Does any book open more occultly?

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

What is Kant thinking?  Why affright the reader in the first sentence?  “Hear your fate:  You will ask questions that you are required to ask and that you are not permitted to ignore; but you will not be able to answer those questions—they are too much for you, you are too limited, too weak.”  So why read on?  The requirement to ask will not be relaxed.  You will have to ask, have to pay attention.  Your powers will not enlarge, grow.  So why read on?  What is the value of reason if this is true of it?  Is reason, too, broken, like everything else about us?

It is easy to think of Kant as reason’s champion, its scarf affixed to his armor, a colorful declaration, as he jousts with speculative metaphysics.  But that is not quite right.  Shake up CPR; shuffle its Table of Contents.  Imagine, if you will, a Noumenal Table.  The Antinomies would come first, syllogistically displaying the peculiar fate of reason.  (If I remember correctly, Gabriele Rabel more or less arranges contents this way in his book of selections (Kant)—or at least he talks about the preferability of so arranging them.)  The reason Kant seeks to understand is not divine; it is human; it is antinomian.  Nothing divine could be fated for such perverse knottedness, such abyssal self-conflict, such stopless restlessness.  Reason can be, must be, Critized.  But, even Criticized, reason is not divinized.  It recognizes what it is but cannot stop being what it recognizes itself to be.  By ascesis, by discipline, it can cease asking unrequired questions, and it can come to see the peculiarity of the required questions.  But that’s all.  What is the value of reason?  Well, it has value.  It serves us well empirically, here under the sun.  But it lacks the fullness of value we could have attributed to it when we thought it divine (as perhaps the Greeks did).  CPR teaches a skepticism about human reason, even as it attempts to subjugate Humean skepticism.

Since I have mentioned the chiastic structure of TLP and PI, let me note that the Antinomies are placed by Kant at what could be regarded as the crux of CPR, at its dialectical middle.  That is a way, on a chiastic scheme of organization, of placing the Antinomies first.  Anyway, the book begins with the Antinomies furled into a remarkable sentence, a sentence that is unfurled across the length of the book.

A Cartographical Oddity, A Mascot for this Blog

This startling and disturbing image is one of the enigmas of cartographic history. The artist, date and place of publication are all unknown, and one can only guess at its purpose. The geography of the map strongly resembles that of the world maps of Ortelius published in the 1580s, giving a tentative date of c. 1590. This is the earliest known use of the world map in a visual joke. Its central visual metaphor is the universality of human folly and various mottoes around the map reinforce that theme. The panel of the left says: “Democritus laughed at it [i.e. the world], Heraclitus wept over it, Epichtonius Cosmopolites portrayed it.” Although Epichtonius Cosmopolites appears to be the author’s or artist’s name, it translates roughly as “Everyman,” leaving the mapmaker’s true identity hidden.

A strong legacy of the theme of the Fool exists in literature and popular art from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. The Fool was licensed to break rules, speak painful truths and mock power and pretension, and the grotesque shape he bore was a kind of living punishment. This frame of reference would have been quite familiar to the audience of this engraving in the 1590s. And people would have recognized in this map a radical visual interpretation of the Fool’s role: it is now the whole world that takes on the Fool’s costume.

Adapted from the book The Image of the World: 20 Centuries of World Maps by Peter Whitfield (Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995)

I dreamt a jumble of things.  Then all tidied itself.

Muffled light of a sanctuary lamp
Eyes now open, large and dark,
Moments before closed, hidden
Vestigial tremors near the call into being
Out of an unbeing cleaved to closely

I dreamt a jumble of things
A worded page stretching from
Visual periphery to visual periphery
A sentence, choose one!, as horizon
Hemmed in by dreamy palaver
Meaning everything, meaning nothing
At once and earlier and later

Conscious now, the words linger
Or their senses do, without reference
The meanings present absences
De Re Nonsenses, de rerum natura
When will words again be word,
i.e., Word
Utterly words, so to speak,
When will everything that can be said be said
Clearly?  (I’d settle if someone whistled a
Snatch for me)

Everything’s smutched.  Jumbled.
Dreamt words tell me no more than I knew
As I slept.  In a dreamy sentence Bachelard
Prophesies:  The words of the world want to make
Sentences.  I believe it against my dream.
All tidies itself.  The words morning gather, crowd
Together between periods.   Together now, at least in twos
(Noun and verb), they make sense, couple

Loud sunlight overspeaks the sanctuary lamp
The horizon is now visible, neither intelligible nor unintelligible
I arise reassured of something—I know not what
I am rooted in
an old faith, the jumbled-made-tidy,
I walk by reading and not by sight

A lovely poem sent to me recently by my friend and colleague, Dafi Agam-Segal.  The translation is hers.  It is a poem by Israeli poet Natan Yonatan.

The Last Chapter

When the yard becomes empty
And the packing house shuts down
And the last car is dismantled
And there remains something unkempt there shall remain
Only the sound of the pump
And the sun’s golden bowl shall die out
In the quicklime crematories on the mountains
And the gates shall be shut
Ironed and sealed.
On the road to the old well the pitcher’s pieces shall lie
There where the woman laid down to rest
And the pale silver cord of the moon shall go down
Unto the fountain’s darkness
And shall return again to its circuits the wind [spirit] and the dust
Of man shall return unto the ground out of which he was taken
And the daughters of music [of the poem] shall be brought low and the door shall close.
And those that shall remain after
Shall open a last chapter of Koheleth.

From: Poems on “Sefer Hayashar”, Or-Am, 1998, p. 68