see in looking at the Yale series that we bought another volume in it last year to give to a friend at Christmas, a collection of Hume's essays.