Seven Deadly Sins and Formulations of Virtue

 Orts
Nov 192010
 

Seven Deadly Sins

Pride is excessive belief in one’s own abilities, that interferes with the individual’s recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.

Envy is the desire for others’ traits, status, abilities, or situation.

Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.

Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.

Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. It is also known as Wrath.

Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.

Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.

Formulations of Virtue over the Ages

The Cardinal Virtues: prudence, temperance, courage, justice
Classical Greek philosophers considered the foremost virtues to be prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. Early Christian Church theologians adopted these virtues and considered them to be equally important to all people, whether they were Christian or not.

The Theological Virtues: love, hope, faith
St. Paul defined the three chief virtues as love, which was the essential nature of God, hope, and faith. Christian Church authorities called them the three theological virtues because they believed the virtues were not natural to man in his fallen state, but were conferred at Baptism.

The Seven Contrary Virtues: humility, kindness, abstinence, chastity, patience, liberality, diligence
The Contrary Virtues were derived from the Psychomachia (“Battle for the Soul”), an epic poem written by Prudentius (c. 410). Practicing these virtues is alledged to protect one against temptation toward the Seven Deadly Sins: humility against pride, kindness against envy, abstinence against gluttony, chastity against lust, patience against anger, liberality against greed, and diligence against sloth.

The Seven Heavenly Virtues: faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice,temperance, prudence
The Heavenly Virtues combine the four Cardinal Virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude — or courage, and justice, with a variation of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity.

The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy
Continuing the numerological mysticism of Seven, the Christian Church assembled a list of seven good works that was included in medieval catechisms. They are: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, give shelter to strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick, minister to prisoners, and bury the dead

Soren Kierkegaard

 Orts
Nov 192010
 

The Rotation Method

The whole secret lies in arbitrariness. People usually think it easy to be arbitrary, but it requires much study to succeed in being arbitrary so as not to lose oneself in it, but so as to derive satisfaction from it. One does not enjoy the immediate, but something quite different which he can arbitrarily control. You go to see the middle of a play, you read the third part of a hook. By this means you insure yourself a very different kind of enjoyment from that which the author has been so kind as to plan for you. You enjoy something entirely accidental; you consider the whole of existence from this standpoint; let its reality be stranded thereon. I will cite an example. There was a man whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue. Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking. I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body. From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed. I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe.

The poet Baggesen says somewhere of someone that he was doubtless a good man, but that there was one insuperable objection against him, that there was no word that rhymed with his name. It is extremely wholesome thus to let the realities of life split upon an arbitrary interest. You transform something accidental into the absolute, and, as such, into the object of your admiration. This has an excellent effect, especially when one is excited. This method is an excellent stimulus for many persons. You look at everything in life from the standpoint of a wager, and so forth. The more rigidly consistent you are in holding fast to your arbitrariness, the more amusing the ensuing combinations will be. The degree of consistency shows whether you are an artist or a bungler; for to a certain extent all men do the same. The eye with which you look at reality, must constantly be changed. The painter Tischbein sought to idealize every human being into an animal. His method has the fault of being too serious, in that it endeavors to discover a real resemblance.

Fragments on Persian History

 Orts
Nov 192010
 

Two titles to note:

Pierre Briant. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Eisenbrauns: 2002) ISBN 1575060310.

Josef Wiesenhofer. Ancient Persian From 550 BC to 650 AD. (Tauris: 2001) ISBN 1850439990.

Review in TLS 2003-07-10 by James Davidson, “Versailles With Panthers”.

On Briant: “his book should be not only required reading for classicists, but also of great interest for students of later monarchical systems, from Britain to Mughal India.”

On Wiesenhofer: “highly readable”

Xenophon’s account of Cyrus’ invasion of Babylon resonates. He knows that his troops are fearful of fighting in the city because the people will go up onto the roofs and fire down on them. Cyrus encourages his troops not to worry since they have plenty of pinewood for torches and will burn down the city – making the rooftops unpalatable places upon which to resist the troops entry into the city. The city was handed over to Cyrus without a fight. To help keep the peace, Cyrus order that all Babylonians had to give up their arms and that wherever weapons were found in a house, the inhabitants were to be put to death.

“Statues are like chess pieces in the ancient Near East, full of power and significance, always being kidnapped, rescued and triumphantly returned.”

The role of the “paradise” gardens in Persian (pre-Islam) is notable since it was later adopted into Islamic culture and theology as well. Tree loving was particularly important since trees were well established images of royal authority in the Near East. Kings were the powers that made the deserts bloom. Paradise means power in the simplest semiotic. The King was seen as a kind of “gardener”. Needless to say, when revolts or invasions took place, one of the first things that was done was to attack the trees and gardens – the symbols of authority.

Briant insists on a view of the Persian polity as one of “imperial consistency and provincial variety. “The peculiar genius of the Achaemenid Empire lay, he suggests, in the balance between cultural diversity and political unity, putting the former at the service of the latter… what kept the whole thing together was a dynastic pact with a thin but enduring layer of socio-ethnic imperial aristocrats, essentially Persian, though not nationalistic, and able to integrate with provincial elites through marriage… The balance between unity and diversity seems also to be bound up with the personal nature of the Empire and the mechanisms of gift-exchange, in the construction of power as superior dignity and subjection as obligation.

Recording technology and music

 Orts
Nov 192010
 

Mark Katz. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. (University of California Press). The “most approachable” of the three texts.

Colin Symes. Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording. (Weslayan).

Robert Philip. Performing Music in the Age of Recording. (Yale).

See fine review article by Alex Ross “The Record Effect: How technology has transformed the sound of music” in The New Yorker, June 6, 2005.

Selected quotes from the article:

John Philip Sousa: “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music. Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.”

“Technology reflects whatever musical culture is exploiting it. The machine is a mirror of our needs and fears.” (attributed to Katz).

The phonograph was not invented by Edison with music in mind but as a means to aid business communication – to replace stenography and improve archiving. To “annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man.” (Edison in 1878 essay).

By the 1890s entrepreneurs were installing phonographs in penny arcades for customers to listen to favorite songs.

The first great star was Enrico Caruso. “From the start, the phonograph favored brassy singing, knife-edged winds and brass, the thump of percussion – whatever could best puncture surface noise.”

“The phonograph was never a mere recorder of events: it changed how people sang and played.” These changes are called “phonograph effects” (according to Katz). One example used by Katz is the change in violin technique in the 20th century and the particular increase in the use of vibrato (which allowed the violin to by picked up more easily in recordings) and the way it allowed players to cover inaccuracies in intonation.

Stravinsky: “Oversaturated with sounds, blase even before combinations of the utmost variety, listeners fall into a kind of torpor which deprives them of all powers of discrimination.”

The arrival of magnetic tape reduced the level of surface noise and meant that a greater range of sounds could be recorded. It also allowed performers to create a reality by allowing editing of the sound.

“Recording hs the unsettling power to transform any kind of music, nomatter how unruly or how sublime, into a collectible object, which becomes decor for the lonely modern soul.” (Alex Ross)

“In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.” (Benjamin Boretz, American composer)

“The paradox of recording is that it can preserve forever those disappearing moments of sound but never the spark of humanity that generates them. This is a paradox common to technological existence: everything gets a little easier and a little less real.” (Alex Ross)

Notes on Photography

 Orts
Nov 192010
 

Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. (Hamish Hamilton, 2003). 0241142075.

Review: Jeremy Harding “Humanitarian Art”. LRB 2003.08.21

Photographs are accessories to the act of remembering. “What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important… with the pictures that lock the story in out minds.”

“To designate a hell is not … to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell…Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others.” To look at a photograph is to pay attention. And attention, however compromised, is better than indifference or ignorance.

“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood… No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.”

“Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens and cannot possibly encompass all the reality of a people’s agony, they still perform an immensely positive function. The images says: keep these events in your memory.”

“To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”

[Harding] “To universalize is both desirable and dangerous, then. Desirable because it is a way of unpacking atrocities committed in the name of this and that, in order to insist that they are first and foremost atrocities. Dangerous because it disguises or obfuscates problems of power.”

“If photographs of devastation in Spain ‘could only stimulate the repudiation of was in the mind of one observer, in another ‘surely they could foster greater militancy on behalf of the Republic.'”

“All photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.”

“The photograph is itself neutral, neither for nor against any political position; a statement of witness, about what people do to each other.”

“The frustration of not being able to do anything about what the images show may be translated into an accusation of the indecency of regarding such images.” But in Sontag’s view this is to charge the photographs with crimes they have not committed.

According to David Levi Strauss’ perspective “photographs can get the viewer started on all kinds of work – visual, intellectual and intuitive – and that a lot of it is richer than the term ‘moral’ can encompass, at least in first draft. But photographs have a way of dragging what is said of them into the moral register, especially when it comes to politics.”