Chungsoo Lee

1000 year history succinctly compressed into a few

Revisado: 05-16-20

like the humor in this otherwise tragic history. a fantastic story that shows the root of the Islamophobia of the west.

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the title is deceiving. This is not Boetheus.

Revisado: 10-14-16

not much substance to philosophy that the author discusses. interesting biographies on the 5 philosophers he discusses. a nice bedtime reading.

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An Enjoyable Memory Lane to the 19 Century France

Revisado: 03-05-16

What made the experience of listening to Remembrance of Things Past the most enjoyable?

Emmanuel Levinas called Proust "a psychologist of the infinitesimal." The concrete images Proust crafts with infinite details and patience in his novel are not so much based on the visual experience as they are on the marvel of imagination rooted in the memory. Proust presents an incontrovertible case of imagination and memory for philosophers to examine. The fact that his descriptions are fictional matters not, because the novel stems from the experience he remembers and imagines. However, he is not interested in reproducing his experiences in modified and refined depictions. He is after something else. He is after the truth of the lost time which his mind cannot resurrect in "the storehouse of memory" (as Augustine puts it), as if the mind is in control of resurrecting and suppressing it, but which arises by itself on its own by a chance encounter with an object or memory that summons up the whole past or the whole bygone city. It is not I but something other than I that calls up the past in memory. It is something external to the I that calls up the past. The past belongs to something exterior to the mind, something beyond the domain of my intellectual power. He says: "It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it [the past], all the exertions of intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it" (46).

As a case in point, Proust offers the following description of a cup of tea his mother offered in one cold winter day with "one of those squat, plump cakes called petites madeleines" (47). He continues: "But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me... by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me" (47). He continues: "Where could it have come to me from - this powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it went infinitely far beyond it, could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I grasp it? [...] It is clear that the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me" (47). But is it up to me to recall the past, as if the past is entirely in my command? Do I re-create the past by my sheer will of imagination? No so, according to Proust. For he says: "It is up to my mind to find the truth. But how? What grave uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is also the obscure country where it must seek and where all its baggage will be nothing to it. Not only that: create. It is face to face with something that does not yet exist and that only it can accomplish, then bring into its light" (48).

The past that confronts him, occasioned by the taste of the tea mixed with petites madeleines, is quite strange, is something he must create as if it is totally new to him. It is the other. The past comes to him as the other, occasioned by the chance encounter with a cup of tea his mother offered with petites madeleines. His mother's madeleines brings forth another one he had in the past, dipped in the "infusion of tea or lime-blossom," offered by Aunt Leonie in one Sunday morning before the Mass at Combray (49).

The entire bygone past emerges out of the cup of tea as in the Japanese game of colored pieces of papers dipped in a bowl of water transforming themselves into different shapes of imagination: "As soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me..., immediately the old grey house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage-set to attach itself to the little wing opening on to the garden that had been built for my parents behind it...; and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square, where they sent me before lunch, the streets where I went to do errands, the paths we took if the weather was fine. And as in the game in which the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper until then indistinct, which, the moment they are immersed in it, stretch and shape themselves, colour and differentiate, become flowers, houses, human figures, firm and recognizable, so now all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little dwellings and the church and all of Combray and its surroundings, all of this which is assuming form and substance, emerged, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea" (50).

The medeleines with tea his mother offered brings to his mind or to his memory the same he tasted when Aunt Leonie offered with tea in Combray, but this happens not as a result of an active work of association that his memory or mind makes. The mind does not create the link. It is the thing itself (felt in sensation) that creates the link beyond the power of the mind. For the link is created only when the mind is purged of all its baggage and its will power, only when the mind "create[s] an empty space" (48).

Only then, the lost past returns like "the murmur of the distance traversed" (48): "I go back in my thoughts to the moment when I took the first spoonful of tea. I find the same state, without any new clarity. I ask my mind to make another effort, to bring back once more the sensation that is slipping away. And, so that nothing may break the thrust with which it will try to grasp it again. I remove every obstacle, every foreign idea, I protect my ears and my attention from the noises in the next room. But feeling my mind grow tired without succeeding, I now force it to accept the very distraction I was denying it, to think of something else, to recuperate before a supreme attempt. Then for a second time I create an empty space before it, I confront it again with the still recent taste of that first mouthful and I feel something quiver in me, shift, try to rise, something that seems to have been unanchored at a great depth; I do not know what it is, but it comes up slowly; I feel the resistance and I hear the murmur of the distances traversed" (48).

The past resurfaces like a stranger in the memory. This appearance is not a result of the Socratic mimesis, where what is recalled is familiar to the mind that recollects it; or a result of the memory retained in the present moment of consciousness, as in Husserl; or a result of the memory that lacks existence before its existence is regained in "the storehouse of memory," as in Augustine. The past that appears again in "the immense edifice of memory" is quite strange to me who encounters it. It is like a dead soul returning to an objection of my possession, as in the Celtic belief Proust cites (46): "But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory" (49). What arises in "the immense edifice of memory" is quite other worldly like a cadaver of the departed, as is brilliantly described in Blonchot's The Space of Literature in drastic contrast to the death affirmed in dasein's resolute march towards it, as in Heidegger.

The past thus re-emerged is not a living past, like a tradition held fast by daily practice or like a well trodden pathway maintained by travelers. It is the past that has been lost forever, something that no recollection can bring back to life. Proust's memorializes the bygone past like we do with the dead. The past is forever gone. We remember in the sadness of knowing that it could never return and come alive again.

Memory, for Proust, is not a "storehouse" from which the mind pulls what it wills. The "immense edifice of memory" in Proust in contrast is like a strange landscape in which the mind enters without the familiarity of associations and habits. It is strange because it is bygone, dead. Levinas notes this strange otherness in the memories Proust recalls: "The result is something unique in Proust, something unprecedented in literature. His analysis... merely translate that strangeness between self and self which is the spout of the soul" (Proper Name, 102). As in memory in Proust, the soul or psyche in Levinas is the otherness within the self, the self that responds to that which is beyond, to the other.

The following depiction of the glory of Mme Swann in stark contrast of the modern women's style of clothes illustrates this melancholy of having lost the bygone past forever, like death of the Gods: "The idea of perfection which at that time I had carried inside me I had conferred upon the height of a victoria, upon the slenderness of those horses, as furious and light as wasps, their eyes bloodshot like the cruel steed of Diomedes, which now, filled as I was with a desire to see again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me down these same paths many years before, I wanted to see before my eyes again at the moment when Mme Swann's enormous coachman, watched over by a little groom as fat as a fist and as childlike as Saint George, tried to control hose wings of steel as they thrashed about quivering with fear. Alas, now there were only automobiles driven by mustached mechanics with tall footmen by their sides. I wanted to hold in front of the eyes of my body, so as to know if they were as charming as they appeared in the eyes of my memory, women's little hats so low they seemed to be simple crowns. All the hats were now immense, covered with fruits and flowers and varieties of birds. In place of the lovely dresses in which Mme Swann looked like a queen, I now saw Greco-Saxon tunics with Tanagra folds, and sometimes in the style of the Directoire, made of liberty-silk chiffons sprinkled with flowers like wallpaper.... [....] But when a belief disappears, there survives it - more and more vigorously so as to mask the absence of the power we have lost to give reality to new things - a fetishistic attachment to the old things which our belief once animated, as if it were in them and not in us that the divine resided and as if our present lack of belief had a contingent cause, the death of the Gods" (427). The past is no longer alive in the memory. It is recalled as a memory of the dead not in the liturgy of worship and veneration but in the desolation of the death of God.

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Lively translation intimately and prayerfully read

Revisado: 03-04-16

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

The text is lively and clearly translated by the well known Wesley theologian and philosopher, Albert Cook Outler, and is well read intimately and prayerfully by Emily Hanna. A woman's narrative voice works well, as Augustine's Confessions are deeply personal and intimate. The inserts of cello played by Peter Plantinga (any relation to Alvin, the famous evangelical Christian philosopher?) at appropriate intervals allow the listeners to pause and meditate at the right moments. What a privilege to "hear" the confessions of St. Augustine! A perfect way to enter Lent or any other spiritual pilgrimage.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Augustine's restless quest for peace, happiness, and truth in the midst of his scattered, dispersed, and distracted life of wonderings, pervades the entire book from the beginning to the end. His powerful words such as "I became to myself a waste land" (2:10) or "in this our straw house" (9:7) found their way into works such as T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and "The Hollow Men." Augustine was already a post-modern before the dawn of the medieval Christendom, which he dominated also.

His struggle to overcome and to be free of both his carnal desires ("the glue of lust") and, at the same time, of the errors of worldly wisdom never ends. He frankly admits, for example, of taking another concubine after his betrothal (because the two-year wait until the marriage was too long) is as striking as painful; as is his reference to the struggle to purge himself of sensual images in his own dreams that he recounts apparently at the time of writing the book in his mid 40's. (His dream analysis is as interesting and insightful as Descartes.')

His restlessness, however, is not confined to things that are sensual alone. It also pertains to his intellectual quest toward topics such as God, Christ, evil, memory or the mind, happiness, time, creation, etc. But ultimately the book is about finding or reaching God, who is beyond our reach and knowledge. For instance, how are we to understand God, who, as Augustine says, "is near when I am far from Thee"? What kind of space does he dwell, where His nearness is not reciprocal to our nearness and His distance not equivalent to our distance? How are we to understand His time, when He knows what we want before we seek it? He already has the foreknowledge of what we are going to seek in the future. Or, how can we understand the eternity when for Him the past and the future is all in the present?

Augustine gives a brilliant analysis of memory (Book 10) but fully realizes in the end that God is not something we can remember. Thus, he squarely rejects the Socratic mimesis as the source of all knowledge--without ever having read Plato! He cries out in the end: "But where in my memory dost thou abide, O Lord? Where dost thou dwell there?" (10:25) He ends the analysis of memory with a profound admission that we cannot recall God by the power of our memory; and we cannot seek God unless and until He first seeks us: "You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours" (10:27).

Likewise, at the heart of his brilliant analysis of time (Book 11), he pauses to confess his/our limitations into knowing the nature of time and invokes God's help to enlighten and strengthen him to go on, as he does, in his inquiry. In so doing, Aristotle's association of time with objective motions of heavenly bodies is decidedly refuted. Instead, Augustine locates time in the subjective consciousness, thus paving the way for the 20th century phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who read Augustine carefully, for his own analysis of time as transcendental consciousness itself, which Heidegger even further developed in terms of the epochal sending of Being (Geschichte or history). (Augustine's words 'memory,' 'attention,' and 'expectation,' are strikingly similar to Husserl's words 'retention,' 'attention,' and 'protention' that he uses to refer to the past, present, and future modes of inner time consciousness.) Without actually having read Aristotle and, for that matter, Plato too (except through the second hand transmissions--for all we know, Augustine only read Plotinus in Latin translation), Augustine's analysis of objectivity, i.e., images (or, in Plato's terms, forms or, in the medieval term, essence) of things and of time is brilliant. His thinking is unparalleled, "perhaps one in a thousand years," as my teacher Adriaan Peperzak told me once. If St. Paul, according to Giorgio Agamben, had singlehandedly determined the fate of Western civilization; St. Augustine had set the entire agenda for the western philosophy and literature. He had dominated the medieval thought without a doubt but arguably also the modern and even the post-modern thoughts.

His affectionate account of the dialogue he had with his mother, Monica, in Ostia while awaiting a voyage to Africa is well known as a classic account of mysticism both he and Monica apparently experienced in the room at the window overlooking the garden (Book 9). One is struck by how fragile such an experience is, however. For even after such a 'mystical' experience he had, Augustine continues to struggle to find peace and rest (sensually, intellectually, and spiritually all around). It is worth dwelling on the account he gives.

Augustine writes: "And when our conversation had brought us to the point where the very highest of physical sense and the most intense illumination of physical light seemed, in comparison with the sweetness of that life to come, not worthy of comparison, nor even of mention, we lifted ourselves with a more ardent love toward the Selfsame (Idipsum)" (9:10). That to which he refers is beyond language and cannot be described. But Augustine attempts to recall what cannot be expressed by prefacing: "What we said went something like this..." No exact account can be given. A provisional or partial recollection will have to do.

What he recalls is conveyed through the Scriptural texts (Psalm 19:1,3; Psalm100:3; Habakkuk 2:20)—as paraphrased and combined—and put under the hypothetical 'if.' He writes: "If to any man the tumult of the flesh were silenced; and the phantoms of earth and waters and air were silenced; and the poles were silence as well; indeed, if the very soul grew silent to herself, and went beyond herself by not thinking of herself; ... if every tongue and every sign and every transient thing... if any man could hear them, all these would say, 'We did not create ourselves, but were created by Him who abides forever' (9:10). If only the whole creation were to fall silent, they would then be able to attest to God; and if we too were to fall silent, we can only then ‘hear’ them speak the inaudible: that they are not the Creator: "for actually if any man could hear them, all these would say..."

They would speak only "if [they] were silenced...." And we could hear them, only if we were silenced. “The heavens are telling the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1, NRSV). This “telling” is both inaudible and audible. Inaudible because they speak in their silence; audible only if we along with the whole creation were silenced. They speak in their silence; and we hear this silent speech only if we ourselves fall silent: “let all the earth keep silence before him” (Habakkuk 2:20, NRSV). In the silence of the heaven and the earth, we hear: “It is he what made us, and we are his” (Psalm 100:3).

What kind of speech is this “telling [of] the glory of God”? What kind of hearing will hear such a speech spoken in silence? Is man, who is said to be ‘a house of being,’ capable of hearing such a speech, as he is said to hear the call of Being in his proper mode of thinking, according to Heidegger? There is no thanksgiving (danken) in Heidegger’s thinking (denken), despite the close etymological connection between the two terms, as Jean-Louis Chrétien correctly observes in The Ark of Speech. Both he and Jean-Yves Lacoste show the plausibility of conceiving human existence in a way other than Being of being: in the way of praise and worship as the essential mode of human existence. To praise in a speech that holds the whole creation together in silence (Chrétien) and to worship liturgically in a vigil awaiting the fullness of time (Lacoste in his Experience And the Absolute) can no longer be discarded simply as pietism of a primitive religion. The silent speech of the whole creation Augustine and Monica heard in their ascent to the “Selfsame” thus offers the direction by which whole of our existence can and must be oriented and redefined.

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