An interesting article (in Quanta Magazine) on string theory, theoretical physics, and the philosophy of science:

A Fight for the Soul of Science

---

---

---

The imagination is defined here as a contractile power: like a sensitive plate, it retains one case when the other appears. It contracts cases, elements, agitations or homogeneous instants and grounds these in an internal qualitative impression endowed with a certain weight. When A appears, we expect B with a force corresponding to the qualitative impression of all the contracted ABs. This is by no means a memory, nor indeed an operation of the understanding: contraction is not a matter of reflection. Properly speaking, it forms a synthesis of time. [...] In any case, this synthesis must be given a name: passive synthesis. [...]

The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, form behaviour and form ourselves other than through contemplation.

Habit draws something new from repetition -- namely, difference (in the first instance understood as generality). In essence, habit is contraction. [...] [C]ontraction [...] refers to the fusion of successive tick-tocks [i.e., AB] in a contemplative soul. Passive synthesis is of [this] kind: it constitutes our habit of living, our expectation that 'it' will continue, that one of the two elements will appear after the other, thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case. [...]

-- from Difference & Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, p. 70-1, 73-4.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[P]erceptual syntheses refer back to organic syntheses which are like the sensibility of the senses; they refer back to a primary sensibility that we are. We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air [...]. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. [...]

What we call wheat is a contraction of earth and humidity, and this contraction is both a contemplation and the auto-satisfaction of that contemplation. By its existence alone, the lily of the field sings the glory of the heavens, the goddesses and gods -- in other words, the elements that it contemplates in contracting. [...]

Moreover, in order to integrate actions within a more complex action, the primary actions must in turn play the role of elements of repetition within a 'case', but always in relation to a contemplative soul adjacent to the subject of the compound action. Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our 'self' only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says 'me'. These contemplative souls must be assigned even to the rat in the labyrinth and to each muscle of the rat. Given that contemplation never appears at any moment during the action -- since it is always hidden, and since it 'does' nothing [...] -- it is easy to forget it and to interpret the entire process of excitation and reaction without any reference to repetition [...].

-- from Difference & Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, p. 73, 75-6.

---

---

---

An interesting article (on Artspace) on Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and Speculative Realism, in the art world:

What Is Object-Oriented Ontology? A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the Philosophical Movement Sweeping the Art World

---

---

---

An interesting article with a philosopher (Lee Braver) that touches on the continental-analytic divide:

On Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida

---

---

---

Many of the glossary words are, like ungive, memorably vivid. They function as topograms – tiny landscape poems, folded up inside verbs and nouns. I think of the Northamptonshire dialect verb to crizzle, for instance, a verb for the freezing of water that evokes the sound of a natural activity too slow for human hearing to detect (“And the white frost ’gins crizzle pond and brook”, wrote John Clare in 1821). When Gerard Manley Hopkins didn’t have a word for a natural phenomenon, he would simply – wonderfully – make one up: shivelight, for “the lances of sunshine that pierce the canopy of a wood”, or goldfoil for a sky lit by lightning in “zigzag dints and creasings”. Hopkins, like Clare, sought to forge a language that could register the participatory dramas of our relations with nature and landscape.

-- Robert Macfarlane, The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape (found here)

---

---

---

The moonlight behind the tall branches
The poets all say is more
Than the moonlight behind the tall branches.

But for me, who do not know what I think---
What the moonlight behind the tall branches
Is, beyond its being
The moonlight behind the tall branches,
Is its not being more
Than the moonlight behind the tall branches.

-- XXXV. "The moonlight behind the tall branches" from The Keeper of Sheep, by Fernando Pessoa

---

---

---

'He has shot like an arrow from the room,' said Bernard. 'He has left me his poem. [...] O friendship, how piercing are your darts -- there, there, again there. He looked at me, turning to face me; he gave me his poem. All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence -- dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones. All semblances were rolled up. "You are not [Lord] Byron; you are your self." To be contracted by another person into a single being -- how strange.

'[...] But now, how comfortable, how reassuring to feel that alien presence removed, that scrutiny darkened and hooded over! How grateful to draw the blinds, and admit no other presence; to feel returning from the dark corners in which they took refuge, those shabby inmates, those familiars, whom, with his superior force, he drove into hiding. The mocking, the observant spirits who, even in the crisis and stab of the moment, watched on my behalf now come flocking home again. With their addition, I am Bernard; I am Byron; I am this, that and the other. They darken the air and enrich me, as of old, with their antics, their comments, and cloud the fine simplicity of my moment of emotion. For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. [...]'

-- from The Waves, Virginia Woolf, p. 66

---

---

---