the divorce of wisdom and pleasure I

Li woke up with that Manu Chao song stuck in our head: me gustas tu. Who knows where the hell that came from? Perhaps because I heard on the radio last week they were coming to Austin…

But me gusta marijuana/ me gustas tu it seems wholly appropriate to today’s post, another in my interminable backasswards crawl towards my current obsession: the divorce between wisdom and happiness. And though I am sure that I have worn out the patience of all but the most hardcore masochists among you, I received a sweet email yesterday about the sage and the fool that made me think: all is not in vain!

So, let’s begin with death:

…

“Yama said: The good is one thing and the pleasant another. These two, having different ends, bind a man. It is well with him who chooses the good. He who chooses the pleasant misses the true end.

The good and the pleasant approach man; the wise examines both and discriminates between them; the wise prefers the good to the pleasant, but the foolish man chooses the pleasant through love of bodily pleasure.” – Katha Upanishad

The context for Death’s routine – Yama is death – is the following: Nachiketas is the son of Wajashrawas, a man who had reached that point in his life when becoming a sage took priority over all else. So he gave away his property. Nachiketas, like the young man in Lewis Carroll’s Father William ("You are old, Father William," the young man said,/"And your hair has become very white;/And yet you incessantly stand on your head--/Do you think, at your age, it is right?"), decided to bother the old man and asked “Father, have you given me to someone?” After being asked three times, Wajashrawas said yes, I’ve given you to Yama – death. Recall that Father William also became impatient with his young man after three questions ("I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"/ Said his father; "don't give yourself airs! /Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?/ Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"). Nachiketas then proceeded to go to Yama’s house, and spent three days there without eating and drinking. Threes, by the way, haunt this story, as they haunt all stories involving wishes. Sure enough, Yama, impressed by Nachiketas’ ascetic regime, grants him three wishes. Nachiketas’ first wish is to be reconciled with his father. His second wish is for Fire. But Yama balks at his third wish, for Nachiketas wants to know if there is something after death. To know what comes after death puzzles even the gods. But Nachiketas insists. Thus begins the second chapter of the Katha Upanishad, with the verses I quoted above, with death making a primary distinction between the wise, who chose the path of the good, and the foolish, who chose pleasure. In the translation made by Shree Porohit Swami and Englished by Yeats, the verse goes; “Who follows the good, attains sanctity; who follows the pleasant, drops out of the race.” I take this to be teasing us with a sense of paths, tracks, traces – something that lets us follow. But I also like the translation I am quoting: “These two, having different ends, bind a man.” In Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”, there is a nice passage about Ananke’s net – Ananke being necessity:

“According to Parmenides, being itself is trapped by the “bonds of powerful Ananke’s net.” And in the Platonic vision of things, we find an immense light, “bound in the sky and embracing its whole circumference, the way hempen ropes are gound around the hulls of galleys.” In each case, knots and bonds are essential. Necessity is a bond that curses back on itself, a knotted rope (peirar0 that holds everything within its limits (peras). Dei, a key work, meaning ‘it is necessary’, appears for the first time in the Iliad: “why is it necessary (dei) for the Argives to make war on the Trojans?” That verb form, governed by an impersonal subject, the es of everything that escapes an agent’s will, is traced back by Onians to deo, ‘to bind’, and not to dea, ‘to lack’ as other philologists would have it. It is the same image, observes Onians, “that, without being aware of its meaning in the dark history of the race, we find in a common expression of our own language: ‘it is bound to happen.’

Tracks do form nets. Reading this, I thought surely Callaso would then reference Vernant and Detienne’s wonderfully mysterious book on Cunning among the Greeks, which teases out a variety of binding, rope twisting and corded words to fill in the semantic field of the ruse – of metis. But he doesn’t. Myself, I am reminded of the fact that civilization has long been identified with metalwork – the bronze age, the iron age – rather than work with fabric. When the Spaniards conquered the Incas, they conquered a culture that had inherited another set of assumptions entirely, deriving from knots and nets. Charles Mann makes this point in 1491, going over recent discoveries in Peruvian archaeology that point to the privileged place of netmaking and weaving from the earliest times. And, of course, there are the khipu, the Incan knot language that was assumed, until recently, to be a form of accounting. Gary Urton, a Harvard archaelogist, is the most prominent recent figure to say, not so – there’s words encoded in those knots and filaments. But such a base for civilization, such soft technology, blindsided the Europeans, who couldn’t even see that it was a technology. Even though, of course, knots, strings, fabrics, weaving do have a lively underlife from the Greeks through the Renaissance witches, and of course every marriage is a knot tied. (Although there is a counterknot to prevent marriage – the noueurs d’aiguillettes were persecuted by Parliamentary decree in France).

Everything here is so old that it happened in your dreams last night, from the three wishes to the division between the wise and the foolish, the path of the good and the path of pleasure, and the bewilderment that came over you as you went down the path until a wolf appeared…

que voy a hacer - je suis perdu…

And the winner is...

North, we missed the Belmont. Damn!

bon diable, good Doctor, and very bad author

Julien Offray de La Mettrie is remembered today for his book Man-Machine – and by collectors of curiosa, for his paen to the sex, The Art of Orgasm (L’art de jouir – which is often translated as “come”, which takes the French term, with its sense of a radiant and sumptuous pleasure, a little too brutally out of its semantic field). In his day, he was considered a thoroughly disreputable figure – a doctor, he’d alienated the medical profession by writing satires of famous doctors; a philosopher, he seemed unacquainted with logic and all too willing to take an undignified and mocking tone towards the ancients; and he was unashamed and undisguised in his atheism, or so it seems – the issue of La Mettrie’s atheism is still debated. After his death, a French writer said that his writing read as though he’d written it while drunk. Voltaire, who knew him, said his talk was as like watching fireworks – a minute of startlingly brilliant, followed by ten minutes of boredom. Voltaire met La Mettrie at Frederick the Great’s court. He’d been brought there when his patron, Gramont, died on a battlefield and he was exposed to the malice of the doctors and the Church. Friedrich II was a collector, and he gathered many semi-scandalous names to his court. Lessing wrote that even the King was shocked by Le Mettrie’s anti-Seneque, ou Discours sur le bonheur, and tossed ten copies of it into the fire.

Carlyle quotes two sources in his biography of Frederick about the death of Le Mettrie – a death surely was an inspiration to De Sade latter on, who dramatized so many of de la Mettrie’s themes:

… [At this time there occurred,] with a hideous dash of farce in
it, the death of La Mettrie. Here are Two Accounts, by different
hands,--which represent to us an immensity of babble in the then
Voltaire circle.

LA METTRIE DIES.--Two Accounts: 1. King Friedrich's: to Wilhelmina.
"21st November, 1751. ... We have lost poor La Mettrie. He died for
a piece of fun: ate, out of banter, a whole pheasant-pie; had a
horrible indigestion; took it into his head to have blood let, and
convince the German Doctors that bleeding was good in indigestion.
But it succeeded ill with him: he took a violent fever, which
passed into putrid; and carried him off. He is regretted by all
that knew him. He was gay; BON DIABLE, good Doctor, and very bad
Author: by avoiding to read his Books, one could manage to be well
content with himself." [Ib. xxvii. i. 203.]

2. Voltaire's: to Niece Denis (NOT his first to her): Potsdam, 24th
December, 1751. ... "No end to my astonishment. Milord Tyrconnel,"
always ailing (died here himself), "sends to ask La Mettrie to come
and see him, to cure him or amuse him. The King grudges to part
with his Reader, who makes him laugh. La Mettrie sets out;
arrives at his Patient's just when Madame Tyrconnel is sitting down
to table: he eats and drinks, talks and laughs more than all the
guests; when he has got crammed (EN A JUSQU'AU MENTON), they bring
him a pie, of eagle disguised as pheasant, which had arrived from
the North, plenty of bad lard, pork-hash and ginger in it;
my gentleman eats the whole pie, and dies next day at Lord
Tyrconnel's, assisted by two Doctors," Cothenius and Lieberkuhn,
"whom he used to mock at. ... How I should have liked to ask him,
at the article of death, about that Orange-skin!" [ OEuvres
de Voltaire, lxxiv. 439, 450.]

The ‘orange skin’ reference is to Friedrich saying that you squeezed a man like La Mettrie until you got the juice out of him, as you would an orange. And then you throw away the orange skin.

Of course, there is something mythical and mysterious about this death from eating a pie of disguised meat – to those with ears for the classical reference, one can’t help thinking of Thyestes, whose jealous brother, Atrios, served him a meat pie that Thyestes eagerly swallowed down. Then Atrios informed him that the meat of the pie was a mash made from the bodies of his two sons. Thyestes cursed the House of Atrios, with results well known in tragedy and psychoanalysis. It is to this famous pie-eating that Poe refers in the purloined letter - --“Un dessein si funeste, S'il n'est digne d'Atree, est digne de Thyeste”. Since the Purloined Letter is about substitution, too – in fact, seems to peer at the very nature of substitution, which is, of course, the very nature of myth – one can only ponder the eagle disguised as pheasant. The aristocratic bird disguised as the gourmand’s bird – which brings down the man whose essay on happiness, his attack on the stoic ethos that, since the rediscovery of the stoics in late Renaissance times, had been the hidden credo of the intellectuals, was one of the true scandals of the age. And for us – looking for the separation, the crack, the felure between wisdom and happiness – there is something going on in this substitution of meats in a pie.

Are these posts really going anywhere, the reader may well ask? And when are we going to get back to Danton’s Death?!!! Goddamn it. Sorry, but first we have to check out La Mettrie’s Discourse on happiness, which caused such offense to people like Diderot. And has been dropped from the canon since.

not paul berman again!

LI has tried to bite our tongue about the recent rash of Paul Berman. Poison ivy I take, stoically, to be part of summer fun. You will never uproot all of it. But Paul Berman is a skin infection of a different kind. He's a fraud, in our eyes, and not something we want to encounter when turning on the radio. It is hard to write about the man calmly - and calmness is all when you want to stick the knife in deep. There’s nothing like a too eager assassin to muff the job. But since the World radio broadcast insisted on broadcasting an interview about his latest screed in the TNR, my patience is over.

Berman has accrued a lot of media capital over the years by being a conscience. A conscience is such a great thing to cast yourself as. Especially when you can be the conscience not of the powerful, not of the CEOs, not of the plutocracy, but the conscience of dissent - indeed, he's an old Dissenter dinosaur. Being the conscience of dissent means that you get to whack away at, say, the crimes of the Sandanistas as the Reagan administration arms narco thugs in Honduras. It means that you look out at the old and established mafia of CIA ties and Islamic fundamentalism that drove the cold war in the Middle East and you see - liberal softness for Islamic fundamentalism. A conscience means that you reprove unnamed liberals for beamingly looking on as Moslem fundies surgically remove clits, stone women, and generally tread on our freedom to mock, re the famous cartoons of Mohammed - in the age of Guantanamo, Falluja, and Grozney. The age, to put not too fine a point upon it, of Western countries killing lots and lots of Moslems. And Moslems killing not very many westerners. Liberals, as "Conscience" Berman notes with shock, have even dared to criticize heroic women, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while making poo-pooing sounds at the Bush administration for banning Tariq Ramadan from coming to the U.S. It is amazing what these non-freedom loving liberals will do – up to and including criticizing the U.S. from banning speech by Tariq Ramadan! Freedom of speech means denying freedom of speech for people who secretly don’t believe in freedom of speech. Don’t we all know this? We all know this at TNR. However, those not in that charmed circle of bile and bad faith can only look at these people with amazement.

The best summary of Paul Berman’s argument is here. (You'll have to scroll down several posts).
However, a recent news item from Iraq forcibly reminds us of what an absurd world this is, where arguments about freedom of speech mounted by warmongers who have not had one word to say about the increasing restrictions on freedom of speech in the West as they harp on freedom of speech issues in Islam-ia garner interviews on the World, while the real suppression of freedom of speech in the service of tyranny – occupation by a foreign power – doesn’t even elbow its way into, say, a decent position in the b section of the NYT. .

Mosul Mayor Sacked in Political Cartoon Fuss
Mayor Refused Demand He Close Newspaper that Printed Maliki-Rice Caricature
06/05/2007 6:24 PM ET
By Namir Huran
Mosul, June 5, (VOI)- Ninewa provincial council approved on Tuesday a decision to sack the mayor of Mosul city for not taking measures to close a newspaper that published a caricature picturing US Secrtetary of State Condoleezza Rice and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a senior official in Ninewa province said.

"The Ninewa provincial council approved the decision to sack the Mayor of Mosul city, Aamer Jihad al-Jerjeri, as it found reasons to dismiss him," the Head of the council General Salem al-Hajj Iessa told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

"The decision was approved unanimously by the district local council," he noted.

A conflict erupted between the mayor and the head of the provincial council last year, when the latter issued a decision obligating the mayor to close "al-Mujtama a-Madani (The Civil Society)" newspaper after publishing a caricature of the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice embracing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, but the mayor refused to close it, saying it violates press freedom.

Mosul, a Sunni city, is 402 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

Darwinian blowback

In the past fifty years, there have been enough national wars of liberation against a technologically superior occupier that we can see a distinct Darwinian pattern emerge. The resistance always consists of varied groups. The groups range, tactically, from the moderate to the extreme. The moderate group is characterized by a sensitivity to civilian casualties and a willingness to find other than military solutions to the occupation. The extreme group is relatively insensitive to civilian casualties and doubtful that any other than a military solution will end the occupation. It should be emphasized that these definitions are about tactics. Thus, the most conservative mujahadeen groups in the Afghanistan war count as the most extreme, and the most nationalist and rigid faction of the North Vietnamese communist party count as the most extreme.

Now, in any mass killing of living organisms, Darwinian laws of selection are going to apply. The case of the Americans in Vietnam and the Russians in Afghanistan are exemplary insofar as these occupations (which involved, in both cases, puppet governments) were so long and so fiercely fought, with the occupying power using conventional weapons in an unrestrained manner. What was obvious by the end of both the Vietnam war and the war in Afghanistan is that the occupying power had essentially selected out the moderates. They are softer targets precisely because they are more afraid of civilian death and make themselves more open to compromise. That openness makes them easier, for instance, to spot – and if you mount a mass assassination movement, as the U.S. did in South Vietnam with the Phoenix program, you can count on this to achieve your objective. In the internal politics between, say, the NVA and the NLF in South Vietnam, there was disagreement about what policies the NLF embraced. In the beginning, Ho was serious about the peaceful struggle for unification, but Diem’s ability to repress the party and its allies in the South made that a dead end. But by the end of the war, the strongest surviving players were those most committed to a militarily achieved reunification – and they got it in 1975.

In Vietnam’s case, luckily, the dynamic was such that the most extreme players had to contend, in North Vietnam itself, with a spectrum of other views in the party. To put it in terms consistent with my Darwinian metaphor – the occupiers did not own the whole landscape. Part of the landscape was owned by the North Vietnamese, which put a counterpressure on the Darwinian selection to the most extreme resistors. Thus, the very tactics the U.S. used to pursue the war made the continuance of the strategy of armed reunification inevitable. The Americans, in effect, eliminated all those who might negotiate with them. The end of the war brought about a lot of hardship to those who had supported the South Vietnamese government, but the period of revenge was not especially brutal – less so, in many ways, than the American revolution, which of course concluded with the brief British plan of freeing the slaves collapsing, and the slave order once again re-established in the South.

In Afghanistan, on the other hand, there was no safe and sovereign place from which the resistance to the Russians could operate. Where the resistance had refuge – in Pakistan – they were not sovereign. Here, Darwinian blowback was much fiercer. The Soviets, like the Americans, were hindered by few rules. Like the Americans, they attacked civilian and military alike. Like the Americans, the Soviets were particularly eager to pacify the villages by picking out the rebels. And like the Americans, the Soviets unconsciously acted as a force of selection, tilting the landscape to the most extreme resistors.

This is what is happening in Iraq at the moment. Those who, echoing Bush, tell us that withdrawal will lead to a bloodbath not only ignore the fact that the bloodbath is happening now – they ignore the fact that it is the occupation, operating with grim Darwinian efficiency, that is preparing the blood bath to come.

if nature makes you a hog, vaunt yourself in the muck

“The truth and virtue says La Mettrie, are “existences that have value only insofar as they are service to someone who possesses them… But lacking such and such a virtue, such and such a truth, will science and societies suffer? Let that be so, but if I don’t garner any advantages from them, I will suffer. Thus, is it for me or for others that reason orders me to be happy?” This is his commentary on Fontenelle’s phrase: If I had my hand full of truths, I’d beware of opening it.” Le Mettrie is, on this point, clearer and more frank than Helvetius. Besides, he doesn’t deny any more than the latter that the elevated instincts carry man towards a conduct that is, apparently, disinterested; but, according to him, men are made variously, and they must conform to their nature: “if nature makes you a hog, vaunt yourself in the muck, like hogs do; for you are incapable of enjoying a more elevated happiness.” – Guyau, Le Morale d’Epicure.

Plutarch saw the Epicureans as the enemy, and wrote an essay against them - ‘Against Colotes, the Disciple and Favorite of Epicurus” – which preserves certain of Epicurus’ writings and sayings. One of them, which is quoted with the imputation that Epicurus was conceited, was a sentence from Epicurus’s letter to Idomeneus, in which Epicurus thanks Idomeneus for sending him fruits to feed his – Epicurus’ - ‘sacred body’. The paradoxes thicken here, of course – for how can there be a sacred dimension if the Gods exist in supreme indifference to man? And how can there be a body at all that is ‘mine’ when it is actually a collection of atoms, as little mine as the drops in a river would form something distinct from the river?



Martha Nussbaum takes Epicurus’ phrase to be referring specifically to something sacred about Epicurus – the sacred body being the center of a hero cult. Thus, it is identified with one particular body, and says nothing about other human bodies. In this way, Epicurus’ remarks about his body are similar to Jesus’ remarks about his body – it was the body of the hero, the divinity, that was sacred.

Let’s say that Nussbaum is right. When a particular body has been singled out as something sacred, we have, of course, a charismatic moment. In a sense, the whole positional economy tends towards the charismatic – it is the absolute level of positioning, the good that cannot be traded. But it can be shared – by symbolic cannibalism, by sex, by the word. That sharing is a sacrifice – the absolute sacrifice of the sacred is to annihilate itself on the altar of the sacred, and thus renew itself – in a triumph of romance over logic. But that avenue is blocked for the Epicurean. Which is why I’d hypothesize – boldly – that the sacredness is connected or coordinated with the Epicurean notion of pleasure.

Whether or not this has any validity in the ancient context, in the seventeenth century context, in which Epicurus served as both a counter to the ascetism of the Church and a counter to the dualism of Descartes, the libertin legitimated volupté by claiming that it had its root in Epicurus’ thought. Volupté, for Bayle, for instance, was a sort of philosophical calming of desires – la beatitude de l’homme consiste à etre à son aise. Here is the forerunner of bourgeois comfort, which already had its art in thousands of Dutch paintings. Bayle refuted the idea that Epicureanism would mean having impure commerce with women, gluttony, intoxication. Rather, the Epicurean struggles against the unruly passions. That form of ascesis clears Epicure, in Bayle’s view, of the scandals associated with ‘volupté”.

However, sixty years later, Le Mettrie is already writing about acting as a pig if it is your nature to act as a pig. We are already moving from the dawn of embourgeoisement to the ethics of Pere Karamazov. Volupté is not as simple as it seems.

the withdrawal project blog starts

I've started the Withdrawal blog - the first step in the Withdrawal project. I hope to transfer all the posts on LI about Iraq - there must be three hundred of them at least - to the Withdrawal blog. Then I'm going to include much more inclusive links. Finally, the blog will then be open to those who want to contribute posts. They'll merely have to ask me for the password.

It is a small step. The Withdrawal project is certainly not about starting another fucking blog, but it needs a base. I haven't yet started the search for a power point pro. I need to put up some notices. Remember, readers, to send me suggestions.