always wrong to the light
an ongoing list
For an ambitious researcher: Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, but about rival camps of Straussian philosophy and political philosophy professors. (Lives of the Eminent Philosophy Professors?)
Christopher Alexander is dead. Let us remember his marvelous public debate with monstrosity-builder Peter Eisenmann, which years ago gave me the courage to finally say what everyone knows in their heart: that modern and postmodern architecture is, by and large, bullshit.
PETER EISENMANN: I was reminded of this when I went to Spain this summer to see the town hall at Logrono by Rafael Moneo. He made an arcade where the columns were too thin. It was profoundly disturbing to me when I first saw photographs of the building. The columns seemed too thin for an arcade around the court of a public space. And then, when I went to see the building, I realized what he was doing. He was taking away from something that was too large, achieving an effect that expresses the separation and fragility that man feels today in relationship to the technological scale of life, to machines, and the car-dominated environment we live in. I had a feeling with that attenuated colonnade of precisely what I think you are talking about. Now, I am curious if you can admit, in your idea of wholeness, the idea of separation—wholeness for you might be separation for me. The idea that the too-small might also satisfy a feeling as well as the too-large. Because if it is only the too-large that you will admit, then we have a real problem.
[…]
CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER: Unfortunately, I don’t know the building you just described. Your description sounds horrendous to me. Of course, without actually seeing it, I can’t tell. But if your words convey anything like what the thing is actually like, then it sounds to me that this is exactly this kind of prickly, weird place, that for some reason some group of people have chosen to go to nowadays. Now, why are they going there? Don’t ask me.
PE: I guess what I am saying is that I believe that there is an alternate cosmology to the one which you suggest. The cosmology of the last 300 years has changed and there is now the potential for expressing those feelings that you speak of in other ways than through largeness—your boundaries—and the alternating repetition of architectural elements. You had 12 or 15 points. Precisely because I believe that the old cosmology is no longer an effective basis on which to build, I begin to want to invert your conditions—to search for their negative—to say that for every positive condition you suggest, if you could propose a negative you might more closely approximate the cosmology of today. In other words, if I could find the negative of your 12 points, we would come closer to approximating a cosmology that would deal with both of us than does the one you are proposing.
CA : Can we just go back to the arcade for a moment? The reason Moneo’s arcade sounded prickly and strange was, when I make an arcade I have a very simple purpose, and that is to try to make it feel absolutely comfortable—physically, emotionally, practically, and absolutely. This is pretty hard to do. Much, much harder to do than most of the present generation of architects will admit to. Let’s just talk about the simple matter of making an arcade. I find in my own practical work that in order to find out what’s really comfort able, it is necessary to mock up the design at full scale. This is what I normally do. So I will take pieces of lumber, scrap material, and I’ll start mocking up. How big are the columns? What is the space between them? At what height is the ceiling above? How wide is the thing? When you actually get all those elements correct, at a certain point you begin to feel that they are in harmony.
Of course, harmony is a product not only of yourself, but of the surroundings. In other words, what is harmonious in one place will not be in another. So, it is very, very much a question of what application creates harmony in that place. It is a simple objective matter. At least my experience tells me, that when a group of different people set out to try and find out what is harmonious, what feels most comfortable in such and such a situation, their opinions about it will tend to converge, if they are mocking up full-scale, real stuff. Of course, if they’re making sketches or throwing out ideas, they won’t agree. But if you start making the real thing, one tends to reach agreement. My only concern is to produce that kind of harmony. The things that I was talking about last night—I was doing empirical observation about—as a matter of fact, it turns out that these certain structures need to be in there to produce that harmony.
The thing that strikes me about your friend’s building—if I understood you correctly—is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.
PE: That is correct.
CA: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.
Jainism is one of the oldest continuously practiced religions in the world. It has three main pillars: ahiṃsā (non-violence), anekāntavāda (non-absolutism), and aparigraha (ascetism).
To practice ahiṃsā, orthodox Jains commit to vegetarianism (as well as a prohibition on root vegetables, to avoid killing plants). Many cover their mouths with cloth masks to avoid inhaling tiny insects as they breathe. Some sweep the ground in front of them as they walk, so they don’t crush anything crawling on the ground beneath their feet.
Anekāntavāda boils down to a kind of absolutist relativism, a firm belief in the inability to know or speak the truth. Of course, this is usually deployed against other people who claim to know the truth in order to defend Jainist doctrines.
Aparigraha is the belief that nobody truly possesses anything, and an avoidance of greediness or taking excessive pleasure in material things. This is complicated by a curious sociological fact:
Jains are more highly educated and wealthier than Indians overall, and few identify as lower caste. Roughly a third (34%) of Jain adults have at least a college degree, compared with 9% of the general public, according to India’s 2011 census. Moreover, the vast majority of Jains fall into India’s top wealth quintiles, according to India’s National Family and Health Survey.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/17/6-facts-about-jains-in-india/
A meeting at work today: coworkers (well-educated young people, all) wracked with roiling anxiety about the possibility of mask mandates coming to an end, the justification for their perpetual continuance constantly invoking “protection”: the need to protect others, the vulnerable, the immunocompromised, “our communities.” The request that mask policies continue until at least September—after that, “maybe” they could be lifted. Frustration expressed that the conversation was too “analytic,” and that we truly didn’t know anything. A refusal to accept that we are probably going to get sick, and will probably get others sick, and that a piece of fabric is unlikely to stop this. (But the ascetic wants to suffer, and wants others to see it.)
Later: introduced myself to a new coworker, who immediately asked me “my pronouns.” The sweep of the broom on the walkway.
And yet, even as he develops such ideas in his fiction, he seems less to think them than to feel or even suffer them—wincing as they crash from side to side in his brain like dense boulders of thought. Melville was not a systematically educated man: though backward in his early schooling, he taught himself literature by devouring haphazard naval libraries during the four years of his sailing adventure. And his lack of education meant that he had only the crudest intellectual tools with which to try to break his ideas open. […] He knew the Bible well, inheriting from his church-going age an almost unconsciously profound biblical awareness that left Scripture the ground on which his mind invariably walked. But Melville had little else of the kind of general education that might have stocked his brilliant mind with anything beyond the intellectual commonplaces of his day. His typical pattern of writing is to take a hackneyed, obvious notion like the Romantic view of the corrupt city and the innocent country, and twist it into complex, awkward shapes in an attempt to make it express the far denser mood-thought he felt about the city.
Only such a crude, haphazardly educated mind could produce the bizarre marvel that is Moby-Dick. Take it as inspiration.
Melville : Nietzsche :: Pound : Heidegger
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Existentialism and the Philosophy of Existence,” from Hedegger’s Ways:
Jaspers was a psychiatrist and apparently an astonishing, wide-ranging reader. When I first came to Heidelberg as a follower of Jaspers, someone showed me the bench in the Koestersschen Bookstore where Jaspers sat for exactly three hours every Friday morning and had all of the new releases laid out before him. And without exception he ordered a large package of books to be delivered to his house every week. With the self-confidence of an important spirit and the posture of a schooled, critical observer, he was able to find nourishment in any of the diverse areas of scientific research that had some import for philosophy. He was able to mesh a conscience or, better, the conscientiousness of his own thought with the awareness of his own participation in the actual research. This gave him the insight that scientific research meets up with insurmountable boundaries when it encounters the individuality of existence and the obligatoriness of its decisions.
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