Fénelon

I'm looking at Fénelon again for my first chapter on Rousseau. This is mainly just getting previous work I had done on Rousseau's intellectual context into neater shape, and pitching this in terms of the Fénelonian currents of intellectual discourse in Rousseau's formative and active years. With Rousseau's reading of Fénelon and other neo-Platonic, and Cartesian philosophers in place probably before he read Plato, the intellectual framework of his particular apprehensions of Platonic views becomes considerably more interesting than has been suggested in current scholarship. And because Rousseau read Locke at about the same time as he read these neo-Platonistsand and because his instincts toward these varied doctrines were immediately syncretic, the fusion I suggest between Lockean ideationalism, Rousseau's account of passions, and neo-Platonic sublimated Eros is made quite plausable indeed.



In the meantime, I thought I might include a picture of the pious Archbishop of Cambrai.

(Image taken from Web Gallery of Art [http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/v/vivien/fenelon.html] for editorial purposes only.)

Also on paintings, I was quite struck by Lucas Cranach's 'Close of the Silver Age' when I visited the National Gallery with Ahreum earlier this week.

(Edit: The link is dead. It is actually far better to look at the painting on the National Gallery's website: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/lucas-cranach-the-elder-the-close-of-the-silver-age. They have a programme which allows very precise viewing. Facial details in the painting are expectional. While one misses the texture of the paints and brush strokes, this web viewer may be than seeing the picture at the gallery, particularly because the lighting there tends to produce a good deal of glare on the painting. August 1, 2009)

If I were writing a book on Rousseau's Second Discourse...

Once more into the breach,

Ben

Riding a bicycle backwards and then forwards

Everyone's had that dream where they are on a bicycle, heading to some important event, fleeing some tragic fate, or otherwise riding for some gripping cause.  In the phantasmagoric world one's forward journey becomes increasingly sluggish.  Then, quite suddenly, frantic peddling is met only with retrograde motion.

 

I also have a similar dream which is draws on my time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison lakeshore dorms.  Particularly the Bradley Learning Community (BLC, also known as the Bradley Liquor Cabinet) and to a lesser extent Tripp Hall.  In the waking world of my first year I had a rather uncomfortable pair of dodgy leather shoes which quickly blistered my feet.  When those blisters got ones of their own, I upgraded my footwear.  Most of the time I walked from the BLC to the Humanities building via the Lakeshore path, which is unpaved gravel.  At the time, the route took me about twenty minutes, and before and for sometime after I replaced the shoes, caused my feet considerable anguish.

 

In slumber-land, I also walk from the lakeshore dorms to lectures and tutorials via the lakeshore path.  I'm rushing to make it on time.  The pain of the blisters remains, perhaps amplified but also disembodied, memory like.  But the cause is different - this time I'm barefoot.

 

Now these dreams might suggest that I am about to engage in some inane, pseudo-Freudian, quasi-psychological analysis of my subconscious.  I am not. 

 

Instead, today I feel a particular kinship with this disembodied sleeping self.  The cause of my consternation is a chapter on Rousseau's neo-Platonic debts.  I had finished this chapter, save for a few loose ends, or so I thought. 

 

Upon further review several substantive sections need serious reworking, and I've changed part of the analytical framework for a third.  I also have to incorporate or point toward the fusion between Lockean ideational thought, and Platonic sublimated Eros.  I had not argued for this synthesis when I drafted the chapter in my second year.  All this adds up to more revision than I expected.  The good news is the chapter will have a more interesting thesis than in its previous incarnation and will fit cheek and jowl with the next.

 

Once more into the breach,

 

Ben

Pictures from Oxford

Just sharing a few pictures from Teddy Hall, and other places in Oxford that will be occupying my view in the upcoming months.

Radcliffe Camera (undergraduate reading rooms in the Bodleian) and the University Church of St. Mary

The most important part of the Bodleian

Entrance to the Bodleian

Radcliffe Camera

Teddy Hall, I had my interview in this building

More Teddy Hall

St Edmund Hall has converted a disused parish church into the college library, and the grounds into a series of gardens. You can even walk on the grass in some of them.

So this is where I'll be working over the next year. I'm really quite impressed by the physical space.

Of course I'm most excited about having an extended period of time to work with Locke's manuscripts. Many of these have now been published, so the exclusivity of access to his drafts is less pronounced than it was twenty or thirty years ago. Still, there is something quite striking about holding papers which record the exertions of a great mind. The hesitancy, immediacy, and intimacy of such experiences are profoundly moving.

Patrick Riley, my undergraduate lecturer, reflected on his use of manuscripts in, recalling from memory, his The General Will Before Rousseau. His experience with manuscripts left him convinced that authors lived on in them; dead philosophers were only deceased in the most trivial of senses. There is something profoundly Socratic in that sentiment, and one which I frequently share.

This however is a photo post, so I will hold off on more extended musings on drafts, journals, and other manuscripts. Perhaps, that will make a good future entry.

Once more into the breach,

Ben