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it was amazing
| Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political change in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Some contemporaries were irritated by this interest in the times as much as the life but not this reader. The book is nearly 680 pages long. Perhaps the more casual reader might have liked some cuts to make it more manageable but the length is justified by the authors interweaving of three closely related stories - that of a personality, that of a scientist and thinker and that of his times. The personality is fascinating in its own right but what comes across as equally interesting is the subversion of his own class - that of the well-heeled but capable gentleman naturalist - by his alliance with the new men of professional science, self made and seeking 'jobs' in institutions. This is where personality ties in with wider social change. What drove this rather timorous man with a life time of seriously unpleasant psychosomatic illnesses to defy convention at some social risk and, quite late in the day, allow the publication of his radical thoughts on evolution and natural selection? Although Desmond and Moore do not quite answer this question directly, a personality that could do nothing but investigate and think on what it investigated - a classical case of scientific curiosity as core to personality - eventually had to break ranks to express its 'truth'. His biography (excepting a rather unprepossessing country gent early life and the last days of being lionised and loving every minute of it) can be roughly broken down into three phases - the days on 'The Beagle', those living his theory discreetly in the country and those once his theory was in play. The first phase is of a very young man with a considerable capacity for hard work who built up sufficient reputation from his specimen collecting to become accepted as part of a family of naturalists and scientists exploring the difficult terrain between nature and revealed religion. The second phase has him highly respected within a respectable world but finding that his 'thinking' was taking existing evolutionary thought and extending it into something that could and would 'in the wrong hands' completely undermine the very social order on which he and his family depended. We have to remember that Darwin was never in want of funds. He was connected to both the Darwin and Wedgewood dynasties and the valuation of his estate at £250,000 (roughly £23m in today's money) at the end of his life did not arise from his writings or scientific work. This was a man from a comfortable Whig family. It may have been in class opposition to aristocratic Tory squires and parsons but it was, like Labour and Tory today, essentially part of a struggle in which both sides competed for advantage within a system they both maintained as 'sound'. During this second phase (as the book makes clear) Darwin's 'thinking' led him into troubled waters because its logic was that of a challenge to the very ideological fundamentals that held the mob at bay in the years following the Chartist threat to property. Working and middle class radicals were very interested in evolution for ideological reasons although they preferred the ideas of Lamarck, a preference of the Left that was to prove highly problematic in the Soviet Union under Stalin. To undermine the ideology of God's grace creating a perfectly structured and benign nature (as proposed by the Anglican Paley) with the 'truth' of an evolutionary natural order with God (if present at all) very distant could imply that radical solutions to social problems were potentially correct. The secret to Darwin's triumph lies not in him being 'right' (which he mostly was) but in what he proposed arriving at just the right time to buttress rising social forces that endorsed a new imperial order that, in turn, buttressed the order of property more effectively than religion. The trigger of course was that Darwin could see that his ideas were in danger of being trumped with the less experimental or consistent thought of others, notably by the younger socialist (in a confused sort of way) Alfred Russell Wallace. He had to publish or lose his edge. It should be made clear here though that Darwin and Wallace were not competing as scientific equals and that Darwin had earned the right to leadership in the field. Darwin never treated Wallace badly and Wallace never regarded Darwin as having done so. Darwin is a complex character. The biography restores emotion to the Victorians but, for all the usual faults that lie in the character of the time (his imperialism, his casual racism, his patronising attitudes to the working class), he was by mid-Victorian lights ethical and broadly compassionate. So, Darwin has to publish to be the one who gets credit for a truth that is brutal in its vision of nature as a war of all against all in the battle of survival and of the survival of those who are fittest. These then, it seems, go on to drive species, racial and all other forms of 'progress'. We can see straight away how useful this was to the rising middle class professionals in the scientific community but also to a new imperial society being born out of the expansion of trade and industrialisation. It 'explained' hegemony. It 'countered' socially radical alternatives. 'Property' (all things being equal) might have been happy to continue with the old Tory paternalist ideology of a settled and benign Nature and of traditionalist values that placed everyone in their assigned role and relied on squires to protect the poor and parsons to comfort them. Science was always going to unsettle this view because science is what it is - the truth of the matter. Unfortunately, Nature is actually mindlessly brutal with God increasingly (if he even exists) pushed further back by reality into being little more than the designer of general laws. The initial challenge had come from two equally opposed sources. We have mentioned the radical challenge which became a socialist one in due course. This emphasised the possibility of social improvement on Lamarckian lines but the more important challenge at this point was the Whig one. Whig intellectuals took up Malthus which led, after the 1832 Reform Act, to the cruelest triumph of Liberal Progressivism - the Poor Laws. Prior to Darwin's publications over a quarter of a century later, 'existential struggle' was already being brutally imposed on the working classes. It is part of the centre-left myth of its own trajectory that Victorian Liberalism was a good thing and the Tories were a bad thing but nothing is so simple. For totally different reasons, yet both thinking in compassionate terms, Tories and radicals challenged the Malthusian ideology of this new elite. Victorian Liberalism was intent on a form of managed revolution in the interests of its own class alliances - wealthy industrialists and dissenters, evangelical Christians, Malthusians, the new professional class, self-made men, the first propertied feminists. This was a culture of trade and empire and of assumptions of worth epitomised by the Self-Help doctrine of Samuel Smiles. The way to handle too many working people was to force them to export themselves to colonies where the imperial authorities subjugated inferior peoples to fit them in. In a weak form, these are attitudes about cultural superiority, social control, ideological conformity and the handling of the working class that are still embedded in American progressives and what was once called 'New Labour'. It is the ideological original sin of the Anglosphere Centre-Left. Darwin straddled this main ideological divide. He was of free-thinking stock where the money had been made in industrial enterprise. He was 'liberal' in the best sense in his dealings with people but, on the other hand, he was also a village country squire and responsible for a parish and good order. The third phase in his life and in the book is what happens when he deals with his internal conflicts and publishes 'The Origin of Species' (1859) and later 'The Descent of Man' (1871) (as well as very many other works) dropping a lighted match into the oil dump of elite ideological tensions. Darwin's work becomes the weaponry to be used by a self-consciously engaged network of 'professional' (or aspirantly professional) elite scientists actively seeking to overturn the old order and transform the existing 'gentlemanly' institutions of the scientific community. Darwin's technique is interesting. He knows what he is doing and he wants to promote the scientific revolution but he also wants to retain his aura of respectability. He does this by standing back and providing the guns and bullets for his shock troops but avoiding the front line himself. His health shifts from being the psychosomatic result of intense stress at the potential revolution that he might create to its being the excuse for not engaging in revolutionary acts by attending events and for not commenting on the ideological, social or political ramifications of his theories. He sits like a spider at the centre of an ideological web as Huxley in particular (but not only Huxley) takes on those who refuse to abandon religion as the core of Victorian ideology (men such as Bishop Wilberforce and the Duke of Argyll) and builds up a shock troop of like-minded scientists. This is why the book is so valuable. It not only gives us an insight into Victorian elite society at a key point in its history between the troubles of the 1840s and the High Imperialism of the 1880s but it helps to explain why change happened and suggests how change might happen today or tomorrow. By the time of Darwin's death in 1882, the 'revolution' is completed. The thesis of Tory Anglicanism and the antithesis of Liberalism are synthesised into the sanctimonious hypocrisy of Darwin's interment in Westminster Abbey (fixed by Huxley and the gang). As Desmond and Moore indicate, Darwin had become a secular saint but his interment in the Abbey as provider of a neat indirect justification of British imperial superiority ('survival of the fittest') was a symbolic negation of the alternative of his interment in a family vault as local patriarch. In essence Gladstonian Imperial Liberalism 'won' and old-style Tory Paternalism lost but the Anglican Church was vouchsafed a place in maintaining social order and the Lamarckian socialists were 'dished' by the weight of evidence that Darwin had provided. Alongside the British story there is, of course, the story of 'Darwinism' (the -ism helps indicate the ideological aspect of this new way of seeing the world) as both Social Darwinism (a more overt ideological system with no serious evidential base) and as its reception overseas. Darwin cannot entirely be absolved of responsibility for Social Darwinism although he did not actively promote it or anything like it. It emerged as, if you like, its own 'bourgeois necessity'. However, he shared the baseline thinking - the struggle for existence with winners and losers in life's race. What becomes interesting is the rapid German intellectual adoption of Darwinism with an enthusiasm and excitability that sometimes comes across as at the edge of comical if we were not reminded of some of the eventual darker consequences of its adoption in the next century. The authors are only interested in how the Germans related to Darwin personally but we can see the lineaments of an interpretation that is similar to that we have seen in relation to the British Empire - an idea, strengthened by its apparent truth, met a newly necessary ideological need. This is the Germany of Bismarck. The defeat of 'effete' France by Prussia saw most of the British elite preferring modernising Germany to France with its perceived tin pot Napoleon III. Germany looked dynamic, the fittest, both to itself in potential and to the wider world. With Haeckel playing the role of Huxley, Darwinism appealed because it weakened the role of the churches in restricting the authority of the State and it suggested ideas of natural selection that were not uninfluential on philosophers like Nietzsche. As my mentor at university, the late Norman Stone, pointed out to me, national socialism was the consequence of a lot of young people being taught half-baked ideological theories by half-educated schoolmasters in small towns. Darwinismus would have been part of their tool kit. One day the path by which two decent men's ideas (those of Darwin and Marx who only interacted briefly in writing once) becomes socially transmuted away from their actual intentions into mass murder and genocide will be traced with more insight than we have seen to date. From this perspective, Desmond (who was an historian of evolution prior to the 'Origin of Species') and Moore (whose previous work was on the controversies in Victorian London triggered by Darwin's work) provide important material on the ideologisation of 'truth' and the role of intellectuals. We should add here that the authors concentrate as much if not more on the man as on his ideas and environment. This makes the book, based on deep research into available letters and papers, extremely readable as a human life that unfolds over more than seventy years. There are two critical death scenes (of Darwin's daughter Annie and of Darwin himself) that should move anyone - in both cases the available evidence gives us scenes of horror that few biographies tend to provide. It is important to understand what death entailed for Victorians. Similarly the account of the Voyage of the Beagle is a deft summary of Darwin's own writings that allows us to picture a young sea sick man prepared to put up with a great deal of hardship and risk to find out how the world might work and do his job of collecting specimens for home. For all the social and ideological aspects and consequences of the case, Darwin comes across as a basically decent human being who loved his family and especially his long-suffering wife Emma, was loyal and supportive to his friends and worked immensely hard because that is who he was. His 'genius' was not based on one just idea or the books for which most people remember him but on a major body of research work involving demanding and committed experimentation and the ability to worry at a problem and follow the logic of his experimental discoveries. How his material was used was not really his fault because he was only telling the truth as he saw it. His truth almost entirely (with the odd speculation overtaken by history) stands up as exceptional science that just happened to be very convenient to powerful people who then weaponised it. Fortunately we have long since moved past the ideological accretions. Scientists eventually returned to the science and built on it. One hopes that, at some stage, the same can be done with those aspects of the work of Marx that still hold 'truths' that it has now become all too convenient to deny. ...more |
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it was amazing
| The title of Professor Grafton's book on early modern magical thinking and practice is a little misleading. Faustus is mentioned at the beginning of t The title of Professor Grafton's book on early modern magical thinking and practice is a little misleading. Faustus is mentioned at the beginning of the book only briefly. Although it ends with Agrippa who is dealt with at length, the author reaches back to Roger Bacon to tell his story. The core thesis may be nothing new - that magical thought was not as irrational as later observers had assumed and was at the cutting edge of the Renaissance and of its concern with technology and understanding a reality that had to take account of both classical philosophy and faith. The book is scholarly and quite dense to start with. It is centred on roughly the mid-fifteenth through to the mid-sixteenth centuries with two chapters (of five) devoted to the contrasting figures of Trithemius and that great synthesiser of magical thought, Agrippa. The story is complex and detailed (with excellent illustrations of key texts). It would be impossible to summarise the full argument of this excellent work in a relatively short Goodreads review. Each chapter is like a mini-monograph, the whole strung together to make the larger argument. Grafton begins by exploring the dynamic tension between Catholic Christianity and magical thought. This led to great pains being taken to divide 'bad' magic (essentially folk magic and magic undertaken for corrupt advantage) from 'good' magic which was a precursor to the natural sciences. We see here a late medieval and early modern discovery of what Arthur C. Clarke would later claim - that magic was just undiscovered science. In a world that accepted miracles from faith, magic was interested in wonder based on reason in that context. The links between good magic as Christian, explanatory of the world, as a potential mastery of the world (very much like twentieth century visions of technology in science fiction) and actual technological innovation are well demonstrated in the book. There is another trend that is explored: the discovery of neo-Platonic philosophy which, of course, had to be squared with Christianity. This created the conditions, in the differing thought worlds of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, for a Renaissance form of magic. We can add to this the discovery of the Jewish Cabala, partially Christianised as Kabbalah, which was seen as an insight into the mind of God through techniques based on the magical use of language and numbers (gematria). Magic could also call down demons (thus 'bad' magic or at least magic where good magicians must know what they are doing before attempting anything) or angels. This latter reached its latest form in that Enochian exploration of John Dee in the second half of the sixteenth century. The relevance of Faustus is only that this figure became the model for the misuse of magic and example for those who would condemn charlatanism, manipulation, fraud and association with demons - as also exemplified in literature much later in Christopher Marlowe's 'Faustus'. However, it is the link to technology or at least to a technological mind set that is most interesting. Grafton recovers astrology as a reasonable 'science' in the context of the time doing no more perhaps than Asimov's Hari Seldon claimed to do with The Foundation. Some might make similar claims in advance of the 'magical' qualities of quantum AI. If everything is connected (a view held by many today), then those connections should be 'scientifically knowable' (and this would include the connections to Heaven and Hell and so to angels and demons). Roger Bacon's alleged autonomous talking head, cryptography, engineering, theatre engines, herbal medicine and war machines could be seen as 'scientific' in being functionally effective but also mysterious as to some of the precise mechanisms that allowed them to work. A lodestone could be both natural (an observable fact in the known world) and implicitly magical insofar as its uncanny properties could not be explained. Of course, engines of war or for courtly masques could be explained but the engineer might not wish to do so and so appear a 'magician'. When technology worked but with no knowledge of the laws of physics or the findings of modern science then an early modern intellectual might reasonably say that something magical was going on without in any way implying the woo-woo of today. The 'artist' enchanted society. Magicians and technologists were thus often conceptually interchangeable. The best example in the book of this is Trithemius' cryptographical work. This was simultaneously magical and scientific. It clearly disturbed contemporaries because of its 'secret' or occult implications. However, it was also technology since encrypting messages within the extensive diplomatic networks of dynastic Europe required secrecy. Many codes could be easily broken once a specialist got hold of the correspondence. Science, technology and magic were all interconnected. Magic was thus a rational response to what could be known at that time and was in fact 'progressive', creating testable explanatory models or paradigms that were ready-made for alternative explanation with new evidence or the eventual unwinding of medieval Christian faith assumptions. The fluidity and uncertainty of all this meant that there was no fixed system, no rigid ideology, of magic until Agrippa's great work of synthesis. Even he, despite his huge commitment to his 'Occult Philosophy', seemed to retain a healthy doubt about aspects of what he was drawing attention to. Both Trithemius and Agrippa, when looked at in the round, evidenced much more rationality and scepticism than we might expect. It is as if intellectuals were determined to understand the world whilst privately knowing that not all magical explanations were sufficient. We should also remember that intellectuals have to eat. Demonstrating magical capacity (especially astrological prediction) was a fee-earner. The temptation to delude oneself about results or be a charlatan for profit might have been considerable. Faustus was just more obvious at the latter. On the other hand, the risks in performing 'bad' magic could be considerable. There was a block on any scepticism about God's ordering of the world, necessary for scientific developmen. It was more than discouraged. It was taboo. Thinkers were thus partially trapped into magic by faith. Any sign of atheism could lead to dire consequences as Giordano Bruno found. He was burnt at the stake even though nearly everyone else who slipped over the approved social and clerical line could generally draw back quickly with a carefully worded retraction We suspect, on the basis of what we read in the book about Trithemius and our own awareness of the Socinian movement, that thoughts that might have been interpreted as cynicism or scepticism about the received Word were far more general and took place far earlier than we might expect. Once some people started to think as an intellectual class across borders, the power of faith was ultimately doomed but a long transitional period had a lot of very intelligent people working very hard to square divinity with observation and technological creation. There is not much in the book about 'bad' magic except in terms of exhortations about charlatanism and that is probably because not a lot of demonic magic was actually going. If it was it was simplistic incantation and talismanic magic and what was mostly happening was deliberate fraud. One insight though is how the debate, from the point of view of those determined to justify 'good' magic, about what was 'bad' magic helped to institute the fear and anxiety that led to the atrocious wave of witch trials that disfigured Europe and North America in the subsequent century. If magic becomes established as undiscovered science and is taken seriously then intent (as with atomic power or genetic engineering or AI) becomes a subject of concern and debate. If all is connected, those who would summon demons from hell become as real as those summoning angels. This excellent book adds a great deal of meat to the bones of our understanding that magic (whatever happened to it later) was part of the process of discovering reason in the world and so a step towards our modern conception of science. It is a highly recommended book with, incidentally, very interesting material on the curious dynamic betweem Judaism and Christianity. The occult tale here is of the emergence of an early attempt, using many new sources, at scientific and philosophical investigation of reality in an age of faith. Magic was thus a sound working model in this context even if it would be overtaken as an intellectually acceptable form of knowledge a hundred years after the high point of Agrippa's 'Occult Philosophy'. Today it seems to be just an adjunct to traditionalism and a form of psychotherapy. ...more |
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really liked it
| Shilo Brooks has undertaken an exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of the four 'Untimely Meditations' that Nietzsche produced between 1873 and 1876 ( Shilo Brooks has undertaken an exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of the four 'Untimely Meditations' that Nietzsche produced between 1873 and 1876 (Ages 29-32) with one clear mission - to demonstrate that they are not to be treated separately but are part of the same philosophical project. In this endeavour Brooks is plausible and broadly successful but he also provides the insights that allows us to see the four essays as (by their termination) an ending and a beginning. Nietzsche expresses a romantic idealism only to prepare the ground for its eventual subversion. All Nietzsche's often absurd and certainly egoistic genius is to be found in these essays as he moves from his excessive debt to the Hellenic heritage of his education through a coruscating critique of contemporary German philistinism and on to the hero-worship of the monumental artist. As always with Nietzsche, the essays are filled with irony and philosophical exclamation points as he thinks his thoughts in public, half in love with the potential for his world-historical fame and half insulting those who would give him that meaning he craves. His reasoning has its logic even if the logic will eventually subvert the very argument he wants to make here. He is already doubting the hero-artist thesis even as he writes his last essay on Wagner. The conclusion may be daft but it does follow on from his reasoning. Thinking in public here does not mean thinking to persuade through sophistic appeals to what his audience wants to hear (mere 'rhetoric') but persuading his audience to think as Nietzsche thinks and Nietzsche cannot help but keep thinking to the point of the eventual subversion of his own thought. Much of 'Untimely Meditations' will seem irelevant to us now. Brooks is able to position what Nietzsche wrote as quite specific to the 'kulturkampf' that Bismark triggered after his victory in the Franco-Prussian War. He positions the essays as a cultural assault in their own right. What we have here is an insurgent cultural bandit attacking the apparent victors of Sedan but refusing to act for the older Catholic tradition that those victors were trying to put in its place. Nietzsche offers something entirely new - a 'forwards to a new past' that unravels conventional ideas of Truth. Is Nietzsche a radical or a conservative in these essays? This is not easy to say . His attack is radical on 'civilised philistinism' but the appeal is to grand post-truth monumental history (a rewriting of the past) and the example of 'great men' whose existence is no longer what they were in reality. The future is one based on new recreations of the past that need have no identity with the actual past but which provide unifying limitations on society. The future belongs to the young who can invent their own future out of the acquisition of the qualities of exemplars and so create new great men. The 'great man' thesis, of course, is of its time. Carlyle had driven that idea in England. Napoleon had existed as exemplar and (temporary) conqueror of Europe only six decades before, roughly where we sit in relation to John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Despite this romanticism, these essays become a way station of great value to understanding the Nietzsche whose tougher critiques of conventional thought would appear later. He will jettison the grand theorising around Schopenhauer and Wagner in order to create a new Nietzschean universal. On the way, he ruthlessly eviscerates the grand old man of complacent German bourgeois Hegelianism, David Strauss, to the point of cruelty and continues the destruction with a post-truth critique of history as the framework of culture. Having destroyed, he tries to rebuild with Schopenhauer and Wagner as exemplars of the great minds that will revive German culture although neither of these figures are to be taken as particularly 'real' - as Brooks argues, they are simply cover for Nietzsche himself as 'great man'. The egoism and narcissism of Nietzsche is here fully present to the point where one hates oneself for accepting that this man is both perhaps a little unhinged even at this early stage in his career and a true philosopher whose analyses (though not his prescriptions) are generally spot on. His critique of the civilised philistine hits home not only in the Germany of the 1870s but in the West of the twenty first century. There is also much meat in his critique both of the academic and professional world that stands today and of history as narrative that shapes culture for good or ill. The shadow of the Greeks lies heavy over early Nietzsche. His attitude to Hellenism is deeply romantic even if he uses it not to mimic the past but only to seek a methodology that will create new mythologies for a German and European future. He contests Plato and the latter's negativity towards the arts in order to engage in a reversal in which life exists within Plato's cave as illusion and not in the reality outside the cave. He wants Art somehow to create an (admittedly contingent) social order that has no room for philistinism. Much of this, of course, is romantic nonsense expressed with a certain desperation as this young man tries to will into being meanings that are not there. His negative experience of the actuality of Bayreuth after the last essay was published was the last nail in that particular coffin. However, what Nietzsche writes here cannot be easily dismissed. The way that he reaches absurd and contingent conclusions is far from absurd or contingent. He is beginning to give insights to the psychology of meaning and what it is to be human that will unfold in the next set of works. The 'Untimely Meditations' may be solely read for purely antiquarian reasons as an insight into Nietzsche's more mature thought but this would be a mistake. His process of thought (if one is patient) unlocks a much more profound critique of how we think under modernity. We are looking at a psychological and phenomenological approach to philosophy in which we construct truth out of reality against the truth constructed for us within reality. Destruction is sought to construct what will have to be destroyed again in order to construct something new once more. The essays come together as a description of the necessity for struggle, action and invented truth as processes required to enhance the life instinct against the flaccidity and deathliness of convention and the chatter of a culture which Nietzsche implicity criticises as 'capitalist' but from the 'Right'. The problem with most readers of Nietzsche is that they jump to the near-hysterical quasi-religious late works and neglect the process that led to their creation. The late works become triggers for just another form of civilised philistinism. What matters is what Nietzsche does when he 'thinks'. The 'Untimely Meditations' are rightly to be seen as coherent (even if the last is 'cringeworthy' in Brooks' words) and as providing a romantic idealist and sometimes absurd base-line for later thinking. Many of the themes that are worth noting and understanding later are first developed here. We can be unmoved (rightly in my view) by the more contingent aspects of the four essays and find the romantic idealism surrounding Schopenhauer and Wagner meaningless and even hysterical (in both the comic and neurotic senses) but the underpinnings of Nietzsche's analysis are deadly serious. A virtue of this book is that it exposes the bones of Nietzsche's thought processes and how they are consistently linked to one other regardless of the ostensible purposes of the essays. 'Untimely Meditations' is recovered as important for uncovering what makes Nietzsche great and dangerous. ...more |
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it was amazing
| One of the problems in studying philosophy historically is that philosophers are taken as an 'event' rather than as a 'process'. A master work is chos One of the problems in studying philosophy historically is that philosophers are taken as an 'event' rather than as a 'process'. A master work is chosen as exemplar or the writer of a book tries to set down the philosophy of a thinker as if it was a thing out of time or out of cultural place. This forgets that philosophers are thinking in time and over a life-cycle of their own from birth (as incipient personality) to culmination in death and that philosophers are not only responding to the past but to the shifting politics and social and cultural changes of their own era. Safranski's 'Nietzsche' is very much the story of a process of thought, a 'philosophical biography', that lodges Nietzsche's thinking within a life (less so within a culture) and tracks how his thinking changed over decades until madness overtook him. Seen in this way, his thought unfolds in three broad phases that match the way a man thinks as he grows and matures. How Nietzsche took something in his core personality and expanded it into something that changed our whole culture is the story of this book. I write 'in his core personality' because, from a very early age, Nietzsche is thinking 'differently' and showing a driven quality to pursue thought to its limits. His life is 'thinking to its limits' in ways that were literally 'unthinkable' to his contemporaries and to the vast majority of our species even today. The first phase of his thought is that largely of his twenties until his final breach with Wagner (1876, Age 32). Influenced by Schopenhauer, his early philosophy might be seen as interesting more in its potential rather than the actual. It is a philosophy of over-enthusiastic late romantic aesthetics. A man of high intelligence drawn into academicism, he rebels because his thought processes see how dessicated was the world that he had joined professionally. Art (not art but Art) as a total Dionysian experience appeared to be a way out as he developed a theory of culture. 'The Birth of Tragedy' provides a grounding for his later thought, situated between his own reaction to Greek thought and what will become an emergent psychology - the bicameral tension between Dionysiac excess and Apollonian order. The disillusion with Wagner (when he sees Bayreuth as just another example of what we might call 'show business') permits the second phase of his thinking which, in my view, is the most important of all - from 1876 until his transcendent peak experience in August 1881. This relatively brief period in his mid-thirties allows him to escape German Idealism entirely and think, without restraint, about the relationship between himself and the world and so, more generally, about what it is to be human in relation to existence. This is a period of both personal misery and sometimes ecstatic insight. He is making profound contributions to epistemology but also to psychology in ways that not merely anticipate Freud but, frankly, are vastly superior to the thinking of the later founder of the psychoanalytic wrong turn. Above all, Nietzsche is a phenomenologist, observing with care how his own mind works in relation to the world and drawing general conclusions about the human condition. From there, he draws, less reliably, further conclusions about culture and society. It is at this point that we might have hoped he would retain his full sanity and come to terms with the 'world-shattering' vision he was developing. But the link to personal misery, much of it expressed psychosomatically, and manic depression meant that things were not going to end well. Given the culture into which he was born and his undoubtedly unstable personality, the idea that he could have somehow transformed himself into Heidegger 'avant la lettre' and explored his thinking about our relation to Being with dogged academic determination is absurd. Nietzsche simply did not have the all the mental tools to sit back and observe his own thought in the way that he seemed to demand as necessary. He 'lived' his thought. His body 'lived' his thought. And he never found a way of conquering the psychological conflicts that his thought created. One of the most interesting aspects of that thought is the transfer of his initially academic Dionysian-Apollonian analysis of culture and the human condition to psychology. Bicamerality is today seen as neuroscientifically real as our minds try to cope with balancing two hemispheres in the brain. Nietzsche's intuitions about bicameral conflict, extended beyond the individual to society and culture as a whole, now look remarkably astute. Attempts to reconcile the impulses in one part of our brain with the cognitive apparatus of the other raise fundamental questions about perceived reality. Our relationship to Being is complicated by physical responses to the fact of our being in Being (questions for Heidegger to deal with although he lost this bicameral psychological assessment in doing so). Nietzsche's real physical reaction to the process of thinking is part of the thought. At the Surej boulder in 1881 (age 37), Nietzsche goes on a very different path. We might consider that the final phase before his collapse into madness in 1889 (Age 45) is one extended mid-life crisis in which he attempts to resolve his contradictions through assertion. What we see is a drive towards self-expression as the 'will to power' amidst a new mythology of the 'eternal recurrence' and the promotion of his poetic character of Zarathustra. It is fertile stuff culturally but often hard to pin down as reliable 'philosophy'. This final phase (if we discount the subsequent decade of insanity) is nevertheless of immense cultural importance although (I would argue) more philosophically barren. Sometimes it seems like a constant scream of egoistic 'look at me', increasingly monomaniac as time passes. This is not to say that these powerful final works are not important but only that the thinking, which is often contradictory and extreme, sometimes has the feel of a tormented man letting rip on the psychologist's couch. Yet it is these works that mostly define what Nietzsche is to the public. The power of these late works (which Safranski significantly spends relatively little time analysing) lies in the effect that their no-holds-barred narcissism has on Europeans looking for an excuse for high emotional expression in a repressive culture. Humans always need excuses. A final chapter on the way Nietzsche's work came to be employed after his death is invaluable in this context especially because of its German focus, indicating how his thoughts came to be used before Heidegger, Adorno/Horkheimer and Foucault employed them as seeds for their own thought. Can Nietzsche be 'blamed' for national socialism? Only a fool would not see that Nietzsche's late thought leads inexorably to its use as a tormented brutalism that follows logically from his refusal to compromise on his vision of the human condition. But 'blame' is absurd. Indeed, it is hard to fault Nietzsche's logic (such as it is). Or, in some respects, even Hitler's and that of the national socialist philosophers like Bauemler, a rival to Rosenberg, who Safranski recognises as sophisticated. Nietzsche's brutal logic can imply national socialism without much difficulty. Yes, his sister and brother-in-law twisted his legacy to serve German nationalism and, no, Nietzsche was anti-anti-semitic and highly critical of nationalism but special pleading cannot hide the continuity between the philosophy of existence and anti-Christian Nazi Darwinian struggle. It is at this deeper (the scientific, in its time) level of existential skirting of nihilism with an invented commitment to will that we see the affinity between Nietzsche and National Socialism and not at the secondary level of antisemitism, militarism, nationalism and imperialism. This is the problem with Nietzsche. The more you read his brute analysis of the human condition (the thinking of Truth including the non-Truth of Truth), the more plausible it becomes although there is no doubt that his struggle was always against the consequent logic arising from this of nihilism. To avoid the nihilistic interpretation of reality, Nietzsche required a will to something, a human engagement in Life and this engagement in Life married to the darkness of Being resulted in a cruel and vicious view of life that failed to live up to the fanatic expectations for Life itself. That this Truth troubled Nietzsche despite his attempt to think things through according to the facts of the matter becomes clear in snatches and it strikes me as no accident that he finally goes mad in response to the beating of a horse which could stand for inner revolt against his own philosophy. It is as if he thought himself into a corner from which there was no escape but insanity and at times, being an honest man intellectually, he could see the way of the meek as a form of will to power whose conquest of the brute might perhaps be part of the Truth too. Whenever he comes close to systematising his thought, his intellectual honesty (which is undoubted) would periodically break through in force to ask an awkward question of himself that might unravel the psychological scaffolding that held him together. If we accept that Nietzsche describes our condition accurately once God is recognised to be dead (God stands for all past solutions to the human condition invented to avoid the Truth), then we are left with decisions about what to invent in its place. Making the invention consonant with science as it was understood in the 1870s and 1880s in Europe means over-accepting science in the construction of the Overman (Ubermensch) and allowing Darwinism to become over-privileged in defining the human condition. In other words, a correct assessment of our relation to the world as material existence (a different issue than the relation to Being as Heidegger would attempt to understand the problem) can get bogged down in inadequate assumptions about our scientific understanding of that world. Nietzschean thought is literally 'beyond good and evil' because it can end up anywhere. Much of non-analytical philosophy since Nietzsche has, therefore, been spent trying to analyse the world in ways that restore some sort of value or re-jigs Truth to be more palatable (that is, not-Truth). Each attempt to do so must be of its time and place much as Nietzsche's own solutions, which were less 'truthful' than the Truth, were bound by its (or rather his) conditions of existence. At this level, all philosophy is personal and about knowing where to sever derivative truths from the Truth itself. In Nietzsche's case (Safranski is very informative on this), our philosopher was embedding his truth in the fact of science (the Appollonian/left hemisphere) in tension with the Dionysiac and so scientific materialism (not the Marxist version) became central to his will to power. This is where Truth becomes problematic for our species - the innocent Darwin set off a chain of events that led to Auschwitz and Nietzsche was no more responsible for that than Darwin was. In both cases, ideas that were true became tools and weapons in the struggle for human meaning. So, Nietzsche sits as a child of mid-century Germany trying to cope with personal turmoil, the death of God (which Heidegger found equally problematic), the rise of science, cultural philistinism, the chatter of the blind and the conventional and he came to certain conclusions. For example, his analysis of Christianity in 'On The Genealogy of Morals' was only too accurate although his assesssment of socialism remained that of a spoiled bourgeois brat. What we do with his analyses is what counts and that includes fundamental criticism of the limitations of his thought. Where Nietzsche 'went wrong' is only in failing to continue to think along the lines he was thinking in his second phase - phenomenologically, psychologically, epistemologically as well as existentially - and jumping into the cultural fray with a form of 'revelation' that over-privileged the Dionysiac. This seems to be core to Nietzsche and to Nietzscheans - the centrality of the rational Apollonian in their assessment of reality but under conditions where they desperately yearn for the Dionysiac, the animal spirits of music, poetry and religion and try to force an older animal brain into action. At a certain point, like an 'old man in a hurry' as if he knew time was limited, Nietzsche wanted to make a mark on the world, to be 'important, the centre of attention, a prophet, perhaps (through Zarathustra) a founder of new world religion or at least national culture. In fact, Nietzsche was not inherently Dionysiac. He wanted it desperately. He thought himself into this state out of this desperation and perhaps it helped tip him over the edge into insanity. Certainly, the psychosomatic aspects of the second phase merge into near-monomania in the third. He never stopped writing important things in that third phase but we, the reader, find ourselves shifting from the thought as a whole to abstracting the thoughts we find useful from a huge corpus of ranting and aphoristic position-taking which is exhausting and time-consuming to say the least. Nietzsche must be counted a true genius if an unstable one but one around which we should be careful to retain our critical faculties. Safranski has thus done us a great service by showing his thought as a process within a particular context underpinned by a very definite personality. What exactly we do with Nietzsche is down to our particular contexts and our particular personalities but one thing is clear. If we are at all serious about thinking, we have to start, in effect, from the Truth of our situation in relation to the world that this genius exposed to us. His thought is only the beginning of our own thought and is not for the faint-hearted. It was always potentially very dangerous to individual and society alike. The continuing denial of its truth may indicate just how deluded about our condition we necessarily have to be in order to be human. ...more |
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it was amazing
| Edmund Burke's influential 'Philosophical Enquiry' (1757) should be considered as an early attempt at phenomenology and the psychology of aesthetics r Edmund Burke's influential 'Philosophical Enquiry' (1757) should be considered as an early attempt at phenomenology and the psychology of aesthetics rather than as a full-blown philosophical work. He addresses language, for example, only briefly as a somewhat desultory if fruitful coda. Still, Burke's description of the 'sublime' (the human response to external stimuli that evoke awe, terror or reverence) still stands as a stimulating insight into what remains a psychological mystery - intense feeling that exists without language although it can be triggered by language. His description of 'beauty' is perhaps less successful because he is describing the norms of his time far more than he is doing in the case of the 'sublime'. The modern mind will naturally baulk at the negative associations he gives to 'blackness' and at his essentialist view of simpering women. Philosophy generally only works when it describes things regardless of contingent cultural conditions unless (as in the case of Heidegger) it is fully aware of that contingency and factors it in as part of the philosophy - in other words that the thinker is maximally aware of the conditions of his thinking. Burke is clearly not aware of the conditioning of his thinking. So, for all the acute analysis of the 'sublime ' which has been so influential in Western cultural history, I am afraid we have to say that Burke as philosopher does not quite stand the test of time. Where he does stand the test of time is as a source of insight into the eighteenth century mind as it turns a little from the Enlightenment towards recognising that our responses to the world cannot be encompassed by pure reason but have other more emotional drivers. To his credit, he does not try to rationalise the sentiments underpinning and surrounding both the sublime and the beautiful. He allows them to 'be' as experiences that we can all recognise (even if they are more culturally variable than he seems to think) and then he investigates them. This is the work of an ambitious young man - he was only 28 at the time. A certain earnestness of enquiry is present through the work. He knows he does not know. He is trying to think his way to some sort of understanding that he knows is incomplete. The book is definitely exploratory. The work remains reasonably readable today because eighteenth century prose tends to clarity more than obscurity. The longeurs only come when you see him puzzling through thoughts that were hard to clarify for himself as much as for us. Yet when he lets rip with descriptions of our actual emotional responses to the sublime and the beautiful, then the two and a half centuries that separate us from him drift away. Much that he writes is embedded not in his century but in us. And he writes well when he needs to. Curiously, based on Adam Phillips' notes (it is appropriate that the Editor is a psychotherapist and not a philosopher), the vast majority of Burke's many classical and literary quotations are marked out as 'misquoted'. Evidently Burke was churning this out in his lodgings without access to a library and from memory. One assumes that the bulk of his readers were also school classicists from memory and not from the academy or else this might have been used against him. There is perhaps an insight here into a fluidity in the use of texts that would not be tolerable in later ages and that misquotation was probably regarded as fine so long as it was not the Bible. His audience could read the Latin and scan a line. The misremembered word was not relevant to the project. Phillips refers to the eroticism of the 'Philosophical Enquiry' but that it is too strong. Burke is simply culturally enabled to describe some truths without the dead weight of the Victorian age and still retain some delicacy. Although not a great work of philosophy, this is still worth reading for its cultural importance. It enables reason to be balanced by sentiment but, more importantly, it opens the door to experimental psychology ... exactly what is happening when an external object excites an emotion? He does not answer that question adequately - there is no cause given for the effect beyond the phenomena themselves - but he is asking the right questions. He is also providing clear and credible descriptions of the relationships between observer and phenomena. His 'philosophy of language' is also not stupid. It too asks an important question which he cannot adequately answer. How is it that words alone, which have no necessary link to the reality they describe, can be formed to excite emotions such as awe, delight, desire and pleasure? This is an important question which still has no satisfactory answer. He contributes by pointing out the mystery that we read without forming clear pictures as we read and yet we 'understand' something from the linking of the words rather than any deep consideration of what they portray. Read any line of 'literature' and ask yourself if you actually envision each word and each event clearly rather than construct a meaning internally that, on careful consideration, is seemingly disconnected from the 'pictures' the language should represent and you will see what I mean. These final observations by Burke on language are worth dwelling on although having described the mystery he has only the most limited account of what is going on. As before, he asks the right question, supplies the evidence of the problem and then moves on. The science and philosophy he uses may be state of the art in 1757 (he knows his Locke) and he is a philosopher to the degree that he does what helps to define philosophy (asking awkward questions of the facts of the matter) but he does not do much more than that. What he does manage to do is get his readers to see that abstract ratiocination can only go so far in describing our responses to the world and that our emotional life, especially in relation to core underlying drives like fear and erotic desire, needs to be observed more closely in order to understand it. ...more |
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it was amazing
| This companion comprises over 60 relatively short essays on Heidegger's key texts and life including two sections devoted to the sources and influence This companion comprises over 60 relatively short essays on Heidegger's key texts and life including two sections devoted to the sources and influences on his philosophy and on his influence on other philosophers and schools with one on major themes in his thought. It is exhaustive, some might say exhausting if you commit to reading it straight through as I did (bar two essays which I simply could not face of which more anon). Severely academic, you are warned that it is not for the faint-hearted even if it is an excellent guide to current scholarship. The essays are, as you would expect, variable in readability and depth but the vast majority are enlightening. The best approach for the generalist is not to worry that you do not understand it all but rather to allow the 'thinking' to wash over you and 'suggest' what might be learned. The book changed some of my views. Above all, it helped me to understand just how much Heidegger's thinking was a continuous process over time. What was thought in the 1920s must be considered on very different terms from what he might have been thinking in the 1950s or 1960s. There is no obligation here to accept a system, Heidegger's philosophy permits disagreement by its very nature. It is fluid. It is always possible to depart from its premises further down the line and come to very different position so long as one thinks in good faith. It also clarified for me the shift from Being & Time (which I can now understand could never have been completed and still allow Heidegger to continue thinking as he had to think) to his even more dense and sometimes almost mystical and poetic later thought. I still prefer the earlier Heidegger and I still appreciate where Sartre took it for all his Cartesian faults but I understand better and appreciate more the indisputable richness of Heidegger's later thought processes even where I find myself increasingly departing from them over time. As to his life, I am not overwhelmingly interested in the tortured 'Heidegger as Nazi' debate which is a flagellating exercise that tells us more about the debaters than Heidegger but I found myself enlightened throughout by just how embedded he was in the faith culture of Germany. His faith journey towards a curious form of spiritualised atheism from Catholicism via Protestantism has its integrity but it also teaches us that the thrownness of this particular Dasein (and of all of us Daseins) means that we cannot be detached from our environment no matter how much we 'think'. This sets up a paradox in his thought. It liberates us from our condition but only up to a point. Our thrownness into the world means that we are our condition even as we expose it to our gaze and question it. Our thinking might throw us back into ourselves but we are still bound by the 'out there'. No review can utter anything truly sensible about his thought but we can still see that it is both coherent and yet expresses the impossibility of any language defining our situation as coherent and fixed in space and time. The turn to the poetical and quasi-mystical seems inevitable in retrospect. We are dealing with Wittgenstein's 'whereof we cannot speak' except that, still interested in language but eschewing the logical-analytical approach, Heidegger will not give up on the possibility of saying much more than other philosophers think possible. Naturally this results in apparent obscurity and an increasingly private language shared publicly even if every word and sentence is coherent in relation to his previous words and sentences - that he should become increasingly engaged with the obscurity of Art is no surprise. Heidegger is a revolutionary force in Western thought. Even now his impact is being delayed by Western habits. The odd thing about him is that his philosophy is difficult to understand intellectually but, once understood even at a basic level, it is surprisingly easy to live. There are one or two low points - the intersectional feminist essay (added as perhaps a concession to the contemporary academy) was one that I could not tolerate after a few paragraphs and the psychoanalytic essay was simply uninteresting unless you are a psychoanalyst. The greatest disappointment was one of the Editors (Eric Nelson) offering an almost obligatory addition of a piece on Heidegger as Nazi. This was embarrassing. After an initially clear exposition, its standard rather pompous liberal moralism denied everything that the man had taught us. In other words, even this excellent and well edited volume could not escape 'fashion' and the associated posturing of early twenty first century ideology, although, having pacified the usual suspects, we can at least say that this stuff represented under 2% of the whole. However, some of these essays more than made up for the stolid academicism of the bulk and the bits of nonsense. Even the most academic and difficult article contained some seed that could grow into revealing thought despite the problems of comprehension. One stand-out essay was Anne O'Byrne's on the application of Heidegger's thought to Birth as much as to Death. It contained powerful insights that could probably only have come from a woman Dasein. If we all are defined by our Finitude, we are also defined by our thrownness into the world as Origin. This allows us to escape something which Heidegger himself seems to have understood as a limitation of his early work and perhaps a flaw in the Sartrean adaptation - an excessive emphasis on our autonomous solitude. We are born into something that is pre-shaped as community and its bonds. This tension between Birth and Death is revealing to me as the tension between male and female (with due regard to the transgender) - between our matriarchal and patriarchal modes of being to some extent. Heidegger finds other ways to remind us of our debt to history. Another stand-out essay, if only for the clarity of the exposition, is Ian Thomson's on Heidegger's Ontotheology. He argues that it is the key to Heidegger's thinking. He is persuasive. Whether right or wrong, he is so clear in his writing that it is the essay I would recommend if only one were to be read. On his influence, there are two essays worth picking out. There is Trish Glazebrook's on Heidegger's influence on environmental philosophy which has spun off into some fairly inhuman directions in ways that I suspect we will see soon in techno-philosophy as Heidegger is inverted in the age of AI. The second is the superb and instructive review of the dynamic relationship between Heidegger and East Asian philosophy (notably Japanese philosophy) where some extreme claims are moderated but the influence of equals recognised. It was a discovery to realise that Japanese student philosophers were present at very early lectures and that Japanese refutations of Heidegger represent some of the most coherent criticism from an intense Zen perspective. It made me want to explore the work of Nishida. Heidegger and the Japanese were targeting the same problem - the experience and expression of the ineffable. Heidegger overthrew the entire Western tradition since (and including) Plato to head in a direction that might be called (dubiously) the pre-Western rediscovered. Most criticism of Heidegger in the West simply fails to understand just how much Heidegger had pulled the rug out from all absolute (as opposed to utilitarian or pragmatic) claims made by Western thinkers. Western criticism is largely a recovery operation exercised in a state of denial. From a utilitarian-pragmatic perspective, the only Western criticism that still seems to have something to say in contestation with Heidegger is not the liberal tradition but the sometimes sarcastic Marxist tradition which, of course, has nearly been crushed to death as alternative. Japanese criticism was, however, far more powerful because it tended to finger Heidegger as still unable to escape his situation as a Western philosopher and unable to think in the absolute terms of the ineffable and of Nothing as East Asians debated the matter. One senses that this criticism was one that Heidegger accepted - that he knew when he was beat but that it did not matter because the fact was that the West was the place into which he had been thrown and the West needed different thoughts from the East because of its own history. In this context, Heidegger's concern with 'techne' (more than just technology) may be his most lasting legacy, creating a problem with the thing that, more than anything else, defines Western power and legacy - and the terms of resistance to it. The resistance is not about rejecting technology but not allowing technology to become more than the hammer that the peasant uses to hammer into place a nail. The Westerner has become his hammer rather than seeing that hammer as just an extension of himself or herself. The critique of technology on these terms has in a simplified and possibly poorly understand form driven romantic environmentalism but now we are faced with a new challenge - forms of technology that may become Dasein on their own account and which replace human functionalities. Personally I tend to disagree with Heidegger on technology as a 'problem' but not as a description in the context of the Being of beings. I slip back into the Nietzschean perspective of 'overcoming' and of mastery of technology as part of overcoming. However, the secret to all this lies in who is overcoming what or who and for what purpose. Heidegger's description and thinking about technology remain invaluable in defining the terms of mastery. Sadly few technologists would seem to have any idea of what he was talking about. This is probably as far as we can go here. Do not read this book (unless you are a professional philosopher) and expect to understand it even with some previous basic reading in Heidegger's thought. Thinking does not work like that. It is a continuous process. Let it flow over you and do not be frightened by what you do not understand. One flash of insight or trigger for thought in each essay is still 160 or so new thoughts or thought processes that may change your own way of thinking. It is hard work but worthwhile and you can take it slowly. ...more |
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it was ok
| Between 1965 and 1975, there was a series called 'The Bluffers Guide to ...' This provided short light-hearted introductions designed to get the middl Between 1965 and 1975, there was a series called 'The Bluffers Guide to ...' This provided short light-hearted introductions designed to get the middle classes through their dinner parties. Today we have the far more serious Oxford 'Very Short Introductions to ..." which started in 1995. Inbetween came instant graphic guides to intellectuals and ideas - the 'Introducing ..." series published by Icon which was an expanded British version of an American series 'For Beginners' that went back to the 1970s. These dominated the instant knowledge market in the 1990s. The point of the 'Introducing/For Beginners' series was that they purported to introduce difficult ideas by explaining them in pictorial terms. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. Introducing Baudrillard sadly does not. This particular introduction was an attempt to pack twenty years of dense French intellectualism into 170 or so pages with perhaps a 100 or less words on a page with the pictures adding very little. 15,000-20,000 words is an article of 30 or 40 pages at most, an hour's read. Half the book is taken up with Baudrillard's struggle to add something meaningful to the rapid decline of Marxist thought. Half the book is thus turgidly incomprehensible. This leaves only half available for when Baudrillard becomes potentially interesting. Baudrillard likes simile and metaphors from cosmology and physics so the best and kindest way to describe what is happening to his thought is that he is being dragged into a philosophical black hole as Marxism implodes and then decides that it is the black hole itself that is interesting. The result is a form of object-oriented nihilism that seems at times little more than a form of patrician intellectual despair at the masses who Marxism was supposed to liberate, a bit like Hitler's railing against the German people as the Russian shells burst overhead in his Berlin bunker. Think of it like this. For decades, intellectuals sat on a pile of dung claiming that it was not dung but the world. It gives way and they are forced to accept that it is dung because they are now suffocating in it as they sink downwards. As the world collapses around them and all the structures of meaning that they have created to explain that world prove meaningless, they drift, if not into cynical public intellectual careerism to enrich themselves, into assuming that the dung is the world and the world is dung. Meanwhile the rest of the world outside the pile of dung continues to do what it always has done without benefit of clerics and intellectuals - live, struggle, survive, die, create personal and social meaning and generally exist regardless of theory. From this perspective, one wonders why anyone would think the post-Marxist intellectual to be in the least interesting but Baudrillard, in his dead-end nihilistic way, still captures something worth considering - the elusive and increasingly absurd nature of social reality. I would tend to ignore his negativity about the mass of the population (and its undoubted impotence at changing what matters to Baudrillard) and think instead of his analysis as often being correct but from which he draws the wrong conclusions. The world he describes when he casts doubt on its reality is not the world of most of us most of the time, it is the evanescent and unstable world of elites (of which he is an unstable part). This is crumbling before our eyes while we duck and dive to deal with the consequences of the collapse. There is a good example at the moment where the real world continues to trade along inflationary lines despite all the efforts of the central bank technocrats to control the process according to 'theory' while governments contribute to the chaos through wasteful potlach expenditures. We have a war in the East whose actual operations work to one side's timetable (the attritional war economy-based long game of the Russians) while the public in the West sees a simulacrum made up of aspiration, agit-prop, hope and moral fervour much as Baudrillard might have pointed out. Nothing Western elites hoped to achieve from February 2022 in terms of economic war has turned out the way that theory predicted. The Russian and Chinese counterparts do not have a theory in the same way - they just have a set of actions based on values and struggle. Baudrillard's critique of society is actually a critique of Western society and of the utter failure of liberal democracy to be anything more than dysfunctional over the long term. We can merge Chomsky's Propaganda Model with Baudrillard's simulacrum here. What we see is a massively complex and unruly system of social and political control that is, indeed, plunging into its own black hole. The 'masses' withdrawal into their own world is a rational response to the absurdity of a distant world that they see humming with self-importance far from them. There is still a real world out there. It is still based on economics and competition for resources as well as on brute power and technology. The Marxism of simple faith rather than scholastic interpretation stands up, at least in part, surprising well. Layered over this real world of markets and techno-innovation, of personal struggles and movements, of brute military force that can mostly not be deployed, of weather and crops, lies a magical world of intellectuals, managers, activists, politicians and technocrats that sucks this real world dry. As the latter loses control over reality, the formally impotent masses enjoy themselves by treating their world as an elaborate game or as theatre with the fall-back position of taking to the streets as they are doing in France or may yet do on Trump's arrest. The frustration of those intellectuals, managers and technocrats who still understand the link of everything to reality is compounded as careerism and the structures of power and media communications intensify the air of fantasy that allowed Baudrillard to speak of wars as illusions. So, Baudrillard ends up both wrong and right. Wrong in that he did not have a correct description of all social reality. Right in that he had a correct description of the collapse of elites into their own black hole of illusion and ineptitude, out of control and taking the illusion for reality. To answer a question posed by the book, Baudrillard is a symptom of what he writes about. Although this particular book is not useful in that respect, he should be read in order to diagnose the symptoms of the disease of Western civilisation from within. If he is right (in this interpretation), the process of implosion will continue remorselessly. This will please political accelerationists but whether the implosion will even be noticed by most of suffering humanity is entirely another matter. They are living in another world entirely. ...more |
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really liked it
| Although over seventy years old (first published in 1949), Bluck's account of Plato's Life and Thought remains informative and, if academic, occasiona Although over seventy years old (first published in 1949), Bluck's account of Plato's Life and Thought remains informative and, if academic, occasionally stimulating. It is a solid guide that stands up against more recent work. It comprises three parts - Plato's Life as far as it can be known from reasonably reliable sources and internal evidence, a review of Plato's thought in the understood order of his works and a translation of his Seventh Letter which adds something to the earlier account of Syracusan politics. Life and thought are not intermingled (an approach that can often confuse) but are discussed separately albeit closely aligned. What we learn is that Plato was not just an ivory tower thinker but a public intellectual engaged in practical politics in the 'distant' Sicilian empire as well as in Athens. Bluck is good at 'layering' Plato's political thought so that we may see his 'ideal' (which, of course, is what most of us in later generations first see) being managed downwards into compromises designed to draw what amount to gangster regimes into line with justice and the good. It is, of course, an exercise doomed to failure given the actualities of human ambition, greed and fear. Bluck allows us to observe the tension between life and thought in a way we rarely see in philosophical commentaries. The whole is a cautionary tale about intellectual pretension. When we leave the 'real world' of politics and look at the thought, most of what appears here will be well known but I was struck by the emphasis on philosophy as something that is diminished by being written down rather than spoken (perhaps rather than thought or experienced). This is a fruitful aspect of the Platonic cast of mind (which in general I am not sympathetic with). It perhaps gets rediscovered in the paradox of the vast written output of Heidegger (as of Plato in the context of his time) trying to explore precisely this zone of Thinking-in-the-World and Being. There is, of course, also Wittgenstein's famous 'whereof one cannot speak' to contend with. Whitehead's 'footnotes to Plato' comment (which I have often doubted) may be considered valid if we consider this quasi-zen aspect of his thinking. Where Bluck scores is in the lucidity of his account of Plato operating in a wider milieu of philosophical thought that was undertaking serious ontological inquiry, with which he was actively engaged, rather than the simplistic caricature of it being all about Socrates taking on the Sophists. Plato is the hard-thinking genius who has survived, perhaps because his thinking was so in tune with subsequent Christian thought as well as because of the direct engagement of Aristotle with him, but there was a lot more going on in Greece which we can only derive from fragments. Obviously there are going to be 'better' books later with more up to date research and more chance of considering the evidence of what survives as well as taking into account the thinking of philosophers since the 1940s but this is still not a bad learning guide. ...more |
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really liked it
| Although over a century old (published originally in 1912) and despite Bertrand Russell changing some of his opinions by 1924 and the first German tra Although over a century old (published originally in 1912) and despite Bertrand Russell changing some of his opinions by 1924 and the first German translation, this surprisingly short (94 pages) account of the very basics of analytical philosophy still stands up as a classic text. It may not be an easy read in places but it is probably the easiest read you are going to get if you are serious about understanding the basics of 'philosophical inquiry'. Less rigorous popular attempts to do the same are just skimming the surface of the subject. At the end, Russell asks the pertinent question of what philosophy is for. Here he answers in uncompromising terms about the importance of the questioning process as it peels off certainties into science and leaves a residue of mystery whose investigation makes life worth living. This book represents a very different approach to that of continental philosophy but the two wings of the bird are complementary and merely ask different questions. This remains an excellent introduction to the rigours of analysis and to what can and cannot be 'known'. ...more |
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| Dec 05, 2019
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it was amazing
| This is a dense, academic but rewarding book in which a prominent scholar of classics (Emeritus Professor of Ancient Greek) extends his range to compa This is a dense, academic but rewarding book in which a prominent scholar of classics (Emeritus Professor of Ancient Greek) extends his range to compare and contrast the early development of philosophy in two apparently unconnected ancient cultures (Ancient India and Greece). He is not a Sanskrit scholar and is using Sanskrit texts in translation (whereas he is expert in Ancient Greek) but there is no reason to believe that his use of these and secondary texts is inadequate for the task he has set himself. I write 'unconnected' because Seaford is dismissive of any influence of one on the other, a position that is highly relevant to his thesis. I am a little less persuaded (see below) but the thesis is certainly exceptionally well argued and plausible. It is certainly not to be dismissed. Using both the presocratic philosophers and poets of ancient Greece and the Sanskrit writings of the Brahmin class and the later 'new religions' of ancient India that culminated in Buddhism as his sources, Seaford has one big hedgehog idea. This is that the rise of philosophical abstraction is intimately tied to the socio-economic process of monetisation. He is not an absolutist about this and he reasonably hedges a little towards the end but he is clear on his book's purpose - to make that link. The evidence he adduces - based on detailed textual analysis and considerable learning in two separate cultures - certainly seems powerful. The abstract mysterious nature of money (not exactly the same as coinage) helps create new thinking about reality, introduces philosophy. I am not going to try to repeat or rehearse his arguments here for two simple reasons. First, I am not qualified to do so. I am not professional philosopher enough to be a sound critic. Second, he does it in such a way that any summary would be inadequate. Let me leave it that the book probably will require a second reading and much slower study to be fully understood (which could be said about most good works of philosophy) and that it falls into that camp (mine too) that would say that thought cannot be abstracted from the human condition. It is wholly plausible that any generalised presentation of reality arises from the social and material position in the world of the thinker, whether as a personality type or as someone with a particular position in society. There is much evidence of the latter in Seaford's analysis. Money, debt, transactionalism, power and class all conform themselves (in his vision) from one state of being (or non-being in the case of money) to another and it is plausible to believe that, thinking being ideology as much as philosophy, thought would accommodate new social realities. His account of the link between Plato's thinking and his attitude to slaves or Parmenides' thought arising from his position as aristocrat is as helpful as his description of the synarchic relationship between Brahmins and Kshatriya or why Achilles was so upset at Agamemnon. The transformation of thought from a religion of gods and communal relations to one of individual relations with a reality presumed to be outside of communal relations or expressive of a new form of transactional communal relations is also plausible. So why do I still have doubts? Partly because I am always suspicious of any intellectual map being claimed for the territory that is life. I am suspicious of surviving texts within any set of particular class and power relations being truly representative of what people in general thought or were. Rather than speaking of religion or philosophy (although both are involved here), I tend to see this book as possibly a description of ideology and ideology is only dubiously to be accepted as reality. Ideology, in particular, is the often inaccurate map of a territory rather than the territory itself. Second, I have a smidgeon of doubt about influence between the cultures because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Seaford is absolutely right about the progress of the two cultures towards monetisation but he may underestimate the possibility of elite exchange of ideas. After all, merchant and traders may only write accounts but they are intelligent, curious and practical (entrepreneurial) and can be expected to be swift to learn neighbouring languages and exchange ideas with wealthy peers when doing the ancient equivalent of the business lunch. The first Greek philosophers were not accidentally practical men in a trading port. Some ideas put forward as independently generated seem very close to similar ideas far away that were perhaps merely transformed to meet local cultural and ideological conditions. Perhaps it was trade and exchange (rather than just monetisation) that drove both monetisation and a new ideology that created the space for coinage on the one hand and abstract philosophy on the other and if Greek coins could influence, why not Indian or Greek philosophy? The argument that there is no Persian philosophical tradition between Greece and India does not persuade because something can pass through a catalyst. All Persia had to provide was the route to the nodes of stable settlement on either side. This is not to say that I think there necessarily was a flow of trading influence but only that the evidence is insufficient to dismiss the idea and that the silences may hide a flow of ideas that became transformed into local ideologies to local taste. However, given what we know, a link between monetisation and the earliest philosophy in two cultural zones is highly plausible. Seaford argues his case exquisitely but I ended the book feeling that it was 'not proven', even that Seaford wanted his idea to be true so much that it became true. Putting the core argument aside, one of the great virtues of the book is the exposition of, first, the development of the thinking of the early Indian poets and philosophers and then of their Greek counterparts from Homer to Plato. Taken as a whole, Seaford analyses and categorises the different schools of thought and sets them in a sequence that shows the processes by which one type of society had the thought processes amongst part of its elite transformed into another set of ideas in another type of society. Each thinker or set of thinking is shown to be coherent and challenging to their predecessors and contemporaries and also to have some form of socio-political aspect to their thinking as they did. They become comprehensibly creatures of their time. This is where the thesis of monetisation as central to the creation of new ways of abstract thinking starts to become increasingly plausible. The process of moving from one way of thinking to another does seem to be perfectly analogical with specific socio-economic changes. The question is obviously whether correlation is causation and we all know that it need not be. Perhaps both processes are derivative of a third lost process where the philosopher and the monetiser are both creatures of some other change - trading or technological or of power relations. Our texts are still those of a very few philosophers and Brahmins made to stand for the many. Archaeology tells us little of thought (except as accounts and royal or aristocratic posturing) so we may be forgiven for wondering if we can ever know the truth of the matter. But if we cannot certainly know the truth, we can, with caution, go for the most reasonably plausible theory that covers all the facts that we do have. In which case, Seaford's book stands as the best probable thesis for lack of negative evidence. It will do. ...more |
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| Feb 03, 2005
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really liked it
| 'Wittgenstein's Poker' is partially biography and partially history with very limited philosophical content although what philosophy is present is cle 'Wittgenstein's Poker' is partially biography and partially history with very limited philosophical content although what philosophy is present is clearly expressed and should not be difficult to follow. The book is about philosophy but not one of philosophy. It hangs on an incident in 1946 when two exiled Viennese philosophers met in a bleak Cambridge. One (Wittgenstein) was said by some to have threatened the other (Popper) with a poker. From this incident, the authors weave a tale with great skill. I would be tempted to say a tale of rivalry but there is scant evidence that Wittgenstein gave much thought to Popper and it takes two to tango under such circumstances. What we see instead is a clash of philosophical cultures and personalities and philosophy is ultimately personality. Coldly considered, the incident, like so many incidents that excite people, was in itself probably trivial, an event that became a subsequent social and cultural point of contention between rival philosophical ways of thinking but which in itself should not concern the rest of us too much. Nevertheless, the authors take this brief moment in history, bring together all the evidence that they can about what happened and why and then offer us an inconclusive detective story, one that only results in us only knowing that we do not know (in a nice nod to Socrates). What we do know - at least we think we know - is what it was like to be in Cambridge in 1946, even in that very room, who our companions were in that room and why the two men who contested in that room behaved the way they seemed to behave. If we want to make that important, then that is our or the authors' privilege but then the supply of meaning to such events is story-telling and story-telling is journalism or history, not science or philosophy. Still, this particular story is well told and educative in the telling. Edmonds and Eidenow give us coherent pictures of Popper, Wittgenstein and, more incidentally, Bertrand Russell and other philosophers in both Cambridge and Vienna that feel all the more authentic for not giving us more than we need to know to understand what was at stake. The Viennese origins of the two men, Wittgenstein the arrogant pseudo-saintly quasi-aristocrat equivalent of a modern billionaire and middle class ambitious Popper, add to them being two peas in a pod in their philosophical monomania whether centred on the primacy of puzzles or problems. The authors embed them in their time and provide considerable insights into the 'Jewish problem' - exactly how Jewish were these two men when neither were Jewish by religion or ethnic orientation, only having that designation shunted onto them by others and history. Having read this book, one might even argue that, as far as European elites were concerned, the national socialists created their own bete noire by defining a race gainst the wishes and beliefs of the people they defined. I think this is what we would call an own goal. Perhaps this is what is most valuable about the book - not its addition to the history of philosophy as such but its contribution to an understanding of the malleability of culture and how fast change can come regardless of the wishes of the victims of change. The philosophical spects of the book are interesting however. This is a go-to popular history of the interactions of the two centres of European philosophy (Cambridge and Vienna) in the early twentieth century that does not require you to be a philosopher yourself. There is a rhythm to the process whereby one school influences another and then creates the conditions for criticism and development. Russell's contribution to linguistic philosophy influences logical positivism only to be challenged in opposite ways by Wittgenstein and Popper. Although the inferior philosopher to Wittgenstein by common consent (inferior to Wittgenstein can still mean great), Russell is nevertheless positioned here as a thinker of considerable historical importance acting as catalyst for intellectual transformation in both major centres. As for Popper, he was perhaps a monomaniac when it came to his philosophy and as he challenged the verification principle with his own counter principle of falsification but he seems, outside of philosophy, to be have been a decent if very introverted man. Wittgenstein was a 'sacred monster' - a genius creating two influential philosophies in one life time - whose later life might be characterised as that of an unwitting cult leader whose philosophy might be said to have shattered its subject as Socrates had shattered the claims of the Sophists. The scene was set for the confrontation (exaggerated in my view) in Cambridge on October 25th, 1946, where one philosopher (W.) dismissed with customary rudeness the idea of Popper's that philosophy could be useful in solving problems rather than mere puzzles of language about life. There was (as the authors outline) a political dimension to all this, albeit not in any simple or obvious sense. Popper had made his name with his destruction of Plato in his 'The Open Society' where the 'problem' of totalitarianism was presented as a problem with a solution. The problem with Wittgenstein (to Popper) was not that he defended Plato and the totalitarians implicitly drawn from them but that he was not interested in such problems at all - if they existed, philosophy had nothing to contribute to their solution. Even now, I am not sure anyone really understands what precisely was going on inside the mind of Wittgenstein but then that was part of the point he was making. Philosophy is just something you do to make sense of the world or oneself in the world through dealing with puzzles they create. For the anxious middle class Popper, an underlying 'problem' was how to make his way in the world and express what he saw as unarguable truths. For the psychologically tormented ex-billionaire, there was no 'problem' just lots of small puzzles to solve to make sense of the world. The fate of their ideas tell us a lot of about this. Popper transformed liberal democracy and can be regarded as one of the fathers, alongside Von Hayek and others, of the dominant liberal ideology that has tried to exert hegemony of the world and is now being challenged by new social forces. George Soros was inspired by Popper. Popperian philosophical perspectives on politics became so dominant as to become an unchallenged and unquestioned norm. Just spend five minutes going through the LSE public lecture programme to see the extent to which he is taken for granted. As the authors point out in an arresting image, Popper's tiny office at the LSE has been converted into a lavatory and yet the metropolitan London elite and that of much of the rest of the Western (or at least 'Anglo-Saxon') world thinks along 'Popperian' lines about politics. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is not taken for granted. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest of Western philosophers,despite having none of the ideological or political influence of Popper, and certainly as a philosopher far greater than Popper himself. This is interesting. Philosophy as a discipline is a job of work, as with the work-a-day linguistic philosophers and scholastics. and it can be the trigger for ideology (as with Marx and Popper) but it is primarily something that transforms our ways of seeing at a deeper more personal level. We can go through all the great philosophers and see that, with exceptions (Augustine and Hegel spring to mind), short term socio-politics (a century is short term) tends to sweep forward without them or bastardised versions of their thought pervert their meaning (as with Nietzsche). Philosophy can be just a technical job in the Academy (Nietzsche's contempt for this may be noted here) but the content of the technical work is laid down by radical re-thinking somewhere earlier along the line - as when Aristotelian ways of thinking were displaced by humanist models. These changes transform minds and societies as they filter out and down to become new ways of thinking across whole cultures. Such changes are not to be confused with 'ideology' which is the ossification of thought in relation to power on terms that resist challenge (and so philosophy). Popper (without in any way intending to do so) contributed to the creation of an ossified elite ideology whereas Wittgenstein's second philosophy (his first fed the technicians) insidiously threatens over time to flow through Western culture in order to transform it from within. The problem is that everyone can understand Popper but few can understand Wittgenstein II (probably less than any can understand any other philosopher even those as obscure as Kant or Heidegger) so that the time of transformation may extend centuries longer. Systems can be built out of Heidegger with determination. Even Nietzsche can be re-tooled into a life-style that is livable but Wittgenstein II requires one either to join a cult of saints (which is against all philosophy and was not his intention) or to really understand his thinking at core. And that is why his contribution may take centuries to unfold but also why Wittgenstein remains in the highest ranks of the pantheon while Popper does not. Philosophers may criticise him but from a position of enormous respect perhaps because he is both a problem and a puzzle in himself. As to the book, I can recommend it as solid popular history that helps our understanding of a period in Western human thought which helps define our culture today. It is readable and intelligent even if the meeting in Room H3 is a Mcguffin. ...more |
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really liked it
| 'Renaissance People' comprises 100 very short and readable biographies of individuals who lived between (roughly) 1350 and 1600 and who contributed in 'Renaissance People' comprises 100 very short and readable biographies of individuals who lived between (roughly) 1350 and 1600 and who contributed in some way to Renaissance culture in the broadest sense. A joint effort by Robert Davis and Beth Lindsmith, the latter's influence can be seen in the inclusion of women who still only (and reasonably given the realities of cultural power in the period) make up under 15% of the whole but who are welcome inclusions nevertheless. Sometimes, in the effort to be 'feminist', history can be stretched (as it is with the inclusion of 'Africans') to make space for 'discoveries' who turn out to be less important, influential or interesting than their sponsors claim but this is not the case here. Partly this is because the editorial approach is soundly based not on just offering us the usual suspects (say Botticelli, Copernicus and Calvin although these are present) but on giving us a more rounded picture of the era and a more rounded picture makes legitimate space for women. This is, therefore, a model of re-balancing history without becoming a-historical and even manages to include a Greek (Manuel Chrysolas), a Turk (Mehmet II), a Moor (Hayreddin Barbarossa) and an 'African' (Leo Africanus), actually another 'Moor'. All these are very important figures in understanding the period and so are inquisitors, a pilgrim, a hanged villain, a bandit chief, an actor, a watchmaker, a master chef, a comedian and an acrobat alongside the expected line-up of artists, condottiere, dynasts, prelates and humanists. There are short and neat introductions to the seven periods into which the authors have divided the Renaissance and, naturally enough, Italy dominates the list with well over half the entries but then that's the Renaissance for you. Best read sequentially to build a sense of change over time, nevertheless individual stories stand up well for the magpie mind. There is also a good 'further reading' appendix at the end if you decide you really want to know more about, say, Alessandra Strozzi and her letters. ...more |
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| Apr 17, 1997
| Apr 17, 1997
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liked it
| As a rather stolid and matter of fact description of the relationship between Western intellectuals and the so-called 'wisdom religions' of the East, As a rather stolid and matter of fact description of the relationship between Western intellectuals and the so-called 'wisdom religions' of the East, this book stands up to scrutiny. It is also a sound and respectful critique of Edward Said's polemical views on 'orientalism'. So far, so good if a little dull. However, published at the high point of post-modernism in 1997, it is also a slightly tormented justification of a post-Gadamerian hermeneutic approach to East-West dialogue that is on less sure ground. I would regard this as a work of ideology masquerading (mostly legitimately) as a work of scholarship. Towards the end, the heart sinks as the tolerant liberal critiques his own ideology and ends up promoting the cuddly fluff that is at the root of the 'decline of the West'. I honestly do not have time to critique the critique of the critique in any depth. Life is short. It is of its period and it represents a variant of the standard position, more or less, of the very nice and comfortable people who inhabit our minor universities. It depresses but is not dangerous. The book will appeal to those who desperately demand the return of some kind of religion to deal with 'nihilism', who are pained by the thought crimes of the West and who think science and religion may have to be shoehorned into a common universal position of mutual understanding. It will also appeal to people who care about the planet, worry about the patriarchy and are not too sure about identity politics when it goes ethnic on them. It is, in short, a text for our times - or rather for the beginning of our times when wokery was still innocent instead of damaging. But it is still worth reading by those of us who do not belong to this universalist and tormented ideological turn precisely because it contains the raw material to feed a suspicion that the West began to destroy itself when it brought back mythic versions of the 'other' from the East. Imperialism, in a sense, both created and destroyed the West and not because imperialism in itself was some inherent moral evil (it was more complicated than that) but because it created a pool of ideas that could be used to eat the West from within. Clarke makes a very good point that the East is not really well understood at any time by Western intellectuals but is rather a tool for various forms of dissent. I would say a tool used by dissenters with often subversive intent. The 'philosophes' used Confucianism (as they had invented it) to critique the Ancien Regime, Eastern 'wisdom' was part of the progressive assault on Christianity and Buddhism has been part of the counter-cultural movements that reach deep into ecology and New Age thought alike. One can see, even as a Western atheist, Pope John Paul II's well-known critique of Buddhism as holding some validity while there seems to have been a 'evil wisdom' in Stalin's total purge of Stcherbatsky's attempt to fuse Buddhism and Marxism (which is not to justify his crimes at all). And there is delusion as to the actuality here. The people of the East are just as complex, decent, bad and evil as we are and the over-privileging of texts and ideas to explain and define them really was a form of disrespectful imperialism, a view Clarke himself explores. It is neatly forgotten that D T Suzuki and the interwar Zen intellectuals of Japan were perfectly happy to justify the murderous worst of Japanese imperialism while Gandhi was a bit of a fraud who owed more to the West than the East in the contruction of his own mythos. The truth is that ideas are just tools - like spades and language itself - and the history of the appropriation of ideas should not concern itself only with the idea but who is using the idea and for what purpose: is it to dig a foundation trench, a grave or a hole for some tree roots? The book starts off as a description of the tools and their uses but becomes, by the end, a tool itself so that we have to ask what idea is the author actually trying to make use of and for what purpose. And, indeed, just how conscious is he of what he is doing? He rightly challenges post-modernism and he rightly challenges the presumption of Western intellectuals throughout history in claiming to 'know' what Easterners thought and meant but he seems all-too-eager to save some of the bath water for his own ideological purposes. My own take on all this is simple enough. The East is different but not special. It has things to teach us - or rather it has ideas we can steal as tools or weapons for our own purposes. There is no reason why we should not steal from them as they have the right to steal from us. But we should deal with this mutual theft with open eyes and get back to the question of who is stealing and why. My nervousness arises from the fact that the Western intellectual's thieving of ideas seems consistently designed to promote his class interests at the expense of his own culture. While Chinese neo-Confucianism or Modi's revival of Hinduism are equally fraudulent, they are empowering their nations and their cultures while ours seems to be going into a self-reflexive terminal decline. The role of the Western intellectual can be creative but it can also be destructive. We seem to have gone over a line where Western 'creative destruction' becomes a narcissistic class-based destructive creativity. A lot of this has to be put down to the explosion in size of an intellectual class that has no purpose but to think and criticise, paid for by its own targets. Instead of single radical critics as creative leavening, providing radical ideas that improve our ability to grow and survive, we have whole classes of intellectual who are sizeable enough to behave (to use an Eastern example) as disruptive 'Buddhist monks' did in medieval imperial China. The use of the East - especially Buddhism - has a sinister component, especially as Western Buddhism is a hybrid of Western liberalism and Eastern Buddhist faith. It is, in effect, the return of obscurantism by the back door, a filling of the gap left by Nietzsche's gutting of Christianity. Instead of having the courage to accept lack of meaning and make choices that take account of our true nature as individuals and as a culture, the desperate search for meaning imports new nonsense from overseas because our own old nonsense no longer stands up. The triumph of Western civilisation lies in our coming to terms with the death of meaning and the invention of procedures to ensure we can still live together and with ourselves. This is all being thrown away by weaklings and cowards who want new religions and new faiths. And so, as our parasitical intelligensia engages in a 'trahison des clercs', making use of 'philosophy' (as in post-modernism), a revived universalism based on 'faith' yet claiming to respect 'science' (less so reason) and a denial of the 'self', we slide into decadence. The destruction of the 'Self' (though easily justified by philosophy) misses the point that we construct the Self not as truth but as tool. The construction of the tool creates our values. To unravel the Self (as Buddhists and post-modernists do) is to unravel democratic society. The fact that the unravelling is an unravelling of Western values is regarded as a good thing by the neo-religious and post-moderns who consider only the negative side of those values and none of their dynamic and energising power. While we are being taught either to despise power or to have power be siphoned off into the small-minded, abstract and resentful, the East itself is accumulating power without any of the flummery ascribed to its 'ancient wisdom' in the West. The Self may or may not be 'true' absolutely but it is true enough to hold the West together. The insidious destruction of the Self by a large minority of educated people who are parasitical on state funding is, indeed, 'trahison', a Fifth Column for abstraction and, ultimately, fragmentation. And when we are fragmented, as in the East, we are ready to be ruled from above. The fact that our rulers may be eco-friendly, liberal, non-patriarchal rulers engaged in tolerant dialogue with other cultures and faiths does not make them any the less our rulers. This is insidious power. So, on balance, this is a frustrating but valuable book because it not only tells us about the alleged 'oriental enlightenment' in honest, fair and factual terms but it exposes an ideology that arises out of it, a component in Western decline to be noted and guarded against. ...more |
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it was amazing
| This is not the type of history that we are used to. Ree has adopted an unusual methodology. He takes the history of philosophy in English (which incl This is not the type of history that we are used to. Ree has adopted an unusual methodology. He takes the history of philosophy in English (which includes the US) in fifty year slices. He does not try to be a completist within a dogged narrative of 'this, then that'. Broadly speaking it works. Starting in 1601, in lengthy chapters, he moves precisely in time (1651, 1701 ... 1901, 1951) and tells a story centred on what it might have been like to think philosophically in that year, looking back over the events since the last date. He refuses to be rigid in his approach and this is a good thing. It means that every half century is treated (almost) equally so we can see which periods were times when English language philosophy was vibrant on its own terms and influencing the world and when it was weak, localised and a derivative branch of something else, often literature or theology. Ree cannot cover everything. People who do tend to produce dry catalogues. The chapters are centred on the relationships and interconnections between key figures so you get a sense of philosophy being conducted within milieux that refer back in time to previous periods. Often one figure dominates the narrative. Understandably, philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century is dominated by Wittgenstein but, for example, he uses Adam Smith for the 50 years to 1751, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) for the 50 years to 1851 and William James to 1901. The choice of Mary Ann Evans seemed odd at first. One might suspect that Ree had fallen prey to political correctness (and would have lost a star accordingly) except that, though not a wholly interesting philosopher herself, she was at the centre of a web of important connections. There is a period after Smith and Hume and before James when philosophy in English is not quite world-beating (other than Mill) but where ideas expressed in English are still interesting and influential and when philosophy becomes tightly entwined with other ways of seeing. If Mary Ann Evans is justified by her connection to Mill, the other dominant literary figure (Hazlitt for the period before 1801) is justified by his role as intellectual bridge between the nonconformist religiosity of the eighteenth century and German idealism. One is struck by the constant interconnections between English-language philosophical thinking, religion, political activism and literature - religion in particular. Religion and not philosophy often dominated national intellectual discourse. The long period from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century when intellectual life was a dialogue between philosophical activism, literature and religion is book-ended by two periods with a more precise interest in philosophy. The first was the formation of English empiricism, seeded by Bacon, but reaching its greatest potency in the eras of Locke and Hume. The second was the period in which American pragmatism, continental-origin Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein contested the same ground. The former reminds us of the critical importance of Scottish education and religious struggles in the formation of British culture. The latter tells us of the equally central importance to English philosophy of Vienna in the twentieth century. Ree is not a light read. Philosophy is a difficult subject at the best of times. Many of these thinkers were dealing with complex technical issues. I suspect there will be times when the average intelligent reader will just have to admit he is stumped and read it up in the Stanford Encyclopedia. But this should not put you off. First of all, it should get you wanting to know more and send you off to do more reading on your own account. Second, it is good not to be patronised with over-simplifications. The real story here lies in the history and flow of relationships. Most histories keep their philosophers isolated and try too hard to explain what it was precisely that they thought. This history may be more elusive on such systems but you get a sense of thought developing over time, how it changed in a social context and how influence ebbed and flowed. You may still need to read a more conventional history for a fuller framework but what you will get from this book is a strong sense of how philosophy related to the wider culture of its time, how thought relates to personality and how much of a challenge it can be to think something new. It also shows us continuities over time. You are sure to find someone in each chapter who relates directly or intellectually to someone in the previous chapter who relates in the same way to someone in the chapter before that and so on. Philosophy is a tradition in its own right. And Ree is very good indeed at evoking the personalities of philosophers. You are under the illusion quite quickly that you know them enough to like or dislike them. In general, I found the 'greater' the philosopher, the more interesting and likeable (to me) they tended to be. That is not to say that philosophical controversies could not get very waspish and sometimes downright nasty. If you embed your identity in an idea, you can feel very threatened by criticism although the best always tended to doubt themselves and take constructive criticisms seriously. There are 'great men' (I am afraid Mary Ann Evans becomes great as an intellectual leader and literary figure rather than as a philosopher) but they are now embedded by Ree in the history of their times. They are more rather than less interesting for this. Because he adopts this approach of embedding philosophy in its time, he has the opportunity to re-introduce those forgotten philosophers who were important bridges between the 'greats' and who made significant contributions on their own account. To take one example, although there is not enormous coverage of the pragmatism that followed William James, considerable and worthwhile time is spent on the intellectual circles that underpinned him and which were connected to Emerson and the Transcendentalists. We see the same with nonconformist struggles to accommodate the new deistic philosophies of the late eighteenth century and its associated political radicalisms and, much earlier still, the humanists' determination to finish off the 'school men' in the late sixteenth century. Ree is also open-minded about the occasional breakthroughs into the elite mainstream of working class thinkers even if he has virtually nothing of consequence to say about the development of English Marxism. Where women are rare actors in the game, they are introduced well and fairly. Those two examples immediately tell you of the price paid by Ree in going for densely told detail of the mainstream struggles over intellectual dominance. His notion of mainstream and determination to discuss connection in depth excludes whole tracts of English language historical philosophy. He is probably right to throw a lot of religious, radical political thought and literary matters at us because they arise naturally from his specific tales of relations but it does mean gaps - American Pragmatism and Marxism were just the most obvious. One final observation - he is good on the flow of ideas from overseas into the British system (and from Britain to the Americas and back again) and the way that English philosophers used the 'new philosophies' to develop distinctive national variants. It might take time for a continental philosopher to be translated cogently into English but there were many capable of reading texts in the original language and interpreting them (even appropriating them). Any truly creative idea (such as those of Descartes) was quickly assimilated. Overall, it is a very useful supplementary text for studying the history of philosophy but it is not an encyclopedia. It is one long and highly educative exercise in intriguing us and making us to want to know more about the missed bits and complexities - and so I recommend it. ...more |
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liked it
| This is a solid short and reasonably readable review of the debate over Heidegger and his Nazism. He was undoubtedly a Nazi, at least between 1933 and This is a solid short and reasonably readable review of the debate over Heidegger and his Nazism. He was undoubtedly a Nazi, at least between 1933 and roughly 1935 (but then so were a lot of people). The author is fair and measured in a difficult debate. At the end of the day though, one gets the sense of a victorious Western liberal culture, staffed by philosophers determined to justify and extend liberalism, desperately trying to deny history and subvert reality in order to come out with clean hands. They want the brilliant, transformative and revolutionary insights of Heidegger (who, in effect, made much of philosophy from Plato to Schopenhauer irrelevant) but they don't want to deal not so much with Heidegger's Nazism as with the complexity of national socialism. The contemporary liberal philosophers' problem is not really with Heidegger who simply failed to behave like a good little boy whose inconvenient genius then becomes irritating, but with the fact that national socialism has never been investigated properly out of fear of contamination. We get the liberal essentialism of Habermas (which at least is honest in its power play), the 'mauvaise foi' of Levinas attempting to create Jewish good out of Nazi evil and Derrida's obfuscations, a case of trying to stop the baby going down the plughole of his thought. It is all absurd because there really are only two strategies here. You can contest the philosophy on its merits (and disregard the politics) or you can properly understand national socialist thinking in all its complexity (and realise that the philosophy was marginal). If I would context Heidegger on the philosophy (I am a strong admirer of the work of the 1920s which I would go so far as to be a remaking of humanity and the basis for a positive transhumanism), it would be on his Nazism as a foolish essentialist lapse. Sometimes brilliant philosophers are not quite as bright as they are cracked up to be. Heidegger was no exception when he was dazzled by the sheen of German nationalism and 'got religion' for a few years. I think we can forgive him for this because none of us have hindsight. The 'shock and horror' of Heidegger's support for national socialism is a-historical naivete and there is little more a-historically naive than the denizens of modern continental philosophy departments. If you did not live then, you cannot judge then. In short, the philosophy stands but stands as the insights of the 1920s. Anything after that is just a gloss on those insights as fallible as the insights of others who understood what he was getting at - including the brilliant Marxist existentialist Sartre who really did understand it and used it. Which leaves us with the real problem - the 'evil' of national socialism - which, frankly, represents a process of demonisation of history designed to be a moral tale from which we are all supposed to learn but, because the tale is a half-truth, teaches us little. I won't say it teaches us nothing because the moral tale, undoubtedly based on true horrors, does teach us about moral things like the lack of a God when you need it, human cruelty when gangsters and not due process rules , the madness of ideology based on bad science and so forth. What we have not come to terms with is that 'national socialism' was not a reified thing that was somehow intrinsically evil but that it is just a word slapped on a massively complex stew of human aspirations, interests and emotions with a history before it had an outcome. The idea that someone was evil just because they were a Nazi or a Communist at point A (or perhaps in the future a Liberal Globalist at Point A) and that all debate should be closed down and their statue destroyed is the simplification of history into a mere morality tale for present purpose. Heidegger and other Germans lived as flotsam in a historical trajectory where his philosophy (partially betrayed, I believe, in his submission to the collective dream) was irrelevant in his prtesent if remaining the only hope of defying all collective historical trajectories in the future. Oddly, he did not think as much as he thought he thought and perhaps was not able to call on Sartre's existentialist choice approach because it had not been invented yet. He just went with a flow that was not essentially evil but resulted in truly evil outcomes - as communism did. Judging Heidegger on 1933-1935 is convenient for the liberal victors but misleading if we want to get to the truth of matters. Demanding apology for the past (the obsession of the modern liberal) is as futile as tearing down a statue - it does not change the past by one atom. As much as fascists and perhaps more than communists, modern liberals are desperate for much of the past not to have happened, to fit into a 'presentist' morality play and then go la-la-la and stick their fingers in their ears rather than face human complexity in both individual and society. They are like children shutting their eyes in the scary bits of the movie or when the stars kiss - yuk! And Heidegger's Nazi period is the scary bit in the movie which then has to be rehearsed and reheated and redrafted until the modern liberal philosopher can have 'closure'. Far better to see his philosophy as a process, history as a process, condemn what needs to be condemned in its precise context and know the truth of things to stop harms in the future. A liberalism that covers up reality for ideology is not going to do that. So, this is a neat little book, not a masterpiece but useful, that will give food for thought and enable you to make your mind up according to your predisposition. The author writes within the modern liberal framework but, pleasingly, avoids customary outrage in favour of description. Above all, he is fair on critiquing the problems with the critics of Heidegger. Derrida comes out of this as perhaps most problematic since there is not a deconstructive exercise he uses to buttress liberalism that could not be directed at liberalism itself. Like Lacan and so many post-moderns, he leaves us standing on quicksand so that you realise that the philosophical destruction of past ideologies has also destroyed value. Values have not been transvalued as Nietzsche suggested but allowed to dissipate as mist. The book was written in 2000 at the high point of post-modernism before it turned into the mess that we see on our social media and television screens every day. It expresses a struggle to appropriate philosophical challenges to 'decency' that failed in the end. You cannot have 'decency' without values. You cannot have values if your questioning is constant and lacks a point where it must stop and a choice be made in accordance with reality and the self. Question reality and the self too far and both disappear and take value with them. Liberalism really cannot survive as anything more than a process designed to manage interests without core values. When the process starts to collapse (as it is doing now), other people will emerge capable of imposing their values because they are sure of them. Habermas, who I consider a philosophical charlatan, at least understands this point about values and choices, placing a certain reality before pure thought. Heidegger's pure thought (which I endorse) does not stop the obligation to choose values that may not be connected to the thought. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations have inspired values in many and come from a process of thought but the aspirational words could not match the political realities of the Roman Empire. Linking thought, reality and values is a project that has barely started in the West. I would not choose Habermas' values but I understand that they are a real choice and that a society built on his values is a coherent ideology. One day perhaps, someone will have to defend Habermas as I defend Heidegger when someone decides to tear down his statue as a 'Liberal'. We might say that Heidegger made a mistake in his choice (but that would play the a-historical game). It would be better to say that he made a choice and it became a mistake because history turned out the way that it did. We are all subject to the fortunes of political war. ...more |
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| 0691090998
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| 4.27
| 381
| 1969
| Feb 17, 2002
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really liked it
| This is a posthumous book, published in 2002 five years after Berlin's death, and represents the recovery of six BBC lectures, given on radio in 1952, This is a posthumous book, published in 2002 five years after Berlin's death, and represents the recovery of six BBC lectures, given on radio in 1952, from incomplete transcripts and notes. The lectures were an attempt to convey to the educated lay public how a set of highly capable and influential philosophers had laid the ground work for a critique of freedom that would come to play a major role in development of the then-recent fascist and then-current communist experiments. Although the book oozes with Berlin's own indoubted intellectual integrity, it has to be seen within this wider context of an urgent contemporary defence of liberalism against any possible revival of one ideological enemy and the possible future hegemony of another. This is not the only work by any means in which he explored these themes - indeed the elucidation and defence of liberalism was his life's mission - but these lectures give us a sense of his ability to communicate difficult ideas to non-specialists. He covers Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon and Maistre (writing roughly from the 1730s to 1820s) and he never falls into the trap of propagandising against these thinkers, treating them generously (notably the last two) and on their own terms. The Hegel lecture where perhaps he is least sympathetic (although he contests the ideas of all of them) is nevertheless probably the best short exposition of that difficult thinker's ideas that I have yet come across. Fichte too is handled superbly well. Saint-Simon is dealt with in almost fond terms as a good man whose ideas would prove dangerous but it is De Maistre in particular who Berlin sees as perhaps the most challenging to the liberal world view because he is so intelligently uncompromising in his studied obscurantism. De Maistre, who was to influence French fascism in the first instance and all forms of dynasticism that were prepared to rule by the knout, nevertheless is possibly the only serious political thinker to have faced head-on the 'problem of the sociopath'. The existence of the sociopath undermines a great deal of political theory based on contract and can draw the practical implementation of the enlightened thinker's projects towards an uncomfortable and tyrannous intrusion into private life. Hobbes wrote of a society that might be ordered or not ordered, either held together by authority or prey to brutishness, but it is De Maistre who goes deeper into why an obscurantist feudal order may be preferable to the fantasies of the Enlightenment. Given his pessimistic view of human nature (which was often perfectly appropriate to an ancien regime of limited resources), De Maistre famously honoured the despised executioner as the man on whom civilisation depended. Terror and only terror could maintain order. Reason is generally disconnected from our experience of what it is to be a human being and the evidence has mounted that he is often right on that score even if we disagree, which we do albeit with reasons that may be sentimental, with the conclusions he draws from that grim truth. There is too much sophistication of argument in these lectures for it to be at all useful to try and summarise them. They each stand as complete in themselves and difficult to simplify. He is particularly useful in showing how a thinker's ideas can shift into new territory, often inverting original intent as that thinker faces intractable problems created by an early idealism. For those interested in this theme, there is also his 'The Magus of the North' where he deals with J. G Hamann. He writes there at greater length on irrationalism in the eighteenth century. Hamann is often paired by Berlin with De Maistre as an enemy of the Enlightenment. A special word of respect to the Editor, Henry Hardy, is due. He has been meticulous both in attempting to give us the authentic voice of Berlin and ensuring that the lectures flow as they would have done on radio. The result is surprisingly readable for such a potentially dry subject. ...more |
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| 1607781131
| 9781607781134
| B001LV6O6G
| 3.75
| 1,033
| 1782
| Jan 01, 2010
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liked it
| This 1782 short didactic dialogue from the Marquis de Sade says things that we now consider quite normal in public discourse but at the time of writin This 1782 short didactic dialogue from the Marquis de Sade says things that we now consider quite normal in public discourse but at the time of writing would have had the most serious consequences if published. Forget for the moment that, in his actual practice of life, De Sade was a complex sociopath, simply read what he writes and be a little surprised at the moral stance he takes within this atheistic and existentialist text (make sure you read the full and not an abridged text). The question is whether this is what De Sade actually believed or whether, given that sociopaths can be skilled at argumentation without necessary belief, it is an exercise - a paradoxical play with the intellectual methodology of the Jesuits who had taught him in his youth. Does it matter? Not really. Or only if you think the man matters and not the text because history has made this short 'tale' (perfectly conventional in style) into an ur-text of an atheistic existentialist revolution in thought that underpins much of what we really think today. De Sade succinctly gives us a run-down of every basic argument for the irrelevance of God to our human existence and leaves us with the 'moment' ... pleasure in accordance with nature. Fear of power is the 'reason' for not commiting crime and social morality somehow is built out of that. The moral aspect of the tale is its weakest element precisely because it is so evidently manufactured. De Sade baulks at having a philosophy of morality, leaving us with something lying between a vague Hobbesianism and an Enlightenment natural morality. The dying man, neanwhile, has lined up some houris for a pleasurable final hours in this life rather than have any expectation of the next and the priest is left without any validation whatsoever of his spritual role. For an eighteenth century text, it still packs a bit of a punch. De Sade was certainly uncompromising and this earliest extant work gives us that bifurcation at once between the reality of the man (a narcissistic monster in social terms) and his radical thought processes which slashed away the lies that hold society together. He is the ultimate anti-Plato. Plato condemned the lies of the poets but De Sade lays the ground work for a subversion of the lies of idealism. He would go on to subvert all moral claims of any sort except as individual pleasure through the exercise of superior power. In fact, the work was not published until 1926 (to have a subsequent influence on dissident French political and philosophical thought) so it cannot be regarded as in any way an influencer of nineteenth century thought but it shows us that the death of God would have consequences. De Sade may not have been the first to think these thoughts and clearly others were to think similar thoughts (especially the existentialists, anarchists and nihilists) between 1782 and 1926 but his placing of those thoughts within a parody of Jesuitism in a text seems to be unique and prescient. Personally, I don't think we can assume that the tale is precisely De Sade's position. The cynical atheistic materialism and dedication to pleasure sounds just like him but the attempt to add a moral gloss based on 'nature' strikes me as deliberate and cynical and of its period. Perhaps the latching on to this piece by many French intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century was (being uncharitable) an excuse to seize hold of the atheism and hedonism yet claim an Enlightenment moral cover story that does not stand up to much scrutiny. Read between the lines and De Sade is saying that we should be moral because, if we are not, bits of us may be cut off by Authority and that Authority must be a restraint that is based on the monopoly of force in the interests of society and not on any theoretical or ideological guff. This helps to make De Sade the sociopath's sociopath exhibiting something many sociopaths crave - a structure of order to bind them so that their crimes are either limited by others to protect themselves or such that they can choose their own work-arounds to get their way. And yet the dying man's analysis of the God-thing is pretty unanswerable unless you resort to arguments derived from 'faith' (which is not intellectually satisfactory by any means). The work faces us head-on with the central problem for society that truth and morality are not friends. ...more |
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| 0712679359
| 9780712679350
| 0712679359
| 3.34
| 47
| 1998
| Jan 01, 1998
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it was ok
| I am rather amazed that I re-read this thoroughly weird book, possibly because I was seduced by its first chapters. Essentially it postulates (on slim I am rather amazed that I re-read this thoroughly weird book, possibly because I was seduced by its first chapters. Essentially it postulates (on slim evidence) that the course of history was changed by boyhood contact in Linz between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Hitler. The seduction of the first chapters is that Cornish really has done some interesting and quite deep research on connections between Hitler's world and Wittgenstein's world which are suggestive of many things that could be possible. It could be that their boyhood contact did trigger different interpretations of Schopenhauer that became world-changing. It could be that Hitler's antisemitism was also triggered by Wittgenstein? It could be that Wittgenstein was an agent of the Comintern? And so forth. His points may not be proven but they are not entirely implausible - given the evidence he provides - but then he ruins the glamour of it all by over-claiming, reading far too much into probable coincidences. And it really proves little if students' rooms were very close together at Trinity. The book then, about half way through, switches to meet another agenda entirely following a rather intelligent disquisition on Schopenhauer, Collingwood, Wittgenstein and magical thinking that slides back and forth into the more doubtful territory of Hitler's alleged occultism. There is merit in exploring the influence of Schopenhauer on both Wittgenstein's more mystical aspects and certainly on Hitler's thought which was uncomfortably often far more sophisticated than our politically necessary demonisation of him ever permits. But Cornish then, as before, overplays his hand with a rather dubious, if well argued in technical terms, attempt to rescue the 'no ownership' theory of mind (the base of a great deal of 'spiritual' and New Age nonsense) from Hitler and restore it as some kind of truth. To be frank, the last half of the book was just downright boring - academic philosophy based on self-evidently false assumptions about the mind and rather disconnected from the previous half which was a series of well researched if over-played historical researches. Equally, frankly, it being the re-read, I simply skipped most of this second half because it soon became pretty clear that it was extended special pleading for nonsense. If anything, the net result was to diminish my previous appreciation of Wittgenstein (I never liked Schopenhauer). This book is two decades old. Since then, we have detected a strong revival of interest in Schopenhauer's Idealism amongst gloomy bourgeois nihilists as the hippy model of universal consciousness (always nonsense) transforms into despair at the world (equally nonsense). The turn back to Schopenhauer is an essentialist pose - a fear of engaging with what Nietzsche actually said against him and contra-Wagner - but it is one that suits the new breed of traditionalists and Kali Yuga Rightists who prefer Lovecraft to life. This book is not quite of that ilk. It is hard to gauge Cornish's politics though he clearly condemns antisemitism and does not like communism. But the fluffy Eastern approach to Mind that underpins the book seems directed at resisting reality by reinventing it, a very bourgeois pose. My resistance to all this is a matter of personality (I never deny this) but I see those who insist on the 'no ownership' theory of Mind as also representative of a personality type - so desperate for meaning in the universe that they will jump through hoops to get the one they need. So, all in all, despite the useful and suggestive research on the worlds of Hitler and Wittgenstein and the thoughtful references on magical thinking, this cannot take up space in my library any longer. 'Spiritual writing' is always going to be dead weight when space is scarce. ...more |
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| 4.04
| 3,897
| Mar 09, 2006
| Jan 01, 2015
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liked it
| The core of this book is a solid account of the 'spiritual' traditions of four great civilisations (the Hellenistic-Pagan; the Judaean; the South Asia The core of this book is a solid account of the 'spiritual' traditions of four great civilisations (the Hellenistic-Pagan; the Judaean; the South Asian; and the Chinese) during the thousand or so years before the end of the third century BC. As far as it goes, it is an excellent and coherent narrative. But I have my doubts. The story sometimes seems shoe-horned not only into the contention that all four cultures saw a first axial age that defined Old World culture until a second 'axial age' in the early modern era but it seems to be designed to be a rather passive-aggressive polemic for religion. Although the range of reading is extensive, the transmission of specialist research impressive and the insights to be had considerable (until the very last chapters when Armstrong sometimes just tells a story most educated people already know), some claims for the early period seem excessive. There are occasions when she appears to lack imagination about the claims of her sources. Is it really so that the very ancient Chinese conducted war in such stately fashion? Perhaps but perhaps the story is derived from later literary tropes. She takes texts on trust sometimes. But the book disappoints because one soon becomes suspicious of her ideological motivation. The first and last chapter spin a yarn about religiosity that I found irritating and even misleading insofar as an empathic sentimentality was linked without warrant to her academic findings. I found this shoe-horning of history into a 'sell' for religion in an age of violence (the book was written five years after 9/11) on the edge of objectionable as if somehow the essentialism of religion was not in itself part of the problem of all times. Complexity went out the window. Still, if you can get her spirituality 'sell' (what the hell is this thing called 'spirituality' when it is not ideology or sentiment?) out of the way, her narrative flows, she is readable and one gets a sense of how one idea builds on its predecessors and why some particular ideas take root. As history it is mostly very worthwhile but as proselytising for empathy and idealistic sentiment, it is in cloud-cuckoo land. There is some very good analysis of the social and political conditions in which ideas take root but very little critique of the nexus between material reality and 'religion'. This intellectual weakness frustrates when the book is taken as a whole. It stays in the library as a ready reference on some key ideas and thinkers, with some sound general history thrown in, but it cannot be regarded as a first class text because its final analysis is overwhelmed with apologia. The fashion for 'spirituality' is one of the problematics of current Western culture. The main theme of the sentimentalists is that if only we would listen to the great teachers and become empaths or submit to something outside ourselves, the violence would cease. Well, perhaps! In fact, the violence and terror won't cease because universal empathy is a human impossibility. We are who we are, complex creatures. If someone has an idea you can be sure that the idea will be used as a tool or a weapon to gain advantage. Yes, this is what we are. Her book-ending chapters presents a world of shoulds and oughts that defies reality and creates a vision that is always going to be more fiction than fact. Exhortation may influence some people to be better persons but as many or more will and must ignore the message. If anything an excess of empathy, when faced by the standard alleged sociopathy of social systems, simply neuters the 'good' and sends them into defensive postures, private life, clerisy or the monastery, leaving everyone else as prey while the faithful protect themselves with 'sacred space'. If humanity is to be liberated in terms of both private freedoms and the avoidance of oppressive harms, it is a moot point whether a passive intellectual and 'spiritual' approach will offer anything more than this defensive protection for the few (often at the expense of the many). I have no problem with people believing in nonsense or even coming together consensually in societies that believe in nonsense but the idea that 'spirituality' will do anything other than abandon the mass of the people to the wolves is increasingly absurd. 'Spirituality' (I am still waiting for a non-nonsensical definition beyond mere sentiment) may be regarded as any belief system that eases the suffering and neuroses of life. There is nothing wrong with that - unless we think it reflects anything other than magical thinking. Out of spirituality comes religion which is little more than the imposition of social order on the crooked timber of humanity, a process of containing and corralling the human 'spirit' (actually the human being) in despair at any other form of social organisation possibly 'being good'. This book, for all its descriptive and narrative value, thus becomes a false friend to a species that needs to stop evading and avoiding material reality and the actual structures of power, stop trying to find bolt holes for itself and start creating practical approaches to solving problems. In essence, there are only two problems here ... how to ensure human autonomy within an otherwise functional social system and how to ensure that one person does not do harm to another person. The great faiths partially solve the second but usually at the expense of the first. They are only a partial solution because religious and 'spiritual' tendencies to treat personal liberation as liberation from the world will often result in the accidental de-humanisation of humanity, running away from materiality by (for example) 'abandoning the ego'. The religious obsession with abandoning the ego is cowardice. The real task is to embrace the ego and put it to work as a lifetime project of self improvement and the social project of equalising the value of all egos viz. a society where you can 'do what thou wilt an harm no-one'. There are arguments, of course, for mystery and ritual - like the Greek tragedies or Chinese li - as undogmatic artistic and magical endeavours that are not trying to make too many claims. The poetry, drama, art, ritual and magic in the performance art that is 'religion' is not a bad thing but it is only valuable when it allows persons to appreciate the liminalities and absences in the world. Subsequently building a system out of such things destroys that very purpose. One final world of praise for the book, however. It is very well served with maps, charts and plans - 25 in all. These are invaluable in comprehending the narrative. Despite the irritations, the book still remains recommended for anyone wanting a basic overview of ancient intellectual culture. ...more |
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| 1840462663
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| 1840462663
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| 364
| 2001
| Nov 05, 2001
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it was amazing
| This is surprisingly good, surprisingly so because it is a short graphic rather than lengthy text-based description of one of the most difficult 'scho This is surprisingly good, surprisingly so because it is a short graphic rather than lengthy text-based description of one of the most difficult 'schools' of Western philosophy which I am reluctant to label 'existentialism' following Appignanesi's own scepticism about the term. Let's start by saying that it is not really introductory at all. If you want a cogent introduction I would start with one of the many other general textual introductions - I began with Mary Warnock's many years ago but Appignanensi has delivered one of his own quite recently. Appignanesi compromises little in his limited space in trying to reach deep into the thought of the 'existentialists'. Many readers are going to find it very obscure and difficult without a grounding in the history and ideas on which the text is based - but I think you might like to persevere. If you have read already in the subject, he has insights that make the difficulty worthwhile. What I like is his avoidance of the tum-ti-tum standard narrative that takes us from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche via Dostoevesky through Heidegger to Sartre and Camus. He restores the often forgotten core of the school, Husserl's phenomenological turn, and then sets the very different yet dialectially challenging Heideggerian and Sartrean world views in the context of the critical business of choice and survival in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Occasional digressions into the broader literary culture and into the politics of the era are suggestive and apposite. The book is the philosophical equivalent of a haiku - many deep thoughts compressed into surprisingly small space. The images entertain but do not distract. I would argue that this school of thinkers still provides the greatest challenge to the liberal group-think of our age. The logic of their thinking towards intensive introspection and liberal science (Husserl), Nazism (Heidegger) and Marxism (Sartre) remains thought-provoking. Attempts to moralise the last two out of their decisions and choices would be seen as futile by any decent 'existentialist'. The silences and refusals to apologise epitomise not the worst but the best of humanity faced with our technologisation and simplistic expectations. The post-existentialists have contributed important criticisms of the existential turn. Foucault in particular has helped us to understand the nature of power relations and Derrida the role of the text but the turn has been taken too far - there is a cultural evasion here with political effects. The 'existential' turn is terribly terribly dangerous to modern liberal society. Yet it is true to our relationship with Being. The challenge of this critique has scarcely been explored. The result is that modern liberal society has been taken by surprise as the new populism emerges. Elite liberalism has been in denial for far too long about that relationship to Being and our personal choices in a world of roles and material things. The panopticon approach, the attempt to create social hegemony, could never succeed against the raw resistance of those who think apart. Somewhere and somehow radical thought will reappear to take this problem that existence precedes essence and the phenomenological anaysis of our situation and so create the humanism required before transhumanism is possible - and offer a 'poetic' attitude to being in the world. Personally, poetry bores me. If something needs to be said, let it be said, and, if not, let it be experienced in direct relation to Being. The text is the very source of our alienation. Yet Heidegger's stance suggests that that which is poetic or spiritual links to the human core. Husserlian 'scientific' investigation of the mind's relationship to itself, Sartrean concern with our performance in the world and Heideggerian investigation of our relationship to Being provide (in this book) the start of an inquiry into a sufficient rebellion to preserve us against new intelligences. We are in the midst of a revolution in which the post-moderns and the academics appear increasingly surplus to requirements much as monks became in the age of printing. A philosophy to cope with this exists already in the formative work of this school if only we knew it. A sound if difficult and challenging guide to a difficult and challenging way of thinking. Grasp it correctly and you will never be the same. Its assertion of mind against 'science' is life-affirming, The reading list at the back, though not all there is to say on the matter, will be useful. ...more |
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|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Mar 28, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.70
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jun 03, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.67
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jun 02, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.36
|
it was ok
|
not set
|
Mar 25, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.25
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Jan 29, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.91
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Nov 07, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.88
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jul 09, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.78
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Apr 15, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Jun 06, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.60
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Dec 12, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.00
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Aug 05, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 2.85
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Jul 04, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.27
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Oct 03, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Jul 28, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.34
|
it was ok
|
not set
|
Feb 09, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.04
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Nov 07, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 2.74
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jul 22, 2016
|
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