I Can't Help It

Call me a blasphemous amateur, it won't stop me from saying that in Western thinking the Continental Idealists and the Anglo-sphere of analytic empiricism all claim the testament to their heritage is in the Ancient Greece of Plato and Aristotle. So be wary of Greeks bearing Gifts. But there are distinctions to be made. From the Swedes, south through the People's Land of Germany and the novelists of Russia and Poland to La Belle Dame Sans Merci of Revolutionary France, these are The Continental Thinkers. The second theme is the small Island of Britannia, its attachments and memories, including the landmass of North America. These are the shopkeepers and chamber of commerce thinkers, practical minds that prefer not to talk with their hands and who would rather everyone else learn English. Chomsky is an Analytic Philosopher from the Americas who may have emerged from a clash between Behaviorism and the peculiar faiths of Anarchism, who found solace in humility and a distant contact with Kant's understanding of transcendence. Kant's transcendence submits us people to a structure that gives the phrase "I can't Help it" to both Lili Marleen's search for love, Chomsky's grasp of grammar or syntax and Kant's own understanding of morality.

The look and Sound of Words. Magister Ludi

The Uganda Flag. A collection of hairpins and a couple of bangles. A Hippo resting on a cloud. A series of Italian prints with church qualities. And a country courtyard, a print which became the centerpiece of a mind game that decorates the unfinished pages titled The Tenant's Agreement. Sometimes you have to admit these things so in Conversations with Baxter the better game was Hesse's Glass Bead Game. OK so Hermann Hesse wrote in German, but I wonder who else really wishes the master of the glass bead game wasn't called a Magister Ludi. Even for the future, it just sounds cretinous.

"Of Course Your Guinea Pig Goes to Heaven."

It's hard work for an analytical empiricist to demonstrate the potential for trueness without the custard pie utterances of idealists that sound so restful. Russell, essentially, answered the question what makes a good philosopher by suggesting the person had to be nice, humble, decent, curious, questioning, aware of limitations. If they were angry, or bitter or a power mad megalomaniacal creep, then not much chance of something worthwhile emerging.

Henri Bergson

In Henri Bergson's book Creativity, time was indivisible, it was fluid. It wasn't the abstract, quantifiable time of math and science, or of clocks. He used the word "duration" to describe the experience of consciousness. "Duration" allowed for a truer appreciation of the real nature of time, as a flux between past, present and future in the process of becoming which could only ever be intuitively grasped. In our compendiums of understanding the error is to mistake intuition for common sense. The latter is practical and cultural. The former perceives the existence of the quantum level, the tiniest of units, but can't demonstrate it. Evolution for Henri, wasn't mechanistic, it was a pure undetermined explosion. It was an easy idea to love.  And indeed the mathematician Penrose would suggest that consciousness itself emerges when the quantum phenomena of superposition occurs in neurons, the energy exchange is corralled by what are called micro-tubules and last long enough to be the source of what Bergson would have considered our experience of time as fluid rather than the mechanistic clock time of bits that are directed by mathematical formulas.