A mother’s eye

I often boast about the artistic genius of my two-year-old son.  But alas, others don’t always share my enthusiasm.  When I show off his work, I am likely to be greeted with a blank stare or a dismissive smile.  So, in this post, I have taken the liberty of interpreting a few of my son’s drawings to allow everyone to see them through the eyes of his mother.

Meet shy elephant, papa penguin, and sad clown:

I took a few pictures Anton drew on the twelve and thirteen of Sept. and transformed them to the cartoons you see on the left.  My husband then took the snapshots I posted here, so it was quite the family art project.  I outlined in red the part of Anton’s picture of the elephant that I used (I think he changed his mind as he was drawing and decided he wanted a more lively creature), but I think it’s relatively easy to see which lines I followed for the other two.  Click on the images to take a closer look if you can’t tell from the thumbnails.

When you have to represent an image, observe some walls that are besmeared with stains or composed of stones of varying substances.  You can discover in them resemblances to a variety of mountainous landscapes, rivers, rocks, trees, vast plains, and hills.  You can also see in them battles and human figures, strange facial features and items of clothing, and an infinite number of other things whose forms you can straighten out and improve.  It is the same with crumbling walls as it is with the sound of church bells, in which you can discover every name and every word you want.

- Leonardo da Vinci, as translated by M.C. Escher in The Regular Division of the Plane, from Escher on Escher

Stumbling upon M.C. Escher’s garden in Bohuslän

A very rough,  preliminary sketch of an apology to Socrates for the arts

What does the art of M.C Escher have in common with Bohus knits?  Surprisingly much, if you ask me.  While most people, even if they don’t know the name, would probably recall having seen at least a few of M.C. Escher’s prints, the same is not true of Bohus Knitting.  Because many people, at least outside of Sweden and outside of knitting circles, are likely to be wholly unfamiliar with Bohus knits, a short history is in order.

The history begins in 1939, when a group of Swedish women living in Bohuslän (the Göteborg area in the southwestern part of Sweden) formed a knitting (“stickning”) cooperative.  Many of their husbands – miners and farmers – lost their jobs due to the Depression, so they hoped to supplement their income.  Their venture turned out to be a tremendous success both at home and abroad.  Bohus knits were widely exhibited internationally and presented as gifts to visiting kings and dignitaries in Sweden.   The cooperative closed in 1969, but many of the patterns are still in circulation today.  The Bohusläns Museum (click here for an English version of the page) also has a fairly extensive collection of patterns on display and knitting kits on sale.  Additional patterns can be found here.  The two images below are examples of the intricate patterns and color work that became the signature of this knitting style. (Clicking on the image redirects to a more detailed picture on the Museum website.)

Bohus "Skogsmörkret" pattern (Forest Darkness)

Bohus "Vävnaden" pattern

I have been posting some of my knitting and crochet projects in my blog gallery, and I was browsing through the Bohus patterns in search of something new to knit.  It didn’t take me long, however, to realize that these patterns were well beyond my current skill level.  As I am often blown away by the ingenuity of even some of the most basic knitting motifs and the sheer number of possibilities unlocked by the use of just two fundamental stitches, I surmised that the woman tho created the first Bohus pattern must have been a mathematical genius, and a quote from M.C. Escher, which had once deeply impressed me, leapt to mind.  I went to look up the passage, which was as follows:

Mathematicians have theoretically mapped out the regular division of a plane because this is part of crystallography.  Does it therefore belong exclusively to mathematics?  I do not think so.  Crystallographers have given us a definition of the concept and have researched and determined what and how many systems and methods exist for dividing a plane regularly.  By doing this they have opened the gate that gives access to a vast domain, but they themselves have not entered.  Their nature is such that they are more interested in the way the gate is opened than in the garden that lies behind it.  Let me continue with this analogy for a while.  Long ago during my wanderings I happened to come into the neighborhood of that domain.  I saw a high wall and, because I had a presentiment of something enigmatic and hidden that might lie behind it,  I climbed it with difficultly.  However, on the other side I landed in a wilderness through which I had to make my way with much effort until I arrived via detours at the open gate, the open mathematical gate.  From there well-cleared paths extended in various directions, and since then I often spend time there.  Sometimes I think I have covered the entire domain and trod all the paths and admired all the views.  Then all of a sudden I find another new way, and I taste a new delight.

-M. C. Escher, from The Regular Division of the Plain, as compiled in Escher on Escher

It occurred to me that the Bohus knitters were playing in, or at least on the perimeter of, that very same garden described by Escher.  Knitters must knit their own canvas, so in a way, the very nature of knitting assures that the background will not be reduced to an inferior status.   And, repetition and multiplication, which Escher credited for “everything we love, learn, order, recognize, and accept,” is also central to the knitters craft.

One of my favorite plane-filling motifs by M.C. Escher

Plane-filling motif on Bohus mitten

While Escher was a graphic artist (so the template for his individual prints was contained in an etching),  a knitter reproduces his or her work by means of codifying the pattern in a set of instructions which look something like this:   K1, p1, [p4, k4] twice, k5, p1 (the preceding symbols representing a single row in a pattern for a scarf).  Or, more complicated patterns can be represented in charts, using symbols like these:

Chart from scarf pattern on knitty.com

To the uninitiated, these symbols appear fairly daunting:  there is nothing to connect it with, it is a language that stands on its own.  Yet, at least knitters possess a language into which they can translate their visual creations and share them among themselves.  This allows for the creation of vibrant knitting communities and the development of distinctive styles of knitting, such as that exemplified by Bohus Stickning.  Escher, on the other hand, expresses frustration in what follows with his inability to communicate thoughts which he, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, viewed as essentially objective:

It is not part of my profession to make use of letter symbols, but in this case I am forced to.  However, I have not received any training for this, as I have in the use of illustrations that serve as a means of expressing thoughts in a more direct way than the word.  Still, my images require explanation because without it they remain too hermetic and too much of a formula for the uninitiated observer. The interplay of thoughts they translate is essentially completely objective and impersonal.  To my unending amazement, however, this is apparently so unusual and in a sense so new that I am unable to identify any “expert” in addition to myself who is sufficiently comfortable with it to give a written explanation.

-M. C. Escher, from The Regular Division of the Plain, as compiled in Escher on Escher

Escher found a certain degree of comity with mathematicians, however, with whom he sometimes collaborated. I don’t even think it is too much of a stretch to suggest that his collaboration with the physicist Roger Penrose, among others, is quite possibly the closest link between art and math and the natural sciences since the time of Leonardo da Vinci’s collaboration with the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli. The resulting book, De Divina Proportione (The Divine Proportion), written by Pacioli and illustrated by Da Vinci, carried an immeasurable influence on the trajectory of art and architecture that followed, up until today.  It is an astonishing shame, therefore, that although any property right maintained in that work should have long since expired, the book appears to be unavailable today, either in hard copy or as scanned in databases such as Project Gutenberg or Google Books. (If anyone knows anything about this, please comment or email me!)

The preceding thoughts all led me to wonder:  why, apart from a few notable exceptions, is there such a large divide between art on the one hand, and math and the natural sciences on the other?  This divide traces back at least to the time of Plato, who, in his Republic, famously argued for the censorship of all art that didn’t pass his rather strict criteria. This, I believe, was Plato’s greatest error, as I will try to explain.

In the single most profound statement of educational philosophy I have ever encountered, in Book VII of The Republic, Plato claims that education is not “putt[ing] into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it,” but rather a redirection, a “turning around.” Plato thought that the soul must be turned away from the material world, or what “is coming into being,”  and instead turned towards the forms, which for Plato were true being, or what is.  A significant part of The Republic is thus devoted to the problem of ensuring that able people remain faced in the right direction, so to speak.  To accomplish this, Plato resorts to all kinds of contortions, including the extreme censorship mentioned previously, but also the so-called “noble lie,”  the deprivation of wages and all forms of private property for the upper-classes, communal living (no spouses, no one to know whose children belong to who), and the suggestion that knowledge of the forms will allow one to reap rewards posthumously.  All of these measures were outlined as means to blunt the all too human desire for material gain.  But, these measures also transformed Plato’s noble aristocracy into a regime that had all too much in common with a tyranny.

Plato didn’t need to resort to so many contortions to accomplish his objective.  What he needed was art.  Although he devoted much of his work in defence of philosophy, in part by drawing a clear distinction between true philosophy and philosophy corrupted by worldly values, he apparently failed to allow that art too, could become corrupt.  In keeping with an analogy used by Plato in the Gorgias:  sophistry: justice :: cookery: medicine :: entertainment : art.  Or, too put it in another way, a lawyer has about as much in common with a true philosopher as an entertainer has with an artist.

Although I do not of course subscribe to Plato’s view of the forms, I do think that there is still a certain sense in which philosophy (and more generally, the natural sciences, which were not distinct in Plato’s time) need art.  Art is the natural motivating factor that forms the counter-balance to the material drives that Plato so desperately tried to control.  Escher expresses this point so perfectly by his garden analogy to which the mathematicians opened the gate but did not enter.  Unfortunately, Escher’s words resonated with all too few, and today a connection between art and science is often very difficult to find.

Instead, it is science and technology that are bound so tightly that it is sometimes hard to tell when science ends and technology begins.  This is all good and well, but I cannot help but feel that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger was on to something with his essay The Question Concerning Technology:  there are other ways of relating to being that we might do well to remember.  Art is one of these ways.

To borrow a useful distinction from Berkeley Professor John Searle concerning ontological and epistemic subjectivity and objectivity, albeit in an unintended context:   technology is created roughly by taking something given, something which is ontologically objective, and then manipulating it to perform a function which is ontologically subjective.  Recall now Escher’s statement that the thoughts he represented were essentially objective.  True art, I believe, takes care to maintain ontological objectivity – there is no change on a fundamental ontological level.  Instead, with art, the change occurs on the epistemic level.  The artist shows us a different way of looking at – of knowing - something ontologically objective.  Art is thus epistemically subjective, but an underlying ontologically objective structure must be maintained, or it is not art. [When an epistemic change is brought about to an underlying structure that is ontologically subjective (e.g., buildings, furniture, clothes, etc.), it is design.]*

It is this epistemically subjective feature of art that accounts for another interesting observation of Escher’s.  He notes:

The plastic arts have not experienced an evolution.  In everything else that man makes and in much of what he thinks, he adds his contribution to what has been done by previous generations.  In everything he strives toward perfection.  The development of his spirit and his increasing mental grasp are staggering in all aspects — except in the plastic arts.  It seems to me that here each individual has to start from scratch each time, without ever taking anything of really primary importance from a predecessor.

-M.C. Escher, from Newsletter of the Dutch Circle of Graphic Artists and Illustrators as compiled in Escher on Escher.

While one might certainly argue against Escher and hold that art has evolved and artists, just as scientists, also “stand on the shoulders of giants,” I think this is missing the point.  There is undeniably a sense in which art is not cumulative in the same sense as that of progress in technology.  This argument is all too often used against art, to show its inferiority (or perhaps more often, it’s unworthiness for funding).  I suppose this is what prompts patrons of the arts to argue that art has “evolved,” as well as other arguments attempting to show the material usefulness of art.  However, any defense of art that proceeds by attaching an ontologically subjective function to it could only result in a Pyrrhic victory:  such a win could only come at the cost of denying to art its defining and most-worthy feature.

A proper defense of art must redress Aristophanes’ affront to Socrates which so enraged Plato. Such a defense would necessarily invoke the same difficulties Plato had in The Republic with defending philosophy generally, but if we are to avoid the contortions Plato resorted to, art must take its rightful place beside philosophy as the one motivational factor capable of “turning around” the intellect  and providing a counter-balance in the individual’s life to the drive for material gain.  The roots for such a defense, I think, are there to be found in the writings and work of M.C. Escher and the Bohus knitters.

* These distinctions are not always so clear due to the fact that there can also be art on top of (or even, e.g., on the walls of) a design, as is the case with knitting, but this simply recasts the age-old form-function-ornament debate, which is beyond the scope of this draft.

Scandinavian Literature: Knut Hamsun

Thoughts after reading the novels Hunger, Mysteries, and Victoria by the Nobel-prize winning Norwegian author Knut Hamsun

Every July, the inhabitants of Stockholm pour out of the city and tourists come streaming in.  It sometimes seems as if everyone in Stockholm must take the entire month off work.  In our district, the few children without vacation plans for July (including my son) were all moved to a central daycare, the only one that remained open.  The daycare my son attended was located next to a nature reserve by the Igelbäcken stream, so the walk there, although quite a bit longer than usual, was absolutely beautiful.  There were also two water fountains located along our route where my son always insisted on stopping in the afternoons on the way back home.  We were never in any hurry, so when the weather was nice (which it often was this July), we stopped at the water fountains so Anton could chase after birds and I could read.  I chose several short novels by the renowned Norwegian author, Knut Hamsun, as my reading material. The novels were very quick reads, both because they were short, only a few hundred pages each, and because they so easily absorbed the reader in the story.  I was finished with each one in only a few sittings, and Anton was happy to play outside by the fountains while I read.

The first novel I read, Victoria, was a tragic love story with a twist.  Unlike, say for example, Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers are doomed because of external factors entirely beyond their control, the plot in Victoria is set up so that the external obstacles, while compelling enough to provoke sympathy for the characters, are by no means insurmountable.  Unfortunately, however, the lovers do not have enough faith in their love to take the leap, and they end up torturing each other in a perverse attempt to find some kind of objective proof capable of giving them the will to overcome these obstacles. Of course, such proof does not exist, and in the end, it is the lovers themselves, and not the obstacles per se, that bring about their own doom.

The contrast between inner life and perceived reality is also brilliantly portrayed by Hamsun.  To spectators, Victoria’s sudden decline in physical demeanor – her pale look and faded beauty – were due to her fiance’s tragic hunting accident.  In reality, her appearance reflected the news that her true love had, in the mean time, also promised himself to someone else.  Likewise, to the outside world, the narrator of the book was a wildly successful author and entertainer, but in reality, all of his books and poems were inspired by and written to one person:  Victoria.  She was the only reader he cared about.

The second book I read, Mysteries, I think I enjoyed even more than Victoria. The book centered around a stranger’s visit to a coastal Norwegian town. The stranger possessed striking intuitive insights, which often unnerved the local residents.  This book also contains elements of a tragic love story, but unlike Victoria, the book is not centered around love, but has a more expanded scope on intuition in general.

Finally, the last book I read, Hunger, now ranks easily as one of my favorite books of all-time.  Hunger’s main theme was artistic inspiration, although again, elements of tragic love and intuitive insight also appear in the book.  The main character, a writer who would sooner starve than suffer spiritual or moral corruption, could have been a guardian or philosopher king in Plato’s ideal city-state.  Hamsun, however, caught his hero in an all -too-plausible inversion of Plato’s ideal, and left him dependent on the vulgar and base for shelter and bread.

The genius of all three books, in my opinion, lies in Hamsun’s ability to portray both the extreme fragility and the supreme importance in those phenomenon which, although outside the scope of scientific enquiry, in practice play a large role in human affairs.  According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, these are the things which “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”  Or, as put by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger:

Earlier I have commented on the fact that for this same reason the physical world picture lacks all the sensual qualities that go to make up the Subject of Cognizance.  The model is colourless and soundless and unpalpable.  In the same way and for the same reason the world of science lacks, or is deprived of, everything that has a meaning only in relation to the consciously contemplating, perceiving and feeling subject.  I mean in the first place the ethical and aesthetical values, any values of any kind, everything related to the meaning and scope of the whole display. All this is not only absent but it cannot, from the purely scientific point of view, be inserted organically.  If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit.  For anything that is made to enter this world model willy-nilly takes the form of scientific assertion of facts, and as such it becomes wrong.

-Erwin Schrödinger, from What is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

Hamsun transports us out of the realm of science and into to the realm of the ideal – into the arms of art, religion, and philosophy -and shows us how these things can be everything and nothing at the same time.  And so love, for example, “is only a wind whispering among the roses and dying away,” but also “an inviolable seal that endures for life, endures till death.”  How does one know whether one is in the presence of the former or the latter?  From a scientific perspective, it is a meaningless love affair – a firing of neurons,  a release of chemicals.  The possibility of the latter exists only subjectively, in the mind or spirit of an individual.

The subjective nature of Hamsun’s themes is what makes them so extremely delicate.  Love, intuition, inspiration:  how fleeting the feeling, how easy it is to doubt, to dismiss.  There can never be an objective confirmation of the meaningfulness of these occurrences in an individual’s life. But one ignores them, or analyzes them from a scientific perspective (which at best amounts to the same thing, and at worst can drive a person insane*) at one’s own peril.  Hamsun here enters the domain of Kierkegaard’s repetition and Dostoevsky’s miracles. While the notions are somewhat different for all three authors, there is a common thread.  For Kierkegaard, “repetition is the raising of [ ] consciousness to the second power.”  It is “the movement by virtue of the absurd that commences when one has reached the border of the wondrous,” and it occurs when:

. . .being has been split . . . the moment it is apparent that the individual can lose himself in events, fate, lose himself in such a way that he therefore by no means stops contemplating but loses himself in such a way that freedom is taken up completely in life’s fractions without leaving a remainder, then the issue becomes manifest . . .

- Soren Kierkegaard, A Little Contribution by Constantin Constantius, Author of Repetition

This point, when the crisis comes, when “being has been split” is the same point at which Dostoevsky saves his hero in The Brothers Karamazov by a miracle in the guise of a meaningful coincidence linked to a dream.  And time and time again in Hunger, Hamsun’s hero also reaches this point of absolute despair, but as soon as this point arrives – the moment he begins to curse God and welcome his death – he is saved by a sudden flash of inspiration or an unexpected act of kindness.  Such occurrences appear as a lifeline thrown out to the character which, if he does not reach out and grab, will leave him to fall and drown in the dizzying depths below.

Hamsun is a brilliant writer, but his stories are dark and his characters profoundly unhappy.  The mood of the novels contrasted sharply with the idyllic scenery surrounding me, and I often found myself worrying whether so much happiness was bound to be cursed.  I think I have had my fill of Hamsun now for a while, but am sure to pick him up again when I feel capable of reading Pan in Swedish (much, much closer to the original Norwegian than is possible with an English translation).

Anton sitting beside one of the fountains on the way to "dagis," the Swedish expression for daycare.

* The trap of analyzing such phenomenon from a scientific perspective is, I think, masterfully demonstrated by Vladimir Nabokov in The Defense.

Useful Heuristics: I and II

Commentary/explanations to follow

Heuristic I

Level One (Material) –> natural sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, etc.

Level Two (Pragmatic, collision between levels one and two) –> social sciences:  law, economics, sociology, demographics, etc.

Level Three (Ideal) –> arts and humanities:  philosophy, religion, art

Level Four (Meta) –> pure mathematics (form), information (bits, content)

Heuristic II

		Results
		Material survival of Individual	Material survival of Society	Ideal (well-being) of Individual	Ideal (well-being) of Society
Agency (Governance)	Individual pursuit of Material	=	Divergent	X	Divergent
	Societal pursuit of Material	Divergent	=	Divergent	X
	Individual pursuit of Ideal	X	Correlated	=	Correlated
	Societal pursuit of Ideal	Divergent	Correlated (exception)	Correlated	=

Miracles and Mysteries in The Brothers Karamazov

Thoughts after reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

I have read The Idiot, and I have read Crime and Punishment. Those books I read ages ago, before law school, but The Brothers Karamazov remained on my “to read” list for years before I finally picked it up this summer.  The book just seemed too long, too dark (a parricide?!, even the cover art seemed dreary and depressing), too male (weren’t there any sisters in this book?), and too Christian (questions concerning old church doctrines couldn’t hold any interest to me).  I left my copy of the book with my parents in the U.S. when I moved back to Europe after my clerkship.  At some point, I asked my mom to send me the book, but she couldn’t find it. When we came back to visit, I looked through my old stuff for it, but I didn’t have any better luck than my mom.  The book seemed to have disappeared.  I forgot about it for a time.  There were other things to read.

Later I ran across Professor Dreyfus’s webcasts of his course on Existentialism in Literature and Film at the University of California, Berkeley. The course featured selections from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and somewhat to my surprise, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  Now, I was really curious.  I got another copy of the book and decided to read it this summer.

The book turned out to be a treat to read – every bit the literary masterpiece it was billed to be.  I finished reading, satisfied that I’d learned something and happy that the book had been well worth my time. But almost as soon as I’d returned the book to the bookshelf, a funny thing happened:  I suddenly found myself moved to tears after seeing an author ridiculed by posts on social news sites.  A separate blog post can be found about the incident here.  It was as a result of this incident that I ended up picking the book up again and began musing over the unsolved problems as set forth in Professor Dreyfus’s lectures.

In The Grand Inquistor, a story contained within The Brothers Karamazov, a Spanish Cardinal explains that the church was founded upon miracle, mystery and authority.  Dostoevsky took it upon himself to explain the significance of these three things in terms of human experience.  In my previous post, I blogged about Dostoevsky’s conception of authority. In this post, I will discuss miracles and mysteries.

Mysteries

After my realization with respect to Dostoevsky’s treatment of authority, I went back to Professor Dreyfus’s lectures to see what the remaining open issues were.  Although Professor Dreyfus had found the places in the book where Dostoevsky had “existentialized” different doctrines like baptism and confession, he wondered what was meant by the use of the word “mystery” in The Grand Inquisitor. I thought back to my Catholic upbringing, and it seemed to me that I remembered hearing the word “mystery” used with respect to receiving communion.  The anointing of the sick also crossed my mind as something that had been explained as a “mystery.”  I looked those up on Wikipedia and the Catholic encyclopedia, but found that I was thinking of the seven sacraments.

I asked my husband, who was baptised in the Orthodox church, if he knew anything about Orthodox “mysteries.” He is not religious, and couldn’t remember much either, but looked up taina, the Romanian word for mystery, on the Romanian language version of Wikipedia. He found that the word taina, or mystery, was synonymous with sacramente, or sacraments.  Evidently, the Greek word “mysterion” is translated in Latin as “sacramentum.” I also looked up “mystery” on Wikipedia, which confirmed that the word is used in the Eastern Orthodox tradition to refer to what are known as the sacraments in the Western tradition.  The seven sacred mysteries (sacraments) are:  baptism, chrismation (confirmation), holy communion, confession, holy orders, matrimony, and unction (the anointing of the sick, or “last rites”).

Because many of the individual mysteries were explained throughout Professor Dreyfus’s lectures, this is primarily only of organizational interest.  However, what follows is a few notes on each.

• Baptism was explained as a positive, loving childhood memory.
• Chrismation appears to be closely connected to baptism, but it relates primarily to the sign of the cross preformed over someone to “seal the initiate with the gifts of the Holy Spirit,” an act that was preformed by the doctor Herzenstube over Dmitry as a child.
• Dostoevsky allowed a “last supper” for Dmitry when he feasted in the town of Mokroye the night before he was arrested.  Holy Communion is taken to commemorate the last supper, which gives me to wonder whether Dmitry’s first feast was the “last supper” and the second feast a communion in commemoration of the first.  The other possibility is that communion is represented by, for example, the Elder Zosima sitting down and drinking tea with his former servant.  In the description of this meeting,  Elder Zosima notes that “between us a great act of human unity had taken place.” Later he recalls:

´What do you want us to do?´they said, ’sit our servants down on the sofa and bring them cups of tea?´ And then I said to them in answer:  `Well, why not, if at least only on occasion?´Then they all laughed.  Their question was a frivolous one, and my reply unclear, but I think that it contained a certain amount of truth.

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, From the Discourses of the Elder Zosima

• The importance of confession was illustrated by the Elder Zosima’s story of the mysterious stranger.
• Ordination was shown by, for example, the Elder Zosima’s dying brother Markel instructing the Elder as a child, in the twilight hour, to “go now and play and live for me!” Another example was Alyosha’s mother dedicating him to the icon, also in the twilight hour.
• No marriages took place in the book, so perhaps Dostoevsky intended to show the importance of this sacrament in his intended follow-up work.  My guess is that it has something to do with Professor Dreyfus’s insight that each character in the book seems to have an “existential double.”
• The anointing of the sick was described in detail by Alyosha’s tending to the sick child Ilyusha.  In these scenes, Dostoevsky describes the process of reconciliation, forgiveness, and a kind of coming to terms with one’s past deeds. I don’t remember any part of the book in which anyone was anointed with oil or perfume, but I wasn’t reading the book looking for such an incident either.  There was an interesting scene in which the dog Zhuchka licked Ilyusha “all over one side of his face,”which makes me wonder whether Dostoevsky might have been making a little bit of fun of the tradition of anointing the sick with oil, but that’s speculative.

One last note about the mysteries:  in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the primary mystery is the incarnation of God. The sacraments receive their importance in relation to this, as a means by which man can become reunited with God.

Miracles

Dostoevsky’s treatment of miracles may be one of the most interesting and thought-provoking aspects of the book.  In his lectures, Professor Dreyfus explains how Dostoevsky de-mystifies one of the most mystical parts of Christianity. The task was a difficult one:  Dostoevsky had to show how a miracle could both be rare and extraordinary – not something that happens every day – and yet, also something that would not contravene the laws of physics and chemistry. To do this, Dostoevsky seizes upon the transformative power of agape love.  What struck me most however, was not the transformation itself – not the content of the miracle – but the mechanism (or perhaps “vehicle” is a better word) for the miracle.

While reading the book, I was struck by this passage during the scene which led to the salvation of both Alyosha and Grushenka:

. . . he might have fathomed that for both there had coincided all the elements necessary to shake their souls in the way that this infrequently occurs in life.

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, The Onion

“Aha!,” I thought, “there’s an example of a meaningful coincidence!” Another meaningful coincidence was portrayed later in the book, when Ivan runs into the singing bum. Miracles, it seems for Dostoevsky, are mirrored by the work of the devil. While Alyosha is portrayed as being saved by the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence followed by a vision in a dream, Ivan seems to be doomed via the same mechanism:  a meaningful coincidence followed by a vision, although in his case it is not clear whether the vision was a dream or a delusion.

I found Dostoyevsky’s use of meaningful coincidence in particular quite fascinating.  A meaningful coincidence can be defined as a random event or string of events that are in no way causally connected, but that nonetheless appear subjectively meaningful to the observer.  Interest in the same phenomenon had years earlier introduced me to the psychology of Carl Jung, who had formulated a concept he called synchronicity to account for it.  Jung published a short book on synchronicity in collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli.  However, the book is no longer available with Pauli’s essay, and because I had difficulties locating either a copy of Pauli’s contribution or the Pauli-Jung letters, I ended up reading a book by a Swedish PhD student, Suzanne Gieser, who had written her doctoral thesis on the relationship between the two giants.  It is also worth mentioning that, according to Jung in his book on synchronicity, the concept had also been explored in an essay by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, but I have also been unable to locate that particular essay.

Unfortunately, much of Jung’s essay on synchronicty now seems quite dated, primarily due to his forays into experiments regarding telepathy and psychokinesis.  On the other hand, his attempts to find scientific verification of the phenomenon does not strike me as any stranger than, for example, something like the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, which is based on the hypothesis that “human intention can reduce natural entropy and create greater coherence within a random series of events.”  This was essentially the same thing that Jung was attempting to show.

It seems to me however, that a better line of inquiry into the phenomenon of the meaningful coincidence might be through memetics, a modern theory concerning cultural information transfer.  This is because the probability of, for example, hearing or seeing of a certain word or concept should be the same both before and after any partiuclar individual learns about that concept.  Memetics shows that this is not always the case, as certain words and concepts seem to appear with greater frequency in society at different times. Thus, memetics seems to provide a way for distinguishing the phenomenon from cognitive biases such as the recency effect or the confirmation bias.

The picture of cultural diffusion painted by memetics also seems relevant to Dostoevsky’s conception of the spread of agape love.  As Professor Dreyfus pointed out, his idea appears to be that pioneering or originating spirits (e.g., Markel in the book) are destroyed by radical revelations because they do not yet have the vocabulary and means to effectively communicate and share their vision.  In an intermediate stage, the revelation becomes institutionalized, and supported by an isolated community of individuals sharing the same beliefs (e.g., Zosima in the monastery).  The last stage occurs when it is spread among the general public (e.g., Alyosha’s role).  I can’t help but to relate these three stages to a more general conception of the diffusion of ideas, and think of Cantor, Boltzman and Nietzsche, each of the same generation, and all driven mad by radical new ideas undermining the quest for certainty in each of their respective fields:  physics, math, and philosophy.

Finally, according to Littlewood’s law, the laws of probability guarantee each person about one miracle per month.  Of course, Littlewood does not use meaningful coincidence in his definition of miracle, but merely defines a miracle as an exceptional event occurring at a frequency of about one out of a million other events.  Because he then defines “event” as something occurring every second, he concludes that exceptional events, or miracles, must be commonplace. That leads me to wonder: are meaningful coincidences also too commonplace to count as miracles?  After all, even my waiting to read the Brothers Karamazov for so long, running across the Dreyfus lectures after I had become an attorney and was tuned into issues concerning authority, and finally, seeing the cruel posts on Reddit and Digg mocking an author . . . these events were a string of coincidences that turned out to be meaningful, to be sure, but could this be called a miracle?

My answer is no, because I think Dostoevsky intended to limit his definition of miracle by requiring the coincidence to (1) have a very profound significance in the life of the individual, one capable of pushing him over the edge towards faith, or, in the case of the devil’s work, damnation, and (2) be linked to a dream or vision.  On the other hand, it is also possible that Dostoevsky was trying to distinguish minor and major (mediate and non-mediated) miracles by using a two-fold notion, but I think the former is more probable.

**Update** Professor Dreyfus places a big emphasis on framing the antinomies in terms of the Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox positions, the Orthodox position being the “solution.”  I am not convinced that this framework, while helpful in some cases, is always so significant, simply because the views of the religions are not so divergent in every aspect treated by Dostoevsky.  For example, what is the difference between the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox view on miracles?  With respect to the framework of the Grand Inquisitor, as Professor Dreyfus points out, Jesus rejects miracles, whereas the Catholic Church as represented by the Cardinal manufactured miracles for the people in supernatural forms.  But apart from that, it appears that miracles in all three religions involve the contradiction of the laws of physics and chemistry, as contrasted with Dostoevsky’s view, which involves no such contradiction.

Perhaps Professor Dreyfus’s framework makes more sense with respect to the mysteries, but here, the problem is exactly the opposite as that in the case of miracles:  the formulation is quite confused in the framework of the Grand Inquisitor, but makes more sense in the comparative religious framework.  Recall that the primary mystery is the incarnation, or God’s presence on earth, which the seven sacraments commemorate.  It is hard to see, in the framework of the Grand Inquisitor, how Jesus could reject the mystery of his own incarnation.  What was rejected by Jesus was rather God’s intervention to save him from death on earth.  But, on the other hand, the high degree of formality and often luxuriant rituals surrounding the sacraments in the Catholic tradition was a major point of contention throughout the Protestant Reformation.  Many Protestant denominations now either don’t celebrate all seven traditional sacraments, or have demoted their significance and importance.  God’s kingdom is not on earth for the Protestants.  The Orthodox tradition, however, does not limit the number of sacraments, and in general has more of an emphasis on the substance than the form.  Dostoevsky seems to have taken the Orthodox view a step further, focusing on the significance of the sacraments as they occur in the life of the individual – existentializing the sacraments, so to speak – and leaving them very little if any formal or ritual properties.  Thus, while the Catholic tradition is too formal, the Protestant tradition was equally wrong in assigning to the sacraments so little importance.  The Orthodox view resolves this antinomy by focusing on the substance and significance of the sacraments, keeping them, and not the formal or ritual properties.

The Protestant-Orthodox-Catholic framework is also problematic with respect to the issue of authority, but there is evidence that something like this is what Dostoevsky had in mind.  Dostoevsky sets up this antinomy most clearly at Dmitry’s trial at the end of the book.  The choice appears to be between a standpoint of absolute guilt and innocence, and a standpoint from which “everything is possible” and no one can be held responsible for anything. The answer seems to involve recognizing different degrees of guilt and innocence.  Crucifixion is what results when one person is held absolutely responsible for their actions, because there will always be others sharing at least part of their guilt.  Does this fit in the Protestant-Orthodox-Catholic framework?  Perhaps.  Such a formulation is suggested toward the beginning of the book, in the chapter entitled May it Come to Pass, during the discussion at the monastery concerning Ivan’s article on the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical-Civil Court.  During this discussion, the Elder explicitly addresses the question of authority in these terms by comparing 1) the separation of church and state in the “Lutheran lands,” 2) the State as Church in Rome (later explicitly tied to the Grand Inquisitor formulation of this antinomy by Father Paisley’s note that this is precisely the “third temptation of Satan”), and finally, 3) Russia, in which the Church plays a role alongside the State, tending to criminals who have  “been punished all too severely by the justice of the State.”

How does the formulation in the beginning of the book relate to the formulation in the latter part of the book?  Of particular note in the beginning discussion is Ivan’s response to the assertion that “the Church is a kingdom not of this world.”  Ivan is concerned with refuting this Protestant viewpoint, which appears to take the Church out of the business of judgment – and therefore criminal justice – entirely.  This calls to mind Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which emphasizes Abraham’s absolute independence from societal standards of right and wrong:  he answered only to God.   Dostoevsky appears to reject this view, and the Elder notes that this view logically ends in a kind of relativism, as the “recent theories” confirm that there are no real crimes (against morality), but instead the so-called criminal acts are instead “merely an act of revolt against an unjustly oppressive power.”  This is the view that appears to be behind the “everything is permissible” argument, and the “new ideas, the new emotions that now about, etc.” referenced in the case against Dmitry.

On the other hand, Dostoevsky also rejects the Catholic ideal of Church as State.  According to the Elder, justice in this model has been supplanted by the pagan view of the State where legality has replaced morality, leading to a law and evidence-based, fact-finding methodology which only “mechanically amputates” and deports the offending citizen, while doing nothing to treat the heart and mind of the criminal.  This is the black and white, absolute guilt vs. absolute innocence view represented by the prosecutor in Dmitry’s trial.  It is only Orthodox justice which brings to a criminal conscience awareness of his (moral) guilt before society, and thus makes possible his reform.  At the time of the Brothers Karamazov, the Russian church acted alongside the State in responding to the needs of the criminals, but the Elder’s ideal was for the State to eventually raise to the level of the Church in its form of (spiritual as opposed to legal) judgment (exactly the opposite of what happened in Rome, when the Church stooped down to the level of the State with respect to justice and crimes against the State accordingly also became crimes against the Church).

In summary with respect to authority, the Catholic church as State appears to represent the idea that one person who is absolutely guilty, can be judged by another, absolutely innocent person by employing scientific methods of investigation.  The Protestant church then represents the idea that no one could be judged by anyone else, and the Orthodox Church occupies a position somewhere in the middle, allowing for a kind of qualified, compassionate judgment with the aim of ending evil chains and setting into motion chains of agape love.