Panpsychism in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Q: What’s the story of To the Lighthouse?
A: In the first major section they don’t go to the lighthouse. After an interval during which some people die, offstage; they do go.

Most of all it is a portrait of Mr. Ramsey and Mrs. Ramsey who are based on Woolf’s parents. From my reading of Leslie Stephen, who was enthusiastic agnostic reared in an evangelical hothouse with a suggestion of having been forced in it but not hardened off to withstand the cold air of Cambridge rationalism, I find this introduction to him true.

Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

Here it is worth noting that both Leslie Stephen and his father James suffered from serious depression. Ramsey/Stephen was a very high maintenance individual constantly seeking reassurance from the women around him. I will leave out the parallels which may be heightened by the retrospective imagination of the author who was 15 when her father died.

If not much happens what sustains the beautiful flow of the novel? The story is not wrenched on by incident as though the characters were stuck in the slough of facticity and needed a brisk shove. Above all it is a world in which as we move from mind to mind are always aware of where all the other bodies are. Mr. Ramsey is walking up and down the terrace declaiming fragments of poetry and worrying about his reputation, Mrs.Ramsey is knitting on the steps of the drawing room and here we are given the feel of French windows but not stated, on the lawn Lily Briscoe is making tentative marks on her painting afraid that it may already be spoiled, Mr.Carmichael is reading a French novel, the ‘little atheist’ Tansley is muttering ‘can’ paint, can’t write’ about women. We never loose sight of them all, they never loose sight or mind of each other. The children brood and fume over the tyrant whose wrath can shift to blessing in a trice. There are no defined edges to each mind or person, they flow together, the house broods over all and its lares and penates are mediated by the hosts Mr. and Mrs.Ramsey. The Boeuf en Daube triumph is one of the great dinners of literature. I am moved by such sustained skill. Will Ramsey spoil it by his anger at Carmichael asking for more soup? That passes over. But what has happened to Roger Rayley and Minta Doyle? They should marry Mrs.R. has decreed, William Bankes should marry Lily Briscoe. The world should marry and mothers will read stories and it all will process down a broad avenue which is also called life.

Here is an example of the permeability of minds and the panpsychism of the alert hedge:

Shabby and worn out, and not presumably (her cheeks were hollow, her hair was white) any longer a sight that filled the eyes with joy, she had better devote her mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and so pacify that bundle of sensitiveness (none of her children was as sensitive as he was), her son James.
“The man’s heart grew heavy,” she read aloud, “and he would not go. He said to himself, ‘It is not right,’ and yet he went. And when he came to the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick, and no longer so green and yellow, but it was still quiet. And he stood there and said —”
Mrs. Ramsay could have wished that her husband had not chosen that moment to stop. Why had he not gone as he said to watch the children playing cricket? But he did not speak; he looked; he nodded; he approved; he went on. He slipped, seeing before him that hedge which had over and over again rounded some pause, signified some conclusion, seeing his wife and child, seeing again the urns with the trailing of red geraniums which had so often decorated processes of thought, and bore, written up among their leaves, as if they were scraps of paper on which one scribbles notes in the rush of reading — he slipped, seeing all this, smoothly into speculation suggested by an article in THE TIMES about the number of Americans who visit Shakespeare’s house every year. If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now than in the time of the Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization? Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity.

Richard Whately: I respectfully demur Professor James

Whately on the suppression of the use of reason

Many people are led into the error of fancying that an irrational faith is even firmer than a rational one, by mistaking for a firm belief, a firm resolution of the will to believe. They seem to imagine that faith can be made firm only by a sort of brute force upon the understanding, and by brow-beating, as it were, their own minds, and those of others, into implicit submission. Now you never see traces of this kind of violence in the case of other truths which men really believe most firmly. You never hear a man protesting with great vehemence, that he is convinced that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that the earth is round like a ball, and not fiat, like a platter; and denouncing all who cannot see the proof. Good proof satisfies the mind of itself, and excludes reasonable doubt without any violent effort. When you are sure that the door is strong enough to keep out the intruder, you sit quietly by your fireside, and let him kick his heels against it till he is tired. But if you rushed over and clapped your back and shoulders to the bolt, that would imply that the door is really weak, or, at least that your faith in it is weak that is, that you had not full confidence in its strength.

(from Thoughts and apophthegms from the writings of Archbishop Whately)

The Carlyle, Stephen, Wilberforce Triangle.

Readers of the previous post may have been puzzled by the apparent acceptance by Sir Leslie Stephen of Carlyle’s proposal to force the pumpkin growing freed slaves into useful employment. It all goes back to the Clapham Sect and their founding of the Sierra Leone Company. William Wilberforce and Sir James Stephen, Sir Leslie’s father were leading lights in this venture which became a centre for the ‘retraining’ of recaptured slaves taken from pirates probably supplying the American trade after it was declared illegal by Britain and subject to confiscation on the high seas. However when the captives were delivered to Sierra Leone they were forced either to accept indenture for a fixed term at a cost of 20$ to their ‘employer’ or join the navy or army. Women were given away. No one was paid and only food, shelter and clothing provided. If an ‘apprentice’ ran off he was re-rescued in chains. This they had to suffer for I think fourteen years at first and later after agitation it was down to four.

Given that background Stephen was in no position to chide Carlyle if indeed he might wish to. Though expressed in brutal terms was Carlyle that far from what Wilberforce was obliged to accept in Sierra Leone? A sketch of that tangled history from a source likely to offer a charitable reading:
Sierra Leone Company

A Guardian review of a book on the Clapham Sect by Stephen Tomkins is, guess what, harsher:
wiberforce condoned slavery

Addendum:
William Wilberforce was influenced by the same escape clause which colonizers often offer as an excuse - ‘We are in principle in favour of independence/freedom for X, Y, Z countries but we feel that they are not ready for it yet. Our duty of care does not permit us to simply throw them into an unfamiliar state of freedom. It would lead to chaos.

Later in the same year (1816) he began publicly to denounce slavery itself, though he did not demand immediate emancipation, as "They had always thought the slaves incapable of liberty at present, but hoped that by degrees a change might take place as the natural result of the abolition."

(from Wikipedia Entry on William Wilberforce:wilberforce

Thomas Carlyle and the Negro Question

My previous post on this topic is
negro question
Carlyle's Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.


Today I was reading in the blog of a Carlyle scholar who criticises the use of the term 'nigger' in the work of Thomas Carlyle. He is aware that there is a certain anachronism involved, but he insists that by the start of the 19th. century things were changing and polite society represented by such as John Stuart Mill used the term 'negro'. There is an irony there in that Mill and his father worked in India House the H.Q. of the colonial plunder and the swag that was the white man's burden. One recalls too that Mill fils took a dim view of helping the Irish during the Famine. Offering this whited sepulchre as an example of probity is ironic.

However the fierceness of Carlyle's scorn in his Discourse on the Negro Question and his apparent support of slavery as superior to anarchic idleness has an unlikely supporter in Leslie Stephen. Writing on Carlyle's Ethics.

It shocks one to find an open advocacy of slavery for black Quashee. But we must admit, and admit for the reasons given by Carlyle, that even slavery may be better than sheer anarchy and barbarism; that, historically speaking, the system of slavery represents a necessary stage in civilisation ; and therefore that the simple abolition of slavery—a recognition of unconditional " right" without reference to the possession of the instincts necessary for higher kinds of society—might be disguised cruelty. The error was in the hasty assumption that his Quashee was, in fact, in this degraded state; and the haste to accept this disheartening belief was but too characteristic. That liberty might mean barbarism was true; that it actually did mean it in certain given cases was a rash assumption too much in harmony with his ordinary aversion to the theorists of his time.

Stephen's father Sir Joseph was the Colonial Undersecretary of State and a noted abolitionist. More irony there. A brother was a legal aide to the Council of State in Delhi. Compartments were hermetically sealed, one from the other.

Text for the Day:

Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.

May i add that I understand perfectly that a young academic would want to draw a cordon sanitaire around Carlyle on this question

Leslie Stephen - Hours in a Library

There is something very modern about the note of plangent sadness which Leslie Stephen sounds as he regrets the seeking of signs and wonders by the devotee who is looking for confirmation of the truth of his faith. One might read this gentle lament in an essay by Gary Gutting in the Opininator of the New York Times.

You are seeking for outwards signs and wonders when you should be impressed by the profound and all pervading mysteries of the universe; and therefore falling into the hands of mere charlatans, and taking the morbid hysterics of over excited women for the revelation conveyed by all nature to those who have ears to hear. Has not the word 'spiritual' till now expressive of the highest emotions possible to human beings, got itself somehow stained and debased by association with the loathsome tricks practiced by importers aided by the prurient curiosity of their dupes?

Stephen is writing about Carlyle's Ethics and mentioning in passing the sad decline into what he could only see as charlatanry of Edward Irving, Carlyle's friend.
irving

This point is made as it were in passing but from other of his writings I feel that he went out of his way. You see Sir Leslie Stephen was a Victorian freethinker and therefore somewhat at bay and inclined to growl. The portrait of him in To The Lighthouse as Mr. Ramsey does not shed a kindly light. The Calvin Carlyle which he offers us was probably influential. More on that perhaps.

Find the essay on Carlyle's Ethics in Bk.III of Hours in a Library
Hours in a library

Knowledge and Awareness

If knowledge is identified with mental ideas of objects, then, in the case of shell-silver and the like, there will be no true cognition or real object. But if knowledge be taken as identical with awareness, then the cause is different. There is no falsity in awareness. For awareness is real and still present at the time of correcting the error, when it takes the form 'Although I was aware of silver, it was in fact shell that was at time misperceived'. Awareness then apprehends the silver and the mental cognition of it as false. The knowledge at the time of the correction was real as awareness; but it does not follow that the silver on which it bore was real too.

(Sri S.S.S. Method of Vedanta

Anatole France's Library of Babel

Endowed with business-like energy and dogged patience, Monsieur Sariette himself classified all the members of this vast body. The system he invented and put into practice was so complicated, the labels he put on the books were made up of so many capital letters and small letters, both Latin and Greek, so many Arabic and Roman numerals, asterisks, double asterisks, triple asterisks, and those signs which in arithmetic express powers and roots, that the mere study of it would have involved more time and labour than would have been required for the complete mastery of algebra, and as no one could be found who would give the hours, that might be more profitably employed in discovering the law of numbers, to the solving of these cryptic symbols, Monsieur Sariette remained the only one capable of finding his way among the intricacies of his system, and without his help it had become an utter impossibility to discover, among the three hundred and sixty thousand volumes confided to his care, the particular volume one happened to require. Such was the result of his labours. Far from complaining about it, he experienced on the contrary a lively satisfaction.

(from Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France)

The Library of Babel according to Anatole France. I can sympathise with his taxomania being forced as I am to build a large bookpress for the overspill and the very explicable congeries which had their logic at some point but now have achieved a declension into chaos. (or is it it's as congeries is singular. Where's Fowler?) The press will be 8' x 5' with glazed upper section and drawers and cupboards below. It is after the plan of the bookcase of the Director General of Railroads from Rodale's Desks and Bookcases. I built one in white oak years ago which looked well. I will make some visual and constructional changes to the plan as shown: a solid plinth, a fancy cornice, lighter glazed doors. Bails or knobs turned in a contrasting wood. So many decisions knowing that at a certain point when you do too much you pass over into fussiness.

Vimuktatman. Time?

It’s a curious business, this nonchalance about dates in Indian Philosophy. Swami Sadchidanandendra Saraswati in his discussion of the text Ista Siddhi of Vimuktatman Acarya neglects to mention his historical background, when he flourished or where he came from. I can now tell you that he flourished between 850 and 1050 A.D. or thereabouts. You may well say that this is a result of a career move into a no career, sanyas. Personal history is eliminated. We are now in the absolute present in the presence of the absolute. Doctrines flow and ebb and what Sri S.S.S. is concerned with is the moola avidya novelty proposed by Vimuktatman which is obviously later in planet side time that Shankara’s advaita. What more do you need to know?

Moola-Avidya/Primal Ignorance

The moola-avidya people hold that avidya-sakti is a powerful primitive force, a force that prevents us from realising our true nature as existence//consciousness/bliss. Opposed to them are advaitins of the school that maintain that avidya is another name for superimposition. This is a simple characterisation of the divergence of views but I think it is fair to say that understanding ignorance as a force or a real existent arises from moving from an analogy i.e. ‘like a cloud’ to a metaphor,‘is a cloud’ . It may be just that simple.

Ignorance essentially is a non-cognitive relationship. We may know in general what the outlines of a topic are but the core of it is opaque to us. It also is the case that we may be in a state of complete ignorance in the case of the unknown unknown or the perfectly camouflaged. It just isn’t there for us. I would suggest that avidya/adhyasa is more like the known unknown that can be pointed to via the finger-post of a transcendental postulate. Start from the hard question - how is consciousness possible? On the face of it it ought to be impossible and there are various arguments for this ranging from causal closure to the gulf between the extended and the non-extended or cerebral events and qualia. Yet it happens. Here the outlines of a known unknown begin to become clear. We are at the start of atma-vichara or sefl-inquiry.

T.E. Intolerance

As I read the paper Valuing Disability, Causing Disability by Elizabeth Barnes I realised that my T.E. intolerance was spoiling my appreciation of it. This has caused me trouble in the past. In a fit of despair brought on by succumbing to a comfort fit trousers, the pants of shame, I threw myself under a trolley only to be saved by a fat man much much bigger than I who had been pushed from the overpass. We bounced off each other and fell to the side of the tracks. A sniggering individual looking down on us from above shrugged his shoulders and went on his way possibly to a violin recital in the Chinese Room.

The one thing that seems true to me in the paper is the quote from a disabled person ,Laura Hershey:

I've encountered people who, neverhaving tried it, think that living life with a disability is an endless hardship. For many of us, it’s actually quite interesting, though not without its problems. And the majority of those problems result from the barriers, both physical and attitudinal, which surround us, or from the lack of decent support services. These are things that can be changed, but only if we as a society recognize them for what they are. We’ll never recognize them if we stay so focused on curing individuals of disability, rather than making changes to accommodate disability into our culture.

(Laura Hershey)

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

The simple schema of a Dostoevsky novel such as Crime and Punishment allows him to create the dramatic contrasts and oppositions that move the story along. It’s all about counterparts. Mother and Daughter of the Roskolnikovs and of the Marmelodovs arrive at a trade of their only asset to support the son in the former and the family in the latter case. Roskolnikov who kills two people and Svidrigailov who caused the death of two are juxtaposed, the one unable to rise to being a cynical ubermensch, the other untrammelled by any kind of ethos. The friend of Roskolnikov, his good angel, Razumikhin is how he might be if he were not oppressed by the evil spirit of philosophisme. Roskolnikov is isolated by the consciousness of crime which is its own punishment but has the promise of redemption. Svidrigailov is an apostle of the absurd finally defeated by Dunya and whose death allows the Roskolnikov family to set themselves up with the good brother as a guardian. Examining Magistrate Porfiry Petrovitch is for me one of literature’s great cops. He spots the culprit quickly. There are too many clues but no hard evidence so he must draw out a confession discussing the Napoleon theories, appreciating and then mocking them. He is like my cat with a captive wren. The proud murderer who must face the truth that he is a bungler whose only triumph is to terrorise Sonia Marmeledov with a confession. There is a sense in which he might have to kill her too.

Everybody meets everybody else and skandaly ensues in Part V with its grotesquerie mitigated by a pantomime German and a drunken Pole and funeral guests egging them on. A worm turns, Luzhin the dismissed fiancé is unmasked. You can’t say that Dostoevsky doesn’t give dramatic value. Even if you’ve never read the book and what are you doing here, I might add; this sketch will not be a spoiler.

some reviews

I see that the Notre Dame sans Merci Philosophical Reviews has a review of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Henri Bergson:Duke University Press
Reviewed by Nicolas de Warren, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven
2016.08.09.
review
It became hard to read almost immediately and fulfilled its promise by being left unread not very far down the page. The hermeneutical contortions of the continental style book is to blame perhaps.

Michael Dirda should know better than to let a ‘heart rending’ escape him. His defence of Kipling against the shunners of evil views holds the short story Beyond the Pale to be such.
dirda
I rend my threadbare kurta, I foam and gnash. That story must be on some course or other. I regularly get visitations out of the night of Google. Put Kipling in the search bar.

I continue to read on every wet day here. War and Peace twice. I have been lingering over a consideration of Part V of Crime and Punishment by the master of skandaly or making scenes. ‘Don’t make a scene darling’, You know in the shop when we draw near to someone giving themselves over to the ecstasy of outrage, anger and ‘I want to see someone in charge’. The deep horror of Mrs. Marmeledov’s successive concussions by fate and Fydor saying to us - well if you can’t cry at least have a laugh.

Dr. Stephen E. Robbins
robbins
follows the true Bergsonian path of reflection founded on his expertise in psychology and memory theory. He does not flinch from consideration of the kernel question: if memory is not stored in the brain, where does it abide? If abide is the wrong way to look at it must we consider that memory is a recreation by a holographic wave built on the scaffolding of continuities that he calls ‘invarients’. I must read up on holography, Robbins’s guiding analogy. Is life long enough?

It’s nearly 10 and a nice day. The garden. I’m off to the carrots and the delicate pluck of finger hoeing.

I

Heart of Darkness

Once again, I do not, even in these concluding moves, wish to deny that most religions have, at one time or another, invoked creedal partisanship to prove their superiority over others. In hoc signo. We have God on our side. There is no God in all the earth apart from ours. These are not catchcries of the past. One need only mention the ongoing struggles between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir, between Buddhist Singhalese and Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, between Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem, between Christians and Muslims in Kosovo—not to mention countless examples of intrareligious wars in places like Northern Ireland, Iraq, and North Africa. These are sorry truths, and there is no point pretending that our secular post-Enlightenment world has exorcised such atavisms. There is, it would seem, a tendency in the “inaugural energy” of almost every religion (with possible exceptions like Buddhism and Jainism) toward some form of exclusivism, exceptionalism, or absolutism.

(from Anatheism by Richard Kearney)

But is this true? I read much the same thing the other day in the opininator piece by Prof. Gary Gutting offered as a Western liberal mea culpa self accusation when condemning the violent tendency of the Muslim religion, as he sees it. He forgot to mention the astrolabe and the golden age of Islamic Culture and so on and so forth. Christendom produced some fine works of art too. And so on and so forth, boilerplate claptrap. No sense of evil, no sense of the heart of darkness that must be surrounded by the guiding light of ideology. Then blithely we can crush, maim, torture and persecute so that you good people can sleep in your beds at night. These ideologies are like the logos on a sportsman's shirt with a major breastplate and minor chevrons to overdetermine their supremacy.

Kearney should know that 'consubstantiation' or 'transubstantiation' was never mentioned in the Good Friday agreement. Maybe they agreed to the concept of 'commemoration'. When the state papers are opened we shall know for sure.