Some philosophy, lit, and art links

Here's an interesting new-ish journal, nonsite.org, the focus of which seems to be on issues straddling the boundary between philosophy and literary studies. Issue 3 of nonsite has some articles on Wittgenstein. Issue 4 includes Gary Hagberg's reply to 'Wittgenstein on the Face of a Work of Art', which was in Issue 3.

Robert Pasnau has a nice article on 'The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy', Averroës.

From an interview with George Steiner: 'My multilinguism enabled me to teach, and to write After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, and to feel at home everywhere. Every language is an open window on the world. This is in contrast to the grim attachment to roots advocated by someone like Maurice Barrès. Trees have roots; I have legs.'

While poking around looking for on-line stuff by or about Kleist for the previous post, I found this long reflection on Freud's development of the notion of the uncanny by reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman'.

Daniel Johnson reviews a book about  'the Jewish Haute Bourgeoisie of Vienna 1800–1938'.

Miranda Seymour reviews a biography of Stefan Zweig.

I first heard of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach when I was doing some research on Gusto Gräser. I didn't realize, though, that Diefenbach was even more of a wild-man-with-a-prophet's-beard than Gräser was. Strange Flowers has a post on Diefenbach with some neat pics. In the slide show at the bottom of that Diefenbach post, one of the photos shows Diefenbach and several other proto-hippies with flowers in their hair.

Here's the ultimate site for Samuel Johnson's dictionary. 'Pudding: ... A kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs.'

Richard Marshall reviews Stephen Barber's Walls of Berlin.

Cool but creepy photos by Stephen Berkman.

Joan Didion interviewed at the NY Public Library by Sloane Crosley:
 

Kleist on-line, etc.

I hadn't realized that last November was the 200th anniversary of Heinrich von Kleist's death. Deutsche Welle posted a brief video about this anniversary (approx. 5 minutes long). Actually, that last link takes you to the Deutsche Welle site but I can't obtain a link that takes you directly to the Kleist material. There is a search window there, though, and entering 'Kleist' calls up the relevant items.

Tony Miksanek notes the concern in many of Kleist's works with the conflict between fate and freedom. Steven Howe has a look at Kleist's treatment of fate in a lesser known work, The Schroffenstein Family. As Miksanek points out, Kafka was influenced by Kleist's reflections on justice, esp. as presented in Martin Kohlhaas. Indeed, Michael Dirda says that Kleist's 'greatest disciple is undoubtedly Franz Kafka, whose fables of uncertain identity and bureaucratic horror take the Kleistian sensibility to its limits.' Liel Leibovitz adds that 'Kafka devoted one of the only two public talks he gave to reading segments of Kohlhaas, and he confessed that he could not think of the novella “without being moved to tears and enthusiasm”.' For Margaret Soltan, the brilliance of Kafka and Kleist 'is to retain narrators who dwell in the heavenly-harmonic even as the events they tell come from hell.' According to Gertrud Leutenegger, Kleist (like Kafka) combined a disposition to melancholy with a wonderfully odd sense of humour or what Geoffrey O'Brien calls a 'dark hilarity'. While reviewing Günter Blamberger's new German biography of Kleist, Iain Bamforth says that Kleist 'wrote with his back to the wall, a “crisis specialist” in Blamberger’s words.' Mr. Waggish looks at an essay by Kleist on speech and thought.

In addition to the above-linked English translation of Kohlhaas, here's Peter Wortsman's translation of 'The Earthquake in Chile', and here's 'The Beggarwoman of Locarno'. Idris Parry's translation of 'On the Marionette Theatre' is on-line. Finally, here's a short story by Kleist called 'Saint Cecilia; Or, The Power of Music'.

Here are some articles about other authors:

James Gardner writes about Georges Rodenbach's 'Symbolilst novel,' Bruges-La-Morte, as well as about Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer's portrait of Rodenbach.

Michael Dirda reviews Laird M. Easton's edition of Count Harry Kessler's diaries.

Sonya Chung looks back at Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard.

Here's a quotation from an article about the amazing Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 'Over the last academic year, the encyclopedia’s entry on Friedrich Nietzsche was the most accessed—followed by “John Locke,” “Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” “Game Theory,” and “Existence.”'

Michael Hofmann has translated and edited a new collection of Joseph Roth's letters. Joseph Roth, a Life in Letters is being published this month. There's a panel discussion of the book tomorrow (Jan. 10) in NY. Hofmann's introduction is behind a pay-wall at the New York Review of Books. Here's a YouTube clip of Hofmann reading from his own poetry.

From Kleist to Feist:

Central European characters

NPR interviews Richard Rhodes about his new book, Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

'Mann's Inhumanity to Mann': Frederic Raphael reviews Evelyn Juers' House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles. Aaron Thier reviews the same book on Heinrich Mann et al.

An excerpt from Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery. A review of Eco's book by Scott Kelly in the Scotsman, and one by Benjamin Balin in Haaretz: 'Conspiracy theories and intense historical settings are Umberto Eco’s forte, and here he turns his attention to one of history’s most persuasive and destructive false texts - with mixed results.'

'[Rosa] Mayreder’s title alone reads as a challenge to [Otto] Weininger’s ... woman-hating bestseller Geschlecht und Character (1903), a title rendered as Sex and Character in English but that should really be translated as Gender and Character. Mayreder took a position against Weininger in her earlier A Survey of the Woman Problem [c. 1913] as well, a position she developed further in Gender and Culture [1923] to explain misogyny in Western culture as a historical phenomenon which she based on an abhorrence of the body and sexuality that had grown out of Christianity.'

Jiri Travnicek on Brno's literary history (mostly Czech literature post WWII) -- he mentions two stories about his home town by Milan Kundera.

'Had [Czeslaw] Milosz been there, said [Artur Sebastian] Rosman, he might have repeated his claim that his readers don’t “take into account a particular, quite fundamental fact: all my intellectual impulses are religious and in that sense my poetry is religious”.'

From Astra Scheib's interview with Thomas Bernhard: 'I also cannot bear people applauding. Applause - actors are paid in such a way. They earn their money in such a way. I like it when the money from my publisher arrives on my account. But marching music, hosts of applauding people in the theater or in the concert -- I can't bear that. Nothing but disaster follows from applause.'

Thomas Bernhard as a sorcerer in Klaus Gmeiner’s Enchanted Forest (1956)

A great piece on Bernhard from last January by Richard Crary.

No great fan of Bernhard's, Peter Handke is interviewed by Cecilia Dreymüller. (I hadn't realized that Handke converted to the Orthodox Church.)

Iain Bamforth reviews a German biography of Kleist: 'Having locked himself up for a week with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he despaired of the self’s inscrutability – it could only be seen “through green glasses”.'

'The Beastly Péter Nádas: Why you need to read the massive novels of this NSFW Hungarian writer'.

'Angelo Soliman is probably best known in his fictional incarnation as the disgraced African servant boy in The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil’s novel about the end of the Austrian monarchy. Soliman ... arrived in Austria as a slave from western Africa, where he was born in 1721. ... He acted as a soldier and adviser in one princely household and then came to Vienna in 1753 to serve as a valet and tutor in another.'

Franz Cede compares the fall of the Habsburgs to that of the Soviets.

Erratic Schwabinger Otto Gross

"Dear Jung, -- I climbed over the asylum wall and am now in the Hotel X. This is a begging letter. Please send me money for the hotel expenses and also the train fare to Munich. -- Yours Sincerely." (Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psychoanalyst, [p. 164])

This wonderful letter was sent by Otto Gross to Carl Jung shortly after Gross had left Jung's care. Gross was a brilliant young physician (a neurologist who worked with Emil Kraepelin) and early psychoanalyst who conducted many of his analyses in Schwabing's Café Stefanie. He at times resided in the early hippie haven, Monte Verità. In my post on that settlement, I noted its similarity to the 1960's counterculture. One missing element, it seemed, was the experimentation with drugs. Well, it wasn't missing when young Otto arrived. As a physician, he had access to drugs, and he did more than just experiment with them. In fact, among the ills for which Jung was treating him at the Burghölzli clinic were addictions to cocaine and morphine.

Gross' brilliance is attested by Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, who met Gross in Schwabing. Jones says, "[Gross] was the nearest approach to a romantic genius I ever met .... He was my first instructor in the technique of psycho-analysis .... Such penetrative power of divining the inner thoughts of others I was never to see again." (Ibid., pp. 163-4)

Gross was a prototype of the young punk rebel. The focus of his rebellion was the constricting, martial culture of German-speaking central Europe. The point of his rebellion is captured by Sam Whimster and Gottfried Heuer, who say that Gross'

central insight was that it was not fathers alone ... who formed the repressive structure of personality in their children but that instead it was the structure and culture of a patriarchal society that had institutionalized repression in the family. His solution was to call for an expressive and unrestrained sexuality, which the unique conditions of Schwabing had shown to be possible. ('Otto Gross and Else Jaffé and Max Weber', Sam Whimster and Gottfried Heuer, Theory Culture Society [1998] 15: 129) 

Indeed, it was Gross who coined the phrase "sexual revolution" (or its German equivalent).

So, for Otto the political was very personal. This brought him into conflict with Freud, who resisted efforts to link a political program to psychoanalysis.

The fusion of personal and political themes in Gross' life is especially clear in connection with his father, Hans Gross, an influential early criminologist (whose classes Kafka attended). Hans was the very opposite of Otto. Hans thought that 'degenerates' (e.g., vagabonds and revolutionaries -- e.g., his son) who didn't respond to treatment should be sent to Africa. Hans studied and tried to develop more effective forms of incarceration, including the concentration camp.

Karl Valentin

So, it's easy to sympathize with Otto Gross in his conflict with his father. Still, Otto was schizophrenic and did great harm to others. For instance, he was wanted by the police in Switzerland because of his role in the deaths of two women -- one an assisted suicide (Lotte Hattemer in 1906), the other a death by overdose (Sophie Benz in 1910). Also, he took no, or little, responsibility for his four children, as is indicated by the fact that both his sons (born in 1907 to different women) were named 'Peter'. He took no role in their naming.

It seems that Otto, though he meant well, didn't know what 'well' meant. It's not entirely surprising, then, that his father tried to have Otto committed to an institution. Hans succeeded in having Otto arrested in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1913. Otto was sent back to his homeland, Austria, and confined there in asylums at Tulln and Troppau. This father-son conflict became a cause célèbre, prompting Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire (among others) to oppose in print the father's incarceration of the son, an act that became emblematic of a generation's wider conflict with the patriarchy


The battle of the Gross's, père et fils, resonated with Kafka and engendered his generally sympathetic response to Otto Gross' ideas. Indeed, Hartmut Binder and others have claimed that the conflict fed Kafka's conception of The Trial. Still, it's difficult to find evidence of any influence by Gross on Kafka, and some authors deny that there was any (see, e.g., Jennifer E. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros: Otto Gross' Impact on German Expressionist Writers [NY: Peter Lang Publishers Inc., 1983], p. 164).

As was noted (above), Hans Gross was one of Kafka's professors. In fact, according to Martin Green (Mountain of Truth: the Counterculture Begins Ascona, 1900-1920 [Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986], p. 40), "Kafka had sat under Hans Gross for sixteen class hours a week in his fifth, sixth, and seventh semesters of law at Prague University." Shortly after he graduated, Kafka met Otto Gross briefly in 1907 (although only the linked source reports that encounter). Later, in 1917, Kafka and Gross met at least twice, first on a night train from Budapest to Vienna (or from Vienna to Prague -- sources differ here) and later in Prague. Of the meeting on the train, Henrik Jensen says (pdf), "Kafka was with Gross ... listening to his meanderings, afterwards claiming that he had not understood a word. Still, he did see something 'essential' beyond the ridiculous, as he later stated in a letter to Milena Jesenská." Here's an excerpt from Kafka's letter (as quoted in a paper by Gottfried Heuer): 

I have hardly known Otto Gross; but I realised that there was something essential here that at least with its hand reached out of the "ridiculous." The perplexed frame of mind of his friends and relatives (wife, brother-in-law, even the enigmatically silent baby amongst the travelling bags ...) was somewhat reminiscent of the mood of the followers of Christ as they stood below him who was nailed to the cross.

(The 'wife' was actually Gross' mistress, Marianne Kuh, and the 'brother-in-law' was her brother, Anton Kuh.) Later in 1917, Gross met in Prague with Kafka, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and others to discuss a new journal in which Kafka showed interest. It was to have been called the Journal Against the Will to Power. Also, Martin Green reports (Mountain of Truth, p. 40) that Kafka read all of the articles that Gross had published in a journal called Die Aktion. Finally, in 1922, three years after Gross' death, Kafka severely criticized Werfel for casting Gross in a bad light in his play called Schweiger, in which the loathsome character of Dr. Ottokar Grund was made the spokesman for Gross' ideas (according to Peter Stephan Jungk, Franz Werfel [NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990], p. 92).

Im Café by Jeanne Mammen

Otto Gross had direct or indirect connections with many other famous people -- Max Weber, D. H. Lawrence, Gustav Landauer, etc. -- but one of these in particular stood out for me. One of Gross' followers was Heinrich Goesch, who befriended Paul Tillich and (rather more intimately) his wife, Hannah Tillich. (That last link is to an article about his parents by René Tillich -- highly recommended. It even mentions a trip to Lake Ascona, near Monte Verità.) According to Martin Green (Mountain of Truth, p. 192), the Tillichs were receptive to many of Gross' ideas, as mediated by Goesch.

Update (Nov. 27, 2011): In a NY Times review of David Cronenberg's film A Dangerous Method, Otto Gross is described as, "A fellow analyst, sent to Jung by Freud, who turns out to be a feral and charming emanation of pure id, an imp of the Freudian perverse."

Recently sighted shades of central Europe

Adolf Loos (photo by Trude Fleischmann)

From 2003, a long article by Robert von Dassanowsky situating The Sound of Music in its historical context

From last August, John Gray on Elias Canetti's best work of fiction, his autobiography. Here's Geoffrey Hill's poem prompted by one of Canetti's other works, 'On Reading Crowds and Power'.

From last April, a new book on Musil, published by Continuum (and relating his work to recent continental theorists). It's reviewed by David Winters.

Mr. Waggish reflects on a paper by Burton Pike about Musil and language; and reflects on Ernest Gellner's Words and Things.

Daniel Hartley reflects on love in Rilke's Duino Elegies.

I didn't know that Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life while vacationing in Duino.

From A Common Reader, a note on the movie version of Joseph Roth's Legend of the Holy Drinker (which features Rutger Hauer), and a series of posts on Roth's Radetzky March.

From Philosophers Zone, Paul Mendes-Flohr on the work of Martin Buber.

The UNC Press blog has an article on Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation.

Leoš Janáček's Sinfonietta features prominently in Murakami's IQ84.

From the New York Public Library, Edmund de Waal in conversation with Paul Holdengraber:

Franz Hessel

One of the interesting characters from early 20th-Century Schwabing was Franz Hessel, a flaneur and friend of Walter Benjamin's whom Anke Gleber has characterized as 'one of the last representatives of the metropolitan, intellectual bohemian characteristic of the European culture of early modernity.' In his book Weimar Germany: promise and tragedy, Eric D. Weitz quotes extensively from Hessel's writings (and Joseph Roth's) in order to convey a sense of Berlin's street life during the Weimar Republic.

Born in Stettin, Hessel arrived in Munich in 1900 as a law student. He soon changed plans in order to focus on archaeology and philosophy. He also became a poet, a vocation that brought him into contact with Karl Wolfskehl and the members of his circle. (I wonder if he bumped into Frederick Grove.) In this part of Hessel's life, his bohemian credentials were well and truly established by his complicated relationship with Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow, which began in 1903 when he entered a ménage à trois with her and Bogdan von Suchocki. (Here's a photo of the house in which Reventlow and Suchocki lived at the time; it's in Kaulbachstraße in Munich, and here's a photo in which you can see Hessel with Reventlow's son.) Suchocki seems to have been replaced in this arrangement in 1907 by Henri-Pierre Roché, by which time Hessel had moved to Paris.

Roché and Hessel would later maintain a similar relationship with the German journalist, Helen Grund, whom Hessel married in 1913. This ménage became famous as the centrepiece of Roché's novel, Jules et Jim, which was the basis of Francois Truffaut's film of the same name. The character of Jules was based on Hessel. Roché was the basis of Jim, and Catherine ('Kathe' in the novel) was based on Grund.

Hessel wrote his own novel about this relationship, but it doesn't seem to be available in English. In German it's called Alter Mann, while in French it's Le Dernier Voyage. Hessel wrote it in the 1930's, but it was thought to have been lost until it was recovered in 1984.

It looks like Hessel's most important relationships with women were in the context of a ménage à trois. In this setting, Jean-Michel Palmier writes that Hessel 'becomes [women's] confidant, he loves them and admires them at a distance, preferring the role of friend to that of lover.' (Here's the original, French version of Palmier's essay.) Of his relationship with Roché and Grund, Hessel himself (in Alter Mann) said that it 'expanded the habitual scope of friendship and love.'

Franz Hessel volunteered to fight for Germany in WWI. After the war, he worked in Germany for Rowohlt Verlag. It appears that he and his family fled for France relatively late (1938). In 1940, Hessel suffered a stroke while in a detention camp in France. I believe that he was held in that camp (Camp des Milles) before the Germans had control of it, at a time when the French were using it as an internment camp for any Germans and Austrians who happened to be in France. After his release from the camp, Hessel died in January, 1941.

His and Helen's son, Stéphane, fought for the French resistance and became an accomplished diplomat. Here are brief bios of father and son.

Franz Hessel

Consciousness, Buddhism & human nature

Alan Saunders interviews David Chalmers about 'zombies and consciousness'

Does possibility entail conceivability? See the comments for points about Davidson's reliance on this entailment in his argument against the possibility of a language that isn't translatable into our own.

On Philosophy Bites, Frank Jackson is interviewed about 'what Mary knew'

William Seager reviews a posthumous collection of papers by idealist and panpsychist T. L. S. Sprigge (The Importance of Subjectivity: Selected Essays in Metaphysics and Ethics)

Mr. Waggish on Buddhism and Galen Strawson's panpsychism

Pain reduction through meditation? 'The degree of concordance between these studies suggests that meditative practices may indeed reduce pain through a unique neural mechanism, one corresponding to increased attention and reduced evaluative/emotional responses'

From last March, David Weisman on Buddhism's anticipation of key findings in modern neuroscience.

Tim Thornton's neat-looking course, 'Meaning, understanding and explanation'

Adrian Owen's detection of consciousness in people previously thought not to have it (people in vegetative states).

From the Abstract for a paper called 'What is a "mood-congruent" delusion? History and conceptual problems': 'This article investigates the history of the concept of mood-congruent delusions and the problems accompanying this concept. In the late nineteenth century, there were conflicting views regarding the relationship between the contents of an individual’s delusional thought and his/her affective state.'

Edge's 'Master Class' on the science of human nature (with Daniel Kahneman, Michael Gazzaniga, Steven Pinker, etc.).

Unfortunately, Kate's performance is cut off in this clip, so if you want the whole of her song, the original video is on YouTube.