The Tower of Babel, we are told, was a monument to mankind's hubris in thinking Heaven could be taken by an act of architecture. In a mythical age devoid of scientific philosophy, the Tower of Babel was what passed in that time for the Ontological Argument, a formal proof attempting to locate God at the conclusion of a series of logical syllogisms: rather than build steps toward a conceptual goal based on reason, bricks were fashioned of dried mud for much the same purpose—to get to Heaven.
“The will to system is a lack of integrity.” ~ Nietzsche I must confess that I’m finding it harder, more laborious, to write my regularly-scheduled column for TAG. It’s not that the project is losing its charm for me, because as time goes on I’m finding the work of my fellow writers to be getting better, and the work of the new additions to the stable is maintaining that trend. It’s rather that I seem to be going through one of my periodic nigredo phases, when I tend to regard the productions of my ego with a sort of nausea, perhaps a “metaphysical masturbation” which tosses its generative fluid out into the objective world around me just so I can hold a card game with myself. Indeed the guileless generation of horrifyingly mangled mixed metaphors is par for the course when this happens, so I’m glad I got that writer’s rubicon out of the way right here in the first paragraph. I would like to observe that the weekly themes our Editor has tossed at us seem to unerringly reflect something of earth-shattering personal importance going on at the time, or at least it sure looks that way after I’ve
Books make great holiday gifts. They’re not usually very big or expensive, though they can be both. And they can signal a regard for the receiver’s interests, intelligence, and aesthetic sense. This sort of multi-level communication is very much in vogue these days. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again (1975) is maybe the easiest book to give, at least in my library. Everyone loves it. So many people that it almost cuts down on the specialness of the book as a gift. Except for that it is an incredibly intimate piece of writing. Not exactly in the sense offered by the latest Kitty Kelley biography, which imagines the uncovering of salacious gossip as some kind of final or conclusive knowledge about its protagonist. And Warhol loved every porny detail, don’t get me wrong. The thing is this is a “philosophy”: a warm, funny, charismatic, and full view of the world, its workings and its workers. The chapters alternate between a transcript of a telephone dialogue between “A” and “B,” and loose collections of anecdotes and aphorisms. Both genres are longtime staples of philosophical writing: Plato and Rousseau wrote dialogues, Pascal and Nietzsche wrote aphorisms. In
