...Thereof one must be silent.

I am not certain who designed this diagram, but I encountered it here. It almost illustrates the radical constructivist epistemology (or its pre-modern and early modern anticipations) as found in the metaphysical speculations of Ibn 'Arabi and his school. If one were to move the "virtuality" circle inside the "reality" circle, I think the diagram would work well as a heuristic device.

Whereof one cannot speak...

Beata Tranquillitas

"One of the most famous and best loved pictures by the great Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer is his engraving of 'St. Jerome in His [Study].' Jerome, the perfect example of the Christian scholar and thinker, is seated undisturbed at his desk in the peaceful seclusion of his well-ordered study. The scene idealizes the vita contemplativa, life in the service of God, and the learned tradition, for Jerome, who once dreamt that he heard a voice declare him more a Ciceronian than a Christian, has his books near at hand and is writing another. The room may very well have been the study room of the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, Durer's closest friend, or the library room of the sanctuary which Conrad Mutian named his beata tranquillitas..."

Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1963), 1.

The Missing Music

in contemporary poetry.

Toshihiko Izutsu (1914-1993)

Izutsu's Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts is a marvelous work of exegetical scholarship. He wrote it while a professor of Islamic philosophy at McGill University at a time when he was entering a "new phase" of his intellectual life, one in which he found himself "groping" towards "a new type of Oriental philosophy based on a series of rigorously philological, comparative studies of the key terms of various philosophical traditions in the Near, Middle, and Far East."

It was an interesting project and, if nothing else, produced a modern study of Ibn 'Arabi's Fusus al-Hikam (in clear and often elegant English, no less) that, to my mind, makes a strong case for regarding Ibn 'Arabi and his "school" as the culmination of the pre-modern Muslim intellectual tradition.

The Tao of Humanism

At the tender age of nineteen, after a long conversation about I-don't-know-what, a friend of mine (who happened to be an Episcopal priest--a quite unusual Episcopal priest), got up from his armchair and walked over to his bookshelves and pulled out a copy of the Tao te Ching (translated or, perhaps better, interpreted) by Witter Bynner. "A gift," he said, and the conversation meandered from there in another direction.

When, at my leisure, I began to peruse the pages of that book, my mind reeled: I found myself shaken to the core. The profundity of the poetry shattered the smug presumption of Western religious and philosophical superiority which, in my youth, had seemed self-evident. At that moment, Lao Tzu became an important milestone in my cosmopolitan awakening. The doors of perception had been cleansed. We should all be so privileged to have such friends contributing to our intellectual maturity.

The Passing of Doris Lessing

Doris learning that she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

Honoring Edward Said

At Columbia University.

Adonis

On the will-to-power over poetry that critics often attempt to impose:

"Legislation and codification go against the nature of poetic language, for this language, since it is man's expression of his explosive moods, his impetuousness, his difference, is incandescent, constantly renewing itself, heterogeneous, kinetic and explosive, always a disrupter of codes and systems. It is the search for the self, and the return to the self, but by means of a perpetual exodus away from the self [i.e., ecstasy]."

An Introduction to Arab Poetics, 34.

The Humanistic Vision of C.P. Cavafy

Two views: one from The Poetry Foundation and another from Kevin McMahon.

Cavafy's poem "Thermopylae."

Why Hegel Matters

"To apprehend what is is the task of philosophy because what is is reason. As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts...To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present, and to find delight in it, is a rational insight which implies reconciliation with reality. This reconciliation philosophy grants to those who have felt the inward demand to conceive clearly, to perceive subjective freedom while present in substantive reality, and yet though possessing this freedom to stand not upon this particular and contingent, but upon what is self-originated and self-completed."

So wrote Hegel in 1820. It is important to understand that, by reason, Hegel sometimes meant (or at least seemed to mean) more than "rationality" or "logic"--words that, in English (since at least Bacon and Mill), have become somewhat shrunken or dessicated. For Hegel, it appears that reason was logos and logos is--despite Hegel's criticism of Kant on this point--the "thing in itself" (whatever that might be). "What is." To apprehend "what is" may indeed be the task of philosophy, but first we must define our terms. Once we have accomplished that prerequisite (answered the threshold question) we have delimited the undelimitable logos and betrayed our very quest.




Unconsciously (or perhaps consciously) echoing Hegel, Norman O. Brown declared that "Nature, Natura naturans, is not an orderly Spinozistic or Dantesque cosmos; Nature is Heraclitean fire. And the fire and the rose are one. And so, in spite of Dante, Heaven and Hell are the same place...Modern, or is it postmodern, thought begins with Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (NOB, "Revisioning Historical Identities").

Only to end, perhaps, in Henry Miller's Rosy Crucifixion. As Hegel understood only too well, philosophy, "as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.







And so, thanks to Hegel, we may conclude that our masterpiece is the private life...

And then along comes Feuerbach and turns Hegel on his head: God is an objectification, an alienation of our subjectivities. Feuerbach is followed by Thomas Wolfe, the great Hegelian poet of "Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness..." The poet "...of wandering forever and the earth again." The poet Of Time and the River.

As the author of Love's Body admonished us all: "There is only poetry." Hegel probably did not intend to teach us that but, as his most perspicacious readers have understood, he left us no other conclusion.