Pin-Up Art & the Metaphysics of Sex

Peter Driben (1908 – 1968)

In an age, on the one hand, of renewed, anti-sexual Puritanism and, on the other, of freely available Internet pornography the names of Peter Driben (1908 – 1968), Gillette Elvgren (1914 – 1980), Earl Moran (1893 – 1984), Alberto Vargas (1896 – 1982), George Petty (1894 – 1975), and Earle K. Bergey (1908 -1985) are largely forgotten although from the late 1920s through the mid-1960s they held a place in the American popular imagination and not only among males.  Notoriety attached itself to these men because they produced the cover-art for a plethora of what went by the name of “glamour magazines,” with titles such as Wink, Flirt, Eyeful, and Beauty Parade, to list only a few.  Unlike Playboy and its later offshoots, which would drive them from the newsstands, the “girlie mags” featured no nudity, but limited themselves to what might be called the scantily clad or, on occasion, the accidentally scantily clad – young women in lingerie, bathing-suits, tennis outfits, and short skirts who sometimes by mischance display in public more limb than they would intend.  Whereas the interiors of these periodicals used black-and-white photography, the house always printed the covers in bright polychrome.  Often the poses are humorous.  The young woman is overburdened with packages, her shorts have come unbuttoned, and she bends her body and pins her elbows against her hips to keep her culottes from slipping away.  From the expression on her face, however, her plight and embarrassment communicate themselves, and her struggle to maintain dignity becomes sympathetic.  Ice-skating and roller-skating accidents sometimes occasion a revelatory maladroitness, but the revelation obeys strict limits.  Men never enter the picture.  The artist invariably portrays the female twenty-something as independent and as going – playfully, of course, but sometimes with bad luck – about her own business.  If she flaunted her comeliness, which qualifies as exceedingly comely, it would be in private and with an excusable girlish vanity.

The Atonement: A Simple Explanation for Children

Son:        Hey, Dad, can I ask a question?

Father:   Sure, kiddo, what’s up?

Son:        Well, I’ve been wondering about the Atonement.

Father:   O, great. Another easy one. At least it’s not about girls, so maybe I can help. What’s the question?

Son:        I can’t see how the death of Jesus helped us. I get that God wanted to help us get back to him, but I don’t understand why he didn’t just make it happen, the way he did when he created light. Why send his Son to Earth, and then have him killed? Why was that necessary? Why did Jesus have to die?

Meaning or Nothing

Synchronicity strikes again, as usual.

The Body of the Mind & the Mind of the Body

I struggled with the problem of the relation of the mind to the body for decades. When at last I felt as though I had finally figured it out, I had a hard time seeing in retrospect what the problem had been.

Proclus, Einstein, & the Logos

Richard M. Powers (1921 – 1996): Paperback Cover (1963)

“Δέστε τη ζώνη ασφαλείας σας. Πρόκειται για μια ανώμαλη βόλτα.”

 – Συνταξιούχος καθηγητής

In the philosophical school of Neoplatonism, the Late-Pagan intellectual dispensation and its nascent Early-Christian counterpart find common ground.  Indeed – they converge.  They coexist miscibly for a while until the Pagan component seemingly disappears, leaving the Christian component as the sole public face of the movement.  This metamorphosis proceeds so smoothly, however, that in comparing a prose-sample from the one phase with a prose-sample from the other, with the author-names redacted, the reader might find himself hard-pressed to discern which of them leaned toward a fading polytheism and which toward the rising Trinitarian conviction.  But then the Pagan chapter of Neoplatonism hardly deserves the label of polytheism.  To the extent that the Late-Pagan thinkers recognize a multiplicity of divinities, they classify them as refracted manifestations of a single luminous principle; and when they insist on the primacy of “The One,” they tend to couch their discussion in the lexicon of a triple-hypostasis.  A Christian Neoplatonist like Pseudo-Dionysius borrows so much in his basic vocabulary and pivotal tropes from a Pagan Neoplatonist like Plotinus or Syrianus that a paragraph by the former will seem to parrot a paragraph by the latter, but it is in fact more a case of continuity than of parroting.  (To parroting – the reader must maintain his faith – the discussion will eventually come.)  Among the shared, interlocking premises on whose basis these thinkers operate are that the cosmos, by virtue of its perfection, must be the creation of a perfect being; that being good and true, the cosmos is also beautiful; and that the Demiurge or World-Creator, whereas he is apprehensible, is nevertheless not comprehensible.  As to the last, the Neoplatonists willingly expend thousands of words to argue that God, in his infinitude, infinitely exceeds the power of language to grapple with him.

Never Panic

There are two options now before me; before America; before the West; before Christendom, as we all approach what seems to be a cultural crisis hundreds of years in the making: either to panic, or to commend our spirits to God, so renewing our pledge of fealty to him our Captain, and then to keep fighting, and before all else to keep praying.

There must be a demonic aspect to the present crisis. Our adversaries on all sides are too various, distributed and yet spookily coordinated for any merely human agency to have organized them so well. Another clue to their demonic inspiration: they are rather dense, as befits an army dedicated to confusion and disorder. They make stupid, obvious mistakes, such as threatening election officials – a federal offense – and then posting recordings of those threats online.

Synchronistically, I just finished the book Daimonic Reality: a Field Guide to the Otherworld, by Patrick Harpur. I have been reading about demons and angels a lot over the last five years or so. I had not wondered why, until yesterday morning. The topic is interesting, but so are many others. Why had I got on to it? Perhaps, I then thought for the first time, out of the blue: perhaps, it has something to do with our present crisis. Perhaps I have been prepared. Or we: for, I am not special. Lots of people in recent years have begun to take angels and demons rather more seriously than had been the case since 1900 or so.

Improper Reduction is Circular

Improper reductions implicitly presuppose the prior facticity of the whole that their explanations presume to explain is wholly generated by or epiphenomenal to its parts – is “nothing but” those parts. They employ the whole as an explanatory factor of the whole. So they are circular. “The cells of the animal signal to each other thusly, and so there is an animal.” Would there be such cells in the first place, or their signals, or indeed their own constituent parts together with their intracellular signals, if there were not already an animal, of which they were constituent parts? No. There would be no cells, no signals. The entire panoply of explanatory entities then would be eliminated. You can’t obtain even a quantum of action in the life of an animal if there are no such things as animal lives, but only quanta of action.

Philosophical Skeleton Keys: Prayer Mediates All Sorts of Influence

I had a hard time understanding how prayer might work until I flipped the figure and ground: it’s not that prayer is mediated by run of the mill physical transactions, but vice versa.

Philosophical Skeleton Keys: Ideas Cannot Conceive Themselves

I feel sure that I am nowise unique in having struggled for years with the difficulty of the ontological status of the Platonic Forms. On Plato’s account, so far as it went, the Forms subsisted in a different realm – indeed, a different sort of realm – than our own. I could see well enough that, as immutable, that Realm must be more actual than our own. But, what is that Realm, where is it (is that even an appropriate question to ask?), and what relates it to our own? Indeed, how could a purely formal realm link up at all to our material world? I found I could not even begin to think about it.

The Argument from Perfect Generality

If there are perfectly general statements that are true, they must be necessarily true, for only a necessarily true statement can be true in all possible worlds, so as to be perfectly general. Bearing in mind that ideas can’t have themselves, and cannot be true in the absence of any domain of reality to which they might appertain, so as to be true thereof, there must be at least one actual necessary being in virtue of whose knowledge of their truth such truths might be true necessarily.

The only question then is whether there are perfectly general statements that are true. “There are no true and perfectly general statements” is a perfectly general statement. If it is true, it is false. So it is false in all possible worlds. So there are perfectly general statements that are true, ergo etc.