What practical application can we derive from Nietzsche's essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense? How do we move back to the body and away from removed abstractions? Karl Marx, echoes a similar sentiment when speaking to the young Hegelians. He mocked them, saying:
“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way” (Marx).
Marx's materialism similarly attempts to move away from the abstractions and towards empirical evidence of what people "actually do"---their actual material product. Of course, this is not a perfectly parallel example, but I bring it up simply to illustrate the implicit battle that has been waged, and continues to be waged, between abstractions and a more earthy, tangible reality, localized in the body.
Nietzsche illustrates the process, in which, we inevitably move away from the body. Scott illustrated this beautifully in class today, and he would also do more justice to Nietzsche essay (and maybe he can in the comments), but nonetheless, I thought I would take a stab at it, mostly to spark up a conversation to explore ways that we can apply his ideas. Nietzsche states:
"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms---in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins" (Nietzsche 46-47).
The above quote could be summarized by a diagram, presented in class today:
Language pushes us further and further away from the body, and the reality of the object. A few additional quotes, from Nietzsche, may help accentuate this point:
"The awakened say: Body I am entirely[...]"
"There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom"
"I love only what a man has written with his blood [...]"
"I would believe only in a God who can dance"
This may also help us understand, as Travis pointed out to me earlier today, why Alex labels himself a "recovering Platonist," and why Nietzsche is the antidote for attempted recovery :) Where as Plato works from forms and down to particulars, Nietzsche sides with Aristotle and works from particulars to universals. In this sense, the particulars are deeply entwined into the body, the universals considered evidence of the disconnect caused by metaphors and symbols. But once again, how do we get back to the body? Can we ever escape abstractions and a society that rests largely on a foundation of metaphors and symbolic speech?
Honestly, I don't have any clear answers. That is, in part, why I wrote this little piece. However, here are a couple practical methods that I can foresee combating the removed shift away from the body:
1. Process, Process, Process. The more we get involved in the physical process of creating, the more language and creativity become localized to the body.
2. Try to escape the use of purposeless metaphors and move closer to the actual thing. Remember, for Nietzsche, the only truth in language is a tautology. For example, "the cow is a cow." The closer we can get to the "real state of things" (I know this phrase is problematic, please permit it for this little pseudo-essay) and further away from abstractions, the more we approach the body.
I'd love to get some comments on this post. Tell me what you think!
Monday, October 8, 2007
Worn Out Metaphors
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Weekly rescrap 10/1/07—10/7/07
Monday:
-Grabloid pondered Universality: Irrationality, Absurdity, Perception
Tuesday:
-Scott commented on Jacques Dupin's three essays on Giacometti
-Torben sparked some discussion on Confucius and the rectification of names
Thursday:
-Rikker discussed the Italian maxim "translator, traitor"
Friday
-Scott excerpted a review of a new translation of the psalms
Sunday:
-Torben posted Metacafe's Best Video of the Year!
-Torben put up a clip about language from Richard Linklater's film Waking Life
Remember, take the time to comment on posts. Keep Language Scraps vital!
Waking Life --- Language
The follow is a clip from Waking Life, a very enjoyable film by Richard Linklater. This specific clip is about language. Check it out.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Translating the Psalms
Desert Storm
Understanding the capricious God of the Psalms.
by James Wood October 1, 2007
Alter’s translation yields an ancient text stripped of Christian ideas.
What is God like? Is he merciful, just, loving, vengeful, jealous? Is he a bodiless force, a cool watchmaker, or a hot interventionist, a doer with big opinions, a busy chap up in Heaven? Does he, for instance, approve of charity and disapprove of adultery? Or are these attributes instead like glass baubles that we throw against the statue of his invisibility, inevitably shattering into mere words? The medieval Jewish thinker Maimonides thought that it was futile to belittle God by giving him human attributes; to do so was to commit what later philosophers would call a category mistake. We cannot describe his essence; better to worship in reverent silence. “Silence is praise to thee,” Maimonides wrote, quoting from the second verse of Psalm 65.
Whatever one thinks of Maimonides’ chilly rigor, it is cannily paradoxical that even as he advises silence he quotes from the noisiest book in the Hebrew Bible. And, not only that, but from the very book that dramatizes, again and again, the gap between our language and the indescribable God, between our certainty that God is with us and our anxiety that he has abandoned us, between his cosmic proportions and our comic littleness.
The Book of Psalms is the great oasis in which a desert people gathers to pour out its complaints, fears, hopes; the Psalms are prayers, songs, incantations, and perhaps even soliloquies. In them, the supplicants invoke God as their light, their water, their warrior, their scourge, their buckler, their rod, and their staff. But these images, these human metaphors, also expose the frailty of such supplication, since just as God is conjured into words he seems to disappear: many of the Psalms are like flares sent out into the night sky of appeal. Jesus cried out at his abandonment on the Cross by quoting the opening verse of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” The verses continue:
Far from my rescue are the words that I roar.
My God, I call out by day and You do not answer,
by night—no stillness for me.
The famous beginning of Psalm 19 announces that the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky declares his handiwork. Eighteenth-century deists were fond of these verses, because they seem to argue that we can infer God’s existence from the glorious evidence of his creation. But the psalm uncomfortably changes course a moment later:
Day to day breathes utterance and night to night pronounces knowledge.
There is no utterance and there are no words,
their voice is never heard.
Now the psalmist seems to say that, if the heavens speak anything, it is not language but possibly only a highly visual silence. Almost three thousand years before such modern doubt, we are briefly in the world of Melville, who complained of “that profound Silence, that only Voice of our God,” asking “how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?” This struggle between faith and doubt, hope and despair, is undoubtedly one of the features that have made the Psalms such a help to so many readers and writers, both believers and nonbelievers—and especially to Christians, who have appropriated this book like no other in the Hebrew Bible. The seventeenth-century poet George Herbert perfectly captures this dappled texture in his psalmlike poem “Bitter-Sweet”:
Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.
Robert Alter’s new translation, “The Book of Psalms” (Norton; $35), is radical, at least to a reader brought up on the early-seventeenth-century King James Version.
see more at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/10/01/071001crbo_books_wood
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Translator, traitor
I'm an amateur translator. Mostly Thai to English, though I've dabbled with English to Thai. Much more difficult. There are some short examples of my work (in English) on my personal blog here here and here. They're excerpts from books I've read, and there's another post about translating titles here.
How do you convey something in another language? There's an Italian saying, "traduttore, traditore." That is, "translator, traitor." I first heard this phrase in an essay by Umberto Eco, which decries, in part, the sentiment behind it, by encouraging the original author to be involved in the translation of his work. I particularly like this statement of Eco's:
The job of translation is a trial and error process, very similar to what happens in an Oriental bazaar when you are buying a carpet. The merchant asks 100, you offer 10 and after an hour of bargaining you agree on 50.I think this is a great insight into the nature of translation. There is no Perfect Language, so there is no Perfect Translation. Eco's explanation of source-oriented vs. target-oriented translation was quite helpful for me.
This essay on the problem of translating puns gives the following dilemma, thought up by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Translate the following phrase into English:
"Oui, oui, vous m'entendez bien, ce sont des mots français."You might translate it as, "Yes, yes, you are receiving me well, these are French words." But wait, they're not anymore. In that case, is "Yes, yes, you are receiving me well, these are not French words" a better translation? What about "English words"? You will probably offend some portion of readers with any of these solutions. Eco mentions a similar problem in translating the French dialogue portions of War and Peace into French--there was a specific reason Tolstoy chose to include French dialogue, or why Eco chose to include Latin text in The Name of the Rose, and why the Latin was left untranslated in the English version of that novel.
Eco ends the essay with a lighthearted reference to the Italian maxim by calling translation "admirable treason." I just hope my efforts, leave much to be desired though they may, can too be called admirable. Or am I weaving the noose for my own traitorous neck?
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Excerpt From Lu Chi's Wen Fu
"Prior to the composition of the Wen Fu, the first great work to discuss the use of language is the Ta Hsueh (or Great Learning) of K'ung-fu Tzu (Confucius). Master K'ung believed all wisdom lies in learning to call things by the right name, and that only through a "rectification of names" might one proceed toward enlightened living. This insight is doubly remarkable when we remember that K'ung Tzu lived in a nation that was far more sophisticated than any other on earth at that time, its language rich in emblematic phrases, euphemisms, double entendres, and layered ambiguities loaded with plurisignation" (Hamill xv-xvi).
More to come later, as I make my way through this text.
Giacometti: Three Essays by Jacques Dupin
We've been thinking about methodologies and anti-methodologies for getting at how words and things relate with one another. Interdisciplinary work, negative capability, multiple teachers, students with various backgrounds, diverse texts, and even the workings of this blog all play a hand in this.
This morning I was reading a translation of Jacques Dupin's three essays on the sculptor Giacometti, two of them translated by a friend of mine, Brian Evenson (whose work we'll discuss near the end of the class), and found these thoughts about how to approach the sculptures with words:
And in fact the written word, condemned to deviousness, tries desperately to find the sudden approach again and is tormented by nostalgia for it. It tries to recreate the strangely active space of that work by attacking it from several sides, as one reconstitutes illusively the unity of a sculpture by multiplying one's vantage points. In its fragmentary pursuit it takes the same path a dozen times, while certain areas remain inexplicably barred to it. Too close to its object, it petrifies and consumes it; too far away, it loses its way and disintegrates in a maze of expectancy that has no beginning. Entangled in lacunae and contradictions, it leaves behind nothing but the muddled traces of an approach, scattered fragments, the least significant debris, spared by the flames, of an imaginary edifice which had to be abandoned.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Universality: Irrationality, Absurdity, Perception, MagicK, Negative Capability, Awareness, etc.
Torben and I had an interesting discussion after class today. Remember in class (sorry for those of you who aren't in the class...hopefully you can catch on...or someone can fill you in) when Alex was talking about when he investigated things in depth (Sicilian folklore in his case) and how he found that so much was completely universal. You would think that the more 'specific' you get the more you would be able to contrast things from each other. Maybe we think that way because that is how academia and the working world are set up...the idea that you become incredibly specialized in a different field than everything/everyone else...that your field is your specialty and you don't deal with anything else. Integrated studies' ability to be universal suits us well here.
I have also found as I study things closely (humanities, music, philosophy, art, ecology and other sciences, etc.) I find similar characteristics that cross all fields and boundaries. This is becoming especially apparent to me in this language class. Especially today’s discussion and how I feel like it (along with many things we’ve discussed in class) is complimented by John Keats’ “Negative Capability”, which I will talk about in a minute.
Our discussion today that was sparked by the Julian quote, the Merleau-Ponty quote, and the Greek Magic(k)al Papyri about Magickal/absurd (?)/irrational processes as a way to expand your mind and perception into being vulnerable to things that are unpredictable and uncontrollable so that we can experience things the we don't already know happened to really interest me! (How is that for a run on sentence?) I can't help (with Torben's help) to draw the obvious connection to Keats' thoughts about Negative Capability (which we also discussed in class before...).
Let's indulge!
John Keats on 'Negative Capability':
"I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."
Julian (quote from class handout):
"Shall we write about the things not to be spoken of? Shall we divulge the thing not to be divulged? Shall we pronounce the things not to be pronounced?"
Yes, we should!
Merleau-Ponty (quote from class handout):
"But the system of experience is not arrayed before me as if I were God, it is lived by me from a certain point of view; I am not the spectator, I am involved, and it is my involvement in a point of view which makes possible both the finiteness of my perception and its opening out upon the complete world as a horizon of every perception."
In an earlier class in the semester we talked about Negative Capability and how it is about being comfortable with the unfamiliar, the unknown, intense experiences, the absurd, the irrational (without, of course, letting it totally demolish you) and walking away CHANGED BY IT.
The Merleau-Ponty quote, the Julian quote, the Keats' quote and the discussion we had about Negative Capability are similar in the way that it is about a person spectating, being involved in and experiencing things (many times 'irrational' or 'absurd' or 'unknown' things) and gaining insight and expanding perception as a result of that. Entering the experience without the lust for a particular result (from our discussion on Crowley)...so that, again, we may experience something unexpected, something that we aren't familiar with or don't already know.
Yeah, it's also in Aleister Crowley's "Magick in Theory and Practice" (Book Four, Part Three, Page 188) that we also read for class (I’m beginning to think that Scott and Alex chose all of these readings for a REASON!...ha.):
"It is therefore not quite certain in what the efficacy of conjurations really lies. The peculiar mental excitement required may even be aroused by the perception of the absurdity of the process, and the persistence in it...”
Well, this is fascinating (to me at least)...both the universality and the persistence in absurd processes in order to gain a greater awareness. These ideas are universal, the more we get in to it the more we see that several people are talking about the same things! And somehow these ideas are tied into language.
As Alex said at some point in class today: “Language is all giving, all allowing and all permitting! We are bound to our own limited perception and also open to the horizon of perception! There is more of a need to lose yourself in the irrational so that you can feel again! The irrational as a liberator...a language of empowerment” I just happened to be writing what he was saying at the time. Seriously.
I’m reminded of something that has been going on throughout the whole class...how enabling and disabling language is.
I remember Alex pointing out that a guy named Jaynes laid a lot of these ideas about universality in his book “The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. I looked up that book. The full title is “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes. It looks very interesting! It's on Amazon here and this website seems to be full of information about it and insight into the ideas presented in it. I will have to get a copy of it.
You can read stuff on Keats' ideas about "Negative Capability" here, here and here.
Sorry the post was so long...I couldn't stop.