Driftwork

Eric, passed a blog post to me from the accused share, what’s interesting, perhaps even more than the content is how noisy the net is with SR once you begin to look…

here http://accursedshare.blogspot.com/

note to myself (i must become more anonymous)

Mark Rowlands book is a philosophical story of his relationship with his wolf Brenin. It is clear from the outset why the creature became so central to his life, for within a few hours of the wolf arriving it had savaged his furniture and wrecked whole areas of his house. Rowlands describes Brenin as an animal that had to be execised, fed, addressed and settled before the philosopher could write, teach or rather bizarrely play rugby. The wolf’s requirements are discussed in the light of the myth of St Francis and the Wolf, which terroized a village anw with whom St Francis made a deal, the villagers would feed the wolf if it ceased attacking the villagers. According to the myth the deal worked, and according to Rowlands strong aggreements are required if you are to share your life with a wolf.

In his professional life, Rowlands presents the idea that conscioussness is embedded in the world around us just as much as it is within us. Typically he would argue that intelligence stems in part from our language using abilities and yet language exists seperate from us. Following from this he argues that the Wolf has a different sort of intelligence, mechanical intelligence which enables it to solve some sorts of problems very quickly. This is different from domesticated dogs who live in a magical world, (more like the Kafka story of the dog and the magical appearence of food), where a dog will deal with closed doors by entreating its owner to open doors. Rowland says that his idea of externalism, which is his concept that the connections between world and mind developed because of his relationshop with Brenin the wolf, a concept which developed “in the space between a wolf and a man". There are some interesting speculative thoughts on human and animal intelligence, and ignoring the majority of the language based ones (language is the mirror of deep reality etc) we arrive at the thought that rationality and moprality exist externally to humans as well. Rowlands seems to be quite clear about this possibility, just as he plainly prefers the wolf to humans and what he calls simian traits.

This is a life-affirming and moving book, i enjoyed the arguments on animals, consciousness and knowledge as engaging as the story of the assemblage of man/wolf. In his becoming wolf Rowlands seems to have become a better human… interesting that.

There are a few reviews around of this - mostly trivial, but still it’s more interesting and consequently better than most popular philosophical books. There are some references which might have been expanded, for example one towards Lev Vygotsky which could have been expanded on… perhaps a little less popular would have been better.

I’m not sure how long it will be before I’m in a position where I’ll be able to write even a few sentences on this book that I will like. But so far at least it seems that the book is a fine and useful complementary text to Badiou’s wonderful Being and Event. A really important collection of essays - it’s worth saying that the Preface by Francois Wahl contains a really interesting comparison of aspects of the work Deleuze and Badiou…

more later I think…