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The Great Books Of The Western World

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  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I have been in self isolation since last week when family members and I developed a fever, hard cough, chills and some tiredness. Not the worst, but obviously we ticked all the boxes. I got it the worst, with a nasty Friday night... but all improving since. Fever returned 1-2 times.

    Could be a bad cold or flu but we will never know as under new testing guidelines we are not eligible according to the GP. Not vulnerable or deteriorating, or health workers.

    Been doing little reading, mainly child minding.

    Finished De Montaigne. Still listening to Pascal (Tonight: “Many of those who are well think themselves ill and many of those who are ill think themselves well ... while the fatal fever approaches and the abscess builds”)

    On page one of Spinozas ETHICS. Tedious.

    Health and strength to all my thread followers! Remember Socrates’ advice on death in the coming weeks. It is either oblivion - the extinguishing of consciousness and a sleep like we have never known - or it is a continuation on an unknowable adventure...


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Abandoned Spinoza. As unreadable as I remember. I suggest everyone just watch the BBC Great Philosophers episode about he and Leibniz.

    Locke’s A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION. This is more like it.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I notice a distinct lack of progress in my reading...

    Despite all the free time others report during this pandemic time, I must confess I'm almost entirely tied up working and minding our children.

    I'm reading a page of Locke here and there, but very little. Likewise on my 'casual' reading, the Eric Flint alternate history novel. I'm thinking of binning it, frankly.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I'm going to have to build in a 20-30 minute per day reading slot into my day and force myself to observe it. No progress - maybe 2-3 pages - since last time. Childminding, working, washing, cooking, cleaning, repeat...


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Minor progress. Finished Locke's A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION.

    I think I'm going to read his bit on the constitution of Carolina, because I think it'll be interesting, and it's very readable... But I don't know that I'm going to read some of his other political writings as, to be honest, the key takeaway seems to be the liberality and notion of religious tolerance best expressed in the LETTER. There is an essay on the same subject but it seems very similar.

    Separately, I'll be done listening to Pascal's PENSEES sometime at the end of next week. I remain impressed with him, a heavyweight in terms of making the argument for religious belief, I believe.

    Today-

    "There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous"

    I think, in fairness, the second half of this argument from Pascal is patently false. There are other categories of sinners.. Sinners who know they are sinners (I don't believe in the Socratic notion that no man knowingly does evil i.e that every wrongdoer believes he is, at heart, excused or not a wrongdoer) and sinners who are so nihilistic that they don't believe the concept of sin or righteousness are even real.

    Should also say I'm not big into the sinner / righteous concepts but I'm working with his language here :)


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Technically speaking I am due to begin ROBINSON CRUSOE now, which I'm actually looking forward to, but I am inclined to wait until I'm finished with the PENSEES on audiobook.

    I feel not so much that I've hit a wall as my focus has slightly waned. I want to possibly get back to one classic at a time for a while to see if that helps.

    I blame Spinoza.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I've consolidated by reading list and have a clearer picture of where I'm going now.

    Going to finish the PENSEES and then on to Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE.

    I've ordered the next four texts, George Berkley's PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, Voltaire's CANDIDE, Henry Fielding's TOM JONES and Samuel Johnson's THE LIVES OF THE POETS.

    Going to also try to squeeze in some Alexander Pope and Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu before the books arrive. Online reading.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Started ROBINSON CRUSOE last night. Kind of have stalled with Zelazny's AMBER books.

    They are a little more dated than I remember... I think 20 year old me was a simpler beast. May tip away at them when I want some light nightstand reading but last night I just felt like starting with CRUSOE (Itself a light read, I feel!).

    The funny thing about CRUSOE is that this is probably the third time I've read it, the first two times being in my teens, and the experience is both nostalgic and somewhat different.

    At the beginning of the book, Crusoe aka Kreutznauer (A great name, by the way) wants to go to sea and his father, who has "made him for the law" wants him to go to school, make a fortune and live a comfortable life of ease. His father's lesson is that the happiest station in life is what their family has, the 'upper' part of low station. Wealthy enough to live well, but poor enough to sail under the radar of the tribulations of nobility and the truly great. And certainly far about the 'mechanistic' class who labour and toil. His father warns him that ordinarily it is only those above and below him in station who chance going to sea... The poor to seek their fortune and improve their lot, and the scions of nobility to make a great name for themselves and prepare the way for a doubling or trebling of their already considerable assets and wealth.

    It's a great little paragraph, evoking both the class and society of the day and the extreme danger and potential of a life lived on the trade winds. And it must have completely sailed over my head as a teenager, because I remember none of it.

    The other thing that struck me was how bald the attitude to life and death is. Crusoe tells us he had two brothers. The one a military officer. The other, he says, he does not know what happened to. He simply vanished in the course of some similar adventure as ultimately befell Crusoe...

    Different times.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Reading a little bio of Alexander Pope as a precursor to THE RAPE OF THE LOCK and his ESSAY ON CRITICISM.

    I had no idea he was such an unfortunate. Born with a form of tuberculosis and also a hunchback only 4'6". Throughout this life he was assailed by critics talking about how his outward form was "downright ape", and similar. Constant physical pain and respiratory difficulties. It's difficult to be disabled these days, I can only imagine the lot of a man born in the 17th century. Not to mention to be a catholic, banned from schools and universities, and restricted from coming within ten miles of London!


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    A slow day here, and I have finished Alexander Pope's THE RAPE OF THE LOCK.

    Well, I can see the structural beauty of it. I don't know very much about poetry at all, but even I can see that Pope crafted it very well. Even a 'lay person' like me can read it and find the form pleasing.

    In terms of meaning, I think I probably got more than half of it, but ... Interestingly... I suspect the interpretation of the poem has shifted over time, to the point where I'm not sure these days the central conceit of it still stands.

    Pope recounts an incident that was related to him by friends. A woman had a lock of hair cut from her head without permission, and this caused a rift between the two society families concerned. The 'rape' referred to is just this, and he's not using the cutting of hair as a euphemism for any real rape, as far as I know.

    Pope's idea, and this idea held for centuries, was that the poem would satirise a ridiculous non-incident by writing it as if it were a mock heroic epic with gods (Pope's sylphs) warring.

    The thing is, once I read this debrief, I thought about our times today, and to be honest I don't think it really works anymore in the sense intended. Because cutting a lock of a woman's hair, and then refusing to return it, isn't a "storm in a teacup" anymore by any measure. It's assault in the first instance, and creepy as ****.

    But honestly, I'm also not sure why it's this, of all the things I've read, that make me go "oh, that might have flown back in the 17 / 19 C but not anymore, pal...".


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  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Listening to David Hume's AN ENQUIRY INTO HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.

    I forgot how accessible Hume is. His ideas of empiricism and scepticism are laid out in English that is not in any way inaccessible to contemporary people.

    Stalled a bit on Robinson Crusoe, just been busy with work.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    ROBINSON CRUSOE laments, prior to taking the fateful ship journey that will see him shipwrecked, that he was ‘born to be [his] own destroyer’.

    I forgot how clear the first 10% of the book is in setting out that he is a prodigal, consistently making decisions at odds with his father’s advice, acting impulsively, and each time he slides down in social position. He pops up again, but just as he has effectively only matched - with his Brazilian plantation - the level of wealth and potential he began with, in his fathers house, he casts it all away on a gamble he needn’t have taken. And this time he definitely loses it ALL. He washes ashore with a knife, a pipe and some tobacco. That’s it.

    Was this meant to be a morality tale as well as an adventure story?

    The slavery is also obviously glaring to a contemporary reader and I would be interested to know more about Dafoe’s personal views. Was the fact that it was a slaving expedition which ruined Crusoe significant? Ironically, himself a former slave who apparently learned nothing from the experience.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Still listening to Hume's AN ENQUIRY INTO HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.

    Hume is bringing me back to my undergraduate college days, but I think I have less frustration with the sceptics now than I did then. Back then I was concerned that Hume was 'shutting down' metaphysics and closing the door on questions that I was really enjoying considering. Now I look at what he was trying to do and admire the honesty and simplicity of his thought.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Still reading ROBINSON CRUSOE.

    From the point of view of a contemporary reader, the earnestness with which Crusoe considers his relationship to God feels like a distant artefact of the past.

    Nowadays, the equivalent would be the protagonist pondering 'who he is', 'finding his identity' and so on. He might look for meaning in his work, his family, his worth as a man and so on. But the likelihood of it turning upon his relationship to God... Pretty slim I would think.

    But there is something contemporary feeling in the way Crusoe notes how his eagerness to believe ebbs and flows. Amidst the storms he has experienced, he cries out to God. When shipwrecked, he by turns thanks God, curses God and then, when his fears have receded and he is in a dull monotony, his very belief itself recedes to the background again, until the next crisis.

    He also notes the particular effect of the persistent illness he has, which he journals. It strikes him down for a full week - a returning fever - and notes that it is so miserable that he reacts quite unlikely how he did to the storm aboard ship... That is, he never considers seeking help from God, because the day to day misery leaves him no sense that there is a higher power there to call out to.

    I suppose I can identify with some of this.

    I put myself in something like the position of Blaise Pascal, where I believe that it would be good for me to believe, and at times I entertain the belief that if I were to make myself think and live as a Christian then that might be almost enough.

    A few times in the past at particular low points in my life I have experienced what Crusoe did - that immediate and convenient belief that God is real, enabling me to ask him for help.

    But what this type of reflexive, almost knee-jerk faith, means, is open to debate.

    ---

    In AN EQUIRY INTO HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, Hume makes an interesting point that when it comes to the value we place in human experience and witness accounts, there are various ways in which our belief is undermined in the account. He notes that the presence of any opposition to the supposed truth of the account is one way, and this is made more potent by being very vehement or insistent. Another way, he says, is that the more marvellous or remarkable the thing that the account is of the more sceptical we are of it. Such a simple observation, and yet so true. We instinctively disbelief accounts of miracles, for the post part, but don't we also raise an eyebrow when an acquaintance in a pub tells us a story that is just so perfectly timed, so funny, so witty, that you think to yourself 'This is so perfect a little anecdote, it just didn't happen'...


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Finished AN ENQUIRY INTO HUMAN UNDERSTANDING.

    Technically next in line was Rosseau but I am taking a slightly side-step because I want to listen to the BBC productions of the Samuel Pepys dairies. I am surprised that Mortimer Adler didn't include Pepys' diaries in his list, to be honest.

    They came to my attention partly as a result of having caught a few episodes on Radio 4 years ago, but also because Pepys' callous attitudes to public and gruesome executions have been referenced in other books I've read about being indicative of how the attitude to violence and suffering has gradually changed over time. The argument is that Pepys was a 'normal bloke' for the era, perhaps even a comparatively enlightened one, and yet by our standards today he comes across as oddly deaf to pain and suffering. Ergo, public attitudes have shifted, goes the argument.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I'm dragging my feet a bit with ROBINSON CRUSOE, still only about 1/3 done. I don't think I realised the original is so much longer than the Puffin versions that I guess I must have been reading as a kid.

    I also never realised (Perhaps because... Puffin is a kids imprint) that there was such a strong horror / suspense element to the book once Crusoe realises that his island is being visited regularly by cannibals, who devour people over fire pits on the beach.

    He's been on the island for years, shooting the place up, burning greenwood and sending smoke up into the air... And it is only through blind luck, to some extent, that the cannibals were never on the beach to hear or see. If they were, he would have been doing his woodworking or corn-growing and suddenly found himself face to face with them.

    Eventually he realises their arrival is predictable and contingent on the tides, so he knows when to desist from things that might give him away, but that doesn't make his prior behaviour any less risky.

    Suddenly the multiple-month project where he built his stake-wall and bower seems eminently sensible, instead of amusing paranoia.

    - - -

    Separately, interesting to note that even in Dafoe's time there was an awareness that morality had changed and that the actions of the Spaniards in cleansing the Americas of the native civilisations were objectively wrong. He talks about the Spaniards' reputation being one of cruelty and shame.

    You'd question whether Dafoe (Or Crusoe) is being very consistent there considering Crusoe held slaves earlier in the book. The two things don't seem to fit well.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Friends, I have not abandoned ye.

    ROBINSON CRUSOE was finished the day before yesterday.

    I couldn't understand why my kindle edition was only showing me approximately 50% of the way through when Crusoe had left the island and was conveying his fortune from Brazil and so on. Realised I had an edition that, although it didn't stipulate it clearly, also comprised THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE. Long version short, I went some way into this (His return to the island, principally) before realising what was going on and finishing my reading. THE FURTHER ADVENTURES have been of significantly lesser literary impact, probably for good reason, they seem to lack the compelling plot of the original book, and are more likely a series of vignettes.

    I have mixed feelings about ROBINSON CRUSOE. It obviously is one of the most published and influential adventure stories in history. But is it dreadful to say that probably some of the later iterations and adaptations of it are actually more enjoyable to read than the original?

    What I mainly took from it was the insight into the mentality of the time. Both the spiritual plot which underpins Crusoe's experiences, and the questions the book raises about race and imperialism. For his time there's no doubt Dafoe is an enlightened man, and Crusoe says things about Friday which must have been remarkable for the time... About how he is a Christian like any other and so on. Also interesting is the point where Crusoe questions whether he is justified in killing the cannibals, if their culture does not mean what they are doing is 'wrong'. And yet at the same time Crusoe takes what he wants and the island is definitively 'his' in every respect, including the loyalty of any visitors or occupants, who either row in with him or are killed.

    I have 2 hours left in the audiobook version of THE DIARIES OF SAMUEL PEPYS. Still enjoying it, but happy to be on to something new in due course.

    In reading terms I have gone on from ROBINSON CRUSOE to George Berkley's PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. I will also read his THREE DIALOGUES, which is closely related.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I should say in passing that Pepys is a remarkable diarist in that he was fortunate in capturing so many events that have truly endured in historical memory -

    - The great fire of London
    - An outbreak of the bubonic plague

    But for me it's the tells about the attitudes and lives of ordinary people back then that are probably most interesting.

    Although I began with a comment about how hardened they were in their attitudes to violence compared to ourselves today, now I'm no longer so sure. I think they were blasé about sickness and the suffering of pain (Because of course they have little to no effective medicine or understanding of it) but I don't think they were as different to ourselves in other respects as I thought. Pepys is uncomfortable and regretful about executions, contrary to some of what I'd read elsewhere.

    Much of what Pepys does and thinks in terms of his relationships with his wife and others are timeless, there are dynamics that have not changed in the intervening period.

    Pepys is a hell of a cheater though. I think these days he might be diagnosed as a sexaholic, or at least would be considered a serial philanderer. He carries on with at least half a dozen women over the course of the diaries, probably more, including the young maid of his wife. And yet he is embarrassed to buy a book of pornographic literature (He burns it after reading), and considers it a stain on his family's reputation if his deceased brother were thought to have died from the pox (He strongarms the doctor into changing his diagnosis by bringing in a doctor of his own to contradict him).


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Finished the DIARIES OF SAMUEL PEPYS and now onto Rosseau's THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

    "Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains."

    This might be one of the best opening lines since THE ILIAD.

    I am a reasonable amount of the way into Berkley's THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE and I am not going to say it is impenetrable, but I can see why it was considered eccentric in its arguments even in its day.

    Berkley is an 'Idealist', a philosophical term I had forgotten. He argues that 'to be' is indistinguishable from 'to be perceived' and it's more or less his position that there is no reality absent the mind and world of ideas and perceptions. To be honest I've never really understood how philosophical Idealism differs from solipsism.... I don't understand how it isn't quite an arrogant point of view.


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  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Enjoying Rosseau. He had a talent for sound bites and catchy lines.

    In some respects I think his analysis of how states operate is insightful. He warns that it is dangerous to have great inequality, with too many very rich people and too many beggars. From the one comes a tyrant, from the other the will to install a tyrant. Isn't that populism 101? Surely he was not the first to say it, but it's true.

    In terms of equality in general he talked about the need that, in signing up to the social contract, the wealthy agree not to allow their personal wills to shape the activities of the State, because of the disproportionate power they can wield in that respect, and meanwhile the poor are not to behave with avarice / covetousness and so destabilise the State.

    Struggling moreso with Berkley. I still think philosophical Idealism is just funny. Once he begins with the proposition that there is nothing but mind and ideas, then it's an easy move to the rest of his philosophy of spirit and god. But I still can't get past the fact that there's a fundamental arrogance in believing that nothing exists other than in the sense that a human mind has a perception of it existing. He argues that although we can only conceive of a thing which we would perceive existing independently in the sense that we imagine that we are perceiving it and yet simultaneously imagine we are not perceiving it, I think surely this only goes to the limitations of our mental faculties than to suggest that indeed, there is only human mental perception as a bedrock for the reality of things.

    I am only holidays for a number of weeks now and plan on just reading trash. I mean serious trash, I have a bunch of bad SF novels downloaded to my Kindle.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Nearly finished Rosseau. I would still recommend him, very readable and interesting observations. But I think I'm starting to identify a trend which crept in where Rosseau feels very much like a public intellectual rather that someone who has had skin in the game of public governance and leadership in the way that Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Jesus Christ, St Augusine or even Machiavelli had. I wonder is this a little marker along a historical road which took us from individuals like that to our contemporary intellectual class, who would (in some cases, not all) hesitate to send to the shop to buy milk.

    About a quarter of the way through Voltaire's CANDIDE. Pleasant, holds up well as a send-up of philosophical and religious absurdities.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Finished THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. It begins very well but I feel flags towards the second half.

    More than 2/3 of the way through CANDIDE now, and - just a passing comment - but the amount of rape somewhat surprised me. It's not graphic in a contemporary sense but there are certainly some gruesome accounts of rape-murder by soldiers in a few different chapters. For a satire I guess I thought Voltaire would skate over the details. Was this material a little shocking for the time also? Or did they not particularly care?

    Listening to book 1 of Adam Smith's THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. It is a huge work, 40 hours of an audiobook, and I'm not honestly convinced I will go the whole hog with it, but we'll see how far I get. I must say that book 1, covering the notion of division of labour and the invention of commerce (so far) is very accessible and pleasant.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    CANDIDE is finito. Very enjoyable, I think worth reading solely to read the passage which is the origin of 'pour encourager les autres'.

    I'm about 1/20 of the way through THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. Still enjoying it, but it's going to be a long listen. I'm passed a rather dry discussion of commodities and Smith is speaking now of why 'masters' find it easier to organise than 'workers' to bargain collectively. In some ways its a timeless discussion.

    'Masters'
    - Fewer of them so inherently easier to organise, Smith says
    - Collectively disposed towards cooperation as they are outnumbered
    - Can withstand a withdrawal of workers' labour longer than workers can withstand a withdrawal of permission to use resources / land / receive payment

    Workers
    - The opposite of all of the above
    - Smith says there are acts of parliament preventing them from withdrawing their labour

    Smith talks about how the 'natural state' is that a worker owns all of the product of his labour, but that this natural state became impossible once the division of labour and invention of private property came into play and go hand in hand. Now, no one can escape a landlord's demand for a cut / rent.

    Now, in terms of print reading, I have a confession to make.

    I have a copy of Henry Fielding's TOM JONES, HISTORY OF A FOUNDLING and I read about 50 pages. Frankly it's not dreadful, I have read worse, but I am at a point in my reading list where genuinely I am starting to see time spent poured into books that are not doing it for me as probably a bit stupid. This is not THE BIBLE, or THE ILIAD, where I know there is a dividend if I keep pushing. It's an 18th century novel that probably no one reads for pleasure now, and it has a really painful narrative style, if anyone has ever tried it. It was 'racy' for its day, but now I can't help but feel that I'd rather just skip it and when the time comes read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and bloody enjoy them.

    So no Henry Fielding for me.

    I'm going to read a few bits of Samuel Johnson's THE LIVES OF THE POETS (Particularly interested in the little life of Milton).


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Almost finished the life of Milton in Samuel Johnson's THE LIVES OF THE POETS.

    Johnson is quite scathing parts, he's the epitome of the bitchy critic in some ways.

    There's a lively, journalistic quality to his writing, though. He has an eye for some of the scandalous bits that he knows the reader will want to hear about, like Milton's problems with his wife.

    He marries her, brings her to his monastic boarding-school type house where they're all living this life on contemplation, and she quickly buggers off to her friends / family, to continue living a more normal lifestyle. She reneges on a promise to return to him, and Milton ... Well, he churns out a few screeds on why divorce is good, until eventually she comes back to him on her knees (Literally.. According to Johnson).

    Making quicker headway through Adam Smith than I expected.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    1/8 of the way through THE WEALTH OF NATIONS this morning... It's still oddly compelling, but I'm not promising I will last the entire thing, depending on whether it descends into the truly arcane.

    Smith really does traverse the length and breadth of the notion of profit, wealth and so on. I'm sure that this is (literally) finance and economics 101 for anyone who was educated in the subject, but to me it's relatively new. I'm familiar with some of the concepts, but Smith assumes nothing and lays it out pretty clearly.

    Random thoughts:-

    He talks about why some jobs pay more than others. It's not just about the difficulty of the work or the skill involved, or the demand... He notes a point that it can also be to do with sheer unpleasantness. It seems that the best example of this that he can come up with is the job of a collier (Coal miner). For reasons that are still obvious to us today, he remarks that they have to be paid quite well just to get them to do their horrendously dangerous job.

    Insurance... Smith notes that we don't think about risk in the same way for every subject. No one pays for overland insurance, he says, and yet everyone understands the need for sea insurance (Ships at sea). Smith notes that there are large shipping concerns with 30 plus ships who might choose NOT to insure their ships as the ships nearly insure each other... The cost of adding up all the premiums together outweighs the cost of a loss, so the merchant just accepts the potential risk.

    Lotteries... Smith is scathing about the odds of winning, and remarks in particular on those who buy more than one ticket. Not sure about the mathematics of this in an absolute sense, but he says buying more than one ticket in a large lottery effectively only increases the degree to which you are likely to be a loser...


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  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Due to start a copy of Edwards Gibbons' THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (An abridged version, it's a single volume Penguin Classics that I've had since my teens).

    I've been looking forward to this for a long time as probably the Greek and Roman era are what I've enjoyed the most thusfar about this whole project. Gibbons' English is famously excellent, some have said he is the greatest prose writer to have ever lived.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Enjoying THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE - the language is truly amazing.

    Also liked this in the Introduction by the editor:-

    "Gibbon appears to have been most chary of discussing his history in these years, when he was writing the first volume. [...] His London acquaintances may well have known that he was engaged in some historical project, but they too were literary men, busy on ambitious schemes of their own. Before the event, they had no to assume that the little fat man with the red hair, the high voice, the fancy clothes and the absurd mannerisms was writing the greatest history that has ever been published in any of the languages of mankind."


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Striking lines in THE DECLINE AND FALL where Gibbons talks about the fact that "the road of fortune" was open to all the provincials conquered by the Romans, and through "merit" they could gain the protection and advantage of Roman citizenship and all the benefits that went with that. He writes of the grandsons of the Gauls who besieged the Legions attending Rome as senators, and bringing their virility and energy to the service of Rome.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I'm a 1/4 of the way through THE WEALTH OF NATIONS now. It's easier going than I anticipated, but I must admit I did skip a chunk related to stocks and the circulation of money.

    Smith talks about the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. All public servants (He mentions the army, for example), are engaged in unproductive labour. No matter the work they complete this year, it will not buy protection next year. So true.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    1/2 way through THE WEALTH OF NATIONS now, making decent headway.

    Striking how concerned Smith was with the risk posed by monopolies. At the time of writing it seems there was a pressure to legislate against what was perceived to be a dangerous proliferation of shop keepers and small businesses, but Smith noted that such activity could only be good for producers and the customer. The effect would be that they might have to buy dear and sell cheap, whereas the risk of monopoly is the converse.

    What would Smith have made of the tech monopoly and state of the high street today? All but destroyed, COVID 19 being the final nail in the coffin? Or perhaps it's more like an accelerant thrown atop a burning fire.

    Still working on and enjoying THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.

    Can't help but relate the chapter I'm reading, about the virtuous Marcus Aurelius and his (all too human) error in choosing his son Commodus as successor, to the movie 'Gladiator', for obvious reasons.

    Commodus, according to Gibbon, showed early signs of normality and the potential to grow into a virtuous man. Gibbon argues that he was led astray by dissolute advisors who encouraged his darkest tendencies, until cruelty became his default behaviour. A lesson, once again, that absolute power presents a moral challenge to the holder that requires immense maturity and positive moral influence around the wielder. Checks and balances go without saying, but if they exist then is it really absolute power...


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  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I have another few weeks left with Adam Smith. I ended up marking out about 30% as material in THE WEALTH OF NATIONS that I decided not to read... Mainly more technical elements that I think might have dated badly (But speculating to an extent, as I didn't read / listen to them).

    Still enjoying but not making massive headway into Edward Gibbons.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I'm over two years into this project and I can safely say that I've read more primary texts than I did in 5 years of university. Probably by a colossal margin, I wasn't great at going to the library and doing my reading... I was either skimming, using secondary texts or outright bluffing.

    In recent weeks I have been reflecting on what I've read and there are undoubtedly stand-outs that I am already considering revisiting in the future. Thucydides, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Livy, Plutarch... Having reached that realisation of what I like and find personal value in, it has made me consider at what point grinding through some of the other less enjoyable material becomes a bit stupid. There is a tipping point where it becomes about OCD and stubbornness.

    In the first year I had to guard against giving in and taking the easy way out with particular books.... The Old Testament springs to mind, but there have been many others.

    But now I feel the need to accelerate a process I have already been employing to some extent, and to curate what is on the remains of the list. I could easily spend a further two years or perhaps three years before completion if I strictly observed the list.

    I feel like sinking two years into Mortimer J Adler's reading list in order to acquire an understanding of what is actually enjoyable and useful for me to read has been worth it.

    So I have made a decision to prune the list in favour of the following. This will be my final off-ramp from this project. Upon conclusion I will begin tackling a large, large backlog of contemporary fiction and non-fiction which is waiting on my shelves. All of it is lighter than what I am reading now. I plan to simultaneously begin dipping back into some of the classics mentioned earlier in this post, and then take a self-guided approach beyond that. There are books out there which were never on Adler's list which I think I would probably enjoy greatly...

    0. Boswell - Life of Samuel Johnson
    1. Hamilton et all - The Federalist Papers
    2. Jeremy Bentham
    3. Wordsworth
    4. Coleridge
    5. Jane Austen
    6. Von Clausewitz
    7. Ralph Waldo Emerson
    8. Nathaniel Hawthorne
    9. Alex De Tocqueville
    10. Mill
    11. Thoreau – Civil disobedience
    12. Marx
    13. Melville
    14. Dostoevsky
    15. Twain
    16. William James
    17. Nietzsche
    18. Freud
    19. Shaw
    20. John Dewey
    21. Alfred North Whitehead
    22. Lenin
    23. Thomas Mann
    24. Kafka
    25. Sartre
    26. Solzhenitsyn

    Looking at this list, there is probably still the guts of two years' work here. We'll see...


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Adam Smith makes some really interesting observations in the final couple of books of THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

    He talks about the threat posed by barbarians to civilised peoples. The examples he uses, of nomadic people threatening more civilised societies which have moved from shepherding to husbandry to farming, is oddly exactly what is going on in my reading with THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Gibbon is painting a picture of virile vandals and goths coming south and beating larger armies of roman legions (Sometimes defending excellent fixed positions). Smith and Gibbon agree that the more primitive people, living harder outdoor lives, pose an inherent threat to wealthier, softer societies.

    But Smith makes the canny observation that wealth and technology intersected to create a situation in warfare that changed all that. Upon the invention of firearms, skill at personal arms and the various means by which societies cultivated fighting power all changed. Now with the new technology came a buy-in price to equip and keep operating an army armed with firearms. Suddenly, wealthier nations pulled clear off the more primitive societies. The gap that emerged still remains! Top tier western armies have things like night vision technology which enables them to fight at night, while the majority of the developing world's militaries totally lack this capability. And so it continues.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I began and abandoned Boswell's THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON almost immediately.

    It's considered a class of the genre of biography. Boswell was a close friend (20 years) of Johnson, and admired him greatly. I have a 50 hour audiobook version and about 1 hour in I very much questioned what possible use this is to me to wrestle my way through.

    I already know far more than I ever want to about what a precious 'scholar', 'without equal' young Johnson was. I'm led to believe he was such hot stuff he was borne on the shoulders of his school mates out of pure respect.

    Honestly, ain't nobody got time for this, so it was on to THE FEDERALIST PAPERS.

    Ah! Now this is more like it. Hamilton and others writing brief polemics in favour of the establishment of the Union.

    The first several cover questions around risk. They address whether the States are at greater or lesser risk of war or exploitation by stronger states if they fail to form a union, and exist either individually or in lose confederacies. A wide variety of arguments are also deployed in favour of the idea that the union by its nature would enable better government due to the nature of a federal government and the way it draws people and resources.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Still working my way through the DECLINE AND FALL and also THE FEDERALIST PAPERS.

    THE FEDERALIST PAPERS are just long enough that I can listen to a full one on my way into work each morning. I have to say, the language and polemic is stunning. This is great rhetoric, in my view.

    Oddly there are things that Hamilton and Madison have to say which are relevant today, in this era of highly polarised US politics. Although when they wrote they were arguing against the peril of faction deriving from a different set of circumstances than Americans face today, and arguably the States were even more politically and religiously diverse then than they are now, I guess. And maybe their military and economic interests were even more divergent.
    Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many cords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness; can no longer be fellow citizens of one great, respectable, and flourishing empire. ... Shut your hearts against the poison which it conveys; the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their Union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies.

    Epic stuff.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I'm at a stage in THE DECLINE AND FALL where Gibbon has just written about a period just before the proper decline sets in. Gibbon likens it to a reprieve, a return to the form of previous glory, before the collapse.

    Diocletian, as emperor, divided his authority not just with one other Caesar, but in fact among three others. He created a model of four princes. Two elder statesmen with responsibility for the softer and richer stations of Italy, Africa and Asia, and then hardier younger Caesars minding the Rhine and the Danube.

    Interesting that Diocletian actually abdicated the purple. He extracted a commitment from his co-elder, Maximian, that he would abdicate at the same time. Later, Maximian visited Diocletian in his native Illyria, where he had retired, and tried to persuade him to take up the reins of power again. Diocletian is reported to have told him that if he could but see Diocletian's cabbages that he had planted, then he would understand why he did not intend to (I'm paraphrasing).

    I would be fascinated to know more about what Diocletian's views on leadership and administration were. Gibbon talks a bit about him, describing him basically as a methodical and competent man, but with no interest or aptitude for philosophy or the liberal arts. He does quote Diocletian saying at least one very insightful thing... That a supreme ruler lives in a bubble and there is a strong disincentive for his courtiers not to present him with an impression of reality which is to his liking. He warns that as this goes on sooner or later the ruler ends up living in a setting made a wasteland by venal courtiers.

    At the same time, Gibbon is very clear that it was Emperors like Diocletian who brought about a situation where powerful civil servants, often eunuchs, became the gate keepers of power and access to the Emperor.

    He harkens back to a time when the Caesars were merely powerful executives, but with small households and modest ownership of slaves. In contrast, Diocletian and others become the more god-like rulers we might think of when we think about absolute monarchs of the ancient world. Such monarchs were not really the norm for the Romans for much of their history.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Important to note that the apparatus for ruling the empire, described above, only survived until shortly after Diocletian's abdication. Then there was a slide into civil war when the 'wrong' people started filling the vacuum for Caesar positions.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    The Federalist Papers no 29... Hamilton is speaking of the tone of some of the critiques he is reading which are arguing against the new Constitution which he is in favour of.

    He says of what he is reading "a man is apt to imagine that he is perusing some ill-written tale or romance, which instead of natural and agreeable images, exhibits to the mind nothing but frightful and distorted shapes "Gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire''; discoloring and disfiguring whatever it represents, and transforming everything it touches into a monster".

    The polarised language of today's political landscape, and the recognition by those at the top of media platforms and political campaigns that the public is easily manipulated when presented with extreme and terrifying visions, is the continuance of the phenomenon Hamilton noted.

    "If it bleeds, it leads"

    "Project Fear"

    Etc.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I'm going over some of the key Federalist Papers, particularly no. 10, and then I think I'm ready to move on.

    In THE DECLINE AND FALL I'm at around the halfway mark. Constantine was just trounced the Praetorian Guard in Italy. Gibbon has a neat turn of phrase in describing the bravery with which the Praetorians went down, however. Recognising the desperate nature of their last stand, in that they had no chance of survival under Constantine's regime anyway, their bodies lay on the position which they occupied in battle. That is, they did not retreat, but died where they stood.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I'm due to read Jeremy Bentham's AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES AND MORALS OF LEGISLATION.

    I'm actually quite interested in Bentham and his role as probably the foremost legal philosopher who ever lived (I'm not even going to qualify that by saying "in the Western world"), and basically I guess he's the daddy of utilitarianism, at least that's what I understand.

    Bentham believed the law should do the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people.

    It strikes me that this gels quite well with some of the content in the Federalist 10, which I listened to again yesterday. In that paper they note that faction and dissent among a community arises due to things like the inherent differences of interest between those with property and those without, between creditors and debtors and so on.

    Isn't the law really about regulating those differences, at a fundamental level... To stop the whole society tearing itself apart.


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  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I am waiting to finish Gibbon before I try and make some headway through Bentham. I can't get a decent audiobook for Bentham so I will give a written copy a crack and then decide if it's worth wading through.

    In the meantime I am pushing on to Coleridge and Wordsworth, the Romantic English poets.

    So far I've been at Wordsworth for a couple of days and I have to say, it's been refreshing and contrary to my expectations.

    Wordsworth was, in my mind, a sort of pastoral painter with words, talking about fields of daffodils and wandering lonely as a cloud and so on.

    However, if you read the likes of LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY it's hard to disagree with the critics that he is as much a poet reflecting on memory as nature. He constantly describes his natural surroundings in terms of his present self, his former self, and notes the change and evolution between them.

    And in respect of nature, it's not so much that he is content to describe but rather he is engaged in very deep self-reflexive consideration of nature and its relation to his memory, his mood and indeed his perception of the divine behind nature.

    In ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY he seems to me to also talk about youth versus age, and he captures himself what must have been the almost supernatural ability he had to perceive nature in such a powerful, almost psychedelic way. And then he says, no more.

    There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
    The earth, and every common sight,
    To me did seem
    Apparelled in celestial light,
    The glory and the freshness of a dream.
    It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
    Turn wheresoe'er I may,
    By night or day.
    The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

    The Rainbow comes and goes,
    And lovely is the Rose,
    The Moon doth with delight
    Look round her when the heavens are bare,
    Waters on a starry night
    Are beautiful and fair;
    The sunshine is a glorious birth;
    But yet I know, where'er I go,
    That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

    The last line almost Tolkienesque!


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Coleridge today.

    I can see myself listening to some of the great English actors reading Wordsworth and Coleridge whenever I need something soothing. What voices, what delivery!

    Coleridge shares Wordsworth's beneficent sense of nature. He says, "nature never deserts the wise and pure". So similar to Wordsworth: "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her".

    I'm not saying they're wrong to admire and be in awe of nature, but even in their time they can't have been blind to what philosophers would call 'natural evil' - the inherent bloodiness of nature as a system within which humans live (Schopenhauer: "red in tooth and claw").

    There was a piece in the Sunday Times by Dominic Lawson at the weekend talking about vaccines and genetic modification of medicine to achieve same. Lawson wrote that the ascent of humankind was the triumph over the senseless violence of nature using scientific means - I'm paraphrasing, but that was basically it.

    This is the rebuff to Wordsworth and Coleridge when they write things like I quoted about nature. It sounds beautiful, but, in the end, nature of course harms those who are good and who love her as readily as those who are bad and who hate her.

    The sea being the classic example, I guess. How many human lives vanished into its maw over the millennia...


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I don't mean to be negative about Coleridge by the way, I particularly like FROST AT MIDNIGHT:-

    Some great lines any father would identify with.

    The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
    Have left me to that solitude, which suits
    Abstruser musings: save that at my side
    My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
    'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
    And vexes meditation with its strange
    And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
    This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
    With all the numberless goings-on of life,
    Inaudible as dreams!

    ...

    I was reared
    In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
    And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
    But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
    By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
    Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
    Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
    And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
    The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
    Of that eternal language, which thy God
    Utters, who from eternity doth teach
    Himself in all, and all things in himself.
    Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
    Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

    Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Some updates.

    Still occasionally listening to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Might throw in a bit of Robert Frost this evening.

    I must admit I have kind of stalled on my plan to get started on Bentham and instead I've hopped on to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE which is a bit of a crowd pleaser and funny even to me. Been listening to a short BBC piece on the 'spirituality of Jane Austen' which is interesting. Although she is cutting about the clergy in many of her books, she is a clergyman's daughter, and was religious herself to a degree. It seems that a very good observation is that Austen is critical of the clergy when they step outside their remit and hold forth on matters beyond that (Such as the character she ribs who is against young ladies reading novels), but is silent in respect of broader issues of religion

    I'm about 2/3 of the way through THE DECLINE AND FALL and on an interesting section talking about the advantages that the early Christians had which led to them eventually becoming the dominant religion of the Empire. I'll be damned if much of Gibbons' analysis seems as good today as it did then, I highly doubt he is wrong in what he writes.

    He does make an interesting observation in respect of their claim to the widespread nature of miracles, including raising the dead. This was a church era where demons were cast out in front of crowds of people on the regular. But Gibbons notes that one Roman made a request of a senior churchman in his region. He advised him that if one person could be raised from the dead in his presence, just once, then he and his entire household would convert. This Roman was senior enough that it should have been of obvious interest to the Church. And yet, they declined his offer. Gibbons doesn't quite say there was shenanigans but he notes that in his (Gibbons' day) they 'understood' that miracles required rigorous evidence as to their reality before they could be accepted. I wonder if Gibbons felt he had to imply that the miracles of his day were real, or whether he actually believed they were realer than the ones claimed by the early Church...? He does make a rather wry observation that it is odd how the early Church experienced so many miracles, and he notes that if they were effective in converting the masses then it is odd that in later eras God would sanction fewer miracles to occur...

    Gibbons describes how early Christians believed that the Roman pantheon were actually demons who used their supernatural powers to masquerade as Roman gods (And, presumably, before them, Greek gods). So all of the Temples and their clerics are literally demon-worshipping and the whole Roman and Greek culture and aparatus on every level is effectively what Gibbons calls "the empire of the demons". He notes that literally every institution and practice becomes demon-tainted as a result, from the Circus to the blessings of marriages and so on. The Christian believer must segregate and step away from everything in the society around him. How difficult this must have been!

    I understand Gibbons is customarily understood as someone anti-Christian. I genuinely cannot make a determination in respect of that, but it's undoubtedly clear that he is both correct and accurate in identifying the Christians as a 'fifth column' within the Empire who rose parallel to its decay.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Enjoying PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, but I just can't get the movie from a few years out of my head... "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"...


  • Registered Users Posts: 2 Wallytonto


    Great book and a lot of fun to read. Check the BBC series with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Well made and very faithful to the book.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Wallytonto wrote: »
    Great book and a lot of fun to read. Check the BBC series with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Well made and very faithful to the book.

    Ehle uploaded her reading the whole thing on YouTube too...

    I agree, it’s a great book. A true page-turner.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    I'm enjoying PRIDE AND PREJUDICE so much that I have ordered SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.

    I'm at the point in P&P where Wyckham and Lydia have been allowed back to see her family, before they go north to live. Of course the family are aghast when it transpires that both are bold as brass, with Lydia in particular apparently having inherited her mothers' absolute blithe unawareness of how she is perceived. It's absolutely toe-crawling. I admire Austen for having written a chapter still so evocative of social awkwardness even despite the passage of time.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    Completed PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Austen certainly knows how to give a satisfying and appropriately detailed round-up and resolution of plot lines.

    I have turned the corner on THE DECLINE AND FALL. On now to Constantine's rule and I think I will finish up around Christmas time. In terms of physical texts I will read next I have Von Clausewitz's ON WAR and I have THE SCARLET LETTER, and some essays by Ralph Walso Emerson.

    In listing terms I have begun a couple of shortish books by Artur Schopenhauer in the area of happiness. I studied Schopenhauer extensively in University and he is one of the more readily intelligible philosophers of that period. From him onwards (and probably before) it became increasingly arcane and technical. Philosophy vanished into language and maths games, like many disciplines did, detaching themselves from interactions with public discourse in any meaningful way.

    Schopenhauer was a notorious pessimist (Although he's oddly upbeat in his description of the irredeemable state of human existence in the world). His "science of happiness" is, as one might expect, not ultimately very positive. Where I am so far Schopenhauer has made a distinction between what a person is of themselves, and what they have and do in the world.

    Schopenhauer argues that what we have and what we do - for example, the state of being a wealthy monarch - are contingent things that do not ultimately satisfy us. He notes the boredom of nobles and great men. Or their avaricious fear of losing what they have. Then, perhaps moreso than now, he notes that to have property was also to have an ongoing battle to safeguard its retention in dangerous times. Schopenhaeur therefore says that to be even the most powerful of men in the world is a less meaningful thing in terms of happiness than it first appears. He suggests that being a king is really more like being an actor playing being a king on a stage, in absolute terms of what it means for your happiness.

    He, as many people still do today, risks being a bit glib, I think, when he talks of 'happy faced peasants' as compared to the dour, angry faces of nobility. I don't get this romanticisation of poverty. I accept that there are all kinds of surveys and studies that suggest that people in poorer societies claim remarkable levels of happiness as compared to ourselves in the first world. I'm incredible doubtful, however, that people living at subsistence level and seeing their children die before them are happy, maybe the more accurate term is they are sanguine about the realities of their lives.

    Schopenhauer talks at length about what a person is referring to what nature has ordained them to have. He is principally interested in whether or not they have an intellect of note. If they have a great mind, believes Schopenhauer, then they have a vehicle to achieve happiness even in utter solitude (Like Cervantes writing DON QUIXOTE while in prison). He's an utter misanthrope, of course. He basically sees the society of people as being a choice to be awash in vulgarity. Isolation is the other option, and his preferred one. An intellect, Schopenhauer believes, is the platform which allows a person to achieve what happiness is to be found in the world, and he leaves us in know down that it is to do with a life of the mind.

    He recounts a wonderful anecdote about this and its anti-materialist implications. He talks of the riches of Ancient Greece being laid out in front of Socrates, who remarked "I never realised how much there is in the world which I do not desire."


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  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 3,180 Mod ✭✭✭✭Black Sheep


    DECLINE AND FALL update..

    My cousin asked me to summarise what the reasons were for the decline and fall. I stuttered my way through what I think Gibbon has said thusfar:-

    - Militarily the Empire's legions and commanders went into military decline due to comfort / complacence, and barbarians started extorting and beating them in the field. I can't quote it, but I think there was a line in particular that mentioned a particular garrison putting blankets under their saddles, this was like it in a nutshell. Reminds me a bit of the apocryphal story that German special forces helicopters wouldn't fly after dark in Afghanistan... Because it was dangerous.

    - The Christians were a fifth column within the Empire who didn't participate in the civil or military life of the Empire. Gibbon is certainly anti-Christian in his perspective here, hard to say otherwise. Not sure he quite explains how this fatally undermined the Empire, however. Or at least, I've not got there yet.

    - Some criticisms I can't quite explain clearly that seem to have to do with the undermining of the traditional role of the Senate, and the introduction instead of Caesars who behave progressively more and more like absolute monarchs. This lead to the introduction of classes of civil servant gatekeepers (Seemingly often Eunuchs?) that Gibbon effectively argues become a class who further act to detach the ruler of the Empire from reality, worsening the state of the Empire in terms of outcomes in governance.


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