 "In 1912, Sergei Bulgakov published The Philosophy of Economy, a sociological, philosophical, and religious examination of economic materialism. This was his way of settling an intellectual debt which he owed from his period as a respected Marxist intellectual. After writing two well-received works of Marxist economics, he drifted from political economy to explore the entire gamut of Idealist thought, particularly Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. This drift ended in one final major transition from Idealism to Christianity through reading the Russian sage and mystic Vladimir Solovyov. Like Solovyov, Bulgakov was drawn to a richly speculative understanding of the figure of Sophia from the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament—relating it in different ways to the order of Creation, the historical person of Mary, and the Church considered as the Bride of Christ. The Philosophy of Economy was Bulgakov’s first work to explicitly appeal to Sophiology in order to illuminate what are usually considered concerns of the practical order. With it, he hoped to move beyond the opposition of life and thought toward a more holistic, liturgical, and artistic understanding of the daily activity and ultimate destiny of the human community."
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 "Though less has been written on negative capability than one might think, writers who have explored the concept over the last two centuries have connected it to concepts of openmindedness, skepticism, nuance, ambivalence, dialogue, ambiguity, multivocality, and romantic irony, but one of the most interesting and least discussed aspects of negative capability is its connection to erasure — thought as palimpsest."
Here.  "Robert Musil, the early 20th century Austrian novelist, begins his multi-volume classic The Man Without Qualities (1930-1943) with a meteorological report about a cold front coming in from the West. The famous opening passage mimes and ironizes weather reporting, while also elevating it by insinuating that the meteorological condition does more than simply provide the background scenery of and for human dispositions and actions, but constitutes a happening in a strict sense. This blast of cold from the West is an event that augurs and confirms an entirely new manifold of human thought, disposition, and action. In it is disclosed a reductive rationalist pattern that excises our relations to the past, each other, as well as our basic humanity. And we would say “God,” if Musil thought that God at this stage were even worthy of being a hypothesis. As the novel proceeds we discover that the cold is also the sign of the disintegration of the relation between reason and will, which in turn essentially undoes both: the fragmentation reduces reason to mere use and will to the basest desire. Although by the nature of the case cold fronts and warm fronts are passing; this particular cold front is not. It turns out to be the sign of the interminable winter in which our dreams turn lurid in order to compensate for the cold. Here Musil seems to offer on the social scale what that other Viennese intellectual, Freud, offered on the individual. Although Musil always remains descriptive and apparently uncommitted, it is evident that this cold front is a catastrophe in the strict etymological sense—a kata-strophe—a radical “turn about” or “revolution” in which our lives not only no longer have the shape they have, but are without definite shape: we speculate on versions of ourselves on the screen of possibility. We can be everything, because with the cold, that is, with the modern, we are no longer anything." Here.  "This reality which Proust expresses, beyond both symbol and surface, Weil takes as the supernatural. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Weil takes our reading supreme reality through the movements of the material world as a supernatural act. Weil writes in The Need for Roots, “The operations of the intellect in scientific study makes sovereign necessity over matter appear to the mind as a network of relations which are immaterial and without force. Necessity can only be perfectly conceived so long as relations appear as absolutely immaterial.” A dense couple of sentences, but illustrative of Weil’s contrast of the limited and unlimited. Picking up shades of contemporary object-oriented ontology (but actually hearkening back to Greek conceptions of how humans read the natural world), Weil is saying that brute matter is not itself able to be penetrated by thought. Thought, being immaterial, understands in ratios and proportions. And so it is through this immaterial thought that the brute and unlimited chaos of the material world becomes ordered cosmos. The better we think, or read, the limits of nature and the unifying associations between phenomena, the more our own minds cohere with the immaterial mind of the Creator."
Here.  "Woven into his writing is a gnawing sense that something grand, something infinite, some great connective tissue, some veiling gossamer, with each fiber affixing itself to the myriad other fibers, spider-silk threads enveloping and intertwining everything that is and ever was and ever will be, has been lost—and a hope beyond reason that that which has been lost may perpetually have a chance for recovery, if only for a moment.
“In the grand cosmology of John McPhee,” writes Sam Anderson, “all the earth’s facts touch one another—all its regions, creatures, and eras. Its absences and presences. Fish, trucks, atoms, bears, whiskey, grass, rocks, lacrosse, weird prehistoric oysters, grandchildren, and Pangea. Every part of time touches every other part of time.” McPhee’s found connections and juxtapositions, entanglements and familial resemblances, influences and complications, analogies and reverberations hint at the ever-yearned-for major complex weave of the universe. Our spot as spiders, though not necessarily at the center of the web—for McPhee, unlike some contemporary purveyors of the personal essay and the memoir, is no narcissist—is somewhere among those silk-spun cables, simultaneously the weavers of meaning and the ones for whom this has been woven." Here.  "The most surprising fact about the lectures, however, is how they conclude: with a meditation on death. This move spares Czapski the accusation that he was merely escaping into the sensory, bourgeois richness of Proust’s art. He is not afraid to confront the specter of his own death head-on, and to use literature to do so. He broaches the topic by evoking the death scene of the writer Bergotte, in a section of “Remembrance” that Proust was editing in the final weeks before he died. Bergotte, by this point in the novel an invalid and shut-in, steps out to see an exhibition that includes Vermeer’s “View of Delft,” which Czapski, borrowing from Proust, describes as embodying a “mysterious charm,” a “Chinese perfection and delicacy.” Having taken in that sight, Bergotte quickly suffers a fatal stroke and dies in the gallery, overwhelmed by his senses. Czapski notes that Bergotte’s last wish is to view the paintings “one more time … though he knows well enough that, given his health, it’s risky for him to go out to see the exhibition.” A good death becomes linked to the experience of good art."
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Scott BeauchampWriter - Critic - Poet - Editor Archives
January 2020
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