The plague of consciousness

I think that academic publishing is in a bit of a state, not yet having adjusted, on the one hand, to the huge number of busy academics in the world and on the other to the Internet, where the work of a lot of those academics whizzes around the world without charge and without enough in the way of checks and balances.

That said, I find ResearchGate, Academia and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) at references 5, 6 and 7 useful sources of material, some of it drafts of papers which end up in their final form behind some respectable if expensive paywall, like those at Nature, the Royal Society or Elsevier. Hopefully, I am not led up the garden path too often by the academic equivalent of fake news.

The letter at reference 1 came to my attention through Academia, who push advertisements for their stuff out by email as well as acting as a searchable repository. The author of this letter is, inter alia, an editor (I imagine one of many) at the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) at reference 8, I think controversial because they charge authors for publication, rather than charging readers by subscriptions or otherwise. The respectable end of vanity publishing. I don’t see anything very wrong with this, but it does incentivise MDPI to maximise the number of papers that it publishes, possibly at the expense of quality. I believe that Academia is another for-profit entity, but I don’t know about the other two – beyond thinking that PLOS is more or less respectable.

In any event, I have been pleased to have the letter at reference 1, as it has pointed me to some interesting people: Emil Cioran (reference 2), Joshua Dienstag (reference 3) and Giacomo Leopardi (reference 4). 

We have the claim that a sense of time arrived with the arrival of consciousness – the fall into time (a phrase echoing the Fall in the Garden of Eden) which propelled the original organic man to the abstract man we have now. An abstract man who might know lots of stuff but is not free of his origins as an organic man. The trick is to enjoy being an organic man - while paying appropriate attention to the advice of the abstract man. But not to get carried away, not to get delusions of divinity or omnipotence: there is lots of stuff out here that even the abstract man cannot know. To my mind, a distinction which is useful, but one should not make to much of it. It does not stand up to close inspection.

Another part of this is our unhealthy pursuit of more and more knowledge, the way we are always poking around, always wanting to know more. Concerning which, in the case for example, of atomic bombs, the inner workings of our brains and machine intelligence, one might indeed have mixed feelings. And from where I associate to Auda abu Tayi of reference 10. Odd how he has stuck with me for so long. Maybe the idea is that we should spend more time doing (organic man) and less time thinking about it (abstract man).

From where I associate to the id, the ego and the super-ego of the Freudians. Also to the writings of D. H. Lawrence and to the love of brute force of the roughly contemporary Fascists. 

Cioran, a Rumanian-French philosopher, came a little later, only being born in 1911, and appears to have been a bit obsessed with death. And who, as a young man, flirted with the Fascists and the Iron Guard, lapses for which he later apologised. He expounds pessimism at reference 2 as a series of aphorisms, not necessarily consistent one with another, but each expressing something which was true at the moment of writing. Perhaps a series of very short chapters. I await delivery.

Leak tells us that one of them is about the impossibility of comparing life in one place – say ancient Egypt – with life in another. About how we cannot know what it is like to be an ancient Egyptian – rich or poor – and that it does not make sense to say that such a life is better or worse than our own. Any more than we can know what it is like to be Nagel’s famous bat of reference 11. Against which one might observe that most people, if offered a longer life, less disease or more food, would take them – and such choices can inform our sense of better or worse.

We also have the claim that a sense of time and consciousness pave the way for optimism and pessimism. Where either of these states of mind might be focussed on one’s own life and the second of which might be called depression – or might be more of a world view. I have been reminded that pessimism about the world is a perfectly respectable place to be; a place where one does not believe in the forces of knowledge and history propelling humans ever onwards and upwards. A place where one thinks it likely that there are going to be some ups and downs. 

Dienstag writes about philosophy and pessimism, but is based in the Law School at UCLA. I was impressed by the 45 page taster for reference 3 which Bing turned up for free. For a philosopher, he is readable and accessible. I read, inter alia, that the depression variety of pessimism is only very weakly linked, if at all, with the world view variety.

One of the things that struck me here was how much of life is organised cyclically, with a calendar, and for how many societies the world as a whole is cyclical. Think, for example, of the long year of the ancients of Central America, a cycle of 52 years - with it being reasonably unlikely that any one person would see more than one rebirth, the start of more than one cycle. For which see reference 9. Or the cycles of rebirth of the Hindus (and others).

Then along came the Christians, for whom time has become linear. The world starts in the Garden of Eden and rolls forward to the Day of Judgement. A long but finite chunk of time somehow embedded in the infinite – and where souls are definitely not recycled; you get just the one crack at it. And somewhere along the way we got used to the idea that things get better as we roll forward. This despite the warnings in the Book of Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun.

I await delivery of Dienstag’s reference 3.

While Leopardi wrote, inter alia, a short and entertaining parable about mankind, which incorporates much of the pessimistic stuff. With truth and knowledge not being without their bad sides – something which the writers of the story about the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden knew all about too. A parable which would make a fine springboard for essays for people in education between, say, the ages of 15 and 20. Roughly the years when I was most interested in such matters.

We will see how Cioran and Dienstag wear on closer acquaintance. The latter has an easy (English) writing style but I have taken a chance on the French for the former. Which may prove too much for me: Simenon fiction yes, Cioran philosophy no. Especially when translated from the Rumanian.

PS: while writing the above, I have been very much aware of the volume of advertising fed into websites that I visit from Sykes Holiday Cottages of reference 12. Perhaps whoever does this feeding uses the amount I spend with them – large compared with what I spend on, say, chocolates, clothes or flowers – as a guide to how often I need feeding.

References

Reference 1 : Cioran and the plague of consciousness – Connor Leak – 2021. Academia.

Reference 2: Sur les cimes du désespoir – Emil Cioran – 1990. Seemingly first published in Rumanian in 1934.

Reference 3: Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit – Joshua Foa Dienstag – 2006.

Reference 4: History of the human race – Giacomo Leopardi – 1820 or so. Available from Project Gutenburg.

Reference 5: https://www.researchgate.net/. 

Reference 6: https://www.academia.edu/. 

Reference 7: https://plos.org/. The Public Library of Science.

Reference 8: https://www.mdpi.com/. The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Fire_ceremony. 

Reference 10: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2008/10/bil.html. Blogger retains the spelling mistake in the title, since corrected.

Reference 11: What Is It Like to Be a Bat? – Thomas Nagel – 1974. 

Reference 12: https://www.sykescottages.co.uk/. 

Reference 13: The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man – Jan Brueghel the Elder, Pieter Paul Rubens – c. 1615. The source of the snap above.