Coetzee and Kurtz @ Bucks
Still dark when I got to Bucks. The sun was rising when I left. Mostly bikers crossing @ 7th and Park; started seeing runners near the Colorado Lagoon and then Marine Stadium. Anyway . . . * Excerpt from The Good Story (Coetzee is speaking/writing): I relate our whole discussion to an essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel that has acquired near scriptural status, called 'What is it like to be a bat?' Nagel's crucial move is to distinguish between two forms of the question: What would it be like for a human to be a bat? and What is it like for a bat to be a bat? In its first form, he says, the question is answerable; in the second form it is not. I disagree with Nagel. I think that by a strenuous effort of sympathetic projection one can reach a flickering intuition of what it is like for a bat to be a bat. But this does not amount to the claim that one can have intuitions of what it is really like for a bat to be a bat. In Nagel's terms, th...