The gnostic historian

 There is a certain kind of skepticism that nests like an ominous crow in the branches of cultural relativism. It is aimed at all the myths and motifs that are used in the hegemonic strata of Western intellectual life – or, taking the nuts and bolts out of my mouth, by orthodoxy, by everything that cultural relativism, since Herder, has sought to take down – Western superiority, a narrow sense of reason, a vulgar notion of progress, all of it. Thus, in the sixties and seventies, when cultural relativism was particularly strong, there were a number of claims that such diverse social phenomena as the practice of cannibalism or the Mafia or European witchcraft were myths. They didn’t exist. There are powerful reasons to take this point of view, as almost always, the existence of the phenomena in question legitimate various forms of repression by established power.

Those reasons, for those who lived in the twentieth century, fell out of the sky, and sent the trains to the barbed wire camps, all as ‘defensive measures’ against an all powerful, and as we know, mythical enemy. Given this disastrous history, given these non-existent enemy others who were glued to the bodies of millions and incinerated in the furnaces, certain historians – notably Norman Cohn, whose The Pursuit of the Millenium is one of the great books in my life – looked back and traced the pattern of fake conspiracies and fictitious entities in Western life back to the Roman era. In a sense, this was a sort of anti-gnostic history.

The insight here is that the powers that be create magic narratives of danger and threat, that they have magic mirrors on the wall, behind which they operate the switches and buttons, also goes back a long way – back to Machiavelli at least, or perhaps to Gyges. In King Lear, the disabused, perfect Machiavellian, Edmund, a bastard and thus by birth an outlaw, confects, out of little hints, Edgar’s plan to take his father Gloucester’s life. His lucidity – which dissolves all traditional bonds (such as the difference between legitimacy and bastardy) and superstitions, such as the connection of the earth to the stars, is the background against which we see him commit his treacheries with the comic glee of one of Shakespeare’s minor hitmen, those spawn of fairground puppet devils:

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,

when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit

of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our

disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as

if we were villains by necessity; fools by

heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and

treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,

liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of

planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,

by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion

of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish

disposition to the charge of a star! My

father compounded with my mother under the

dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa

major; so that it follows, I am rough and

lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,

had the maidenliest star in the firmament

twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar--

Enter EDGAR

And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old

comedy: my cue is villanous melancholy, with a

sigh like Tom o' Bedlam. “

This view of power as manipulated by an absolutely skeptical consciousness that has, as a preliminary to its move, dissolved all pacts with the stars, all differences of birth, has leveled the world to its bare bones and yet – the inexplicable last undissolved illusion – wants to rule over those bones is itself the kind of thing that should prompt our skepticism. Granting that moral panics can be generated in much the way that a movie director can generate a windy scene – using machines that the camera never films – we imagine that those who claim that these fictitious conspiracies and organizations – the Jew, the Witch, the Trotskyite – exist, and work their subterranean evil everywhere, are totally aware of the off-camera machinery. Surely the potter knows his pots. This view, however, is mystifying in its own way. We can find real equivalents for the theatrical cynicism of an Edmund in our history – we can cull statements from Goebbels, Stalin, Mussolini, etc, and take them as sudden illuminations of the arcana imperii – but in doing so, we mirror the tendency we are fighting against, we endow our creatures with a consciousness that has no unconscious, that is impervious to its own mythmaking, that is all machine and no ghost.

I find this interesting because I have come to think of the Gnostics as my forebears, my distant correspondents. I've read that Fanny Howe was absolutely against the gnostics because, to her, they were the fount of dualism. And indeed, the Manicheans were pretty big on duos - day and night, material and immaterial, etc.

And of course, at a certain point in the Cold War, certain conservative thinkers like Voeglin wanted to sweep the entirety of the left into the Gnostic fold. All were obsessed, of course, by the eschaton. Which nimbly replaces revolution with the apocalypse.

I have my own idea about the way the apocalypse is passed around like a hot potato in American political life.

But - to the gnostics themselves! And so, looking up the current literature on Gnostics, I find a strong current in the scholarship that want to brush the very concept out of our history like a dusty cobweb. Karen King, in What is Gnosticism, my guide to the current scholarship, comes dangerously close to this position. It is understandable in some ways. When you read the exegetes, busy dissolving the texts, it is a wonder and an astonishment. Some postulate a complexity to the making of the texts at Nag Hammadi that would make a a particle physicist proud. Often, the assumptions seem a little, well, non-empirical. I’ve read some of the scholarship about the Gospel of Thomas which takes the fact that it contains ‘doublets”, or passages that repeat each other, as proof that it must have been compiled by many writers. Obviously, these scholars should ask an editor – such as moi – since it is rare that I edit a lengthy manuscript that doesn’t contain doublets.

King does one very good thing, and attempts to disentangle gnosticism from heresy. As the Gnostics were mainly known from the denunciation of them by various hepped up church fathers, it is hard not to think of them through that lens – a lens that seems all their writings as motivated by reaction to orthodoxy. In fact, when we go back early enough, there is no reason to think that orthodoxy is a very good description for what is going on in the spread of the Jesus cult – and its taking into itself other floating notions about salvation – changing one’s life – in the Eastern Mediterranean.

So, what did the Gnostics think, anyhow? One persistent motif has to do with a certain dualism vis-à-vis creation. The world, in this framework, was created by a lesser god, the child of Sophia. Not necessarily an evil one – but certainly lesser, and certainly not all knowing. He doesn’t quite know what he is doing. Lovely Eve discovers this when the helpful serpent suggests eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which was not a sin – but the first revelation. This gives us the Gnostic historian’s equipment – a suspicion about the framework of matter or appearance, the notion that the fundamental elements are the hidden and the plain, the secret and the truth, sides – in other words, the jagged sense that the world isn’t finished and the glorious delusion that what will finish the world is one’s history of it. The demiurge, for the cool Gnostic, is authority in all its helplessness – weaving violence out of its vulnerability. The Gnostic historian proceeds with a film noir sense of the world, in which the femme fatale is actually Sophia’s embodiment here on earth.

Stevan Davies, in an article about the Gospel of Thomas (1983), made a case for it as a fifth gospel. It is a striking text, in that it takes the important thing about Jesus to be what he said. This way of understanding Jesus has, of course, been displaced – it seems to us that there is no contradiction between the Church being a defender of the family and the son of God that this church worships, even though Jesus is much more scathingly anti-family than, say, Rimbaud – there is no giving and receiving of wives and husbands in the Kingdom, and “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple.” This contempt for the family exhibited in Jesus’ every recorded gesture is simply not considered important. It was, however, before the cult erased the person, and the Gospel of Thomas, while lacking any real sense that the important thing about Jesus was that he was resurrected, is full of the sense that the new life begins by breaking utterly with the old rules.

How to think about these things?

Thomas preserves at least two parables which almost certainly come from Jesus but which exist in a kind of pre-church purity. They allow one, in all likelihood, to hear Jesus without the whispers of centuries encouraging particular interpretations. I'll pick up on one of them. ''Here is 97:

Jesus said, the Kingdom of the [Father] is like a woman who was carrying a jar which was full of meal. While she was walking on a distant road, the handle of the jar broke, the meal spilled out behind her onto the road. She did not know; she was not aware of the accident. After she came to her house, she put the jar down; she found it empty.”

The jar – which she didn’t notice, since she was carrying it on her back – the crumbs in the road – the empty container. The Gnostic historian is like that woman whose things have slowly trickled away from her, every step she takes, leaving a trail behind her for the birds of the air to eat – all of this without her knowing it.

Lose everything. To my mind, this is the anti-apocalypse. We will all lose everything. Everybody has. Everybody will. But the moment in which that loss is not just death, but liberation - that is a Kingdom of Heaven cut to my size and shape.

China's century

 The U.S. defined itself, in the post WWII period, as the "leader of the free world". And the U.S. was an astonishing economic success in the 20th century.

But the free world is dead, now, and the U.S. is being left behind by China - just as the whole "developed world" is being left behind by the BRICS. This NYT long read by David Wallace-Wells about the pitiful failure of neoliberal politics in Europe and the U.S. to face global climate change has a misleading title:" It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics." The whole world here means, as always, the reassuringly white world, the world of the North. But two thirds into the article you bump into the real world - the world of the BRICS countries.

"And the other side of the great-power rivalry? China has made a different bet and is fast becoming what people in Silicon Valley, raised on science fiction, like to call the world’s first electrostate. A decade ago, those who saw themselves as energy realists would often argue that moving faster on decarbonization amounted to a self-imposed handicap that would benefit less scrupulous powers, like China. But the actual pattern of recent history has been the inverse: As the United States has moved more slowly on green tech, China has stormed ahead. In fact, if you had to name the single biggest development in climate geopolitics since Paris, it would be the startling rise of China as a green-energy superpower in the midst of what looked, at the outset of the period, like a global future still dominated by an indispensable United States"

The other side - of the World. Wallace-Wells unrolls a story that has not been on the front pages. In 1922, due to the cut-off of gas from Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine, there was an energy price crisis in Pakistan. But instead of similar crises in the EU and America, where people lined up at gas stations and demanded lower taxes on gas, etc., in Pakistan this happened.

"And then, something miraculous happened: Without any coordination or planning, millions of frustrated Pakistanis began buying and importing rooftop solar panels manufactured in China, which had grown so inexpensive that in some global markets they were cheaper to buy than the wood for a yard fence. The result: Once a green-energy afterthought, Pakistan is now the sixth-largest solar market in the world, with recent solar additions equal to the entire country’s pre-existing electric grid, all thanks to what the Carnegie Endowment’s Noah Gordon and Daevan Mangalmurti called a “disorganized, bottom-up boom” and the entrepreneur Azeem Azhar and the researcher Nathan Warren called a “silent energy revolution.”

Well, the experts quoted at the end don't add much, but I find this an amazing story. A story that should send a chill through the European or American heart, though it will not. What the OECD powers are doing is equivalent to hiding their heads. Imagine, after the invention of artificial fertilizer due to the Haber-Basch process, that the developed countries had said, oh, no thanks, we will stick to guano? You would have soon had a very severe food crisis. Instead of the famines in the third world, you would have had famines in the first world.

China really is tomorrow. The EU has responded, as I suppose was inevitable when the financial sector is the only sector of interest to the power elite, but massively failing this moment. The materials revolution that wasn't - we have watched the Macron-Merkel entity utterly fail. There are many causes, but I keep going back to the vast wealth inequality encouraged every step of the way by policymakers in the period after the fall of the Wall, who profitted from it, and I think this is what we get for the era of yadda yadda yadda and "carbon tax credits". What a ghastly century the "victors" in the Cold War have had.

Pavlovian politics

 There is necessarily a strain of the Pavlovian in electoral politics - I'm not going to call it democratic politics, because elections by themselves don't produce a democratic society. A case in point is North Dakota. Since the Trump administration, bowing to the senile leader's every neural spark, put insane tarrifs on China, China - which has a bigger economy than the U.S. - has played its own hand. For instance, soybean sales to China have dropped this year by half, and as the September harvest comes up, that drop is getting close to zero.

North Dakota is one of the soybean farming states. Soybeans are third, behind wheat and corn. And as the sales to China evaporates, so does the wealth of the farmers in this particular sector. This is the NYT story about it.

However, this seems to have had no effect on the affection of North Dakotans for Donald Trump. In a state that would not be a state in a better managed republic - it would have been merged with surrounding states by now - Trump gets some of his highest approval numbers.

These numbers are not going to budge even after a chain of bankruptcies rips thorugh North Dakota's farm country.

At some point, the politics here could shift. It did shift in 1914, when A.C. Townley, a former socialist, started a progressive party that took over the Republican party in the state. He started the Non-Partisan league, and this league Like Mamdani advocating for publicly held grocery stores, the NPL demanded state ownership of banks, grain mills and elevators, thus taking the middle man out of the farming process and rewarding the farmer. The North Dakota Mill and Elevator is still state owned, and it is the largest flour mill in the U.S.

The democratic party establishment today is far more regressive than the progressive wing of the Republican party was in the 1910s. They would find it intolerable to demand state control of banks - heavens!

But maybe getting their asses handed to them on a plate by Trump will eventually concentrate their minds, or weed out the gerontocratic neo-libs and their pups.

The White Riot

 The white riot that is occurring in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder is on par with the one that occurred after OJ Simpson’s acquittal.

White riots back then were enacted mostly on the establishment news, with the new cable tv networks joining in. But social media at that point was mostly listserv, so it was an oral thing you’d hear in bars and at work. I remember going to a bar with my friend Dave and a friend Dave’s from Brooklyn and watching as the news reports stoke amazing amounts of anger in the room. And in Dave’s friend. I, who at the time was taken up with other matters and read a newspaper once a week, was not expecting this. I thought it was in the order of things that rich people killing their wives were as likely to get off as cops killing black kids. We live in the U.S.A., I thought. But the wound in the white notion of the order of things was very raw.

I’m more plugged in, although of course living in France not that plugged in, and still the white riot after Kirk’s murder surprised me. Intellectually, I had long suspected the “centrist” crowd, from Bari Weiss to Matt Yglesias, all those influencers, pundits, substackers and whatnot, were connected by a secret sympathy with the Trumpites. Secret sharers in the bigotries, the misogyny, the homophobia, and above all the racism. But I was not prepared, emotionally, to see this spelled out in 24/7 surround sound. That is how you know you are in a White Riot.

In the OJ Simpson case, it made some sense. Yes, we all read about rich fucks doing what they want and getting great lawyers and getting off. But this was a black rich fuck, a celebrity, and it reversed the white sense of order – for above all, the White nation’s self-image is that of punishers. From lynching to mass imprisonment, this comes out of the heart. And in that instance, they were rendered, well, nooseless.

In the Kirk case, the environment has changed. Every punk and pokey pony has a pocket phone with 24/7 social media and news on it. And substackers know substackers. Thus, while it isn’t that much of a surprise that Bari Weiss’s Free Press (which is to the establishment media now what Matt Drudge was to establishment media then – a home away from home for the Freudian Es) would publish a headline, Nous sommes tous Charlie, both echoing and shitting on the 2015 terrorist attacks in France, it did surprise me that a mook like Ezra Klein, or a magazine like Atlantic, would take up the line that Kirk was doing politics “the right way.” The right way apparently includes advocating for public televised executions – beheadings for instance. As he said, it would be good for the kids. https://www.reddit.com/.../to_suggest_that_televised.../

I hate White Riots. But there isn’t much I can do about them, and really, the order of things itself is a little bit like a frozen White Riot. So there’s, sadly, that.

I read Schopenhauer during my summer vacation

 

Rūdiger Safranski’s Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy might not have earned the Master’s approval, title-wise. In his view, Philosophy, the high thought of the sages in Athens, India and Königsberg, was being declawed and domesticated in his own age of “university philosophy”.  Of course, the reason Schopenhauer could adopt Plato’s contemptuous view of the sophists to his struggling contemporary junior professors was because he himself was the heir of a prosperous Danzig merchant. In his lifetime, his habit of pouring the vials of his wrath on Hegel and the Hegelians and all the other “functionaries” teaching philosophy, even as they married and procreated, kept him from having a hearing until the end of his life, when an article about him in an English journals was translated and printed in a Berlin newspaper.  But such odd ricochets his star was born.  As well, on the minus side of his ledger,  there was the disparagement of his mother Joanna, a writer and bosom friend of Goethe, who had brought him into the great man’s orbit but in her son’s view had not encouraged a friendship,. Until the 1850s, when you said Schopenhauer in learned circles you meant Joanna and her novels. 

However, by the Wild Years Safranski means the years of the Romantic era. Schopenhauer was certainly a product of that era. In fact, his main work was published in 1819, and his rediscovery in 1850, which is when it was reprinted, and his subsequent book of essays, Parerga and Paralipomena, made it seem as though a certain relic from the generation before was being rediscovered. Such are the achronic tricks of reputation - sometimes you do live to enjoy your posthumous status. 

The Romantics do give us a sense of what Schopenhauer was doing. It was through the influence, especially, of Herder that German culture deprovincialized itself by looking to the Orient. Through a teacher who was taught by Herder, Schopenhauer discovered Indian Vedic philosophy. In Dresden, in 1817, his name and friend, Karl Christian Krause, was not only a translator of Sanskrit but a practitioner of meditation – which is a thing to marvel at a bit: an Indian besotted practitioner of breathing exercises in the midst of the German bourgeoisie of the early 19^th century. The “plague” – the hole opening in the dissolution of a Christendom that was even then getting its second, colonialist wind – reminds one of the great experimenters, such as Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, the man who turned Goethe onto Hafiz, and  Doctor Moreau, who turned Baudelaire onto hashish.

I’ve been reading Schopenhauer this summer, patching up the hole in my own reading. When I was an adolescent, I read a bit of The World as Will and Representation. I remember most its cover – an indigo blue, with the title in golden script. Two volumes. Decatur Public Library. But I have no memory of what I thought of the text. I am a man perpetually impressed by book covers.

This time, I’ve been reading WWR in German instead of the Haldane and Kemp translation  and thinking that I must have been hella lost as a teen going through this bushy work. Schopenhauer, for one thing, is always referring you to other tomes he’s written, which makes for an annoying experience – you don’t want to read that what you are reading is not what you should be reading if you are reading it because it has been written better by the author elsewhere. However, if you march onwards past this annoying tic – if, in other words, you skip around – you can find a lot of pleasure here.

As reading and skipping are my instruments for understanding S., I’ve also been going through the Parerga and Paralipomena – a title I truly admire. This is how I found one of the great essays: Over the apparent intendedness [Absichtlichkeit] in the fate of the individual, which has been Englished as: “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual.”

It is Schopenhauer at his wildest. In it, he approaches the claim that “second sight”, or déjà vu, which is a talent shown in particular by certain mesmerized subjects, somnambule (cut to Dr. Caligari here) shows the “strict necessity” of everything that happens in life. Déjà vu is a moment, in Schopenhauer’s reading, when the true,  necessary course of a life, with all its seemingly chance elements, is seen, as though in a flash.

Schopenhauer had a weakness for optical devises – the kaleidoscope, the microscope, the mirror. In this case he uses as a metaphor and model anamorphosis – the same reference that would be used by Lacan in his seminar on the Four Basic Concepts of Psychoanalysis (a title that, perhaps intentionally, echoes Schopenhauer’s first book, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Reason). Lacan’s seminar summons a painting, Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which is a double portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, two ambassadors at the court of Henry IV, who are portrayed standing in their regalia, facing the spectator. In the foreground there is a strange blob looking like someone had smeared the painting with bubble gum. It isn’t bubble gum, it is a skull. You use a conic mirror to see the skull shape. Lacan references Duerer’s Perspectograph, a screen that helps the artist arrange an image – and to distort an image so that its “true” appearance can only be achieved by putting the canvas on which one paints it at a certain angle.

“All this shows that at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated—annihilated in the form that is, strictly speaking, the imaged embodiment of the minus-phi of castration, which for us, centres the whole organization of the desires through the framework of the fundamental drives.

But it is further still that we must seek the function of vision. We shall then see emerging on the basis of vision, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function, as it is in this picture.
This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze.”

Is there an anamorphosis in the foreground of Lacan’s seminar on anamorphosis? I tread lightly when I write about Lacan, since the very name summons armies. Nevertheless, it is of interest to place the non-place of castration, the place of the death-in-life of the skull, against Schopenhauer’s sense that the intendedness – the working of the will – in the lifestory has to be read by way of instruments to de-cipher the path of apparent accidents to see the nameable necessity that runs through it. Nameable as your name, or mine – nameable as the individual. “Than it is not in world history, as the Professor Philosophers claim, delusionally, that there is a plan and wholeness, but in the life of the individual. Peoples exist simply in abstracto: the individuals are the real.”

But that real – which transcendental fatalism reveals to us – has to be understood by taking an unusual stance. There is a secret tug that moves everyone on their appointed path.

“Yet it seems that one is, against the mighty influence and great power of circumstance, not enough: and thus it seems incredible that the most important thing in the world, purchased through the plagues and suffering of the human life-course, and even the unknown links to come, must be sustained so completely out of the hand of a blind to itself inexistent being, an organization divested of all accident.

One is much more tempted to believe that – as in certain pictures, named anamorphoses, which are crippled and distorted shapelessnesses to the naked eye, yet shown to be human figures when one looks at them reflected in a conic mirror – that the purely empirical conception of the world-course is like the picture seen by the human eye; meanwile, the tracing of the intendedness of fate is like a glace into the conic mirror, showing the connectedness and order of the thrown together image. This can be contrasted with what we believe to see in the course of life, which proves it to be the unconscious effect of an ordering and schematizing fantasy, similar to the situation in which one sees human shapes and figures on a wall spotted with flecks, which is the effect of bringing into those flecks our plan-like sense of connection, though they have been distributed there by the blindest accident.”

Schopenhauer’s comparison of the anamorphic effect and what we would now call the Rorschach card has a complexity not dissimilar to Lacan’s thesis of the gaze that sees the phallic object in all its death drive distortion. Where Lacan’s notion leads us to a level of looking that will see the drivers of fate, not unlike Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer, rejecting the Gestalt, the world-historical fantasy, brings us back not to the subject but to a blind-to-itself organizing power unique to the individual, all of whose circumstances from birth do death are necessary – and yet, troping St. Paul, seen in a mirror, darkly.

2.

In the World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer mentions Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste in the context of a discussion of the present – which is both the real and the foundation of our illusion of the past and the future. Here the Eleatic notion that there is actually no coming forth and going away – Entstehen and Vergehen – but, in truth, an unmoving whole.

“… one should mention that curious and surprising place in Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste: an immense castle, on the face of which is written: I belong to nobody, and I belong to everybody; you were here before you entered, and you will still be here when you leave.’

“Of course, this signifies that man at his creation comes from nothing and at his death becomes nothing. To actually meet this nothing personally would be very interesting;  even a moderately clever person can see that this empirical nothing is in no way absolute, but is nothing in a different sense.  We are lead to this insight by the empirical observation that all the properties of the parents are reproduced in the children, and thus have withstood death.”

Schopenhauer’s rather odd mixing of an ontological category – nothing – and a folk biological fact – inheritance – gives us a sense that Schopenhauer has a very different sense of the metaphysical categories of everyday life. Or perhaps I should say transcendent categories. One can see this in his casual mix of references to mesmerized subjects, somnambules, and the notion of necessity that mark his arguments about the seeming intentionality of events in a person’s life.

It is not just argument that moves us along in the Fate essay. Schopenhauer is also a good man, a genius, at springing out passages in literature: the castle reference in Jacques le fataliste (which went on to influence Kafka, or so the secondary literature says) is just another example of Schopenhaurian sampling. To read Schopenhauer, one must keep an eye on the quotations, even though they are often in Latin or Greek. There is something very 17^th century about this nineteenth century writer – there’s a feeling that he would be very comfortable in the society of a Robert Burton, and would get all the references in Anatomy of Melancholy .

The essay on fate is built upon a powerful claim: “Purely and objectively we see that though all things without exception there is and remains a causal connection, by the means of which everything that happens is completely and strictly necessary.”

This is both a strong claim and, in a sense, a very vacant one. Schopenhauer is seemingly identifying the necessary with the caused. Causality here references the “and then” structure of time. Each moment necessitates the next moment, and has been necessitated by the moment before. “Moments” here designate the largest blocks of the world. But the world that fills those blocks is, as Schopenhauer knows, an endlessly various thing. It is that endless variation to which we refer when we are talking about accident – and not something external to the temporal order.

That I walk down the street in one bit of the world, Moment x, and that a piano falls off a roof, too, in Moment x, might result in me being squashed under a piano in Moment y. In the largest sense, as we are both in the world where Moment x must be followed by Moment y, my squashing is necessary. “Every given element is a link in the chain of cause and effect, which progresses in the direction of time.”

This is true, but insufficient.

During Schopenhauer’s lifetime, a new social temporality was talking hold in Germany – and in France and Britain and America, etc. – the temporality of the contemporary. It was made up of the news, of public opinion, of fashions of all kinds, and it was the sphere in which the literate population found itself. Increasingly. As a follower of Schopenhauer, Karl Kraus, would put it in 1914, freedom of the press has abolished freedom from the press.

Schopenhauer’s model of the temporal and the causal would invoke a kind of synchonicity – but not that of the newspaper. He reached into Vedic and Greek thinking for the image of the net.  And with that fabric of overcrossing cords in the background, Schopenhauer has a go at the problem of the piano squashing and every “event”: If we imagine individual causal chains run through by meridians that lie in the direction of time, we can thus indicate the synchronic and that which does not stand in direct causal connection through parallel circles.”

The meridian idea has a strange heritage. It seems to show up in Quine’s philosophical explanation of event lines that striate through different worlds. And is it possible that Celan pulled out the idea of the Meridian that entitles his famous essay on poetry from Schopenhauer?

But to get back to Schopenhauer’s model: “these circles, though not dependent on one another, overlap as the whole net inflects, which makes their simultaneity necessary.”

Upon this here rests the accidental encounter of all conditions of a, in a higher sense, necessary given; the occurrence of this is what fate has willed.”

Fate, the fisherman, with all of us flopping in the net. Or the net is in the individual fish.  Or the fish is made of netting.

Can all these be true?  Hasn’t necessity gone from being empty to being too full?

 

Can we co-dream?

Near the end of Schopenhauer’s essay on the appearance of intendedness in the fate of the individual, he considers the dream from the point of view of will and representation. At the end of considering the dream as a very good model of the individual’s life, he considers that life is not a dream – for the dream is an event in the individual’s life, whereas the exterior world is not confined to the precincts of the individual’s experience of the external world.

Here are the rules of the game:

“All events in the life of a person stand accordingly in two fundamentally different kinds of connection. Firstly, in the objectively causally linked one of nature, and secondly, in that of subjective connections that have a presence only in relation to its experiencing individuality, and so subjectively as its own dream, in which its succession and substance is as necessarily determined as the first kind, but in the way the scenes of a drama succeed each other according to the plan of the dramatist.”

This would seem to neatly store the dream in the “experience” – Erlebnis – of the individual, and make the dream only a fact in the natural history of the individual from the objective point of view.

Thus, we have a model that would make the idea that “life is a dream” – the title of Calderon’s play, which Schopenhauer probably saw in Goethe’s production of it in 1813, when Schopenhauer’s book, the World as Will and Representation (WWR) was in the process of getting itself into ink and pages outside of Schopenhauer – seem a mistake.  I should point to a play that was withdrawn from the Berlin theatre two years before – Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg – which also addresses dream and reality, and which I don’t think Schopenhauer read. In Safrinski’s biography of Schopenhauer, he compares the disastrous encounter of Kleist and Goethe, which wounded Kleist’s sense of himself,  to Schopenhauer’s healthier encounter with the great man – Schopenhauer, who remained out of his orbit, but with a vivid sense of his personality. There’s a famous conversation remembered by Schopenhauer: “But this Goethe… was so entirely a realist that it simply would not dawn on him that objects as such only exist insofar as they are represented by the cognizing subject. “What!” he said to me once, staring at me with his Jupiter eyes, “light is supposed to exist only insofar as you see it? No, you wouldn’t exist if light did not see you.”

But back to the dream. The heady idea here is that the external compulsions – time, space, relationships, particulars, generals – are in a distant sense composed by us – or rather to the will to which we have blindly subscribed by being born. Or, on a lesser plane, by falling asleep. That sleep to which all humans are heir. This is where the dream analogy makes some sense. And where, as Schopenhauer says at the end of his essay, the ominious, that mood or epiphenomenon, has its place – an irreducible place, even in the most materialist of worlds. Freud does not, I think, quote Schopenhauer much, although he read him, has a similar notion: every subject has a tendency, at one point or another in life, to sense the uncanny. A certain panic.

Bringing us to the heady and impossible thought of the co-dream.  A quote (remember, I am doing the translating, here):

“As well, our horror of that great universal thought might lessen when we remember the subject of the great dream of life is the same as that of the will to life, and that all the muchness of appearance is conditioned by time and space. It is a great dream, dreamt by one thing: but it is such that all its persons co-dream it.”

Haven’t we reached, here, a violation of the model or the metaphor of the dream? Isn’t it, by its nature, a thing that cannot be co-dreamt?

It is at this point that Schopenhauer’s very literary references seem to lead him astray – or seem, at least, to anthropomorphize the will. I am interested in this “slip”, so to speak, because it speaks to the register in which Schopenhauer’s rhetoric moves us.

My argument is this: the notion of destiny or fate, as Schopenhauer signifies it, is rooted not in the society growning up around him – the society of contract, to use the Weberian vocabulary – but the more archaic, the classic society of status. In the latter, as know all to well, the causal logic of the dream applies to the cosmic whole via the acts and thoughts of the King, or those of monarchical status. The king sins – for example, King David falls in adulterous love with a married woman and arranges to have her husband killed – and a natural event occurs – a drought, or a plague – which is “caused” by that sin. The ultimate actor, here, is another monarch, God. The causal chain links the sin to an event that has nothing whatsoever to do with the sin. And that “nothing whatever” is filled in by the logic of punishment and reward.

This is a very deep total social fact. Freud found, among his patients, similar pseudo-causal thoughts – I masturbate and my mother dies; I have a wet dream and my teacher gives me a failing grade in Math. And so on. Fate, or the apparent intendedness in the individual’s life, goes back to that archaic strata. Which is a strata that continues unabated in the society of contract. One has only to look around to see how action is causally related to a whole schema of punishment and reward, which plays out within the political unconscious. We co-dream – even though this is impossible – and we look around at the world in terms of our co-dream. The American dream. Or the dream of a better world. Dream upon dream, all of which depend upon a dream logic of a collectivity that, by definition, cannot co-dream. Call this the antinomy of fate.

 

Call it what you want, but try to get out of it. I, one of your co-dreamers, dare you to.

 

False friends

 Every student of French or German is familiar with the phrase “false friends.” False friends are those words one comes across that look enough like some English word that the unwise student will assume that they mean the same thing. For instance, ‘aire’ – which, of course, means domain in French.

I think the metaphor of false friends should be adopted by those who write about the political and moral sphere. It iwould clear up so much! The term liberal of left, for instance, seems to be a magnet for false friends. From Marty Peretz's the New Republic to this year's shiny "Abundance" agenda (and its new magazine, The Argument, just filled with former or even current members of the Effective Altruism movement, a false friend if there ever was one!), they come running. And it makes sense. You (and me) in the bougie household, we want to be liberal and we want nothing to change in our personal or professional life except the ever upward part. So why not a compromise position that sorta gives away all the liberal part buy does allow you to look down on NIMBY types? That is the ticket!

Meanwhile, the false friends of the right are curiosly proud of being false friends - of asserting overwhelming governmental force, whether in forcing Intel to sell 10 percent to the executive branch or eliminating free trade from the vocabulary. Here, of course, the only thing that keeps the friends together is owning the liberals and hitting the woke. A violent bond, that.

Perhaps the political sphere, given the weird place of party and the oddness of the representation relation, is always going to be full of false friends. Still, it is good to have a phrase to distinguish them.

The tithe art owes to the banal

 

In his

preface to Anthropology from the Pragmatic Point of View, Kant wrote:

“Finally, there are those things that are not, in truth, sources of Anthropology, but supplements [ Hülfsmittel] to it: world history, biographies, and yes, even plays and novels. Because although both of the last are not actually founded in experience and truth, but only in poetic imagining, and the exaggeration of characters and situations are allowed wherein persons are set as in dream images, and this seems to hold nothing out for the teaching of the knowledge of mankind, still these characters, as they are sketched out by a Richardson or a Moliere, must have their fundamental features taken from out of the observation of the real action and forbearance of men because they, although exaggerated to a degree in quality, must after all still agree with human nature.”

The key to the exaggeration of the artist is the degree of accuracy of his observation of the characters and situations of human kind. But what kind of accuracy is it that is pitched against exaggeration? It is not the mathematical precision of science; rather, what holds the correspondence together, here, is what is plausible. The “agreement” with human nature is not a correspondance with natural fact, but an correspondance to what we consider to be a plausible account of what humans do.

Evans, in Aristotle’s Concept of Dialectic, claims that Aristotle uses two words, endoxos and eikos, to speak of a certain kind of reasoning from probabilities. The two words are often confused in translation to mean ‘what is generally received” or what is plausible. Endoxos can mean famous or glorious, or it can be applied to views that have a certain weight, that come with a certain reputation; endoxon can mean a common belief, a commonplace or view. The weight of a view, its human probability, comes, then, not from some fact about the world, but from the regard we have for the source of the view, or in other words, the regard we have for the persons who, we suppose, have the view. The plausible is, thus, always a view that refers to some class or group. That view of a group, the opinion held by the public – and what counts, here, as the public – the consensus, the serious, is all encrypted in the exaggerations of ‘a Richardson or a Moliere”. The writers are, in a certain sense, allowed the dreamer’s freedom to distort. But, as with dreams that we consider to hold truths about the past or future, through the distortion we can read a certain message. The message, for the anthropologist, concerns what is magnified in dramatic incidences – that is, the elements of a character. And what gives the character its unity is the logic of the plausible, the inferences that find their objective side in, say, the deductions of Sherlock Holmes – who understands character in terms of the neglect of a sleeve, or the tilt of a hat. This logic, as Aristotle says in the Topics, defines the dialectical method:

“Now reasoning is an argument in which, certain things being laid down, something other than these necessarily comes about through them. (a) It is a 'demonstration', when the premises from which the reasoning starts are true and primary, or are such that our knowledge of them has originally come through premises which are primary and true: (b) reasoning, on the other hand, is 'dialectical', if it reasons from opinions that are generally accepted. Things are 'true' and 'primary' which are believed on the strength not of anything else but of themselves: for in regard to the first principles of science it is improper to ask any further for the why and wherefore of them; each of the first principles should command belief in and by itself. On the other hand, those opinions are 'generally accepted' which are accepted by every one or by the majority or by the philosophers-i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and illustrious of them. Again (c), reasoning is 'contentious' if it starts from opinions that seem to be generally accepted, but are not really such, or again if it merely seems to reason from opinions that are or seem to be generally accepted. For not every opinion that seems to be generally accepted actually is generally accepted. For in none of the opinions which we call generally accepted is the illusion entirely on the surface, as happens in the case of the principles of contentious arguments; for the nature of the fallacy in these is obvious immediately, and as a rule even to persons with little power of comprehension. So then, of the contentious reasonings mentioned, the former really deserves to be called 'reasoning' as well, but the other should be called 'contentious reasoning', but not 'reasoning', since it appears to reason, but does not really do so.”

What is “generally accepted” is what is endoxos. There is, of course, a difference between a literary character and an argument, even in the most didactic of texts, but literary characters, in Kant’s view – a view that is ‘generally accepted’ by a philosophic tradition going back to Aristotle – are made out of what we would expect, and a little bit more – that little bit being a matter of the art of the observer.

In an essay by Genette on vraisemblence (or plausibility) and motivation in literature, he quotes a letter from Bussy-Rabotin to Madame Sevigne concerning The Princess de Cleves in which he decries one of the actions of the heroine for partaking of what ought not to be done, even if such things are done. What happened in the novel “should only be said in a true story.”

Bussy-Rabotin’s sentiment is one we can easily recognize. It is alive in the way people speak of books, plays, movies, tv. But, oddly, it drives more of a wedge between what Aristotle called the demonstrative and the plausible. It is as if we have gone through the mirror of art and come out on the other side, for the truth of art is precisely the contrary of what “should only be said in a true story.” This is not, I must emphasize, an aesthetic that died in Madame Sevigne’s salon – you have merely to hear politically committed people speak of a film or a novel to realize that there is a whole political bienseance in which what might be said in a true story should not be said, or should be said otherwise, in a false one.

In The Princess de Cleves, in fact, Madame de la Fayette underlines the violation of the rules of bienseance, and even plausibility, by having her heroine write that her confession to her husband is ‘without example’ – or as Genette puts it, has the support of no generally accepted maxim.

Genette applies the system of the plausible to the question of motive, which is after all the test of the property and distinctness of character – that is to say, the element that diversifies character. The avaricious character is motivated by love of money to make a certain deal. The saint is motivated by love of humanity to help a certain person. But the modern, Genette points out, is characterized by a movement away from the maxim, the reputation, the consensus, the ‘what ought to be’, and towards the gratuitous, the implausible – towards what Manchette, the French mystery writer, called the behavioristic style, in which action does not refer, explicitly, to motive. Genette calls this the decline, or transformation, of the discursive voice in the novel. Balzac, for Genette, is the classic example of a writer whose authorial asides – representing the whole system of the plausible - intrude the discursive, or the explanation by way of motives, into the heart of the story. But the massiveness of Balzac’s explanations actually undermine the system of the plausible by revealing the arbitrariness of the “psychological explanation”. One is continually coming across very different, even contradictory, psychological explanations in Balzac for the same type of action. As Genette points out, Balzac’s generalizations can often be reversed, as for instance in his novel The Cure of Tours, when he writes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit! He could not, like many stupid people, support the boredom that was caused in him by the presence of stupid people. People without wit are like weeds that like to grow in good soil, and they like to be amused as much as they bore others.” As Genette says, such explanations almost irresistibly call for “Ducassian inversion” – that is, for the kind of inversion of the common maxim that pleased Lautreamont. In so elaborately motivating his characters, Balzac ‘protests too much’: he betrays the “arbitrariness of the recit.” For, of course, the Cure of Tours can do almost anything. There is no natural control upon him, no fact that impinges on his making. This can lead to the direction of apparently immotivated action or, as Genette observes, to the absolute expansion of discourse, or the ‘essayistic’ – from Balzac to Proust there is less distance than one thinks.

It is the plausible, then, that is engaged by the dialectical. In consequence, dialectic always bears the slight impress of the “who” that believes, makes a maxim, follows a norm – that is, the slight impress of the banal.