Nayef Saif

 

Two Sentences on Robert Brandom Worth Remembering

 

"Brandom is not a utilitarian, and his work follows out the line of thought that leads from Kant to Hegel, rather than the one that leads from Mill to James. But his construal of assertions as the assumption of responsibilities to other members of society, rather than to 'the world' or 'the truth,' brings him into alignment with James."

        ~ Richard Rorty, Radical Interpretation in Religion, 57.

Two Sentences on Wittgenstein Worth Remembering

 

"Wittgenstein's philosophy is an ascetic therapy of desire intended to return himself and others to a form of life that neither is, nor takes itself to be, dependent on an essentially explanatory approach to topics like truth and meaning. It is a form of pragmatism in part because it recommends seeing a life of sound understanding as prior to philosophy."

        ~ Jeffrey Stout, Radical Interpretation in Religion, 34.

Tina Modotti

                                         A Fragile Life.

Still

                                                 ~ A. R. Ammons

Alfred North Whitehead on Religion

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something which gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

                                        ~ Science and the Modern World

Rothko

                                             Ten Paintings.

Russian Literature

 

I have often wondered why, in the early 1990s, I became obsessed with Russian literature. It seemed to happen out of the blue. I always just assumed that the overpowering strength of the work was reason enough--and it is, of course. But I also suspected that there was more to it than that.

Writing in 1995, Alfred Kazin observed: "The 'Russian novel,' if that still means anything, is being lived all over this country [i.e., the United States] in poverty, racial conflict, homelessness, drug addiction, and the increasing numbers of so-called redundant workers thrown into the streets every week by one technological replacement after another" (Kazin, Writing Was Everything, 149).

There is my answer.

ART/ARCHITECTURE - Mark Rothko

Writing Was Everything

 

I have written before about my love for the late literary critic—extraordinary reader and literary artist in his own right—Alfred Kazin. After years of dithering, I picked up a copy of the Massey lectures he gave at Harvard a few years before he died. It’s a slim volume, almost flawlessly written, contending on every page that “the aim of literature has always been to reconcile us to life by showing that it is not limited to the actual data of existence.”

This is what the best among us understand. The rest is opera.