Anonymous37 wrote: Sun Sep 26, 2021 3:55 pm Gulliver's Travels. The book is 295 years old, and I'm surprised at how readable it is, in the sense that Swift's English is similar enough to our English that the experience remains immersive to us in the present day.

-Is Swift’s English readable?

-Readable, sirrah? Why, do the very Dugs of the She-Pig touch the Mud?

I got the weird notion to read William Carlos Williams' epic poem Paterson. It's pretty weird and difficult and it might even be boring if it wasn't so weird. Some of the references have lead to some curious Wikipedia wormholes.

I'm starting to think there are only a few of the grand, modernist literary works that click with me and those might have been right book, right time.

Starting Umbrella by Will Self again. For some reason I did not get rid of this book even though the first time around I couldn't hang.

enframed wrote: Sun Sep 26, 2021 8:44 pm Starting Umbrella by Will Self again. For some reason I did not get rid of this book even though the first time around I couldn't hang.

I read Will Self's Book of Dave and Great Apes because both had a premise I found really entertaining. Neither book was exactly what I'd call entertaining or funny, but I suppose they were memorable. Interesting author, that Self.

Book of Dave was OK, Great Apes I thought was very good. He is an interesting cat, into concepts and seeing if he can do something with them. I need to get a book of his stories.

I just read Alan Moore’s and Jacen Burrow’s Lovecraft-referencing “Providence”, followed by a emetic sprint through their preceding “Neonomicon”, which Moore summed up best in an interview:

Neonomicon is really fucking horrible

The first ten of the 12 chapters of “Providence” ends with chunks of text, typically 12-14 pages long, and I found myself labouring through those at first - I’d read the comic-book chapter in 15 minutes, and spend longer wading through the diary entries and other ephemera that contextualise what comes before. But by the end I felt the mixed media works, and “Providence” might be another of Moore’s masterpieces. It is also really fucked-up.

kokorodoko wrote: Wed Sep 15, 2021 7:09 amI have always regarded, as I think is pretty common, Hobbes' idea of the polity as cold and brutal, because of its apparent amorality. Thinking more about it however, his kind of political order is considerably less oppressive (potentially) than one that seeks to use law to instate and maintain a kind of moral order. In Hobbes, the law is pure power. The function of the law is to make the people scared enough of the sovereign that they are protected from each other. There is thus a clear distinction between law and morals - morals have to do with relations between people. Since the actions and values of individuals at their root (this is Hobbes' view) are results of "passions", they are not rational and cannot be rationalized. No principles can be derived from them, they can only be negotiated, and they remain perpetually in an unsteady state.

Some further thoughts:

I was looking through the document from the First Vatican Council, and I came upon this passage, which called to mind again something I've been thinking about a lot recently:

... we believe that the things which he has revealed are true; not because of the intrinsic truth of the things, viewed by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God himself ...

The things that are true, are true, ultimately, because God has said so.

Which thing is such that its truth cannot be established through "the natural light of reason", but solely through the authority of its source? Well it's law of course. Law, which precisely is the divine revelation.

Originally, the lawgiver was a king.

So it is accepted as fact for Hobbes that law is law because the sovereign has commanded so. However, the truth of the law, or its justification, is not here located in the source of the command, but in its object. Namely, the lives of the citizens. The justification for this command now rests on it being in accordance with the contract made between the sovereign and the citizens.

Interesting.

^ Law as divine revelation seems like the old school theological version of "Because I said so".

This is a laymen's take on the opposite end of modernity but I think people like Hobbes got the importance of law right but the inherent value of any written law all wrong. It's interesting in contemporary discourse how people bring up legality as if it's directly synonymous with an ethical purity and with an almost divine reverence. The painfully slow winding road to legal justice in the US is a pretty quick referendum on the entire notion (I'm sure anyone reading is thinking of obvious examples).

I guess what I'm saying is there is still something Hobbesian in our modern discourse around law and government.

But I suppose this is missing one of the most interesting points in Hobbes that you summarized well: there is an exchange between citizens and government where we give legitimacy through our belief in exchange for protection. This seems like a tiny note of enlightenment thinking creeping in.

Just received Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation in the mail. So excited. It's next for sure.

losthighway wrote: Thu Sep 30, 2021 6:54 pm^ Law as divine revelation seems like the old school theological version of "Because I said so".

Pretty much, but it's the problem of how to ground the authority of the law. The law is supposed to be impartial, but all we have are partial perspectives and judgements. So we have to appeal to some super-individual source - the lawgiver is himself a god or judges with the blessing of the god, or something like that. This is the problem that the Israelites are trying to get around (they really don't like kings or oracles).

I've always been obsessed with this question of how the law becomes law, how legal authority can be (secularly) justified. Usually I only get some vague thing about consensus, which doesn't really help. I agree with you that the basis of modern democratic states is essentially Hobbesian, which is why it is strange that it so rarely seems to be stated outright. Maybe it's because these states also follow a history of thought where power has to justify itself through reason, which runs counter to this formation, which makes it embarrassing. Then again, in Hobbes' time ideas of constitution haven't become popular yet, I suppose these complicate the picture.

We have here a very early attempt at a secular notion of governmental authority, which at the same time reveals the link between this and religious authority (Hegel called the state "God on Earth"), and at the same time starts to shift the locus of sovereignty and modify its idea. It's obviously important if we're considering how a stateless polity would work. Really interested in seeing how this develops over the following centuries.