Melville on the Perils of Platonist Whalers

From Moby Dick:

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.

"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

Noun Classifiers and the Wari

From Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate:

In a previous book I mentioned that the language of the Wari people of the Amazon has a set of noun classifiers that distinguish edible from inedible objects, and that the edible class includes anyone who is not a member of the tribe.

Quine on Language

From the first chapter in Quine's Word and Object:

Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfil the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.

Searle on Derrida's Intellectual Influence

Searle on why the mind-boggling Derrida became so fashionable in literary theory departments throughout the world (found in a review of Culler's book on deconstruction, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism from the New York Review of Books, vol. 30, no. 16, 27th October 1983):

It is apparently very congenial for some people who are professionally concerned with fictional texts to be told that all texts are really fictional anyway, and that claims that fiction differs significantly from science and philosophy can be deconstructed as a logocentric prejudice, and it seems positively exhilarating to be told that what we call "reality" is just more textuality. Furthermore, the lives of such people are made much easier than they had previously supposed, because now they don't have to worry about an author's intentions, about precisely what a text means, or about distinctions within a text between the metaphorical and the literal, or about the distinction between texts and the world because everything is just a free play of signifiers. The upper limit, and I believe the reductio ad absurdum, of this "sense of mastery" conveyed by deconstruction is in Geoffrey Hartman's claim that the prime creative task has now passed from the literary artist to the critic.

Because It's Funny

From The Age article on Casey Stoner:

Young gun: Casey Stoner, 21, with wife Adriana Tuchyna, 18. They met at Phillip Island four years ago when Adriana asked him to sign her stomach.

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

A major philosophical influence on Nietzsche was Schopenhauer. Scandalously, Schopenhauer is often left unread these days and what is often a Schopenhauerian thought read in one of Nietzsche's books, who still retains an allure for the contrarian wishing to take on the world, is often misinterpreted.

Hence, the following from Ecce Homo, which is classic Schopenhauer and brilliantly expounded in his epistemology, is often just taken as an one of Nietzsche's sui generis philosophical insights:

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

Remedial French

I can read French reasonably well thanks to my already having grappled with Spanish and Portuguese, but I still have trouble with remembering the following little features:

QUI (subject) = who, which, that (of persons or things)
QUE (object) = whom, which, that (of persons or things)
DONT = of whom, of which (of persons or things)
LEQUEL = who, which, that (of two) (of persons or things)
DUQUEL = of whom, which, that (of two) (of persons or things)
AUQUEL = to whom, which, that (of two) (of persons or things)
DE QUI = whose, of whom (persons only)
À QUI = to whom, whose
QUOI = what (things only)
DE QUOI = of what (things only)
À QUOI = to what (things only)
QUEL, QUELS, QUELLE, QUELLES = which (persons or things)
LEQUEL, LESQUELS, LAQUELLE, LESQUELLES = sexed version of that or whom as in "La soeur de Jean, laquelle est riche".

---

CELUI = this (masc)
CELLE = this (fem)
CEUX = this (masc pl)
CELLES = this (fem pl)
CE = this
CECI = this here
CELA = that there
ÇA = that

---

NE verb PERSONNE = nobody (Je ne parle avec personne = I do not speak with anyone)
NE verb RIEN = nothing (Je ne pense rien = I do not think anything (nothing))
NE verb PAS ENCORE = not yet (Je ne joue pas encore = I do not play yet)
NE verb QUE = only (Je ne pense qu'à ma mère = I think only of my mother)

---

EN = of something or some person and is masculine, feminine, singular and plural = equivalent of DE plus a noun

J'en ai = I have of it, of them
En avez vous? = Have you some of it? Have you (of) them?
Combien en avez-vous? = How much of it (or them) do you have?
J'en ai une douzaine = I have a dozen (of them)
J m'en souviens = I remember it (EN used for verbs that require "DE" after them)

Y = there and used as preposition of place and object of verbs that require à = the chief difference between Y and EN is that Y is seldom used for persons.

j'y avais = I am going (there)
j'y ai ètè = I have been (there)

nous leur y en avons parlé = we spoke of them of it there