Richard Rorty is Dead

1931-2007.

Henry Adams on Color

First this from The Education of Henry Adams (p. 8):

His idea of color was a peony, with the dew of early morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea, as he saw it a mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli in a June afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples of colored prints and children's picture-books, as the American colors then ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies, were the cold grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy thaws of Boston winters.

Now this from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (p. 129-130), in the chapter on the glass of Chartres:

The windows claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are darkness beside them.

And quoting Viollet-le-Duc:

...the first condition for an artist in glass is to know how to manage blue. The blue is the light in windows, and light has value only by opposition.

1819

Birth year of John Ruskin, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville. Also Queen Victoria.

Lewis Mumford's Precursors

Just guessing, not based on any particular source: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Patrick Geddes, John Ruskin, William Morris, Herman Melville.

Ruskin against the Political Economists

From "Essay I" of Unto This Last (p. 168):

Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, i founds an ossifant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death's head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world.

Vaclav Havel on Tower Building

From the New York Review of Books (worth reading the entire short article):

I have to admit to something I don't know whether I can actually say here: I absolutely hated those two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center. They were a typical kind of architecture that has no ideas behind it. Moreover, they disrupted the skyline of the city; they towered absurdly over the beautiful crystalline topography of Manhattan. They were two monuments to the cult of profit at any cost: regardless of what they looked like, they had to have the greatest imaginable number of square meters of office space.

Marx on the "Anglo-Persian War"

The current propaganda war between Britain and Iran reminded me of this passage from an artical by Karl Marx entitled "Anglo-Persian War" that appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune on October 30, 1856:

So soon as the Company [i.e., the East India Company, acting as the foreign policy proxy for England] casts a greedy look on any of the independent sovereigns, or on any region whose political and commercial or whose gold and jewels are valued, the victim is accused of having violated this or that ideal or actual convention, transgressed an imaginary promise or restriction, committed some nebulous outrage, and then war is decalred, and the eternity of wrong, the perennial force of the fable of the wolf and the lamb, is again incarnadined in national history.

Carlyle and High Victorian Racism

David Brion Davis considers Carlyle's 1853 pamphlet Occasional Discourses on the Nigger Question [another source cites an 1849 version published as "Occasional Discourses on the Negro Question"] - which incidentally is the source of the expression "dismal science - as symptomatic of a rebirth of "official" scientific racism displacing earlier scientific notions of racial equality:

Despite the prejudice of Hume and some other eighteenth-century writers, and in striking contrast to post-Revolutionary France, most British scientists of the early 1800s, exemplified by James Cowles Pritchard, insisted on the unity and even perfectability of all human groups. The historian Seymour Drescher makes the extraordinary point that not a single M.P. spoke of any alleged incapacity of the Negroes. But by the 1850s African American visitors in Britain, like Frederick Douglass, sensed a deeply troubling change in attitude even from the mid-1840s (symbolized by Thomas Carlyle's 1853 Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question). (Inhuman Bondage p. 76)

On the 'Dismal Science'

The once commonly held assumption that Carlyle’s directed the phrase “dismal science” toward the economics of Malthus (or Ricardo) has been thoroughly discredited. In fact, Carlyle does not seem to have much to say about Malthus or Ricardo throughout his writings.

Carlyle did use the word dismal in reference to Malthus ("The controversies on Malthus and the 'Population Principle', 'Preventative Check' and so forth, with which the public ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventative check and the denial of the preventative check." In Chartism, 1839).

Carlyle actually used the phrase “dismal science” in reference to a notion of racial equality advanced by John Stuart Mill. Carlyle justified slavery by believed that African laborers were morally inferior to white planters, who could legitimately force them to work. This argument countered Mill’s beliefs against racial inferiority and forced labor. Carlyle’s 1849 essay “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” argued for the reintroduction of slavery into the West Indies, and directed against Mill the comment that liberal economics was not “a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science”

Interestingly, the phrase “gay science” against which Carlyle says “dismal science, derives from a Provençal expression (gaya scienza) used later by Nietzsche:

The “Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird,” written for the most part in Sicily, are quite emphatically reminiscent of the Provençal concept of gaya scienza – that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which distinguishes the wonderful early culture of the Provençals from all equivocal cultures. The very last poem above all, “To the Mistral,” an exuberantly dancing song in which, if I may say so, one dances right over morality, is a perfect Provençalism. (in Ecce Homo)

Notwithstanding the above, the popular misconception contains a grain of truth. Mill’s political economy – along with similar strains of Benthanism or Utilitarianism – were criticized for attempting to reduce human behavior to mathematical formulae. In this sense, the Utilitarian spirit of economics was indeed dismal.

Ruskin on Tower Building

From Lecture I on Architecture and Painting, a definitive statement on tower building:

The first tower of which we hear as built upon the earth, was certainly built in a species of aspiration; but I do not suppose that any one here will think it was a religious one. "Go to now. Let us build a tower whose top may reach unto Heaven." From that day to this, whenever men have become skilful architects at all, there has been a tendency in them to build high; not in any religious feeling, but in mere exuberance of spirit and power - as they dance or sing - with a certain mingling of vanity - like the feeling in which a child builds a house of cards; and, in nobler instances, with also a strong sense of, and delight in the majesty, height, and strength of the building itself, such as we have in that of a lofty tree tree or a peaked mountain. Add to this instinct the frequent necessity of points of elevation for watch-towers, or of points of offence, as in towers built on the ramparts of cities, and, finally, the need of elevations fir the transmission of sound, as in the Turkish minaret and Christian belfry, and you have, I think, a sufficient explanation of the tower-building of the world in general.

Herodotus on Tower Building

Herodotus in 440 B.C. offers a more technical account of the tower:

The outer wall is the main defence of the city. There is, however, a second inner wall, of less thickness than the first, but very little inferior to it in strength. The centre of each division of the town was occupied by a fortress. In the one stood the palace of the kings, surrounded by a wall of great strength and size: in the other was the sacred precinct of Jupiter Belus, a square enclosure two furlongs each way, with gates of solid brass; which was also remaining in my time. In the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. When one is about half-way up, one finds a resting-place and seats, where persons are wont to sit some time on their way to the summit. On the topmost tower there is a spacious temple, and inside the temple stands a couch of unusual size, richly adorned, with a golden table by its side. There is no statue of any kind set up in the place, nor is the chamber occupied of nights by any one but a single native woman, who, as the Chaldaeans, the priests of this god, affirm, is chosen for himself by the deity out of all the women of the land.

The Bible on Tower Building

Genesis 11:4

They said, "Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."

Judges 9

46. When all the leaders of the tower of Shechem heard of it, they entered the inner chamber of the temple of El-berith.
47. It was told Abimelech that all the leaders of the tower of Shechem were gathered together.
49. All the people also cut down each one his branch and followed Abimelech, and put them on the inner chamber and set the inner chamber on fire over those inside, so that all the men of the tower of Shechem also died, about a thousand men and women.
51. But there was a strong tower in the center of the city, and all the men and women with all the leaders of the city fled there and shut themselves in; and they went up on the roof of the tower.
52. So Abimelech came to the tower and fought against it, and approached the entrance of the tower to burn it with fire.

Song of Solomon 4

"Your neck is like the tower of David,
Built with rows of stones
On which are hung a thousand shields,
All the round shields of the mighty men.

I'm sure one could come up with much more than this on tower building in the Bible, but it's just a start to a series of posts on tower building.

Gandhi's Precursors

Autobiography p. 77:

Three moderns have left a deep impression on my life, and captivated me: Raychandbhai by his living contact; Tolstoy by his book The Kingdom of God is within You; and Ruskin by his Unto this Last.

Picasso Green

They'll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like; but that particular green, never.

Blue John

When Ruskin refers to "fluor spa" I suspect he is referring to the following, which is from the wikipedia entry for "fluorite":

One of the most famous of the older-known localities of fluorite is Castleton in Derbyshire, England, where, under the name of Derbyshire Blue John, beautiful purple-blue fluorite was extracted from the Blue John Cavern. It was used for ornamental purposes, especially in the 19th century. The name derives from French "bleu et jaune" (blue and yellow) characterising its colour. It is now scarce, and only a few hundred kilograms are mined each year for ornamental and lapidary use. Recent deposits in China have produced fluorite with similar colouring and banding to the classic Blue John stone.

The entry for "Blue John Cavern" has this to say about the name:

The name is popularly said to come from the French; bleu-jaune, meaning 'blue-yellow'. It is a fact that some Blue John was indeed sent to France for gilding by the French Ormolu workers of the Louis XVI period. However, they were emulating the pionerring ormolu ornaments of Matthew Boulton of Birmingham who around 1765 called the stone 'Blew John'. It became such a popular base for the ornaments that Boulton tried to lease the whole output of the Castleton mines.

The Green of the Rhone

Ruskin (in TWS p 115-116):

Rhone has been green all day instead of blue. Looking through it, the colour is decided green; but along the surface it is blue - very like fluor spa. Notice effect: reflection taking off light from ripple, shows in transparent green, very slightly affected by colour of object. The chimney of steamer opposite is rich brown inclining to red, but its reflection is still green, a little dirtied by the red colour.

Robespierre Green

Two lines lifted from the introduction from Scurr's Fatal Purity:

Under the drawing are the words "green eyes, pale complexion, green striped nankeen jacket, blue waistcoat with blue stripes, white cravat with red."
...
He always wore green-tinted glasses.

The Green All Over Incorruptible

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This is going way beyond a favorite green coat:

And yet he was but a man, only the mightiest that might mount a steed; broad of chest and shoulders and slender of waist, and all his features of like fashion; but men marvelled much at his colour, for he rode even as a knight, yet was green all over.
For he was clad all in green, with a straight coat, and a mantle above; all decked and lined with fur was the cloth and the hood that was thrown back from his locks and lay on his shoulders. Hose had he of the same green, and spurs of bright gold with silken fastenings richly worked; and all his vesture was verily green. Around his waist and his saddle were bands with fair stones set upon silken work, 'twere too long to tell of all the trifles that were embroidered thereon--birds and insects in gay gauds of green and gold. All the trappings of his steed were of metal of like enamel, even the stirrups that he stood in stained of the same, and stirrups and saddle-bow alike gleamed and shone with green stones. Even the steed on which he rode was of the same hue, a green horse, great and strong, and hard to hold, with broidered bridle, meet for the rider.

On Purple and Yellow

More Ruskin (from Modern Painters Vol. I, Part II, Sec II, Ch. II):

I think the first approach to viciousness in any master is commonly indicated chiefly by a prevalence of purple, and an absence of yellow. I think nature mizes yellow with almost every one of her hues, never, or very rarely, using red without it, but frequently using yellow with scarcely any red; and I believe it will be in consequence found that her favourite opposition, that which generally characterizes and gives tone to her colour, is yellow and black, passing, as it retires, into white and blue. It is beyond dispute that the great fundamental opposition of Rubens is yellow and black; and that on this, concentrated in one part of the picture, and modified in various greys throughout, chiefly depend the tones of all his finest works. And in Titian, though there is a far greater tendency to purple than in Rubens, I believe no red is ever mixed with the pure blue, or glazed over it, which has not in it a modifying quantity of yellow. At all events I am nearly certain that whatever rich and pure purples are introduced locally, by the great colourists, nothing is so destructive of all fine colour as the slightest tendency to purple in general tone; and I am equally certain that Turner is distinguished from all the vicous coloursists of the present day, by the foundation of all his tones being black, yellow, and the intermediate greys, while the tendency of our common glare-seekers is invariably to cold, impossible pruples.

The Nobility of Color

Ruskin:

Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn...

The Blue of the Pacific

The color of the sea (the Pacific Ocean, in this case) according to Tim Severin:

Now that the sun had come out the ocean itsekf turned the most remarkable shade of blue...Under those conditions the blue of the Pacific was very different from any other sea. It was not the pale green-grey turning to blue of the North Atlantic, nor the azure of the Carribean or Arabian Sea, nor the dull brownish blue of the China Sea, but a deep indigo-blue. What is more, the special Pacific blue seemed to transfer everything in the sea: the electric luminescence of the plankton was a more powerful luminous blue, the blue of fish more vivid, the shadow under the raft deep blue, even the shark we had caught was such a startling blue in the first few hours after it came out of the water that I thought it must be some rare new species. Only later did the skin of the shark turn back to its more usual blue-and-white shading. As for the water itself, it was such an intense colour it seemed that blue was the only colourin the spectrum, and the special signature of the Pacific.

The Curse of Ham

Staying on the topic of colors, one of the most disturbing passages from the Bible concerns the "Curse of Ham," which has been more influential than any text in history in the justification of modern slavery and racism. The actual story related in Genesis 9:18-27 is so bizarre and nonsensical that it is hard to believe anyone takes it seriously today, although I am curious as to how contemporary biblical literalists interpet it. Here is the text:

The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the earth.

Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father's nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father's nakedness.

When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,
"Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers."

He also said,
"Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem!
May Canaan be the slave of Shem.

May God extend the territory of Japheth;
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be his slave."

Setting aside the inexplicable curse on Canaan's son (but not on Canaan himself), and setting aside the fact that skin color is not mentioned, the influence of the text derives from the supposed explanation for the different "races" of humanity and the legitimation of the enslavement of one of these races. In the historically dominant interpretation, Ham and Canaan were black, and there descendants were properly slaves. Broadly speaking, Japheth's descendants were the Eastern Europeans, Shem's descendants were the Arabs and Hebrews, leaving Africans and other Aisans to be descended from Ham. Thus the Biblical origins of the racist "Curse of Ham."

On Colors of Dead Leaves

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red (Shelley, Ode to the West Wind):

O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being;
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

Why Is the Sea Wine-Dark?

Barry Strauss:

Homer makes sparing use of the adjective "wine-colored" to refer to the sea and to oxen. Like the color of ancient wine, the color that the poet had in mind is unclear. Yet certainly the phrase evokes the sea’s mystery and intoxication, in English made more poetic by the nineteenth-century translation, "wine-dark." Authors such as Thomas Cahill, Patrick O’Brian, and Leonardo Sciascia have used the phrase in book titles.

The Wine-Dark Sea is just the right description of the waters which the Greeks ruled and on which they died. It is just a short step from "wine-dark" to "blood-stained," an adjective used by Aeschylus in his description of the sea at Salamis. The wine-dark sea is a place of many undiscovered secrets, and one of them is Salamis: the world’s first great multicultural battle, in which the men of three continents met – and one woman, the first female admiral in history.

Another essay explains it:

The best history of this phrase is an article by R. Rutherford-Dyer, "Homer's Wine-Dark Sea", Greece & Rome, v. 30 (October 1983), p. 125-128. Homer's Greek for "wine-dark" is oinos, an expression that translates to something like "sunset-red." It occurs in the Iliad when Achilles, after Patroclus' funeral, is looking out over the water with the sun going down, in the Odyssey when Telemachus sails all night to Pylos, and when Odysseus' ship is destroyed in a storm. It is translated in many ways, such as "wine-blue" in Richard Lattimore's version, and scholars had thought it a romantic nonsense phrase. Pr. Rutherford-Dyer happened to be on the coast of Maine when Mt. St. Helens erupted, and the sunsets became quite glorious, turning the Atlantic to the color of Mavrodaphni wine. From that he reasoned that Homer was describing the dark red sunsets that obtain when large amounts of dust are in the air, or when storm clouds are gathering.

"The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea." - James Joyce

The Color of the Sea

Ruskin:

Waves of clear sea are, indeed, lovely to watch, but are always coming or gone...the ever-answering glow of unearthly aquamarine, ultramarine, violet-blue, gentian-blue, peacock-blue, river-of-paradise blue, glass of a painted windowmelted in the sun and the witch of the Alps flinging the spun tresses of it for ever from her snow.

Why did Carlyle refer to Robespierre as the sea-green incorruptible?

“The song is a short one, and may perhaps serve to qualify our judgment of the ‘sea-green incorruptible.’” - Thomas Carlyle

This site poses the question directly but fails to answer it.

Does it have to do merely with green eyes, or a pale greenish complexion, or the 'greenish hue' of his veins as Mme de Stael described them?

This highlights the derivation from Homer:

If an epic represents the belief of a people as manifested in its actions, then the French Revolution, which manifested a nation's unbelief, provides problematic material for epic. Within his epic framework, Carlyle represents the actions of the French people as mockepic. The French need a deus ex machina (Carlyle's use of the English equivalent of this phrase, "god from the machine," already tends to deflate it) but get only an ineffectual "Mars de Broglie" and a royal usher "Mercury ... de Brézé" (I: 160). The epic machinery that motivates the action of the history becomes mere "preternatural suspicion" (1: 126-27). Homer's "wine-dark sea" gets adapted as the mockheroic epithet "sea-green" to describe Robespierre.

And then there's the color of his favorite coat:

On the face of it, Carlyle is doing no more than to manufacture a soubriquet out of the colour of Robespierre's favourite coat' "The Incorruptible" was the title given to him by his contemporaries. Most politicians would be proud to bear the name "Incorruptible" (though it would be tempting fate today)' but adding the epithet "sea-green" has, as Carlyle intended, a slyly subversive effect: it evokes something from the depths, something slimy, something reptilian.

Chistopher Prendergast offers this in the NLR:

But philology suggests another reading: 'seagreen' as derivative from Old English 'sengreen', the household leek; folk-etymologically deformed to 'seagreen', and thus evoking the notion of the 'evergreen', the moral sense of 'incorruptible' - Robespierre as the man who could never be bought - linked to the temporal sense of incorruptible, the everlasting status of the republic of virtue.

Sengreen? Houseleek?

Althusser on Marx's Precursors

"The more philosophy I read and the more I studied Marx, the more I came to realise he had explored major doctrines elaborated by writers who preceded him..."

1. Epicurus
2. Spinoza
3. Hobbes
4. Machiavelli (partially)
5. Rousseau
6. Hegel

Source: FLF p. 211

Prezzolini on Machiavelli's Precursors

1. Plato
2. The Sophists
3. Euripides
4. Thucydides
5. Aristotle
6. Polybius (204?-122 B.C.)
7. Plutarch
8. Carneades
9. The Romans: Cicero
10. St. Augustine (354-430)
11. Dante (1265-1321)
12. The Humanists