A sunday meditation on balls

 

There is a tremendous literature about sports in the 20th and 21st century, but really little about the ball. The ball itself. Yet the ball is fascinating. The hardness, the compression of the racket ball balls is satisfying, but I can’t get myself into one of those balls. By contrast, that is what I spent my time trying to do between 11 and 21, playing tennis. I was a steady player, but mediocre. I was paired with another such player on the high school team – not for me the thrill of starting as a single. On the other hand, I was good enough that I could sometimes defeat our single player – not the Swedish ringer, but my buddy, W. – in a match. In tennis, sometimes you have a growth spurt – you play above the level of your play, you get it in a new way, the ball is your second self. But I could never climb to that level and stay there. Not enough dedication. Even so, I knew that when I played well, it was about the ball. The racket, the beautiful racket, followed, obeyed, it was a part of you, but it wasn’t idiosyncratic, it didn’t have a free will, it wasn’t a ball.

It is odd that economists don’t consider the ball. All the activity, the immense labor, that is woven around balls. Because why? Because you want to win, and to win means doing your thing with the ball, which is the thing – the object and the symbol – between you and your opponent.

Balls have evidently been around a long time, but they don’t get the study that, say, coins do. They should, though. Take, for instance, the American football. That ball is grotesque. It is less ball than projectile. If Adorno had had a sportif bone in his flabby kritikdrenched body, he would have recognized the intimacy between the football and Hiroshima. In fact, football is a tremendously interesting game, but it is interesting the way the war in the Pacific, circa 1941-1945, is more interesting than the Thirty years war.

On the other hand, you have the baseball, which is all Renaissance, a thing of beauty that would have been recognized by Alberti or by da Vinci. The stitching and the whiteness and the generally regal bearing of that ball, the great materials it is made of, mystically color the entire game.

When I was a kid, someone – I think Uncle Harry – gave me a baseball on which was inscribed the names of the Baltimore Oriole players from the great 1966 team. Boog Powell, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, etc. Looking back, this was probably a manufactured thing, with those signatures. But the thing about the thing is: we move here from pragmatics to memorabilia. From the sphere of use to the sphere of fetishism. And this has downward effects on our way of thinking of Plato’s heaven of ideas. Myself, I think  we cannot get rid of essences in philosophy, but we find them right before our nose rather than beyond the starry sky. When we try to pluck one and only one particular from the crowd of essences, we pluck it out of one field of use. A wonderful thing about the baseball in Don Delillo’s Underground is that it is literally plucked, or caught, by someone seated in the Dodger’s stadium. It is a magic trick – as all catching of a baseball has a certain magic aura about it. From the essence to the particular – this is the route of humanism as well as magic.

Yet even so – there is the ball – not the individual balls. Oddly, all of these balls are inter-substitutable. One doesn’t play a ball game with the individual ball in mind. There are, of course, balls that are fetishistically claimed – bowling balls, for instance. But mostly the balls are disposable in their very essence. You might try to live on the tennis ball during the game, you might try to clear your mind of everything else, but in the end, you have no affection for the ball qua that particular ball.

…

Children’s encyclopedia’s retail glorious myths about the invention of fire, or of the wheel, or the pully, or bronze – but they never both to imagine the invention of the ball. The ball, in fact, seems part of nature. A pebble, a nut. Yet the ball is surely the very symbol of culture – it is the very symbol of the symbol. In itself, it is nothing. But in play, it becomes more than itself. It starts to mean. It is Victor Turner’s symbolic object, and as such, it defines spaces and limits. It creates a passage, traversing a space that is charged with meaning. But unlike those objects – human beings – who also go through passages, the ball can mean but it can’t express. This, of course, brings us back to the afore mentioned fact that balls do not earn our affection, as say a piece of furniture, a house, a car do. A ball is always being subsumed into the great collective of balls.

…

And that’s it for the Sunday meditation on balls. 

Liner notes by Karen Chamisso

 

There was one song he played I could really feel – Joni Mitchell

 

Little Sheba’s in the under-verse spotlight

Lapdancing for sugar and feels

And there’s this one white American heiress

blown westward in platinum and heels

 

This one white American heiress

Leaving selfies in Vegas and Paris

 

Yes, race, the brunt and burden of it

Is the putty and soul of the American song

And some have to make money working

While others in family trees belong 

 

And there’s this one white American heiress

Leaving selfies in Vegas and Paris

 

The angels ride the browning needles

That are shedding from Grandma’s  Christmas tree

Which is where the lynch rioters ended up

With the usual hot tar and bigotry

 

And that was so long ago

That it might be this morning’s penitentiary

In a number of small towns dying

Save for that old-time punitive luxury

 

Which will never reach out for one white American heiress

As she leaves selfies in Vegas and Paris

Causes and resentments

 

 

What difference does cause make?

The Egyptians and Eastern Mediterranean cultures thought that thinking went on in the heart. There was strong evidence for this: the heart for instance spoke – it beat. Whereas for the Egyptians, nothing came out of the brain exactly.

The Greeks strongly believed, for the most part, in the extramission theory of vision – that miniscule rays issue from the eyes, which is how we see. In a sense, vision is touch – the rays touch the things seen. Even Leonardo da Vinci implies an extramissionist belief in his notebooks. In fact, as was shown in a widely circulated 2002 article by Winer, Cottrell, Gregg, et al., a survey of adult Americans finds that large numbers of adults, among whom are college students, still think something shoots out of the eye that “causes” vision.  When shown a three models of vision, one showing “rays” represented as dotted lines going out of the eye, one showing photons “entering the eye” and one mixing the photons entering the eye with the rays coming out of the eye, from 41 to 60 percent of the adults surveyed preferred the last choice. I’m not sure however if the adults really believed this or thought that if given three choices, one of which mixes up the first two choices, the safest bet is the half of one, half of the other choice. The last refuge of the student who didn’t have time to study the subject.

Until the 17^th century, the majority of physicians in the “Western” world believed that the passions were the result of various humors, usually put at four: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. The animal spirits were the middle men, so to speak, of the humors. Very subtle entities, the animal spirits were produced by the blood in the heart.

We – by which I mean myself and Occidental physicians and most of their patients – no longer believe any of these “cause” stories. By believe I mean that it doesn’t cross your doctors mind to check and see if some subtle vapor formed in the heart is picking up too much black bile, thus causing you to be depressed.

However, if the extreme change in the belief in causes – causes on an intimate scale, causes that helped one define one’s very self, down to thinking thoughts about the very self and feeling “feels” about the self – hasn’t caused any meta-change in the self’s concept of itself, hasn’t a place, so to speak, in the intellectual history of our ordinary life – is this proof that, basically, we don’t have any feelings about cause?

I ask this question because it isn’t often asked by historians. That is, not in this way. One traces the “progress” of science, but one doesn’t ask what effect that progress has on the Da-sein in question.

2.

I admire Carlo Ginzburg for being one of the historians who admits the existence of other disciplines into his historical method – but it astonishes me that he is one of the few who does so. In the anthropology of emotions, there has long been a dialogue over the study of how different cultures express emotions. But this dialogue has to do with the Other – with the “non-Western” peoples who, in the colonialist calendar, are primitive, live in another age – say the stone age – from our hip to the plastic Westerners.

I have long thought – it was the thought that drove my interest in the way happiness became a total social fact in modernity – that we should look to these anthropologists in order to understand the development of that modernity in places like France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.

For instance: Robert I. Levy, in an essay entitled Emotions, Knowing and Culture [1984], proposed two axes for analyzing emotions on the sense making level – that is, not as private experiences, but as experiences that enter into the public domain. On the one hand, he speaks of hyercognition – “Hypercognition involves a kind of shaping, simplifying, selecting, and standardizing, a familiar function of cultural symbols and forms. It involves a kind of making “ordinary” of private understandings.” In contrast to that stands hypocognition – “Hypocognition forces the (first order) understanding into some private mode.” Citing his own work on “sadness” among Tahitians (Levy claims that, while there are words for severe grief and lamentation, there are “no unambiguous terms that represent the concepts of sadness, longing, or loneliness… People would name their condition, where I supposed that [the body signs and] the context called for “sadness” or “depression”, as “feeling troubled” pe’ape’a, the generic term for disturbances, either internal or external;…”) Levy writes that these are some “underschematized emotional domains”, and that these are hypocognized. “One of the consequences of hypocognition is that the felt disturbance, the “troubled feelings,” can be interpreted both by the one who experiences them and by others around him as something other than ‘emotion’. Thus, the troubled feelings that persist too long after the death of a loved one or those that occur after some loss that Tahitian ideology holds to be trivial and easily replaceable are in the village often interpreted as illness or as the harmful effects of a spirit.”

Other anthropologists have named this form of emotional expression “situated”.

Levy’s idea has not, unfortunately, been taken up by intellectual historians. Perhaps this is because one thinks, still, of emotion as being a very intimate and incommunicable state of feeling, which, though perhaps aroused by an external incident, is wholly enveloped within the individual self, much as a tooth ache is felt by the possessor of the tooth and not by the dentist who pulls it. But the affections are not spontaneously invented within us, even if they are, of course, neurologically guided. In fact, one would expect that the kind of epistemic and social ruptures that are thought to constitute the great transformation within the Occident – defined as capitalism, or the industrial or scientific revolution, or the emergence of new encompassing institutions – should present situations that evoke feelings that are ‘underschematized’.

The feeling of cause, for instance, seems underschematized. And yet, much of our schooling is all about schematizing our sense of cause. And in so doing, it alienates us from a sort of idiot sense – a private, but shared, popular sense – of cause.

It is harsh, schooling. The accumulated social feeling about teachers often comes out in reactionary times when the whole process, the learning that one is entirely wrong about almost everything, is revenged.

It is an oddity of the work of Foucault, and of his followers, that though Foucault was very clear about the kind of epistemic rupture that he dates, approximately, to the late 18th and early 19th century, the rupture is not witnessed. On his account, it happens in a sense without any contemporary realizing it. I call this odd in that Foucault thought that he, on the contrary, could very well recognize the ‘end of man’ and the shifts that signaled another epistemic rupture. If we suppose that such things could be witnessed, perhaps the witnesses would struggle with hypo-cognition – perhaps they would not be able to interpret their feelings about what they witnessed, about the new thoughts they thought. Suppose, suppose.

 

 

 

 

 

The sidelined "lefty"

 It is the fate of the people of “lefty” opinions, such as myself, with no particular organizational skills but a buncha thought out and even written down notions, to feel that we generally sit on the sidelines of history. Lefties, during most of the twentieth century, felt like actors, while lefties in the 21st century, even under the best of circumstances, feel like responders. The accidents pile up and the responders can merely sort through the bloody mass of victims – usually at a safe distance. There they are, in the photographs, under this or that bombed building. Here we are. Hi.

As an amateur and mere spectator, I fall under Blake’s dictum, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. During the regnum of SuperBush, the Vulcan spector lauded between 2001 and 2007 for having stupidly allowed 19 hijackers to destroy the WTC and using that springboard as an excuse to fight a long bloody losing war in Afghanistan and a long bloody pointless war in Iraq, I occupied myself, between bouts of political hysteria, with trying to piece together a certain systematic view of the happiness ethos in the Occident – or whatever you want to call the hodgepodge of peasantry, factory workers and owners, and investors in the Western part of the Eurasian continent.

I never got my system all together. But occasionally I revisit it. And feeling the strong chill of a sideline period extending who knows how far since the fascisctoid goofies took command of the D.C. jungle gym, I thought I’d revisit it again. Here is a summary I wrote up a coupla years ago;

In 2007, I was suddenly struck with a vision – or a trifecta of visions. The first vision was that happiness, in Western culture, was a total social fact – the name Marcel Mauss gave to concepts that pervade social relations and social representation in a given culture. Happiness, like mana (the primal power spoken of by Polynesian people, which served as the object of Mauss’s study in The Gift) was located in three conceptual places: as an immediate feeling – I am happy about some x; as a judgement about a whole life or collective institution – for example, in survey questions about whether the respondent is “happy”, which elicits a life judgement – and finally as a social goal against which social systems should be judged – the well-being promised, for instance, by market-oriented economists. This threefold set made me wonder how it was all connected – for these were not simply different definitional aspects of happiness, but truly ontic differences that were, at the same time, understandably linked.

Vision number two was that the happiness culture was built in the early modern era. This was accompanied, or quasi caused, by the beginning of the idea of economic growth – in contradistinction from the older, Malthusian restrained, society of the image of the limited good, and by a change in fundamental family patterns in which, increasingly, males and females married and started their own households, instead of remaining in the paternal house. The destruction of the society of the limited good – the idea that your goods, or luck, take from a restricted common pot - was, as well, the destruction of a larger worldview in which nemesis, or God’s judgment, played a predominant part. The old notion of fortune’s wheel was laid aside in the name of a new notion in which economic activity actually intertwined beneficently – the vices of the rich were the profits of the jeweler and hatmaker, etc. and equilibrium was disconnected from non-growth. The second phenomena, which was first postulated by an obscure scholar named John Hajnal, who proposed, in 1965, that that, in essence, starting with the end of the 16th century, you could draw a line from Trieste to St. Petersburgh and allot two different household formations to each side. On the West, you have what Hajnal came to call the simple household formation, in which one and only one married couple were at the center of the household; in the East, you had what he called a joint household formation, in which two or more related married couples formed the household. Hajnal claimed that in the sixteenth century, the Western type of household was new, and characterized by a demographic shift in which marriage occurred significantly later in life. For women, for instance, the average age moves from 20 to 25. Meanwhile, in the East, the marriage age remained very young, and so a married couple of, basically, teenagers remained in a household with an older couple, usually the husband’s family. This, to me, was a fascinating fact – even if later scholars messed about a bit with the neatness of Hajnal’s theory. What this meant was that a window in biographical time opened up between independence and marriage. For both males and females, that window was something new – it was youth. As it shifted down in the twentieth century, it became adolescence and young adulthood. The effects of this were enormous.

Vision number three was of the effect of combining the treadmill of production, accelerated by technology and the revamping of the social structure, and the happiness culture. That effect was, essentially, to remove the limits on the human. The human limit, once rigidly defined by the gods or necessity, and the scarcity of luck, now expanded to include the world. The world became the instrument for making humans happy. It had no more “rights” than any other instrument.

So, that was the sum of it, and then I got bored. I always get bored, out here on the sidelines.

This spring we're on our own: the end of the cult of the savior billionaire and the battle of Columbia

 

As the revolutionary fevers of the sixties were calming in the seventies, the Right Wing was alarmed by what they took to be the sneaky new strategy of subversion by the New Left, the so called “long march through the institutions”.  The Modern Age, a magazine that was proudly to the right of National Review, published an article by a certain Helmut Schelsky (translated by Edward Shils) in 1974 that laid out the program in the most apocalyptic terms possible: “The unity of “left-wing radicalism” which resides in this consensus regarding strategy embraces the German Communist Party and its university affiliate “Spartakus”, as well as the most diverse anarchist grups, the leadersip of the Young Socialists, as well as important sections of the Young Democrats.” Schelsky’s message was not just for Germans (West Germans, who lived in a country, incidentally, where the Communist party was as illegal as it had been in the 1930s, under the Nazis), but for all defenders of the West. Schelsky puts upfront the fact that the systematic strategy of subverting the system is about “the conquest of the universities and of teacher training colleges…”

Schelsky’s sense of the Long March through the institutions was not exactly an illusion. Indeed, in the seventies, the return of student radicals to graduate programs was a long event. In many ways, the second wave of feminism was nurtured in English departments – to my mind, one of the great triumphs of liberal civilization. Similarly, gay civil rights was an exercise in both the streets and the classrooms.

Although I am quoting an article from 1974, I could be quoting Chris Rulfo in 2023. He even uses the verb conquest in his articles and podcast about how the “radical left conquered everything.” It is a curious thesis – in the year 2023, without a peep from the Democrats or the “radical left”, billionaire wealth surged by 2 trillion dollars. Not, from this “radical leftist”, a banner year in our conquest. But if one keeps in mind that the conquest has a nub of truth – the oppression of women, of gays, of blacks, Hispanics, etc in America was, at the very least, discredited, even if out there in the fields it was still doing its work – and one looks at that surge of wealth for those at the top, it was obvious that the so called “cultural war” – which is really a civil rights struggle, disguised as a struggle against “woke censorship” – was about to take a new turn. The universities and schools simply cannot hold out in their aging liberal sensibility against the massive changes in the composition of wealth not only in America but throughout the “West”. The American liberal cult of the savior “billionaire” – the ex of Bezos, or Bezos himself, or Soros, or some other moneybags – signals that everything has gone wrong. The long march had become a wholly owned subsidiary, in the standard centrist Democratic party narrative, of the “good rich people”.

Thus, the Potemkin villages were easy targets of destruction. Much easier than anybody thought. The news channels, newspapers and universities have been rolling over at speed in a mere three months due to the efforts of the truly stupidest collection of bozos ever to have used the Oval office to sell baseball caps.

When a collective collectively loses its backbone like this, one must look at more than individual vice. The long march of plutocracy through the parties, starting with the Dem surrender to Reaganism, has borne its poisoned fruit.

There is some relief, I suppose, in knowing who you can’t rely on. In this acid test of American democracy, we can see the savior billionaire groupies looking for some win-win figleaf, some way of making retreat and surrender look like the most reasonable thing ever done by a Democratic politico in the gym basement of the Senate building. In other words, we see the sheer comedy and parody on display of the woke-lite brigade. They will, when the cards are down, join the Trumpies.

Tin soldiers and Columbia folding/this spring we’re on our own, to parody an old song.

We are on our own.

 

1917, War, democracy and conscience: on Franz Rosenzweig's Vox Dei

 

1.

Franz Rosenzweig was stationed in Macedonia, in a German unit that was in liaison with the Austro-Hungarian army, in 1917.  In January of that year, his parents sent him Kafka’s The Judgment, which he read and tried to analyse. Over the course of that year, Rosenzweig was very productive: he wrote extensively on the philosophy of politics, and sketches of the thinking that went into Star of Redemption. In one of his letters to his parents (the most oracular letters to one’s parents one can imagine: only an adoring, highly cultivated Central European mother and father could have endured them), Rosenzweig wrote: Truth is a sea into which only he may dive whose heart has a specific gravity greater than “truth”, that is, a heart full of irreducible reality.”

Which I think is a pretty straightforward methodological statement. I can’t imagine what the parents thought. Those parents! Kafka’s, Benjamin’s, Rosenzweig’s!

The essay Vox Dei?, which came out of this period, was first published in the “Little Writings” in 1937. A fuller version was published in the Collected Works in 1984. It has been translated into French. But I cannot find a translation into English. Pity.

Rosenzweig, at this time, was pulled between Zionism, of which he had a vague idea, and the fierce anti-zionism of Hermann Cohen, the most famous Jewish philosopher of the time – who visited Rosenzweig’s parents in 1917. Cohen told Rosenzweig, in listing the deficiencies of Zionism, that the Zionists wanted to be happy. This was a putdown indeed.

Rosenzweig visited with the Sephardic Jews of Greece, and wrote about them to his parents with a mixture of sympathy and condescension. His experience, however, was important to his thinking about community and the meaning of “the people” in political discourse.

Rosenzweig’s friend, Martin Buber, would later develop his political philosophy, vis a vis Zionism, by an extended meditation on the Jews as a nomadic people, and the Jews as a nation, with the latter characterized by the fact that the Jews demanded a King. The relevant passage here is 1 Samuel 8:

4 “So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”

6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

Rosenzweig, in 1917, does not cite this passage in his essay; but he surely knew of it. Thus the irony encoded in the term Vox dei, entitling the essay, and the ending sentence, which quotes the entire phrase: vox Populi, vox Dei.

The subtitle of the essay is: Democracy’s question of conscience. Or in the French translation: the case of conscience in democracy.

The essay is structured around three slogans. The term in German is Schlagwort, and Rosenzweig plays with the meaning of Schlag – a blow. Slogans are blows, necessarily making a point without trailing or incorporating the long course of reflection that stands behind them.

The slogan that he is, perhaps, closest to is at the beginning: Everything for the people, everything by the people. This is, he takes it, the slogan of democracy, of democrats. The problem with it is: what does it mean by the people? The second slogan takes that problem into a reactionary point of view: Everything for the people, nothing by the people. However, Rosenzweig points out, this is not an escape from the problem of the people. Finally, after balancing reaction against democracy (a democracy with an anarchist slogan, as that is where the everything for the people, everything by the people has its root), Rosenzweig considers the middle way: “Everything for the people, everything under the concurrence [Mitwirkung] of the people.” Out of the slogan of the middle way emerges the legislative moment, legitimated not by the monarchical or authoritarian instinct for the people, and not out of the people themselves somehow autonomously self-governing.

Thus, a rather liberal shaping of the problem of the people. Rosenzweig’s next move, however, is rather surprising. It is the introduction of the temporal dimension that defines the people. The people of yesterday, or the day before yesterday? The people of tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow? Or the people defined by the today?

Here Rosenzweig makes an complicated case that requires quoting a long paragraph:

The today is violent in both cases. Its power makes itself felt against the habits and wishes of the practical life of the “people as well as against the history and determination replete souls of the leaders of the people [Volkheit]. These yesterdays and tomorrows, these days before yesterday and days after tomorrow fall as victims of sacrifice to the today in the same manner. All politics is putting into action the claims of today against these. And while the people and the leaders of the people express their will to political action, they declare themselves prepared to sacrifice these resistances to the command of today. Politic proves itself as sacrifice, as self-denial as much for the people as the leaders of the people. Both must throw the whole sum of their being – than what other is the collective of memory and hope – into the melting pot of the moment. The people would love to live its good days in its usual circle, in peaceful development: and the leaders of the people would like to make the living race a ship, that carrying the cargo of the fullness of the past steers towards undiscovered coasts of the future; but the moment calls for something else. It will have its own rights respected and carried out,; nothing, neither human life nor the cultural property of the people, is as valuable to it as death for the fatherland. Thus is compounded in the today the legitimacy [Rechtsgrund] for the whole indivisible state reality of the people in both senses, and opens itself at the same time to the possibility that both kinds after their different concepts of the people in the moment that they step out of their essence into action fall together as one. The sacrifice, that they bring to the moment, the sacrifice of yesterday and tomorrow, and of the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow, is exactly the sacrifice of that which divides them. A naked, pure today, they now both stand before the alter of the mighty goddess, the moment. In the sacrifice is thus realized the union of the people with the state, to which it has an unconditional right.”

Given this reconciliation of opposites in a pure negation that affirms their existence in the moment, both the reactionary and the democrat are led to a paradox – not the liberal “all for the people, all with the concurrence of the people”, but a more tragically paradoxical slogan that accounts for this sacrifice: everything by the people, everything against the people. “Thus are loosened the knots of the polyvalent people concept.”

Opfer – the word I am translating as sacrifice – means, as well, victim. The universal victimhood of the people, in the name and by the hand of the people, is a logic that probably looks a lot more plausible on the corpse strewn fields of battle in the Southern front of the First World War. Yet, there is something powerful about Rosenzweig’s idea as a way of getting us to those corpse strewn fields – or to our own reality of corpse strewn cities shown on a million screens, and always on the “periphery” of states, evil empires in which we as people who want a good day and have memories of good days and hopes for good days in the future have to cope.

“No people want war. And firstly for the simple reason that no people want action, but rather, being.” If being means something as simple as taking all the moments of one’s life as one’s being, then we can perhaps say that no people want, more broadly, sacrifice. But the people live in the State – or as the elders of Israel put it, having a king, like other people have.

Up to this point, we have moved from anarchy to reaction to liberalism to something like de Maistre’s state, or de Sade’s. And if sacrifice is the ultimate and ever present condition of politics, we are, I’d say, good and fucked - that is, Sade’s old fuckers rule. But this is not the whole story of the Voice of God and the Voice of the People. There is, as well, conscience, which is the subtitle of Rosenzweig’s essay, after all.

2.

“Ain’t gonna study war no more” – a verse in a folksong popular in my boyhood – pretty much encapsulates my position vis-à-vis war. When I first heard that song, I had little idea of what nuclear armaments were. I had no notion that somewhere, an ICBM had my name (or at least my part of the world, my bit of the U.S., my Atlanta metro area) inscribed in its program. Of course, it did.

Back in that boyhood, the good old days of the sixties, the Communist tactic was simple and seductive: advancing the program of peace. Peace even penetrated the iron curtain and became a byword among some of the bloodiest “statesmen” of the century, like Nixon and Kissinger. And of course peace for the Soviets was twinned with oppression. But the communists were, I still think, right. Peace is good.

Peace, however, was not such an absolute good to Franz Rosenzweig, writing Vox Dei? In 1917. To a man or woman in a World War, the world seems, indeed, to be a war.  The war seemed to represent some truth about the pre-war world – namely, that the prewar world was not wholly real. It was missing some core.

Vox Dei is supposed to give us some guide to the conscience in a democracy. That’s a good thing to have. It is topical: I am not in a world war, but a world in which institution after institution is collapsing due to force exerted by the stupidest people in the world. People who have so little sense of disguise that they parade their stupidity and ignobility as if it were charming. And institution after institution is showing a complete lack of conscience, which I take to be a sense of integrity, of the worth of their cause such that they would resist, with the utmost effort, the collapse of their collective history as it is embodied in these institutions.

Rosenszweig’s essay, unfortunately, leads us to a certain fascinating point in the understanding of the state and democracy – and then leaves us there. The end of the essay, it must be admitted, is a proto-Spenglerian mess, a tour d’horizon of England, Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary that rises to the level of a newspaper feuilleton – a bad one, one of the one’s victim to Karl Kraus’s cutting judgment. Or to Robert Musil’s, whose criticism of Spengler’s method, style, and anti-scientific method is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

But even given these codicils to reading the essay, it is worth following for its dialectical teasing out of the slogans underlying anarchism, reaction, and liberalism.

Which, to recall yesterday’s little ditty of mine, were: ‘everything for the people, everything by the people’;”everything for the people, nothing by the people’; and ‘everything for the people, everything with the concurrence of the people’. The last slogan is awkward, as awkward as the liberalism it encodes. This is the style of the middle way, and somewhere in that middle way style itself will become suspect – the liberal hates nothing more than a killer prose style. It’s a mutual hatred.

But this is by the by. As my man Musil shows, a killer prose style is no substitute for an awkward but logical argument.

Remember, too, Rosenzweig’s methodology, which recalls Hegel’s remark, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, that you can’t learn to swim on dry land. Rosenzweig imagines himself as the diver into the sea of truth, whose specific gravity – his skin, breath, dreams, etc. – is an actuality that allows him to plunge. Every dive has its deepest point, at which his actuality directs him back up to the surface. The sea itself cannot rise above its surface, cannot breathe – the truth to that extent cannot set itself free.

The deepest point in the dive into political philosophy (I am not going to call this political theology – since I think that phrase is horseshit) is reached when the slogans we are dealing with turn into actualities of state power. It is then that we reach a paradoxical slogan: “everything for the people, everything against the people.”

A man in a war sees the world as a war, and the state as a war formed entity. This is the case with Rosenzweig. He begins to ask about war from the viewpoint of the people: “no people want war.” The folksinger who aint gonna study war no more would say that this is because people basically don’t want to kill each other or be killed. But in Rosenzweig’s view, a view from within a total war, the desire of the people for peace is a desire for inertia – for the ordinary life, with its yesterdays and its tomorrows. The German word “Ruhe”, for peace, is also the word for rest – and it is on that lexical play that Rosenzweig builds his case (even as peace as Ruhe and peace as Frieden uneasily alternate in the essay) It is not that far from Marx’s remarks about rural idiocy. The traditional people are, as it were, encased in a world that is ritually organized. But the state – and the statesman – has discovered something different: a today, a moment [Augenblick] that not only overshadows the yesterday and tomorrow that gives ordinary sense to time – but also demands the sacrifice of that ordinary sense of time.

The goddess Moment  stands in, here, for the introduction of the simultaneous and the contemporary into ordinary life – the introduction of news, the twin of politics. It is to Moment that the politician sacrifices the people for the sake of the people.

In order to do this, the people must be pulled from their being (Sein) into existence (Dasein). Although Rosenzweig is writing in 1917, before Heidegger, this vocabulary was in the air – partly from Hegel, partly from expressionism and the culture of critique, etc. ‘The people do not want to acknowledge [wahrhaben] the moment, because if the moment becomes true for them, Being must be disturbed: it wants to have its ‘peace’, wants the same course of the familiar and the pleasure-borne work in its everyday, its self-satisfaction in the mirror of its holidays, its self-celebration and its vows. The people do not want war. The state does.”

Now comes a curious twist. If the state is lead by people who identify with the people, why would it want what the people don’t want? The twist is overcome here by the transition from Being to Da-sein by way of consciousness. The state, then, makes the people conscious.

Rosenzweig puts this in terms of the word – the state gives the people, or makes the people, conscious of the word. Historically, the state takes on the task of educating the population. The moment, the contemporary, the new, only emerges as a force in an educated population. Underneath that seemingly progressive goal is another one: to get the people to want War.

Just as in the unconscious, everything is desire, so to in the consciousness of the state, everything is war.  “Even peaceful acts are painted in the image of struggle, of conflict, and the equaling out of conflicted strivings, of blow and counter-blow, of the insistent and the resistant, of act and pay-back. It is with such eyes that the statesman views the stockpiling of world-historical tensions.”

So the world looked in 1917. But if the world looks like this, the statesman and the state have a big problem. How to end a war? For the end of the war sees the reversal of the leader of the state and the people. The people now demand the word, they have seized the word, they will have their say.

Thus, the dive. Having dived into the war, the state must come back to the surface. But this is a tricky business.

To my mind, Rosenzweig’s essay, here, goes off the tracks into, as I said above, a proto-Spenglerian look at the powers at war. What is lacking, here, is the conscience. Rosenzweig has viewed the question of democracy through the question of war, but his very terms have disallowed the leap to the other level, which is the question of peace – the question, that is, of conscience. For consciousness of the actual, of the moment, must come, if there is to be peace, if ethics is indeed possible, with the formation of conscience – with the Gewissensfrage which is never put.

 

On the hedgehog

In a famous essay, the Fox and the Hedgehog, Isaiah Berlin creates a taxonomy of thinkers based on a line from Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The thinkers who know one thing are, in Berlin’s view, systematic thinkers. All thought tends to the center, among them, the one big thing that explains the world. The Foxes are anti-systematic. They are essayists, explorers of the intersections of thought and experience, from the scope of which they take it no principle can absorb experience without something stubborn and unabsorbed remaining from that experience – what Thomas Nagel calls the quality of “what it is to be like”…

Now evidently, Berlin is using the hedgehog image as a way into talking about the mindset of certain writers, and in particular, of Tolstoy. Tolstoy has to an extreme degree the fox’s virtue, which is to understand the difference made by experience, by what it is to be like – and he has to an extreme degree the hedgehog’s vice, which is a thirst for the god’s eye view that will not rest until everything has been settled according to some central principle.

However, what gets a little lost here is why Archilochus chose the hedgehog, of all creatures, to represent the systematic viewpoint – if Berlin’s interpretation is right.

There is, perhaps, another way of looking at the hedgehog’s emblematic meaning. In Schlegel’s Fragments – which is, among other thing, a defense of the Fragment as a genre of philosophical knowledge - the hedgehog, Igel in German, reappears – perhaps in some reference to Archilochus’s line:

“A fragment must be like a tiny artwork, wholly sundered from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a hedgehog.”

What Schlegel’s image proposes is not that the one great thing the hedgehog knows absorbs the world – rather, it separates a tiny, particular experience from the world and completes it. The paradoxical stress, here, is between the fragment and perfect or complete closure [in sich selbst vollendet sein]. While Berlin’s does not begin his essay by asking about what it is, in the hedgehog, that leads to the “one big thing’ he knows, Schlegel – whether consciously referencing Archilochus or not – returns to the ethological, or perhaps I should say ethnological, base of the comparison. [After I wrote this, I discovered that Anthony Grafton had been here before me – noticing this echo, too, in an essay on fragments in the classical tradition]

Stephen Gould, writing about Archilochus’s image, quotes Erasmus’s latin translation, which preserved the image in the humanist curicculum: multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. Gould also, rightly, goes to Pliny for some sense of what the hedgehog meant to the ancients. However, Pliny deserves to be quoted at length, for it is in Pliny that we get a sense of the hedgehog figuring in a certain kind of game or work – that of hunting. This aspect is neglected in Gould’s essay.

“When they perceive one hunting of them, they draw their mouths & feet close togither, with all their belly part, where the skin hath a thin down: & no pricks at all to do harme, and so roll themselves as round as a foot-ball, that neither dog nor man can come by any thing but their sharpe-pointed prickles. So soon as they see themselves past all hope to escape, they let their water go and pisse upon themselves. Now this urine of theirs hath a poisonous qualitie to rot their skin and prickles, for which they know well enough that they be chased and taken. And therefore it is a secret and a special pollicie, not to hunt them before they have let their urine go; and then their skin is verie good, for which chiefly they are hunted: otherwise it is naught ever after and so rotten, that it will not hang togither, but fall in peeces: all the pricks shed off, as being putrified, yea although they should escape away from the dogs and live still: and this is the cause that they never bepisse and drench themselves with this pestilent excrement, but in extremitie and utter despaire: for they cannot abide themselves their own urine, of so venimous a qualitie it is, and so hurtfull to their owne bodie; and doe what they can to spare themselves, attending the utmost time of extremitie, insomuch as they are ready to be taken before they do it.”

This habit of the hedgehog – or at least this trait attributed to the hedgehog – puts us closer to the particular knowledge possessed by the hedgehog, in Archilochus’s verse. It is knowledge in a field – the field of hunting – and the hedgehog, far from being the systematic master, is the victim, the object of the chase. The domain of hunting seems to be behind the fables that Archilochus uses as his references – fables now obscure to us, although we still know the stock of them labeled with the name of their supposed author, Aesop.

One of the reasons Berlin poses the question of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and how seriously we are to take it is that he is concerned, as one of the premier Cold War intellectuals, with Marx’s philosophy of history. What he wants to know is whether it is possible to get the hedgehog’s view of history outside of the reification of history – that is, outside of an explanation of causes (attributed to “history’’) that is merely an affirmation of effects. The nineteenth century in which he places Tolstoy was hypnotized by the verb, ‘determine’. That x ‘determines’ y seemed to say something more profound about y’s connection to x than to say x causes y. Determine – in German, Bestimmung – announces a power relationship that quickly slides into myth – the myth of the relation between creator, who shapes, and the creature, who lives within the creator’s lines, the creator’s survey plat.

“History alone – the sum of empirically discoverable data – held the key to the mystery of why

what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century.What is to be done? How should one live? Why are we here?What must we be and do? The study of historical connections and the demand for empirical answers to these proklyatye voprosy1 became fused into one in Tolstoy’s mind, as his early diaries and letters show very vividly.”

Berlin is moving his pieces forward in the essay in broad, easy gestures, which has the advantage of making his essay accessible and interesting, and the disadvantage that comes from refusing to nitpick: that is, gliding over certain philosophically important issues. In particular, the junction of empirical and positivist does a lot of work for Berlin in the essay, even as one has to question its self-evidence. Positivism was not simply about the empirical – it was about progress. It was about a pattern in history that is above the empirical, the scatter of facts. Similarly, the romantic protest against the great anti-metaphysical writers of the eighteenth century was not, as Berlin actually knew, simply a rejection of science. Schlegel was not rejecting science so much as questioning its universal application – the fragment, in Schlegel’s view, presents a sort of monadic block to the statistical method of science. It doesn’t transcend the empirical – far from it. It dwells in the empirical, it weighs down experience with all its force, it presents its ‘bristles’ to the world like a hedgehog. And it does so in the consciousness that it is being hunted. For science, here, is no neutral social mechanism – it is used with definite aims.

One of those aims, as Berlin sees, is to prop up egotism. Tolstoy is a great deflator of egotism, and in this is the heir of the moralistes – of, especially, Pascal. But Pascal does retain the ego, the hateable “I” – and Tolstoy has his doubts. Perhaps in fact egotism precedes the ego: we have a theory of the I that precedes the I. Schlegel’s fragment and Tolstoy’s rage against the illusions on which are propped further illusions – egotism propping the ego – keep company with each other, in as much as the fragment is about its opposite – a perfect self-enclosure, a perfect completion – and the critique of egotism is about the nourishment of this thing that does not exist, the ego. And yet, and yet … something, something is stuffed into that great dark bag that is Ivan Ivanovich’s last terrifying experience on earth…