Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi

Leopardi is quite possibly my favourite poet, this despite my reading him in English and being aware that quite a bit must be getting lost. Anyway, David Bentley Hart reviews Zibaldone published a few years back pointing out in his review Leopardi’s paradoxical cast of mind as does the always insightful John Gray (second and third quotes)

He had a particular disdain for the beguiling myth of progressive enlightenment. As far as he was concerned, all cultural values are historical contingencies; and those of the modern age enjoy no conspicuous superiority over those of antiquity. Quite the reverse, in fact. He saw the tension between traditional religious piety and scientistic rationalism as no more than the natural hostility that exists between incompatible, and equally arbitrary, dogmatic adherences. The latter devotion has perhaps brought about considerable advancement in the sciences, but this he regarded as anything but an unequivocal good. The practical benefits of modern science can hardly compensate for the abyss of meaninglessness that modern rationalism opens beneath our feet, or for the surrender to total nihilism that it invites.

Leopardi found the unthinking moral certainty of secular thinkers highly questionable, not least because of their hidden debts to Christianity.

Realising that the human mind can decay even as human knowledge advances, Leopardi would not have been surprised by the stupefying banality and shallowness of current debates on belief and unbelief. He accepted that there is no remedy for the ignorance of those who imagine themselves to be embodiments of reason.

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Booker’s Birthday

James Booker

Today marks the birth of James Booker. Quite recently while looking for a fresh image of Booker I stumbled across the work of Cheryl Anne Grace. What’s particularly appealing about her work is that it doesn’t suffer from that Jackson Square/Pirate’s Alley schlock (Confederacy of Dunces) look. Cheryl’s work is palpably affectionate and the stylish iconography adds a very nice “canonized” touch to several great musical N.O. characters: Mr. Okra, Fats, Ernie K-Doe, Booker, Allen Toussaint as well as some still life paintings that have resonance for me as well — The Bead Tree, Café au Lait at Napoleon House, Mother In Law Lounge, Snake and Jake’s and Bachanal. Anyway, check out the Booker documentary to learn more about the amazing character that was Booker and support Cheryl’s work — and hopefully Cheryl’s roster of N.O. portraits will expand.

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The search goes on

Christianity

Nick Spencer’s The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values warmly reviewed in The Economist. This theme was one that Walker Percy repeatedly returned to.

Lurking everywhere in the secularised West is what he calls a “disenchantment with disenchantment”. People still want more than just freedom and choice. They want to belong, they want community rooted in something shared and they want to find meaning beyond themselves. “Having arrived at the secular self,” says Mr Spencer, “we kept on searching.”

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The ideological opposition to biological truth

evolutionary biology

Jerry Coyne’s latest on his blog Why Evolution is True.

To claim that there are no evolutionary differences in behavior and psychology between men and women is fatuous.

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The vanity of cleverness

SUSAN HAACK

The deliciously scathing Susan Haack on the “vanity of cleverness“

At dinner the night before I was to give a talk in her department, a young professor solemnly told me that there’s no place for humor in serious philosophy.

The serious philosopher must indeed work in earnest–but not in grim earnest.

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William Christenberry

art

Obituary and NYT profile

William Christenberry’s work is a poetic evocation of a haunted countryside.  . . .  [that it] really says it all, because it [his work] deals not only with the Southern landscape of beauty and wonderment, but also the side of it that is haunted with memory and sadness.

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Walker Percy Wednesday 114

walker percy

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“Thus, these word signs have been evacuated, deprived of meaning something real. Real persons. Not so with Jews.”

*****

“Since the Jews were the original chosen people of God, a tribe of people who are still here, they are a sign of God’s presence which cannot be evacuated. Try to find a hole in that proof!”

*****

“Try to subsume Jews under the classes of mankind, Caucasians, Semites, whatever. Go ahead, try it.”

*****

“Read St. Paul! It is clear that their inability to accept Jesus was not only foreordained but altogether reasonable and is not to be held against them. Salvation comes from the Jews, as holy scripture tells us. They remain the beloved, originally chosen people of God.”

*****

“Jews are naturally skeptical, hardheaded, and, after all, what Jesus was proposing to them was a tall order.”

*****

“How many times in your work have you encountered someone who claims to be Napoleon, the Messiah, Hitler, the Devil?”
“Often.”
“How often have you encountered a Jewish patient who claimed to be the Messiah or Napoleon?”
“Not often.”

*****

“Even an anti-Semite! Did you ever notice that an anti-Semite who despises Jews actually believes them deep down—that’s why he hates them!—and isn’t that the reason he despises them?”

*****

“The Jews as a word sign cannot be assimilated under a class, category, or theory. No subsuming Jews! Not even by the Romans.”

*****

“The Holocaust was a consequence of the sign which could not be evacuated.”

*****

“You are a member of the first generation of doctors in the history of medicine to turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind—and to do so without a single murmur from one of you. Not a single letter of protest in the august New England Journal of Medicine. And do you know what you’re going to end up doing? You a graduate of Harvard and a reader of The New York Times and a member of the Ford Foundation’s Program for the Third World? Do you know what is going to happen to you?”

*****

“Do you know where tenderness always leads?”
“No, where?” I ask, watching the stranger with curiosity.
“To the gas chamber.”
“I see.”
“Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.”

*****

“If you are a theorist of Mankind like Rousseau or Skinner, who believes he understands man’s brain and in the solitariness of his study or laboratory writes books on the subject, you are also probably harmless and might even contribute to human knowledge, right?”
“Right.”
“But if you put the two together, a lover of Mankind and a theorist of Mankind, what you’ve got now is Robespierre or Stalin or Hitler and the Terror, and millions dead for the good of Mankind. Right?”

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Foundations of Austrian Economics

austrian economics

H/T to Steve Horwitz who has provided the introduction to FEE’s newly released ebook of Kirzner lectures/essays from various FEE events and publications.

For Kirzner and the Austrians, however, the assumption of perfect knowledge heads economists off on a trail that is an intellectual dead-end. The real world of the market is one in which knowledge is dispersed, contextual, and often inarticulate. From its origins in the work of Carl Menger, through its development in Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, the Austrian school has focused on how markets coordinate human action given that such action is always taken in a world of uncertainty and fragmentary knowledge. Different thinkers have refined different aspects of this perspective, but all have recognized the basic problem situation of action under uncertainty and tried to explain how market institutions enable us to overcome it. This is what Kirzner does in his elaboration of the basics of supply and demand and the market process, focusing on his own distinct contribution concerning the role of the entrepreneur.

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Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

evolutionary biology

Robert Wright in The New York Times on the late great William Hamilton

“I’m also quite open to the view that there is some kind of ultimate good which is of a religious nature — that we just have to look beyond what the evolutionary theory tells us and accept promptings of what ultimate good is, coming from some other source.” That’s an unusual thing for a great evolutionary biologist to say, but the most unusual part was still to come.

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