the divorce of wisdom and happiness II

In my last post on this subject, we ended with the knots and nets of necessity: once you grant that the path of the wise man and the path of the fool are separate paths, you have granted the central condition for the hegemony of wisdom over pleasure – the ascetic ideology. That ideology is not annulled by asserting the hegemony of pleasure over wisdom, however – such is the primitive sense of epicurean materialism, as Lukacs understands it - since wisdom and pleasure, the wise man and the fool, are still kept at a distance from one another. However, there is a moment in that reversal that does not inevitably lead to embourgeoisement, or to the reign of happiness triumphant, the horror that currently bestrides our globe. Or at least that has been my hypothesis – embodied in a life in which, as hypotheses go, it has been rudely and roundly confuted by circumstances. Nevertheless, LI is a stubborn cunt and is going to hold to our glimmers and glimpses into the possibility that the path of the wise and the path of the foolish is the same path, but turns into a different path depending on whether you go forward on it or backwards.

…
So much for the mystagogic intro. Now, let’s get back to La Mettrie, the mythical monster. He was never admitted to the company of the philosophes – for Voltaire, who knew him, he was a fool. Diderot, who was afraid of the proximity of La Mettrie’s thought to his own, also classified him as a buffoon. And who but a buffoon would mistake an eagle for a pheasant, wolf it down, and consequently die of it? Yet I suspect that La Mettrie can’t be laid aside quite like that. He was rediscovered, in the late nineteenth century, for his thorough working out of the Man-machine idea, suggested by Descartes. And this makes him easy to put in a slot for intellectual history. But he does have readers, particularly in Germany who claim a higher status for him, and in particular like to say that the Essay on Happiness is his masterpiece. It certainly seems to prefigure Nietzsche, in tone as well as in certain of its thoughts. This, for instance, could easily fit into The Dawn:

“To live tranquilly, without ambition, without desire. To use our wealth, and not to enjoy it; to conserve it without worries, to lose it without regret, to govern it, in place of being the slave of it; to not be troubled nor moved by any passion, or rather not to have any; to be content in misery, as in opulence: in pain, as in pleasure… to disdain pleasure and voluptuousness; to consent to having pleasure as one is rich, without being too seduced by its agreeableness; to disdain live itself: at last, to arrive at virtue by the knowledge of truth, such is the theme that forms the sovereign good of Seneca and the stoics in general, and the perfect beatitude which follows from it.

How much this makes us Anti-stoic! Those philosophers are severe, sad, hard; we are soft, gay, compliant. All soul, they make an abstraction of their bodies; all body, we make an abstraction of our soul. They show themselves inaccessible to pleasure or to pain, we make it our glory to feel one and the other. Killing themselves to be sublime, they elevate themselves above all events, and don’t believe themselves to be men until they have ceased to be men. Ourselves, we do not have control over what governs us; we don’t command our sensations; avowing their empire and our slavery, we try to make ourselves agreeable, persuaded that this is the seat of the happiness of life: and, finally, we believe ourselves the happier the more we are human, or more worthy of being human.”

That beginning is obviously not going to go down well with the philosophes crowd, who inherited a clinging to the Stoics as a sort of secular religion. With La Mettrie, they were confronted with the crumbling of a hard won hedonism into the bottomless gulf of nothingness. La Mettrie starts several thoughts, in the essay on happiness, that bring us into contact with the Underground Man – whose teethgrinding is, in a sense, the height of hedonism. But the Underground Man’s embrace of the pleasure of pain is, from La Mettrie’s standpoint, simply the refusal to accept our essential slavery – a term that La Mettrie, either following Hume or independently of Hume, takes to describe the relation of reason to passion:

“We, we do not have the disposition of what governs us; we do not command our sensations; avowing their empire and our slavery, let’s try to render ourselves agreeable, persuaded that this is where the summit of happiness lies.”

Having an idea that the issues at play here derive from a sacramental economy that is falling prey to another economy, the grand transformation that is turning every sacrifice into a commodity, it is interesting that the old feudal notion slave emerges as though in a dumbshow to hint, in gestures, that the liberation of the philosophes, the “delices” of civilization, were actually in contradiction with their production – thus attacking the philosophe norm from a different direction than Rousseau. But the logic that La Mettrie follows is ultimately not that much of a departure from that pronounced in the Katha-Upanishad. La Mettrie, in the essay on happiness, takes the stoic theme that the truest happiness accrues to he who tires to find the truth and shows that it isn’t so. Happiness is quite independent from an intellectual search. Those who have no intellect to speak of can well be happy. And it is not possible to deny that they have some mysterious different and lower type of happiness, since that implies what remains to be proven – that the intellectual search for truth is the real, the essential form of happiness.

Rather, as La Mettrie points out, it seems to be the senses that give us pleasure, and pleasure that gives us happiness. Thus, that we receive pleasure from the senses should not shame us – we don’t need the stoic discipline. Quite the contrary. What we need is to lose our remorse for the pleasure of the senses.

“Since remorse is a vain remedy for our troubles, troubling even the clearest water without clarifying the most troubled, destroy it. … We are right to conclude that if those joys that are rooted in nature and reason are crimes, the happiness of man is to be a criminal.”

Writing things like this has made some wonder, of course, how much La Mettrie de Sade read.

One of the paradoxes of La Mettrie’s position is that he pretty much strips away the motivation for intellectual behavior. Which leaves us with two choices: either intellectual behavior is strange – expressing, as with Lucretius, the clinamen – or it isn’t what it seems. As the slave of the sensations, the intellect is, at least, distinct from the sensations. But the possibility looms that it isn’t even that – the slave fades to shadow.

The frontline is in D.C., and the casualties are carted off to less visible think tanks

Alas, I have no time today. But there is one link LI must urge on our readers. It is this story by Joshua Halland and Raed Jarrar, entitled Bush says “We’ll be in Iraq for 50 Years, Reporters don’t bother to ask Iraqis to Comment.” I had trouble reading it myself – lately, as I read things that make me unbearably angry, my neck starts to stiffen up. But I trooper on! Anyway, it has the goods on the Washington Post’s Ann Scott Tyson – although she only represents the Beltway Court Society in its Conventional Wisdom mode. Still. She writes a story suggesting that the U.S. is considering staying in Iraq for the next fifty years, South Korea style. She quotes a general, a GOP hack, a Bushie, a token Dem. So this happens:

When we reached the Washington Post's Ann Scott Tyson and asked her why there were no Iraqi voices in her story, she was somewhat taken aback by the question. She hadn't considered getting the views of any Iraqis, "because the story was focused on a shift in the administration's thinking here in Washington. It wasn't really focused on Iraqis, or their reaction." She later added: "There's a limited number of viewpoints you can include." Tyson explained that it wasn't always possible to reach people in Iraq for a quote before deadline. It's a valid point, except that several of the articles we reviewed were analyses written several days after talk of the Korea model started kicking around D.C. When we asked if that were true in this case, she said it wasn't -- it was primarily because the story wasn't "taking place in Iraq."

Ah, be still my swollen neck! The Iraq war is, after all, not really taking place in Iraq. This is the vampire’s most secret thought, his unconscious speaking.

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.