Breakfast of Champions

I decided to quickly breeze through this one because I just saw Alan Rudolph's cinematic version.  Though the film was a complete commercial flop it actually had some interesting elements that reminded me of things like Fear and Loathing and Schizopolis.  I can't say it was a great movie, but it was kinda entertaining, and this is exactly how I would describe the novel as well. It's certainly not one of Vonnegut's best.  It's too scattered and indulgently meta-fictional to not feel a bit like a well know writer trying to come up with just anything to publish.  But it's also got a few great laugh-out-loud moments that only the non-author of "Wear Sunscreen" could have come up with. 

The Anomaly

Thanks for this one goes to another esteemed colleague from Tejas, Dr. Maddog, who recently suggested that I might find Hervé Le Tellier's novel interesting.  And while I'm not sure describing it as a "novel' is completely accurate (Le Tellier called it a scoubidou of short stories), I definitely enjoyed and would recommend the book.  The plot centers on the gradual revelation of the eponymous anomaly, and there's little point in discussing it without giving away the central conceit.  However, part of the pleasure of the story lies in initially knowing nothing about how it's structured, so ...

SPOILER ALERT

The anomaly is a duplicated plane together with all its passengers.  Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York lands in March, and then an identical flight literally falls out of the sky again in June.  Accordingly, the novel is broken into three parts -- the stories of the various passengers before the anomaly has been revealed to them, the comic relief provided by the deep state machinations that bring the two sets of passengers together once the anomaly is discovered, and the aftermath of this strange duplication.  The first part is an interesting stylistic exercise because each character's story is told through the lens of a particular type of genre fiction (ie. thriller, drama, sci-fi, psychological novel, etc ...).  It makes for a very fast paced and interesting way of setting up what we gradually see coming -- something about the flight they took back in March unites these otherwise unrelated and unsuspecting characters.  It's a neat trick on Le Tellier's part because introducing so many characters so quickly might otherwise have left us confused and bored rather than off-balance but intrigued.  The second part, as I say, is mostly comic relief.  Imagine Douglass Adams or Mel Brooks describing the Deep State tripping over itself in an effort to contain such an anomalous event.  The third part is naturally the most interesting bit, since it explores the classic literary theme of the double or doppelgänger.  Here, Le Tellier pursues the main metaphor that guides our interpretation of the anomaly -- it lends credence to Nick Bostrom's version of the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation.  Many folks don't think about the connection between this modern version of the double (or n-tuple) and the long tradition of thinking about twins, though, as Le Tellier makes clear, he is not one of them.  Modern simulation believers tend to treat the hypothesis as a scientific one, when in fact its main function -- reiterated from mythology down to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche -- is ethical.  And this is clearly what the third part of the novel is all about.  What exactly would you learn from meeting your double? 

What most simulation hypothesis adherents fail to understand is that a duplication of identity in time and space meant to prove that there is a glitch in the matrix can never be a physical fact.  But thinking about such a duplication has long served as a lens with which to examine our concept of identity and our notion of reality.  This has been true ever since the Buddha compared the body to a lump of foam and consciousness to a magic trick.  The prehistory of this idea that there is something illusory about reality basically encompasses all of history.  The modern simulation hypothesis is amusing because it simultaneously taps into the deep root of this intuition, at the same moment that it betrays it.  Because the simulation is based on analogy to the contemporary computer, we immediately assume that it must be run by some programmer and on some hardware. These seem to be the necessary correlates of the idea that we are nothing but software.   Inevitably, this analogy leads directly to the establishment, explicit or not, of a concept of "base" reality composed of both an ideal base 'knower' and a material base 'known'. 

But of course this concept is nonsense; the materialist philosophy this concept relies on is self-contradictory, and there's no way we could ever know if we were in base reality  By contrast, just about any experience can suggest to us that we are a sort of simulation.  The encounter with a double obviously provides an extreme example because the individual identity we all subjectively feel literally provides the model for our very concept of identity. If there can be more than one me, then I am immediately forced to rethink my innate conviction that I am a unique, atomic, self-existent entity and consider a world that is capable of producing multiple copies of my self.  This is why we reach so naturally for the simulation hypothesis in this instance.  

Notice though, what's actually happening here.  We are simply perceiving two of the 'same' thing.  But this very act implies some sort of consciousness that the things are not the same, otherwise we would not say that there are two of them.  To be exactly the same, they would have to perfectly overlap in space and time and not just in DNA and personality as Le Tellier's characters do.  In which case we would not perceive two separate things but a single one.  Perceiving two things that are 'the same' is hardly the stuff of science fiction though.  It's our most commonplace experience.  We are constantly fabricating the identity of all things when what we are given is ceaseless flux.  When we say that we see two of something it's a sort of shorthand -- we take it for granted that if we look more carefully, we'll find these things differ in some way, and that we can later go on to specify how the two distinct sets of phenomena were similar enough to treat as the same for certain purposes.  In other words, embedded within the very concept of repetition is the notion that the identity of things are constructed, that the solidity of objects is not innate but depends on context, and that our perception of reality is changeable.  These are all observations that most everyone would agree with but that we all constantly overlook in everyday experience.  The power of the anomaly lies in the way it forces these truths on us by showing us they apply even to the one thing we think cannot be constructed -- our self.  But in principle, every experience can be anomalous.  Indeed, we might think of our brain's main job as to avoid seeing every experience as anomalous so as not to be overwhelmed by it.  But take some drugs or sit very still for a long time and watch the way your perception changes.  All of our experience and all of the things in it are constructed, fabricated, and hence empty.  The only thing you need to do to observe this is watch.  So the world that is capable of producing multiple variations of me is not some post-human hyper-technoligcal simulation, but this very world, which is already in itself a sort of simulation, a "star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream".

So naturally, this brings us to the question of what we can learn from the shock of meeting our double and seeing our reality and our identity as a construction.  The answer is probably obvious -- we can, if we choose, imagine reconstructing it some other way.  The theme of duplication constantly illustrates a world of possible variation.  Whether due to chance or wisdom, we could be different.  This is often the central point in doppelgänger stories like Dostoevksy's The Double or Notes from Underground where the hero is poised on a knife edge of self-aggrandizement and self-abasement, or Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, where the author's recreation of the Quixote is, "verbally identical, but ... almost infinitely richer".  And it is certainly the deeper significance of Nietzsche's myth of the Eternal Return.  We have lived this exact moment before, indeed innumerable times before, down to its finest details of feeling and motivation.  But what exactly is this moment that we are reliving?  And is our awareness that it is being re-lived a source of joy or the greatest weight?  The answers, according to Le Tellier, vary.  Some of us love our double as ourselves (Slimboy), and some of us need divorce proceedings (Lucie).  Some of us make a change (André) and some of us repeat the same sorrow (David).  And if we look carefully in the mirror, we'll probably find that most of us go through all of these emotions every single anomalous day. 

Built From Broken

I think someone from GMB must have recommended Scott Hogan's no-nonsense guide to keeping the body running.  Since our library had a copy I perused it very quickly and found it quite interesting.  While I haven't double-checked any of the references and investigated the quality of the studies Hogan cites, it does appear to live up to its subtitle: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body.  The focus throughout is not on how to build the most muscle mass or train for any specific sport, but on what really counts as we get older -- the ability to maintain a wide range of motion in a variety of circumstances.  Hogan provides some scientific backing to an empirical conclusion I had already arrived at; this basically comes down to how well your joints and connective tissue function.  So what we really need to train is joint health.  

Coming at fitness from this slightly different angle doesn't necessarily imply a huge change in the exercises we do.  The book is filled with pretty standard looking stuff.  But knowing what the prime target is, and knowing something about the way joints differ from muscles in their response to training, can definitely change how we do many of these exercises.  The takeaway isn't earth shattering nor terribly different from the approach GMB constantly cultivates.  We want to move more often, with greater attention to the details of our exercise, through a greater range of motion (with perhaps a lighter load), and above all, more slowly (especially in the eccentric phase).  In addition to explaining why these principles are important to our joints and giving us a list of exercises, Hogan describes a 4 week workout program that includes an interesting periodization.  Though the exercises stay the same, each week is devoted to a specific goal like "connective tissue remodeling", "hypertrophy", "strength", and "endurance plus energy loading".  The changing goals correspond to changes in not only sets and reps and weights, but in how we perform the exercises.  Since I just finished the book, I can't comment on how effective this workout program is for healing painful joints and preventing injury, but it sounds plausible and I'm eager to give it a shot.

The Volcano Lover

Even though she's gotta be high in the running for the sexiest female intellectual of all time, I'd only ever read a few of Susan Sontag's essays.  So when the cat bookstore kindly furnished a copy of one of the novels, I figured I had to give it a shot.  I found it a bit slow going for the first hundred pages or so but it gradually grew on me.  While Sontag never makes this obvious, and doesn't even tell you the names of the characters, it turns out she's written a historical novel.  

The plot consists in the real lives of three famously intertwined characters from 17th century English history -- William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the kingdom of Naples, his second wife Emma Hamilton, the most famous and notorious beauty of her age, and Horatio Nelson, the British answer to Napolean, the most famous war hero of his day.  As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia articles, the plot is historically accurate, and Sontag's fiction lies only in her narrative attempt to get inside the experience of these characters.  This accuracy also accounts for why the novel begins relatively slowly, and as a meditation on the art of collecting.  Sir William was one of those Englishman who "discovered" the beautiful antiquities of "backward" regions that today populate the British Museum (such as the Portland Vase).  This placid existence of a wealthy collector accounted for the first 50 years of Sir William's life.  Things only changed when, after his first wife died, he made his greatest find and discovered Emma, a former prostitute pawned off on him by his cousin.  Emma turned out to be not merely a beautiful trophy wife, but so remarkably intelligent and creative that she quickly became the talk of Europe despite her scandalous history.  Despite an age difference of 30 years, the two married and lived quite happily for many years.  Until Horatio Nelson turned up on the doorstep one day, fresh from his historic victory in the Battle of the Nile but desperately ill and in need of nursing.  Thus began a passionate affair between Emma and Nelson that Sir William, now in his dotage, simply accepted as inevitable.  At this point the center of gravity of the novel naturally starts to shift away from Sir William, and becomes more of a reflection on gender relations circa 1800.  Sontag shines most in the way she illuminates the psychology of the asymmetric situation you can easily discover by examining the wikipedia articles.  A huge chunk of Emma's is taken up by her decade long involvement with Nelson, but Emma barely merits a passing mention in the much longer Nelson article, despite the fact that she bore him a child and that the two lived in open sin for many years while Nelson remained married to another woman.  History demands that both the hero and the temptress fit in a certain mold, and Sontag imagines how ill-fitting this must have been for these larger than life characters.

Finally, my favorite part of the novel was the last 50 pages, which contain a lovely narrative twist (not to be confused with a plot twist) that I won't spoil.

A History of Mathematics

Back when I was working on the Leibniz project, I realized that I could do with a better grasp of the history of mathematics.  Deleuze was making all sorts of references to the development of the calculus that I mostly followed, but only more or less.  So, after a bit of research, I settled on this Boyer and Merzbach tome.  It definitely did help me better understand the way that the calculus was originally oriented around infinite series; this has mostly been lost in how it is taught today (well, at least how it was taught 30 years ago).  But I actually found that the most interesting part of the book was the first 300 pages leading up to the calculus.  It was fascinating to read about things like Mesopotamian sexagesimal fractions and the incredible work of Apollonius on the conics.  While it's a cliche, it really does give one a renewed appreciation of how far ahead of their time the Greeks were.  Unfortunately, even though I read it slowly and in small doses, I find it hard to recommend the book as a whole.  While I began reading pretty closely and working out some of the problems myself, by the final 150 pages or so I was mostly just skimming.  Once they go past Euler and Gauss you pretty much need a complete undergraduate education in pure math to follow much of the story. 

Breath

I find that I'm usually not quite the intended audience for most popular science writing, so I can end up sounding overly critical of books I have actually enjoyed.  The genre frequently leaves me as frustrated by its incompleteness and lack of depth as it does intrigued by the research it covers.  While James Nestor's bestseller is no exception to this pattern, I would still recommend the book.  I haven't seen anyone else cover, even superficially, this many aspects of breathing in one place.  The topic is simply so interesting that it shines despite the breezy, introductory, should-be-read-at-1.5X quality to the writing. 

Nestor begins with a discussion of the evolutionary changes in human head and neck structure caused by our adaptation to cooked food.  These seem to have made breathing inherently more problematic for us than for any other mammal.  In modern times, we've compounded these problems by adopting softer diets that exercise our jaws less, as well as by living in that state of chronic low grade tension otherwise known as "civilization".  All of these changes make it more difficult to breathe effectively through our noses and to take full, deep breaths.  And this is apparently very bad for us.  

Nestor goes on to explain some of the reasons for why this is bad, and some of the ways we can combat it.  But he's more interested in striking anecdotes about rogue research than in consensus science, so most of these come off as pretty sketchy and not always coherent.  For example, he sometimes tells us that what we really want to do is learn to tolerate higher levels of carbon dioxide in the blood by extending our exhale and breathing much more slowly than we often do.  At other points he encourages us to breathe much harder, almost to the point hyperventilation, in the style popularized by Wim Hof.  Then again, maybe we should use yogic breathing techniques like alternate nostril breathing and etc ...  To sort out which of these partially contradictory ideas actually has any scientific support would require an extended tour through Nestor's bibliography (a very nice resource to have online).  While that might be an interesting project, I imagine the correct conclusion is likely predictably underwhelming: it depends.  The 'best' breathing techniques are wildly likely to depend on how you are and what you want to accomplish.  And this is of course precisely why these techniques are hard to study scientifically.  Which means that Nestor's book is ultimately most useful as a survey of possible ways to breath that we can experiment with personally.  So I'm excited to go through his instructional videos and see what happens.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I've had Kuhn's classic on the shelf since college, but somehow never gotten around to reading the whole thing.  Which in a way is too bad, since it could have saved me a lot of time -- Kuhn articulates more or less the same beef I've had with science for many years now, but in much clearer and more concise form.  The book is a classic for very good reasons.

Kuhn's basic thesis is so well known that it's hardly worth spending much time repeating it.  Science does not progress towards truth through successive falsification, as if asymptotically approaching some limit.  Instead, it progresses through revolutionary shifts between completely incompatible paradigms, shifts which are catalyzed from within by the way each round of "normal", or paradigmatic, science extends and develops the paradigm it unquestioningly takes to be the true model of reality.  In short, Kuhn takes science to be an evolutionary process where new scientific theories arise like new species that simply out-compete the old ones, rather than somehow disproving them.  This process tends to produce theories of increasing complexity, scope, and accuracy that can legitimately be seen as 'progress' in some sense.  But as with Neo-Darwinian evolution, this isn't progress towards some one true final species. 

While I was already familiar with, and largely agreed with, this thesis, reading the original version of it was still rewarding for several reasons.  First, because you can clearly hear Kuhn's tone, which is in marked contrast to many of the people who popularized his idea.  As he points out in the postscript, Kuhn does not consider himself a relativist.  On the contrary, he began life as a physicist and thinks of his historical and philosophical project as being more, not less, 'scientific' and empirical about how science actually works.  At no point does he suggest anything close to the idea that scientists can just make up whatever theory they like, that all theories are equally good, or that the sole factor in the acceptance of a paradigm is simple social consensus.  He is even a firm believer in the 'progress' of science.  However, as the quotes suggest, since Kuhn rethinks the very structure of science, his theory changes what we mean by the terms science and progress.  He wants us to see that since science isn't the successively closer approximation of truth we took it to be, it doesn't progress the way our textbooks teach us.  And while he cannot, by hypothesis, argue that this is a truer view of the scientific enterprise, he does a fine job of putting forward all kinds of perfectly empirical and theoretical reasons to convince us we should adopt this view of science.  So while he he takes seriously the observation that all the science we know of is practiced by a certain species of hairless chimp, he does not intend to suggest that science is merely a social construct.  We should recognize the reductionist relativist position for what it is historically -- a weaponization of Kuhn by struggling humanities departments.

Second, I was delighted to discover the extended use he made of the gestalt switch model for perception.  Scientific revolutions take us from seeing the duck to seeing the rabbit.  After a phase shift, the same data crystalizes in a new way.  Today, we could make the same point even more effectively by discussing Predictive Processing and the Bayesian Brain framework.  Kuhn actually already moves in this direction by repeatedly arguing that scientists are not simply interpreting neutral facts and assembling a theory from a sea of bottom up data, but are using their prior training to directly perceive the entities their theory posits from the top down as real.  Scientific revolutions are the sudden shifts in scientific perception triggered when experimental errors and theoretical anomalies reach a critical threshold that causes us to adopt a new set of priors, a new paradigm.  I think part of what made Kuhn's book controversial was the way this inverts the flow of information in our usual model of perception; it's hard to convince most folks that they are actively constructing and inferring their world (and self) when it feels like these things are simply given to them.  Of course, if you've already drunk the kool-aid, this controversial analogy is part of what makes the book brilliant.

Nexus

I breezed through a copy of Ramez Naam's techno-thriller at the suggestion of a local bookstore hooligan.  They claimed it was such a gripping and fast paced read that I would surely want to move right on to the other two books in the series.  Since I agree completely with the first part of this assessment, it's somewhat surprising that the second half breaks down; while I thoroughly enjoyed Nexus, I have no plans read Crux or Apex.  The trouble is that Naam writes good but quite generic sci-fi, and seems above all to be auditioning a script for the next Bourne franchise film -- his creative motto is apparently, "always be blowing up".  But while it was certainly a quick and engrossing read, there's something inherently unsatisfying about a story that takes all kinds of themes I'm interested in -- drugs, meditation, AI, neuroscience, geopolitics -- and mashes them together in the least surprising and interesting ways.  

The main plot device is solid idea.  Imagine if you could take a programmable psychedelic, as in, a drug that actually consisted of chips that stayed in your brain and could be used to send signals in and out of it.  Theoretically, this would let you change your perception in more fine grained and functional ways that simply flooding your system with serotonin.  It would also provide a sort of weigh station between normal human experience and the experience of that great staple of modern sci-fi -- the fully digital being.  Naturally, once we became able to program individual brains like this, we would surely want to start networking these analog-digital hybrids.  Which then makes each hybrid computer a potential hacking target, and etc ... You can imagine where it goes from here.  This is a fine premise that affords connection to a bunch of interesting questions, each of which is represented by Naam's well-drawn if slightly predictable and cardboard characters.  The trouble is that Naam is so prisoner to his screenplay that he doesn't have time to delve too far into any of these from an intellectual perspective.  The reader apparently cannot be counted on to wait more than about 10 pages between either tense near misses or gory combat scenes.  Eventually, this makes the plot feel kinda predictable and paint-by-number, and gives it that Hollywood sheen that leaves every movie looking like every other.  Will the good guys win in the end?  I'll admit that I'm kinda curious what happens.  I guess I'll just watch the Netflix series to find out.  But that too will take material suited for a 90 min film and, using suitably timed explosions and faux-epic grandeur, scatter it over 600 minutes of television.  And sometimes, you should just write a single novel, not a trilogy.

The Origins of the Second World War

I no longer recall who suggested that A.J.P. Taylor's short study of European politics between the Wars was a masterpiece.  Which is too bad because they were right and I should listen to more of their suggestions.  Taylor does a great job of explaining the tensions remaining after the Treaty of Versailles, and then tracing these lines of force forward as the complicated machinery of European politics played out over the following 20 years.  Since I've never studied the details of this history before, all I can say is that it is a fascinating story that seems well supported and well argued enough to perhaps be mostly true.  The book has apparently come in for a lot of criticism, and the reason for this is entirely predictable -- he doesn't blame the war on how evil Hitler was.  However, Hitler's inherent evilness is only a convincing historical explanation for people who just want to have a simple way to avoid considering the question.  For the rest of us, it's obvious that while Hitler's evilness may be a true and even necessary cause of the war, it is far from sufficient.  By explaining anything Germany might have done, it explains nothing about what it actually did.  

Instead, Taylor suggests that while Hitler transformed Germany domestically, his foreign policies were almost identical to all other German leaders since the end of WW1.  Since that war ended with German defeat and humiliation, but not a dismemberment of the German state, the goal of German leaders and the German people thereafter was to restore their greatness as the largest power in Europe.  And since Germany was the size of France and Britain combined, Taylor asserts that both those countries accepted that a restoration of German power was the inevitable outcome of the gradual dismantling of Versailles.  Naturally, they both also hoped that this could be delayed as long as possible, and ultimately carried out peacefully.  The shocking part of Taylor's thesis is that he suggests Hitler shared this latter goal.  Hitler had no intention of starting a great war with France and Britain in 1939.  He merely used the threat of force to hurry along the process of reunifying the German speaking people who had been separated off into Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland).  Germany had long sought this reunification, and the French and British had long assumed it would eventually happen despite whatever objections those small countries might have.  So while successive occupation of these three areas was indeed the direct trigger for the start of the war, Taylor argues that their reincorporation into Germany was not a sign of Hitler's endless desire to dominate the world.  Instead, Hitler's tactic all along was one of bluffing then waiting.  He threatened to use military force, and constantly exaggerated the capability of the German army (apparently much to the discomfort of his generals), but only as a means of pressuring the various European powers to acquiesce without a fight.  Unfortunately, gambling is a dangerous business.  Sometimes people call your bluff, and the rest is history.

Against the Gods

Peter Bernstein's "Remarkable Story of Risk" had been on the shelf for so long that it somehow migrated into bedtime reading.  While it was engaging and well written, I found I wasn't really the target audience for the book.  I was already familiar with all of the mathematics, and even many of the historical anecdotes, that he discusses in the first half of the book.  And just a routine tour of duty in finance makes the second half's discussion of risk management techniques a bit redundant.  In fact, I almost stopped reading after the eye-rolling-ly triumphant late 90's tone of the introduction; these days, that era's presumption that we had managed to design a foolproof self-correcting risk management system looks nothing short of amazingly naive.  However, I'm glad I pushed on despite my misgivings.  I ended up enjoying the way Bernstein unfolded his story and nuanced the neo-liberal tone he began with.  Ultimately, it's not a bad book to hand someone who has never reflected on the issue of what "risk" is, nor how our definition of this concept has shifted over time.  

Religion and Nothingness

I'm unsure how to approach this review of Keiji Nishitani's collection of essays on the relationship between religion and nihilism.  

From a comparative philosophy perspective, they form a deep reflection on the connection between the Buddhist concept of emptiness and the way Nietzsche saw the history of Western philosophy dead-ending in nihilism.  Exploring this connection, and especially examining Nishitani's reading of Eternal Recurrence as, "... breathing ... the same pure mountain air that we felt in approaching the the standpoint of Dōgen ..." (RN, 215), could easily be a review in itself.  It's the only time I've seen anyone transpose Nietzsche's idea to a Buddhist context and ask the rather obvious question -- does the Eternal Return describe samsara or nirvana, the greatest weight, or the most unbearable lightness of being?  Yes.  

But there's so much more to the book than this question that it seems unfair to focus on it exclusively.  In fact, even if we stick with a purely philosophical lens, there are so many point of correspondence with The Fold and Nietzsche and Philosophy that the book also deserves its very own chapter in my forthcoming magnum opus The NonDual Deleuze.  Nishitani reinvents emptiness as the plane of consistency, a field of force that holds everything together in a "non-being that is not the being of the negative".  He insists that this field of experience only arises on the far side of our personal ego, after a journey through the center of an impersonal nihilism again to a Great Death.  He discusses various syntheses of time that lead us to see every instant as a "monad of eternity".  I could go on, but it's clear these two are breathing the same mountain air of non-duality.  

And yet, even this longer review would fail to do the essays complete justice.  Because ultimately Nishitani doesn't even see his point as purely philosophical.  As a devoted Zen practitioner himself, his point is also deeply religious or "existential" -- he is concerned with that aspect of our human experience where we necessarily call into question just who we are and what it means to experience, where we begin to look outside of ourselves in an attempt to understand what's happening on the inside, and thus begin to blow apart the nice stable contained self we imagine is our birthright.  This vertiginous exploration of the ground of our existence is for Nishitani the essence of the religious impulse and directly explains it connection to nothingness.  Colloquially speaking, it's that moment of quiet reflection when we wonder, "what does it all mean?"  When we live, rather than theorize, this search, we find ourselves starting into the same groundless abyss that stared back at Nietzsche. And only by crossing this river of absolute nihilism, this gulf where nothing really means anything, can we reach the far shore where the abyss converts 'full circle' into the empty suchness of the present.  In other words, at the deepest level, I think Nishitani is trying to construct a philosophy adequate to his lived experience of sitting zazen.  In a sense, we might see it as asking what is the transcendental condition of possibility of Zen -- who or what are we that sitting still and doing nothing can have such a profound effect on our experience?  The answer of course is that we are the world, and the world is a field of infinite emptiness.

There's so much more that could be said here.  For example, another interesting review would focus on how Nishitani continues Heidegger's line of thought about technology and the fixation of human telos as mechanism.  He illuminates this question by bringing it into connection with Nietzsche's ideas about the master-slave 'dialectic' and Buddhist thinking about freedom and dependent origination.  Yet another review would be needed to address the theory of Christianity that Nishida develops, which centers on a mystical interpretation of the circumincessional unity of the trinity as another expression of what Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing.  But since it's clear that I'm not going to write all these reviews, or in fact any of them, I think I'll just leave it here and start rereading the book.

Middlemarch

I was a little surprised when my esteemed colleague from Tejas suggested we read George Eliot's classic.  I didn't know a whole lot about the book when we began.  I think I mentally lumped it together with "the Jane's" -- Jane Eyre and Jane Austen -- simply because these were British female authors of roughly the same era.  And I very vaguely remember disliking the Jane's as sort of soap-opera-y.  As it turns out Eliot was born after Austen died.  A while it's true that she and Brontë were contemporaries, and one could indeed call Middlemarch a kind of soap opera ... I rather enjoyed it. 

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the book was its dry English sense of humor.  There are not merely many droll comments from the narrator, but some wonderfully sarcastic dialogue that must have been hilarious in the original 19th-century English, but comes through fine even in translation.  Beyond that, there is also a lot of perceptive and even wise psychological observation.  Eliot only rarely provides any 'realistic' detail about settings and dress and the way the light glimmered in her father's eye on that dappled afternoon in the ... etc ... etc ...  Instead, she provides something I consider much closer to reality by ignoring all this setting and delving deeply into the psychology of each character.  We see their strengths and flaws in such clear light that we almost feel as if we're reading non-fiction, a case study where all the characters simply did what they had to do, given who they are.  If most soap operas rose to this level, I would certainly watch more TV.

Sanity and Sainthood

In a way, I'm probably not the best person to objectively review Tucker Peck's book about "Integrating Meditation and Psychotherapy.  After attending his weekly eSangha classes for roughly three years, I'm not terribly surprised to find that there's almost nothing in the book I haven't heard him mention in conversation on more than one occasion.  Needless to say, this is hardly a critique; I wouldn't have listened to Tucker talk for ~150 hours if I didn't think his teaching was valuable.  But it does mean I can't come to these ideas with the same mindset as someone hearing them for the first time.  The book was still fun to read regardless because it compiles and organizes all these insights for future reference.  It also gives me something simple and tangible to hand to other people who are interested in quickly (it took less than 150 hours to read this) understanding what Tucker has to offer as a teacher.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who is both a dharma teacher and a professional therapist, the basic point is that both modalities are useful and even complementary, but they serve different purposes.  Meditation helps us to become aware of the process of our thoughts, whereas therapy works at improving their content.  While this simple distinction seems pretty intuitive, it contains a wealth of wisdom.  Because on the deepest level, it helps us to give up on the craving to have perfect content -- to be perfectly happy -- all the time.  As Tucker repeats throughout the book, and I've seen myself, meditation has a lot to offer, but it does not show any signs that it will magically deposit me in a state of permanent bliss anytime soon.  And while that might sound disappointing, I think perhaps we should see it as a blessing.  Do we really want to do something that leads us towards being unable to feel human emotion?  In fact, while meditation does seem to improve life overall, it actually has a tendency to open me to a much wider range of possible emotion.  A lot of the book gives advice for dealing with this sort of destabilization in a way that leads towards a broader dynamic stability that lets us function as a better, more wise and compassionate person, both towards others and ourselves.  And if this isn't the point of life, then what is?

Deleuze and Buddhism

How could I resist a title like this?  Unfortunately, this collection of essays did not live up to the potential I imagined, and still imagine, in exploring how Deleuze's thought overlaps with Buddhism.  They range across the non-sequitur (Higaki), the awful (See), the amateurish (Cook), and the word salad (Bradley), before culminating in the stream of consciousness (Ueno).  That is, five of the six essays are philosophically useless.  The best that can be said of them is that they made me aware of a few Japanese thinkers who sound interesting -- Kenji Miyazawa and Toshihiko Izutsu -- and drew my attention to a particular passage in A Thousand Plateaus (below).

The only essay I found particularly thought provoking was Simon Duffy's.  He approaches the connection between Deleuze and Budddhism by what seems to me a very natural path -- through drawing on Deleuze's reading of Spinoza.  Spinoza's system already bears comparison to Buddhism, and Deleuze's atheistic reading of it only accentuates this resemblance.  Deleuze reworked Spinoza's puzzling and seemingly contradictory idea that knowledge of the third kind gives us a window onto eternity in terms of an intensive and an extensive part of the individual.  Duffy, in turn, goes on to apply this concept to make sense of the Buddhist idea of reincarnation.  Basically, the more my self-definition begins to revolve around the constructive connections I have with the world, the more "I" shift towards being a intensive virtual singularity and away from identifying with my current extensive actualization of this essence.  In everyday terms, I get closer to being a pure possibility, a way of being that can be taken up by any being and hence re-actualized indefinitely.  This is a very complex thought, and the essay manages to be both a bit pedantic and yet short on the details.  Nevertheless, it poses the interesting question of "what happens when a Bodhisattva dies?"  They become completely expressive, completely virtual, only an intense essence that can live on in any of us indefinitely.  Duffy doesn't make it clear exactly how this differs from an eternal soul, or even from the way a lineage actively preserves the memory and spirit of a sage, so we're mostly just left with this suggestion that the path to immortality is in defining oneself as pure connection.  It may not be the version of immortality you were looking for.  But I found it food for thought.

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I imagine that the camouflage fish reference in this quote was inspired by its (dis)appearance in Neo-Finalism (probably not Ruyer's only use of this example).  Regardless, it caught my attention as an apt metaphor for non-duality.

Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible. The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural, but cosmic. Francois Cheng shows that poets do not pursue resemblance, any more than they calculate "geometric proportions." They retain, extract only the essential lines and movements of nature; they proceed only by continued or superposed "traits," or strokes. (ATP, 280)

Individuation Project

Here's the bibliography for the individuation project spawned by my preliminary reading of The Fold.  It includes the philosophy of technology detour that happened between the first and second Simondon books.

Gilbert Simondon -- On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,

W. Brian Arthur -- The Nature of Technology

Langdon Winner -- Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought

Lewis Mumford -- The Myth of the Machine, Volume 1, 2

Joanne Macy -- Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory

Gilbert Simondon -- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information

Jakob von Uexküll -- A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Elanor Rosch -- The Embodied Mind

Raymond Ruyer -- Neofinalism

Erwin Schrodinger -- What is Life?

Bernard Cache -- Earth Moves

Richard Halpern -- Leibnizing

Gilles Deleuze -- The Fold

Healing Back Pain

My rolfer suggested I read Dr. Sarno's simple and slim volume about the psychological roots of back pain.  Sarno spent many years treating patients with recurring back and neck pain and came to the conclusion that in many cases the pain is actually psychosomatic.  He describes a medical condition which he calls, somewhat unmemorably in my opinion, tension myositis syndrome.  The idea is very simple.  When we have some chronic emotional disturbance (Sarno points particularly to represessed anger) our nervous system can protect us from this threat by using a physical pain to distract us from seeing the emotional suffering.  It's a trick as old as the Freudian unconscious (which itself goes all the way back to the minute perceptions of Leibniz).

After all, in our culture we have trained ourselves to believe that all physical things have a physical cause and that any pain we feel must signal some sort of 'real' physical tissue damage.  That is, we literally can't imagine that a pain could be caused by the mind, because there is no possible mysterious woo-woo new-age mind-body connection.  We take this naive materialist position as an article of faith these days, and indeed, that is what it literally amounts to -- scientism.  When looked at with even a modicum less religious fervor, however, we can immediately see that this sermon can only convince the already indoctrinated choir.  After all, if there's no mind-body connection, there's no pain and hence nothing to explain.  That'll be $4.5 trillion please.  The very possibility that we should look into the mind to find the cause of a pain in the body is excluded in advance, which of course makes this a perfectly airtight mechanism for repressing the consciousness of an emotional state.  It becomes literally unthinkable that the physical pain could be caused by an emotional disturbance.  

By contrast, Dr. Sarno successfully treated back pain simply by talking to patients about their emotions.  The only prescription is mental awareness.  In fact, in order to maximize the potency of this medicine, Dr. Sarno suggests completely ignoring the physical pain, literally pretending that it doesn't 'really' hurt at all, and that it therefore requires no special physical attention or treatment of any kind.  Forget all the scary X-rays and MRI images and other medical rites and rituals.  Once we convince ourselves that the problem is simply repressed emotional tension, the pain which served to hide this tension from us can no longer serve that purpose, and so evaporates.  He says this has worked for many people.  And, at least so far, it has worked for me as well.  

Attentive readers may notice that there is a funny irony to this mind-only diagnosis and treatment.  It requires a similar yet opposite faith that the physical cannot possibly be the cause of the pain.  From the perspective of the efficacy of the treatment, this makes perfect sense.  But from an intellectual perspective, it encloses us in another self-justifying loop of faith.  For now we have convinced ourselves that pain can have nothing to do with the physical body, which is of course only slightly less ridiculous a hypothesis than we began with, since it leads us directly to the idea that there is 'really' no body at all.  The resulting logic isn't quite as self-refuting as naive materialism, but it still leaves us with a very deep mystery.  Why is the idea of a pain in "the body" so convincing that it literally becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if there is no such thing as "the body"?   

The Warmth of Other Suns

A while back I started Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, but never finished it.  It wasn't that I thought Wilkerson was wrong or explaining herself poorly or anything.  I just found that the book didn't have that much new to offer.  Because of course America has a system of hereditary privilege.  It is certainly not a perfectly static system, and we could even argue about how well it maintains itself today relative to other times and other places, but it is surely there for anyone with eyes to see. I tend to think of it above all as an economic system, and I could give plenty of reasons why I think this description provides the best lens for analysis and action.  However it is certainly also a system with a racial component, and indeed, it's often impossible to treat these two as separate variables.  If you'd like to call their correlation over time (in certain cases) a "caste system", I guess that's fine, but what exactly have you offered with this word?  Economic -- which is after all the usual terms in which people pose this question now -- Success tends to mate with Success and beget more Success, and vice versa for Failure.  The logic of this feedback loop clearly leads to a stratified society.  But is this usefully considered a "caste system" when it produces only two castes -- rich people and poor people?  And does the manifest current instability of the racial correlations in this system not make it seem pretty distant from the the Indian system the name references?  

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of the US knows that just about every new 'non-white' group is discriminated against upon their arrival (or in the case of Native Americans, upon the arrival of whites).  Irish and Italians and Poles and the many flavors of Asians and Latinos have all occupied this unenviable niche for longer or shorter stretches of time.  The story of these groups is distinct, and they arrive into distinct Americas.  But these stories also tend to have a similar arc.  The discrimination against the group (among other factors) at first forces them to interact mainly internally with one another, and tends to reinforce their difference from the rest of the society and cement their place at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.  Gradually, however, what seems like it should be an endlessly self-reinforcing mechanism nevertheless starts to fade.  This happens pretty quickly with the Irish and Italians, and much more slowly with Asians and Latinos.  But even with Asians, who have seen a century of discrimination, I think this process has largely run its course by now.  I don't mean that racism towards Asians has disappeared altogether, but if we look at statistical measures like median wages or the percentage of people who oppose interracial marriage, it's hard to see Asians as an oppressed minority locked into perpetuating the bottom-rung of a caste system because they can't reproduce with anyone else.  In fact, we might look at the present status of Asian-Americans as evidence that American society is not capable of enforcing a stable caste system over even a century, much less over the millennia this system has existed in India. 

However, before we start congratulating ourselves on how progressive we are, we should consider the history of black Americans.  They've been here for as long as white Americans, and yet this process of assimilation and intermixing has certainly not resulted in their gradual equalization with the rest of society.  It's enough to consider the same charts I just referred to and note that 63% of non-blacks thought that it was a bad idea to marry a black person even as recently as 1990!  Perhaps this doesn't constitute a perfect caste system -- I think it's both inaccurate and disempowering not to see that black Americans are relatively better off than they were in 1619 -- but the fact that these intertwined racial and economic attitudes have been preserved intact for hundreds of years obviously illustrates what Wilkerson was getting at.  So while American society in general is more usefully described as a capitalist rather than a caste system, black history specifically is analogous to the Indian system.  

Which brings us, finally, to The Warmth of Other Suns.  This is the book that won Wilkerson a Pulitzer Prize long before she wrote Caste.  And this book is a lot more interesting.  Instead of a broad-brush political philosophy of dubious generalizations, Wilkerson gives us an intimately detailed and specific piece of the history that helps explain how America managed to maintain its white-black caste system for so long.  We all know this history begins with slavery and continues with Jim Crow.  But while these explanations are undoubtedly central, they leave it fundamentally mysterious how this caste system endured so long after Civil Rights formally ended segregation.  The missing link is, as the subtitle goes, "The Epic Story of America's Great Migration".  It's the story of how millions of blacks moved from the rural South to the urban North and West between 1915 and 1970. I think it's this particular history that accounts for the unique durability of anti-Black racism up to the present moment, and not some generalized American Caste System.  To make a long story short (too late), I wish I'd read this book first because it puts Caste in its proper context. 

The fact that the writing in The Warmth of Other Suns is a real pleasure partially makes up for all the deeply disturbing stuff we have to read about.  As one might expect, roughly half the story takes place in the South and shows us the conditions that drove the desperate hopefulness of the migration.  Wilkerson unfolds this history in novelistic detail, focusing on the personal stories of three representative characters.  The oral history format brings us face to face with the reign of terror that was the Jim Crow South.  But it also brings us face to face with the frustrations and problems of arriving in Northern cities that (usually) dispense with the terror but retain most of the racism.  And because the emigrants arrive in such astounding numbers in concentrated areas, the backlash they provoke in Chicago and New York and Los Angeles sets the stage for the ghettoization that has troubled a lot of black history ever since.  For me, reframing the era that leads up to the civil rights struggle as a type of refugee crisis, where literally half the black population flees the country called South for the one labeled North, supplies a key missing piece of the puzzle.  Throughout the time period of this long migration there is still quite clearly a white-black caste system in the entirety of the US, one that cements itself in economic terms for generations to come because of the enforced concentration of the black caste in the migration's destination cities.  Packing all the immigrants into a ghetto has always been a key aspect of keeping them down.  This is how what is on one level certainly a triumph and step forward for our three heroes -- escaping the terror of the South -- nevertheless doesn't create the promised land of freedom and intermixing one might have hoped for.  Though some fare better than others and the migration is clearly the central event in weakening a caste system that has lasted for hundreds of years, it is not yet the end of that system, but more a kind of mutation in it.  It's heartbreaking to think of how many generations have seen their freedom deferred in one way or another.  Naturally, this is the most touching aspect of the book.  Wilkerson paints these lives with an epic grandeur that befits their everyday struggle, regardless of how much ground they won or loss in the great sweep of history. 

All Fours

My special lady friend suggested that I read Miranda July's wildly popular new novel.  I didn't know anything about July as an artist, filmmaker, or writer, so I assumed at the outset that I was reading a piece of fiction.  Slowly, however, it became obvious that there was a strong element of autobiography to the story.  Obviously, we wouldn't want to confuse our (not so) humble narrator and main character with July herself, but the similarities between the story of a woman's sexual awakening/midlife crisis and July's own life are clear. Normally, I'm not terribly interested in highly autobiographical fiction.  Of course, it's all a matter of degree, since every author unavoidably puts much of themselves in every work in one way or another.  But generally I've found that the closer we come to autobiography, the less interesting the fiction becomes, perhaps simply because people are too close to their own life to really have much useful or broad or wise perspective on it.  Without a deliberate thrust towards universalization on the part of the author, it seems to me that the story often ends up lacking enough imaginative power to fully draw us in.

I think July mostly avoids this trap.  In part this is due to the fact that the story is pretty inventive and unpredictable, and the writing funny and philosophical enough to keep us entertained.   But the larger reason the narrative partially transcends autobiography is because it focuses in an almost sociological way on an experience that more than half of the population will at some point relate to -- menopause.  Now, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but loyal readers are doubtless aware that my personal reflections on menopause should be taken with a grain of salt.  Still, it seems to me that the novel is an interesting and honest exploration of what the experience might be like.  And July not only tells her own story, but to some extent tries to weave in the experiences of other women with all the girl-group discussions she details.  

There's a limit to this however, and in the end this limit points to the biggest problem I had with the book.  People who write highly autobiographical fiction tend to take their own life way too seriously, and these people are kinda unpleasant to be around or read about because they're basically just narcissists.  In reading the novel, I couldn't help feeling my compassion for the main character run out time and again for the simple reason that, despite going through menopause, she still doesn't seem to be able to grow up.  She remains incapable of considering the impact her actions are going to have on those around here.  Fundamentally she seems rather neurotic, childish, and self-absorbed.  The novel is all about her 'exploring her desires', in principle a brave and admirable thing, if done in a responsible and adult fashion, rather than as one long train wreck.  In fact, seen from a distance, the relatively happy moral it leads us to is that you can have everything you desire in life ... if only you stop worrying about how much damage your frantic grasping at it has on you and everyone around you.  Which strikes me as whatever the exact inverse of wisdom is. 

This assessment of what was really an enjoyable and interesting book is clearly too harsh.  There are all sorts of ways to work ourselves back towards compassion for the main character, not to mention the distinction between this character and the author. The birth of her child was a major medical and emotional trauma.  We have a tough culture in which to be a successful and sexually independent woman.  And maybe we should look upon menopause itself as a form of trauma.  These all sound like pretty tough things to cope with.  When I criticize something these days, I frequently realize upon further examination that I'm really just saying I wasn't the target audience.  Which in the case of this novel is a pretty obvious observation.  

At the same time, I think it's worth doing a simple thought experiment.  Imagine that All Fours was written by a middle aged man freaked out by the fact that he has a hard time getting it up anymore.  In wrestling with how catastrophic this existential midlife crisis feels, our hypothetical 'hero' goes on a bender with a much younger woman that ends up destroying his marriage.  I submit to you that many such autobiographical novels have in fact been written, and that we wouldn't consider this sort of story new, interesting, bestselling, or anything except the same deplorable one that the "Great Male Narcissists" (as DFW called them) have told so many times.  Of course, something changes when we switch the genders and mix up the sexual orientations.  And we shouldn't ignore the fact that certain people have historically been unfairly locked out of casting themselves as the 'hero' of this story.  But we also shouldn't necessarily think we are reading a fundamentally different, and somehow magically more admirable story.  Something doesn't change when we retell this story.  Indeed, how big a stretch is it between Miranda July's unnamed main character and Ben Turnbull?

Maybe the only thing the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he's such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps us figure out what's been so unpleasant and frustrating about this gifted author's recent characters. It's not that Turnbull is stupid - he can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It's that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike — he makes it plain that he views the narrator's impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I'm not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don't get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.