A protohistory of the "banality of evil"

 

 1

I admire a certain kind of essay that takes a phrase or even a word and attempts to find the backstory for it. I’m thinking here of Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on Estrangement from the Wooden Eyes collection, or of Nicholson Baker’s wildly eccentric essay on “Lumber” in the Size of Thoughts – a terrible title, that is, of the collection, by the way. The cross between historically valid investigation and a sort of tarot where words are the cards you turn over is a difficult cross to pull off. You have to have a wide reading, the kind of physical sensitivity to words that most people have to faces, and an ability to bluff. The greatest instance of this kind of essay is, I think, Robert Merton’s investigation of Newton’s phrase, ” I have seen more because I sit on the shoulders of giants”: On the Shoulders of Giants: a Shandean postscript. The Shandean essay is my favorite kind of essay, obsessive, divagating, willfully obscure. It is the inheritor of Montaigne’s original essayistic impulse; or perhaps I should say Plutarch’s.

Merton, in his preface, placed the Shandean essay in the category of the comic – a framework through which to view the real. However, it is obscene to view mass murder through the comic – obscene in all its etymological fullness: obscaenus from the Latin, ill-omened or abominable. Yet the inexorable logic of the backstory endures in the profane and the obscene, the serious and the most terrible. Hell itself cannot abolish narrative – hence, all the story-tellers in Dante’s Inferno.

Still: I hesitate. In a letter to Hannah Arendt after the publication of her book, Eichmann in JerusalemL a Report on the Banality of Evil, Gersholm Scholem wrote: “There is in the Jewish tongue something that one can absolutely not define, but which is perfectly concrete: what the Jews call Ahabeth Israel, love for the Jews. And of this quality one perceives nothing with you, dear Hannah, no more than with so many intellectuals who come from the German left. An analysis like yours demans, if you will alllow me to say so, the most unfashionable type of objective and meticulous treatment, just there were profound emotions enter into play and must be invoked, as in the case of the murder of a third of our people – and I consider you totally as a member of this people, and nothing other. I do not have sympathy for the style of lightheartedness – I mean in English, flippancy – which you so often exhibit in this regard in your book. There is an inconcevable inadequation between it and the thing of which you speak.”

An inadequacy. But, is there a possible adequacy?

I’m not sure I have all of the equipment to take that Shandean path like Merton – whose book runs to 290 pages, a mock heroic scrapbook - but nevertheless, I want to try to tell the backstory of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the banality of evil.

2.

Eichmann in Jerusalem was published first, over various issues, in the New Yorker. Arendt is trying out a new position here, that of reporter. This is Arendt’s most controversial work, starting with the subtitling phrase, which seems to have the uncanny quality of the already said. Adam, my cinephile son, gifted me with a word a week ago: re-quel. This is when a movie is redone with the same characters and situations, but differently. The banality of evil has a certain requel quality.

“The trouble with Eichmann,” Arendt wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

I will put aside the controversy over whether Arendt took Eichmann’s word too literally when he testified he was not anti-semitic. I will come back to that. This is not where I’m starting. I’m more interested in the relationships, here, between evil, banality, and the normal.

3.

In journalism, they say to put the hook in the first graf. In writing suspense stories, they say to put the twist at the end. The twist. The flip. I’m going to take a leap here. In the case of the banality of evil, I want to explore a certain flip side: for there is another phrase that haunts Arendt’s subtitle. “The evil of banality.” This phrase comes out of Gogol and the Devil, one of the great essays in Russian literature, written by Dmitri Merezkhovsky in 1906. I use the word “great” – but who am I?

Thomas Mann: “After the War, I heard from Alexander Eliasberg that Mereschkowkij …fleeing the Bolshevik powers, had found himself in Warsaw, and planned to come to Germany, to Munich, and visit me. Dmitrij Meschkowskij! The most brilliant critic and world-psychologist since Nietzsche! Whose books on Tolstoi and Dostojewskj had made such an inextinguishable impression on me in my twenties, and whose unexampled work on Gogol I had never put away!”

I ran across this essay for reasons I cannot now remember, reading the English translation in Robert Maguire’s 1976 collection of essays on Gogol. Gogol for the twentieth century. I had never heard of Dmitri Merezkhovsky (or Meschkowskij – the transcription of Russian names changes over time and languages, which gives the discussions of the Russian authors in English an underlying... fishiness, as though we were talking of people who cross the border with different names).

Did Arendt read Mereschkowskij? .

4.

Merezkhovsky is not a name that stands out for the non-specialist reader. But rest assured, his name graces many a novel that now lies gathering dust in the Dewey Decimal section of major libraries, ones that were once read even in the U.S. and advertised in the papers. He is mainly known now as the husband of Zinaida Gippius, whose poems and prose are appreciated not only by Slavic studies graduate students but by, well, general readers in Russia and elsewhere. Her posthumous reputation, like any other, has waxed and waned, but it particularly waxed in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is even an English language biography out there, which I take to be a mark of recognition.

Of her husband, though, there is no English language biography. That would have surprised the literati of the period between 1900 and the 1920s, for during this time Merezkhovsky was one of the most translated of Russian authors, the successor, supposedly, of the great 19th century Russians. His book on Gogol, which contained the essay Gogol and the Devil, was translated in 1911 into German – as were most of his novels and pamphlets. First for Piper Verlag in Munich, and in the 1920s for other presses. Piper, however, is important. Piper published the collected works of Dostoevsky, in German translation, with introductions by, in some cases, Merezkhovsky. The couple Merezhkovsky and Dostoevsky was implanted in the German literary mind of the Weimar generation. One can almost be as certain that German intellectuals had run into those introductions as one can be that American readers of classic paperback books of my generation – the seventies – had run into the name Leavis if they read the Penguin paperbacks of the Victorian novelists. To paraphrase Shelly, those who write the introductions are the secret rulers of the world. Or perhaps they are the secret sharers of that power.

Merezkhovsky’s writing was also abundantly translated into French and English during the first half of the twentieth century. The New York Times reviewers mentioned his name as the inheritor of the mantel of Dostoevsky and Tolstoi. In particular, he was read for that mixture of spirituality and history embodied in his trilogy, The Death of the Gods (which included a novel on Leonardo da Vinci, a figure of perennial interest to Americans on up to the days of the Da Vinci Code). The gloominess, the sexiness, the sprituality! Echt Russe, na?

Bennett Cerf’s Modern Library, that great series of books to which I owe a lot of my education, published the Romance of Leonardo da Vinci in the thirties, with a translation by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, whose translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls was singled out by the very nitpicky Vladimir Nabokov as an extraordinarily fine work. But it was in Germany that Merezkhovsky made his mark. An essay, a book could be written about the different ways France and Germany received and distributed an image of Russian literature and through that, of Russia and the “Russian character”. That essay is beyond me. It would not be Shandian.

5.

In the early 30s, when Mann was researching sources for his Joseph trilogy, he took very seriously Merezhkovsky’s book, The Secret of the East.

By that time, things had gone seriously wrong for Merezhkovsky both personally and as a writer. He and Grippius had chosen exile after 1920, leaving in their wake a trail of violent pamphlets comparing the Bolsheviks to Antichrist. This was, in fact, his second period of exile – the first had come after the failure of the revolution of 1905. It should be said that Merezhkovsky was no cutout reactionary – he had honorably opposed Russia’s entrance into war with Austria and Germany, foreseeing the disaster to com (as did Rasputin – one of the reason Rasputin has a demonic reputation in the West is because his neutralist sympathies made him a target for British and French propaganda. If Czar Nicholas II had paid more attention to Rasputin and less attention to his generals, the course of Russian history would have been changed, perhaps, for the better. Or perhaps the rotten, pogram-ridden regime would have raced the Nazis to the lowest circle of hell). Merezhkowsky and Gippius were closest to the Cadets and other Russian liberals, among whom he must have known Vladimir D. Nabokov, the father of the novelist. They went to the same school. From Petersburg he moved to Paris with Grippius. They were a power couple in the Russian exile community.

Yet that community was well aware of the criticisms thrown at Merezkhovsky as the “leader” of the symbolist/modernist movement in Russia even before World War I, especially since the hurlers of said criticisms were Bely and Blok, the heavy hitters of the silver age. The Bs had been promoted, early in their careers, by Merezkhovsky, and in turn they piled a certain contempt on him. The usual literary patricide. The sons overthrow the fathers and eat them. And it is true, Merezhkovsky and Gippius had a good bit of windbaggery in them, and were pretty easy for the young bucks to puncture.

Particularly because of sex. Sex, sex, sex. They were among the intellectuals who introduced the principle of “free love” into the culture of St. Petersburg, with the aid of their sometimes ally, Vasilli Rozanov. But Rozanov’s eroticism – which proclaimed sex without God – was definitely not Merezkhovsky’s, who proclaimed sex as a mystical union with the divine. From Nietzsche and Baudelaire Merezkhovsky picked up the idea that Christianity had destroyed the pagan enjoyment of the flesh, introducing a culpability that perverted every sex act. These hothouse fin de siècle circles – how easy it is to condescend from the heights, or depths, of our gonzo porn age! When Balabanov’s film Of Freaks and Men came out in 1998, the reviewer in the New York Times described its sepia stained recreation of early twentieth century erotica (in a narrative that obviously references Rozanov) as quaint. Yet these debates about free love are, as well, about desire as an identity – setting the switches for the way sexual desire has become an identifying category today.

6.

Three moments.

First moment. In the winter of 1924, according to Hans Jonas, Heidegger fell on his knees and begged Hannah Arendt to become his lover. In the summer of 1925, he wrote her a letter in which he reported that he read volume one of Der Zauberberg in one blow. In another letter, he asks Arendt to bring the second volume with her when she visits his house, so they can read it together. As the critic Reinhardt Mehring puts it, Martin and Hannah’s relationship did not take the platonic course of Hans Castorp and Clawdia Chauchat.

The second moment. “When Heidegger took the post of Professor at Freiburg in 1928, he personally made sure that the library bought the complete Piper edition of Dostoevsky’s works. On his writing desk he even put a portrait of the Russian author.” “In the lecture on nihilism that he held at the beginning of World War II at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger quoted extensively from Dostoevsky’s "Pushkin Speech," completely subscribing to the Russian author’s analysis of the "negative" Russian man: "He is a man who is restless and will never content himself with the existing order, who does not believe in his native soil or its powers, who ultimately negates Russia and himself, who does not want to share anything in common with his fellow compatriots, and who, nevertheless, sincerely suffers from all this.”

The Third Moment. In 1950, Hannah Arendt visited Heidegger and his wife in Freiburg. In return, she got a letter from Heidegger that contains this remarkable, and typical, passage: “But that you were here and out of this “here” remain “there” has brought everything nearer, us and you. We both are at the same time now forced to see the growing threat of the Soviets, more clearly, brighter than the West sees it. Because now we are the immediately threatened. Stalin doesn’t need to declare war, as you believe. He is winning a battle everyday.”

A remarkable passage. Heidegger, the philosopher of the forgetting of being, forgets that his “ here” would have remorsely slaughtered Arendt, stripped her naked and sent her to a gas chamber, if she hadn’t fled to there. He knows that well enough – we read him in the Black notebooks complaining about the “shrieking” posters that the Allies put up in German cities, by which he meant the photographs of the camps. But in the Black notebooks he sees this as posturing and inauthentic. On the other hand, he certainly sees himself and his “here” as the victim of a threat now – the Soviets!

And rounding up with Stalin, he writes a sentence that could easily have come out of J. Edgar Hoover’s collected works on the Communist conspiracy. It is an almost perfect expression of the continuity between the Nazi anti-Bolshevism of the 30s and the Conservative Cold War anti-communism of the fifties. It doesn’t miss a beat, this language.

7.

Hannah Arendt was the executive director of the European Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction from 1948 to 1952. In 1949, she made a swing through Europe on its behalf. It was at that time that, as her biographer Young-Bruhl puts it, she “renewed” her relationship to Karl Jaspers. In 1951, her big book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, came out, and she became a “cover girl” – her face was on the cover of the Saturday Review, which at that time was the most read literary journal in America.

On September 1, 1949, Jaspers wrote her a letter in which he commented on Heidegger: “ He is completely absorbed in speculation about Sein ; he spells it Seyn. Two and a half years ago he was experimenting with “existence” and distorted everything thoroughly…. Can someone with an impure soul – that is, a soul that is unaware of its own impurity and isn’t trying to expel it, but continues to live thoughtlessly, in filth – can someone in that kind of dishonesty perceive what is purest?”

On September 29, 1949, Arendt wrote back: “Heidegger: because human beings are consistent, I at any rate, I was pleased. You are right a thousand times over in each of your sentences. What you call impurity I would call lack of character – but in the sense that he literally has none and certainly not a particularly bad one. At the same time, he lives in depths and with a passionateness that one can’t easily forget. The distortion is intolerable, and the very fact that he is arranging everything now to look like an interpretation of Sein und Zeit suggest that it will all come out distorted again. I read his letter against humanism. Also very questionable and often ambiguous, but still the first thing of his that comes up to his old standard (I’ve read him here on Holderlin and also his quite awful, babbling lectures on Nietzsche).”

The feeling that, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt was dealing with a specter – a transparency. Behind the person of Eichmann, there was a characterless man:

“Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal” – “More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable” – and finally the minister who had paid regular visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be “a man with very positive ideas.”

8.

And this bit, in the reply of Arendt to Scholem’s letter, quoted above : And to connect immediately the last point, I will begin by 'Ahabath Israel (you would do me a great favor if you would tell me when this notion began to play a rôle in Hebrew and in the written tradition, when it appeared for the first time, etc.) You are perfectly right to say that I have no “love” of this kind. This is so for two reasons. Firstly, that I have never in my life « loved » a people or any kind of collective : neither German nor French nor American, nor for the working class or whatever falls in this price range. I only in fact love my friends, and I am totally inapt at all other kinds of love. But secondly, this kind of love for the Jews is suspect to me, being a Jew myself. I don’t love myself, no more than I love that which composes my substance, in one way or another. »

The first claim in this passage makes some sense. But the second claim, it seems to me, needs some unpacking. Why would the love of oneself be more suspicious to Arendt as a Jew? Is it because this kind of love is only commanded when the object is God? To make the object the Jews is, here, to make an idol of a collective. One doesn’t get far into the prophets to see that all idols must be torn down. Yet to carry this fear to the length of refusing to love herself or the “matter” that composes her substance seems an ascetic position that one doesn’t often associate with Arendt. Of course, at this moment in her life she is driven by the feeling that her book on Eichmann is being intentionally misread, so to Scholem she might be exaggerating. However, the Talmudic resonance here is even more emphasized as she continues this paragraph: “To make you understand what I mean, I would like to tell you of a discussion with Golda Meier, who, in passing, I must say pleased me greatly, so much so that I beg you not to think that there is any personal animosity in what follows: We were speaking of the absence of separation of religion and state in Israel, which is for me ominous, a situation she defended. She said to me, in substance – I can’t recall the exact wording: Understand that, in as much as I am a socialist, I don’t believe in God, I believe in the Jewish people. I reckon that this is a horrible phrase, and I could not respond because I was too shocked, but I could have retorted: the greatness of these people has in the past been to believe in God, and to do it in a manner so that the love of God depasses the fear of God. And now the people only believe in themselves? What do you think will happen with that? In brief, in this sense, I do not “love” the Jews and I do not “believe” in them, I only belong to this people naturally and factually.”

Here I think I am eavesdropping on a struggle that has become more and more visible: the struggle for an identity, for a loveable larger self that one can claim, that one can then be loved within. I am straight, I am gay, I am a Jew, I am a white Protestant, etc. Against which the modernist impulse to impersonality makes its case – that the wound to narcissism is, in a strong sense, the origin of all good things, a necessary harrowing.

9,

The method of indirection to find direction out. Hamlet’s detective work.

A quotation on banality from Gogol and the Devil: “Everyone can perceive evil in great violations of the moral law, in rare and unusual misdeeds, in the staggering climaxes of tragedies. Gogol was the first to detect invisible evil, most terrible and enduring, not in traged, but in the absence of everything tragic; not in power, but in potence; not in acuity and profundity, but in inanity and planarity – in the banality of all human feelings and thoughts; not in the greatest things, but in the smallest. … He was the first to understand that it is the Devil who is the smallest thing that exists, and seems big only because we ourselves are small…”

Merezkhovsky’s essay is never named by Nabokov in his book on Gogol. That would be showing his receipts, so to speak. It would be a cool-hunter admitting to listening to some tacky group or singer. Yet once I read Merezkhovsky's essay, I began to feel that it cast a shadow over Nabokov’s book. The book came out in 1961. In 1962 Pale Fire came out, and was reviewed rapturously by Mary McCarthy in The New Republic. Did Arendt read the Gogol book?

The answer is yes. We know this because McCarthy corresponded with Arendt about Pale Fire. Arendt answered like this: “There is something in N which I greatly dislike. As though he wanted to show you all the time how intelligent he is. And as though he thinks of himself in terms of “more intelligent than.” There is something vulgar in his refinement, and I am a bit allergic against this kind of vulgarity, because I know it so well, know so many people cursed with it. But perhaps this is no longer true here. Let me see. I know only one book of his which I truly admire, and that is the long essay on Gogol.”

Chichikov, as Nabokov says, is not strikingly evil in himself. “Morally Chichikov was hardly guilty of any special crime in attempting to buy up dead men in a country where live men were lawfully purchased and pawned.” Which makes it all the more interesting how the Devil gets into the case: “The dead souls he is buying are not merely names on a slip of paper. They are the dead souls that fill the air of Gogol’s world with their leathery flutter, the clumsy animula of Manilov or of Korbochka, of the housewives of the town of N., of countless other little people bobbing throughout the book. Chichikov himself is merely the ill-paid representation of the Devil, a traveling salesman from Hades, “our Mr. Chichikov” as the Satan and Co. firm may be imagined calling their easy-going, healthy-looking but inwardly shivering and rotting agent. The poshlust which Chichikov personifies is one of the main attributes of the Devil, in whose existence, let it be added, Gogol believed far more seriously than he did in that of God.”

Scholem accused Arendt of being “flippant”, and there were many reactions to the book’s tone, which seemed to create such confusion that she was often accused of mocking or condemning the Jews for going like sheep to the slaughter in the camps and the countryside – when, in fact, she was reporting the words of the prosecutor, who in turn was voicing a certain thematic in the Zionism of Ben-Gurion’s Israel, one in which the Jews of Europe were, precisely, accused of a cowardice that the Jews of Israel would rebuke in act and word. But it is still an interesting tone, not often used by Arendt, except in her private correspondence.

And this is Mr. Sammler from Bellow’s novel: “Do you think the Nazis didn’t know what murder was? Everybody (except certain blue-stockings) knows what murder is. That is very old human knowledge. The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred. To defy that old understanding is not banality. There was a conspiracy against the sacredness of life. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience. Is such a project trivial? This woman professor’s enemy is modern civilization itself. She is only using the Germans to attack the twentieth century – to denounce it in terms invented by Germans. Making use of a tragic history to promote the foolish ideas of Weimar intellectuals.”

10.

It sticks in the throat, banality. The Germans, the blue-stockings, the pure human beings, the impure, the characterless. To not even have a bad character as you trade flesh and blood people for money – one of Eichmann’s proudest achievements. Although of course he was prouder of the killing system he helped make ever more efficient.

At the end of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt deals with Martin Buber’s concern that Eichmann’s execution – which he was opposed to – would serve to “expiate the guilt felt by many young persons in Germany”. She throws her rebuke to Buber in a parenthetical aside that tells us how much the other side of the banality of evil – the evil of banality – keeps the system going.

(It is strange that Buber, a man not only of eminence but of very great intelligence, should not see how spurious these much publicized guilt feelings necessarily are. It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent. The youth of Germany is surrounded, on all sides and in all walks of life, by men in positions of authority and in public office who are very guilty indeed but who feel nothing of the sort. The normal reaction to this state of affairs should be indignation, but indignation would be quite risky – not a danger to life and limb but definitely a handicap in a career. Those young German men and women who every once in a while – on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial – treat us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the burden of the past, their fathers’ guilt; rather, they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality.) Professor Buber went on to say that he felt “no pity at all” for Eichmann, because he could feel pity “only for those whose actions I understand in my heart,” and he stressed what he had said many years ago in Germany – that he had “only in a formal sense a common humanity with those who took part” in the acts of the Third Reich. This lofty attitude was, of course, more of a luxury than those who had to try Eichmann could afford, since the law presupposes precisely that we have a common humanity with those whom we accuse and judge and condemn.”

The Creepy Times

 You know that the newspapers have passed the creepy point when the NYT devotes a frontpage story to how Sarah Palin's loss is only "temporary" - don't loose heart, rightwing wankers! - and demotes a story about how the largely black city of Jackson, Mississippi, has run out of drinking water to the U.S. section of the digital edition.

But at least it shows the editors have overcome that pesky wokeness.

The mythical trucker: american psychopathology, lesson one million

 The immediate centrist-right wing response to the limited student loan forgiveness has been diagnostically fascinating. What Governor Rick DeSantis said about truck drivers not liking their "bosses" getting loan forgiveness sort of sums it up. Truck drivers, in this country club view, aren't like country clubbers and trust funders. The latter are so concerned with their families that they put enormous pressure on Congress to lower inheritance taxes, and have succeeded. But truckers - truckers are abstract Ayn Randian beings. Their parents have no college loan debt, their spouses have no college loan debt, their children and grandchildren don't - or maybe they do, but the proud individual, socially blank trucker (who often him or herself has college debt) doesn't care. This individual without any social ties, this immaculate conception of a trucker, cares only, egotistically, about its own self - how much it can eat, how much it can wank, how much it can shit. It is cut off from all social relations.

This actually reflects the dominant way of thinking in patriarchy. The patriarchal subject is, ideally, some trust fund frat boy who says things like "there's no free lunch", even as their very physical existence has depended on at least eighteen years of free lunches. In their delusional, testosterone stoked imaginations, they are "self-made". In a culture with a more realistic view of life, the idea of a self being self-made would be cause for laughter or concern - concern that this claim was evidence of some deep psychopathy. But in the odd tribal culture of American patriarchy, this claim becomes something heroic.

These things all tie into the psychopathology of American politics. Governed by fatally flawed myths, American politics is and has been a real threat to ... Americans. Flesh and blood Americans, Americans who love, have connections, realize throughout their lives that there is such a thing as a free lunch, a lunch they can never pay back.

So I am having a good time reading tweets, especially from the political industry of consultants, pundits and general scoundrels in DC who together form the club of Very Serious People. Their views are reflected everywhere - from the halls of the NYT to the seats of Fox News. And... they are completely unhinged.

The first man (and woman) in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns

 The Ancients, the Moderns, and all that jazz

Adam, the first man – and not my son, who bears the same name – has long been a subject of fascination. The story in Genesis of Adam and Eve and the Garden and the Snake and the Tree of Good and Evil has such a satisfying drive, like a beautiful dream; and like a dream, it seems to come to our waking senses to be somehow in fragments, lacking certain important connective moments.

Hobbes, in the Leviathan, uses a very interesting term to distinguish Adam in the first of a line of charismatic beings:

“From the very Creation, God not only reigned over all men Naturally by his might; but also had Peculiar Subjects, whom he commanded by a Voice, as one man speaketh to another. In which manner he Reigned over Adam, and gave him commandement to abstaine from the tree of cognizance of Good and Evill; which when he obeyed not, but tasting thereof, took upon him to be as God, judging between Good and Evill, not by his Creators commandement, but by his own sense, his punishment was a privation of the estate of Eternall life, wherein God had at first created him…”

The Peculiar Subjects are now called Leaders, Geniuses, or even, in the TED era of accelerated bourgeouis banality, Thought Leaders. Hobbes here is replaying the state of nature that Leviathan speculates about – the state of primal war – with paradise, in orthodox Anglican fashion, at the beginning. Hobbes seems to forget, though, that by the same property, i.e. being commanded by a voice, Eve was also a Peculiar Subject. This forgotten “aside” is typical of patriarchy, where the social logic that gives us masculine x does not give us feminine y because… well, we either forget about y or rationalize y away.

If history turns around Peculiar Subjects, it becomes an ultimately inscrutable affair, in as much as there seems to be no scrutable cause in God’s choice. For instance, he chooses Abraham. And out of Abraham’s descendants, he makes a Peculiar people, Israel, and he chooses certain persons among that Peculiar people, like Moses, or the prophets. For the English empiricists, history, then, can't be a science in any but the most bare bones way: a collection of facts, out of which we can speculate about causes but lack experimental apparatus to prove our hypotheses.

Having a Baconian interest in causes, this larger story causes Hobbes some difficulty. There are those who read Hobbes as an atheist, or at least theistically deist. In fact, there’s no reason to think Hobbes’ difficulty is unorthodox – without this historical difficulty, we subtract grace and faith from the world. We partake in the Peculiar Subject that is Jesus in communion. As Weber would put it, charisma is normalized in tradition.

If we look at Adam in the Early Modern British culture, he operates as a peculiar argument for the moderns as opposed to the ancients. Joseph Glanvill, who was the secretary of the Royal Society and on the side of the new learning, takes Adam’s fall (and Eve’s, though she isn’t mention) as an event in meta-physiology: not only do Adam’s descendants die, but they have to scrape by with their diminished sensorium:

“Adam needed no spectacles. The acuteness of his natural optics (if conjecture may have credit) showed him much of the celestial magnificence and bravery without a Galileo's tube: and 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper world as we with all the advantages of Art. His sight could inform him whether the Loadstone doth attract by Atomical Effluviums. It may be he saw the motion of the blood and spirits through the transparent skin as we do the workings of those little industrious animals (bees) through a hive of glasse Sympathies and Antipathies were to him no occult qualities, &c."

Glanvill’s Scepsis Scientifica, where he made these claims, is prefaced by a defense of this interpretation of Adam. It is a highly wrought passage, the kind of prose that delighted moderns like James Joyce.

“But lest the ingenious rumble at my threshold, and take offence at

the seemingly disproportionate excess, which I ascribe to Adam's senses: I'll subjoin a

word to prevent the scruple. First then, for those that go the way of the allegoric, and

assert pre-existence; I'm secure enough from their dissatisfaction. For, that the

ethereal Adam could easily sense the most tender touches Upon his passive vehicle,

and so had a clear and full perception of objects, which we since plunged into the

grosser hyle are not at all, or but a little aware of; can be no doubt in their hypothesis.

Nor can there as great a difference be supposed between the senses of eighty, and

those of twenty, between the opticks of the blind bat and peripicacious eagle, as there

was between those pure uneclipsed sensations, and aide of our now-embodyed,

muddied sensitive. Now that the pr-existent Adam could so advantageously form his

vehicle, as to receive better information from the distant objects, than we by the most

helpful telescopes; will be no difficult admission to the friends of the allegory. So that

what may seem a mere hyperbolical, and fanciful display to the sons of the letter; to

the allegorists will be but a defective representation of literal realities.”

That time reversal – in which the ancients become young, and the moderns become old, by analogy to the human organism (with its own tender touches upon its passive vehicle – I am going to stifle the obvious dirty joke here, but surely this is referenced somewhere in Finnegan’s Wake), is a pattern that becomes central to the New Learning’s self image. Newton sees farther because he is seated on the shoulders of giants.

Bernard Bouvier de la Fontenelle, the great popularizer of the new learning, recounts the story of Hartsoecker in his Eloge to the Dutch scholar in 1725. This story makes a strong claim that Hartsoecker was the first to examine human sperm with a microscope. It is a story that brings together onanism and science, shame and discovery, in a truly Adamic flourish.

Hartsoecker was 18 when he built his first microscope, on a model he remembered from seeing Leeuwenhoek's. And he shut himself up in his room, for fear his father would find out what he was doing.

“ … [he was} the first for whom was unveiled the most unexpected spectacle in the world for physicians, even the most bold in speculation : these little animals up to now invisible, which were transformed into pleaop, which swam in prodigious qantities in the liquid appointed to carry them, only in those of males, which have the shape of tadpoles, with big heads and long tails, and lively movements. This strange novelty astonished the observer, who did not dare to speak of it. He even thought that what he saw might be some strange sickness, and he did not follow up on his observation. »

The enduring, fundamental narcissism of the human male! I could make the parallels - the hiding from the father, the shame - but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. I am sure that if this story were abroad in the circles where Fontenelle moved, it was, perhaps, available to Jonathan Swift, who would have loved it – and drawn quite another conclusion than Fontenelle. Hartsoecker has a quality of mind that seems quite… Gulliverian.

If you never have been tempted by a demon or a god

 

“At Pharai in Achaia [a  rite] was practised under the official patronage of Hermes, the market god. In front of the image is a hearth made of stone, with bronze lamps clamped to it with lead. He who would inquire of the god comes at evening and burns incense on the hearth, fills the lamp[s with oil, lights them, lays a coin of the country called a copper on the altar to the right of the image, and whispers his question, whatever it may be, into the ear of the god. Then he stops his ears and leaves the market-place, and when he is gone a little way outside he takes his hands from his ears, and whatever words he hears he regards as an oracle.” - William Halliday Greek Divination (1913)

Overhearing, eavesdropping – I have long thought that these are severely neglected topics in the philosophy of language and literary criticism.  In the Pharai example, the inquirer intentionally overhears. He or she intentionally appropriates the word spoken and applies it to the question asked. But of course that an utterance can be inhabited by a wholly other spirit than that in which it is spoken gives us an eery sense of how the gods operate in the world. There is a great deal of this in the modernist novel. To give just one example that occurs to me right now, this was the sort of thing Evelyn Waugh loved. In Black Mischief,  Basil Seal, making love to Prudence Samson, the daughter of the British envoy to Azania tells her she’s a grand girl and “I’d like to eat you up.” A phrase that the reader is not especially called upon to remember – it is all just lovey-dovey, innit?  Yet, in the final chapter, when Basil attends a dance of the Azanian tribe that has overthrown the Azanian emperor and captured his entourage, including Prudence, he  is treated to a feast at which he asks the headman where the white girl has gone, and the headman responds by rubbing his belly and saying “why here – you and I and the big chiefs have just eaten her.” 

This is the overheard word that is not overheard by the person who speaks it – it is rather commandeered. All of us have surely had those moments when, in the thick of some bad situation, we think back to something we have said without thinking that seems to point to the future mysteriously.

Such is the oracular power of words that are, so to speak, overheard by fate that I often, superstitiously, will knock on wood after making some decisive judgment, like, I am sure I don’t have COVID. What I am certain of has a tendency to vanish in the future. To leave the noise and voices of the market place and go “a little way outside” is the philosopher’s path – from Socrates to Descartes to Nietzsche – and it is only imperfectly imitated by the university. The philosopher, of course, wants to be a scientist, not a superstitious supplicant. Thus, no philosopher that I am aware of has written a tractate on eavesdropping, which is a pity – and a puzzle. Philosophy moved, at some mythical point,  from worshipping at the altar of Athena to worshipping at the altar of Hermes, who overhears and delights in being overheard. A trans deity.

And still a deity. The force of the oracular word has not been slain by the formula or set theory. On the contrary, one of the great evidences of social media is that some phrase, attached to a celebrated name – “said”, most often – is circulated over and over, to the evident satisfaction of the circulators. “God doesn’t play dice, said Einstein.” So, for instance,  we copy this and use it, often with illustrations, and it becomes a kind of evidence, and Einstein becomes a kind of oracle.

But what if the word overheard is not recognized by others as an oracle? What if charisma for me (remember, Weber’s image of charisma is exemplified in Jesus, the man who said: “I say unto you”; the man whose mission was, so to speak, captioned when, as described in Matthew 3:, And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased) is not for thee?  There is a saying for that: “They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.".

When we identify with the voice within we call it thinking. But what if we don’t identify, and the voice comes? Is it eavesdropping? Overhearing? An oracle? A daemon? Or schizophrenia? Myself, I think there is always a bit of schizophrenia, of another voice, lurking within, things "said" in the brain that we do not identify with, flashes in the brainpan, words that answer questions we did not know we were asking.

From Poyen to Hitchcock - for a mesmeric history of the new world

Alexis de Tocqueville landed in America in May, 1831 and spent nine months there; out of that experience he wrote Democracy in America and became famous.

Charles Poyen never quite became famous, and is now utterly forgotten. He came to America by a convoluted journey worthy of a Greek hero – his itinerary was littered with omens, pronounced by somnambulists. He consulted a somnambulist, Madame Villetard, in Paris, looking for a cure for a chronic pain he suffered from. Her remarkable knowledge of his disease- which, we are assured in his memoir, The Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, was not altogether beyond Poyen’s own comprehension, since he was a medical student – led him to ask her about his proposed journey to Guadaloup, where part of his family resided, apparently as plantation owners. Madame Villetard gave her approval, so off our hero went, to convalesce and further explore the mysteries of somnambulism. He did so, using some ‘colored servants’ as subjects, and proving to his own satisfaction that the mesmeric trance touched on something universal: …the human soul was gifted with the same primitive and essential faculties among every nation and under whatever skin, black red or white, it may be concealed.”

Admirable sentiments. However, the somnambulists of Guadaloup predicted that his illness would not resolve itself any time soon, so he set off for New England, where he had relatives. He went to Maine. He went to Lowell. He taught French. And, admiring his new country, he resolved to plunge into its difficulties, writing a book that ‘was calculated to avoid all social commotions and give equal satisfaction to the parties interested.’ This was in the 1830s, and it was to be expected that a plantation owning Frenchman would attack abolitionism – but, of course, not in the meantime defending slavery. Then Poyen turned his hand to translating and lecturing on animal magnetism. Of course, he felt the heat of prejudice – after all, the theory had been exploded by the ‘great Franklin’ fifty years before, alluding to the committee, including Franklin, Bailly, Lavoisier, Thouvet and other notables that investigated Mesmer, under the direction of the royal government in 1784, which concluded that Mesmeric effects were the result of pure suggestion. It was patriotic to disbelieve in animal magnetism. But the enlightenment America of Franklin’s time had disappeared. Paine, coming back to America in 1803, had already written bitter articles about the narrow and bigoted class that had supplanted the enlightened colonial elite. Poyen didn’t find the class particularly bigoted, except, of course, among the establishment medical men.

Poyen was just the kind of enterprising individual that America in the age of the Great Awakening tended to embrace. He had a story of sickness. He had a story of a cure. And the cure was not simply a cure, but a metaphysics, a cosmology, the beginning of a new world. From our diseases we make our discoveries.

Poyen confesses that he himself could not ‘magnetize’, but he quickly found a countryman of his, a Monsieur Bugard, a French teacher, who could. Thus began a practice that was also an exhibit.

It wasn’t that Poyen was the first Mesmerist in America, but he was the first well known Mesmerist missionary. And he had an effect in America that was, in some ways, larger than Tocqueville’s. He attracted a number of New England mechanicals who put down their tools and took up magnetic cures. Among them was a Mr. Phineus Quimby – the very name is like a Jules Verne character! – who heard Poyen lecture in Belfast, Maine, where Quimby worked as a clockmaker. Poyen saw that Quimby was a natural, and Quimby believed him, so like many a disciple, Quimby gave up his former life and embarked on a new one as a healer. Among those Quimby operated upon was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

Between Poyen’s stay in America and Quimby’s own practice, certain parts of the mesmeric doctrine melted away – or rather merged with other intellectual currents in New England. It is no accident that Poyen was attracted to the slavery debate – abolitionism and other social causes – woman’s suffrage, temperance, etc. - and spiritualism were joined at the hip in pre-bellum America. As was the intellectual culture that, for Edgar Allan Poe, was the only ‘aristocracy’ in America.

Poe, in the 1840s, took up mesmerism as a convenient device for producing uncanny effects. It worked – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a fan letter to Poe, mentioned that ‘Valdemar’ had produced a sensation in England. Indeed, it produced a sensation in mesmeric circles in general. The story begins with a pitch perfect reproduction of the tone of the animal magnetism pamphleteer, with its mixture of personal experience and scientific ‘fact’:

“My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine month ago, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:—no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extend, or for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the process. There were other points to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity—the last in especial, from the immensely important character of its consequences.”

Of course, the experiment in magnetic influence is held upon M. Ernest Valdemar – who is, of course, originally a Frenchman now resident in Manhattan. Poe has a lot of his usual fun setting up his joke: Valdemar, skinny and dying, is prevailed upon to allow himself to be subject to the mesmeric influence during his ‘dissolution’. Startlingly, after his death, Valdemar still communicates with the mesmerist:

“… here were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation—as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.

I have spoken both of "sound" and of "voice." I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct, syllabification. M. Valdemar spoke—obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. Now he said:

"Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead."

The story was published as a true account, originally, in England, although Poe didn’t intend it as a hoax. Poe’s own obsession/compulsion was with erotic resurrection. Always a great griever, Poe found a woman who reminded him of his dead wife – one Sarah Helen Whitman. She knew of him from common friends, one of whom had written to her about his ‘uncanny’ ways – ‘the strangest stories are told, and what is more believed, about his mesmeric experiences.’ He had talked to her a total of one time when, in 1848, he received a Valentine from her. That prompted one of his spookiest love letters, an outpouring that even ‘Helen’, as he decided to call her, must have found daunting. This includes this passage:

“Immediately after reading the Valentine, I wished to contrive some mode of acknowledging – without wounding you by seeming directly to acknowledge – my sense – oh, my keen – my exulting – my ecstatic sense of the honour you had conferred on me. To accomplish as I wished it, precisely what I wished, seemed impossible, however; and I was on the point of abandoning the idea, when my eyes fell upon a volume of my own poems; and then the lines I had written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first purely idea love of my soul – to the Helen Stannard of whom I told you – flashed upon my recollection. I turned to them. They expressed all – all that I would have said to you – so fully – so accurately and so exclusively, that a thrill of intense superstition ran at once through my frame.”

A voice at a distance, so gelatinous as to be congealed into dead print. Naturally, Poe's one meeting with Sarah/Helen had led to a walk in the cemetery. The actor being captured by the act - such things always seem to happen to America's outlaw writers.

I do not know how thoroughly Hitchcock knew Poe, but Poe's theme, and the theme of the mesmeric influence of the dead, pervades Vertigo. While another fifties classic - Lolita - toys of course with Poe's fascination with girls. Oh, that male desire for the resurrected femme fatale!

the geography of lost

 

There's the geography of maps, where the objects are a town, a river, a mountain, and then there is the subjective map, where the objects are all object-events: getting lost, coming home, being-in-a-strange-apartment. The subjective map has a very different scale - it measures not inches, miles, or kilometers, but uniqueness and repetitions. For instance, the geography of getting lost depends upon its position in the scale of encounters with a place - getting lost in the same place the second time is a harder thing to do, and eventually, if you keep coming back, you aren't lost at all and the lostness that you once experienced seems like a dream.

There is a vital connection between this dreaminess and adventure. Simmel wrote that adventure cuts itself off from normal life and is recalled as a kind of dream – but what kind? Lostness, I think, is the condition of adventure.
In ordinary life, we often talk about what we are “like”. If I lose, say, my wallet, I may say, I always leave it on the table. In so saying, I’m observing myself anthropologically – this is what the tribe of me is like. It has these rituals, these obsessions, these returning points. At the same time, there are rituals and obsessions I am not so aware of. There are people we know who fall in love, say, with a certain type. From outside, you recognize it. But from inside that lover’s illusion, as you might think it, there is all the difference in the world between x and y. How does this person’s radar pick out these loves? Freud speaks of “fate” in the love life. Of course, fates preside over other things beside the destinies of our libidos. La Bruyere, for instance, outlines the characteristic of a man who is always losing things, bumping into people, misreading signs, mistaking his own house for somebody else's and somebody else's for his own. We might think that this state of confusion, in the extreme, is evidence of some pathological disturbance of the brain. However, there are a number of habits one "falls" into in one's life, resolves not to continue with, and still - falls into again.
Simmel speaks of events and their meanings in themselves and in relationship to the whole of life. Which can also move in the other direction:
“Events which, regarded in themselves, representing simply their own meaning, may be similar to each other, may be, according to their relationship to the whole of life, extremely divergent.”
Simmel’s definition of adventure is on the basis of this relationship of the parts of life to the whole course of life:
“When, of two experiences, each of which offer contents that are not so different from one another, one is felt as an adventure, and the other isn’t – so it is that this difference of relationship to the whole of our live is that by which the one accrues this meaning that is denied to the other. And this is really the form of adventure on the most general level: that it falls out of the connections of life.”
That falling out of the Zusammenhange – the “hanging together” of our life isn’t to be confused, according to Simmel, with all unusual events. One shouldn’t confuse the odd moment with the adventure. Rather, adventure stands against the whole grain of our life. There is a thread that spans our lives – Simmel uses a vocabulary that returns us to the “spinning” of the fates – and unifies it. Adventure follows a different course:
“While it falls out of the connections of our life, it falls – as will be gradually explained – at the same time, within this movemen it becomes a foreign body [ein Fremdkörper]in our existence, which is somehow bound up with the center.
The exterior part [Ausserhalb] is, if even on a great and unusual detour, a form of the inner part. [Innerhalb].”
As always in Simmel, there is a lot of sexy suggestion here, which clouds one’s questions – especially about the latent conflict between a thread spanning a life and a center. One recognizes the logic of the supplement here – an excess in affirming a proposition has the effect of making it less clear, rather than more clear.
Simmel’s ‘proof’ of this theory about adventure is that, when we remember these mutations in our life, they seem dreamlike. Why would the memory set up an equivalence, as it were, between a dream and an adventure? Because it is responding to the logic of the exterior/interior binary. Dreams, which are so exterior to our waking life that we cannot see them as playing any causal role in that life, are so interior that we share them with nobody else. Introjected – Melanie Klein’s word – wasn’t available in 1912 for Simmel, but something similar is going on.
“The more “adventurous” an adventure is, the more purely it satisfies its concept, the “dreamier” it becomes in our memory. And so far does it often distance itself from the central point of the I and the course of the whole of life consolidated around it, that it is easy to think of an adventure as if somebody else had experienced it.”
These traits – which are expressed, Simmel says, in the sharpness of beginning and ending which defines the adventures in our life, as opposed to other episodes – make adventures an “island” in our life. These traits too call up another in the chain of signifiers that are suggested by the dream – that is, the artwork. Adventurers are like artists in that the adventure, like the artwork, lies both outside of and deep within the whole of a life. It lies outside of and deep within from the perspective of memory – while the perspective that unfolds during the course of the adventure is one of presentness – this is why the adventurer is deeply “unhistoric”. That present is neither caused by the past nor oriented towards the future.
Simmel’s adventure concept, as one can see, is akin to lostness. I’d suggest that the most characteristic lostness there is is being lost in a wood. The beginning of the Inferno casts its shadow precisely because the forest represents a certain alienness to human settlement. It is a tree settlement, a bushes settlement, something that arises without human thought or intention, but that is visibly a settlement, a matter of mutual interdependence, something that is, perhaps, beyond us. To be lost in the world is, partly, in my way of conceptualizing it, about giving ourselves up to the strange – and the stranger. The ultimate strangers are non-human coordinating communities – the community of the sea, the community of the mountains, the forests. These strangers are echoed in the strangers, the human ones, where adventure takes its course.
And the moral of all this is Miranda’s:
“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't!”