141. Cézanne & Gestalt

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Cézanne continued

The Blank Canvas
p116 When Cézanne began his studies in the blank canvas, science had no way of explaining why the paintings appeared less vacant than they actually were. The very existence of Cézanne's nonfinito style, the fact that the brain could find meaning in nothing, seemed to disprove any theory of mind that reduced our vision to pixels of light.

The Gestalt psychologists of the early twentieth century were the first scientists to confront the illusions of form that Cézanne so eloquently manipulated. Gestalt literally means "form," and that's what interested Gestalt psychologists. Founded by Carl Stumpf, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, and Max Wertheimer... the German Gestalt movement began as a rejection of the reductionist psychology of its time, which was still enthralled with the theories of Wilhelm Wundt and his fellow psychologists. Wund had argued that visual perception is ultimately reducible to its elemental sensations. The mind, like a mirror, reflected light.

But the mind is not a mirror. The Gestaltists set out to prove that the process of seeing alters the world we observe. Like Immanuel Kant, their philosophical precursor, they argued that much of what was thought of as being out there -- in our sensations of the outside world -- actually came from in here, from inside the mind. ("The imagination," Kant wrote, "is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.")... According to the Gestaltists... everyday illusions [like vase/silhouette] were proof that everything we saw was an illusion. Form is dictated from the top down... the Gestaltists began with reality as we actually experienced it. [Like Kant, they are, I believe, saying that we aren't in a position to say anything about the thing-in-itself.] 

p117 Modern neuroscientific studies of the visual cortex have confirmed the intuitions of Cézanne and the Gestaltists: visual experience transcends visual sensations... If the mind didn't impose itself on the eye, then our vision would be full of voids... we each have a literal blind spot in the center of the visual field. But we are blind to our own blind spot: our brain unfailingly registers a seamless world.
...

p119 The shocking fact is that sight is like art. ["surrounded by artifice"] What we see is not real. It has been bent to fit our canvas, which is the brain. When we open our eyes we enter an illusory world, a scene broken apart by the retina and re-created by the cortex...

...[The visual experience] is art, and not science, that is the means by which we express what we see on the inside. The painting, in this respect, is closer to reality. It is what gets us nearest to experience. When we stare at Cézanne's apples, we are inside his head. By trying to represent his own mental representations, Cézanne showed art how to transcend the myth of realism. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Cézanne made the fruit so real that it ceased to be edible altogether, that's how thinglike and real they became, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness." The apples have become what they have always been: a painting created by the mind, a vision so abstract it seems real.

Postscript

We were celebrating the completion of work on our building last night, so I didn't get around to posting this. I'll post two sections today.

Next - 142. Igor Stravinsky

87. Absalom + Contracts

Previous - 86. Social contracts

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Absalom

Now I'm thinking Faulker just has a thing for italics. I was thinking this was well on the way to turning into a full blown epistulary novel, but that, peeking ahead, doesn't seem to be the case. And then there are pages of interior monologue also rendered in italics. 

And now that we've gotten used to the father and son (whoever they are) we get Shreve who we know even less about except that he was born to recite the last chapter in Absalom, Absalom! summary while being either ignorant or willfull about the connection between Quentin and Miss Rosa. And still our story is either recited by one character to another or read or recounted in reflection. In some ways I'm reminded of Ford Madox Ford's style in Parade's End from about a decade before. But that's mostly because the method of storytelling is convoluted and difficult. Something like a cat feeder I saw recently that required the cat to climb around and really work for its kibble.

And Shreve progressing from calling Sutpen a "Devil" to calling him "Faustus." I admit I didn't see that coming. Does that make Jones Mephistophelese? That does make a kind of sense.


I'm at Sutpen's backstory now -- Southern Culture as viewed by a Virginia hillbilly -- so it occurs to me (could it really be for the first time?) that slavery was a way to re-assert what Ford would have called a "Tory" world order in a New World that rejected the Tory order of social classes. Slaves were the new peasantry that had even fewer rights than in old England. America was a step back not a step forward for "all" men. (Interesting to note that serfdom was developing in Russia (1600-1650) around the same time that chattel slavery was developing in the North American Colonies (1650-1700)).

Social contract theory

I'm now into part 3. of that piece on political and moral philosophy. John Rawls is the kind of academic who gives ivory towers a bad name. I'll give him credit for terminology that is more meaningful than his buddy Kant's, but "the Original Position, behind the Veil of Ignorance" sounds like he spent his youth reading comic books. (Not that that's an entirely bad thing.)

In a way, Rawls' rational ethics reminds me of pre-Copernican calculations for the movements of heavenly bodies. If you don't understand the actual logic behind these movements all you can do is invent increasingly convoluted schemes. It's all really clever, but it has nothing to do with reality. 

Reasoning from an "Original Position, behind the Veil of Ignorance," you could show that everyone should eat a low calorie, vegetarian diet; walk, run, or bike everywhere; women should probably have their babies before they are 20 with mates chosen by computers; and I could come up with a better list if I wanted to think about it a while -- which I don't, because it's just silly.

And there is nothing here to suggest that this rational invention of an ethics would make actual people happy. I do agree with the final statement in 3. a. "Rawls’ theory of justice constitutes, then, the Kantian limits upon the forms of political and social organization that are permissible within a just society." He does take Kant's notions about as far as they can go. If we were rational beings, it would all make prefect sense. Though even then you would need to demonstrate that an ethics and a political constitution constructed on this foundation actually made people happy.

The 3. b. update of Hobbs is just the same, too Kantian in thinking we are rational. I'm still going with Hobbs.

In 4. a. ii. there's this interesting passage, "C.B. Macpherson, for example, has argued that Hobbesian man is, in particular, a bourgeois man, with the characteristics we would expect of a person during the nascent capitalism that characterized early modern Europe. Feminists have also argued that the liberal individual is a particular, historical, and embodied person. (As have race-conscious philosophers, such as Charles Mills, to be discussed below.) More specifically, they have argued that the person at the heart of liberal theory, and the social contract, is gendered. Christine Di Stefano, in her 1991 book Configurations of Masculinity, shows that a number of historically important modern philosophers can be understood to develop their theories from within the perspective of masculinity, as conceived of in the modern period. She argues that Hobbes’s conception of the liberal individual, which laid the groundwork for the dominant modern conception of the person, is particularly masculine in that it is conceived as atomistic and solitary and as not owing any of its qualities, or even its very existence, to any other person, in particular its mother. Hobbes’s human, is therefore, radically individual, in a way that is specifically owing to the character of modern masculinity." 

I think Hobbs was just trying to be as rational as possible, but this is another way of saying that all three of our imaginers of a Social Contract, were ignoring sociological and anthropological factors.

This seems to be the case with most of the gender or race based attacks on the Social Contract that follow.

Next - 88. A simple plan

78. Kant + Music + Wisdom

Previous - 77. YouTube + Alice

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Not exactly karma

I hate it when you sneer at something and then realize you are doing the very thing you just sneered at. Today it was "Retail Therapy." I was walking past the upscale Crocker Galeria where I noticed the sign suggesting that this was the place to process your trama. I sneered... just as it occurred to me that I was in the process of doing two errands that were not at all necessary and that I would have put off indefinitely a couple weeks ago.

It occurred to me weeks ago that I would have a much easier time seeing pens sitting on the black-stained counter above my desk that holds my computers, if I had a white pen. Good idea but low priority. Today I sought out and purchased a white pen. I've been wanting to replace more of my lights with LEDs for a long time, but they are expensive, I have few lights, and the compact flourescents I have last a very long time the way I use them. But last night, in the first step of this retail therapy chain of events, I purchased an air cleaner online -- now in transit -- so I have a "good" reason to try to reduce my electrical overhead by a few watts (five, I think). So after my stop at the stationary store, I hit my hardware store for a new LED lamp. I can't wait to test out my new toys. (According to the the date I wrote on the old CFL lamp I replaced, it has been in use for over seven years. I'll probably move it to an HOA common area fixture the next time a light burns out.)

Five watts doesn't sound like much, but then I use very little electricity. My refrigerator consumes the most power and I've considered replacing it with a new, more energy conserving unit, but I'm not sure I can really save that much and my current unit still works fine. The thing is, my power bill is already so low that these little improvements won't really make much of a difference. I'm just doing this to please myself.

It could be that the real reason I'm thinking about this now is that last night was our first "cold" night. Soon I will need to turn on my space heater, (I have indeed) that's the only time I use a serious amount of power. In a normal year though, I only run my space heater for three or four weeks and then only during the evening. Enough to double my power bill for a couple months, but since the base usage is so low, it still doesn't amount to much. Many people pay more per month then I pay per year. I once calculated that it would take centuries for me to amortize the cost of replacing my windows with better insulated ones, even if it cut my heating needs to zero.

That bastard Kant

It occurred to be me this morning that it is not Utilitarianism but rather a sociological interpretation of morality that stands in opposition to both Kant and Utilitarianism. And this is because a sociological interpretation has no foundation at all in reason, moral laws are simply arbitrary group rules that bind people together and exclude non-group members. 

Fundamentalism -- regardless of the religion -- is simply the formation of a new, smaller group without seeming to break the rules of the larger group they are breaking away from. My favorite example of this is the ultra-Catholic group Mel Gibson's father belongs to. As I understand it, they are such "good" and "pure" Catholics that they are forced to contradict the Pope. This is all amusing until the fundamentalists start blowing things up.

Ohhh... It occurs to me that you can hypothesize something like a Sociological Strong Force that holds these groups together until they get too large and then can spontaneously "decay" into smaller, again stable, groups. Cool.

Chemistry/physics question

Why is it that titanium, in the form of white titanium, and mercury both reflect all frequencies of visible light but mercury reflects the light in an orderly fashion while with white titanium the reflected light is diffuse? 

"Top Songs" of the '50s and '60s

I clicked on something different in YouTube and then spent the past two nights listening to popular songs from my formative years (1952-1970). How they select the songs to include is a mystery. (I had no idea Eddie Fisher and Rosemary Clooney were so big the year I was born. And how have I never heard of Joni James? It's also interesting that Tony Bennett's tone got richer over the years.) It would be impossible to produce a really complete collection unless you had hours rather than minutes for each year. Country music is short changed and the TV theme version of "Route 66" is ignored (the Nelson Riddle instrumental version. I would try to get the Nat Cole vocal version of the much earlier "Get your kicks on Route 66" on my list somehow), and the late '60s seems to be especially bad as music got more and more diverse -- almost nothing of the San Francisco bands and no Led Zeppelin! 

But the late '50s and early '60s are surprisingly good. I've always been a fan of instrumental songs and it seemed like virtually every year from '57-'62 had at least one good one. "A Summer Place" is probably the instrumental song I recall the best, but there were others including "Canadian Sunset" which I had forgotten until I heard it again.

I had originally gone with '54 as the beginning of my formative years, but after listening to music from '52 and '53, I realized I knew some of this music just as well. I have the edition of the National Geographic from the month I was born (such a different world) but listening to the "Top Hits" from the year I was born turns out to be just as revealing.

One thing that surprised me was how much of the Everly Brothers was included in this series. They were never popular in my family and, reading more about them, I'm sure it's because they were originally from Muhlenberg county, Kentucky, so my mother would have dismissed them as hillbillies. I hadn't realized their influence on artists that followed, like Paul Simon and even Lindsey Buckingham -- who even toured with them at one point. 

I don't think my mother ever realized how fond I became, as early as my college days, of Bluegrass music. Ironically, Muhlenberg county is the subject of one of my all time favorite Bluegrass songs, "Paradise." 

There's also almost no Jazz included in these collections, which I can understand since Jazz has rarely been mainstream. 

The visuals that accompany the music varies from contemporary TV, to the bands playing their hits much later (disconcerting), to neo-Ken Burns photo montages to my favorite -- shots of 45 singles sitting on a turntable so you can see the recording label and related information. I would have done them all this way so you would also get a bit of history of the music industry. Of course I would also have added a note if either Ahmet Ertegun or Clive Davis had been involved in any way.

Getting back to instrumental songs, I can't think of many that have been "top hits" in recent years or even decades. When I started writing this, "Europa" was on the "radio" here at my favorite pizzeria -- their fondness for Santana may be a reason I like the place. I can think of (and have written about) some other guitar god masterpieces that would be on my list of hit instrumentals, but I can't think of anything similar to the orchestral pieces I mentioned above. Maybe music from special movies like Star Wars or The Godfather. Vangelis's music for "Chariots of Fire" might be the last music (I can think of) to crossover to become a radio hit? Not at all sure of this. (I just found a list of the most popular movie music but the page was so media intensive that it crashed my computer. So I'm sticking with what I think I know.)

A Century of Wisdom

Finally finished the book! She, either Alice or the author or both, chooses not to dwell on Alice's feelings about Judaism except to emphasis again her fondness for Spinoza's God who is but isn't particularly interested in us. My first thought when I opened this book and read her quote of Epictitus was that Alice is probably the one and only Survivor I could have asked my question, If you could snap your fingers and change history so that the Holocaust didn't happen, would you? In fact, I would never ask the question, but I do wonder what she would answer. 

Next - 79. Backpack + Base isolation

77. YouTube + Alice

Previous - 76. The New Financial Distric

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Same ole, same ole

Despite liking the space and having a pretty good veggie sandwich, I'm back at the Market Street Pete's because the WiFi on Pine was almost as slow as at the Bank Cafe. Too bad.

Trying to process the Trump election while reading a book about the Holocaust is either a bad or a very good idea. Still not sure which. But it certainly does get me thinking. 

A lot is being made here about Clinton winning the popular vote. Fair enough. But the difference is still tiny and I don't actually doubt Trump's claim that he could have won the popular vote if he had campaigned more in California and New York. But it's really even worse than that.

Trumps core constituency are the people who feel disenfranchised, left out of the New Economy and the New Values of our Brave New secular world. Many of these people don't vote at all. I would be willing to bet that if everyone was forced to vote, the popular vote would be way in Trump's favor. 

And it isn't just white men who bash gays or women or Jews or any other "privileged" group they feel they have social permission to attack. This is something people -- mostly, but not entirely men -- of color can participate in as well. Hate does a surprisingly good job of bringing people together.

By coincidence, I was rereading something I wrote about Ayn Rand in my previous blog (here) that is worth rereading with Trump in mind. It would be so sad if Nietzsche was again to be used to make the world an even worse place.


Which brings me back to... The Brothers Karamazov. I bet you thought I was going to say The Magic Mountain. Start with Lizaveta (who Google doesn't even include in the list of key characters). I still maintain that she represents the Russian, Orthodox Christian, ideal of goodness in the novel, so of course she is raped by Fyodor and then dies giving birth to Smerdyakov, who represents the new man unrestrained by traditional values. He longs for, but lacks the opportunity to participate in, bourgeois success. The new, Godless, Russia (Foyodor) rapes and kills traditional Russia (Lizaveta) and spawns Smerdyakov the striving man without values or restraints.

Crash Course Philosophy

I've been watching this series of videos since they started and am having so much fun. I don't remember how many of these courses I've followed so far, several literature ones, history, parts of the chemistry one, and some others. What seems to be different about Philosophy is the community of philosophy nuts in the comments. Like me, most of the commenters are watching not so much to learn something new but to participate in a conversation about topics we rarely get a chance to talk about. Sometimes it seem like half the comments for one episode are in anticipation of what is coming next. We went nuts in anticipation of Kantian ethics -- how often does anyone get a chance to say that? The shear number of Kant puns was something to see.

I accused us of acting like fan-boys and got the usual hostile internet response, which is actually pretty funny. About the same thing is happening on another YouTube channel with military history, the difference I think is that military history seems to be a more common interest in the world at large. (When guys geek out about military history I always think of Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, but I can't think of a philosophical equivalent.) That there are so many people out there who know and care about Kant (and are so eagerly anticipating Nietzsche) is a pleasant surprise. 

The problem with the Crash Course Philosophy series is that it is not going into the detail we would like. And the presenter just had a baby so it's unlikely that he will jump in with a user-requested extension of the course. Our only hope is that sleep deprivation will drive him to reconsider the very nature of our perception and existence. 

YouTube travel

I also use YouTube to live vicariously though others, something that saves me a lot of trouble and expense. I'm subscribed to one couple traveling around the U.S.A. in an RV, a couple building their Tiny House, a couple sailing around the world, and, as of last night, a second couple also sailing around who just completed a transit of the Erie Canal -- something I've thought of doing -- and are currently stuck on the Hudson due to engine problems with their sailboat.

I suspect (but it would be great to know for sure) that as many people watch these videos and think, "Wow, what a lot of trouble and expense" as think "Now that's something I want to do next." This is especially true, I think, for the Tiny House series. What a lot of work it is to build (yourself) even a tiny house. The guy is an electrician, which meant that he was qualified to do all the electrical work himself, but he also took the opportunity of being his own client to add every electrical feature he had ever imagined. The house is wired like a space ship. I can't help but think how I would do it all differently, and more simply, but the thought of doing all the work he's doing also makes me think, just, no.

I fantasize about gutting my apartment and starting fresh -- a much simpler task than building a Tiny House -- but the thought of how much debris would go to the dump and of how little of an actual improvement it would be in the end, makes me sure I would never actually do it.

A Century of Wisdom

As was the case with Musicophilia (obviously) and Doctor Faustus, A Century of Wisdom is largely about music. With Doctor Faustus in mind, it is particularly interesting how important Beethoven was to Alice -- even in the camp.  Especially in the camp. While Doctor Faustus is about the "taking back" of Beethoven's 9th, A Century of Wisdom is about the survival of the 9th even under the worst circumstances. 

I'm close to the end of the book now and there has still been no mention of religion as such. It seems that music has taken the place of religion in Alice's life -- something that makes much more sense to me personally. Religion frequently uses music -- from Bach to chanting -- for it's own purposes, but one has to wonder which has primacy in this relationship. (Another question I would like to ask Temple Grandin, besides how she visualizes music, is if her appreciation of music was similarly affected by the sheep dip chemical reaction that killed her religious feelings?) 

This is awkward, but there's something else one needs to say about Alice's experience of the Holocaust: For almost everyone else, life in the camps terminated, or at least suspended, their "normal" life. Alice and, to a lesser extent, Victor Frankl lost their freedom, but not their avocations or even their vocations. Their lives, in the most important sense, continued in the camps. And this was especially the case with Alice. Even in the camp she continued teaching and performing. After the war, while living and teaching in Israel, she didn't talk about her past -- to the extent that most of her students had no idea that she was a Holocaust survivor. In the book we at least get an account of her experience and of how she tried to protect her child from the reality of his situation (which reminds me of the plot of Life Is Beautiful, though I never saw the film). 

She claims that, after the war, her reasons for not speaking of her past were that she didn't want her son to remember, and didn't want any special consideration, but I have to wonder if she also felt a sort of survivor's guilt, not just at having survived but at having had such a freakishly mild experience of the Holocaust. In her place, I would not have wanted to compare experiences with survivors from other camps.

Does this matter? Yes and no. Her experience and her insights are as valid as anyone else's. But when you consider the questions posed by The Sunflower, I would include her in the class of people who would be in no position to forgive because they hadn't really been there. This is a little unfair, as I said, she lost her freedom and also her mother and husband, but she didn't have to face the full brutality of the camps. She had glimpsed the "elephant" but didn't actually come face to face with it.

Next - 78. Kant + Music + Wisdom