It’s the winter of 1486 and the city is Rome. It’s a city of cold stone and candlelight, of woodsmoke drifting through cloistered courtyards and of damp wool steaming in crowded halls. It’s into one such hall, filled with assembled scholars, churchmen, the curious and the sceptical, that a young man walks who is, by all accounts, almost unreasonably handsome. He is slight, pale, has long fair hair and boasts the kind of high forehead beloved of Renaissance painters. He is twenty-four years old. He is, by his own unembarrassed account, the most widely read man in Europe, and he has a proposal.

He’s spent years moving between the universities of Italy and France, ingesting philosophy the way other young men ingested wine. He has read the Platonists and the Aristotelians, the Arabic philosophers and the Christian scholastics, the Hebrew Kabbalists and the Chaldean mystics. Nine hundred philosophical treatises, give or take, absorbed and cross-referenced by a mind that seems to have operated at a temperature slightly above normal. Now, he wants to debate all of it, publicly, with anyone willing to show up.

His name was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Count of Concordia, and the aspect of that winter evening in 1486 that concerns us today is not any single argument from the disputation that followed (not least because none of those exchanges survive) but rather the short prefatory oration he delivered to set the tone. His philosophical overture, if you like. It is sometimes called the Oration on the Dignity of Man, and sometimes, not entirely hyperbolically, the manifesto of Renaissance humanism.

Pico takes as his starting point a claim he has no intention of disputing: that man is, of all things in the world, the most marvellous. Abdala the Saracen said so; Hermes Trismegistus said so; the whole weight of philosophical tradition, in fact, has said so. What he refuses to accept, however (and we may be forgiven for expecting a little contrariness from a man conducting such a feat of intellectual bravado), are the reasons traditionally given for this conclusion.

That man is the intermediary between creatures, familiar to the gods above and lord of the beings beneath; that by the acuteness of his senses and the light of his intelligence he stands as nature’s interpreter, positioned midway between the timeless and the temporal: these are not bad arguments. Pico grants them considerable weight. But they don’t actually answer the question so much as redescribe the phenomenon. Why, he asks, should we admire man more than the angels themselves, who possess these qualities in far greater measure?

There must be something else; something that belongs to man uniquely, and Pico reckons he’s found it:

“At long last, however, I feel that I have come to some understanding of why man is the most fortunate of living things and, consequently, deserving of all admiration.”

It’s because, says Pico, we’re something like chameleons. Let me explain.

All other creatures in the divine hierarchy have their nature in some sense or other locked in. The oak is always an oak; the angel perpetually angelic; the leopard unable to change its essential spottiness, etc. But man? Man can be anything. Man can paint the ceiling of the Sistine chapel or become internet famous for flinging a cat into a wheelie bin. Man is protean, mutable, self-determining. His dignity lies not in his fixed nature but in his radical lack of one.

As Pico puts it, imagining the divine address to Adam:

“I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.”

The rather daunting conclusion to be drawn from this is that we are makers of our own destiny. If man is a creature without a fixed rung on the ladder of being, then he must choose his own altitude. Our ascension is navigated, according to Pico, via a kind of academic curriculum that wouldn’t look out of place in certain corners of Substack.

One begins with moral philosophy, which orders the passions and brings the self under a kind of rational control; one proceeds through natural philosophy, which reveals the structure and intelligibility of the world; and one culminates in theology and metaphysics, where the mind, shedding its attachments, turns toward what is eternal. He borrows Jacob’s ladder as his central image, complete with angels ascending and descending, and asks, who would dare “set muddied feet or soiled hands to the ladder of the Lord?”

And thus, in some tellings of the intellectual history, humanism was born. Most of the telltale signs are there: the belief that human beings have the capacity and responsibility to shape their own lives; that this can be completed through reason, education, and ethical action; the emphasis on human dignity, potential, and experience.

But Pico’s vision is a lot less secular than the tradition that claims him tends to acknowledge. His chameleon can descend or ascend, sure, but the ascent is a rigorous spiritual programme culminating in mystical union with none other than God himself. This is not the humanist of liberal mythology, cheerfully displacing the divine with the human. The freedom Pico celebrates is the freedom to become angelic. The stakes are eschatological.

It’s also worth acknowledging that his program leaves little room for the stubborn fact, later emphasised by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud (who I’m sure Pico would have read were it not a temporal impossibility), that human beings are not reliably self-perfecting creatures. I have significant personal experience to draw from in making this argument. We are just as capable of rationalising our worst impulses as we are of transcending them, and the freedom Pico celebrates may just as easily entrench vice as cultivate virtue. In that sense, his vision of ascent can read like a beautiful but aristocratic account of what humans could be, rather than a sober reckoning with what they typically are.

But it’s a fun read nevertheless, and I do enjoy that image of the chameleon, endlessly capable of transformation and endlessly reckoning with the question of what, exactly, to transform into.

I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, is the short of it, and the administrative burden of a household with small children is no longer commensurate with the many, many hours I pour into producing the newsletter. It has become a chore when it used to be a joy, and I think that has been reflected in the quality of the output.

To protect my own mental health, I’m reducing the amount I’m promising to subscribers. Starting tomorrow, the weekend post will be a single article about an idea from the world of the humanities that has captured my attention, and I’ll give it my full and proper attention. In the week, the scrapbook (which is fast becoming my favourite aspect of the newsletter) will continue for a wider audience.

Paying subscribers will still be getting more than free subscribers, but I appreciate that some of you have signed up for a full year based on the previous offering. If you’d like a full or partial refund, send me a private message and I’ll get it sorted for you.

This was never supposed to be about counting subscribers; it was supposed to be a joyful and energising exploration of ideas. I think these changes will help it to feel like that again.

Thanks for your support x

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What you'll get:

• From issue #24: Who Am I? And does it Matter? Derek Parfit on Personal Identity #philosophy

• From issue #21: Boethius on the Three Types of Music #music #philosophy

• From issue#6: Kierkegaard on estrangement #philosophy

• From issue #12: Bergamo doors of the dead #anthropology

• From issue #33: Dreaming with Fernando Pessoa #literature

Who Am I? And does it Matter? Derek Parfit on Personal Identity #philosophy

Source: Chapters 10-13 of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit, 1984

At a glance: Derek Parfit radically challenges the idea of a fixed self, arguing that by letting go of rigid notions of personal identity, we can live more ethically and compassionately.

Let us begin this week with the mythical ship of the ancient greek hero Theseus.

When he wasn’t slaying Minotaurs, legend has it that Theseus’s trusty vessel underwent a fair bit of routine maintenance. Over time, as parts of the ship wore out, they were replaced with new ones, plank by water-damaged plank, until eventually there wasn’t an original piece left in the entire vessel.

He was nothing if not meticulous. You can imagine him waxing the steering wheel, arguing with dock workers over the price of a new rudder, tightening loose rigging whilst talking to ‘her’ (it’d definitely be a ‘her’) in hushed tones. And why not? After all, he’s been looking after this ship for years.

Or has he? If every part of the ship has been replaced since that first heroic voyage, then can it really be said to be the same ship at all? Unwittingly, our seafaring hero has been laying the groundwork for one of philosophy’s most enduring thought experiments.

Let’s refer to this as the persistence problem, which ultimately is a problem of personal identity. What we’re really asking ourselves, prompted by Theseus and his ship-tinkering, is what makes someone the same person over time?

What connects the little boy in the fireman’s helmet in the photo on my mother’s fridge to the person sitting here now, writing this article and drinking coffee far too late into the evening?

The man I’d suggest we turn to for help with this problem is Derek Parfit, whose mammoth book Reasons and Persons (1984) challenges traditional ideas about personal identity and how we think through the concept of self.

The first and most obvious answer to the question prompted by that faded photo on the fridge has to do with what we might call somatic continuity. Those bones are these bones. That flesh is this flesh. There is something about our biology which makes us the same over time.

But Parfit points out the problem here with another little thought experiment.

Imagine it’s the year 2100, and there’s a mad scientist (yes, really) whose taken an interest in you. Every night, while you sleep, he quietly enters your home and swaps out a few of your cells with perfect duplicates. This continues night after night. After a year, none of your original cells remain.

By your own standard, if you’re in the somatic continuity camp, the person now walking around in your place isn’t really you. It’s just a flawless replica.

But here’s the problem: when exactly did you die?

Surely, on the first night—when only a handful of cells were replaced—you were still you. And by the final night, when virtually every cell had been swapped, you believe the person left is no longer you. That means there must have been a specific night when the changeover happened: one evening, it was still you going to bed; the next morning, someone else woke up in your body.

But how could such a dramatic shift in identity hinge on replacing just a few identical cells? How could the line between being alive and being dead be crossed so quietly, with so little difference?

It’s the Theseus Ship Paradox made flesh.

What must matter more to our sense of personal identity, then, is something more like psychological continuity. Our cells may have been replaced, but I’m still me because my memories are intact, my desires and goals and intents are also the same as they were before.

This would be a good time to turn to another of Parfit’s examples. It’s still the year 2100, and you are given access to a teletransporter which scans your brain and body, destroys the original, and rebuilds you atom-by-atom on Mars (he’s a dense but fun read). This new person has all your memories, personality, and looks just like you. So is this a replica, or is it you?

We’d probably say it’s us, no? It’s the closest thing that would remain anyway, given the destruction of our ‘original’ body.

But then Parfit ups the stakes. Suppose the machine malfunctions. It creates the replica of your body on Mars successfully as usual, but this time it fails to destroy the original. Now we’ve got two yous. Each has all your psychological traits, memories, feelings, opinions and plans. Both believe they are you. Both have what we might call psychological continuity. But they cannot both be you, can they?

This leads to a contradiction: both are psychologically continuous with you, yet they are not the same person as each other. So personal identity cannot just be about psychological continuity.

So where do we go to get out of all of this?

Well, Derek Parfit suggests something bold. What he proposes is that we get rid of our attachment to personal identity altogether

Instead of clinging to the idea of a single, unchanging self that persists through time, Parfit asks us to let go of that need entirely. It’s all sounding very Buddhist really, specifically the Anatta (no-self) doctrine, which he acknowledges.

What matters more than identity is psychological connectedness and continuity: the survival of thoughts, memories, intentions, character traits. Even if those don’t exist within a single, indivisible self.

This idea aligns with something known as the bundle theory of the self, famously put forward by David Hume and expanded by Parfit. According to this theory, the self isn’t one fixed thing, but rather a bundle of experiences, memories, emotions, and intentions held together loosely over time. There’s no single “thread” running through all of it, just a flowing pattern of connections that gives rise to the illusion of a solid self.

We are but a bundle of experiences, with no underlying person beneath them at all.

So when I look at that photo of the little boy in the fireman’s helmet on my mother’s fridge, what connects him to the man writing this article isn’t some essential, unchanging core. It’s a bundle of remembered moments and psychological links.

There may be certain characteristics — my brown hair, my just-a-little-too-short legs, my shyness in social situations or my unwavering devotion to Sriracha hot sauce — that stay in the bundle for lengthy periods of time, but none of these things can be said to equate to personal identity, and I cannot be explained simply in terms of them.

Put it this way: both the laptop I’m writing this on and the silicone and microchips (I think) that comprise it can both be said to exist. But, if I carefully disassembled it all, laying out the pieces across my desk, the parts would still exist but the laptop would not. There’s no single chip or key that I could point to and say “that’s the laptop.” It’s the bundle of parts together that create it.

We’ve been here for a while now, so let’s pose one final question, which may be the most important of all: why does any of this matter?

Well, I think it matters in terms of its consequences for morality and how we make ethical decisions. If the self is not fixed or separate, the distinction between “me” and “others” becomes less rigid. From here, we might begin to see others’ suffering as not fundamentally different from our own. I haven’t quoted the source much this week, but I’m presented now with the opportunity to give you my favourite quotation from the reading;

“When I believed that my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.”

Perhaps that’s what this is all about, that Buddhist detachment from ego. Maybe what I’ve learnt this week, more than anything, is that we should stop asking who we are, and instead ask what should continue.

Maybe Theseus’ ship never stopped being Theseus’ ship. Or maybe it did. But what really matters is whether the ship still sails, and where it’s going.

Anicius Boethius on The Three Kinds of Music #music #philosophy

Source: The Fundamentals of Music by Anicius Boethius (originally written in the 6th Century and published in 1492). Chapter One. Translated by Calvin Bower

At a Glance: Music isn’t just sound. It’s the secret architecture of the universe.

Music isn’t just an art form to be admired and enjoyed at a distance. Rather, it’s something more like a profound force, something woven into the fabric of our very being and into the cosmos that surrounds us.

Even if we tried to reject or ignore it, its presence in our lives, consciously or unconsciously, remains unavoidable.

This, or something very close to it, is the point made by Boethius, a Roman philosopher and statesman of the early 6th century whose work bridged classical thought and medieval philosophy. In the opening chapter of his Fundamentals of Music, he writes:

“it appears without doubt that music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired.”

Given this all-encompassing influence of music on human life, it stands to reason that:

“the intellect ought to be summoned, so that this art, innate through nature, might also be mastered, comprehended through knowledge.”

And that, in a nutshell, is what Boethius takes the following 200 pages of his dense and almost entirely theoretical text to explore.

On this quest to understand the nature of music, Boethius turns to Pythagoras as his guiding figure, drawing on the ancient philosopher’s belief that music, when you think about it, is really all about numbers.

Here’s how I think it works.

When things—say a drumstick, or a string—move or bump into each other, they make sounds. The pitch of these sounds depends on the frequency of vibrations: faster vibrations produce higher pitches, slower vibrations produce lower ones.

The relationships between pitches, in turn, can be expressed using simple numerical ratios, such as 2:1 or 3:2, which correspond to musical intervals like the octave and the fifth.

Music turns out to be all about numbers, then, and it is only through understanding these numbers that, for Boethius, we can come towards an appreciation of the unchanging essence of music.

For a non-mathematician like myself, this mathematical view of music is interesting for one main reason. By understanding music as the science of numerical ratios, an ordered and proportional relationship among parts, Boethius is able to expand the definition of music to encompass something beyond the field of audible sound itself.

This brings him to divide music into three distinct types: musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis.

Musica Instrumentalis is essentially the music we actually hear. It is the sound produced by voices, instruments, and other vibrating bodies. But for Boethius, it is also the least important, as it is simply the outward expression of deeper, more abstract harmonies.

Musica Humana refers to the internal music of the human being. It is the harmony between body and soul, reason and emotion. A well-ordered life or a virtuous soul, in Boethius’s view, reflects a kind of inner musical harmony. As he asks:

“what unites the incorporeal nature of reason with the body if not a certain harmony and, as it were, a careful tuning of low and high pitches?”

Musica Mundana is the broadest definition of music, and it relates to the “music of the spheres” or the cosmic music that governs the movements of celestial bodies. The moon’s rotation around Earth, the Earth’s rotation around the sun, the combinations of the elements, the diversity of the seasons and the essential harmony of the universe.

Though inaudible to the human ear, this type of music reflects the divine order and balance of the cosmos, which mirrors the same mathematical relationships found in audible music.

For Boethius, then, music is not primarily an art form or performance, but a mathematical and philosophical discipline. He invites us to consider it not as cultural expression but as a reflection of cosmic and human order, a bridge between the mind, the body, and even the universe itself.

Extract of the Week #philosophy

Kierkegaard articulates that feeling of estrangement that gets at us all from time to time:

‘One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger into existence - it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into this thing and now leaves me there?.... How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted .... but was thrust into the ranks as though I had been bought of a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director?....Whither shall I turn with my complaint?’

Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, 1843

Image of the Week #history #anthropology

As you wander the cobbled streets of Bergamo, Gubbio or other medieval Umbrian towns, you’re likely to encounter mysterious walled up doors like the one pictured above. They come in different shapes and dimensions but are usually narrow, adjacent to the larger main entrance, and raised just above the street level.

These are known as porta del morto, or doors of the dead.

Behind these doors is a long staircase leading, without any corners, directly to the living quarters. There are practical explanations for the existence of these doors and staircases - security, for example - but over time they took on a new significance.

Upon the death of a family member, the straight staircase offered a convenient route for a coffin to be carried unimpeded from living space to the waiting funeral cart outside, thus avoiding the use of the main entrance, which was reserved for the living. This separation became not just practical but steeped in superstition, reflecting a belief that the dead should not reenter through the same doorway used by those still among the living.

After the funeral, the door would often be permanently sealed, leaving behind a wonderfully eerie architectural mystery which, for those who take the time to look, offers a glimpse into the spiritual traditions and rituals of the medieval world.

The Collection: Dreaming with Fernando Pessoa #literature

Source: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

I’ve always chosen to read The Book of Disquiet, the fragmentary collection of musings from the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, as a manual for dreaming, a how-to-guide for those of us seeking refuge from the real world of responsibilities in an alternate world of imagination. Most of the pages I have marked in my copy relate to dreams and dreaming: here’s some favourite snippets:

“I’ve never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life. My worst sorrows have evaporated when I’ve opened the window on to the street of my dreams and forgotten myself in what I saw there. I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me.”

“The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.”

“I’m a well of gestures that haven’t even all been traced in my mind, of words I haven’t even thought to form on my lips, of dreams I forgot to dream to the end.”

“When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.”

“With merely a kind of smile in my soul, I passively consider the definitive confinement of my life to the Rua dos Douradores, to this office, to the people who surround me. An income sufficient for food and drink, a roof over my head, and a little free time in which to dream and write, to sleep – what more can I ask of the Gods or expect from Destiny?”

“If there’s any justice in the Gods’ injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they’re impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they’re trivial. Today, because I’m still young, I can dream of South Sea islands and impossible Indias. Tomorrow perhaps the same Gods will make me dream of owning a small tobacco shop, or of retiring to a house in the suburbs. Every dream is the same dream, for they’re all dreams. Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming.”

“In my dreams I’ve sometimes tried to be the unique and imposing individual that the Romantics envisaged in themselves, and I always end up laughing out loud at the very idea. The ultimate man exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and Romanticism is merely the turning inside out of the empire we normally carry around inside us. Nearly all men dream, deep down, of their own mighty imperialism: the subjection of all men, the surrender of all women, the adoration of all peoples and – for the noblest dreamers – of all eras. Few men devoted, like me, to dreaming are lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of dreaming of themselves in this way.”

“Everything useful and external tastes frivolous and trivial in the light of my soul’s supreme reality and next to the pure sovereign splendour of my more original and frequent dreams. These, for me, are more real.”

“A breath of music or of a dream, of something that would make me almost feel, something that would make me not think.”

“My hapless peers with their lofty dreams – how I envy and despise them! I’m with the others, with the even more hapless, who have no one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I’m with these poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature besides their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.”

“There are times when dreaming eludes even me, an obsessive dreamer, and then I see things in vivid detail. The mist in which I take refuge dissipates. And every visible edge cuts the skin of my soul. Every harsh thing I see wounds the part of me that recognizes its harshness. Every object’s visible weight weighs heavy inside my soul.”

“Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people, a false life which I could live and suffer and enjoy. Misfortune would sometimes strike me there, and there I would also experience great joys. And nothing about me would be real. But everything would have a sublime logic; it would all pulse to a rhythm of sensual falseness, taking place in a city built out of my soul and extending all the way to the platform next to an idle train, far away in the distance within me… And it would all be vivid and inevitable, as in the outer life, but with an aesthetics of the Dying Sun.”

“I’ve dreamed a great deal. I’m tired from having dreamed but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because dreaming is forgetting, and forgetting doesn’t weigh a thing; it’s a dreamless sleep in which we’re awake. In dreams I’ve done everything.”

“My imaginary excursions, my outings in a countryside that never existed! The trees along the roadside, the pathways, thenstones, the rural folk passing by – all of this, which was never more than a dream, is recorded in my memory, where it hurts, and I, who spent so many hours dreaming these things, now spend hours remembering having dreamed them, and it’s a genuine nostalgia that I feel, an actual past that I mourn, a real-life corpse that I stare at, lying there solemnly in its coffin.”

“I am nothing. I’ll never be anything. I couldn’t want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”

All new stuff next time. Until then, be well!

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It's these moments that the writers in this week's collection are grasping at, and we'll begin with someone who's work does more than anyone I know to render them in words.

The Garden, Pierre Bonnard, 1945

Readers drawn to this theme may also enjoy earlier collections on walking, love, or friendship, gathered in the archive for library members.

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We turn first to Virginia Woolf, who coined the phrase “moments of being” to describe those shocks that puncture the “cotton wool” of ordinary life. Here she is in A Sketch of the Past (1939) talking about flowers, amongst other things:

“This leads to a digression, which perhaps may explain a little of my own psychology; even of other people's. Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand -"non-being". Every day includes much more non-being than being. Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good day; above the average in "being". It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; my head was relieved of the pressure of writing about Roger; I walked over Mount Misery† and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like-there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book-the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette-which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool, This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight temperature last week; almost the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can; and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both. I tried-in Night and Day; and in The Years. But I will leave the literary side alone for the moment.

As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being. Week after week passed at St Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock; some-thing happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life. I will give a few instances. The first: I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed. The second instance was also in the garden at St Ives. I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; "That is the whole", I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later. The third case was also at St Ives. Some people called Valpy had been staying at St Ives, and had left. We were waiting at dinner one night, when somehow I overheard my father or my mother say that Mr Valpy had killed himself. The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by the apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr Valpy's suicide. I could not pass it. I stood there looking at the grey-green creases of the bark-it was a moonlit night-in a trance of horror. I seemed to be dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape. My body seemed paralysed.

These are three instances of exceptional moments. I often tell them over, or rather they come to the surface unexpectedly. But now that for the first time I have written them down, I realise something that I have never realised before. Two of these moments ended in a state of despair. The other ended, on the contrary, in a state of satisfaction. When I said about the flower "That is the whole," I felt that I had made a discovery. I felt that I had put away in my mind something that I should go back [to], to turn over and explore. It strikes me now that this was a profound difference. It was the difference in the first place between despair and satisfaction. This difference I think arose from the fact that was quite unable to deal with the pain of discovering that people hurt each other, that a man I had seen had killed himself. The sense of horror held me powerless But in the case of the flower I found a reason; and was thus able to deal with the sensation. I was not powerless. I was conscious-if only at a distance-that I should in time explain it. I do not know if I was older when I saw the flower than I was when I had the other two experiences. I only know that many of these exceptional moments brought with them a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; myself passive. This suggests that as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the blow. I think this is true, because though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are now always welcome; after the first surprise, I always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable. And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we-I mean all human beings are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.”

Repast in a Garden, Édouard Vuillard, 1898

When we're lucky enough to have such a moment, we'd do well to notice it. So says Kurt Vonnegut in Knowing What’s Nice:

“And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

That’s one favor I’ve asked of you.

Now I’ve got another one, a show of hands. How many of you have had a teacher at any point in your entire education who made you happier to be alive, prouder to be alive than you had previously believed possible? Now please say the name of that teacher out loud to someone sitting or standing near you.

OK? All done? “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge, James McNeill Whistler, 1872-1875

Alongside the regular essays and Perspectives, I’ve begun a small weekly commonplace for members of The Humanities Library. Upgrade if you fancy seeing what it's all about.

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Marcel Proust wouldn't let such a moment pass him by unnoticed. Here, putting on a dinner jacket while a red sun sets over the sea, he finds himself in a moment that makes everything that has preceded it fade into insignificance:

“Presently, as summer came to an end, when one got out of the train at Douville, the sun dimmed by the prevailing mist had ceased to be anything more in a sky that was uniformly mauve than a lump of redness. To the great peace which descends at nightfall over these tufted salt-marshes, and had tempted a number of Parisians, painters mostly, to spend their holidays at Douville, was added a moisture which made them seek shelter early in their little bungalows. In several of these the lamp was already lighted. Only a few cows remained out of doors gazing at the sea and lowing, while others, more interested in humanity, turned their attention towards our carriages. A single painter who had set up his easel where the ground rose slightly was striving to render that great calm, that hushed luminosity. Perhaps the cattle were going to serve him unconsciously and kindly as models, for their contemplative air and their solitary presence when the human beings had withdrawn, contributed in their own way to enhance the strong impression of repose that evening conveys. And, a few weeks later, the transposition was no less agreeable when, as autumn advanced, the days became really short, and we were obliged to make our journey in the dark. If I had been out anywhere in the afternoon, I had to go back to change my clothes, at the latest, by five o'clock, when at this season the round, red sun had already sunk half way down the slanting sheet of glass, which formerly I had detested, and, like a Greek fire, was inflaming the sea in the glass fronts of all my bookcases. Some wizard's gesture having revived, as I put on my dinner-jacket, the alert and frivolous self that was mine when I used to go with Saint-Loup to dine at Rivebelle and on the evening when I looked forward to taking Mme. de Stermaria to dine on the island in the Bois, I began unconsciously to hum the same tune that I had hummed then; and it was only when I realised this that by the song I recognised the resurrected singer, who indeed knew no other tune. The first time that I sang it, I was beginning to be in love with Albertine, but I imagined that I would never get to know her. Later on, in Paris, it was when I had ceased to be in love with her and some days after I had enjoyed her for the first time. Now it was when I was in love with her again and on the point of going out to dinner with her, to the great regret of the manager who supposed that I would end by staying at la Raspelière altogether and deserting his hotel, and assured me that he had heard that fever was prevalent in that neighbourhood, due to the marshes of the Bac and their 'stagnous' water. I was delighted by the multiplicity in which I saw my life thus spread over three planes; and besides, when one becomes for an instant one's former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one's sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives the slightest shocks of those vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, and to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunken man.”

Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872

Finally, we'll hear from Walter Pater in the conclusion to his Renaissance (1873). His plea to “burn always with a hard gem-like flame” inspired Oscar Wilde to call it “the most beautiful passage in all prose writing.” Judge for yourself.

“Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of colour from the wall — movements of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest — but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when [235] reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions — colour, odour, texture — in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off — that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve — les hommes sont tous condamnés mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion — that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.”

Sun Setting over a Lake, Joseph Mallord William Turner, c.1840

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In the issue:

• John Berger on The Painter of the Underworld #art

• 🔒Thomas Aquinas on the Persistence of an Incomplete Self #philosophy

• 🔒Why Dissonance Has Nothing to Do With Ugliness #music

• 🔒Francis Galton’s Composite Portraits #photography

• 🔒The Architectural Fantasies of Arthur Skizhali-Weiss #architecture

Why Should You Care About Caravaggio? John Berger on The Painter of the Underworld #art

Source: Portraits by John Berger

There is a version of Caravaggio that everybody knows, or thinks they know. He is the great innovator of chiaroscuro, the turbulent genius who dragged European painting from the mannered refinements of the late Renaissance into something rawer and stranger.

He is the link, as the art history books tell it, between the high drama of the Counter-Reformation and the domestic interiors of the emerging Dutch bourgeoisie; his radical play of light and shadow anticipating Rembrandt, influencing almost everyone who followed.

He killed a man in a brawl. He died young and probably alone, somewhere on the coast of Lazio, fever-ridden and on the run. The violence of his life, we are told, explains the violence of his art.

It is a satisfying story. It is also, according to John Berger, rather badly wrong.

Berger’s essay on Caravaggio appears in Portraits, his collection of writings on artists, and it is one of those pieces of criticism that does the work of clearing away any and all accumulated ideas, so you can actually see the thing anew.

Berger does concede the art-historical reading readily enough, it’s just that he argues that it doesn’t get anywhere near what Caravaggio was actually doing, or why standing in front of one of his canvases should feel, four centuries later, like a confrontation with something alive.

This is one thread in a larger conversation about how we see and what seeing costs us. Library members can explore related pieces from the archives:

• #34: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki on light, shadow, and the art of not seeing

• #38: Georges Perec on the discipline of attention

Plus access to 40 other fortnightly issues exploring philosophy, art, literature, and the strange corners of human experience, along with a new scrapbook every week.

We’ll start where Berger does. His opening observation is the one, after all, that reframes everything that follows.

What he notes is that every painter who came before or after Caravaggio who painted what we might call the ‘underclass’ (there is no word in any traditional European language, after all, which “does not either denigrate or patronise the poor it names”) — Brower, Hogarth, Goya, Géricault etc. — were painting for their audience. These were what Berger calls genre pictures, documentary records of how the less fortunate lived, presented to viewers who stood safely outside that world. But Caravaggio, Berger writes, “was the first painter of life as experienced by the popolaccio, the people of the backstreets, les sans-culottes, the lumpenproletariat, the lower orders, those of the lower depths, the underworld.”

He didn’t depict that world for others. “His vision is one that he shares with it.”

Which brings us to the darkness.

When Caravaggio deployed his chiaroscuro (those strong contrasts between light and shadow), he wasn’t devising a compositional technique or pioneering a new kind of pictorial drama. He was, for Berger, doing something more intimate and more urgent.

“His chiaroscuro allowed him to banish daylight. Shadows, he felt, offered shelter as can four walls and a roof [...] He only felt at home - no, that he felt nowhere - he only felt relatively at ease inside.”

The darkness in a Caravaggio is not, therefore, theatrical; it is residential. It:

“smells of candles, over-ripe melons, damp washing waiting to be hung out the next day: it is the darkness of stairwells, gambling corners, cheap lodgings, sudden encounters.”

What has been driven out, along with the daylight, is something equally unwelcome to those who live precariously:

“distance and solitude — and both these are feared by the underworld.”

This reading transforms the most famous of the canvases. Take The Calling of St Matthew. Five men sit round their usual table, telling stories, counting money. The room is dimly lit. Suddenly the door is flung open and two figures enter. Behind the drama of this moment of decision, there is a window at the top of the stairs giving onto the outside world. In traditional painting, windows were sources of light or frames for nature. Not this one.

“No light enters by it,” Berger writes. “The window is opaque. We see nothing. Mercifully we see nothing because what is outside is bound to be threatening. It is a window through which only the worst news can come.”

Matthew, the tax collector with a shifty conscience, points at himself and asks: is it really I who must go? Is it really I who must follow you? Berger reads this not as divine grace descending upon the profane world, but as a scene intelligible entirely on the underworld’s own terms.

“How many thousands of decisions to leave have resembled Christ’s hand here!” The hand is held out towards the one who has to decide, yet ungraspable because so fluid. It orders the way, yet offers no direct support. Matthew will get up and follow the thin stranger from the room, down the narrow streets, out of the district. Probably he will be murdered.”

The theological reading is still available to you, of course. But once you’ve seen the other one, you can’t quite unsee it.

Here is where Berger’s argument takes its most surprising turn, and where the underworld reading and his reading of Caravaggio’s desire become the same argument.

“Caravaggio is the painter of the underworld,” he writes, “and he is also the exceptional and profound painter of sexual desire.”

These are not two separate claims about the same artist. They follow from a single fact about what it means to live precariously, in darkness, with few consolations available. Desire, for those who have nothing else, is not decoration. It promises, as Berger puts it, “as nothing else can, momentary completion.” It “touches a love to oppose the original cruelty.” To be fallen, in Caravaggio’s world, is precisely what makes the body available to this kind of knowledge.

The faces Caravaggio painted carry that knowledge on them. Berger describes a particular facial expression that exists nowhere else in painting: on Judith’s face in Judith and Holofernes, on the boy’s face in Boy Being Bitten by a Lizard, on Narcissus gazing into the water, on David holding up the head of Goliath.

“It is an expression of closed concentration and openness, of force and vulnerability, of determination and pity.”

He has seen something like it, he admits, on the faces of animals before mating and before a kill.

“The faces he painted are illuminated by that knowledge, deep as a wound. They are the faces of the fallen — and they offer themselves to desire with a truthfulness which only the fallen know to exist.”

Beside him, Berger writes, most heterosexual painters “look like pimps undressing their ‘ideals’ for the spectator. He, though, had eyes only for the desired.” The bodies in his paintings bear marks of use and experience: soiled hands, a thigh already going to fat, worn feet, a torso that “was born, grew up, sweats, pants, turns sleepless in the night.” Their sentience is palpable.

On the other side of their skin, Berger writes, is a universe.

“Their very appearance beckons towards the implicit — in the most unfamiliar, carnal sense of that word. Caravaggio, painting them, dreams of their depths.”

We arrive, then, in front of a Caravaggio carrying centuries of art history on our backs — the chiaroscuro, the realism, the scandalous models, the brawls — and Berger relieves us of the load. What remains is something palpably more human: a painter who found in darkness not drama but shelter; who saw in the dispossessed not subject matter but companions; who painted desire with the knowledge of someone for whom it was one of very few available consolations.

Are You Still There? Thomas Aquinas and the Persistence of an Incomplete Self #philosophy

Part Three of a series: Is there a legitimate, secular claim for consciousness after death?

Source: Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Q. 75, 76, 89

At a glance: Thomas Aquinas agrees that the soul survives death. He is less comfortable about what survives, and honest enough to say so.

You join us again on our quest, seeking comfort in the face of oblivion, an intellectual balm against the terror of non-existence, hoping against the available evidence that someone, somewhere in the long history of human cleverness, has a credible argument that death is merely the end of a paragraph rather than the final full stop.

Plato offered us a vision of the soul as a divine visitor temporarily lodged in reluctant flesh. Descartes would later identify the self entirely with the thinking mind. Both were giving us the message, in slightly different ways, that we might be okay. Then we get to Thomas Aquinas, who (I suppose we'll say to his credit) tells us a rather different story.

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This is a collection of voices on the topic of spring. My own personal definition of the first day of spring is when the blossom tree on my street starts to bloom. We're not quite there yet, but this still feels seasonally appropriate. There's daffodils showing their faces, after all.

In an act of immeasurable decency, I've started the collection with something that wasn't included first time around. As always, I'd love to hear what I've missed in the comments. Enjoy, and normal service should be resumed next week.

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Readers drawn to this theme may also enjoy earlier collections on:

• Trees

• Earth and soil

• Birds

gathered in the archive for library members.

On longer evenings, / Light, chill and yellow, / Bathes the serene / Foreheads of houses.

A thrush sings, / Laurel-surrounded In the deep bare garden, / Its fresh-peeled voice / Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon, / It will be spring soon / And I, whose childhood Is a forgotten boredom, / Feel like a child / Who comes on a scene / Of adult reconciling, / And can understand nothing / But the unusual laughter, / And starts to be happy.

Philip Larkin, Coming

Flower Garden, 1922, Emil Nolde

‘As simple as that -

Spring has finally arrived

With a pale blue sky’

Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1827

‘A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, / And the young winds fed it with silver dew, / And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light. / And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.

And the Spring arose on the garden fair, / Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere; / And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast / Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.’

The Sensitive Plant, Percy Byshe Shelley, 1822

‘Levin put on his big boots, and, for the first time, a cloth jacket, instead of his fur cloak, and went out to look after his farm, stepping over streams of water that flashed in the sunshine and dazzled his eyes, and treading one minute on ice and the next into sticky mud.

Spring is the time of plans and projects. And, as he came out into the farmyard, Levin, like a tree in spring that knows not what form will be taken by the young shoots and twigs imprisoned in its swelling buds, hardly knew what undertakings he was going to begin upon now in the farm work that was so dear to him. But he felt that he was full of the most splendid plans and projects.’

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878

Butterflies, 1910, Odilon Redon

‘“You run off and explore, my pretty one!” he said. “I’ll deal with the boat.” When she was gone he thought to himself, “It’s the way she parts her hair and pulls it back and twists it, that I like so well. Who would have guessed that I’d find her like this the first minute I got to my native land? He frowned a little and then closed his eyes. Though it was warm enough to be May rather than March, it was too early for that confusing murmur of insects which is the usual background for a hot afternoon. When the rustling of her steps died away an incredible silence descended on the place. The newborn reeds were too young to play with the flowing river. The noon had become afternoon. The larks were silent. The fish had ceased to rise. There were no swallows yet and the few spring flies that hovered over that weedy ditch were safe from attack whether from the firmament above or the firmament below. The only sound that reached his ears was the sound of a faint trickle of water which came from some infinitesimal ledge in the bank above his head and fell down drop by drop into the ditch. Not a breath of wind stirred. Not a leaf-bud quivered. Not a grass-blade swayed. There was only That elfin waterfall and, except for that, the very earth herself seemed to have fallen asleep. “This is Norfolk,” he said to himself, and in that intense, indrawn silence some old atavistic affiliation with fen-ditches and fen-water and fen-peat tugged at his soul and pulled it earthward.’

John Cowper Powys, a Glastonbury Romance, 1932

‘A thousand welcomes to spring, though she can-not bring back, with all her flowers, the flower of our youth; though she cannot, with all her poe-try, bring back the poetry of early love though she cannot repaint the rose on cheeks that are pil-lowed beneath the yew; nor enable us to offer the first-gathered violets to the dear souls who are in heaven; yet she brings joy to the earth still.’

William Howitt, On the Month of April, 1871

‘Spring has come back again. The Earth is / like a child that’s got poems by heart; / so many poems, so many verses, / patient toil winning her prizes at last.

Strict, the old teacher. We loved the whiteness in the old gentleman’s beard, its bright snow. / Now when we ask what the green, what the blue is, / Earth knows the answer, has learned it. She knows.

Earth, you’re on holiday, lucky one: play now! / Play with us children! We’ll try to catch you. / Glad, joyous Earth! The gladdest must win.

Every lesson the old teacher taught her, / all that is printed in roots and laborious / stems: now she sings it! Listen, Earth sings!

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 1922

Blooming Magnolias - The garden in spring, c1908, Natalia Goncharova

‘Connie went to the wood directly after lunch. It was really a lovely day, the first dandelions making suns, the first daisies so white. The hazel thicket was a lace-work, of half-open leaves, and the last dusty perpendicular of the catkins. Yellow celandines now were in crowds, flat open, pressed back in urgency, and the yellow glitter of themselves. It was the yellow, the powerful yellow of early summer. And primroses were broad, and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy. The lush, dark green of hyacinths was a sea, with buds rising like pale corn, while in the riding the forget-me-nots were fluffing up, and columbines were unfolding their ink-purple ruches, and there were bits of blue bird’s eggshell under a bush. Everywhere the bud-knots and the leap of life!’

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928

‘We lay on the grass / covered dried blood with our / bodies / green blades swayed between / our teeth.’

Etel Adnan, from The Spring Flowers Own: “The morning after / my death”, 1990

‘Like souls that balance joy and pain, / With tears and smiles from heaven again / The maiden Spring upon the plain / Came in a sun-lit fall of rain. / In crystal vapour everywhere / Blue isles of heaven laugh’d between, / And far, in forest-deeps unseen, / The topmost elm-tree gather’d green / From draughts of balmy air.

Sometimes the linnet piped his song: / Sometimes the throstle whistled strong: / Sometimes the sparhawk, wheel’d along, / Hush’d all the groves from fear of wrong: / By grassy capes with fuller sound / In curves the yellowing river ran, / And drooping chestnut-buds began / To spread into the perfect fan, / Above the teeming ground.’

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, 1843

Murnau The Garden II, 1910, Wassily Kandinsky

‘Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king, / Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, / Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing: / Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!’

Thomas Nashe, Spring, the sweet spring, 1600

‘It is not the variegated colors, the cheerful sounds, and the warm breezes, which enliven us so much in spring; it is the quiet prophetic spirit of endless hopes, a presentiment of many joyful days, of the happy existence of such manifold natures, the anticipation of higher everlasting blossoms and fruits, and the secret sympathy with the world that is developing itself’

Martin Opitz

‘It’s hard to die in the spring, you know’

Jacques Brel, lyrics from Le Moribund, 1961

‘”Springtime’s comin’,” he said. “Cannot tha’ smell it?”

Mary sniffed and thought she could.

“I smell something nice and fresh and damp,” she said.

“That’s th’ good rich earth,” he answered, digging away. “It’s in a good humor makin’ ready to grow things. It’s glad when plantin’ time comes. It’s dull in th’ winter when it’s got nowt to do. In th’ flower gardens out there things will be stirrin’ down below in th’ dark. Th’ sun’s warmin’ ‘em. You’ll see bits o’ green spikes stickin’ out o’ th’ black earth after a bit.”

“What will they be?” asked Mary.

“Crocuses an’ snowdrops an’ daffydowndillys. Has tha’ never seen them?”

“No. Everything is hot, and wet, and green after the rains in India,” said Mary. “And I think things grow up in a night.”

“These won’t grow up in a night,” said Weatherstaff. “Tha’ll have to wait for ‘em. They’ll poke up a bit higher here, an’ push out a spike more there, an’ uncurl a leaf this day an’ another that. You watch ‘em.”

“I am going to,” answered Mary.’

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, 1911

‘A Light exists in Spring / Not present on the Year / At any other period — / When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad / On Solitary Fields / That Science cannot overtake / But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn, / It shows the furthest Tree / Upon the furthest Slope you know / It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step / Or Noons report away / Without the Formula of sound / It passes and we stay —

A quality of loss / Affecting our Content / As Trade had suddenly encroached / Upon a Sacrament.’

Emily Dickinson, A Light exists in Spring, c.1875

The Ball, 1891, Félix Vallotton

‘For the same reasons that the hedonic value of any emotion-inducing stimulus decreases with continued exposure (Cabanac, 1971), it would be maladaptive for pleasant weather to have the same hedonic effect irrespective of prior exposure. Thus, we [predict] that warm and sunny days in the spring (when people have been deprived of such weather) boost mood and alter cognition more than warm and sunny days later in the year, when pleasant weather is less of a novelty.’

Keller et al. (2005) A Warm Heart and a Clear Head: The Contingent Effects of Weather on Mood and Cognition

‘There is no time like Spring, / Like Spring that passes by; / There is no life like Spring-life born to die, / Piercing the sod, / Clothing the uncouth clod, / Hatched in the nest, / Fledged on the windy bough, / Strong on the wing: / There is no time like Spring that passes by, / Now newly born, and now / Hastening to die.’

Christina Rossetti, Spring, 1859

‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. /

Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers. /

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, / And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, / And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.’

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

Vallombrosa, 1916, Emilio Pettoruti

‘The trees are afraid to put forth buds, / And there is timidity in the grass; / The plots lie gray where gouged by spuds, / And whether next week will pass / Free of sly sour winds is the fret of each bush / Of barberry waiting to bloom.

Yet the snowdrop’s face betrays no gloom, / And the primrose pants in its heedless push, / Though the myrtle asks if it’s worth the fight / This year with frost and rime / To venture one more time / On delicate leaves and buttons of white / From the selfsame bough as at last year’s prime, / And never to ruminate on or remember / What happened to it in mid-December.’

Thomas Hardy, A Backwards Spring, 1917

‘From you have I been absent in the spring, / When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, / Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, / That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell / Of different flowers in odour and in hue, / Could make me any summer’s story tell, / Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:

Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white, / Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; / They were but sweet, but figures of delight / Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those.

Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away, / As with your shadow I with these did play.’

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 98, 1609

Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, 2011, David Hockney

‘It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. We had our pea-coats with us, and I took a bag. Of all my worldly possessions I took no more than the few necessaries that filled the bag. Where I might go, what I might do, or when I might return, were questions utterly unknown to me’

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861

‘Years of gladness, / Days of joy, / Like the torrents of spring / They hurried away.”

From an Old Ballad

"O sweet spontaneous

earth how often have

the

doting

fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked

thee

,has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

beauty how

often have religions taken

thee upon their scraggy knees

squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

O SWEET SPONTANEOUS]”

e.e. cummings, O Sweet Spontaneous, 1923

‘And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain / And I will never ever grow so old again’

Van Morrison, Lyrics from Sweet Thing, 1968

Flower Bed, 1913, Paul Klee

Except this week I'm sending it to everyone, just to give you a taste.

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1 - We start with a story. Last week we wrote about René Descartes and his conviction that the mind and body are entirely separate substances — a philosophical position so influential it still shapes how we talk about consciousness today. It turns out the universe has a sense of humour about these things.

Descartes died in Stockholm in 1650. When Louis XIV ordered his remains returned to Paris sixteen years later, the coffin arrived with two notable absences: his right index finger (pocketed by the French ambassador as a personal relic) and, more troublingly, his skull. What followed is one of the stranger episodes in the history of philosophy: a seventeenth-century Swede named Planström, apparently in debt and in possession of a corpse, is thought to have employed a technique known as skull blasting — filling the cranium with dried peas, adding water, and waiting for the expanding starches to crack the skull neatly along its sutures, yielding six to eight marketable pieces. A 2014 study confirmed that dried chickpeas are the fastest method, edging out mung beans. Science marches on.

France believes they have the genuine article, now held at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. Sweden disagrees, pointing to a fragment in Lund inscribed, in Swedish, *the skull of Descartes, 1691, number 6.* DNA testing has been ruled out; there are no living descendants and the remaining remains are in poor condition. The matter is, philosophically speaking, unresolved.

The man who split mind from body was himself split for parts. You couldn't write it.

2 - There's a second curious little story that circulates around Descartes, though historians are sceptical of it.

Descartes had a real daughter, Francine, born to a Dutch servant he referred to publicly as his niece. She died of scarlet fever at five. The legend (almost certainly invented) holds that grief drove him to build a mechanical replica, which he kept in a casket beside his bed and took everywhere. When Queen Christina summoned him to Stockholm, the casket came too. During the voyage, the crew grew uneasy. Someone broke in. The automaton sat up. They hauled her to the deck and threw her into the sea.

3 - Another curiosity cut from the main newsletter owing to my deep respect for the time of you good people. Here's the story:

During the Second World War, Emmanuel Levinas spent years in a German POW camp while his family in Lithuania were murdered. He tells of how a stray dog used to appear at the camp and greet the Jewish prisoners with tail-wagging excitement, wholly indiscriminate, apparently unbothered by their status as prisoners in Nazi society. Levinas named him Bobby, and called him "the last Kantian in Nazi Germany,” the only being in that environment who still treated the prisoners as ends in themselves rather than a category.

4 - I've heard of the Rosetta stone; you've heard of the Rosetta stone. I know that it helped us to discover the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphics; you know that too. What I didn't know, until my YouTube rabbit hole took me to this video this week, created by Egyptologist Franziska Naether, was how. What does it say? What were the clues? What was the process? All questions answered here:

5 — Those vast, luminous Rothko rectangles are the result of an almost obsessive process: unprimed canvas, hand-mixed pigments, layer upon layer of thin washes, each one left to dry before the next was applied. A fascinating deep-dive via the Harvard Art Museums:

https://harvardartmuseums.org/tour/39/slide/513

6 - Let's not share this too widely, but Álvaro Mutis’s The Adventures of Maqroll, a series of novellas following a wandering, world-weary Colombian sailor-philosopher called the Gaviero, or “the lookout,” is an absolute gem.

A few passages by way of introduction:

“Life attacks us like a blind beast. It swallows up time, the years of our life, it passes like a typhoon and leaves nothing behind. Not even memory, because memory is made of the same swift, ungraspable substance out of which illusions emerge and then disappear.”

“There at the top of the highest mast, in the crow's nest where the lookout questions the horizon, all mystery vanishes in the flight of curlews and gulls and the crack of the sail in the wind, and nothing is left standing in us. Believe me!”

“I wouldn’t care if we turned back right now. I won’t, through pure inertia. As if it were just a matter of making this trip, seeing the jungle and sharing the experience with people I’ve met here, going back with new images, voices, lives, smells, deliriums, to add to all the other phantoms that walk with me, with no other purpose than to unravel the monotonous, tangled skein of time.”

7 - This is a horse called Clever Hans.

In early twentieth-century Berlin, he became a sensation for his apparent ability to do arithmetic, spelling, and calendar calculations by tapping his hoof. A scientific commission investigated and declared him genuine. It took a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst to notice that Hans could only answer correctly when the questioner already knew the answer. He was reading microscopic, involuntary shifts in their posture as they waited for the right number of taps. Not doing maths, then. But still a rather impressive ability to read people.

Psychology still uses the “Clever Hans effect” to describe experiments contaminated by unintentional cues from researchers to subjects.

8 - David Lynch on that wonderful final scene in The Straight Story, writing in Room to Dream with Kristine McKenna:

“My favorite scene in the film is the ending. What Richard and Harry Dean did together is just incredible. Jack built Lyle's house, which was a beautiful house, and it was up high and was surrounded by mountains and there was sort of a dip in the mountains where it sat. So Richard is going down this incline toward the house with the heavy weight of the trailer behind him, and he turns into Lyle's and the thing stops. Richard gets off and walks partway to the house and he calls out to Lyle. The light was just beautiful and the sun was right on him and he calls out to Lyle and the second after he did that the sun goes behind the mountain. If we'd been seconds later we would've missed that completely. We were so lucky to get that. Then, when Richard spoke to Lyle he had this little choke in his throat, and that little choke of the heart is incredible. Harry Dean and Richard Farnsworth? The word "natural" is them. Harry is as pure as can be and Richard's that way, too, and you can feel that in that scene.”

9 - A good excuse to watch it back, I reckon. Here's the scene, complete with that heartbreaking throat croak:

All the best until next time!

As ever, I hope you find something that makes a small part of the world feel less unexamined. If you do, please do like or share!

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In the issue:

• Emmanuel Levinas on The Infinite Alterity of the Other #ethics

• 🔒Can the Mind Exist Without the Body? Descartes’ Case for a Disembodied Mind #philosophy

• 🔒Tolstoy on What to Read and When to Read It #literature

• 🔒Antillia, the Island That Didn't Exist #history

• 🔒India’s Rock-Cut World #architecture

What Does The Face of The Stranger Ask of You? Emmanuel Levinas on The Infinite Alterity of the Other #ethics

Source: Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas (1969)

At a glance: Emmanuel Levinas argued that the face of another person is the origin of all ethics and that being truly good means accepting a responsibility you never chose and cannot fully discharge.

Emmanuel Levinas studied under Edmund Husserl in Freiburg in the early 1930s and wrote one of the first French introductions to Heidegger’s thought. He was, by any measure, a devoted student of the German phenomenological tradition. Then the Nazis killed most of his family, and he spent five years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and when he came home he dedicated the next four decades to arguing that the entire philosophical inheritance he’d been trained in had made a single, colossal, morally catastrophic error.

The error was this: it started with the self.

His 1969 masterwork, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, is not an easy book; Levinas writes with a philosophical intensity that can sometimes feel like trying to read the sun, and I won’t pretend I found it straightforward. But its central provocation is clear. Western philosophy, he argues, has always been secretly solipsistic. From Plato to Heidegger, the tradition has organised reality around the experiencing subject, the I, the ego, treating everything and everyone else as objects to be comprehended, categorised, brought within what Levinas calls “totality”: the great imperial project of reducing the world to one giant blob of sameness.

So what of that word totality? A totalising system, whether philosophical, political, or personal, is one that cannot tolerate genuine otherness. It takes whatever is foreign or resistant and finds a way to absorb it, name it, explain it away.

This instinct, for Levinas, risks flattening what is most important about other people, which is precisely that they are not us. They are not variations on a theme. They are, in the deepest sense, other.

Against totality, Levinas places infinity. The Other person is not larger than me in the way that a mountain is larger than a molehill, still just a matter of scale, still comprehensible within the same framework. The Other exceeds my categories entirely.

“He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension,” Levinas writes, “even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my site.”

The best way I can make sense of this is: you could know everything about a person, their history, their psychology, their fears, and still not have exhausted what makes them them. There is always a remainder, always something that resists your understanding, like a word in a foreign language that cannot be translated without losing the very thing that made it worth saying.

This is one thread in a larger conversation about what we owe to one another. Library members can explore related pieces from the archives:

• #26: Simone Weil on remaining open to the mysteries of others

• #25: Jacques Derrida on hospitality and what it actually means to welcome a stranger

• #12: Eric Fromm on how to love

Plus access to 39 other fortnightly issues exploring philosophy, art, literature, and the strange corners of human experience, along with a brand new scrapbook every week.

The place where this infinity announces itself most vividly is the face, though Levinas means something specific by this: the face as address rather than object, less the arrangement of features than the sheer fact of being looked at. This is, I think, one of those philosophical ideas that sounds obscure until it suddenly doesn’t. When someone looks at you in vulnerability, in suffering, in need, something happens that precedes all your systems of thought. You are summoned, so to speak. And the summons carries a specific content; it says, in Levinas’s formulation, do not kill me, or more precisely, don’t reduce me to nothing, don’t make me merely useful, don’t make me a mirror of yourself.

“This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in his face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder.’”

This is Levinas at his most incandescent, and his most deliberately strange. He is not saying that the face makes murder physically difficult. What the face does is it opens a dimension of ethical resistance that operates entirely outside the register of power. You could kill this person. The very fact that you could, that their vulnerability is real, is precisely what calls you not to. The ethical is, as he puts it, “the resistance of what has no resistance.”

What this means for the question of how to be a good person, genuinely good rather than merely rule-following or socially acceptable, is radical. For Levinas, ethics is a posture toward the Other that is prior to freedom: I am responsible before I have chosen to be responsible. My responsibility for the Other is not conditional on the Other’s reciprocal responsibility for me. It is, as Levinas insists, asymmetrical. I make no demands on the Other. I find myself subject to the demands of the Other.

When I first encountered this I thought it sounded like a recipe for being permanently exploited; I’ve since come to think that’s rather the point.

This is, he cheerfully admits, a form of heteronomy, the very thing Kant spent his career trying to philosophically destroy. But Levinas thinks Kant’s autonomy, the self-legislating rational subject answering only to its own reason, is just another version of solipsism in disguise. The self that constitutes itself in splendid isolation, deriving its ethics from its own rational legislation, is still the self at the centre of everything. Levinas wants to dislodge the self from the centre entirely.

The obvious objection arrives at this point with some urgency, and it is not really something we can dismiss. If I am infinitely responsible to every Other, to every face that presents itself to me in its nakedness and need, what happens when those faces multiply? When the stranger on the street and the friend in crisis and the child at home all make their claims simultaneously? Levinas’s ethics is often accused of being beautiful but practically useless precisely here: it gives you everything you need to feel the weight of your responsibility and nothing whatsoever to help you adjudicate between competing ones.

His answer, which is less satisfying than it sounds, is that this is where justice comes in: the move from the face-to-face encounter to the social world, the world of institutions and laws and third parties, where comparison between incomparable claims becomes necessary. He does not pretend this transition is clean, and I find his honesty about that more convincing than any philosopher who claims to have resolved the tension neatly.

A world in which the only ethical unit is the dyadic encounter, two faces in a room, is not the real world, but the moral urgency that the face generates might, he suggests, be precisely what drives us toward better institutions; toward a justice that is perpetually dissatisfied with itself, perpetually measuring its achievements against the infinite demands that generated it.

What Levinas leaves us with, ultimately, is a reorientation. The question “how should I act?” turns out to be secondary to the question “who is in front of me?” The stranger, the destitute, the Other whose inner world I cannot fully enter: these are the condition of my ethical existence. It is only in responding to them that I become, in any sense worth taking seriously, a self at all.

Something to think about: Levinas’s ethics begins in the singular: one face, one summons, one irreducible person standing before you in their nakedness and need. The moment you build an institution to handle that encounter at scale — a welfare system, a court, a humanitarian organisation — you are, by necessity, replacing the singular with the categorical. When we build institutions in this way, to deliver justice at scale, what exactly do we lose?

Can the Mind Exist Without the Body? Descartes’ Case for a Disembodied Mind #philosophy

Part two of a series: Is there a legitimate, secular claim for consciousness after death?

Source: Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy

At a glance: Descartes strips the question of consciousness down to its bare minimum and arrives, almost despite himself, at a compelling case for the soul’s independence from the body.

Last time, we left Socrates drinking his hemlock with enviable composure, having made a probabilistic case that the soul’s resemblance to the eternal gave us reasonable grounds for hope of consciousness after death.

Before this series can go anywhere interesting, though, it has to pass through Descartes. There is no route around him. He is the philosopher who took Plato’s foundational intuition about the soul’s distinctness from the body and sharpened it into something so precise it has been cutting people ever since. So: let’s get him on the table.

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Who knows, perhaps one day we'll assemble something like this for each of the world's great cities. Anyway, for now, bonne lecture!

Vincent van Gogh, View from Vincent's Room in Rue Lepic, 1887

Alongside the regular essays and Perspectives, I’ve begun a small weekly commonplace for members of The Humanities Library. There's a free preview here. Upgrade if you fancy seeing what it’s all about.

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“Adorable!

Not managing to name the specialty of his desire for the loved being, the amorous subject falls back on this rather stupid word: adorable!

‘One lovely September day, I went out to do some errands. Paris was adorable that morning,’ etc. A host of perceptions suddenly come together to form a dazzling impression (to dazzle is ultimately to prevent sight, to prevent speech): the weather, the season, the light, the boulevard, the Parisians out walking, shopping, all held within what already has its vocation as memory: a scene, in short, the hieroglyph of kindliness (as Greuze might have painted it), the good humor of desire. All Paris is within my grasp, without my wanting to grasp it: neither languor nor lust. I forget all the reality in Paris which exceeds its charm: history, labor, money, merchandise—all the harshness of big cities; here I see only the object of an aesthetically restrained desire. From the top of Père Lachaise, Rastignac hurled his challenge to the city: Between the two of us now; I say to Paris: Adorable!”

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 1977

“In Paris they simply stared at me when I spoke to them in French. I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.”

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869

“There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.”

Vincent Van Gogh, letter to a friend, undated

Gustave Caillebotte, A Balcony in Paris, c. 1880–1881

“That’s how it is, Rocamadour: in Paris we’re like fungus, we grow on the railings of staircases, in dark rooms with greasy smells, where people make love all the time and then fry some eggs and put on Vivaldi records, light cigarettes... and outside there are all sorts of things, the windows open onto the air and it all begins with a sparrow or a gutter, it rains a lot here, rocamadour, much more than in the country, and things get rusty... we don’t have many clothes, we get along with so few, a good overcoat, some shoes to keep the rain out, we’re very dirty, everybody is dirty and good-looking in Paris, Rocamadour, the beds smell of night and deep sleep, dust and books underneath.”

Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, 1963

“The weather is icy, but Paris looks beautiful. Everything is white & every morning the sun disappears in a pink sky. The fountains are just a bubble in their basins of ice…I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city…It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.”

Katherine Mansfield, letter to a friend, 1913

“The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef.”

Henry James, The Ambassadors, 1903

Apologies for the interruption, but readers drawn to this theme may also enjoy earlier collections on Cities, Wine or Good Taste, gathered in the archive for library members.

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Auguste Chabaud, Gare du Nord, 1907

“There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. It is a racecourse tension. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once.”

James Joyce, letter to a friend, undated

“The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music…it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in Everything.”

James Thurber, letter to a friend, 1918

“There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. Paris was always worth it, and you received return for whatever you brought to it…”

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964

“Two roads were open to him: the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal. Curiosity makes one lose more time in Paris than anywhere else.

How may one walk without looking at those little oblong boxes, wide as the stones of the parapet, that all along the quays stimulate book lovers with posters saying, ‘Four Sous—Six Sous—Ten Sous—Twelve Sous—Thirty Sous?’ These catacombs of glory have devoured many hours that belonged to the poets, to the philosophers and to the men of science of Paris.

Great is the number of ten-sous pieces spent in the four-sous stalls!”

Honoré de Balzac, A Street of Paris, undated

John Singer Sargent, In the Luxembourg Gardens, 1879

“The waggons rumbled on, and the horses picked their own way, with drooping heads. The stranger whom Madame Francois had befriended was lying on his stomach, with his long legs lost amongst the turnips which filled the back part of the cart, whilst his face was buried amidst the spreading piles of carrot bunches. With weary, extended arms he clutched hold of his vegetable couch in fear of being thrown to the ground by one of the waggon’s jolts, and his eyes were fixed on the two long lines of gas lamps which stretched away in front of him till they mingled with a swarm of other lights in the distance atop of the slope. Far away on the horizon floated a spreading, whitish vapour, showing where Paris slept amidst the luminous haze of all those flamelets.”

Émile Zola, Le Ventre de Paris, 1873

“The national characteristics…the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.”

Lawrence Durrell, undated

“Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

John Berger, undated

“Sometimes I think of Paris not as a place but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. Paris is intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy.”

Anaïs Nin, undated

Félix Vallotton, Street Scene in Paris, 1895

“The boulevards seemed to her to be a kind of abyss of human passions, and there could be no doubt that the houses there concealed mysteries of prodigious love. But she felt that she was growing old, and this, without having known life, except in those regular, horridly monotonous, everyday occupations, which constitute the happiness of the home. She was still pretty, for she was well preserved in her tranquil existence, like some winter fruit in a closed cupboard; but she was agitated and devoured by her secret ardor. She used to ask herself whether she should die without having experienced any of those damning, intoxicating joys, without having plunged once, just once into that flood of Parisian voluptuousness.”

Guy de Maupassant, An Adventure in Paris, undated

“It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator.”

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934

“Under the Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine / And our loves / Must I remember them / Joy always followed pain / The night falls and the hours ring / The days go away I remain / Hand in hand let us stay face to face / While underneath the bridge / Of our arms passes / The water tired of the eternal looks / The night falls and the hours ring / The days go away I remain / Love goes away like this flowing water / Love goes away / Life is so slow / And hope is so violent / The night falls and the hours ring / The days go away I remain / Days pass by and weeks pass by / Neither past time / Nor past loves will return / Under the Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine / The night falls and the hours ring / The days go away I remain”

Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Pont Mirabeau, 1912

Édouard Léon Cortès, Café de la Paix, Place de l'Opéra, undated

“Paris was dead. More cars, more pedestrians—except at certain hours in certain quarters. We walked between the cobblestones; it appeared that we were the forgotten members of an immense exodus. A bit of provincial life was caught on the sharp angles of the capital; it remained a skeleton city, pompous and immobile, too long and too big for us: too large, the streets that we discovered as far as the eye could see, too great the distances, too vast the perspectives: we got lost.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris Under the Occupation, 1944

“’Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York—’ He was smiling. I stopped. ‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.’”

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 1956

“At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless.”

Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958

Alfred Stieglitz, A Wet Day on the Boulevard – Paris, 1897

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Alongside that, I’m excited to launch a new series asking whether there’s a legitimate secular case for life after death, or at least consciousness after it. This will be a paid perk if you fancy following a man all the way down his road to existential dread, but I'm including this first piece for free for everyone. A teaser, as I believe they call it in the world of marketing.

Anyway, thank you, as ever, for being here. And if you can't afford to support the newsletter financially, or simply don't feel that way inclined at the moment, I'd really appreciate you liking, sharing or telling a friend about us. Enjoy!

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In the issue:

• Marshall McLuhan on Media, Artificial Intelligence and the Self #cultural studies

• Plato and the Case for Life After Death #philosophy

• 🔒Atomic Theory With Flann O’Brien #literature

• 🔒The Mystery of Rongorongo, Easter Island’s Undeciphered Script #linguistics #archaeology

• 🔒The Unique World of Georges Rouault #art

We Built the Tool. Now We Wait for What the Tool Builds: Marshall McLuhan on Media, Artificial Intelligence and the Self #cultural studies

Source: McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

At a glance: Marshall McLuhan argued that every technology reshapes the humans who use it, and if he’s right, we should be even more worried about AI than we currently are.

Imagine you are aboard a ship caught in a storm of the kind described by Edgar Allan Poe in A Descent Into The Maelström—which is to say, not the sort of storm where you can get away with bailing out some water and reassuring the dog. This is a vortex of extraordinary violence, a spiraling black nothing that drags everything within reach down to the bottom of the ocean. Your brothers are already lost. The ship is breaking apart. You’re running out of time.

Now: what do you do?

Most people, Poe suggests, would cling to the ship and wait. But the narrator of his story does something more interesting. He pays attention. While going down, he finds it within himself to study the vortex, noting its speed, its patterns, the way certain objects are claimed by the deep whilst others are flung back to the surface. A cylinder, he notices, descends more slowly than a ship’s hull. So he lashes himself to a barrel and is carried, improbably, to safety. It is the least heroic rescue in all of literature, and one of the most instructive.

Marshall McLuhan loved this story so much that he returned to it constantly throughout his career, because he thought it described perfectly our relationship to the media and technologies that surround us. We are, all of us, in the maelström. Most of us are clinging to the ship. The question—then, now, perhaps especially now—is whether we can train ourselves to study the vortex instead.

The Medium is the Message

McLuhan was a Canadian literary critic who became, somewhat against his will, a prophet. By the 1960s he was appearing routinely on television to explain what television was doing to everyone who watched it. His central preoccupation was this: that we are extraordinarily attentive to what our technologies and media say, and almost entirely blind to what they do. The content, he wrote, is “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” Attend to the content and you miss the story. The medium, as he so famously put it, is the message.

To understand what he meant by that, you need his foundational claim, the one everything else rests on: that every technology is an extension of ourselves. The wheel extends the foot. The telescope extends the eye. Clothing extends the skin. These are not merely tools; they are projections of human capacity outward into the world, and when we make them, something changes—in the world, certainly, but also in us. We make the tools, McLuhan kept insisting, but the tools make us as well.

Written language is his best illustration, and perhaps the most vertiginous to contemplate. Here is a thought experiment: try to imagine the interior life of a person who has never encountered writing. Not an unintelligent person (the oral cultures of the ancient world sustained extraordinary complexity, after all), but that interior life is structured differently. Ideas exist in relationship to the bodies that voice them (you cannot have an anonymous opinion in a village). Knowledge is communal and contextual. The very notion of a private self with a fixed, legible identity is, in some sense, a literary achievement.

What writing does, and what the printing press then does at scale, with industrial force, is reorganise consciousness around the visual, the linear, the individual. Ideas gain autonomy from the people who had them; you can publish under a pseudonym, circulate a pamphlet, be argued with by someone in a different century. The self hardens into something discrete and separate. Time becomes a sequence rather than a cycle. McLuhan called this the “Gutenberg galaxy,” and his point was not that it is good or bad but that it is contingent. It is a particular way of being human made possible by a particular technology, rather than the natural, inevitable form of human consciousness that we tend to assume it is.

A fish, he remarked, doesn’t know what water is until it’s been beached.

This is one thread in a larger conversation about how media reshapes perception, language, and the self.

Library members can explore related pieces from the archives:

• #9: Lakoff on how cognition is scaffolded by language, and how the structures we think with determine what can be thought at all.

• #18: Leonard Bernstein on Instant Gratification: attention, tempo, and what happens to judgment and depth in cultures engineered for speed.

Plus access to 38 other fortnightly issues exploring philosophy, art, literature, and the strange corners of human experience, along with a brand new scrapbook every week.

The Distinction Between Hot and Cool Media

This brings us to his most useful distinction: between hot and cool media. A hot medium is high in definition, dense with information, low in participation; it does most of the work for you. Radio is hot; so is film, the photograph, the printed book. A cool medium is sparse, sketchy, demanding, it requires you to fill in the gaps, to bring something of yourself to complete the act of communication.

The telephone, for McLuhan, was cool. So was the graphic novel and the seminar. The intimacy of the call-in show, the participatory texture of a conversation are phenomenologically quite different from the experience of sitting in a cinema watching information wash over you.

What he was mapping was the question of what different media demand from their audiences, what cognitive postures they require, what they exercise and what they allow to atrophy. And once you start thinking in these terms, it is quite difficult to stop. The medium doesn’t just transmit your message; it shapes the kind of messages that can be sent, the kind of mind required to receive them, and ultimately, after long enough exposure, the kind of culture that grows up around them.

What Would McLuhan Have Made of A.I.?

Let’s take a moment to do what McLuhan himself loved doing, which is to risk an extrapolation.

Towards the end of Understanding Media, he wrote something that his contemporaries (always a little sceptical, to say the least, of the academic credibility of that guy who’s always being interviewed for the telly) read as mere speculation. Reading it today, however, gives it a rather different quality:

“We are rapidly approaching the final phase of the extension of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.”

He published this in 1964. He was describing, with remarkable precision, what we now call artificial intelligence (not, of course, because he foresaw it technically, but because the logical endpoint of his framework always pointed there.) If media are extensions of ourselves, and if each extension externalises a further portion of our cognitive and sensory capacity, then the terminus of that process is the externalisation of the process of knowing itself.

Every previous medium, however transformative, left the generative core intact. You still had to think the thought before writing it down; you still had to compose the argument before broadcasting it; you still had to feel the emotion before the poem could be transmitted. What we are now building is something that proposes to think alongside us—or, in certain moods, instead of us. Not an extension of the eye or the ear or the memory, but of cognition as such.

McLuhan would not, one suspects, be reassured by arguments about the quality of AI outputs. That is precisely the distraction he spent his career warning against. He would want to know what posture the new medium requires of its user. How much participation does it demand? Which faculties does it exercise, and which does it allow to go soft?

There is a version of this story that is optimistic, or at least ambivalent (McLuhan himself refused easy value judgments, and we should probably follow his lead). The extension of writing didn’t make us less thoughtful, after all; it made certain kinds of thought possible that couldn’t have existed otherwise. The extension of consciousness into AI might yet liberate the human mind for modes of knowing that we can’t currently imagine, in the same way that writing liberated it from the labour of total recall. We can hope.

But there is another possibility that the framework opens up, and it feels, at least from where we’re sitting now, to be a more likely outcome. What if the medium, this time, is hot in a way nothing has ever been hot before? What if it is so dense with information, so thorough in its completion of the cognitive task, that participation itself becomes the atrophied capacity? What if, having extended the process of thought outward, we find there is less of us left on the inside?

We’ll wrap up that rather terrifying thought by going back to what we learnt from Poe and his Maelström. Paying attention to what is happening is still the only barrel we have.

Key takeaways

1. According to McLuhan, media are extensions of ourselves—and every extension changes what it means to be human, often in ways we don’t notice until it’s too late.

2. Writing didn’t just record thought; it restructured consciousness itself, creating the individual, linear, private self we now take for granted.

3. If AI externalises the process of thinking rather than merely its outputs, we may be the first generation to extend the one faculty we can least afford to lose.

The Soul’s Strange Homesickness: Plato and the Case for Life After Death #philosophy

Part One of a series: Is there a legitimate, secular claim for consciousness after death?

Source: Plato’s Phaedo

The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David, 1787

At a glance: Plato argues in the Phaedo that the soul is distinct from the body and naturally oriented toward what is eternal rather than physical.

I want to start with an admission that might disqualify me from writing this series at all: I don’t know what I think happens when we die. I suspect this is true of most people, if they’re honest. We live in an age that has, broadly speaking, outsourced this question to either religion or dismissal. You either believe in something or you don’t, and either way you probably feel vaguely embarrassed to be caught thinking too hard about it.

But here’s what I find interesting. Long before the great monotheisms claimed the territory of the afterlife as their own, before heaven and hell became the culturally default options, there were philosophers making arguments — careful, rigorous, secular arguments — for the persistence of consciousness after the body’s death. Arguments that didn’t depend on faith, revelation, or the authority of priests. Arguments that rested, for better or worse, on reason alone.

This series is an attempt to take those arguments seriously.

The obvious place to start is Plato. And the obvious text is the Phaedo.

Socrates’s Death

The setting alone is almost unbearably poignant. It is the last day of Socrates’ life. He is in his prison cell in Athens, his friends gathered around him, the hemlock already prepared. He has been condemned to death by the city he spent his life trying to improve, and in a few hours he will drink the poison that kills him. And yet Socrates is not afraid. More than that: he seems almost impatient to be gone.

His friends are weeping. He is not. He tells them that the philosopher, of all people, should be prepared for death, should be looking forward to it with something close to anticipation. “The one aim of those who practise philosophy in the proper manner,” he says, “is to practise for dying and death.” It is an extraordinary thing to say. What on earth does he mean?

Plato’s answer, worked out through a long afternoon of dialogue, involves a radical claim about the relationship between the body and the soul. Not just that they are distinct (although that is where he starts) but that the soul is more at home without the body than with it.

The body, in this view, is not so much a vessel for the soul as an impediment to it. It “fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense,” Socrates says, “so that in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body.”

Every piece of genuine knowledge we possess, we have obtained despite our embodiment, not because of it. Philosophy is, at its core, a kind of training: a lifelong practice of loosening the soul’s attachment to the physical, so that when death finally separates them, the soul knows where it is going.

This is the backdrop against which Plato offers his three main arguments for the soul’s immortality. They are not equally successful. But they are all, I think, more interesting than they are usually given credit for.

The Argument from Opposites

The first is the argument from opposites, or, scholars sometimes call it, the Cyclical Argument. Socrates observes that in nature, all things emerge from their opposites: the large from the small, the strong from the weak, the sleeping from the waking. Between every pair of opposite states, there is a pair of opposite processes: increase and decrease, sleeping and waking, growth and decay. And crucially, these processes must balance each other out; otherwise, everything would eventually tip to one side. “If coming-to-life did not balance out dying,” Socrates reasons, “everything would eventually be in the same state.” All things would, in time, simply be dead.

Therefore (and here is the leap) “the living come from the dead,” just as the dead come from the living. The soul must persist through death in order to return.

Now, I’ll be honest: this argument doesn’t quite work. Socrates himself seemed to know it (he later suggests it needs propping up by the arguments that follow). The analogy between natural opposites (big/small) and existential ones (alive/dead) is shakier than it first appears; it’s not obvious that death and life are the same kind of opposition as sleeping and waking, and the inference from “natural cycles balance out” to “therefore individual souls persist” is a long bow to draw. But the argument does establish something important: the idea that death might be a transition rather than a terminus.

The Theory of Recollection

The second argument is the one I find most genuinely strange and, in its strangeness, most alive. Plato calls it the Theory of Recollection, and its starting point is an epistemological puzzle that had been nagging at him for years.

When we perceive two roughly equal sticks, we immediately grasp not just that they are approximately equal, but that they fall short of perfect equality. We compare them, implicitly, against an ideal standard — a concept of Equality as such, absolute and flawless — and find them wanting. But where did we get that standard? We have never encountered perfect equality in the world. We have only ever seen approximations. And yet we recognise the approximation as an approximation, which means the ideal against which we are measuring must have come from somewhere else.

Plato’s answer is that we didn’t learn it. We remembered it. The soul, before birth, existed in direct contact with the eternal Forms, the ideal archetypes of which all worldly things are imperfect copies. The Form of Equality, the Form of Beauty, the Form of the Good. When we encounter earthly instances of these things, something in us stirs; recognition flickers. Learning, on this account, is not acquisition but anamnesis, a word that means, roughly, un-forgetting.

“If those realities we are always talking about exist,” Socrates tells his friends, “the Beautiful and the Good and all that kind of reality — and we refer all the things we perceive to that reality, discovering that it existed before and is ours... then, just as they exist, so our soul must exist before we are born.”

The problem, as Socrates’ friend Simmias immediately points out, is that even if the soul pre-existed our birth, this doesn’t prove it survives our death. Plato waves this objection away somewhat briskly — combine this argument with the first one, he says, and you’ll get there — which is perhaps the least satisfying moment in the dialogue.

It is the third argument, the Affinity Argument, that comes closest to articulating what Plato actually wants to say. And it is, at its core, an argument from belonging.

The Affinity Argument

Socrates asks his friends to consider two kinds of reality. On one side: the visible, composite, changeable world of physical things — bodies, sticks, stones, people — that is perpetually in flux, never quite the same from one moment to the next. On the other: the invisible, non-composite, eternal world of Forms — the Beautiful, the Equal, the Just — that are always the same, that admit no change, that can be grasped only by the mind and never by the senses.

Now consider the soul. Which world does it resemble? The soul, Socrates argues, is like the Forms: invisible, simple, unchanging in its essential nature. When the soul “makes use of the body to investigate something, whether through sight or hearing or some other sense,” it is dragged into the realm of flux and confusion. But when it “investigates by itself,” it moves toward “that which is always the same.” It enters its native element.

The soul is persuaded, through philosophical discipline, “to trust only itself and whatever reality, existing by itself, the soul by itself understands... for this is different in different circumstances and is sensible and visible, whereas what the soul itself sees is intelligible and indivisible.”

This is, I think, one of the most beautiful and one of the most dangerous ideas in the history of philosophy. Beautiful, because it offers a way of thinking about human consciousness as something that is not quite at home in the material world, that reaches toward something it cannot quite grasp in embodied life, and might fully apprehend only once the body falls away.

Plato is careful, and this is to his credit, to frame the Affinity Argument not as a proof but as a probability. “What kind of thing,” he asks, “is likely to be scattered” after death? The soul, given its resemblance to that which is eternal and non-composite, is unlikely to simply dissolve. This is not certainty. It is an educated wager.

Does The Idea Hold?

So: is the case legitimate? Is there a secular argument here worth taking seriously?

I think there are two things to say. The first is that Plato’s arguments are more honest than they are often portrayed. He builds in his own scepticism. He lets his interlocutors object. He frames the strongest of his arguments in explicitly probabilistic terms. He is actually doing philosophy rather than handing down dogma.

What he gives us is simply a man on the last day of his life, thinking as hard as he can, in front of the people he loves, about whether there is any reason to hope.

The second is that the arguments leave significant work still to be done. The Theory of Recollection requires a metaphysics of Forms that most modern philosophers would find extravagant. The Affinity Argument establishes resemblance, not identity (the soul might be like the eternal without being eternal). And the whole framework rests on a distinction between soul and body — a dualism — that has been under sustained philosophical attack for centuries.

Which brings us to where this series is going. Because Plato was not the last person to make a secular case for consciousness after death — and his most immediate inheritors worked within frameworks that were, in important ways, more rigorous and more troubling. Next, we turn to a thinker who took Plato’s foundational dualism — soul distinct from body — and sharpened it almost to breaking point. Descartes, who stripped the question back to its bare bones and arrived at something that was either a proof of the soul’s independence or a philosophical disaster, depending on your sympathies.

For now, though, let’s just sit with what the Phaedo actually gives us. Socrates, drinking his hemlock, calm among weeping friends. A man who believed, on the basis of argument, not revelation, that his soul was heading somewhere it recognised. Whether he was right is a question we, of course, will not be able to answer. But it's a question we'll not dismiss either.

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Whether you're spending today with someone you love, nursing a broken heart, or simply enjoying the quiet pleasure of your own company, I hope you'll find something here provides reasonable company for an m…

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*A joke that references something you haven't actually read yet. Forgive me, it’s been a long week.

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In the issue:

• Gregory Bateson on purposive thinking and original sin #anthropology

• 🔒Georges Perec’s practical guide to noticing more #literature #phenomenology

• 🔒Walter Benjamin on Childhood, Conquest and a Mother’s Waiting Gaze #literature

• 🔒The Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia #history #archeology

• 🔒The World's Most Beautiful Cemeteries #architecture

What If the Original Sin Was Learning to Think? Gregory Bateson On Purposive Thinking and Its Discontents #anthropology

Source: Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Lecture to London Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation in August 1968

At a glance: Western civilization’s crisis stems from a fundamentally flawed mode of consciousness—linear, purposive thinking that sees straight lines where nature operates in self-correcting loops

“But that arrogant scientific philosophy is now obsolete, and in its place there is the discovery that man is only a part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole.”

Gregory Bateson, influential mid-century anthropologist and one of the founders of cybernetics, once told a parable about the Fall. It was during a lecture to the London Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation in August 1968, and it strikes me as just about the best way I’ve found into understanding his work.

His recounting of the story is not exactly the biblical version, but his own retelling that gets at something he thought was nearly universal about human nature.

There was a Garden, he said, fertile and balanced, with hundreds of species living together in ecological equilibrium. That was until two apes, more intelligent than the others, spotted some fruit high in a tree, yum yum. The problem was that it was too high to reach, and so they did something fateful, something irreversible: they began to think.

The he-ape (let’s call him Adam) found a box, positioned it under the tree and climbed up, but still couldn’t reach the fruit. Not to be deterred, he got another box (I’m not sure where these boxes are coming from but stick with it), stacked it on top of the first, climbed up on both and finally, to his great pleasure, grasped that delicious red apple.

These two clever apes were, Bateson said, almost drunk with their discovery. Now this was how to do things: make a plan, A-B-C, get D. They would become specialised in this planned, purposive way of living, but in doing so they would cast out from the Garden — and this was the problem — any concept of their own total systemic nature, or of the systemic nature around them.

The topsoil vanished. Plants became weeds, animals became pests. Adam found himself sweating for his bread, cursing a vengeful God for the consequences of his own cleverness.

The original sin, in Bateson’s telling, is really about a particular kind of consciousness that is linear, purposive, and focused on getting what we want through the shortest logical path. His story is about what we’ve lost in becoming so very good at stacking boxes.

The Problem with Purpose

Consciousness is necessarily limited. Bateson compares it to a television screen that can only display a fraction of what’s happening in the total television process. To report on any extra bit would require extra circuitry, which would then also need reporting, and so on and so on.

We settle, instead, for extremely limited consciousness, and that consciousness becomes what Bateson calls “a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical or causal path to get what you next want.” Dinner, sexual activity, a Beethoven sonata, the television remote, and, always above all, money and power.

In selecting for purpose, consciousness pulls out sequences that lack what Bateson calls the “loop structure” characteristic of whole systems. The apple isn’t just a resource to be obtained through clever box-stacking, no matter how satisfying. The apple is part of a tree, which is part of a forest ecosystem, which depends on soil microbes and pollinators and the decay of previous generations. Purpose isolates the fruit from the pattern. We see straight lines where there are actually circles, feedback loops, mutual dependencies.

Consider a steam engine fitted with a governor: as the engine spins faster, centrifugal force flings weighted balls outward (I can’t be accused of not doing my research); the wider they diverge, the less fuel flows to the engine. More speed means less fuel; less fuel means less speed. The system balances itself through its own internal relationships, no external control required. This is the origin of cybernetic thinking, understanding patterns that self-correct through structure rather than through will or purpose.

But purposive consciousness doesn’t naturally think this way. When it surveys an oak wood with perhaps a thousand species living through competition and mutual dependency, each with potential for explosive growth yet somehow maintaining equilibrium, what does it see? Resources. Problems. Things to extract or eliminate. It doesn’t see, can’t really see, the whole pattern that would reveal our entanglement in something we cannot control.

This is one thread in a larger conversation about systems, consciousness, and modes of knowing beyond linear purpose. Library members can explore related pieces from the archives:

• #20 - Ecological systems theory: An example of the nested cybernetic systems Bateson describes

• #3 - Margaret Mead on adolescent angst: anthropological thinking from Bateson's collaborator and wife

• #10 - Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: architecture as systemic wisdom rather than purposive design

• #11 - Karl Popper's concept of piecemeal social engineering: the limits of linear planning in complex social systems

Plus access to 37 other fortnightly issues exploring philosophy, art, literature, and the strange corners of human experience, along with a brand new scrapbook every week.

Subscribe now

The Three Self Correcting Systems

Bateson argues in his talk that we’re dealing with three enormously complex self-correcting systems:

“One is the human individual. Its physiology and neurology conserve body temperature, blood chemistry, the length and size and shape of organs during growth and embryology, and all the rest of the body’s characteristics”

“Second, we deal with the society in which that individual lives -and that society is again a system of the same general kind.”

“And third, we deal with the ecosystem, the natural biological surroundings of these human animals.”

Each of these systems operates through similar principles—feedback mechanisms, self-correction, precarious balances between competition and cooperation.

The pattern repeats at every scale. What’s true of species in a woodland is equally true of organs and tissues in your body, or groups of people in a society. Yet we’re systematically destroying the balanced natural systems of the world through something like epistemological myopia. Homo sapiens has exterminated species, introduced others that became pests, and altered water supplies. Bateson notes, almost casually, “We simply make [natural systems] unbalanced.”

It all stems from a lack of what Bateson calls “systemic wisdom”—a knowledge of the larger interactive system and how our actions ripple through it. Let’s take, because Bateson does, medical science as an example.

Medical science is something human beings (rightly, I think) are incredibly proud of. It has given us extraordinary tricks for specific problems, vaccines and treatments and surgical interventions that would have seemed miraculous a century ago. We’ve come a long way from stacking boxes.

But, for Bateson, these tricks (his word) bear the same purposive hallmarks of that original sin. Even our finest minds in the medical sciences, as grateful to them as we might be if loved ones have been saved through one of their conjuring acts, demonstrate “extraordinarily little knowledge of the sort of things [he is] talking about; that is, of the body as a systemically, cybernetically organized self-corrective system.”

Purpose has determined what comes under inspection, and we’ve solved isolated problems brilliantly whilst remaining blind to the larger pattern.

This is the crisis as Bateson sees it: we are wielding ever more powerful tools whilst operating with a mode of consciousness fundamentally unsuited to understanding the systems those tools affect. Modern technology has empowered conscious purpose to upset the balances of the body, of society, of the biological world around us, but a catastrophic loss of balance is threatened by our doing so.

The problem is made worse by a cruel twist of irony:

“Dr. Laing noted that the obvious can be very difficult for people to see. That is because people are self-corrective systems. They are self-corrective against disturbance, and if the obvious is not of a kind that they can easily assimilate without internal disturbance, their self-corrective mechanisms work to sidetrack it, to hide it, even to the extent of shutting the eyes if necessary, or shutting off various parts of the process of perception. Disturbing information can be framed like a pearl so that it doesn’t make a nuisance of itself, and this will be done, according to the understanding of the system itself of what would be a nuisance.”

Our minds are themselves self-correcting systems. If something obvious intrudes that we can’t easily assimilate, our mechanisms work to sidetrack it, hide it, even shut our eyes if necessary. This is why ecological collapse can be happening all around us and yet remain somehow unreal, why we keep stacking boxes even as the garden dies.

Wisdom and the Unconscious

Bateson’s call is for a kind of synthesis between conscious purpose and systemic understanding. The idea that wisdom might come not from thinking harder in straight lines but from accessing modes of knowing that include the unconscious, that let us experience ourselves as parts of larger wholes.

He notes that many people in his era were turning to psychedelic drugs for enlarged consciousness, “and I think this symptom of our epoch probably arises as an attempt to compensate for our excessive purposiveness.” But he doubts wisdom can be got that way, that simply letting unconscious material gush out just exchanges one partial view for another.

So what would that systemic view look like in practice? How do we learn to see in circles rather than lines, to understand ourselves not as separate agents stacking boxes but as organs within larger organisms?

“Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished,” Bateson writes. The biological systems—individual, culture, ecology—are “partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. But the systems are nonetheless punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces ‘God’ if you will.”

We committed what Bateson frames as original sin—the sin of purposive thinking, of believing we could extract ourselves from the systems we’re embedded in—and now we’re living through the punishment. It’s not divine wrath we’re experiencing but systemic correction, the exponential curves appearing as natural balance collapses under the weight of our brilliant, myopic interventions. The topsoil didn’t ask to disappear. We planned that into existence, one rational decision at a time, each choice perfectly reasonable in isolation, catastrophic in accumulation.

Perhaps what we need is less willpower and more humility, less purpose and more attention to the patterns that connect us to everything else. We have a desperate need for more structures that naturally correct toward balance, wisdom woven into relationship rather than imposed from outside. The steam engine governor doesn’t will itself to maintain equilibrium; it does so through the elegance of its own design, through understanding rather than force.

Key takeaways:

1. Purposive consciousness sees straight lines where nature operates in circular feedback loops—we grab apples without seeing the ecosystem.

2. Our minds actively hide information that threatens our purposive frameworks, making ecological collapse somehow unreal even as it unfolds around us.

3. Systemic wisdom requires learning to see in circles rather than lines

Georges Perec’s Practical Guide to Noticing More #literature #phenomenology

Source: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec, 1974

I’m sitting in a park on a Tuesday afternoon, trying my best to fulfill this Year’s (and last year’s, for that matter) January resolution to “be more present.” The weak sun is doing that dappled thing through the leaves. A dog barks somewhere. I’m here, I’m noticing, I’m checking my phone again. The tyranny of mindfulness apps and their breathless injunctions to “be here now” has rather spectacularly failed me. What I need, it turns out, isn’t another reminder to notice, but actual instructions on how.

Enter Georges Perec, that most peculiar of French writers, with what might be the only useful guide to paying attention ever written.

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