「2022年はこれから自分が一生のあいだに何度も立ち返るであろう、直立して生きるための倫理を、暴力に逆らう言葉によって表現することを選んだ人たちとの出会いに恵まれた年になったと思う、だから今年はかれらとの面識を新しい人の方へと深める年にしたい」とつぶやきかけた元日、自分がこれから数か月のあいだ熱中することであろう、Jacob Brownoski という学際-詩人-数学者を (Dawkins 経由で) 知ってしまった、それも George Steiner に似通う20世紀のユマニスムと大陸のアクセントをそなえた人を・・
Words so powerful don’t need a raised voice or ostentatious tears. Bronowski’s words gained impact from his calm, humane, understated tones, with the engagingly rolled Rs as he looked straight into the camera, spectacles flashing like beacons in the dark. [...]
Bronowski was a rationalist and an iconoclast. He was not content to bask in the achievements of science but sought to provoke, to pique, to needle.
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
— Richard Dawkins, Books Do Furnish a Life: Reading and Writing Science (2021), ch. 1, Rationalist, Iconoclast, Renaissance Man
私はそれからイギリスに行きまして、ロンドンでの会の後、南西部のウェールズ地方にまいりました。そこで地方の芸術祭が開かれておりまして、それに参加したのです。何度も話をしておりますと、疲れてきますし、とくに私は英語がへただということもあり、先方の期待によく応えられないという気もして、しょげてしまって海岸のホテルの部屋で寝そべっていました。ところが主催者の方が私のことをよく調べていられて、大江がしょげた場合どうするかということも私のエージェントに手紙で問い合わせてあったらしいんです (笑)。それに、私の家内か友人がつたえた情報として、こういうことが知らせてあった。大江がしょげた場合は何か珍しい本をやれば元気になる。ここに一冊を持っておりますが、もっとたくさんもらいましたけれども、ウェールズの R. S. トーマスという詩人の詩集です。
My father was enraptured on finding me freed from the vexations of a criminal charge, that I was again allowed to breathe the fresh atmosphere, and permitted to return to my native country. I did not participate in these feelings; for to me the walls of a dungeon or a palace were alike hateful. The cup of life was poisoned for ever; and although the sun shone upon me as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me. Sometimes they were the expressive eyes of Henry languishing in death, the dark orbs nearly covered by the lids, and the long black lashes that fringed them; sometimes it was the watery, clouded eyes of the monster as I first saw them in my chamber at Ingolstadt.
My life, as it passed thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep alone that I could taste joy. O blessed sleep! often, when most miserable, I sank to repose, and my dreams lulled me even to rapture. The spirits that guarded me had provided these moments, or rather hours, of happiness, that I might retain strength to fulfill my pilgrimage.
— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Ch. XXI, XXIV
My philosophical development may be divided into various stages according to the problems with which I have been concerned and the men whose work has influenced me. There is only one constant preoccupation: I have throughout been anxious to discover how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty of doubtfulness. [...]
My original interest in philosophy had two sources. On the one hand, I was anxious to discover whether philosophy would provide any defence for anything that could be called religious belief, however vague; on the other hand, I wished to persuade myself that something could be known, in pure mathematics if not elsewhere. I thought about these problems during adolescence, in solitude and with little help from books.
-- Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (1959), Chapter 1
My German friend threatens to be an infliction, he came back with me after my lecture & argued till dinner-time - obstinate & perverse, but I think not stupid. [19.10.11]
My German engineer very argumentative & tiresome. He wouldn't admit that it was certain that there was not a rhinoceros in the room. . . [He] came back and argued all the time I was dressing. [1.11.11]
My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable - I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't. [2.11.11]
In later life Russell made great play of these discussions and claimed he had looked under all the tables and chairs in the lecture room in an effort to convince Wittgenstein that there was no rhinoceros present. But it is clear that for Wittgenstein the issue was metaphysical rather than empirical, to do with what kind of things make up the world rather than the presence or otherwise of a rhinoceros. In fact, the view that he is here so tenaciously advancing prefigures that expressed in the famous first proposition of the Tractatus: 'The world is the totality of facts, not of things.'
-- Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: the duty of genius (1991), Ch. 3, pp. 39-40
並んでいる商品の みかけ からはその値段があまりに信じられないものなので、自分の手で確かめるためにセルフレジでバーコードを読み取らせようとでもいおう気でいる始末、and lo and behold, 看板に偽りはなさそうです:
Children have two advantages: they don’t know what they’re supposed to like and they don’t understand money, so price is never a guide to value for them. They have to rely instead on their own delight (or lack of it) in the intrinsic merits of the things they’re presented with and this can take them in astonishing (and sometimes maddening) directions. They’ll spend an hour with one button. We buy them a costly wooden toy made by Swedish artisans who hope to teach lessons in symmetry and find that they prefer the cardboard box that it came in. They become mesmerized by the wonders of turning on the light and therefore proceed to try it 100 times. They’d prefer the nail and screw section of a DIY shop to the fanciest toy department or the national museum.
This attitude allows them to be entranced by objects which have long ago ceased to hold our wonder. If asked to put a price on things, children tend to answer by the utility and charm of an object, not its manufacturing costs. This leads to unusual but – we recognize – more rightful results. A child might guess that a stapler costs £100 and would be deeply surprised, even shocked, to learn that a USB stick can be had for just over £1. Children would be right, if prices were determined by human worth and value, but they’re not; they just reflect what things cost to make. The pity is, therefore, that we treat them as a guide to what matters, when this isn’t what a financial price should ever be used for.
We have been looking at prices the wrong way. We have fetishized them as tokens of intrinsic value, we have allowed them to set how much excitement we are allowed to have in given areas, how much joy is to be mined in particular places. [...]
— The School of Life: An Emotional Education (2019), p. 244
[...] However, we can pay less attention to what things cost and more to our own responses. The people who have most to teach us here are artists. They are the experts at recording and communicating their enthusiasms, which, like children, can take them in slightly unexpected directions. The French artist Paul Cézanne spent a good deal of the late nineteenth century painting groups of apples in his studio in Provence. He was thrilled by their texture, shapes and colours. He loved the transitions between the yellowy golds and the deep reds across their skins. He was an expert at noticing how the generic word ‘apple’ in fact covers an infinity of highly individual examples. Under his gaze, each one becomes its own planet, a veritable universe of distinctive colour and aura – and hence a source of real delight and solace.
The apple that has only a limited life, that will make a slow transition from sweet to sour, that grew patiently on a particular tree, that survived the curiosity of birds and spiders, that weathered the mistral and a particularly blustery May is honoured and properly given its due by the artist (who was himself extremely wealthy, the heir to an enormous banking fortune – it seems important to state this, to make clear that Cézanne wasn’t simply making a virtue of necessity and would have worshipped gold bullion if he’d had the chance). Cézanne had all the awe, love and excitement before the apple that Catherine the Great and Charles II had before the pineapple; but Cézanne’s wonderful discovery was that these elevated and powerful emotions are just as valid in relation to things which can be purchased for the small change in our pockets. Cézanne in his studio was generating his own revolution, not an industrial revolution that would make once-costly objects available to everyone, but a revolution in appreciation, a far deeper process, that would get us to notice what we already have to hand. Instead of reducing prices, he was raising levels of appreciation – which is a move perhaps more precious to us economically because it means we can all access great value with very little money.
— The School of Life: An Emotional Education (2019), p. 243
-- 住んでみててちょっと思うけどね、もしかして日本の良さとはひとつ「暮らし」にあるかもね
*1:ほら、自身の地元を '観光客' として -- 同じ場所を違う目で観察しながら -- 歩けることほどたのしいものはないでしょ ? -- もちろん、(Alexis de Tocqueville のいうように) ここで individualisme [自己満足] なんてゆるされたものではなく、Proust の想定した芸術家 (や彼自身) ぐらい努力する才能がなければね: ところで、このまえの誕生日に Paris 旅行をしたあとの Ruby Granger はこのことをよく理解していたと思うよ ("I'm aware that travelling to new places and seeing new places ... that's what gives you new perspectives, and that's what helps you to see the world in new ways"): https://youtu.be/UrE0PeZVQ6s?t=889
