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Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 1480-1556)
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
The Venetian Lorenzo Lotto developed a very idiosyncratic pictorial language of his own and sought unconventional iconographic solutions.
This work shows a vision of St Catherine of Alexandria.
While on the lookout for a suitable husband who could equal her status, wealth and intellect, a hermit presented her with a picture of the Virgin and Child and suggested Christ as her spouse.
In a dream, the Christ Child thereupon placed a ring on Catherine's finger as a sign of the mystical marriage.
Inv. Nr. 32
Provenance: 1804 from the secularization of the first bishop's residence of Wurzburg.
Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I suppose my greatest asset is my femininity and that is why I became Jojo as I was never really at home as a man and always looked up to women for their intellect and looks with a kind of envy. I'm quite a sexual being too and I've learnt all the things we T.Girls are supposed to do and now I'm used to it I love it especially being 'entertained' and as long as they let me feel female I have no qualmes about my lovers lol. But having said that apart from the fact that I'm obviously not one, in other respects I feel like a woman. That means I might enjoy lovely clothes and looking good but I get no fetish enjoyment at all from dressing or blatant exhibitionism and never have. Of course that doesn't mean I look down on others who do and that is fine as we are all different with different lives and needs. That doesn't mean I don't like to post sexy pictures as well but I do things my way and I like to think it is also why I have so many followers. Of course some of them keep coming back hoping they might see more. Well guys it does happen and there's always tomorrow.
I carry my burden
My pain in the neck...
Is it my doubt?
Is it my scepticism?
My mind.
What drives me to go this way?
Do I have to explore emptiness?
Winter...
Yes
My liberator
I recognize
I (it) took me to the north
HKD
The energy of A5 took me to the north. I became a thinker and rationalist. I felt I had a clear mind. During this time I had the energy to write several books. I started with a novel and finished with a psychological one about character and motivation. The books are published in Germany only. Writing a book about consciousness is writing about the energy of A5. For those who like the series “Star Trek” – Mr. Spok – Data – Tuvok – all these characters are empowered by A5. Data is an android of course… but his reactions are based on logic only.
Pure logic – emotional coolness – even absence of any emotion – this is A5. You may compare this form of energy-field with the ancient god Apollo, or Manjushri, a very popular transcendent Buddha in Tibetan Buddhism.
The opposite energy is B5 - you are empowerd by pure "emotion".
A5 logical intelligence...
B5 emotional intelligence...
HKD
Vernunft, Verstand, Ratio, strenge Logik - das ist die Energieform A5.
Große Denker, Rationalisten - z. B. Imanuel Kant und René Descartes - wurden sehr stark von dieser Energie beeinflusst und motiviert.
In Umschreibungen kann man sagen, die Gottheit Apollo stand Pate an ihrer Wiege...
Ob Hexen, Teufel oder Götter - in den Märchen berichtet uns der Volksmund darüber, dass Menschen von bestimmten Kräften beeinflusst - wenn nicht gar getrieben werden. Man spricht sogar davon, dass einen der Teufel reitet, eine Gier oder Wut.
Alle Energien haben positive wie negative Seiten. Die Bezeichnung für die logischen Kräfte des Universums - A5 - ist neutral. Natürlich ist der Logos auf der einen Seite ein Befreier von Unwisseneheit und führt zu Toleranz und Verständnis. Allerdings wird durch diese Energieform die Gefühlsseite sehr stark ausgetrocknet. Das ist der Grund dafür, dass ausgeprägte Rationalisten eine gewisse Gefühlskälte ausstrahlen und sich selbst auch als Einzelgänger oder gar als isoliert wahrnehmen.
HKD
Created for MacroMondays - Theme - Emotions
The first blossoms of the spring bring joy and happiness. The forsythia bush's early yellow blossoms bring smiles to the faces of many. Yellow is the color of sunshine. It's associated with joy, happiness, intellect, and energy.
Have a Happy MacroMonday!
Yellow is the color of sunshine. It's associated with joy, happiness, intellect, and energy. Yellow produces a warming effect, arouses cheerfulness, stimulates mental activity, and generates muscle energy.
General Sir John Monash.
(1865-1931) was a civil engineer who became an Australian military commander in World War I. Regarded as Australia's greatest general, his brilliant leadership turned the tide of the war. Monash was also a born writer and intellect, and his writing displays a delight in detail, mastery and grace.
Dust jacket note on "John Monash"
The Australian Victories in France in 1918.
See Currency and other words at ozwords.com.au/
By Kel Richards..
Using the kit lens and a 10mm tube.
From Google Gemini AI.
what did the world do at the end of World war II?
The world reacted to the end of World War II with a mix of jubilation, relief, and a somber understanding of the immense cost of the conflict. Here's a breakdown of some key responses:
Celebrations and Relief:
Widespread Joy: News of the surrenders (first Germany in May 1945, then Japan in August 1945) sparked massive celebrations in Allied countries. People filled the streets,embracing and cheering, marking the end of years of hardship, anxiety, and loss.
Return of Soldiers: The end of the war meant the return of soldiers to their home countries. This was a joyous occasion for families and communities, although it was also a period of readjustment for many veterans.
Reconstruction and Recovery:
Devastation in Europe and Asia: Many parts of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. Cities were bombed, infrastructure was destroyed, and economies were shattered. The immediate focus was on providing humanitarian aid, rebuilding infrastructure, and restarting economies.
The Marshall Plan: The United States launched the Marshall Plan, a massive economic aid program to help rebuild European economies. This was crucial in preventing further instability and fostering recovery.
Political and Geopolitical Shifts:
Emergence of Superpowers: The war significantly altered the global balance of power. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers, leading to a period of geopolitical tension known as the Cold War.
Formation of the United Nations: In 1945, the United Nations was established with the goal of preventing future global conflicts through international cooperation and diplomacy.
Decolonization: The war weakened European colonial powers, contributing to the rise of independence movements in Asia and Africa.
Dealing with the Aftermath:
Nuremberg Trials: The Nuremberg trials were held to bring Nazi leaders to justice for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. This set a precedent for international criminal law.
Coming to Terms with the Holocaust: The full extent of the Holocaust was revealed after the war, shocking the world and leading to a greater understanding of the horrors of genocide.
A Desire for Peace:
"Never Again": The immense suffering caused by the war led to a widespread desire to prevent future global conflicts. This sentiment was reflected in the formation of the United Nations and other international efforts to promote peace and cooperation.
In summary, the end of World War II was met with widespread celebration and relief, but also marked the beginning of a long process of recovery, reconstruction, and dealing with the political and social consequences of the conflict. 1 The world was forever changed by the war, and its aftermath shaped the course of the 20th century. 2
Belgian collectors card for Cine Rio à Coxyde. Photo: Unifrance Film.
French actress Bernadette Lafont (1938-2013) appeared in several classics of the Nouvelle Vague. Original and full of contradictions, she was both sexy and rather plain, brassy and quite serious, a mixture of intellect, sensuality and humour.
Bernadette Paule Anne Lafont was born in Nîmes in the South of France in 1938. She was the daughter of a pharmacist and his wife. As a teenager, she started her career as a dancer. She entered the Opéra de Nîmes where she fell in love with her future husband, the handsome actor Gérard Blain. In Paris, she met the young critic and aspiring film director François Truffaut, who offered her a role in his second short film, shot in Nîmes. So she made her screen debut in Les Mistons/The Mischief Makers (Francois Truffaut, 1957) opposite Gérard Blain. It was a comedy about five kids, who spy on two lovers during a hot summer day. It turned out to be that she was in the right place at the right time to catch the Nouvelle Vague movement, the new wave of filmmakers that would revolutionize the cinema.
She starred particularly in films by Truffaut and by Claude Chabrol. Her first feature and still one of her best-known films is Le Beau Serge/Bitter Reunion (Claude Chabrol, 1958) with Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy. (She had married Blain the year before but they would divorce a year later.) Many Nouvelle Vague films followed. With Chabrol she also made À double tour/Leda (Claude Chabrol, 1959) starring Madeleine Robinson, Les bonnes femmes/The Good Time Girls (Claude Chabrol, 1960) with Stéphane Audran, and Les godelureaux/Wise Guys (Claude Chabrol, 1961). She appeared in Truffaut’s comedy Tire-au-flanc 62/The Army Game (Claude de Givray, François Truffaut, 1960), and was the feisty heroine of Truffaut’s Une belle fille comme moi/A Gorgeous Bird Like Me (François Truffaut, 1972). For Louis Malle, she did a supporting part in his comedy Le voleur/The Thief of Paris (Louis Malle, 1967) starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, and for Jacques Rivette, she joined the cast of Out 1, noli me tangere/Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, Suzanne Schiffman, 1971) and Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette, 1974). Finally, she played the role of Marie, one-third of the trio of lovers in La Maman et la Putain/The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973), considered by some critics as the last film of the Nouvelle Vague.
A well-known film with Bernadette Lafont is La Fiancée du Pirate/A Very Curious Girl (Nelly Kaplan, 1969). The success of this film about violence against women renewed her career after a difficult period. She was seen in Les stances à Sophie/Sophie’s Ways (Moshé Mizrahi, 1971), the crime drama Zig Zig (László Szabó, 1975) with Catherine Deneuve, and had a small part as the cellmate of Isabelle Huppert in Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol, 1978). In Italy, she appeared in the comedy Il Ladrone/The Thief (Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1980). In a 1997 New York Times article, Katherine Knorr writes: “Lafont has in a tumultuous life done a bit of everything, from television movies to the stage, never quite the megastar but always a strong presence, smart and messed up all at the same time”. In the 1980s she appeared in Chabrol’s crime films Inspecteur Lavardin/Inspector Lavardin (Claude Chabrol, 1986) featuring Jean Poiret, and Masques/Masks (Claude Chabrol, 1987) with Philippe Noiret. She also played in Les saisons du plaisir/The Pleasure Seasons (1988) and other comedies by Jean-Pierre Mocky. Lafont won the César Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for L'Effrontée/Charlotte and Lulu (Claude Miller, 1985) starring Charlotte Gainsbourg. The energetic Lafont created in 1990 an audio-visual workshop to help young actors develop their creativity. She is the co-founder and on the committee that awards the Glace Gervais and an accompanying 100,000 franc prize to works competing in the Cannes Film Festival ‘Un certain Regard’ category. The award was designed to help bolster the budding careers of filmmakers. Her later films include Généalogies d'un crime/Genealogies of a Crime (Raul Ruiz, 1997) with Catherine Deneuve, and the comedy Ripoux 3/Part-Time Cops (Claude Zidi, 2003) with Philippe Noiret. In May 2007, she chaired the jury for the fifth edition of the Award for Education presented at the 60th Cannes Film Festival. After her divorce from Blain in 1959, Bernadette Lafont married the Hungarian sculptor Diourka Medveczky. Although the marriage was difficult and ended in a divorce, there were three children: actress Élisabeth Lafont, David Lafont and the late actress Pauline Lafont, who died in the summer of 1988 under tragic circumstances. She went for a walk near the family property in the Cevennes and never returned. For many weeks, police searched and the popular press went on a feeding frenzy. When Pauline's body was finally found, it became clear she had fallen down in a rough, lonely terrain. Lafont published her autobiography in 1997, an event heralded by a grand star-studded gala in Paris. For her long service to the French motion picture industry, she was given an Honorary César Award in 2003. She was made Officier de la Légion d'honneur (Officer of the Legion of Honour) in 2009. Bernadette Lafont had been hospitalised in her home town of Nimes on Monday after falling ill and died early Thursday 25 July, the hospital said in a statement.
Sources: Katherine Knorr (New York Times), Sandra Brennan (AllMovie), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Project 365 - Image 49/365
This morning when I woke up I strangely found Jeero lying in a bowl of peas, and had no idea at all why this was the case or what he wanted to achieve.
He lay totally silent for about 25 minutes and then he decided to talk to myself and Mireille, "I'm here to save the planet, I've joined Green Peas, see!".
It took a further 10 minutes for myself and Mireille to stop rolling on the floor with laughter, Jeero's lower intellect sure does provide some great laughter at times.
From the Uglydoll blog at adventuresinuglyworld.blogspot.com/
Quote of the Day from 'The Religion of God (Divine Love)' by HDE RA Gohar Shahi: 'What of the accountability when the intellect is lost in God's love!'
Normally I don't like cats but this guy walked onto my property as a young stray and got my attention immediately. He seems to have an uncanny intellect and his ability to manipulate other animals and humans is beyond belief.
bumblebee on chives; from the same series as this one.
“It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful,
and gives birth to imagination.”
(Henry David Thoreau)
Have a beautiful summer's day!
Miles de años lleva el hombre pensando que las ovejas son animales sin inteligencia.
Un estudio del Instituto Babraham de Cambridge, en Inglaterra, demuestra que estos animales tienen un gran sistema de memoria, y son muy buenos para reconocer caras, algo que se considera en sí un signo de inteligencia.
Las ovejas reconocen rostros individuales y los recuerdan a largo plazo.
Dígales a las ovejas que todas se parecen y quizá deseen ser diferentes. Al igual que los primates, las ovejas, según los estudios, reconocen diferentes caras, y aún mas, las distinguen dos años más tarde.
Las caras familiares las tranquilizan y pueden reconocer expresiones tanto contentas como enojadas. Éstas, son habilidades muy sofisticadas para un animal que en general no se distingue por su intelecto, dice Keith Kendrick, del Instituto Babraham.
Una oveja fue capaz de indentificar correctamente una cara humana en una pantalla en todas las 50 pruebas a las que fue sometida en el Instituto británico Babraham, en Cambridge.
Por otra parte, científicos del CSIRO, Livestock, Perth, en Australia, demuestran que ovejas enfermas saben qué hierbas comer para sentirse mejor y que pueden aprenderlo de sus madres.
La investigación se basa en estudios previos que demuestran: Cuando se les ha dado la opción, las ovejas regresarán a una planta que le ha ayudado a sentirse mejor en el pasado.
Otro estudio también demostraba que las ovejas experimentan emociones humanas complejas: “…las ovejas tienen sus mejores amigos y se sienten tristes cuando miembros de su manada mueren o son sacrificados”.
Por cierto… ¿Qué cuentan las ovejas para poder dormir?
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Thousands of years has the man thinking that sheep are mindless animals.
A study of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, shows that these animals have a large memory system, and are very good at recognizing faces, something considered in itself a sign of intelligence.
The sheep recognize individual faces and remember them long term.
Tell the sheep that all look alike and may wish to be different. As primates, sheep, according to research, recognize different faces, and even more, the are two years later.
The reassuring familiar faces and can recognize both happy and angry expressions. These are sophisticated abilities for an animal that is not generally known for his intellect, says Keith Kendrick of the Babraham Institute.
A sheep was able to correctly identify a human face on a screen in all 50 tests that was submitted to the British Institute Babraham, Cambridge.
In addition, scientists from CSIRO, Livestock, Perth, Australia, show that diseased sheep know what herbs to eat to feel better and can learn from their mothers.
The research builds on previous studies that show: When you were given the option, the sheep will return to a plant that has helped him feel better in the past.
Another study also showed that sheep experience complex human emotions: "... the sheep are his best friends and feel sad when members of the herd died or were killed."
By the way ... What have the sheep to sleep?
"Euclid's Elements is certainly one of the greatest books ever written, and one of the most perfect monuments of the Greek intellect."
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, p. 211
My entry in the preliminary round of the 2018 Bio-Cup, of course! I was set from the start on offering something entirely original. After a days or two muddling through various unsatisfying 'elements' from alchemy, technology, and science, I suddenly recalled the Greek mathematician Euclid's authorship of the landmark geometry textbook entitled Elements, and knew I would depict him. In a Bionicle twist, he now wields Geometry powers in addition to his trademark compass and straightedge! I look forward to your thoughts, hope you enjoy, and wish my fellow participants good luck in the Bio-Cup!
"Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark."
(William Butler Yeats - Irish Writer, Dramatist and Poet. Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, 1865-1939)
This amazing mansion stands at Rani ghat along the Ganges in Varanasi (Benaras).
This ghat is near the bridge where no tourist goes, it is a very quiet place away from the noise and the turmoil of the center.
On this side of the river many other buildings recall the splendour of the past which once made the renown of the City of Lights...
Join the photographer at www.facebook.com/laurent.goldstein.photography
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The evil that is within us all the ultimate villainous team and the most powerful forces of evil to roam the earth and beyond. The Legion seeks domination over all of mankind and to destroy the much despised Justice League. Consisting of the war mongers, assassins, thieves, kings, gods, aliens and those who swear revenge they are truly a force to be reckoned with.
The Legions roster gathered by the immortal tyrant Vandal Savage includes that of Lex Luthor; one of the most intelligent men on the planet, with enough power and influence to take countries by force and the only one that has subdued Superman time and time again.
Cheetah; the merciless woman gifted with the attributes of the dangerous animal of the wild, the Cheetah one of the few people who knows the ways of bringing Wonder Woman down to size.
Bane; in his words is the 'Bane of Humanity' with increased strength through the drug venom on which he has the only physical prowess to withstand the poison along with the intellect to plan masterful plans of strategies the seldom ever go astray, and the man who 'broke the bat'.
Mirror Master; the man who found and possibly helped create the mirror-verse, a multi dimensional realm connect through the reflective substances that reside upon earth, the one man fast enough to out think the Flash and stay one step ahead.
Black Manta; a man hidden in mystery and secrets, he host a long lived vendetta against Aquaman, holding his own legions of troops and soldiers he has his own army waiting beneath the ocean and is one of the few people that has evaded that of the league for his entire existence under the persona of Black Manta
Merlyn; the greatest archer in all of the world, always one level above his rival Green Arrow that he has bested in all of their meetings together, he has one of the sharpest eyes not only giving him the highest accuracy rate of all on earth, it also means he will never miss anything that goes on around from those hiding in his peripherals to those gone in plain sight. One of the highest ranking assassins in the world rivalling that of Deathstroke and Deadshot he is one that should not be underrated.
Captain Cold; the worlds leading expert in cryogenics technology second to that of Mr. Freeze he is cold hearted and will not think twice about hurting one or destroying life, he will do so without remorse. He is cold and calculating an will be willing to sacrifice a team mate to complete a mission. Cold is also a master of weather manipulation, that could change the temperature from high to low and vice versa.
Ocean Master; brother to the king of Atlantis and hidden in shadows as the vile Ocean Master, unknown to his brother Arthur that he pots against him, he provides information on the enemy to the Legion and is a master of the Atlantian water manipulation provided through the ancient relic he focuses the magic through the treasure, his skill competing that of Kaldur Ahm.
Metallo; the one man able to hold back the Man of Steel and is literally the adaptive machine that can survive any circumstance, even that of radiation (though prep must be given for such a feat) powered by a kryptonite heart and his life as a criminal before his transformation Metallo knows all of the tricks to fighting and his strength is enough to withstand foes such as Wonder Woman or Hawkman.
Circe; a woman with the powers of a god, a master of all form of magic, particularly that of Chaos and transformation. Circe is perhaps one of the strongest magic wielders that has ever existed, just below that of Klarion and the chaos and order lords and the Gods of Olympus. Possessing every incantation and spell, she holds anger to Wonder Woman for ruining her plans of domination and manipulation, creating that of her own realm.
Sinestro; some say he is the true embodiment of fear, the founding member of the Sinestro Corps, utilising that of the yellow element of the emotional spectrum, the emotion of Fear. With the ability to negate the power of will and a sworn oath to eradicate the Green Lantern Corps and the menace of the Guardians of space. Creating anything he can imagine, feeding of the fear around him to charge his ring. The man is responsible for crimes across the universe and with knowledge of the enemy of when he was part of the Green Lanterns he knows the extent of there power and their weaknesses.
Ma'alefa'ak; the Martian brother of J'onn J'onzz, Ma'alefa'ak possesses all the powers of normal Martian physiology except his ability to read and reach into minds, which he had sacrificed to create the plague and made himself immune and gave him immunity to fire that eradicated half of the green Martian race and helped lead the attack of the white Martains to complete the genocide of his own race. He holds personal hatred towards his brother for surviving the destruction of their race, he personally killed J'onn's wife and daughter in the war to prove his cold insanity. Following his brother to earth, he yearns to destroy his brother to complete his Genocide.
These most vile and despicable forces create that of the unbeatable team
....
....
....
The Legion of Doom!
A sparkling new Volvo B5TL / Wright Gemini 3, number 222 (SJ16 CSO), one of ten buses in the City Sight Seeing Tours fleet being introduced during September 2016. Note the plaque on the wall above the bus which reads:
In a house on the east side of this close ROBERT BURNS lived during his first visit to Edinburgh, 1786.
Burns arrived in Edinburgh on 28th November 1786, and took up residence in Baxters Close in the Lawnmarket, (now demolished). At that time Edinburgh was somewhat carefree, squalid, venerable, and literary. The Edinburgh society of the day welcomed the rustic poet and introduced him to the noblemen and learned professors of the day. The attention he received from all ranks would have turned any head today and Burns's independent spirit and strong intellect carried him safely through the Edinburgh period.
Edinburgh was a triumph for Burns where he completed writing the second edition of his poems, published in 1787.
For an accumulative guide of Lothian's new tour fleet, in numerical order, please click here as the story develops..
www.flickr.com/photos/stuart_montgomery/albums/7215767282...
This commission was an amazing challenge. Marlene Dietrich is the original blond bombshell who inspired Marilyn, who inspired Madonna, who inspired Lady Gaga... Her open gender fluidity and pansexuality, intellect and powerful presence make her an icon that should never be forgotten.
I hand sculpted the head for this doll, so she is truly one of a kind. Her make up is classic 30's (although Marlene's career in film and stage stretched from 1920's silent film era, through golden age of Hollywood, to Las Vegas marquee until 1970's). Her golden hair is curled alpaca and she wears my favourite doll fashion ever made: the Sybarite Blade's razorblade gown.
*This is a commissioned doll and not for sale. If you want a bespoke OOAK doll of your own please visit www.emiliacouture.com
The DeLorean lands where the TARDIS also has just landed. It's strange that these two would intersect in time and space, but here they are, for the very first time. But Dr. Emmett is worried. He always has that worried look.
"Dr. Emmett, do you know this man?"
"Of course, Marty. Who's his name."
"What?"
"No. Who. This is Dr. Who."
"Which one?"
"He's not a witch, Marty. He's a Doctor."
"Who?"
"Like I've been trying to tell you."
20201123 328/366
November 23 Is Dr Who Day
On this day in 1963, the British science-fiction television show Doctor Who first premiered. It quickly became an institution in the United Kingdom, and later gained a large fan base in the United States, where it was in syndication from the 1970s through the 1990s, and became a staple on PBS stations. In its original run, new episodes were created until 1989, and new episodes have once again been created since 2005, which continued the plot where it had left off. The show follows the adventures of "the Doctor," who is not a human, but an ancient extraterrestrial being called a Time Lord. His travels through space and time take place by using TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), a spaceship shaped like a blue British police box. As the Doctor travels to help people and civilizations in need, he is accompanied by companions, and takes on many foes, with his intellect and a minimal amount of resources. As of 2017 there had been twelve doctors, and the thirteenth doctor had been chosen, the first time a woman would play the role. Time Lords can regenerate into new incarnations, which has made it easy to write transitions to new doctors into the plot of the show. Doctor Who was originally intended for a family audience, and the use of time travel was intended to explore scientific ideas and famous events in history. Over time the science fiction stories came to dominate. There have been many spin-offs of the show in various mediums since its inception.
How to Observe
Celebrate the day by watching Doctor Who! There are so many episodes to choose from, but since today celebrates the anniversary of the show, it may be good to start with the first episode ever, "An Unearthly Child." Besides watching episodes, you could watch the two Doctor Who films that were made in the 1960s, Dr. and the Daleks and Daleks—Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., or the 1996 television film, Doctor Who. Other spin-offs include comic books, novels, audio dramas, other television shows, and appearances on stage. These could all be sought out and enjoyed today. If you have friends who also enjoy Doctor Who, you could have a Doctor Who themed party, where you dress up as characters from the show, and watch your favorite episodes together.
Famous Dr. Who Quotes:
“There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.”
“Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind.”
Feelings Versus Intellect.
Procese divizibil schimbare Propuneri de-a lungul implicații ipotezelor anterioare simțit,
verschiedene Theorien untrennbar Geschwindigkeit anzeigt entfernte Bewegungen verhältnismäßig Kräfte kniete,
άνιση αγάπες διαφέρουν αντίστοιχες συνθήκες κατηγορίες συμμέτρηση ομοιότητα περιπτώσεις,
megnyilvánulásai a jelenség feltárására motivációs kérdések illusztrációk kifejezések ismert,
в подчинении сознания представление невнятно макрокосма принципы внутренней части природы,
paradossali filosofia riflette esitazioni dogma modifiche Considerando l'individualità del ridicolo,
eðlislæg ástæður óbeinum raun núverandi Virknin eignuðust skoðanir fáránleikans tengingar orsakir,
forståelige undervisnings sjeler usvikelige belysning påfølgende konsepter fantasi innvendig heretter,
moderne uitgeput filosofie representaties transcendentale selecties bloemlezing esthetiek posities vallen,
génie spécifique et extraordinaire capacité consciente dispositions des règles instinctives art,
影響を受けない物腰丁寧な不協和音の再発の教義の危険説得力のある声の魅力的な事項は、成長.
Steve.D.Hammond.
1. The Mind-Body Problem and the History of Dualism
1.1 The Mind-Body Problem
The mind-body problem is the problem: what is the relationship between mind and body? Or alternatively: what is the relationship between mental properties and physical properties?
Humans have (or seem to have) both physical properties and mental properties. People have (or seem to have)the sort of properties attributed in the physical sciences. These physical properties include size, weight, shape, colour, motion through space and time, etc. But they also have (or seem to have) mental properties, which we do not attribute to typical physical objects These properties involve consciousness (including perceptual experience, emotional experience, and much else), intentionality (including beliefs, desires, and much else), and they are possessed by a subject or a self. Physical properties are public, in the sense that they are, in principle, equally observable by anyone. Some physical properties – like those of an electron – are not directly observable at all, but they are equally available to all, to the same degree, with scientific equipment and techniques. The same is not true of mental properties. I may be able to tell that you are in pain by your behaviour, but only you can feel it directly. Similarly, you just know how something looks to you, and I can only surmise. Conscious mental events are private to the subject, who has a privileged access to them of a kind no-one has to the physical. The mind-body problem concerns the relationship between these two sets of properties. The mind-body problem breaks down into a number of components. The ontological question: what are mental states and what are physical states? Is one class a subclass of the other, so that all mental states are physical, or vice versa? Or are mental states and physical states entirely distinct?
The causal question: do physical states influence mental states? Do mental states influence physical states? If so, how?
Different aspects of the mind-body problem arise for different aspects of the mental, such as consciousness, intentionality, the self. The problem of consciousness: what is consciousness? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of intentionality: what is intentionality? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of the self: what is the self? How is it related to the brain and the body? Other aspects of the mind-body problem arise for aspects of the physical. For example:
The problem of embodiment: what is it for the mind to be housed in a body? What is it for a body to belong to a particular subject?
The seemingly intractable nature of these problems have given rise to many different philosophical views.
Materialist views say that, despite appearances to the contrary, mental states are just physical states. Behaviourism, functionalism, mind-brain identity theory and the computational theory of mind are examples of how materialists attempt to explain how this can be so. The most common factor in such theories is the attempt to explicate the nature of mind and consciousness in terms of their ability to directly or indirectly modify behaviour, but there are versions of materialism that try to tie the mental to the physical without explicitly explaining the mental in terms of its behaviour-modifying role. The latter are often grouped together under the label ‘non-reductive physicalism’, though this label is itself rendered elusive because of the controversial nature of the term ‘reduction’.
Idealist views say that physical states are really mental. This is because the physical world is an empirical world and, as such, it is the intersubjective product of our collective experience.
Dualist views (the subject of this entry) say that the mental and the physical are both real and neither can be assimilated to the other. For the various forms that dualism can take and the associated problems, see below.
In sum, we can say that there is a mind-body problem because both consciousness and thought, broadly construed, seem very different from anything physical and there is no convincing consensus on how to build a satisfactorily unified picture of creatures possessed of both a mind and a body.
Other entries which concern aspects of the mind-body problem include (among many others): behaviorism, consciousness, eliminative materialism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, identity theory, intentionality, mental causation, neutral monism, and physicalism.
1.2 History of dualism
In dualism, ‘mind’ is contrasted with ‘body’, but at different times, different aspects of the mind have been the centre of attention. In the classical and mediaeval periods, it was the intellect that was thought to be most obviously resistant to a materialistic account: from Descartes on, the main stumbling block to materialist monism was supposed to be ‘consciousness’, of which phenomenal consciousness or sensation came to be considered as the paradigm instance.
The classical emphasis originates in Plato’s Phaedo. Plato believed that the true substances are not physical bodies, which are ephemeral, but the eternal Forms of which bodies are imperfect copies. These Forms not only make the world possible, they also make it intelligible, because they perform the role of universals, or what Frege called ‘concepts’. It is their connection with intelligibility that is relevant to the philosophy of mind. Because Forms are the grounds of intelligibility, they are what the intellect must grasp in the process of understanding. In Phaedo Plato presents a variety of arguments for the immortality of the soul, but the one that is relevant for our purposes is that the intellect is immaterial because Forms are immaterial and intellect must have an affinity with the Forms it apprehends (78b4–84b8). This affinity is so strong that the soul strives to leave the body in which it is imprisoned and to dwell in the realm of Forms. It may take many reincarnations before this is achieved. Plato’s dualism is not, therefore, simply a doctrine in the philosophy of mind, but an integral part of his whole metaphysics.
One problem with Plato’s dualism was that, though he speaks of the soul as imprisoned in the body, there is no clear account of what binds a particular soul to a particular body. Their difference in nature makes the union a mystery.
Aristotle did not believe in Platonic Forms, existing independently of their instances. Aristotelian forms (the capital ‘F’ has disappeared with their standing as autonomous entities) are the natures and properties of things and exist embodied in those things. This enabled Aristotle to explain the union of body and soul by saying that the soul is the form of the body. This means that a particular person’s soul is no more than his nature as a human being. Because this seems to make the soul into a property of the body, it led many interpreters, both ancient and modern, to interpret his theory as materialistic. The interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind – and, indeed, of his whole doctrine of form – remains as live an issue today as it was immediately after his death (Robinson 1983 and 1991; Nussbaum 1984; Rorty and Nussbaum, eds, 1992). Nevertheless, the text makes it clear that Aristotle believed that the intellect, though part of the soul, differs from other faculties in not having a bodily organ. His argument for this constitutes a more tightly argued case than Plato’s for the immateriality of thought and, hence, for a kind of dualism. He argued that the intellect must be immaterial because if it were material it could not receive all forms. Just as the eye, because of its particular physical nature, is sensitive to light but not to sound, and the ear to sound and not to light, so, if the intellect were in a physical organ it could be sensitive only to a restricted range of physical things; but this is not the case, for we can think about any kind of material object (De Anima III,4; 429a10–b9). As it does not have a material organ, its activity must be essentially immaterial.
It is common for modern Aristotelians, who otherwise have a high view of Aristotle’s relevance to modern philosophy, to treat this argument as being of purely historical interest, and not essential to Aristotle’s system as a whole. They emphasize that he was not a ‘Cartesian’ dualist, because the intellect is an aspect of the soul and the soul is the form of the body, not a separate substance. Kenny (1989) argues that Aristotle’s theory of mind as form gives him an account similar to Ryle (1949), for it makes the soul equivalent to the dispositions possessed by a living body. This ‘anti-Cartesian’ approach to Aristotle arguably ignores the fact that, for Aristotle, the form is the substance.
These issues might seem to be of purely historical interest. But we shall see in below, in section 4.5, that this is not so.
The identification of form and substance is a feature of Aristotle’s system that Aquinas effectively exploits in this context, identifying soul, intellect and form, and treating them as a substance. (See, for example, Aquinas (1912), Part I, questions 75 and 76.) But though the form (and, hence, the intellect with which it is identical) are the substance of the human person, they are not the person itself. Aquinas says that when one addresses prayers to a saint – other than the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is believed to retain her body in heaven and is, therefore, always a complete person – one should say, not, for example, ‘Saint Peter pray for us’, but ‘soul of Saint Peter pray for us’. The soul, though an immaterial substance, is the person only when united with its body. Without the body, those aspects of its personal memory that depend on images (which are held to be corporeal) will be lost.(See Aquinas (1912), Part I, question 89.)
The more modern versions of dualism have their origin in Descartes’ Meditations, and in the debate that was consequent upon Descartes’ theory. Descartes was a substance dualist. He believed that there were two kinds of substance: matter, of which the essential property is that it is spatially extended; and mind, of which the essential property is that it thinks. Descartes’ conception of the relation between mind and body was quite different from that held in the Aristotelian tradition. For Aristotle, there is no exact science of matter. How matter behaves is essentially affected by the form that is in it. You cannot combine just any matter with any form – you cannot make a knife out of butter, nor a human being out of paper – so the nature of the matter is a necessary condition for the nature of the substance. But the nature of the substance does not follow from the nature of its matter alone: there is no ‘bottom up’ account of substances. Matter is a determinable made determinate by form. This was how Aristotle thought that he was able to explain the connection of soul to body: a particular soul exists as the organizing principle in a particular parcel of matter.
The belief in the relative indeterminacy of matter is one reason for Aristotle’s rejection of atomism. If matter is atomic, then it is already a collection of determinate objects in its own right, and it becomes natural to regard the properties of macroscopic substances as mere summations of the natures of the atoms.
Although, unlike most of his fashionable contemporaries and immediate successors, Descartes was not an atomist, he was, like the others, a mechanist about the properties of matter. Bodies are machines that work according to their own laws. Except where there are minds interfering with it, matter proceeds deterministically, in its own right. Where there are minds requiring to influence bodies, they must work by ‘pulling levers’ in a piece of machinery that already has its own laws of operation. This raises the question of where those ‘levers’ are in the body. Descartes opted for the pineal gland, mainly because it is not duplicated on both sides of the brain, so it is a candidate for having a unique, unifying function.
The main uncertainty that faced Descartes and his contemporaries, however, was not where interaction took place, but how two things so different as thought and extension could interact at all. This would be particularly mysterious if one had an impact view of causal interaction, as would anyone influenced by atomism, for whom the paradigm of causation is like two billiard balls cannoning off one another.
Various of Descartes’ disciples, such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, concluded that all mind-body interactions required the direct intervention of God. The appropriate states of mind and body were only the occasions for such intervention, not real causes. Now it would be convenient to think that occasionalists held that all causation was natural except for that between mind and body. In fact they generalized their conclusion and treated all causation as directly dependent on God. Why this was so, we cannot discuss here.
Descartes’ conception of a dualism of substances came under attack from the more radical empiricists, who found it difficult to attach sense to the concept of substance at all. Locke, as a moderate empiricist, accepted that there were both material and immaterial substances. Berkeley famously rejected material substance, because he rejected all existence outside the mind. In his early Notebooks, he toyed with the idea of rejecting immaterial substance, because we could have no idea of it, and reducing the self to a collection of the ‘ideas’ that constituted its contents. Finally, he decided that the self, conceived as something over and above the ideas of which it was aware, was essential for an adequate understanding of the human person. Although the self and its acts are not presented to consciousness as objects of awareness, we are obliquely aware of them simply by dint of being active subjects. Hume rejected such claims, and proclaimed the self to be nothing more than a concatenation of its ephemeral contents.
In fact, Hume criticised the whole conception of substance for lacking in empirical content: when you search for the owner of the properties that make up a substance, you find nothing but further properties. Consequently, the mind is, he claimed, nothing but a ‘bundle’ or ‘heap’ of impressions and ideas – that is, of particular mental states or events, without an owner. This position has been labelled bundle dualism, and it is a special case of a general bundle theory of substance, according to which objects in general are just organised collections of properties. The problem for the Humean is to explain what binds the elements in the bundle together. This is an issue for any kind of substance, but for material bodies the solution seems fairly straightforward: the unity of a physical bundle is constituted by some form of causal interaction between the elements in the bundle. For the mind, mere causal connection is not enough; some further relation of co-consciousness is required. We shall see in 5.2.1 that it is problematic whether one can treat such a relation as more primitive than the notion of belonging to a subject.
One should note the following about Hume’s theory. His bundle theory is a theory about the nature of the unity of the mind. As a theory about this unity, it is not necessarily dualist. Parfit (1970, 1984) and Shoemaker (1984, ch. 2), for example, accept it as physicalists. In general, physicalists will accept it unless they wish to ascribe the unity to the brain or the organism as a whole. Before the bundle theory can be dualist one must accept property dualism, for more about which, see the next section.
A crisis in the history of dualism came, however, with the growing popularity of mechanism in science in the nineteenth century. According to the mechanist, the world is, as it would now be expressed, ‘closed under physics’. This means that everything that happens follows from and is in accord with the laws of physics. There is, therefore, no scope for interference in the physical world by the mind in the way that interactionism seems to require. According to the mechanist, the conscious mind is an epiphenomenon (a notion given general currency by T. H. Huxley 1893): that is, it is a by-product of the physical system which has no influence back on it. In this way, the facts of consciousness are acknowledged but the integrity of physical science is preserved. However, many philosophers found it implausible to claim such things as the following; the pain that I have when you hit me, the visual sensations I have when I see the ferocious lion bearing down on me or the conscious sense of understanding I have when I hear your argument – all have nothing directly to do with the way I respond. It is very largely due to the need to avoid this counterintuitiveness that we owe the concern of twentieth century philosophy to devise a plausible form of materialist monism. But, although dualism has been out of fashion in psychology since the advent of behaviourism (Watson 1913) and in philosophy since Ryle (1949), the argument is by no means over. Some distinguished neurologists, such as Sherrington (1940) and Eccles (Popper and Eccles 1977) have continued to defend dualism as the only theory that can preserve the data of consciousness. Amongst mainstream philosophers, discontent with physicalism led to a modest revival of property dualism in the last decade of the twentieth century. At least some of the reasons for this should become clear below.
2. Varieties of Dualism: Ontology
There are various ways of dividing up kinds of dualism. One natural way is in terms of what sorts of things one chooses to be dualistic about. The most common categories lighted upon for these purposes are substance and property, giving one substance dualism and property dualism. There is, however, an important third category, namely predicate dualism. As this last is the weakest theory, in the sense that it claims least, I shall begin by characterizing it.
2.1 Predicate dualism
Predicate dualism is the theory that psychological or mentalistic predicates are (a) essential for a full description of the world and (b) are not reducible to physicalistic predicates. For a mental predicate to be reducible, there would be bridging laws connecting types of psychological states to types of physical ones in such a way that the use of the mental predicate carried no information that could not be expressed without it. An example of what we believe to be a true type reduction outside psychology is the case of water, where water is always H2O: something is water if and only if it is H2O. If one were to replace the word ‘water’ by ‘H2O’, it is plausible to say that one could convey all the same information. But the terms in many of the special sciences (that is, any science except physics itself) are not reducible in this way. Not every hurricane or every infectious disease, let alone every devaluation of the currency or every coup d’etat has the same constitutive structure. These states are defined more by what they do than by their composition or structure. Their names are classified as functional terms rather than natural kind terms. It goes with this that such kinds of state are multiply realizable; that is, they may be constituted by different kinds of physical structures under different circumstances. Because of this, unlike in the case of water and H2O, one could not replace these terms by some more basic physical description and still convey the same information. There is no particular description, using the language of physics or chemistry, that would do the work of the word ‘hurricane’, in the way that ‘H2O’ would do the work of ‘water’. It is widely agreed that many, if not all, psychological states are similarly irreducible, and so psychological predicates are not reducible to physical descriptions and one has predicate dualism. (The classic source for irreducibility in the special sciences in general is Fodor (1974), and for irreducibility in the philosophy of mind, Davidson (1971).)
2.2 Property Dualism
Whereas predicate dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of predicates in our language, property dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of property out in the world. Property dualism can be seen as a step stronger than predicate dualism. Although the predicate ‘hurricane’ is not equivalent to any single description using the language of physics, we believe that each individual hurricane is nothing but a collection of physical atoms behaving in a certain way: one need have no more than the physical atoms, with their normal physical properties, following normal physical laws, for there to be a hurricane. One might say that we need more than the language of physics to describe and explain the weather, but we do not need more than its ontology. There is token identity between each individual hurricane and a mass of atoms, even if there is no type identity between hurricanes as kinds and some particular structure of atoms as a kind. Genuine property dualism occurs when, even at the individual level, the ontology of physics is not sufficient to constitute what is there. The irreducible language is not just another way of describing what there is, it requires that there be something more there than was allowed for in the initial ontology. Until the early part of the twentieth century, it was common to think that biological phenomena (‘life’) required property dualism (an irreducible ‘vital force’), but nowadays the special physical sciences other than psychology are generally thought to involve only predicate dualism. In the case of mind, property dualism is defended by those who argue that the qualitative nature of consciousness is not merely another way of categorizing states of the brain or of behaviour, but a genuinely emergent phenomenon.
2.3 Substance Dualism
There are two important concepts deployed in this notion. One is that of substance, the other is the dualism of these substances. A substance is characterized by its properties, but, according to those who believe in substances, it is more than the collection of the properties it possesses, it is the thing which possesses them. So the mind is not just a collection of thoughts, but is that which thinks, an immaterial substance over and above its immaterial states. Properties are the properties of objects. If one is a property dualist, one may wonder what kinds of objects possess the irreducible or immaterial properties in which one believes. One can use a neutral expression and attribute them to persons, but, until one has an account of person, this is not explanatory. One might attribute them to human beings qua animals, or to the brains of these animals. Then one will be holding that these immaterial properties are possessed by what is otherwise a purely material thing. But one may also think that not only mental states are immaterial, but that the subject that possesses them must also be immaterial. Then one will be a dualist about that to which mental states and properties belong as well about the properties themselves. Now one might try to think of these subjects as just bundles of the immaterial states. This is Hume’s view. But if one thinks that the owner of these states is something quite over and above the states themselves, and is immaterial, as they are, one will be a substance dualist.
Substance dualism is also often dubbed ‘Cartesian dualism’, but some substance dualists are keen to distinguish their theories from Descartes’s. E. J. Lowe, for example, is a substance dualist, in the following sense. He holds that a normal human being involves two substances, one a body and the other a person. The latter is not, however, a purely mental substance that can be defined in terms of thought or consciousness alone, as Descartes claimed. But persons and their bodies have different identity conditions and are both substances, so there are two substances essentially involved in a human being, hence this is a form of substance dualism. Lowe (2006) claims that his theory is close to P. F. Strawson’s (1959), whilst admitting that Strawson would not have called it substance dualism.
3. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction
If mind and body are different realms, in the way required by either property or substance dualism, then there arises the question of how they are related. Common sense tells us that they interact: thoughts and feelings are at least sometimes caused by bodily events and at least sometimes themselves give rise to bodily responses. I shall now consider briefly the problems for interactionism, and its main rivals, epiphenomenalism and parallelism.
3.1 Interactionism
Interactionism is the view that mind and body – or mental events and physical events – causally influence each other. That this is so is one of our common-sense beliefs, because it appears to be a feature of everyday experience. The physical world influences my experience through my senses, and I often react behaviourally to those experiences. My thinking, too, influences my speech and my actions. There is, therefore, a massive natural prejudice in favour of interactionism. It has been claimed, however, that it faces serious problems (some of which were anticipated in section 1).
The simplest objection to interaction is that, in so far as mental properties, states or substances are of radically different kinds from each other, they lack that communality necessary for interaction. It is generally agreed that, in its most naive form, this objection to interactionism rests on a ‘billiard ball’ picture of causation: if all causation is by impact, how can the material and the immaterial impact upon each other? But if causation is either by a more ethereal force or energy or only a matter of constant conjunction, there would appear to be no problem in principle with the idea of interaction of mind and body.
Even if there is no objection in principle, there appears to be a conflict between interactionism and some basic principles of physical science. For example, if causal power was flowing in and out of the physical system, energy would not be conserved, and the conservation of energy is a fundamental scientific law. Various responses have been made to this. One suggestion is that it might be possible for mind to influence the distribution of energy, without altering its quantity. (See Averill and Keating 1981). Another response is to challenge the relevance of the conservation principle in this context. The conservation principle states that ‘in a causally isolated system the total amount of energy will remain constant’. Whereas ‘[t]he interactionist denies…that the human body is an isolated system’, so the principle is irrelevant (Larmer (1986), 282: this article presents a good brief survey of the options). This approach has been termed conditionality, namely the view that conservation is conditional on the physical system being closed, that is, that nothing non-physical is interacting or interfering with it, and, of course, the interactionist claims that this condition is, trivially, not met. That conditionality is the best line for the dualist to take, and that other approaches do not work, is defended in Pitts (2019) and Cucu and Pitts (2019). This, they claim, makes the plausibility of interactionism an empirical matter which only close investigation on the fine operation of the brain could hope to settle. Cucu, in a separate article (2018), claims to find critical neuronal events which do not have sufficient physical explanation.This claim clearly needs further investigation.
Robins Collins (2011) has claimed that the appeal to conservation by opponents of interactionism is something of a red herring because conservation principles are not ubiquitous in physics. He argues that energy is not conserved in general relativity, in quantum theory, or in the universe taken as a whole. Why then, should we insist on it in mind-brain interaction?
Most discussion of interactionism takes place in the context of the assumption that it is incompatible with the world’s being ‘closed under physics’. This is a very natural assumption, but it is not justified if causal overdetermination of behaviour is possible. There could then be a complete physical cause of behaviour, and a mental one. The strongest intuitive objection against overdetermination is clearly stated by Mills (1996: 112), who is himself a defender of overdetermination.
For X to be a cause of Y, X must contribute something to Y. The only way a purely mental event could contribute to a purely physical one would be to contribute some feature not already determined by a purely physical event. But if physical closure is true, there is no feature of the purely physical effect that is not contributed by the purely physical cause. Hence interactionism violates physical closure after all.
Mills says that this argument is invalid, because a physical event can have features not explained by the event which is its sufficient cause. For example, “the rock’s hitting the window is causally sufficient for the window’s breaking, and the window’s breaking has the feature of being the third window-breaking in the house this year; but the facts about prior window-breakings, rather than the rock’s hitting the window, are what cause this window-breaking to have this feature.”
The opponent of overdetermination could perhaps reply that his principle applies, not to every feature of events, but to a subgroup – say, intrinsic features, not merely relational or comparative ones. It is this kind of feature that the mental event would have to cause, but physical closure leaves no room for this. These matters are still controversial.
The problem with closure of physics may be radically altered if physical laws are indeterministic, as quantum theory seems to assert. If physical laws are deterministic, then any interference from outside would lead to a breach of those laws. But if they are indeterministic, might not interference produce a result that has a probability greater than zero, and so be consistent with the laws? This way, one might have interaction yet preserve a kind of nomological closure, in the sense that no laws are infringed. Because it involves assessing the significance and consequences of quantum theory, this is a difficult matter for the non-physicist to assess. Some argue that indeterminacy manifests itself only on the subatomic level, being cancelled out by the time one reaches even very tiny macroscopic objects: and human behaviour is a macroscopic phenomenon. Others argue that the structure of the brain is so finely tuned that minute variations could have macroscopic effects, rather in the way that, according to ‘chaos theory’, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in China might affect the weather in New York. (For discussion of this, see Eccles (1980), (1987), and Popper and Eccles (1977).) Still others argue that quantum indeterminacy manifests itself directly at a high level, when acts of observation collapse the wave function, suggesting that the mind may play a direct role in affecting the state of the world (Hodgson 1988; Stapp 1993).
3.2 Epiphenomenalism
If the reality of property dualism is not to be denied, but the problem of how the immaterial is to affect the material is to be avoided, then epiphenomenalism may seem to be the answer. According to this theory, mental events are caused by physical events, but have no causal influence on the physical. I have introduced this theory as if its point were to avoid the problem of how two different categories of thing might interact. In fact, it is, at best, an incomplete solution to this problem. If it is mysterious how the non-physical can have it in its nature to influence the physical, it ought to be equally mysterious how the physical can have it in its nature to produce something non-physical. But that this latter is what occurs is an essential claim of epiphenomenalism. (For development of this point, see Green (2003), 149–51). In fact, epiphenomenalism is more effective as a way of saving the autonomy of the physical (the world as ‘closed under physics’) than as a contribution to avoiding the need for the physical and non-physical to have causal commerce.
There are at least three serious problems for epiphenomenalism. First, as I indicated in section 1, it is profoundly counterintuitive. What could be more apparent than that it is the pain that I feel that makes me cry, or the visual experience of the boulder rolling towards me that makes me run away? At least one can say that epiphenomenalism is a fall-back position: it tends to be adopted because other options are held to be unacceptable.
The second problem is that, if mental states do nothing, there is no reason why they should have evolved. This objection ties in with the first: the intuition there was that conscious states clearly modify our behaviour in certain ways, such as avoiding danger, and it is plain that they are very useful from an evolutionary perspective.
Frank Jackson (1982) replies to this objection by saying that it is the brain state associated with pain that evolves for this reason: the sensation is a by-product. Evolution is full of useless or even harmful by-products. For example, polar bears have evolved thick coats to keep them warm, even though this has the damaging side effect that they are heavy to carry. Jackson’s point is true in general, but does not seem to apply very happily to the case of mind. The heaviness of the polar bear’s coat follows directly from those properties and laws which make it warm: one could not, in any simple way, have one without the other. But with mental states, dualistically conceived, the situation is quite the opposite. The laws of physical nature which, the mechanist says, make brain states cause behaviour, in no way explain why brain states should give rise to conscious ones. The laws linking mind and brain are what Feigl (1958) calls nomological danglers, that is, brute facts added onto the body of integrated physical law. Why there should have been by-products of that kind seems to have no evolutionary explanation.
The third problem concerns the rationality of belief in epiphenomenalism, via its effect on the problem of other minds. It is natural to say that I know that I have mental states because I experience them directly. But how can I justify my belief that others have them? The simple version of the ‘argument from analogy’ says that I can extrapolate from my own case. I know that certain of my mental states are correlated with certain pieces of behaviour, and so I infer that similar behaviour in others is also accompanied by similar mental states. Many hold that this is a weak argument because it is induction from one instance, namely, my own. The argument is stronger if it is not a simple induction but an ‘argument to the best explanation’. I seem to know from my own case that mental events can be the explanation of behaviour, and I know of no other candidate explanation for typical human behaviour, so I postulate the same explanation for the behaviour of others. But if epiphenomenalism is true, my mental states do not explain my behaviour and there is a physical explanation for the behaviour of others. It is explanatorily redundant to postulate such states for others. I know, by introspection, that I have them, but is it not just as likely that I alone am subject to this quirk of nature, rather than that everyone is?
For more detailed treatment and further reading on this topic, see the entry epiphenomenalism.
3.3 Parallelism
The epiphenomenalist wishes to preserve the integrity of physical science and the physical world, and appends those mental features that he cannot reduce. The parallelist preserves both realms intact, but denies all causal interaction between them. They run in harmony with each other, but not because their mutual influence keeps each other in line. That they should behave as if they were interacting would seem to be a bizarre coincidence. This is why parallelism has tended to be adopted only by those – like Leibniz – who believe in a pre-established harmony, set in place by God. The progression of thought can be seen as follows. Descartes believes in a more or less natural form of interaction between immaterial mind and material body. Malebranche thought that this was impossible naturally, and so required God to intervene specifically on each occasion on which interaction was required. Leibniz decided that God might as well set things up so that they always behaved as if they were interacting, without particular intervention being required. Outside such a theistic framework, the theory is incredible. Even within such a framework, one might well sympathise with Berkeley’s instinct that once genuine interaction is ruled out one is best advised to allow that God creates the physical world directly, within the mental realm itself, as a construct out of experience.
4. Arguments for Dualism
4.1 The Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism
One category of arguments for dualism is constituted by the standard objections against physicalism. Prime examples are those based on the existence of qualia, the most important of which is the so-called ‘knowledge argument’. Because this argument has its own entry (see the entry qualia: the knowledge argument), I shall deal relatively briefly with it here. One should bear in mind, however, that all arguments against physicalism are also arguments for the irreducible and hence immaterial nature of the mind and, given the existence of the material world, are thus arguments for dualism.
The knowledge argument asks us to imagine a future scientist who has lacked a certain sensory modality from birth, but who has acquired a perfect scientific understanding of how this modality operates in others. This scientist – call him Harpo – may have been born stone deaf, but become the world’s greatest expert on the machinery of hearing: he knows everything that there is to know within the range of the physical and behavioural sciences about hearing. Suppose that Harpo, thanks to developments in neurosurgery, has an operation which finally enables him to hear. It is suggested that he will then learn something he did not know before, which can be expressed as what it is like to hear, or the qualitative or phenomenal nature of sound. These qualitative features of experience are generally referred to as qualia. If Harpo learns something new, he did not know everything before. He knew all the physical facts before. So what he learns on coming to hear – the facts about the nature of experience or the nature of qualia – are non-physical. This establishes at least a state or property dualism. (See Jackson 1982; Robinson 1982.)
There are at least two lines of response to this popular but controversial argument. First is the ‘ability’ response. According to this, Harpo does not acquire any new factual knowledge, only ‘knowledge how’, in the form of the ability to respond directly to sounds, which he could not do before. This essentially behaviouristic account is exactly what the intuition behind the argument is meant to overthrow. Putting ourselves in Harpo’s position, it is meant to be obvious that what he acquires is knowledge of what something is like, not just how to do something. Such appeals to intuition are always, of course, open to denial by those who claim not to share the intuition. Some ability theorists seem to blur the distinction between knowing what something is like and knowing how to do something, by saying that the ability Harpo acquires is to imagine or remember the nature of sound. In this case, what he acquires the ability to do involves the representation to himself of what the thing is like. But this conception of representing to oneself, especially in the form of imagination, seems sufficiently close to producing in oneself something very like a sensory experience that it only defers the problem: until one has a physicalist gloss on what constitutes such representations as those involved in conscious memory and imagination, no progress has been made.
The other line of response is to argue that, although Harpo’s new knowledge is factual, it is not knowledge of a new fact. Rather, it is new way of grasping something that he already knew. He does not realise this, because the concepts employed to capture experience (such as ‘looks red’ or ‘sounds C-sharp’) are similar to demonstratives, and demonstrative concepts lack the kind of descriptive content that allow one to infer what they express from other pieces of information that one may already possess. A total scientific knowledge of the world would not enable you to say which time was ‘now’ or which place was ‘here’. Demonstrative concepts pick something out without saying anything extra about it. Similarly, the scientific knowledge that Harpo originally possessed did not enable him to anticipate what it would be like to re-express some parts of that knowledge using the demonstrative concepts that only experience can give one. The knowledge, therefore, appears to be genuinely new, whereas only the mode of conceiving it is novel.
Proponents of the epistemic argument respond that it is problematic to maintain both that the qualitative nature of experience can be genuinely novel, and that the quality itself be the same as some property already grasped scientifically: does not the experience’s phenomenal nature, which the demonstrative concepts capture, constitute a property in its own right? Another way to put this is to say that phenomenal concepts are not pure demonstratives, like ‘here’ and ‘now’, or ‘this’ and ‘that’, because they do capture a genuine qualitative content. Furthermore, experiencing does not seem to consist simply in exercising a particular kind of concept, demonstrative or not. When Harpo has his new form of experience, he does not simply exercise a new concept; he also grasps something new – the phenomenal quality – with that concept. How decisive these considerations are, remains controversial.
4.2 The Argument from Predicate Dualism to Property Dualism
I said above that predicate dualism might seem to have no ontological consequences, because it is concerned only with the different way things can be described within the contexts of the different sciences, not with any real difference in the things themselves. This, however, can be disputed.
The argument from predicate to property dualism moves in two steps, both controversial. The first claims that the irreducible special sciences, which are the sources of irreducible predicates, are not wholly objective in the way that physics is, but depend for their subject matter upon interest-relative perspectives on the world. This means that they, and the predicates special to them, depend on the existence of minds and mental states, for only minds have interest-relative perspectives. The second claim is that psychology – the science of the mental – is itself an irreducible special science, and so it, too, presupposes the existence of the mental. Mental predicates therefore presuppose the mentality that creates them: mentality cannot consist simply in the applicability of the predicates themselves.
First, let us consider the claim that the special sciences are not fully objective, but are interest-relative.
No-one would deny, of course, that the very same subject matter or ‘hunk of reality’ can be described in irreducibly different ways and it still be just that subject matter or piece of reality. A mass of matter could be characterized as a hurricane, or as a collection of chemical elements, or as mass of sub-atomic particles, and there be only the one mass of matter. But such different explanatory frameworks seem to presuppose different perspectives on that subject matter.
This is where basic physics, and perhaps those sciences reducible to basic physics, differ from irreducible special sciences. On a realist construal, the completed physics cuts physical reality up at its ultimate joints: any special science which is nomically strictly reducible to physics also, in virtue of this reduction, it could be argued, cuts reality at its joints, but not at its minutest ones. If scientific realism is true, a completed physics will tell one how the world is, independently of any special interest or concern: it is just how the world is. It would seem that, by contrast, a science which is not nomically reducible to physics does not take its legitimation from the underlying reality in this direct way. Rather, such a science is formed from the collaboration between, on the one hand, objective similarities in the world and, on the other, perspectives and interests of those who devise the science. The concept of hurricane is brought to bear from the perspective of creatures concerned about the weather. Creatures totally indifferent to the weather would have no reason to take the real patterns of phenomena that hurricanes share as constituting a single kind of thing. With the irreducible special sciences, there is an issue of salience , which involves a subjective component: a selection of phenomena with a certain teleology in mind is required before their structures or patterns are reified. The entities of metereology or biology are, in this respect, rather like Gestalt phenomena.
Even accepting this, why might it be thought that the perspectivality of the special sciences leads to a genuine property dualism in the philosophy of mind? It might seem to do so for the following reason. Having a perspective on the world, perceptual or intellectual, is a psychological state. So the irreducible special sciences presuppose the existence of mind. If one is to avoid an ontological dualism, the mind that has this perspective must be part of the physical reality on which it has its perspective. But psychology, it seems to be almost universally agreed, is one of those special sciences that is not reducible to physics, so if its subject matter is to be physical, it itself presupposes a perspective and, hence, the existence of a mind to see matter as psychological. If this mind is physical and irreducible, it presupposes mind to see it as such. We seem to be in a vicious circle or regress.
We can now understand the motivation for full-blown reduction. A true basic physics represents the world as it is in itself, and if the special sciences were reducible, then the existence of their ontologies would make sense as expressions of the physical, not just as ways of seeing or interpreting it. They could be understood ‘from the bottom up’, not from top down. The irreducibility of the special sciences creates no problem for the dualist, who sees the explanatory endeavor of the physical sciences as something carried on from a perspective conceptually outside of the physical world. Nor need this worry a physicalist, if he can reduce psychology, for then he could understand ‘from the bottom up’ the acts (with their internal, intentional contents) which created the irreducible ontologies of the other sciences. But psychology is one of the least likely of sciences to be reduced. If psychology cannot be reduced, this line of reasoning leads to real emergence for mental acts and hence to a real dualism for the properties those acts instantiate (Robinson 2003).
4.3 The Modal Argument
There is an argument, which has roots in Descartes (Meditation VI), which is a modal argument for dualism. One might put it as follows:
It is imaginable that one’s mind might exist without one’s body.
therefore
It is conceivable that one’s mind might exist without one’s body.
therefore
It is possible one’s mind might exist without one’s body.
therefore
One’s mind is a different entity from one’s body.
The rationale of the argument is a move from imaginability to real possibility. I include (2) because the notion of conceivability has one foot in the psychological camp, like imaginability, and one in the camp of pure logical possibility and therefore helps in the transition from one to the other.
This argument should be distinguished from a similar ‘conceivability’ argument, often known as the ‘zombie hypothesis’, which claims the imaginability and possibility of my body (or, in some forms, a body physically just like it) existing without there being any conscious states associated with it. (See, for example, Chalmers (1996), 94–9.) This latter argument, if sound, would show that conscious states were something over and above physical states. It is a different argument because the hypothesis that the unaltered body could exist without the mind is not the same as the suggestion that the mind might continue to exist without the body, nor are they trivially equivalent. The zombie argument establishes only property dualism and a property dualist might think disembodied existence inconceivable – for example, if he thought the identity of a mind through time depended on its relation to a body (e.g., Penelhum 1970).
Before Kripke (1972/80), the first challenge to such an argument would have concerned the move from (3) to (4). When philosophers generally believed in contingent identity, that move seemed to them invalid. But nowadays that inference is generally accepted and the issue concerns the relation between imaginability and possibility. No-one would nowadays identify the two (except, perhaps, for certain quasi-realists and anti-realists), but the view that imaginability is a solid test for possibility has been strongly defended. W. D. Hart ((1994), 266), for example, argues that no clear example has been produced such that “one can imagine that p (and tell less imaginative folk a story that enables them to imagine that p) plus a good argument that it is impossible that p. No such counterexamples have been forthcoming…” This claim is at least contentious. There seem to be good arguments that time-travel is incoherent, but every episode of Star-Trek or Doctor Who shows how one can imagine what it might be like were it possible.
It is worth relating the appeal to possibility in this argument to that involved in the more modest, anti-physicalist, zombie argument. The possibility of this hypothesis is also challenged, but all that is necessary for a zombie to be possible is that all and only the things that the physical sciences say about the body be true of such a creature. As the concepts involved in such sciences – e.g., neuron, cell, muscle – seem to make no reference, explicit or implicit, to their association with consciousness, and are defined in purely physical terms in the relevant science texts, there is a very powerful prima facie case for thinking that something could meet the condition of being just like them and lack any connection with consciousness. There is no parallel clear, uncontroversial and regimented account of mental concepts as a whole that fails to invoke, explicitly or implicitly, physical (e.g., behavioural) states.
For an analytical behaviourist the appeal to imaginability made in the argument fails, not because imagination is not a reliable guide to possibility, but because we cannot imagine such a thing, as it is a priori impossible. The impossibility of disembodiment is rather like that of time travel, because it is demonstrable a priori, though only by arguments that are controversial. The argument can only get under way for those philosophers who accept that the issue cannot be settled a priori, so the possibility of the disembodiment that we can imagine is still prima facie open.
A major rationale of those who think that imagination is not a safe indication of possibility, even when such possibility is not eliminable a priori, is that we can imagine that a posteriori necessities might be false – for example, that Hesperus might not be identical to Phosphorus. But if Kripke is correct, that is not a real possibility. Another way of putting this point is that there are many epistemic possibilities which are imaginable because they are epistemic possibilities, but which are not real possibilities. Richard Swinburne (1997, New Appendix C), whilst accepting this argument in general, has interesting reasons for thinking that it cannot apply in the mind-body case. He argues that in cases that involve a posteriori necessities, such as those identities that need discovering, it is because we identify those entities only by their ‘stereotypes’ (that is, by their superficial features observable by the layman) that we can be wrong about their essences. In the case of our experience of ourselves this is not true.
Now it is true that the essence of Hesperus cannot be discovered by a mere thought experiment. That is because what makes Hesperus Hesperus is not the stereotype, but what underlies it. But it does not follow that no one can ever have access to the essence of a substance, but must always rely for identification on a fallible stereotype. One might think that for the person him or herself, while what makes that person that person underlies what is observable to others, it does not underlie what is experienceable by that person, but is given directly in their own self-awareness.
This is a very appealing Cartesian intuition: my identity as the thinking thing that I am is revealed to me in consciousness, it is not something beyond the veil of consciousness. Now it could be replied to this that though I do access myself as a conscious subject, so classifying myself is rather like considering myself qua cyclist. Just as I might never have been a cyclist, I might never have been conscious, if things had gone wrong in my very early life. I am the organism, the animal, which might not have developed to the point of consciousness, and that essence as animal is not revealed to me just by introspection.
But there are vital differences between these cases. A cyclist is explicitly presented as a human being (or creature of some other animal species) cycling: there is no temptation to think of a cyclist as a basic kind of thing in its own right. Consciousness is not presented as a property of something, but as the subject itself. Swinburne’s claim that when we refer to ourselves we are referring to something we think we are directly aware of and not to ‘something we know not what’ that underlies our experience seemingly ‘of ourselves’ has powerful intuitive appeal and could only be overthrown by very forceful arguments. Yet, even if we are not referring primarily to a substrate, but to what is revealed in consciousness, could it not still be the case that there is a necessity stronger than causal connecting this consciousness to something physical? To consider this further we must investigate what the limits are of the possible analogy between cases of the water-H2O kind, and the mind-body relation.
We start from the analogy between the water stereotype – how water presents itself – and how consciousness is given first-personally to the subject. It is plausible to claim that something like water could exist without being H2O, but hardly that it could exist without some underlying nature. There is, however, no reason to deny that this underlying nature could be homogenous with its manifest nature: that is, it would seem to be possible that there is a world in which the water-like stuff is an element, as the ancients thought, and is water-like all the way down. The claim of the proponents of the dualist argument is that this latter kind of situation can be known to be true a priori in the case of the mind: that is, one can tell by introspection that it is not more-than-causally dependent on something of a radically different nature, such as a brain or body. What grounds might one have for thinking that one could tell that a priori?
The only general argument that seem to be available for this would be the principle that, for any two levels of discourse, A and B, they are more-than-causally connected only if one entails the other a priori. And the argument for accepting this principle would be that the relatively uncontroversial cases of a posteriori necessary connections are in fact cases in which one can argue a priori from facts about the microstructure to the manifest facts. In the case of water, for example, it would be claimed that it follows a priori that if there were something with the properties attributed to H2O by chemistry on a micro level, then that thing would possess waterish properties on a macro level. What is established a posteriori is that it is in fact H2O that underlies and explains the waterish properties round here, not something else: the sufficiency of the base – were it to obtain – to explain the phenomena, can be deduced a priori from the supposed nature of the base. This is, in effect, the argument that Chalmers uses to defend the zombie hypothesis. The suggestion is that the whole category of a posteriori more-than-causally necessary connections (often identified as a separate category of metaphysical necessity) comes to no more than this. If we accept that this is the correct account of a posteriori necessities, and also deny the analytically reductionist theories that would be necessary for a priori connections between mind and body, as conceived, for example, by the behaviourist or the functionalist, does it follow that we can tell a priori that consciousness is not more-than-causally dependent on the body?
It is helpful in considering this question to employ a distinction like Berkeley’s between ideas and notions. Ideas are the objects of our mental acts, and they capture transparently – ‘by way of image or likeness’ (Principles, sect. 27) – that of which they are the ideas. The self and its faculties are not the objects of our mental acts, but are captured only obliquely in the performance of its acts, and of these Berkeley says we have notions, meaning by this that what we capture of the nature of the dynamic agent does not seem to have the same transparency as what we capture as the normal objects of the agent’s mental acts. It is not necessary to become involved in Berkeley’s metaphysics in general to feel the force of the claim that the contents and internal objects of our mental acts are grasped with a lucidity that exceeds that of our grasp of the agent and the acts per se. Because of this, notions of the self perhaps have a ‘thickness’ and are permanently contestable: there seems always to be room for more dispute as to what is involved in that concept. (Though we shall see later, in 5.2.2, that there is a ‘non-thick’ way of taking the Berkeleyan concept of a notion.)
Because ‘thickness’ always leaves room for dispute, this is one of those cases in philosophy in which one is at the mercy of the arguments philosophers happen to think up. The conceivability argument creates a prima facie case for thinking that mind has no more than causal ontological dependence on the body. Let us assume that one rejects analytical (behaviourist or functionalist) accounts of mental predicates. Then the above arguments show that any necessary dependence of mind on body does not follow the model that applies in other scientific cases. This does not show that there may not be other reasons for believing in such dependence, for so many of the concepts in the area are still contested. For example, it might be argued that identity through time requires the kind of spatial existence that only body can give: or that the causal continuity required by a stream of consciousness cannot be a property of mere phenomena. All these might be put forward as ways of filling out those aspects of our understanding of the self that are only obliquely, not transparently, presented in self-awareness. The dualist must respond to any claim as it arises: the conceivability argument does not pre-empt them.......
5.2 The Unity of the Mind
Whether one believes that the mind is a substance or just a bundle of properties, the same challenge arises, which is to explain the nature of the unity of the immaterial mind. For the Cartesian, that means explaining how he understands the notion of immaterial substance. For the Humean, the issue is to explain the nature of the relationship between the different elements in the bundle that binds them into one thing. Neither tradition has been notably successful in this latter task: indeed, Hume, in the appendix to the Treatise, declared himself wholly mystified by the problem, rejecting his own initial solution (though quite why is not clear from the text).
I had the privilege to spend some time with Brad Litwin, a kinetic artist based in Philly. His ingenuity, mechanical intellect and artistic vision is exceptional visit his web site its a must see. www.bradlitwin.com/
I've had these figs built for a while and talked about them on discord but I haven't shown them yet. So these are Goldfeather's villains
from left to right
Soldier 101:
ex military soldier and down right badass she is an expert martial artist and has expert intellect.
Reinhart:
originating from Japan, he is the muscle of the group and is equipped with a hand made axe and a glowing Hart made with a purple stone of energy found in an abandoned caves
Spirit hunter:
a monk who was lost in a chemical field to be later found as a deadly assasin
Jupiter:
the tech wiz and the girl with style. has a teleportation device and heat sensitive goggles
I hope you enjoy these and if you have any questions ask away and I'll see you all later :)
Island of Flying Books
“What do you want?” Little Rinpoche asks.
“I am here to bring back all these books to the island where they came from.”
“Oh yes, I remember”, he says. “I’ve ordered them back. Well done so far. Now open your mind and let all concepts fly away!”
He claps his hands and you will not believe it, but all books fly away.
HKD
„Rinpoche“, fragte der Junge. „Woher kommen die Wünsche?“
Sie kommen aus dem See der himmlischen Erde.
Und wo liegt dieser See?
Auf der Insel der fliegenden Bücher...
Die gibt es doch gar nicht.
Doch gibt es sie. Im innersten deiner Seele. Manche nennen diesen Ort auch Phantasie oder Imagination. Sobald du mit dem Boot deines Wünschens auf die Insel reist, erlebst du deine Phantasie. Und von dort bekommst du die Botschaften für deinen Alltag. Was wäre das Leben ohne Phantasie? Koste am schönsten Nektar deiner Seele, lass deine Phantasie zu, dann bist du mit der Insel der fliegenden Bücher verbunden.
Heute bin ich erwachsen, beinahe schon ein alter Mann, doch jetzt habe ich die Insel der Seligen entdeckt, Hypoberea. Aus meiner Sicht ist sie vergleichbar mit Shambhala von dem Rinpoche in eben jenem Buch berichtete, das auf dem obigen Bild durch die Gegend fliegt. Die kleine Figur hat sich aus der Druckerschwärze selbst erschaffen und nutzt das Buch wie einen fliegenden Teppich. Ich muss noch herausfinden, wer dieser kleine Mann ist... :-)
HKD
Falls Psychologie interessiert:
Auf dem Pfad der Entwicklung des Bewusstseins aus den Schleiern der Maya kommt der Punkt, an dem man alle Konzepte wieder aufgeben muss. Ein freies Bewusstsein kann weder an Prinzipien noch an Konzepten haften, obwohl sie für die Befreiung notwendig sind. Bewusstheit wird durch den Logos gebildet und daher kann man die Konzepte die er aufbaut als Boot oder Fahrzeug bezeichnen. Mit dem Boot setzt man über den großen Strom. Auf der anderen Seite liegt das Paradies der Freiheit. Es ist die innere Freiheit, das diamantene Bewusstsein. Dagegen sind äußere Freiheiten und Unfreiheiten unwesentlich. Was aber nicht heißt, dass sie zu vernachlässigen wären... :-)
Daher muss man sich konkret von den Büchern befreien. Ich selbst bin rituell mit einem Koffer voller Bücher in die Wüste gefahren und habe sie am Fuße einer großen Wanderdüne vergraben. Für große Übergänge bedurfte es bei mir stets großer Rituale, damit der Geist die Veränderung akzeptieren und verstehen konnte.
HKD
Anmerkung:
This is digital art work, not reality.
Das Bild ist ein digital hergestelltes Werk.
Jede Ähnlichkeit mit realen Gegebenheiten wäre rein zufällig.
HKD
The Surveyor
HKD
Falls Psychologie interessiert: Logik kontra Gefühl – Ordnung und Chaos
Der Landvermesser
Das Prinzip der Ordnung beruht auf der Grundlage von Teilung. Ein Ganzes wird zerschnitten in zwei Teile, die Yin und Yang genannt werden können. Die Ordnung im Kosmos beruht auf dem Vergleich von links und rechts, oben und unten, Himmel und Erde. Es entstehen einzelne Teile, die miteinander verglichen werden können. Auf diese Weise entsteht Wissen, natürlich aufkosten der Ganzheit, die als Ursprung der Zwei und damit der Zeit in Vergessenheit gerät. Die Zweiheit und mit ihr die Verzweifelung wird – weil eben so erfahren – als einzige Realität angesehen. Widerspruch wohin das Auge blickt und der Gedanke schweift. Und das ist vollkommen normal, denn Yin bedingt Yang, das Leben den Tod, die Freude das Leid, Antipathie und Sympathie, die Reihe könnte ich endlos fortsetzen.
Selbstverständlich findet sich der Widerspruch in der Psyche entwickelter Wesen, sobald sich in ihnen der Verstand gegen das Gefühl stellt und dieser innere Kampf bewusst wird. Kann der Trieb sich unbewusst ausleben, ist der betreffende Mensch in zwei Persönlichkeiten gespalten, wie die Geschichte um Dr. Jekyll und Mr. Hyde zeigt. Eine helle und eine dunkle Seite wird dann erkennbar und wieder ist es dadurch dem Bewusstsein möglich, sich selbst zu erkennen. Die Basis jeglicher Erkenntnis ist Trennung in A und nicht A.
Die westliche Gottheit Apollo oder der östliche Buddha Manjushri sind Platzhalter für die logische Funktion des Geistes, eben jener Motivationskraft, die nach Licht, nach Sonne und Erkenntnis strebt., sobald dieses Software-Programm in der Psyche gestartet wird Es könnte heißen: Search Yourself. In der Tat hat dieser Landvermesser mit dem apollinischen Prinzip zu tun. Von ihm wird er motiviert, sich mit Zahlen und mathematischen Vorgängen zu beschäftigen.
Ein hoch entwickelter Intellekt hat immer mehr Energie aus dem Bereich der Lenden und dem des Herzens gezogen und die Gefühlswelt eines Logikers wie etwa Tuvok (Star-Trek – Voyager – der Sicherheitsoffizier des Rauschiffes) ist nur noch rudimentär vorhanden. Alle sieben Jahre bricht sie aus den Tiefen der Psyche hervor und zwingt den Mann (Vulkanier) zur Paarung.
Der Intellekt übernimmt in gewissen Menschen die Macht und diese Konzentration der Energie auf abstrakte Ordnungsprinzipien bringt große Reichsgründer und Führungspersönlichkeiten hervor. Doch auch der Landvermesser streckt Grenzen ab, trennt Verantwortungsbereiche und schafft Ordnung unter der künftigen Nachbarschaft. Bis hierhin und nicht weiter, darfst du ackern, bauen oder Einzäunen.
Regeln, Gesetze, Vorschriften, Erlasse, all diese Dinge finden energetisch ihre Wurzeln in der Motivationskraft A1. In einem Menschen paart sich gern die Energie A5 dazu. Der Landvermesser steht mit beiden Beinen auf der Erde, er ist verbunden mit der Scholle, der Außenwelt mit ihren Prinzipien und Ordnungsstrukturen. Und zu dieser Ordnung trägt er bei, vernünftig, sachlich, präzise. Dafür sorgt A5, die zuverlässige und rationale Motivationskraft, die Tuvok so wunderbar verkörpert, während Madame Captain ein hervorragendes Beispiel für eine Führungspersönlichkeit ist, die von A1 motiviert wird. Der Captain (A1) und der Sicherheitsoffizier (A5) sind in der Serie sehr gut miteinander befreundet. Der Captain stellt die Regeln auf und der Logiker setzt sie mit gebührender Logik um.
Auch der Landvermesser arbeitet mit Logik und Sachverstand, Emotionalität stört bei Tätigkeiten, die einen kühlen Kopf brauchen. Wenn sich in Systemen Fehler einschleichen, spielt eine andere Energie mit, das chaotische Prinzip. Es ist der Ordnung entgegengesetzt und gleichzeitig komplementär wie es Yin für Yang oder die Ebbe für die Flut ist. Ordnung und Chaos bedingen einander und ziehen sich an. Und so schleichen sich immer wieder subversive Kräfte in die Ordnungs- und Sicherheitssysteme ein und entpuppen sich als geschickte Gegenspieler.
Wie beim Schach, mal gewinnt Weiß, ein anderes Mal Schwarz. Und aufgrund der Teilung in Schwarz und Weiß nehmen die Bewusstheit und schließlich die Selbst-Bewusstheit zu.
Selbsterkenntnis beruht auf der vorausgegangenen Teilung, die sich aufgrund dieses Erkennens anschickt, wieder ein Ganzes zu werden und diesen Vorgang auch zu verstehen.
Wie viel versteht der Landvermesser bereits von sich selbst? Kennt er die verschiedenen Bereiche seines Denkens und Fühlens? Wird er bald beginnen mit der Vermessung seiner Innenwelt?
Das sind Fragen, die ich in dieses Bild hinein interpretiere. Vielleicht geht dieser Vermesser nach getaner Arbeit mit seinem Freund zur Jagd… Ach, was weiß ich denn schon?
HKD
Digital art based on own photography and textures
HKD
Fallen man, and thus the average man, is as it were poisoned by the passional element, either grossly or subtly; from this results an obscuring of the Intellect and the necessity of a Revelation coming from the outside. Remove the passional element from the soul and the intelligence (remove "the rust from the mirror" or "from the heart") and the Intellect will be released; it will reveal from within what religion reveals from without.
This brings us to an important point: in order to make itself understood by souls impregnated with passion, religion must itself adopt a so to speak passional language, whence dogmatism, which excludes, and moralism, which schematizes; if the average man or collective man were not passional, Revelation would speak the language of the Intellect and there would be no exoterism, nor for that matter esoterism considered as an occult complement.
There are here three possibilities: firstly, men dominate the passional element, everyone lives spiritually by his inward Revelation; this is the golden age, in which everyone is born
an initiate.
Second possibility: men are affected by the passional element to the point of forgetting certain aspects of the Truth, whence the necessity - or the opportuneness - of Revelations that while being outward are metaphysical in spirit, such as the Upanishads.
Thirdly: the majority of men are dominated by passions, whence the formalistic, exclusive and combative religions, which communicate to them on the one hand the means of channelling the passional element with a view to salvation, and on the other hand the means of overcoming it in view of the total Truth, and of thereby transcending the religious formalism which veils it while suggesting it in an indirect manner. Religious revelation is both a veil of light and a light veiled.
---
Esoterism as Principle and as Way by Frithjof Schuon
French postcard by Editions d'Art Yvon, Paris, no. 212. Photo: Sam Lévin.
French actress Bernadette Lafont (1938-2013) appeared in several classics of the Nouvelle Vague. Original and full of contradictions, she was both sexy and rather plain, brassy and quite serious, a mixture of intellect, sensuality and humour.
Bernadette Paule Anne Lafont was born in Nîmes in the South of France in 1938. She was the daughter of a pharmacist and his wife. As a teenager, she started her career as a dancer. She entered the Opéra de Nîmes where she fell in love with her future husband, the handsome actor Gérard Blain. In Paris, she met the young critic and aspiring film director François Truffaut, who offered her a role in his second short film, shot in Nîmes. So she made her screen debut in Les Mistons/The Mischief Makers (Francois Truffaut, 1957) opposite Gérard Blain. It was a comedy about five kids, who spy on two lovers during a hot summer day. It turned out to be that she was in the right place at the right time to catch the Nouvelle Vague movement, the new wave of filmmakers that would revolutionize the cinema.
She starred particularly in films by Truffaut and by Claude Chabrol. Her first feature and still one of her best-known films is Le Beau Serge/Bitter Reunion (Claude Chabrol, 1958) with Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy. (She had married Blain the year before but they would divorce a year later.) Many Nouvelle Vague films followed. With Chabrol she also made À double tour/Leda (Claude Chabrol, 1959) starring Madeleine Robinson, Les bonnes femmes/The Good Time Girls (Claude Chabrol, 1960) with Stéphane Audran, and Les godelureaux/Wise Guys (Claude Chabrol, 1961). She appeared in Truffaut’s comedy Tire-au-flanc 62/The Army Game (Claude de Givray, François Truffaut, 1960), and was the feisty heroine of Truffaut’s Une belle fille comme moi/A Gorgeous Bird Like Me (François Truffaut, 1972). For Louis Malle, she did a supporting part in his comedy Le voleur/The Thief of Paris (Louis Malle, 1967) starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, and for Jacques Rivette, she joined the cast of Out 1, noli me tangere/Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, Suzanne Schiffman, 1971) and Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette, 1974). Finally, she played the role of Marie, one-third of the trio of lovers in La Maman et la Putain/The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973), considered by some critics as the last film of the Nouvelle Vague.
A well-known film with Bernadette Lafont is La Fiancée du Pirate/A Very Curious Girl (Nelly Kaplan, 1969). The success of this film about violence against women renewed her career after a difficult period. She was seen in Les stances à Sophie/Sophie’s Ways (Moshé Mizrahi, 1971), the crime drama Zig Zig (László Szabó, 1975) with Catherine Deneuve, and had a small part as the cellmate of Isabelle Huppert in Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol, 1978). In Italy, she appeared in the comedy Il Ladrone/The Thief (Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1980). In a 1997 New York Times article, Katherine Knorr writes: “Lafont has in a tumultuous life done a bit of everything, from television movies to the stage, never quite the megastar but always a strong presence, smart and messed up all at the same time”. In the 1980s she appeared in Chabrol’s crime films Inspecteur Lavardin/Inspector Lavardin (Claude Chabrol, 1986) featuring Jean Poiret, and Masques/Masks (Claude Chabrol, 1987) with Philippe Noiret. She also played in Les saisons du plaisir/The Pleasure Seasons (1988) and other comedies by Jean-Pierre Mocky. Lafont won the César Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for L'Effrontée/Charlotte and Lulu (Claude Miller, 1985) starring Charlotte Gainsbourg. The energetic Lafont created in 1990 an audio-visual workshop to help young actors develop their creativity. She is the co-founder and on the committee that awards the Glace Gervais and an accompanying 100,000 franc prize to works competing in the Cannes Film Festival ‘Un certain Regard’ category. The award was designed to help bolster the budding careers of filmmakers. Her later films include Généalogies d'un crime/Genealogies of a Crime (Raul Ruiz, 1997) with Catherine Deneuve and the comedy Ripoux 3/Part-Time Cops (Claude Zidi, 2003) with Philippe Noiret. In May 2007, she chaired the jury for the fifth edition of the Award for Education presented at the 60th Cannes Film Festival. After her divorce from Blain in 1959, Bernadette Lafont married the Hungarian sculptor Diourka Medveczky. Although the marriage was difficult and ended in a divorce, there were three children: actress Élisabeth Lafont, David Lafont and the late actress Pauline Lafont, who died in the summer of 1988 under tragic circumstances. She went for a walk near the family property in the Cevennes and never returned. For many weeks, police searched and the popular press went on a feeding frenzy. When Pauline's body was finally found, it became clear she had fallen down in rough, lonely terrain. Lafont published her autobiography in 1997, an event heralded by a grand star-studded gala in Paris. For her long service to the French motion picture industry, she was given an Honorary César Award in 2003. She was made Officier de la Légion d'honneur (Officer of the Legion of Honour) in 2009. In 2013, Bernadette Lafont died in a hospital in her home town of Nimes.
Sources: Katherine Knorr (New York Times), Sandra Brennan (AllMovie), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
St Oswald
Church of England
Monument to Penelope Boothby (Detail)
(1785-1791)
by Thomas Banks
1793.
Carrara Marble
Inscription:
"She was in form and intellect most exquisite. The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark and the wreck was total”.
The inscription is in four different languages – English, Latin, French & Italian, all of which Penelope spoke.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Boothby
Penelope was the only child of Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet Boothby, and his wife Susannah.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Brooke_Boothby,_6th_Baronet
Go here to see a portrait of Penelope by Sir Joshua Reynolds:
www.flickr.com/photos/oxfordshirechurches/6675020865/in/p...
youtu.be/KcPcJ9ycEu4?t=2m22s Full Feature
Curse of the Demon / Night of the Demon
Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment
1957/58 / B&W / 1:78 anamorphic 16:9 / 82, 95 min. / Street Date August 13, 2002 / $24.95
Starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis, Maurice Denham, Athene Seyler
Cinematography Ted Scaife
Production Designer Ken Adam
Special Effects George Blackwell, S.D. Onions, Wally Veevers
Film Editor Michael Gordon
Original Music Clifton Parker
Written by Charles Bennett and Hal E. Chester from the story Casting the Runes by Montague R. James
Produced by Frank Bevis, Hal E. Chester
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Savant champions a lot of genre movies but only infrequently does one appear like Jacques Tourneur's superlative Curse of the Demon. It's simply better than the rest -- an intelligent horror film with some very good scares. It occupies a stylistic space that sums up what's best in ghost stories and can hold its own with most any supernatural film ever made. Oh, it's also a great entertainment that never fails to put audiences at the edge of their seats.
What's more, Columbia TriStar has shown uncommon respect for their genre output by including both versions of Curse of the Demon on one disc. Savant has full coverage on the versions and their restoration below, following his thorough and analytical (read: long-winded and anal) coverage of the film itself.
Synopsis:
Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), a scientist and professional debunker of superstitious charlatans, arrives in England to help Professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham) assault the phony cult surrounding Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall McGinnis). But Harrington has mysteriously died and Holden becomes involved with his niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins), who thinks Karswell had something to do with it. Karswell's 'tricks' confuse the skeptical Holden, but he stubbornly holds on to his conviction that he's " ... not a sucker, like 90% of the human race." That is, until the evidence mounts that Harrington was indeed killed by a demon summoned from Hell, and that Holden is the next intended victim!
The majority of horror films are fantasies in which we accept supernatural ghosts, demons and monsters as part of a deal we've made with the authors: they dress the fantasy in an attractive guise and arrange the variables into an interesting pattern, and we agree to play along for the sake of enjoyment. When it works the movies can resonate with personal meaning. Even though Dracula and Frankenstein are unreal, they are relevant because they're aligned with ideas and themes in our subconscious.
Horror films that seriously confront the no-man's land between rational reality and supernatural belief have a tough time of it. Everyone who believes in God knows that the tug o' war between rationality and faith in our culture has become so clogged with insane belief systems it's considered impolite to dismiss people who believe in flying saucers or the powers of crystals or little glass pyramids. One of Dana Andrews' key lines in Curse of the Demon, defending his dogged skepticism against those urging him to have an open mind, is his retort, "If the world is a dark place ruled by Devils and Demons, we all might as well give up right now." Curse of the Demon balances itself between skepticism and belief with polite English manners, letting us have our fun as it lays its trap. We watch Andrews roll his eyes and scoff at the feeble séance hucksters and the dire warnings of a foolish-looking necromancer. Meanwhile, a whole dark world of horror sneaks up on him. The film's intelligent is such that we're not offended by its advocacy of dark forces or even its literal, in-your-face demon.
The remarkable Curse of the Demon was made in England for Columbia but is gloriously unaffected by that company's zero-zero track record with horror films. Producer Hal E. Chester would seem an odd choice to make a horror classic after producing Joe Palooka films and acting as a criminal punk in dozens of teen crime movies. The obvious strong cards are writer Charles Bennett, the brains behind several classic English Hitchcock pictures (who 'retired' into meaningless bliss writing for schlockmeister Irwin Allen) and Jacques Tourneur, a master stylist who put Val Lewton on the map with Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie. Tourneur made interesting Westerns (Canyon Passage, Great Day in the Morning) and perhaps the most romantic film noir, Out of the Past. By the late '50s he was on what Andrew Sarris in his American Film called 'a commercial downgrade'. The critic lumped Curse of the Demon with low budget American turkeys like The Fearmakers. 1
Put Tourneur with an intelligent script, a decent cameraman and more than a minimal budget and great things could happen. We're used to watching Corman Poe films, English Hammer films and Italian Bavas and Fredas, all the while making excuses for the shortcomings that keep them in the genre ghetto (where they all do quite well, thank you). There's even a veiled resentment against upscale shockers like The Innocents that have resources (money, time, great actors) denied our favorite toilers in the genre realm. Curse of the Demon is above all those considerations. It has name actors past their prime and reasonable production values. Its own studio (at least in America) released it like a genre quickie, double-billed with dreck like The Night the World Exploded and The Giant Claw. They cut it by 13 minutes, changed its title (to ape The Curse of Frankenstein?) and released a poster featuring a huge, slavering demon monster that some believe was originally meant to be barely glimpsed in the film itself. 2
Horror movies can work on more than one level but Curse of the Demon handles several levels and then some. The narrative sets up John Holden as a professional skeptic who raises a smirking eyebrow to the open minds of his colleagues. Unlike most second-banana scientists in horror films, they express divergent points of view. Holden just sees himself as having common sense but his peers are impressed by the consistency of demonological beliefs through history. Maybe they all saw Christensen's Witchcraft through the Ages, which might have served as a primer for author Charles Bennett. Smart dialogue allows Holden to score points by scoffing at the then-current "regression to past lives" scam popularized by the Bridey Murphy craze. 3 While Holden stays firmly rooted to his position, coining smart phrases and sarcastic put-downs of believers, the other scientists are at least willing to consider alternate possibilities. Indian colleague K.T. Kumar (Peter Elliott) keeps his opinion to himself. But when asked, he politely states that he believes entirely in the world of demons! 4
Holden may think he has the truth by the tail but it takes Kindergarten teacher Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins of Gun Crazy fame) to show him that being a skeptic doesn't mean ignoring facts in front of one's face. Always ready for a drink (a detail added to tailor the part to Andrews?), Holden spends the first couple of reels as interested in pursuing Miss Harrington, as he is the devil-worshippers. The details and coincidences pile up with alarming speed -- the disappearing ink untraceable by the lab, the visual distortions that might be induced by hypnosis, the pages torn from his date book and the parchment of runic symbols. Holden believes them to be props in a conspiracy to draw him into a vortex of doubt and fear. Is he being set up the way a Voodoo master cons his victim, by being told he will die, with fabricated clues to make it all appear real? Holden even gets a bar of sinister music stuck in his head. It's the title theme -- is this a wicked joke on movie soundtracks?
Speak of the Devil...
This brings us to the wonderful character of Julian Karswell, the kiddie-clown turned multi-millionaire cult leader. The man who launched Alfred Hitchcock as a maker of sophisticated thrillers here creates one of the most interesting villains ever written, one surely as good as any of Hitchcock's. In the short American cut Karswell is a shrewd games-player who shows Holden too many of his cards and finally outsmarts himself. The longer UK cut retains the full depth of his character.
Karswell has tapped into the secrets of demonology to gain riches and power, yet he tragically recognizes that he is as vulnerable to the forces of Hell as are the cowering minions he controls through fear. Karswell's coven means business. It's an entirely different conception from the aesthetic salon coffee klatch of The Seventh Victim, where nothing really supernatural happens and the only menace comes from a secret society committing new crimes to hide old ones.
Karswell keeps his vast following living in fear, and supporting his extravagant lifestyle under the idea that Evil is Good, and Good Evil. At first the Hobart Farm seems to harbor religious Christian fundamentalists who have turned their backs on their son. Then we find out that they're Karswell followers, living blighted lives on cursed acreage and bled dry by their cultist "leader." Karswell's mum (Athene Seyler) is an inversion of the usual insane Hitchcock mother. She lovingly resists her son's philosophy and actively tries to help the heroes. That's in the Night version, of course. In the shorter American cut she only makes silly attempts to interest Joanna in her available son and arranges for a séance. Concerned by his "negativity", Mother confronts Julian on the stairs. He has no friends, no wife, no family. He may be a mass extortionist but he's still her baby. Karswell explains that by exploiting his occult knowledge, he's immersed himself forever in Evil. "You get nothing for nothing"
Karswell is like the Devil on Earth, a force with very limited powers that he can't always control. By definition he cannot trust any of his own minions. They're unreliable, weak and prone to double-cross each other, and they attract publicity that makes a secret society difficult to conceal. He can't just kill Holden, as he hasn't a single henchman on the payroll. He instead summons the demon, a magic trick he's only recently mastered. When Karswell turns Harrington away in the first scene we can sense his loneliness. The only person who can possibly understand is right before him, finally willing to admit his power and perhaps even tolerate him. Karswell has no choice but to surrender Harrington over to the un-recallable Demon. In his dealings with the cult-debunker Holden, Karswell defends his turf but is also attempting to justify himself to a peer, another man who might be a potential equal. It's more than a duel of egos between a James Bond and a Goldfinger, with arrogance and aggression masking a mutual respect; Karswell knows he's taken Lewton's "wrong turning in life," and will have to pay for it eventually.
Karswell eventually earns Holden's respect, especially after the fearful testimony of Rand Hobart. It's taken an extreme demonstration to do it, but Holden budges from his smug position. He may not buy all of the demonology hocus-pocus but it's plain enough that Karswell or his "demon" is going to somehow rub him out. Seeking to sneak the parchment back into Karswell's possession, Holden becomes a worthy hero because he's found the maturity to question his own preconceptions. Armed with his rational, cool head, he's a force that makes Karswell -- without his demon, of course -- a relative weakling. Curse of the Demon ends in a classic ghost story twist, with just desserts dished out and balance recovered. The good characters are less sure of their world than when they started, but they're still able to cope. Evil has been defeated not by love or faith, but by intellect.
Curse of the Demon has the Val Lewton sensibility as has often been cited in Tourneur's frequent (and very effective) use of the device called the Lewton "Bus" -- a wholly artificial jolt of fast motion and noise interrupting a tense scene. There's an ultimate "bus" at the end when a train blasts in and sets us up for the end title. It "erases" the embracing actors behind it and I've always thought it had to be an inspiration for the last shot of North by NorthWest. The ever-playful Hitchcock was reportedly a big viewer of fantastic films, from which he seems to have gotten many ideas. He's said to have dined with Lewton on more than one occasion (makes sense, they were at one time both Selznick contractees) and carried on a covert competition with William Castle, of all people.
Visually, Tourneur's film is marvelous, effortlessly conjuring menacing forests lit in the fantastic Mario Bava mode by Ted Scaife, who was not known as a genre stylist. There are more than a few perfunctory sets, with some unflattering mattes used for airport interiors, etc.. Elsewhere we see beautiful designs by Ken Adam in one of his earliest outings. Karswell's ornate floor and central staircase evoke an Escher print, especially when visible/invisible hands appear on the banister. A hypnotic, maze-like set for a hotel corridor is also tainted by Escher and evokes a sense of the uncanny even better than the horrid sounds Holden hears. The build-up of terror is so effective that one rather unconvincing episode (a fight with a Cat People - like transforming cat) does no harm. Other effects, such as the demon footprints appearing in the forest, work beautifully.
In his Encyclopedia of Horror Movies Phil Hardy very rightly relates Curse of the Demon's emphasis on the visual to the then just-beginning Euro-horror subgenre. The works of Bava, Margheriti and Freda would make the photographic texture of the screen the prime element of their films, sometimes above acting and story logic.
Columbia TriStar's DVD of Curse of the Demon / Night of the Demon presents both versions of this classic in one package. American viewers saw an effective but abbreviated cut-down. If you've seen Curse of the Demon on cable TV or rented a VHS or a laser anytime after 1987, you're not going to see anything different in the film. In 1987 Columbia happened to pull out the English cut when it went to re-master. When the title came up as Night of the Demon, they just slugged in the Curse main title card and let it go.
From such a happy accident (believe me, nobody in charge at Columbia at the time would have purposely given a film like this a second glance) came a restoration at least as wonderful as the earlier reversion of The Fearless Vampire Killers to its original form. Genre fans were taken by surprise and the Laserdisc became a hot item that often traded for hundreds of dollars. 6
Back in film school Savant had been convinced that ever seeing the long, original Night cut was a lost cause. An excellent article in the old Photon magazine in the early '70s 5, before such analytical work was common, accurately laid out the differences between the two versions, something Savant needs to do sometime with The Damned and These Are the Damned. The Photon article very accurately describes the cut scenes and what the film lost without them, and certainly inspired many of the ideas here.
Being able to see the two versions back-to-back shows exactly how they differ. Curse omits some scenes and rearranges others. Gone is some narration from the title sequence, most of the airplane ride, some dialogue on the ground with the newsmen and several scenes with Karswell talking to his mother. Most crucially missing are Karswell's mother showing Joanna the cabalistic book everyone talks so much about and Holden's entire visit to the Hobart farm to secure a release for his examination of Rand Hobart. Of course the cut film still works (we loved the cut Curse at UCLA screenings and there are people who actually think it's better) but it's nowhere near as involving as the complete UK version. Curse also reshuffles some events, moving Holden's phantom encounter in the hallway nearer the beginning, which may have been to get a spooky scene in the middle section or to better disguise the loss of whole scenes later. The chop-job should have been obvious. The newly imposed fades and dissolves look awkward. One cut very sloppily happens right in the middle of a previous dissolve.
Night places both Andrews and Cummins' credits above the title and gives McGinnis an "also starring" credit immediately afterwards. Oddly, Curse sticks Cummins afterwards and relegates McGinnis to the top of the "also with" cast list. Maybe with his role chopped down, some Columbia executive thought he didn't deserve the billing?
Technically, both versions look just fine, very sharp and free of digital funk that would spoil the film's spooky visual texture. Night of the Demon is the version to watch for both content and quality. It's not perfect but has better contrast and less dirt than the American version. Curse has more emulsion scratches and flecking white dandruff in its dark scenes, yet looks fine until one sees the improvement of Night. Both shows are widescreen enhanced (hosanna), framing the action at its original tighter aspect ratio.
It's terrific that Columbia TriStar has brought out this film so thoughtfully, even though some viewers are going to be confused when their "double feature" disc appears to be two copies of the same movie. Let 'em stew. This is Savant's favorite release so far this year.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Curse of the Demon / Night of the Demon rates:
Movie: Excellent
Footnotes:
Made very close to Curse of the Demon and starring Dana Andrews, The Fearmakers (great title) was a Savant must-see until he caught up with it in the UA collection at MGM. It's a pitiful no-budgeter that claims Madison Avenue was providing public relations for foreign subversives, and is negligible even in the lists of '50s anti-Commie films.
Return
Curse of the Demon's Demon has been the subject of debate ever since the heyday of Famous Monsters of Filmland. From what's on record it's clear that producer Chester added or maximized the shots of the creature, a literal visualization of a fiery, brimstone-smoking classical woodcut demon that some viewers think looks ridiculous. Bennett and Tourneur's original idea was to never show a demon but the producer changed that. Tourneur probably directed most of the shots, only to have Chester over-use them. To Savant's thinking, the demon looks great. It is first perceived as an ominous sound, a less strident version of the disturbing noise made by Them! Then it manifests itself visually as a strange disturbance in the sky (bubbles? sparks? early slit-scan?) followed by a billowing cloud of sulphurous smoke (a dandy effect not exploited again until Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The long-shot demon is sometimes called the bicycle demon because he's a rod puppet with legs that move on a wheel-rig. Smoke belches from all over his scaly body. Close-ups are provided by a wonderfully sculpted head 'n' shoulders demon with articulated eyes and lips, a full decade or so before Carlo Rambaldi started engineering such devices.
Most of the debate centers on how much Demon should have been shown with the general consensus that less would have been better. People who dote on Lewton-esque ambivalence say that the film's slow buildup of rationality-versus demonology is destroyed by the very real Demon's appearance in the first scene, and that's where they'd like it removed or radically reduced. The Demon is so nicely integrated into the cutting (the giant foot in the first scene is a real jolt) that it's likely that Tourneur himself filmed it all, perhaps expecting the shots to be shorter or more obscured. It is also possible that the giant head was a post-Tourneur addition - it doesn't tie in with the other shots as well (especially when it rolls forward rather stiffly) and is rather blunt. Detractors lump it in with the gawd-awful head of The Black Scorpion, which is filmed the same way and almost certainly was an afterthought - and also became a key poster image. This demon head matches the surrounding action a lot better than did the drooling Scorpion.
Savant wouldn't change Curse of the Demon but if you put a gun to my head I'd shorten most of the shots in its first appearance, perhaps eliminating all close-ups except for the final, superb shot of the the giant claw reaching for Harrington / us.
Kumar, played (I assume) by an Anglo actor, immediately evokes all those Indian and other Third World characters in Hammer films whose indigenous cultures invariably hold all manner of black magic and insidious horror. When Hammer films are repetitious it's because they take eighty minutes or so to convince the imagination-challenged English heroes to even consider the premise of the film as being real. In Curse of the Demon, Holden's smart-tongued dismissal of outside viewpoints seems much more pigheaded now than it did in 1957, when heroes confidently defended conformist values without being challenged. Kumar is a scientist but also probably a Hindu or a Sikh. He has no difficulty reconciling his faith with his scientific detachment. Holden is far too tactful to call Kumar a crazy third-world guru but that's probably what he's thinking. He instead politely ignores him. Good old Kumar then saves Holden's hide with some timely information. I hope Holden remembered to thank him.
There's an unstated conclusion in Curse of the Demon: Holden's rigid disbelief of the supernatural means he also does not believe in a Christian God with its fundamentally spiritual faith system of Good and Evil, saints and devils, angels and demons. Horror movies that deal directly with religious symbolism and "real faith" can be hypocritical in their exploitation and brutal in their cheap toying with what are for many people sacred personal concepts. I'm thinking of course of The Exorcist here. That movie has all the grace of a reporter who shows a serial killer's atrocity photos to a mother whose child has just been kidnapped. Curse of the Demon hasn't The Exorcist's ruthless commercial instincts but instead has the modesty not to pretend to be profound, or even "real." Yet it expresses our basic human conflict between rationality and faith very nicely.
Savant called Jim Wyrnoski, who was associated with Photon, in an effort to find out more about the article, namely who wrote it. It was very well done and I've never forgotten it; I unfortunately loaned my copy out to good old Jim Ursini and it disappeared. Obviously, a lot of the ideas here, I first read there. Perhaps a reader who knows better how to take care of their belongings can help me with the info? Ursini and Alain Silvers' More Things than are Dreamt Of Limelight, 1994, analyzes Curse of the Demon (and many other horror movies) in the context of its source story.
This is a true story: Cut to 2000. Columbia goes to re-master Curse of the Demon and finds that the fine-grain original of the English version is missing. The original long version of the movie may be lost forever. A few months later a collector appears who says he bought it from another unnamed collector and offers to trade it for a print copy of the American version, which he prefers. Luckily, an intermediary helps the collector follow up on his offer and the authorities are not contacted about what some would certainly call stolen property. The long version is now once again safe. Studios clearly need to defend their property but many collectors have "items" they personally have acquired legally. More often than you might think, such finds come about because studios throw away important elements. If the studios threaten prosecution, they will find that collectors will never approach them. They'd probably prefer to destroy irreplaceable film to avoid being criminalized.
Real Name: None
Age:Unknown
Species: Goldfish
Powers: Fish abilities and Genius intellect
Weakness: Hot temperatures and can't breathe out of water
Weapons: None
Job:None
Backstory: This fish was just an ordinary Goldfish until one day he swam past part of an ocean in Avalon City were TOXIN(I'll show him soon) was dumping his chemical waste into the water which genetically altered the gold fishes brain chemistry which gave him vast intellect. Going by the name Gills he is now hell bent on destroying humans and attempts to sink dry land by using his extreme intelligence to build extreme power suits and weapons.
This is one of my ridiculous
Villains everyone!
Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death (James 1:13-15)
We think of sin as a single act, but God sees it as a process. Adam committed one act of sin, and yet that one act brought sin, death, and judgment on the whole human race. James described this process of sin in four stages.
Desire (v. 14). The word lust means any kind of desire, and not necessarily sexual passions. The normal desires of life were given to us by God and, of themselves, are not sinful. Without these desires, we could not function. Unless we felt hunger and thirst, we would never eat and drink, and we would die. Without fatigue, the body would never rest and would eventually wear out. Sex is a normal desire; without it the human race could not continue.
It is when we want to satisfy these desires in ways outside God’s will that we get into trouble. Eating is normal; gluttony is sin. Sleep is normal; laziness is sin. “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled; but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge” (Heb. 13:4).
Some people try to become “spiritual” by denying these normal desires, or by seeking to suppress them; but this only makes them less than human. These fundamental desires of life are the steam in the boiler that makes the machinery go. Turn off the steam and you have no power. Let the steam go its own way and you have destruction. The secret is in constant control. These desires must be our servants and not our masters; and this we can do through Jesus Christ.
Deception (v. 14). No temptation appears as temptation; it always seems more alluring than it really is. James used two illustrations from the world of sports to prove his point. Drawn away carries with it the idea of the baiting of a trap; and enticed in the original Greek means “to bait a hook.” The hunter and the fisherman have to use bait to attract and catch their prey. No animal is deliberately going to step into a trap and no fish will knowingly bite at a naked hook. The idea is to hide the trap and the hook.
Temptation always carries with it some bait that appeals to our natural desires. The bait not only attracts us, but it also hides the fact that yielding to the desire will eventually bring sorrow and punishment. It is the bait that is the exciting thing. Lot would never have moved toward Sodom had he not seen the “well-watered plains of Jordan” (Gen. 13:10ff). When David looked on his neighbor’s wife, he would never have committed adultery had he seen the tragic consequences: the death of a baby (Bathsheba’s son), the murder of a brave soldier (Uriah), the violation of a daughter (Tamar). The bait keeps us from seeing the consequences of sin.
V 2, p 343 When Jesus was tempted by Satan, He always dealt with the temptation on the basis of the Word of God. Three times He said, “It is written.” From the human point of view, turning stones into bread to satisfy hunger is a sensible thing to do; but not from God’s point of view. When you know the Bible, you can detect the bait and deal with it decisively. This is what it means to walk by faith and not by sight.
Disobedience (v. 15). We have moved from the emotions (desire) and the intellect (deception) to the will. James changed the picture from hunting and fishing to the birth of a baby. Desire conceives a method for taking the bait. The will approves and acts; and the result is sin. Whether we feel it or not, we are hooked and trapped. The baby is born, and just wait until it matures!
Christian living is a matter of the will, not the feelings. I often hear believers say, “I don’t feel like reading the Bible.” Or, “I don’t feel like attending prayer meeting.” Children operate on the basis of feeling, but adults operate on the basis of will. They act because it is right, no matter how they feel. This explains why immature Christians easily fall into temptation: they let their feelings make the decisions. The more you exercise your will in saying a decisive no to temptation, the more God will take control of your life. “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13).
Death (v. 15). Disobedience gives birth to death, not life. It may take years for the sin to mature, but when it does, the result will be death. If we will only believe God’s Word and see this final tragedy, it will encourage us not to yield to temptation. God has erected this barrier because He loves us. “Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?” (Ezek. 18:23)
These four stages in temptation and sin are perfectly depicted in the first sin recorded in the Bible in Genesis 3.
Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary (vol. 2; Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 342–343.
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I.
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[...] The shamanism is much older than all the world religions, he is as old as mankind. Many cave paintings from the Stone Age shamanic rituals are dar. We deal with our own roots as it were, if we now turn our attention to shamanic dreams. Many people today have a great yearning for the lost connection with these roots.
We have lost the one-sided by the full development of the intellect. We have said somewhat simplified, only used our left side of the face and put all the right areas out of service. This unused storage spaces of our options would be responsible for feelings, intuition, imagination, visual, symbolic way of thinking, intuition for the irrational.
Moreover, use our intellect, and I will not demonize the way, only the directed way of thinking, so we fixed a certain point that you want to see as sharp. It's the same principle as a telescope:
The price, however, you pay for this focus is a very narrow field of view. [...]____________________________________________
Source: Susanne Elsensohn - "Schamanismus und Traum"
Translated by Mr. Google!
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Nothing new. Prepping for my youngest son's birthday party. His birthday was last month but we are late as always.
These things start out modestly, and then they escalate terribly to being over-the-top!
We had all the best intentions :-)
Photo of the finest details of soap bubbles from the soap bubbles macro abstract photography assignment captured via Minolta MD Macro Rokkor-X 100mm F/4 lens. Inside the creative halls of the 494 ∞ Labs. Mid December 2021.
Exposure Time: 1/250 sec. * ISO Speed: ISO-1250 * Aperture: F/4 * Bracketing: None * Color Temperature: 3900 K * Adaptor: 1:1 Extension Tube * Tele-Converter: Deitz 2X MC-4 M/MD
Curiosity is one of the most reliable and safe characteristics of an active intellect.
(Samuel Johnson)
Alessia Scriboni
One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.
-- Edward Hopper
I am awake, but do not open my eyes. Instead, I process everything that has happened:
We were running
K'hym is dead
So is M'yri'ah
I am not
At least, not as far as I am aware.
I am also aware that I am not the only being in this room.
I go into deep thought, accessing the being's mind.
~His thoughts merge into my mind. I see the basic shapes and colours that form in another's mind.
This being is not Martian. That much I can tell. His thought patterns differ from that of a Martian's; for one thing, his mind is far less complicated than mine.
His intellect is far less superior, too.
I look deeper, and discover the aspects of the being's life. His culture, species and language all flood into my mind.
Earth
Human
English
America
Name...
Name...~
I open my eyes.
"You are Doctor Saul Erdel."
The doctor stops his actions and stands still.
"W...w...what did you just say?"
I find this statement interesting. Do these humans require everything to be said to them twice?
"Doctor Saul Erdel. You are doctor Saul Erdel."
He still appears to be in shock.
"You are human. This planet is Earth."
He walks around the screen he has been monitoring for the duration of my stay, and finally manages to structure a sentence to reply to me with.
"But you...how do you know me? My language?"
He moves in closer to me, and only now I realise I am securely bound to a table of some kind.
"Remarkable. Where are you from?"
I say nothing.
"Oh...okay. You do speak English, don't you?"
"Everyone I know is dead."
My words do have an effect on him. His mouth is open, but no words escape.
"..."
"I am a coward."
He finally manages to engage in conversation with me.
"Your family...what happened?"
"I abandoned them."
His eyes widen.
"Oh God. Is this...Is this my fault? My machine, did it kill your family? Oh God..."
I am confused.
"Your machine? Your machine is responsible for the Plague?"
He stops rubbing his face with his hand, and looks down to me.
"What? Plague? I...I don't..."
He rabbles on as I enter his mind again-
~This "machine" he talks about is responsible for bringing me to Earth. He believes it is responsible for killing my family too. I tell him what has really happened to put his mind at rest.
It seems only fair.
"Your machine did not kill my family."
"..."
He falls silent. But his mind is clearly still uneasy due to my telepathic abilities.
"I can read you thoughts."
"You...you can?"
"Yes. And I do not mean you harm."
He is slightly more relaxed now, but still clearly uneasy.
"I have done enough harm already."
"Did you-"
Reading his thoughts, I answer the question he is about to ask.
"No. I do not kill."
"Oh."
Silence.
"You are quite remarkable."
I do not know how to reply, so I do not.
"Do you...do you have a name?"
This I can, and do, answer.
"Yes. My name is J'onn J'onzz."
He clearly has many questions to ask me.
"So, you read minds?"
"Yes."
"Can you do anything else?"
"That depends. What are you humans capable of?"
He presses a button on the side of my table, and my restraints rise up, freeing me.
"You are uneasy, I understand. But I will not harm you."
He steps closer as I sit up.
"Mister J'onzz, I would very much like to study you, if you don't mind."
"Why would I mind."
He hesitates.
"Well, I take that as a yes then."
He places a hand on my shoulder, and helps me stand up. He is a small man, but my size does not seem to impose him.
"Mister J'onzz-"
"Call me J'onn."
"J'onn, would you like to follow me?"
He gestures towards the door, and walks out.
I follow.
He turns and looks at me, but before he can ask, I answer his question again.
"Yes, if you wish to study me, you may."
He smiles, turns and with that, we leave the room.
{3.2.2010 ~ Day 107 of 365} **EXPLORE**
It was far too beautiful a day to be stuck inside an office, though that's where I found myself. Thank goodness for a leisurely lunch and stroll around the park - fresh air and warm sunshine is what my soul needed today :)
Today's gratitude ~ left overs! Girlfriend is tired, and in no mood to waste precious veg time in the kitchen ;)
Happy Melancholia
Blue Fire
Keeps me flying
Through happy nights
I love being alone with you
Logos – North Island
Cool Fire
Cool Mind
HKD
I am nearly happy
Means I am happy
With beeing
Nearly happy
HKD
www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7BeGDZewHs
A Tibetan Terrier rescued in the nick of time. My heartfelt admiration to all those folk who rescue dogs and give them a loving home.
"We may think we understand them, but ultimately our judgement of a dog and its behaviour and intellect is almost always effected by our own way of perceiving the world.
We seem to judge the worth of every animal on the planet, according to what they can give us or how much they resemble us. Can they think like us? Can they feel like us? It's the wrong way to look at it because we're not acknowledging their innate worth.
There are so many different kinds of intelligence in animals that are nothing like ours.
However much we like to think we understand them, they probably understand us better."