(no subject)

13. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
14. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
15. Poems of the Night, Jorge Luis Borges
16. The Sonnets, Borges
17. Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges
18. Selected Poems (1999), Borges
19. A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
20. Ficciones, Borges
21. Introduction to American Literature, Borges
22. Introduction to English Literature, Borges
23. Conversations (Ed. Burgin), Borges
24. On Argentina, Borges
25. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
26. All the Names, Jose Saramago
27. On Mysticism, Borges
28. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman

Probably shouldn't count On Mysticism, as it only contains about 15 pages of new material so that's all I read of it. On Argentina was about half new, mostly taken from the long-suppressed prose of his 20s, and pretty interesting, though the translation was garbly at times--allegedly Borges' early, baroque-modernist Spanish is practically impenetrable.

The Pullman book's pretty interesting too. The message is simple enough, but the task of keeping it feeling organic to the original material is occasionally beyond him--though there's an impressively high number of striking felicities in among the march of overall (relative, honorable) failure at a pretty much impossible job that I'm becoming used to with him.

Actually, here especially it's truly bizarre that the fusion of old text and new commentary works as well as it does, kind of reminding me of Taymor's success with Titus, a reading which you'd think would be entirely against the grain of the material it's working with, and in fact in places proves to be, but in others feels so astonishingly right that some sympathetic vein or countercurrent in the original must truly exist for that to even happen. The real Shakespeare hates violence, the real Jesus agrees with Pullman. Except at other times not.

The Saramago, which I'd taken several aborted stabs at over the years, proved amazing and mysterious. I grasped only some of what he's saying but became enthralled anyway, an experience I've become unused to but which probably characterized much of the reading of my younger days. Even in the many places where I probably do know what he's saying I don't feel sure I do, because he's coming in from some original, dream-guided angle--probably a lesson for Pullman, if this sort of thing can even be taught. I'll be reading more of him.

(no subject)

Sam Harris is inviting a pile-on with this, but, as you can imagine from my third post back, I like it a lot:

So, while it is possible to say that one can't move from "is" to "ought," we should be honest about how we get to "is" in the first place. Scientific "is" statements rest on implicit "oughts" all the way down. When I say, "Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen," I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn't share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place?

So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs.

[Sean] Carroll and [P.Z.] Myers both believe nothing much turns on whether we find a universal foundation for morality. I disagree. Granted, the practical effects cannot be our reason for linking morality and science -- we have to form our beliefs about reality based on what we think is actually true. But the consequences of moral relativism have been disastrous. And science's failure to address the most important questions in human life has made it seem like little more than an incubator for technology. It has also given faith-based religion -- that great engine of ignorance and bigotry -- a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary -- because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science. I think it is time we tried.

Fuck yeah. Hume's is/ought target was religious sources of absolute morality anyway. All you need for scientific study is an accepted norm, and because of our biological near-identity--so often unnoticed exactly because it can be relied on, whereas the little differences are, after taking care of daily survival needs, our only business--we have that.