Reviews and Comments

So there's a tendency in Nietzsche's fans that whenever you criticize Nietzsche they think that's because you don't understand him. In this aspect Nietzsche is very similar to Wagner: if you criticize Wagner it must be that you don't understand the passionate solemnity of Wagner.

This is a great work but equally a profoundly flawed work. In fact I never liked it. I liked Nietzsche's other writings, in spite of their self-contradictions and outright stupidities, I liked, but this book is just much too theatrical. It's a work for the moderns who no longer understand what "solemnity" precisely means. So they'll be immersing themselves in Wagner's, Mahler's, and Bruckner's nearly hysterical sound masses and exclaim "solemn" and "magnificent" without realizing that this sensual chaos has nothing that solemn or "transcendental" per se. I used the word "transcendental", then Nietzsche's fans will be like, no I don't want transcendence I want immanence and I'm faithful to the Earth or whatever. So there's a universal lie that acts as an rhectorical device to segregate Nietzsche's fans from other people who they think are inferior.

Whether they're superior I don't know, it seems plain to me that they're not trying to understand others since this very act of trying to understand leads them to believe that they may not be that unique and that passionate - there's a hidden insecurity in their passion. Anyway, in this childish, hysterical display, I can only see something lamentable rather than something admirable.

Of course they don't want to be admired I know perfectly well. Just see how much resentment and defence they have regarding their uniqueness and passion.

Futile struggle that accomplishes the very feeling of struggle and Amor Fati by means of acting it out. Seeking its own destruction as if it is meaningful somehow. Give it up seriously. This really is a badly written work. It's good for some people, but whomever has read and actually understands this work can only pity and lament Nietzsche's downfall.

Sure, scholasticism is not dead, we still have so-called neo-scholasticism and Thomism is a powerful force in analytic philosophy, but the original spirit of scholasticism, the scholasticism that corresponds to the age of great Gothic cathedrals, that utilized the most recent devices at hand, and was in touch with the Sciences in general, seems quite dead. Thought it should also be kept in mind that phenomenology branched out from the scholastic background of Brentano, and Peirce was an ardent reader of the scholastics. Cantor, when arguing for his theory of actual infinites, engaged mainly with the scholastic philosophers. This little treatise, in the guise of constructive type theory, actually indicates that the scholastic method is finally coming back. Citing Aristotle, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Boethius, Cajetan, etc., with a clean, rational, and no-nonsense writing style that never tries to obscure, utilizing logical method as it should have be utilized - in contradistinction to Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy - by, say, Abelard and Ockham, never blinding itself to new methods and machineries invented, reunificating the sciences developed by Frege, Peirce, Hilbert, Gentzen with the nearly forgotten (by the contemporary philosophers) authors of the middle ages and the Baroque ages, indicates that scholasticism is coming back. This time its center being in the low countries and the northern Europe. There's a structural similarity between the constructive tradition initiated in its full-blooded form by Brouwer and the culminating form of German idealism that is exemplified by Rudolf Steiner, Schelling, Whitehead, Peirce (though the latter two were not German idealists). A re-conceptualization of the continuum, together with a revolution in logic in terms of geometric logic is dawning. The nextg great scholastic synthesis is gradually taking shape.

While I really do not like some overtly sexual - not a disfavour out of morality; the elegant, sensual and innocent eroticism just makes me feel somehow uncomfortable - images in Eric Gill's works, it is undeniable that nothing can excel his types, sculptures, and especially friezes and monument engravings, in their pristine simplicity; the simplicity of which in particular never forced and never pretentious. Human beings in his sculpture are always non-corporeal and abstract in a non-obvious but essential way. They appear sometimes medieval, sometimes Buddhist, but never Greek in its usual sense, i.e. never Renaissance-humanist, even the sensual female torso of Mankind is that of an ethereal being incarnated in flesh.

Eric Gill was a complex person, infamous for his overwhelming libido that led him to his incests with his sister and his daughters, but I wasn't surprised at all when I learned that the designer of unsullied, refined but rational Perpetua and Gill Sans and the author of moralizing, disciplined, stern and stark Last Essays and An Essay on Typography engaged in this sort of sexual perversity. There is something dangerous, something out of human scale, something mysterious and unfathomable in the dignified curvature of his lines, be them present in stone cuts or in wood ingravings, or simply in abstract geometric form that needs to be concretised, as in the typefaces.

In might be that while the stern, mathematical-logical-metaphysically unfolding morality and pureness in the spirits was distilled and condensed into his works, the shadow lurking in his flesh was left in utter thirst of primordial desire a la Tiamat that continuously burst in the constraint of being limited in his private life. But I sense something deeper, an urge, a yearning, for the innocence of Eden. I think I need to write something longer about Eric Gill.

It took me literally two years to finish this book. The problem with Merlin Donald's prose is that it is too dense with allusions to literatures, and the ideas of people that Donald refers to aren't explained clearly at all. Merlin Donald tends to inflate pargraphs the ideas expressed by which should have been possible to be presented in a couple of sentences rather than several pages.

The underlying idea, or rather the rule of thumb that guides the train of thought and speculations presented in this book is a simple extension of neo-Darwinism to species endowed with culture; here 'culture' means roughly those entities that are studied by the discipline of ethology. Evolution might well be said to be operating in the physiological and anatomical level, but for a picture of adaptation to pressure to be painted, it is not enough to single out some features of the human mind or brain such as encephalization, cerebral laterality, consciousness, etc., but rather the circumstance under which certain feature emerged; environmental factors, in its broad sense, that forced the archaic human in a certain evolutionary stage to evolve into another stage, i.e. to evolve phyletically. One example is the organizational structure of society, which, for the society member might be an environmental factor, while not environmental in its traditional-materialist sense. This crucial insight is given by Henry Plotkin and his colleagues, and Donald is utilizing the insight to its full strength, synthesizing theories from cognitive science and archaeology and ethology, given the factual data available to him.

I myself don't have the patience and the mindset to memorize the tons of dry facts Merlin Donald presents, and this book is clearly a pseudo-monograph written more or less for professionals, sometimes too elementary, sometimes too technical (maybe too specific is a better way to put it) and fringe for a general reader. It would be good if someone can write a shorter book that can serve as a general introduction, or restructure the book in a readable manner, separating factual data and speculations apart. This book is more a handbook, a guide to the literature around the time of writing.

It might also be that I am simply not interested in the details of human cognitive evolution, but a larger picture of how intelligence seen as an abstract entity emerged, found human beings as its host, and at the same time generated the phenomenological-or even the ontological Universe. So for me the sole interest of reading this book is to see how the externalization of things such as memories should be seen in a large scale. Is it a "symbiosis between brain and culture", or should it be seen as an endosymbiogenesis, a process in which cognitive atoms become substrata of a being with its own purpose, much in the way Naturphilosophie speculates?

I have always admired Jean Cocteau's church murals. While his murals might look like those pictures appearing on the cover of the notebooks of high-school girls' from bourgeois families, when contrasting to those heavy and 'sublime' Romanticist or Baroque paintings that have lost the meaning intrinsitc to the style due to the fading of the cultural climate where they blossomed, the lightness and down-to-earthiness in the aesthetics of his murals renders them ethereal and pristine, calm and at the same time full of life forces.

They are rational, objective and restraint in the French sense: refined, fresh and aristocratic, crisp, dry and sparkling, with a strangely vintage feel. Unsurprisingly but at the same time surprisingly, Cocteau refers to Francois Couperin's titles for his works to indicate what's hidden behind ridiculous titles of Erik Satie: free of sentimentalism and pretentiousness, a sense of refineness, dignity that manifests itself through the even, harmonious proportion, without overusing precious titles to show off one's taste like some false connoisseur in a salon. "Down-to-earth" and "everyday" are missleading words to really describe the aesthetics that Jean Cocteau is promoting, what is crucial being the notion of truth, of honesty.

It is a form of "Gallic masculinity", much similar to the seemingly-silly masculinity in the music of the Village People but endowed with elegance and control, something Mozartian, in the spirit of Jean Simeon Chardin. Only a highly refined culture with a long aristocratic tradition can perpetuate this sort of aesthetics without practicing atavism and reverting to neo-classicism and such.