The Aristos

NOTES

References are to page and paragraph numbers.

13.3: Many modern philosophers. The classic statement of their position was made by the Viennese Circle in the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung of 1929.

‘The metaphysicians and theologians, misinterpreting their own sentences, believe that their sentences assert something, represent some state of affairs. Nevertheless, analysis shows that these sentences do not say anything, being instead only an expression of some emotional attitude. To express this may certainly be a significant task. However, the adequate means for its expression is art, for example lyric poetry or music.’

16.15: Pangloss. The pedantic old tutor to the hero in Voltaire’s Candide (1759). His incurable and misleading optimism brought him nothing but misfortune.

17.19: supernovae. A supernova is a star that explodes as a result of violent internal changes of pressure, which lead to an equally violent nuclear reaction. In the first second of such an explosion as much energy may be released as in the course of 1,000 million years of the star’s normal nuclear reaction processes. Such explosions may have an intense phase of a fortnight or more, and all life on the supernova’s own and neighbouring stars’ planetary systems would be charred to nothingness. Professor Fred Hoyle has calculated that in our own galaxy alone there are at least 100,000 million stars capable of evolving human life on their planetary systems.

20.35: Emily Dickinson. The great and lonely American poetess (1830-1886) whose brilliant command of paradox was married to a profound insight into the nature of human suffering. The line quoted is the central theme of much of her work: if life were one long happy summer, we should be without the mysterious truths we learn from our ‘winters’ of suffering.

21.42: A phoenix infinity. The mythical bird phoenix, supposed to be the only one of its kind and to live for five or six hundred years, lit its own funeral pyre and then sprang reborn and young again from its own ashes. The red shift referred to in the previous paragraph is the proof – from spectographic analysis – that very distant objects in our universe are receding from us; a blue shift would indicate that they are falling back on us, and that a universal holocaust was one day inevitable.

22.51: St. Augustine. Bishop of Hippo, and author of The Confessions.

23.54: Tao Te Ching: Exceedingly difficult to translate, but roughly ‘The Classic concerning the System that governs all and the Nature of things’. It was formerly ascribed to Lao Tzu (‘Old Man’), a supposed contemporary of Confucius (551-479 bc). Modern scholars now believe that Lao Tzu was the name of the book, not of the author; and that it is really an anthology of Taoist thought from the fourth and third centuries before Christ, designed primarily to give advice to the wise as to how to live through the troubled times of the Warring States period (480-222 bc). Politically and socially it recommends meekness and submission – the art of survival at all costs. But what makes it one of the great monuments of human thought is its attempt to describe the indescribable – the nature of God and of human existence. The Tao (way or system or divine principle) is often described as wu wei and wu ming – without action (in human affairs) and without name (indescribable in words). There are some strange parallels with pre-Socratic Greek thought.

26.62: contingent. Used here, of course, in the sense of ‘conditional’ or ‘non-essential’.

27.71: Erigena. Otherwise known as Johannes Scotus (c. 815-877). Philosopher and theologian.

29.4: The Bet Situation. From the famous pensée of Pascal. Il faut parier. Cela n’est pas volontaire: vous êtes embarqué. (You must bet. You have no choice: you are in the game.)

45.71: stasis. Stoppage of the circulation of the blood.

52.23: My contention here was tragically borne out by the Robert Kennedy assassination. At the preliminary hearing, Sirhan’s greatest concern was that his name should be correctly spelt and pronounced. There is something almost parasitical in such acts: now Sirhan’s name will be remembered as long as Bobby Kennedy’s.

74.29: amour courtois. The code of ‘knightly love’ that dominated educated Europe in the early Middle Ages had as its central principle the idea that truly noble love is never consummated. It was, so to speak, a game without a prize – and whose only purpose could therefore be the continuance of the game.

102.2: Ernst Mach. Austrian physicist and psychologist (1836-1916).

104.9: Kierkegaardian step in the dark. The argument of the Danish philosopher is that at some point in all the major decisions of life (for Kierkegaard, of course, the greatest was whether or not to be a Christian) reason and intelligence and scholarship become powerless to help; so one must either live in perpetual doubt and anguish or step into the dark.

Tertullian. Tertullian (c. 155-222) came, like Saint Augustine, from near Carthage. He too led a wicked youth, turned to Christianity in his later years, and became the greatest theologian and apologist of his time. His most famous statement of position is his credibile quia ineptum – it is credible because it is absurd.

114.43: Odi profanum… ‘I loathe the vulgar crowd, and shun them’ – from Horace. He was given the Sabine farm – which remains a delicious rural retreat only twenty miles from Rome – by the millionaire Maecenas.

115.47: the ancient Milesians. The pre-Socratic philosophers. Miletus ought to be ranked with Athens, Rome and Paris for its importance in the growth of the European spirit.

Orphic mysticism. The associated cults of Orpheus and Dionysus – both gods of the senses – relied on music, alcohol and ritual to gain and hold adherents. These cults probably had much in common with more recent African secret-society ‘religions’. Apollo stands for reason, law, moderation.

130.27: ‘feelies’. From Brave New World – movies that can be felt as well as seen and heard.

152.40: an artefact. Artefact properly means any artificial object (as opposed to natural object), but since ‘works of art’ has come to be applied to painting and sculpture only, I use artefact here in the sense of any creation of man in any of the arts.

158.65: Laius and Jocasta. The parents of Oedipus.

171.112: Meaulnes. From Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier. One of the great parables of that aspect of the European spirit that prefers the dream to the reality. Do-maine perdu, domaine sans nom: lost place, place without a name.

172.116: nostalgie de la vierge. Nostalgia for the girl. Nabokov’s Lolita was symptomatic of a general twentieth century tendency, and one that is reciprocated by a nostalgia for the father in girls. Though physical virginity has lost its attraction for men, the chief drive in these girl-father relationships seems to be the mutual attraction of inexperience and experience; and this is reinforced by the typical consumer-society belief that the latest model is the best. The consumer’s pleasure is what counts; unfortunately in this case the discarded model is another human being.

176.124: persona. The literal meaning is ‘mask’, as used by actors in the Greek and Roman theatre.

181.142: Adler. Alfred Adler (1870-1937), the Austrian psychologist, believed that Freud overemphasized the sexual motives of human behaviour. Adler considered much more attention should be paid to the individual’s striving for superiority and power over others.

Karen Homey. A German woman psychologist (1885-1952) who was greatly influenced both by Adler and by her experience of the United States, where she lived for the last twenty years of her life. She placed stress on the need for security as a fundamental psychological drive, and believed that much neurosis was caused by environment rather than by disturbance in childhood.

184.3: noösphere. A term coined by Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit philosopher and anthropologist who died in 1955. In the noosphere there is no time – but only the placeless and ageless thoughts and creations of the human spirit in art and science, which encircle our present lives as the atmosphere encircles the earth.

196.41: aleatory. The term (from the Latin alea, a dice-game) used to describe all those modern creative techniques that rely on hazard.

198.52: lycanthropism. Literally, the desire to be a werewolf, but used of those forms of schizophrenic madness in which the patient has phases in which he imagines himself to be some beast and exhibits depraved appetites – the Jekyll-and-Hyde personality.

204.72: onomatopoeia. The formation of words that sound like what they describe – hiss, bang, murmur, etc.

209.88: Mallarmé. Stephane Mallarmé (1842-98), the greatest poet of the Symbolist school, whose most famous work is L’Après-midi d’un Faune, on which Debussy based his piece. The Symbolists erected metonymy, the literary device of suggesting instead of directly stating what one means, as the chief mode of poetic expression. One of Mallarmé’s best-known sonnets begins: Is the fresh, vivacious and beautiful today going to break with a drunken blow of the wing that stern forgotten lake which the transparent glacier of flights that have not flown haunts beneath the frost? These lines are generally taken to refer to the agonizing difficulty Mallarmé sometimes had in composing his poems; but other meanings are possible. It is this deliberate ambiguity of meaning that has dominated all modern art since Mallarmé.