Good Robber

            About five months ago I put two Royal Copenhagen “Christmas at Niagara Falls” plates up for sale on Kijiji on behalf of my upstairs neighbour, David. I started them out at $40 each, after two months took $10 off and two months later I knocked the price down to $20. On Monday I finally got a call from a collector in Niagara that wanted to come into town on Tuesday and buy them. It turns out he graduated from OCA in 1980, three years before I started working there. He’s also one of the last people in the world that only has a land-line and he can’t call me when he arrives, so I’ll have to meet him in the donut shop.

            I spent most of the day working on my Philosophy essay. Here’s a bit of what I have so far:

            Anselm’s Monologian attempts to prove the existence of god by presenting qualities that human beings value, such as goodness and greatness. He then elevates each of these qualities to their comparative adjectives, “better” and “greater” in order to show that every quality we recognize can have a purer manifestation. He concludes that each value must have a superlative, as in “best” and “greatest” at a plateau that he considers not only to be the utmost manifestation of these qualities, but also their source, or god, which he insists is the meeting place of all superlatives and the source of all existence, and which must necessarily be the source of its own existence.

He presents these qualities as what we have in common with each other, the rest of creation and ultimately with god. Of one quality, he says that we all share a common goodness. Goodness for Anselm is not thought in terms of behaviour, as in children being good boys and girls. He relates the assessment of comparative goodness with the degree to which something is useful, as in his example of a horse being good through its strength or its speed. He asserts that a human being better than a horse and does not venture to prove this point, but certainly if goodness is equated with degree of utility it would not be difficult to conclude that in general a human has more utility and therefore goodness than a horse or any other creature that is known to humanity.

Continuing with Anselm’s equating of usefulness with goodness, since god, according to Anselm is the superlative manifestation of goodness, although he does not specifically refer to god as useful, it would be by Anselm’s definition the ultimate utility. He does not in this text delineate the utilitarian relationship that he thinks god has with humanity other than to be the source of all existence, including the existence of the quality of goodness. The only way that he presents the utility of goodness specifically in the Monologian is through his example of a horse being good through either strength or speed. He does however indicate by an inverted example how he understands usefulness in human beings. He states that a fast and strong robber is not good because they are harmful, which is the opposite of useful, but also the opposite of helpful and so from this it can be concluded that a good human is also useful or helpful and that the best human being would be the most useful or helpful. Anselm does not speak of usefulness or harmfulness except in relation to human beings being helped or harmed and this suggests that the goodness of things is valued according to how useful they are to human beings. This would include human beings being seen as good according to how useful or helpful they are to each other.

But if usefulness and goodness are synonymous in Anselm’s reckoning then how can human beings be perceived as good by a self-existent superior being that is supposed to be the source of all goodness? Of what use are human beings to an entity that is fully self-supporting?  If human beings are not useful to god, then from god’s perspective human beings would have no goodness.

Regarding Anselm’s example of the horse, from the animal’s perspective, what is useful and therefore good would not necessarily be the same as the utilitarian expectations that humans have of horses. Speed and strength in a horse might very well be useful both for humans as users of horses and for the well-being and survival of horses in a herd. But other qualities that would be useful and therefore good for horses may be detrimental to a horse’s utilitarian function and therefore goodness for a human being. For example, a stallion that is not intended for breeding is usually more useful to a user of horses if he is gelded, because otherwise he will often be hard to control. But the qualities that would make a horse difficult for a human to control would be useful and therefore good for a horse in the wild.

Regarding Anselm’s example of the fast and strong robber representing the opposite of goodness because of harmfulness, the legend of Robin Hood, who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, comes to mind. There are also many cases in historical conflicts in which stealing from the enemy is considered useful and therefore good. But what is useful and good for one side in a war is almost always harmful for the other side.

The fact that there are conflicting goodnesses contradicts Anselm’s claim that there is a common goodness in nature with only differences of degree and level that has its source in the goodness of god.  If there truly is a commonality of goodness in all things, it could not be discerned by utility.

            It is not clear why Anselm accepts the concept of a supreme being going on forever as more plausible than an infinite procession of succeeding superior manifestations of these qualities.

           

            

Deforest Kelley

            I spent most of Sunday researching my Philosophy essay, which is due next Thursday.

            I practiced playing “Dead Autumn Leaves” five times but because of needing to work on the essay I don’t think I’ll be going to play it at Shab-e She’r on November 28. I’ll have to save the song for the one in December.

            Near the end of the day I felt like I was ready to start writing down ideas for my paper, but first I had to have dinner. I watched the third episode of the second season of Mike Hammer. Each story tends to take place in a different New York neighbourhood and Daren McGavin as Mike Hammer always does a voice over at the beginning to set the scene. This one was on the Lower East Side: “The melting pot of a big city that has moulded some of its most famous citizens, as well as some of its most infamous … The East River Drive is a thin ribbon of concrete which connects the two extremes of New York’s East Side: the lush, fashionable Upper East Side of the 80s and the Lower East Side of Delancey and Forsythe Street. Only a few miles apart in distance, miles apart in other ways.”

            The other interesting thing about this episode was that the bad guy was played by Deforest Kelley, who later played Dr.“Bones” McCoy on the original Star Trek series. His character murdered a man while robbing his drug store. A young man witnessed the crime but refused to cooperate with the police because Kelley’s character was married to his big sister.

            It’s striking how much Gary Sinise looks like the young Deforest Kelley.

            I finally started working on my essay before bed.

Religion Needs A Conscience

            I discovered on Saturday that the song “Comme un Boomerang” that I’ve been learning doesn’t fit with my chronological approach to translating Serge Gainsbourg songs. It turns out that there is another song by him from 1966 called “Boomerang” and that the one I translated was published in the 1970s but not released until 2001. I’m not going to be obsessive compulsive about it though. I’ll finish the song because I like it a lot and then I’ll go back to the chronology.

I finally got an email from the Australian Boot Company telling me that I could replace my Blundies under warranty. But I got them from the store on February 12, 2015, so I wonder if the warranty is still good. Plus, I didn’t pay for them myself, as they were a gift from my friend Audrey, so even if it’s under warranty they might need notification from her as proof of purchase. I emailed them about it and the response was that it doesn’t matter. If the boot has damage that doesn’t fit with its age the warranty still stands and I don’t need proof of purchase. The manager’s exact wording was, “Once we have a go ahead from Blundstone Canada on a warranty, it’s a yes, no mater what. All I have to do is bring the boots in (I’ll remove the laces though, since I bought those to replace the old ones). That’s pretty nice and it seems like a rare policy for a company to have.

            I wanted to work towards starting my Philosophy essay but I had to do the reading of Averroes in order to answer next week’s tutorial question. I think I would have been able to start my essay last week if not for those stupid, complicated assignments that the TAs assign. Even though our responses are supposed to be short, I often have to read the text several times just to understand it enough to come up with a response.

            The question I chose was: What do you think of Averroes' argument that philosophical study of the world is mandated by religious law? How is this related to some of the arguments we've considered for God's existence?

            Here’s my answer:

            Religion needs a conscience in order to keep it from being too sure of itself. Philosophy can fill that role and also serve as a bridge between religions, because there are commonalities in logical thinking that may not be shared by the dogma of two given religions. Certainly the “proofs of the existence of god” that the Christian, Anselm and the Muslim, Avicenna have arrived at through their separate applications of logic are not incompatible with one another. 

Kodak

            I spent a lot of Friday writing about Thursday and then in the evening I had to work at Artists 25. It was the last sitting of a three-week pose. When I arrived I chatted with Peter about my Medieval Philosophy course. He thought it was interesting that Islamic philosophers had such an influence on European thinking. He segued to asking me about my ethnic background. I outlined the Scandinavian background on the two sides of my family.

            When it got time to start working there was nobody there. Since Peter doesn't draw I had nothing to do for ten minutes until someone arrived. About fifteen minutes later, when I was most of the way through my first pose, someone else showed up but that was all that came. From two people the studio wouldn’t have gotten enough to pay me so Peter must have dipped into either the Artists 25 cache or else paid from his own pocket.

            Earlier that day I thought I’d check to see if my camera batteries needed a recharge and since the camera didn’t go on I assumed they needed topping up. My two sets of rechargeable batteries take several hours these days to turn the green light of my recharger on. Once they were charged I put them into the camera but it still wouldn’t wake up. I took the other set out of my amplifier’s remote control and recharged them as well, but while I was waiting I considered the possibility that my trusty Kodak had finally died after eight years. When I came home from work the second set of batteries were all powered up but they didn’t work in the camera either. I noticed though that the battery chamber door was not fully closing. When I pressed it down and pushed the “on” button the camera came on. So it looks like my Kodak and I are back in business.

If You Don't Philosophize You Are Breaking The Law

            I’ve been working for the last few mornings on a translation of Serge Gainsbourg’s song, “Boomerang”. It involves trying to convey his meaning while at the same time trying to use for every other line words that rhyme with the “rang” part of “boomerang”. I think that the French language has a lot more words like that and so it makes for an interesting challenge.

            On my way to school, I noticed when I was stopped on Brock at the Dundas light that “Bikes On Wheels” is gone and it’s been replaced by “The Brockton Cyclery”. I always though “bikes on wheels” was a stupid name anyway so “Brockton Cyclery” is better and their logo has a more class.

            Outside of philosophy class James commented about how old my Think Pad laptop is. I told him that it’s a family heirloom and that my great grandfather brought it here from Sweden at the end of the 19^th Century.

            Just before class started I realized that I’d forgotten to bring my notebook for the second time in the course so I had to write in the empty spaces of my little weekly planner.

            Someone at the back complained that they had no lights and so the student, the professor and Cilia were all trying different things to try to get them to work.

            During the lecture I was having trouble keeping my eyes open and I was embarrassed after letting them droop that when I opened them up again Professor Black was looking straight at me. If I sat at the back I could have just gone to sleep if I’d been so inclined.

            Averroes offers a legal opinion of philosophy using the Qu’ranic texts. He wrote three responses to Ghazali:

            Decisive Treatise – Legal

            Uncovering the Methods of Proof – Theological

            Incoherence of the Incoherence – Philosophical

            The legal question is: Does the Qu’ran prohibit, allow or command the study of Philosophy? Is it prohibited, allowed or obligatory? Averroes declares from the start that it is permitted but then he argues that it is obligatory.

            She reminded us of the old game show that she’d mentioned and then warned us that she was going to go even further back now to Perry Mason. She told us that Cilia didn’t even know who Perry Mason was but that he’d been on TV. She said it went back to the 1930s and of course she was referring to the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner. I mentioned that there had also been a radio show.

            Averroes insists that it is a religious duty to be a philosopher. Why not see religion and philosophy in harmony? He approaches the matter on different levels of discourse. He states that if anyone is a heretic it is Ghazali, but he doesn’t mean it literally.

            Philosophy is the arbiter of religious tradition. Philosophy is the study, which is the study of being.  This can be chopped up to Metaphysics – the study of immaterial being; Physics and Math – the study of material being; and Ethics – the study of the right things to do.

            Philosophy is the study of natural being and relations with divine being.

            The Qu’ran says to reflect on other beings as signs of the creator, so it fits as philosophy. But so far the argument only proves that philosophy is permitted by the Qu’ran. The Qu’ran says one must fulfill one’s duty in the best way possible. What is the best way? The intellect is the best way, which takes us to Philosophy. Reflection is nothing more than inference and drawing out of the unknown from the known or the hidden from the apparent, and since this is reasoning, we are obligated to carry on our study of beings through reasoning. Logic is a method of taking the known and applying it to the unknown. Logic is the key to happiness. Logic is the criterion.

            Al Farabi said there is tension between theology and philosophy. There was a rejection of the imposition of Aristotelian logic into Islam.

            Averroes says logic is a foreign science and so it is extraneous. We can follow those before us and stand on the shoulders of giants. If a tool from outside of Islam helps to follow the Qu’ran it is okay. The best tool is that of demonstration. “The best way possible” means that the command can only be directed at those with an ability to do logic. Since the obligation is directed at those with the ability to use logic, it is forbidden for believers not capable of doing logic to stand in the way of those that can. It would be like standing at the door of the mosque and preventing worshippers from entering to pray. So Ghazali is at fault because anything philosophers do in good faith cannot be heretical even if they make mistakes.

            Averroes says that Philosophy and Theology should be in harmony because truth does not oppose truth. If you discover something true and I discover something true they must be in harmony.

            Averroes says Philosophy is the superior master and religion is the servant. Tensions in the Qu’ran create misunderstanding and so the nature of Qu’ranic revelation needs a method to resolve conflicts. Those that read the Qu’ran must learn to discern between the literal teachings and the allegorical or Ta’wil. Augustine did the same thing with the Bible and the Jews did the same with the Torah. There are only certain textx on which everyone agrees they are ethical and practical. There is no consensus among the scholars about how to interpret the theoretical.

            Averroes claims that religion is a social-political construct. Religion is designed to govern and to stabilize but not to convey philosophical truths. Part of the group of Muslim scholars are philosophers. Their lack of consensus is almost a tautology. Most religious debates are on ethics, even today.

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought a package of hot Genoa salami, some ground beef and a couple of jars of unsweetened apple sauce because I’m getting tired of mixing canned peaches with my yogourt.

            That evening I heard shouting and cheering outside and when I looked through the window there was a fight going on outside my window. A bunch of young guys were standing around two guys that were going at it, though it looked more like a contest than a grudge match. At one point the one guy picked the other one up and slammed him down on the concrete and then the battle was over. It didn’t look like the loser was angry though, after he got up.

            That night I cooked the cottage roll that I’d bought a few days before. I boiled it for an hour and a half with garlic, cloves and a bay leaf in the cast iron crock-pot that my daughter gave me. Then I coated it in brown sugar and mustard and glazed it in the oven at high temperature for 15 minutes. It turned out surprisingly well.

            I watched the last episode of the first season of the 1950s TV series, “Mike Hammer”. The first ten episodes were full downloads but the rest were only partial and so I had to deal with missing parts, though I caught the gist of every story. Darren McGavin played the character of Mike Hammer somewhat comedically despite the stories being dramatic and violent. He apparently deliberately toned down a character that in the novels was extremely violent. I downloaded the second season, which overlaps into 1960. This download was complete, so I won’t have any glitches when I’m watching it.

            

Terror, Lab Coats and Gloves

            Late on Wednesday morning I got a call from Tracy Buchanan, the model coordinator at OCADU. She said she had a last minute cancellation and wondered if I could be at the college in 45 minutes. I told her I could but I’d better not because I had to work on an essay. I always feel guilty about turning down work and perhaps a little afraid that if I turn it down then I won’t be offered it next time. I usually don’t pass up those kinds of offers and though I didn’t get around to working on my essay, working that day would have delayed me from working on it another day because of all the other things I had to do.

            When Tracy called I was in the middle of a tech dilemma because I was trying to upload to my computer the photos I took with my phone the day before. Just plugging my phone into the USB didn’t do much of anything. My PC acknowledged the Moto e4 but said the folder was empty. On the phone it was Google that was most prominent and wanted me to use it to transfer the files. I didn’t want to do it through wi-fi. Finally, after digging around my phone I found a buried option for file transfer and I got the photos onto my hard drive. I don’t even remember though how I did it now.

            Another reason I didn’t want to work was because I had my 20^th Century US lit class that night and I wanted to relax at home beforehand.

            I got there fifteen minutes early, as usual and spent my time reading some more of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

            When class started, Scott said we would start right away with a film about Robert Frost. He commented first though that Frost’s poetry tends to be taught badly, as if he were a nature poet. Scott declared, “He was the poet of terror!” and promised that we would look into why he was so misunderstood.

            The video from the Unites States National Endowment for the Humanities began. The name Elizabeth Bishop appeared on screen. The title was Voices and Visions and the first voice was that of a woman reciting, “There are too many waterfalls …” and later on in the poem, “rain, like politicians speeches …” It seemed off for Frost to directly speak of politicians in a poem.

            After about three minutes Scott got up and said that he’d clinked the wrong link. This was a movie about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Scott switched it and we finally got the one about Robert Frost, which began with Frost speaking, “Matthew Arnold said that nature is cruel … Nature is always more or less cruel … I want to reach out to all sorts and kinds … These poems are written in parable …”

            He became his own myth.

            “The saw snarled and rattled …”

            “Poetry is organized violence upon language … A way of taking life by the throat.”

            From the clip of Frost reading “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s inauguration:  “The land was ours before we were the land’s …”

            “I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems … only two poems without a human being … Don’t be too arbor-trary.”

            “Who first recognizes a good one? Not the village …”

            “I kept farms as a fugitive from the world … A symbolic farmer … A symbolic teacher …”

            Listening to all the poetry ever written before starting to write would have taken too long.

            The poem, “Mowing” has a fresh, subtle mixture of rhythms, including those of lulling and consoling. “What was it it whispered?”

            Frost does not work in large structures. There are no epics, cantos or suites and so there is no need for advance planning. He is a lyric poet. He does not go to the poem but lets the poem come to him. Start with a happy perception. There is a statement. One arrives at wisdom.

            He wrote Apple Picking without fumbling a line. There are overtones and displacements to the words. Apple picking takes place between heaven and earth. It is not a poem about death but rather of hibernation.

            By 1912 he had written some of his greatest poems but only a few had been published. When he was young, Frost’s best book was “Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics”, in which he discovered Keats, Tennyson and Chaucer. The best way to be known as a great America poet was to be received well in England where there was a vital literary community, including Yeats and Pound. He sold his farm and to establish his credentials, took his family to England, the land of the golden treasury where F. S. Flint introduced him to Pound. He published his first book right away. He settled right down and did not travel. Reviews by Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas helped his success.

            Frost and Thomas became good friends and went for long walks together. On one of those treks they were confronted by a gamekeeper on Lord Beecham’s estate who accused them of trespassing. Frost almost came to blows with the keeper but the man pulled a gun on him.

            “I can mock anything out of my system.”

            Frost said of Wilfred Gibson that he is one of the plain folk with nothing of the literary poseur about him.

            Frost said poetry is the sound of sense and sentence sounds. “I alone have consciously set myself to make music. The most original writer only catches words fresh from talk.

            “The Mending Wall” is too easily understood.

            Eliot addressed Frost as a regional poet.

            One of the commentators in the video said that the poem he wished he’d written was Frost’s “Home Burial”.

            Frost returned from England in 1915 and bought a farm in Vermont. He stuck to poetry and family. He met his wife in high school.

            “The Wood-Pile” is self-referential.

            “My poems are little bits of order.” So are smoke rings.

            Frost insisted that modernist despair was harmful.

            “Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.”

            In 1938 Elinor Frost died of a heart attack. This was the second of three losses in six years.  Four years before that his daughter died while giving birth and two years later his son committed suicide. Of his wife Frost wrote: “My, my what sorrow runs through all she wrote to you children … She was not as original as I in thought but she dominated my art with the power of her character … she came to resent something in the life I had given her”.

            “Acquainted With The Night”.

            Frost resisted making recordings and appearing on television at first, but he was a ham at heart.

            His poems were very popular with soldiers.

            He is associated with living at university.

            He joked about all of the honorary degrees he’d received as “degree-dation” and that he had been educated by degrees.

            He predicted that Kennedy would be president. “You can tell how I vote from my books. I’m a Democrat. But I’ve been unhappy since 1896.”

            The great bard of adrenaline. He was not a gentle New England poet. He was ferocious. He had the guts to write about fear and hatred. He inhabits the world at body heat.

            “Never again would bird’s song be the same.”

            We took a break.

            Because of the last time I’d gone to the washroom in the basement it was flooded, I decided to try out the one on the second floor. Someone in the building has added the homey touch of three well-maintained potted plants on the window ledge of the first landing and a larger one at the top.

            It took me a while to find the men’s room because I first walked in the wrong direction. In the hallway was a janitor pushing what looked like a mini-zamboni. The washroom door had a very old sign with trickly brown stains on it and the upper left corner was bent. I was puzzled and a little frightened by the message: “gloves and lab coats to be worn in the washroom.” I hesitated and lifted the upper left corner of the sign to reveal that the sentence actually began with “No”.

            After the break we looked at some of Robert Frost’s poems.

            The first was “Mending Wall”. Scott asked what we tend to mend. I said clothing and bodies.

            Is “mending” here an adjective or a verb?

            There is wordplay with “give offense” 

            It’s a poem about the creative process.

            I said the speaker initiates the mending of the wall by contacting his neighbour on the other side, but he does so because mending the wall together is the only way they can behave as if there is no wall between them.

            A mature female student that sits in the front row said that she’d read that women converse face to face while men converse side by side.

            The next poem was “The Road Not Taken”.

            Take the road no one takes. Self-reliance is a myth because it’s really random. It’s a poem about Frost’s friend Edward Thomas who was chronically indecisive. When they went for their long walks, Thomas would often joke that they should have gone the other way.

            It’s about the lies we tell ourselves.

            Of “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening”, Robert Frost predicted that this poem was the one that people would remember most.

            It’s “Whose woods these are I think I know” and not “I know whose woods these are.” There is a perfection of simple and rhythmic language.

            Scott asked what “stopping by” usually means. I said visiting.

            The fact that he doesn’t want to slow down and be seen suggests a weakness. Stopping is not industrious.

            The third line is always picked up in a rhyme with the first line in the next stanza.

            The falling snow is a burial. Does he mean death?

            “The darkest evening of the year” is the winter solstice. But does he mean his own darkest hour?

            The last poem we looked at was “Design”. It’s an Italian sonnet. They usually begin with a question, but he flipped it.

            The spider is fat because it has just eaten. This poem is more imagistic than his usual works. A white spider on a white flower. Overly white things lose definition. What would “a white piece of rigid satin cloth” be used for. Someone said to line a coffin. Scott suggested a bridal gown.

            The word “appall” could also be read as “a pall” which is a cloth covering for a coffin.

            The speaker must be lying in the grass to be able to see all of this.

            This is much more highly constructed than his usual poems. There is never a wrong word.

            I asked Scott why he had declared that Robert Frost was “the poet of terror”. I couldn’t see anything in his craft that would indicate that he was trying to convey terror. There was darkness, yes, and some fear, but terror seems pretty intense for such reflective poetry. Scott cited the poem we just covered and said that the reference to a dark design is terrifying.

            As I was unlocking my bike the skinny student with the beard stopped to argue with me about the idea of terror. I sort of acknowledged that a dark design could be terrifying but that for most of Frost’s work there is nothing terrifying. Terror usually means intense fear in anticipation of an event and horror is intense fear after an event. I think you can draw terror out of his and many other poems but I don’t think their primary intention is to evoke terror.

            I needed a quick dinner when I got home, so I made pizza bread with two slices of whole grain bread, some gourmet tomato paste from a tube and old cheddar cheese.

                        

West Hall Selfie

            On Tuesday morning I heaved my body out of bed and as usual made my way like an automaton to the bathroom for my ablutions. But something made me hesitate in the living room. Where was my soundtrack? I couldn’t hear the rooster crowing that usually accompanies my journey. I looked at my phone and saw the reason why. It was 0:45 and only 40 minutes since I’d gone to bed. I took a pee and then headed back to the sack until 5:00.

            The fragrance of chocolate oozed into my nose like a double-filled cuberdon as I passed north of the Cadbury factory while riding to school along College.

            When I got to class I continued to try to get a handle on Anselm’s Proslogian so I could write my essay that’s due next week.

            Professor Black gave her last talk on Ghazali.

            Ghazali’s divorce analogy about god’s decision to create the temporal world is an argument against the philosophers even though the philosophers agree on rejecting variation with the divine will. God does not change its eternal will.

            Philosophers say that the world is eternal and has an infinite past. Avicenna says if the world is eternal that there would be an infinite amount of human souls existing at the same time.

            The philosophers worry about whether god creating in time is coherent or not. All moments in time are indistinguishable so why would god choose one moment to create the universe over another? No one can choose between identicals. Ghazali says this is wrong and that choices like that are made all the time.

            A little later, French philosopher Jean Buridan used a similar analogy to that of Ghazali’s dates, involving a hungry ass or donkey with two identical bales of hay equidistant in front of it. Will the donkey starve before deciding which one to eat? This analogy is so similar to Ghazali’s that some think Buridan must have read a translation of Ghazali.

            The philosophers would respond that there is nothing truly identical in the physical world.

            Averroes would say that if a choice is made then there is a difference.

            Specification or particularization. Preponderance – the underlying concept in the scenario. The possible is between existence and non-existence. Necessary cause causes preponderance. If there is no prior reason, an act of choice is specification. This will become choice-worthy. Let this be the better of the two. We have a libertarian conception of freedom that imposes qualities. We decide and then we make up the difference.

            If hungry and confronted by two identical dates, you need to eat and so you specify and pick one. It’s a random choice.

            Ironic example: A radical notion of freedom. If you are an Asharite the concept of human agency clashes with occasionalism. The Asharites say that god causes everything and so we are not the parents of our own actions. We acquire or perform the actions written by god. Kasb-acquisition or performance. If two people are shoving, god causes the shoving but produces in you the agency of acquiring the act. God writes the script and you perform it (interpret?).

            Ghazali says we are appointed to perform and acquire power for the act that is simultaneous with the act. If the goal is to preserve freedom of choice, tension between paradigm and performance can apply to god. His idea that it’s freedom you just declare is an unusual account of free agency and model for creation.

            Averroes wrote “Incoherence of the Incoherence”. Most of the Islamic philosophers were from in and around Persia, but Averroes was born in Islamic Spain in 1126 into a family of lawyers. His grandfather was the chief justice of Seville and his father took on the same position. He studied theology, law and medicine and wrote on all of those topics. Most Islamic and Jewish philosophers of the time were doctors and lawyers at the same time.

            One of Averroes’s mentors, Ibn Tufail, who was also a physician, wrote the first philosophical novel, “Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan” (Literally: “Living Son of Wakefulness” but translated as “The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai ibn Yokdhan”). The story is about an abandoned boy that is raised by deer and teaches himself philosophy. The holy people arrive. He leaves to sample civilization, deems it necessary for the civilized but not for him and so he returns to the island.

            Tufail was a court physician for a caliph and he took the young Averroes to meet him. The two men had a conversation about the eternity of the world. Averroes politely held back for a while but finally joined in. The caliph was so impressed with his intelligence that he rewarded him with several gifts. The caliph was interested in Aristotle and Averroes wrote commentaries on Aristotle (Aristotle was known as “the commentator”). Averroes wanted to get to the core of Aristotle and lose the accretions. He developed new systems that were critical of what he saw as Avicenna’s corruption of Aristotle. He wrote three types of commentaries on Aristotle: Epitomes or brief summaries; paraphrases; and long, sequential discussions. Over the years he revised his positions and evolved his thinking.

            Averroes thought that human beings share the same intellect.

            Averroes was dedicated to legitimize philosophy in Islamic thought. The Qu’ran requires reflection on its writings and required the reader to philosophize. Ghazali made a mistake to attack philosophy and that might have made him a heretic.

            Averroes had a career of judgeships in Spain and North Africa. In 1184 the caliph died and his son took over. Pressure was placed on Averroes to be more orthodox and philosophers were being persecuted. Averroes was exiled to a small town. Later the caliph relented and brought Averroes back to his previous position, but he died shortly after that.

            After class I rode up to University College and went to the West Hall to work on my laptop. Sitting in the sunlight in that beautiful chamber inspired me to try out the selfie function on my new phone.

            A student passing through the hall stopped to play the piano for a couple of minutes.

            I stayed there until 12:55 reading and editing Anselm’s Proslogian and then I went down to my tutorial. As I was standing outside the classroom, James came up to wait beside me. I asked him what an anti-obstructionist was but he didn’t know what I was talking about. I reminded him that he’d said Professor Black was an “anti-obstructionist” and he corrected me that the word was “anti-abstractionist”. He explained that an abstractionist that if one, for example, looks at several different triangles, one can abstract an understanding of the universal triangle. An anti-abstractionist would say that one can only arrive at universals through inspiration either from a higher power or the higher part of one’s mind.

            The conversation continued after we were in our seats and Cilia joined in. I confess that I didn’t follow it much past what I wrote above. The talk ate up five minutes of our tutorial though.

            Cilia began the tutorial by telling us that it’s necessary to understand the fight between Avicenna and Ghazali.

            She explained the concepts of necessary conditions, sufficient conditions and necessary and sufficient conditions.

            It is a necessary condition to have flour to bake a cake or to have eyes in order to see.

            This contrasts with the sufficient condition. Being a poodle is a sufficient condition for being a dog but one does not need to be a poodle to be a dog. It is sufficient for being a fruit to be an apple but one does not need to be an apple to be a fruit.

            The necessary and sufficient condition is the holy grail of conditions and its specification is “if and only if”, as in 2 + 2 = 4 if and only if 1 + 1 = 2.

            Avicenna was committed to sufficient reason.

            Existence and not existence are equally possible but existence happened and so there must be a reason.

            Avicenna says the world could not have come to be in time because moments t1, t2, t3 and so on, are equal. If there is no difference between one moment and another it is impossible for god to make an arbitrary decision to have picked one over another, therefore the world must have always existed. If “god” is sufficient for creation at t1 but it created the world at t2 it implies that there was a change in god’s nature before it created the world.

             For Ghazali though the choices of identical objects are simply, whatever and pick one. That’s hat the will does.

We looked at the analogies of the dates, the water and the hay and I commented that each analogy is seeded with a motivation of need in order for the choice to be made. I wondered if they believed that “god” needed to create the world. Cilia answered that they thought that god created the universe out of inherent generosity. I argued that if “god” is inherently generous then the world must have existed with “god” through eternity and so it couldn’t have been created. She suggested they mean that there was an overflowing of god’s generosity but I countered that would imply that before hand there was less flow of generosity in god which would mean that it changed. Cilia said that was a pretty good argument and she didn’t know how Ghazali would respond.

            We finished the tutorial with a look at occasionalism. Avicenna or any Aristotelian will say that, with all things being equal, cause is necessary and sufficient for effect. A match is a sufficient condition for setting a bunch of gas soaked rags n fire.

            Ghazali says this is wrong. There is no reason to believe that a match is necessary and sufficient for setting the rags on fire. We have been tricked. Tricked into thinking that it is necessary to have a head in order to be alive. Reason is concurrence. We’ve been tricked by seeing it happen all the time.

            The blind man regaining sight is supposed to show that opening our eyes and see things then opening our eyes causes sight.

            I rode along College to Dovercourt and then down to Dundas and west again until I got to Sole Survivor. The cobbler there told me there was nothing she could do about my boots, but she advised me to take them back to Blundstone to see if they could do something.

            I rode east to Palmerston, south to Queen and then back west a few blocks to the Australian Boot Company. They were very busy but the manager was very nice and took the time to look at my boots. She thought their structural collapse was quite weird, since the boots were otherwise in pretty good shape. She took down my email and took a picture of the boot and told me she’d email Blundstone Canada about it. She said that I should hear back from them by the next day.

Lazy Saxophone, Lonely Dog

            My plan on Monday was to take my broken boot with me to work and then to stop at a shoe repair place in my neighbourhood on the way home. But since I had some time before work I made my first call with the new phone and rang one up that was at Dundas and Gladstone. Their message though said they were closed on Mondays. Of course I could have just gone to another cobbler but I thought the name “Sole Survivor” was cool so I decided that my footwear dilemma could wait until Tuesday and I would shod myself in my old black steel toed Italian shoes that my late cats enjoyed scratching so much.

            I worked at around midday at OCADU for Terry Schoffner, who's one of my favourite instructors to work for. Just before I started posing he held up a fedora to me from across the room. I said, “If you want.” So he tossed it to me like a Frisbee and I wore a hat for the first time in a couple of decades. He explained later that the class assignment was to do a portrait of someone wearing a hat. He told me that it looked really good and I heard him comment to one of his students about their work, “Christian meets Mick Jagger.”

            Another thing I like about my new phone is that when I use the countdown timer it saves each amount of time I count down. For instance, last Friday night when I set it for 20 minutes it saved that setting so I didn’t have to type in “20” this time. It just popped up when I called up the timer.

It also has a front and back camera and I was going to try out the selfie camera at the end to take a picture of myself wearing the hat but Terry asked for the hat back when I was finished.

I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I bought grapes, a whole chicken and a cottage roll among a few other things.

I roasted the chicken and boiled a squash. I watched an episode of Mike Hammer that presented an unrealistic scenario. Hammer received a letter from someone saying that he’s being held against his will in a mental hospital. The unlikely part involved Hammer getting on a plane and flying upstate to check out the man’s story. It doesn’t make sense that a private investigator would jump on a plane to look into something like that when he doesn’t even know who the person is.

A saxophone player was busking in front of the Dollarama, but only playing short bursts of fragments of simple tunes between conversations and he packed up and left fairly quickly.

A lonely dog was barking in front of the donut shop.

Tin Foil Man Doing Yoga

            On Sunday morning, starting my yoga was like putting a crinkly sculpture moulded out of tinfoil through all of the poses.

            I spent a lot of the day going through Ghazali’s “Incoherence of the Philosophers”. I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to answer the question for Tuesday’s tutorial, but here’s what I came up with:

            Al-Ghazali considers a man who needs to choose between two equally tasty dates. How does he use this example to refute the philosophers' argument that the world must be eternal? 

            Ghazali uses the analogy of the identical dates to show that just as the hungry person will know which date to take without subjectively responding to imagined differences or proximity the will of “god” does not need to choose between temporal moments to bring the world into existence. The one that it chooses will be the right one and the moments will have no bearing on the decision. It is interesting that he equates “god’s” will or the motivation behind it with hunger in this analogy. It would imply that creating the world was the result of a need on “god’s” part. 

Need Boot Fixed

            I didn’t get much done for most of Saturday. I wrote about my old phone dying and buying a new one.

            It looks like I might have to dip deeper into my recent windfall because my right boot is broken. The framework of one of my Blundstones, where it holds the leather in shape above my foot in the front seems to have buckled and now when I walk, something jagged is digging into my toes. I’ll see if a cobbler can fix them, otherwise I’ll have to go boot shopping soon. If I need new ones I can’t get Blundstones again because they’ve discontinued the kind with the laces and I need laced boots to support my ankle. It doesn’t bother me so much when I’m riding my bike but even while just stepping out to the liquor store to buy two cans of Creemore I could feel the broken framework grating against my second largest toe. It’s too bad, since these Blundies were comfortable.

            I practiced playing “Dead Autumn Leaves” five times. It seems to me that I play better in the morning. Either that or in the morning I’m not as aware of how badly I play.

            I read a section of Ghazali’s “Incoherence of the Philosophers” twice. He’s arguing that the world is temporal but god isn’t and that there was nothing temporal about god creating the world at a certain time since god created time as well.

Brand New Motorola

            On Friday morning my phone had been behaving like it needed a restart. It didn’t always wake up but instead often just stayed black when I tried to open the display to check the time. In the late morning I restarted it but it froze at the Alcatel splash page. I removed the battery and put it back in but the same thing happened. I took it over to Freedom Mobile but the guys behind the counter couldn’t make it work either. They concluded that the software had failed. Fortunately I’ve had a bit of a windfall this fall because of the retroactive payments that I’d gotten at the end of September from the Toronto Housing Allowance program, so I had more than enough in the bank to buy another phone. Their cheapest phone, at  $120, was another Alcatel, which I was told was two upgrades past the on I had, plus it was between $60 and $80 cheaper than the one I’d bought two years before. But I wasn’t happy with the Alcatel. Things started going wrong with it almost a year ago. The alarm stopped sounding and it wouldn’t upload photos to my computer were two of the main problems. The next cheapest was a brand of phone that I’d never heard of and so I didn’t really trust it. I figured the fact that it was so close in price to the Alcatel might mean that it would screw up quickly as well. The next one up was a considerable jump at $200, but it was a name I recognized and I’d actually had a Motorola several years ago when I made my first short venture into phone mobility. I was still a Bell customer back then and I was stupid enough to get sucked into a cell phone plan that they’d offered me. This was before smart phones became so common and so they sent me a Motorola mobile phone which I would have to pay off in instalments but there were so many hidden fees that I told them after a month that I wanted out. Since I’d already committed to the contract I had to pay for a phone that I wasn’t going to use. Years later when I told Bell to go fuck themselves and switched to Wind Mobile I took the Motorola to see if I could use it through them, but it wasn’t compatible. I actually still have that old Motorola in a drawer. Some day it will be an antique and I will become rich from selling it. Of course though I will be 120 years old and I won’t remember what money was.

            So I looked at the Motorola Moto e4. I wanted to make sure that it had a countdown timer because I need it for work when I’m posing for artists. It’s likely that every smart phone has a countdown timer (Even the first non-smart phone that I got from Wind, the Huawei had a countdown timer) but I wanted to make sure. The guy showed me how to get to the timer and it seemed fine, so I said I’d take the phone. I had to pay with my bankcard, which I’d forgotten to bring, so I asked him to switch the sim card from my old phone and I went home to get my backpack.

            The phone cost me $226 after tax. It’s 2.25 cm longer than my old phone and half a cm wider. I wonder if it will be clunky wearing it in my pants pocket in the summer. I noticed when I got it home that the clock was exactly an hour and a half fast and so for some reason it had been set for Newfoundland time. It took me a few minutes to finally get it onto Eastern Standard Time. I took a siesta in the afternoon and one thing I like about the phone is that I don’t have to push a button to check the time. I just have to slightly move it and without fully waking up it will briefly show the time.

            I worked that night for my second sitting of a three-week pose at Artists 25. It took me a while to figure out how to set the countdown timer on the phone. I finally figured out that the first two numbers one punches are seconds and adding a third number pushes the first number into minutes and so on. The problem was that after 30 seconds the screen went to sleep. My Alcatel had always kept the countdown on display, which is what I need for posing. It’s useless to me if I an only see it when the time is up because I like to give a two minute warning to the artists that are drawing me and in general I just prefer to see the timer. On my five-minute break I tried to figure out how to fix the problem, but then I had to pose again. Fortunately they have a clock on the wall, so I was able to approximately time my 20-minute sittings. During the third sitting I decided that I might have to take the phone back the next day but during my break I decided to ask if anyone knew a way to keep the display from blacking out. One guy showed me that I had to swipe down to get to my settings, then punch Display and then Sleep. Then I could choose from several settings ranging from 15 seconds to 30 minutes. 30 minutes was what I needed and that made sure I could see the timer counting down. I think this is something I could have done with my previous phone but when I had taken it to Wind about it blacking out or described the problem on my blog, no one had offered the solution that I’d gotten that night.

            I was scheduled to work until 21:30 but when I took a break at 21:10 everyone packed up. Peter, the guy that coordinates the session had paid me as soon as I’d arrived. He’s the first person I’ve seen running an Artists 25 session who does not draw. He just sat at the desk the whole night, reading or looking at his phone. I asked him what he got out of doing this. He said he gets a lot of reading done. I suggested that he could read at home but he said he finds that a change in environment is sometimes less distracting. He said he likes libraries for the same reason. He added though that he’s also a filmmaker and a model and so coordinating the Friday night sessions puts him in touch with artists and actors.

            I left work feeling pretty good about my phone purchase and my newfound knowledge of how to use it more efficiently than the old one.

The Servant Boy is a Horse in the Library

            On Thursday when Professor Black came in I called out to her, “To Tell the Truth!” She nodded and shared that she’d looked it up as well, assuring us that she only uses Wikipedia to research pop culture references. From behind me, Ryan wondered what “To Tell the Truth” was and so I explained to him that it was a game show. In each game, three contestants would all come in and claim to be the same person with the same experience and three panellists would interview them and finally guess which of them is telling the truth. Deborah Black commented, “They just don’t make game shows as well as they used to!” Ryan asked, “So you don’t like The Price is Right?” She said, “I hate to tell you, but The Price is Right has been around a long time as well.”

            She began the lecture.

            The problem Ghazali had with metaphysics was that the arguments don’t harmonize with religion. One can’t reject religious ideas outside of a religious context.

            Ghazali was idiosyncratic.

            Of math and logic: If someone shows themselves to be a great mathematician there is danger of accepting what they say about everything else. Or one might go the opposite way and reject everything someone says if they are wrong in one area.

            Of physics, Ghazali says there is nothing wrong with it. This is tricky. She once again brought up the game show and said, “Will the real Ghazali please stand up?” It’s hard to know where he stands. If accepting natural science means requiring natural causes, Ghazali is on thin ground.

            His diagnosis of the problem with philosophy does not match what philosophers do. Ghazali doesn’t say much about ethics. He thinks the Greeks were out to elaborate on the virtues of character. There’s a danger of throwing everything out from both philosophy and theology. He thought philosophers didn’t live up to their own standards and that direct knowledge was needed.

            That was the end of Professor Black’s lecture on Ghazali’s autobiography. She moved then to his book, “Incoherence of the Philosophers”. The first part refutes the idea that the world is eternal. The second part, the 17^th Discussion is his response to the attack on necessary connections. David Hume echoed Ghazali’s views on causality. Nicolas Malebranche actually cited Ghazali on this topic. They were both Occasionalists, insisting that creatures (angels) are not causes. Ghazali called into question the philosophers connecting of the world and the divine. God is the only true agent while the creature’s instruments are occasions. God builds atoms from moment to moment.

            Ghazali’s arguments are epistemological (relating to the nature of human knowledge). He says that if philosophers were honest they couldn’t make the kinds of claims they do about there being necessary connections in the physical world. One could become a skeptic then, but the other choice is that allowing for no underlying causal structure in the physical world it makes room for miracles such as bodily resurrection as reported in the Qu’ran.

            Cause leading to (with, concomitant, simultaneous) Effect. Avicenna thinks they are spontaneous. There is nothing to show necessitation as in try or through. The agent cause is distinct from the effect.

            This is not that cause and effect are discrete individual things.

            Ghazali drew from the looseness of Avicenna and concluded that sensation alone will not work. If there is a necessary connection it should be logical. It is possible to imagine that a cause occurs but the effect won’t follow as in eating without getting full or someone being decapitated and not dying like the headless horseman. Imagine the reversing of the laws of physics as in Roadrunner cartoons. If you can imagine this it is not impossible. God chooses to make everything work in its customary, regular way but can change its mind.

            If you take cotton, god is the agent of its whiteness and if you set it on fire god causes and is the agent of its burning and its blackness.

            Ghazali says we can accept legitimate descriptions off the order. How can you be certain that your servant boy has not turned into a horse in your library? This is a traditional Asharite answer. God created knowledge in our minds that things are regular but when it performs a miracle we can recognize that possibility. But god cannot cause 2 + 2 = 5.

            Ghazali’s second causal theory is what if we want to maintain necessity but still come up with an account to make miracles possible? What if god could just make the normal stuff happen faster? If you’ve heard of people being thrown into fire without being burned, god could have shielded them from the fire. As long as we preserve the natural order in explaining miracles we won’t get any argument from philosophers. Matter contains all possibilities and has potency within. Matter always does change into something else. So a rod is transformed into a snake. The things that a rod is made of will eventually break down and could eventually become the substances that a snake is made of. God could just fast-forward the process, so take that philosophers! You don’t have to buy it but you cannot be sure.

            Of the agency of entities that can make choices, philosophers have an impoverished conception of agency. Philosophers say the world is eternal and if god is the necessary existent then anything that issues from it if it creates the world is necessary. Ghazali says this must be overturned. He claims the philosophers model of the world is like that of the Asharites.

            If god creates the world how can the temporal proceed from it? Something eternal and unchanging creating the temporal is irrational. If you are eternal how do you arrive at a moment to create the world? You’re willing to be alone and then you suddenly start making stuff. Ghazali puts this in the mouths of the philosophers based on the decree of divorce. God could decree with an eternal decision. The temporal moment is built into the eternal will. If we understand the decree there are no pre-existent conditions. We are free agents.

            I passed Professor Black on the way out and said I’d see her Tuesday. She wished me a great weekend. She looks a lot older when she’s climbing the stairs than when she’s lecturing. She was really kind of struggling and pulling herself up by the handrail.

            The day before that I’d forgotten to mail my income report to Social Services, so after class I took College past Lansdowne to drop it off at the office. Then I took advantage of the rare occasion of being in that area and stopped at the big No Frills at Lansdowne and Dundas. They don’t always have better deals than Freshco but this time they did. They had red seedless grapes that were a lot fresher than Freshco and for the same price. I got some Thompson cinnamon bread, some Rubschlager bread, some old cheddar and a box of roasted red pepper crackers. They had large bottles of Listerine on sale and I got some Arm and Hammer toothpaste.

            I don’t know what it is with that location. Perhaps it’s because they’re at the top of a hill looking south and west, but that parking lot always seems to have a spectacular cloud display to greet me when I leave with my groceries.

Hurry up please it's time!

            I spent a lot of Wednesday writing about Tuesday. I would have a test that night but there isn’t much one can do to study for an English test. My strategy was just to relax for the day and then go in prepared to have some fun writing the in-class essays. In retrospect though, I should have thought to at least make sure I could connect the names of the authors to the works I would be writing about.

            As I was locking my bike in front of the Fitzgerald building a young, skinny, nervous, kind of dishevelled looking guy with a beard and smoking a cigarette came up to talk to me. It turned out that he was from my class, though I didn’t recognize him. He asked me if I knew for sure that the test would be in our classroom and not in some other building. It’s exams and not tests that are in designated examination spaces. I assured him that our test was in the classroom. He explained that he hadn’t been able to attend all the classes because of his job but he’d be able to come from now on.

            Once class started, Scott handed out the tests first to give us a chance look the questions over for ten minutes and then he handed out the writing books and told us we could begin. We had 70 minutes to write on two topics out of four. Two of the choices were non-fiction, which is less interesting for me to sink my teeth into than created works, so I chose the other two. One of them was the pub scene from T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and the other was “Paul’s Case” by … I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of that story’s author. It was the very first story we covered and it was from a handout. I probably lost marks for not remembering Willa Cather as the author, but I knew I didn’t remember her name when I made the decision to write on that topic.

            The excerpt from “Paul's Case” was the end of the story where all of the metaphors tumble together into one spectacular death scene. Paul saw that the red carnation that he wore and which I think was the symbolic heart of his superficial life of grandeur and style was fading and he did not want to see himself fade. He ventured out into the weather that he detested, ritualistically buried the carnation in the snow and stepped in front of a train bound for his home in Pennsylvania to allow it to strike him hard in the heart and send his mind back into the great design of things.

            The pub scene in T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is haunted by the traditional English bartender’s final call, “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” that punctuates a conversation between two patrons. The woman, Lil is being chastised for not doing more to improve her womanly appearance and for not wanting to have children. Time is constantly evoked because it is the woman that is always warned to be afraid of decay and of it being too late to have children. The woman is doubly threatened by death in her own body and in being forced to take on the responsibility of bearing life as if not doing so is a type of death in itself. This point is driven home in the final repetitions of “Goodnight ladies” when time has finally run out. This part of The Wasteland reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Closing Time” which is also about getting old and facing the inevitability of death.

            Time seems to pass quickly when writing in-class essays. It was over at 19:37. As I was getting ready to leave, the young guy with the beard came up and apologized to Scott for having missed so many classes. They were still talking as I headed for the door and called out to Scott, “Thanks! That was fun!” Scott turned and asked me with surprise, “That was fun?” I said, “Yeah!” He declared, “Well, that’s great!”

            When I got home there was plenty of time to go back out to the liquor store and buy myself a beer to have with dinner. I made myself a salami, cheese and pickle sandwich and watched an episode of Mike Hammer that had kind of an interesting scenario. Mike’s girlfriend and her brother had a photography business at a fancy nightclub. She would go from table to table and take pictures of couples and then the photos would be developed before they left. They would get a print and then a smaller version of the portrait would be printed onto a book of matches as a memento. When she was taking a picture of a particular couple though, two men behind them saw that they were included in the shot. One of them came into the darkroom later, slugged the photographer’s brother and took the print, and then he mugged the couple for their copy as they left the club. When Mike Hammer investigated he discovered that the thieves had overlooked the book of matches. He retrieved it from the couple and saw that behind the couple in the photograph were the lower halves of the two men that had been behind them and that one of the men’s hands were on a brass rail that separated two sections of the restaurant. Mike arranged for the rail to be dusted for prints and discovered that one set of prints belonged to a gangster that was supposed to have died in a plane crash three years before.

. 

To Tell the Truth

            When I was leaving for Philosophy class on Tuesday morning I thought about checking to make sure that I had my bike lock and chain. But then I was sure I had it because I didn’t remember removing it from my backpack after doing my laundry on Sunday. Plus, it gets tiresome second-guessing myself because I start feeling that I’m being obsessive-compulsive if I re-check my pack every time I leave the apartment.

            When I got to the bike rings on St George beside the U of T Bookstore I discovered that I didn’t have my bike lock and chain. If only I’d thought about it before leaving home! I remembered then that what I’d done on Sunday was coiled up my chain, attached my lock to it and shoved it into one of my laundry bags, which was still on my kitchen table. There was nothing to do but to try to sneak my velo into the lecture theatre. It’s a good thing that security isn’t oppressively present at U of T. At OCADU the security desk is right at the front entrance and you can’t swing a purple and blue haired foundation student without hitting a security guard. I had no problem bringing my bicycle into the building, taking it downstairs and into the back door of the classroom. I wedged my bike behind a couple of spare podiums in the left-front corner of the theatre.

            Professor Black began her first lecture on the early 14^th Century Islamic philosopher, Ghazali by telling us that his philosophy was similar to Augustine, although Ghazali had not studied him. They had both drawn some of their thinking from Neoplatonism though. She commented that Ghazali and Descartes were uncannily similar, again with no connection other than that great minds with similar goals think alike.

            Ghazali was Persian but he wrote in Arabic. His formal profession was that of jurisprudence. He went from law to theology (kalām) and was one of the representatives of the later kalām school of the Ash’arites. He detoured to Philosophy and studied Avicenna. His scathing critique of Avicenna, “Tahafut al-Falasifah” (The Incoherence of the Philosophers” was translated into Latin and circulated in the west. In later life Ghazali seemed more sympathetic to Avicenna. He finally moved from Philosophy to Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.

            She commented that Ghazali had so many sides that it reminds her of an old game show, “Will the real Ghazali please stand up!” She said she don’t remember the name of the show. I suggested that it was “What’s My Line”. She declared that we were dating ourselves.

            Ghazali was sceptical of law and theology although he admitted that they had their place. He went through a spiritual crisis (read nervous breakdown) and lost the ability to speak. He finally decided that theology and philosophy were not enough and so he turned to mysticism. Mysticism rests on dhawg (the sense of taste) used as a metaphor for direct experience of the divine source. True knowledge must be infallible and not subject to doubt. Don’t base beliefs on taqlid (blind obedience to authoritative knowledge) alone. For example, something isn’t true just because Aristotle says so. Theologians and Philosophers accused each other of taqlid.

            Ghazali and Descartes both had the same worry that we could even be deceived about basic truths like 2 + 2 = 4. They both insisted that one must be absolutely certain before accepting a truth. If someone shows themselves to have astounding magical powers by turning a stick into a snake, accept that they are powerful but don’t accept it if they say something that is false like 10 is smaller than 3.

            Ghazali kept finding things that he thought ere certain but he fell short.

            One can be deceived by the senses like with the illusion of a stick bending in the water. A dream can seem vivid and sure, but then you wake up. If the senses and dreams can deceive us, how do we know we can depend on the intellect? How can we be convinced that the truth cannot be overturned? Perhaps mystical knowledge is the answer.

            Islamic theologians were generally atomists. God causes everything, including irregularity.

            Even after becoming a Sufi, Ghazali still wrote like an Asharite theologian, which is basically apologetics, polemic and dialectical (rooted in debate and discussion. A theologian’s role is to accept the faith, defend it from outside attacks and refute heresies from within.

            Early Islamic theologians were suspicious of Greek philosophy. Ghazali was okay with Aristotelian logic but thought that most philosophers succumbed the disease of hubris. They would take their love of logic even against the Qu’ran. He says the problem is metaphysics and its claims about what is necessary for god. He said it was kufr. Denial of the truth (unbelief or heresy).

There are three basic philosophical beliefs that are kufr:

1.      Pre-eternity of the world.

2.      God knows particulars in a universal way.

3.      Denial of bodily resurrection. 

Ghazali says it is clear there is bodily resurrection.

Avicenna says there is personal immortality but Ghazali says that is unbelief.

Ghazali concluded that philosophers don’t have the path to certain truth and so what is needed is direct knowledge of the divine.

At the end of class I mentioned to Professor Black that the game show she was thinking of might be “I’ve Got A Secret”. Later though I looked it up and discovered that the actual show in which the lines were, “Will the real (so and so) please stand up!” was “To Tell the Truth”.

I immediately grabbed my bike, carried it upstairs and headed home to get my lock and chain because I couldn’t take the chance on having someone stop me from bringing my bike into University College for tutorial. I had an hour and ten minutes before tutorial and so I figured that would give me time to get home and back before it started.

As I was riding west on Dundas near Trinity Bellwoods Park a fairly young (perhaps homeless) guy with a beard and pushing a shopping cart was waiting to cross the street. As I passed he was muttering, “All those fuckin lies! All those fuckin lies!”

As soon as I came in the door of my apartment I saw my coiled up chain with the lock attached clearly visible on my kitchen table and not buried under laundry like I’d expected. I grabbed it and put it in my backpack, and then I took a pee and headed back downtown.

I got to UC with twenty minutes to spare. I sat in the window cove outside the classroom next to Noel, the pastor’s son. I was doing some writing until I looked down at the lower part of the left collar of my jacket and saw a very large insect crawling upwards. I said, “Jesus!” and brushed it off. The pastor’s son immediately got up and moved away from me. I think the bug was a type of centipede but whatever it was it seemed to fit with the damp old stone walls of University College.

At the beginning of tutorial I voiced my objection to Avicenna’s claim that there has to be a singular Necessary Existent that is the cause of everything else that exists. I said that existence could just as easily be random and perpetual. Noel suggested that the Necessary Existent might simply be the laws of physics. That’s an interesting possibility.

Cilia talked about Ghazali having come from a pluralistic society in Persia where there were Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and several sects of Islam. People tended to follow their parents but Ghazali wanted to find out the truth and a way to approach it without going wrong. He started by building a foundation of firm knowledge made of indisputable truths embodied in first principals. He found the most reliable things were direct sense experience and necessary truths like “ten is bigger than three”.

Testimony in Islam is a huge source of knowledge. He would look at the chain and dismiss it if it had unreliable links. All the while though he would use what he found to prove Islam.

I voiced my objection to the idea that someone would be going to such lengths to find the truth and then would sacrifice objectivity by bending it all to use it to prove one’s religion. Cilia used the analogy that if her doctor tells her she has strep throat she’s not going to dispute it. I didn’t really get the comparison. Noel said he would never trust a doctor’s diagnosis.

Only the intellect can tell the difference between phenomenologically identical sense perceptions to figure out which are right and which are wrong. But what tells the intellect if it’s wrong? He’s worried about false generalizations and intellectual laziness. A higher faculty is needed.

Ghazali had a nervous breakdown trying figure it out. He decided he was a fraud and went into seclusion for ten years until he’d achieved union with the divine mind.

Ghazali concluded that Avicenna knew what he was doing but couldn’t pull it off.

Cilia said that our Professor Deborah Black is an anti-obstructionist. I don’t know what that means in philosophical terms.

Sufis are about achieving oneness with god. You stop existing and are subsumed.

I pointed out that one can misinterpret a mystical experience.

The pastor’s son said that studies have shown that psilocybin produces the exact same effect on the brain as mystical experiences.

Cilia talked about taking a leap of faith to accept 2 + 2 = 4. This won’t commit you to an absurdity.

Ghazali tries to prove Sufism from the start. Theologians are supposed to argue with heretics. If mathematicians say false things about Islam it doesn’t mean their math is wrong. One has to evaluate each claim independently with a reliable method.

Ghazali concluded that philosophers weren’t doing it right. He believed that any properly done rational enquiry would conform to Islam.

She told us that our upcoming essay should be two-thirds comparison and explanation and one-third assessment. She warned us that we must understand the mechanics of inference to assess properly.

After tutorial I went down to OCADU to pick up some unclaimed student drawings of me that one of the Design instructors, Bob Berger had held onto until he retired last year. Tracy Buchanan, the model coordinator had emailed me about them a couple of weeks before. When I got there she wasn’t in because she only works mornings three days a week but another guy in the office knew about the drawings because there was a pile of them in large folders each modeled with a different model’s name. Mine seemed to be much thicker than the others. I didn’t bother to go through them since whatever I didn’t take would probably be trashed anyway so I just took everything. I asked if the guy had a bag and he found me a fairly large one from Ikea.

Everything was in the bag vertically and they sat too high in the bag for me to tie the handles over the top. I tried riding my bike but the Ikea bag was catching in my front spokes. I stopped and rearranged the contents by separating all the paintings and then rolling up the drawings all together so I could lay them sideways in the bag. That allowed me to tie the handles and make the bag shorter as it hung on my right handlebar so it didn’t catch in my wheel.

I rode up to the Jackman Humanities Building at St George and Bloor to sit in an easy chair in the lobby and write while I was waiting for my TA’s office hour at 15:30. I was there for more than half an hour before it was time to go upstairs. Ahead of me outside of Cilia’s office was Noel, the pastor’s son. I said hi to him but he ignored me. I heard him have a conversation a few minutes later though with the other TA and he was telling him that he was going that night to a lecture by controversial U of T professor, Jordon Peterson on the psychological significance of the Biblical stories. The pastor’s son said Peterson is “Awesome”. I’ve heard Peterson on YouTube suggest that Feminism is the manifestation of a woman’s instinct to play hard to get. Noel just saw Cilia briefly and when he left he didn’t acknowledge me either even though he walked right past.

I talked with Cilia about my recent essay because I wanted to see what I’d done wrong to get a C-plus. Apparently I made a major mistake in missing that Anselm’s main proof that we are alive is that we can be deceived. That seems so stupid. But I guess he was focusing on the sceptical argument and the sceptics say you might be deceived about knowing you are alive while Anselm says that being deceived is proof. It also proves that I’m alive in the same way if I think Anselm is an idiot. I told Cilia that being deceived doesn’t prove we are alive if all we are is a bunch of thoughts floating around. She said I should have used that argument. She advised me for my next essay to go with my gut and if I have a major objection then write about it.