There’s an app for that. Well, technically, it’s a website, not an app.
Yesterday was C.S. Lewis’ birthday.
Like many English speaking folks (especially those, like myself, raised within Lewis’ own Anglican communion), Lewis was a big part of my reading childhood. I devoured all those Narnia books which, in the bad old days before the internet, took a while to finally collect.
My own favorite (though I gather it is not held in high esteem by critics and Lewis scholars) was The Horse and His Boy.
Later, I delved into his more adult stuff: The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Out of the Silent Planet (I never read the rest of the series, rather feeling it to be similar to, but ultimately second best to Madeleine L’Engle’s series beginning with A Wrinkle in Time).
Later, when going through a difficult time, I read a book he wrote after his wife’s death, A Grief Observed.
I should also note his scholarly book, The Allegory of Love. Though I have to admit that I have not read it, it is reckoned be a very important work in developing our understanding of medieval literature and the medieval mind and it is a reminder that C.S. Lewis was not just a children’s writer nor just a Christian polemicist, but an Oxford don and a scholar of no little repute.
His books combine to form a Christian theodicy, an explication of how evil and suffering can exist in a world created by a perfect and loving god.
And this one is from The American Prospect, too. But for heaven’s sake, can we not call that insane and deeply weird (and deeply boring) writer and all around wacko Ayn Rand ‘Nietzschean?’
It seems a rather tenditious argument – Camus’ philosophical relationship to Judaism (other intellectual currents far better explain his ideas) – but I’ll read anything about Camus.
Hopefully, you will too – so here is an article I came across.
Well, there’s a new book out about Nietzsche and the history in Nietzsche in America (intellectually, of course, not physically; he never visited America). The book is called American Nietzsche.
I didn’t know this, though I’m glad to read it, but Nietzsche was, apparently, much influenced and inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I bought his collected essays when I lived in Atlanta. Reading it, I was much surprised by the influence of Kant on Emerson. I lost that particular copy during one of my many moves, but luckily now have a nice, leatherbound edition that I picked up at a used bookstore (though it looks nearly new).
Nietzsche is one of those authors who is everything to everyone. I, of course, am a liberal (with a lot of caveats) and I love Nietzsche. But his influence on right wing politicians, fascism, and nazism is well known.
It would be easy to blame the affection of Hitler for Nietzsche on misunderstanding (and he was deeply misunderstood by Hitler, which was partly Nietzsche’s sister’s fault; I’m not going to explain this, if you want to know more, just google it), but it would also be simplistic. Nietzsche, let us say, is not bereft of intellectual and spiritual violence within his oeuvre.
If you’ve took any philosophy courses in college or hung out with anyone who took a philosophy course in college, you probably had a love affair with Nietzsche.
He was one of those writers whose books were hidden in our backpacks at high school, nestled next to Marx and Ginsberg. Like Marx and Ginsberg, he was also deeply misunderstood by us, but what the heck, we were sixteen. We mostly just quoted from the aphorisms you find in the middle of Beyond Good and Evil (“That which does not kill me, makes me stronger,” anyone?).
In college, we started to understand him. But then later, you get a little embarrassed by him. He’s not a rigorous, systematic thinker. And you know that he’s the favored philosopher of pretentious college students who don’t read any other philosophers. So you put him down for fear of being mistaken for them.
Then you pick him up again. And you read him again, and you get a new appreciation for him and the depth of his own learning and understanding. You don’t forget his limitations, but you see stuff you didn’t before. You take the time to read him more systematically and see he’s a little more of traditional philosopher (rather than just a reciter of pithy ideas) than you had thought. So maybe you don’t fall in love again (or maybe you do), but at least you fall in “like.”
I went to Paris when I was eighteen. I met a guy there – a young man, though older than I – who was generally uneducated but with a weird autodidactic streak. He had read volume after volume of Carl Gustav Jung, but had no idea that ‘Jung’ was (approximately) pronounced ‘yung,’ instead pronouncing it with a hard ‘j.’
I thought of him when I saw this article on the meaning and place of Jung in contemporary thought.
While Freud, if also dismissed and sniffed at as a pervert of limited inspiration, is at least still placed within the realm of psychology as something approximating a science.
Meanwhile, Jung is relegated to the realm of spiritualists, mystics, and comparative religion.
Of course, I’m not sure that article helped matters much, but focusing on Jung’s religious beliefs (obsessions?).
Norman Spinrad is a sci fi author who you probably haven’t read unless you read a lot of sci fi. Not that he’s not good, but he hasn’t been much of a crossover writer for a long time (crossover, in the sense of Ursual K LeGuin or Margaret Atwood crossing out of the genre trap into literary respectability or J.K. Rowling into widespread, if undeserved, fame).
While digging through the basement of my favorite local used bookstore, I picked up a book of his called Agent of Chaos. It was fast paced, decently written, leavened with an anarchist philosophy that was heavy handed, but not didactic. It was a slim, old fashioned sort of pulpy paperback that they just don’t make much of anymore. Love that kind of stuff.
After finishing it, I downloaded to my Nook a copy of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is still a nice, pulpy magazine (at least in its physical format). I did so simply because it had a story by Spinrad.
I like the idea of Spinrad. He writes politically tinged (charged?) sci fi, he lives in Paris now and sometimes publishes in French. He is a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. And one of his novels was denounced on the floor of the House of Commons.
This particular story was very different, though, from Agent of Chaos, which is an old fashioned space opera at its heart. An odd story about the songs of whales and other cetaceans and a sort of eco-fable. Not sure what I thought about it. I certainly agree with its sentiments, but not exactly what I was looking for.
No, not really.
But this article does posit him as a guide for how the movement might push America towards building a more just society.
An ancient manuscript by the Greek mathematician Archimedes (the one who saw water spilling out of his bathtub and leaped out and ran naked through the streets, yelling eureka, having realized that he’d figured out that whole mass displacement thing) was decoded or deciphered or whatever you want to call it after years and years or work.
The original writing had been scraped off by a medieval monk who was short on paper, so the challenge was determining the writing beneath and generally putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
You can see it at the Walters Museum of Art in Baltimore.
It used to be the case that my favorite, though rarely used (because it’s pretty mean), put down in cases where someone disputed the veracity my statement was to say, “That’s because this information is hidden… in books.”
Will I live to see when that is no longer the case? When the truest information (please, no discussion of epistemology here) is no longer in printed books but online?
But I’ve already moved away from books, haven’t I? I found that article online and I published this post online. Is everything I do undermining what I proclaim to treasure?
the coffee philosopher 