Some events and quotes from early 1916

February 6: Jan Smuts (future Prime Minister of South Africa) accepts command of a British force, which includes African and Indian soldiers, that is to capture German East Africa. One of Alfred North Whitehead's sons, Thomas North Whitehead (later a professor at Harvard Business School), serves in the east Africa campaign.

February 12: From a letter by Arthur Graeme West:

I got a "Spenser" from T....., and am now travelling through "The Faerie Queen" with the chaste Britomart. Yes, by all means send me "Tom Jones": those long things I can manage very well here, when we are back from the hellish trenches, where I find it hard to read, though I can manage to write letters, more or less.....How bloody people seem to be in England about peace and peace meetings. I suppose they are getting rather Prussian in the country, but are all peace meetings always broken up by soldiers (who've probably never been here at all)? (West, Diary of a Dead Officer, p. 12)

February 23: Étienne Gilson is taken prisoner by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun.

Indian troops at Kut Al Amara

Source of above image.

March 1: An excerpt from Abhi Le Baghdad by Sisir Sarbadhikari, who served with the British Indian forces that were trapped in the Siege of Kut Al Amara (about 100 miles south of Baghdad):

A bombardment started on the morning of March 1....A Gurkha was standing outside his tent, smoking, and the bomb fell near him. For a while there was only smoke and dust. When it cleared we saw only chunks of flesh and bone; the earth around there had turned into blood-soaked mud. (Sisir Sarbadhikari, Abhi Le Baghdad, trans. Amitav Ghosh [Calcutta, 1958], p. 80)

On April 27, three British intelligence agents, including Captain Thomas Edward Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), offered the Ottoman commanders a million pounds' worth of gold in exchange for release of the troops at Kut. The offer was refused. The British Indian forces surrendered to the Ottoman forces on April 29, 1916. At the time, it was the largest surrender of troops that the British had made.

March 1: Benito Mussolini promoted to rank of Corporal. From his recommendation:

For his exemplary activity, high Bersaglieresque spirit and calmness. Always first in every enterprise of work or daring. Heedless of discomforts, zealous and scrupulous in the carrying out of his duties.

March 2: Charles de Gaulle is wounded and captured by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun.

Franz Marc, 'Dreaming Horse' - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

March 4: Artist Franz Marc is killed at the Battle of Verdun. 'In one day at Verdun...7,000 horses were killed by German and French shelling....In one of his last letters before his death, the German painter Franz Marc exclaimed: "The poor horses!"' Shortly after his death, Marc's 1914 paper ('Im Fegefeuer des Krieges') is published with the epigraph 'Im Anfang war die Tat'.

March 8: Edmund Husserl's son Wolfgang Husserl is killed at the Battle of Verdun. In a letter to Hugo Münsterberg, Husserl writes, 'In this conflict, they [young Germans] went to fight in a Fichtean spirit, considering it a holy war, and to offer themselves wholeheartedly in sacrifice to the homeland'. (trans. by me from a French translation of the original German in Marc de Launay's 'Professorenkriegsliteratur' Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, no. 3 [2001]: 83-100 [at 96, n. 47])

March 17: Apollinaire receives a head wound from shrapnel, from which he never recovered. He died in 1918.

Apollinaire

 March 20: From Siegfried Sassoon's letter to Edward Dent:

On 18 March 1916 David Thomas was wounded in the jaw and died the same evening, aged 20: ‘an artery went, & he was choked,—drowned in his own blood....When the parson had finished (& the machine-guns kept making his words inaudible) a big thing fell about 150 yds away & burst with a final smash. And so my Tommy went away, happy and stainless.

-Shortly afterwards, Sassoon writes the poem 'Golgotha'.

March 23: Wittgenstein receives orders that transfer him to the eastern front; he takes with him a copy of the Brothers Karamazov. His diary entry for April 6 is 'Life is one'.

March 24: Spanish composer Enrique Granados Campiña is killed when his ship is sunk by a U-boat.

Late March: Eugene Bullard is seriously injured at the Battle of Verdun. Though American, he had joined the French forces. He was the first African-American military pilot, and he later worked as a club owner and as Louis Armstrong's French interpreter.

Christopher Eccleston reading Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce Et Decorum Est':


Also in March: Arthur Graham West writes a poem called 'Night Patrol'.

April 3: Ernst Toller suffers from shell-shock and is removed from the front at the Battle of Verdun. On April 29, at a hospital near Strasbourg, he is diagnosed as having suffered a complete nervous collapse and is removed from active service. (F. S. L. Schouten, Ernst Toller: an intellectual youth biography, 1893-1918, Ph.D. dissertation, 2007, pp. 108-110)

April 10: After meeting with David Lloyd-George (then Minister of Munitions), Bertrand Russell writes (in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell) that Lloyd-George 'was very unsatisfactory & I think only wanted to exercise his skill in trying to start a process of bargaining.' On April 25, Russell reports to Morrell that

I got the impression that Ll. George expects the war to go on for a long time yet; also that he thinks the whole situation very black. He seemed quite heartless. 

Lloyd George had invited Russell and other members of the No-Conscription Fellowship to meet and discuss the situation of conscientious objectors, some of whom were in a legal position no different from that of deserters (who could be shot).

April 22: Siegfried Sassoon writes a poem called 'Stand-to: Good-Friday morning'.

April 24-30: Lenin attends a conference of the International Socialist Commission in Kienthal, Switzerland.

April 28: In a performance at the Bürgertheater in Vienna, Austrian troops on leave re-enact the March 21st Battle of Uscieczko, which they lost to the Russians. Karl Kraus pillories the event in Die Fackel:

As those up there knelt down to pray before the audience, and as those up there saluted, and the vermin down below cheered them and sang patriotic songs, and stood there side by side in their top hats and tails, it struck him as the most terrible of all contrasts, like an infernal battle between the glory of God and the arguments of the devil, and the anguish for a delirious humanity, mocking its own sacrifice.

Audio of Kraus reading from 'Die letzten Tage der Menschheit'; and of Kraus reading a passage about Verdun.

May11: Physicist Karl Schwarzschild dies from an illness that he caught while serving on the Russian front. Albert Einstein is critical of Schwarzschild for having joined the war effort. In a letter to Michele Besso (on May 14), Einstein writes: 'Schwarzchild ... is a real loss. He would have been a gem, had he been as decent as he was clever.' (quoted from Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin [Bantam Books, 2003], p. 130)

May 12: After meeting with Prime Minister Asquith (on May 11), Bertrand Russell reports to Ottoline Morrell that he is 'immensely encouraged'. Asquith was 'very sympathetic' and seemed 'prepared to exert himself to prevent C. O.'s being shot'. On May 12, Asquith sends a note to General Haig, instructing him not to have conscientious objectors shot for disobeying orders.

May 16: Karl Planck (son of Max Planck) is killed at the Battle of Verdun.

May: Edmund Blunden arrives in France as part of the 11th Royal Sussex Battalion.

Three mistakes in a recent book on Einstein and Bergson

I've seen few philosophical works on the books-of-the-year lists. One of the few is The Physicist and the Philosopher by Jimena Canales. The focus of the book is a dispute between Einstein and Bergson about the nature of time.

I've just bought the book and haven't had time, yet, to read it. However, after skimming some pages I've found three mistakes.

First, on p. 183, Canales says that 'Einstein admired Eddington for refusing to fight during World War I and liked Bertrand Russell, who had been imprisoned for refusing to join the army, for similar reasons'. In fact, Russell was fined in 1916 for writing an anti-war pamphlet, and was imprisoned for six months at the end of the war because he had written that American troops in the UK might be used for breaking strikes.

Secondly, on p. 204, Canales writes that Jacques Maritain 'helped craft' the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the Charter was written after public consultations in 1980 and came into effect in 1982. Maritain died in 1973. I can find no evidence that Maritain contributed to Canada's earlier Bill of Rights (1960).

Thirdly, on p. 205, Canales reports that 'Maritain is known for having coined the word "scientism".' In fact, he isn't known for having coined the word, since it was being used before he used it (in 1910).

Update (Dec. 16): A colleague has informed me that Canales' book is longer than it needs to be (i.e., could do with a good edit) but is worth a read.

Cheer up, Arty! It's your birthday

I recently read some of Arthur Schopenhauer's work. He was a first-rate aphorist who, unfortunately, diluted his pithy wisdom with mediocre metaphysics (a sentiment shared by Isaiah Berlin).

Here's some of George Carlin's wisdom: 'Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.' No one more clearly epitomizes this truth than Schopenhauer. He was 'cynical' in the everyday sense of that term (as opposed to the technical, philosophical sense). Schopenhauer's cynicism was an aspect of his pessimism. He held out no great hope for humankind, which is one reason why he recommended resignation and renunciation -- resign yourself to our collective failure to advance morally beyond our predecessors, resign yourself to the fact that romantic love is generally a cruel joke, etc. etc. and, accordingly, renounce your worldly hopes. Such world-denying pessimism must be grounded in idealism (Carlin's point), for only against the backdrop of very high, ideal standards can such a sweeping condemnation of worldly endeavour make sense. And Schopenhauer was an idealist with a vengeance. He damned the chilly shadow-land of history as forever farcical and, shunning it, sought the perfect luminescence of Plato's ideal forms. Since he eschewed any divine agent of vengeance, Schopenhauer took its expression upon himself. From his disillusion flew the cutting aphorisms.

Schopenhauer set his idealism in a metaphysical nightmare. He tried to bring together Kant's noumenon, the Platonic forms, and the will ... oops (cue the Beethoven) ... the WILL. A volatile mixture, to be sure -- I just hope he had good insurance. Somehow, the really real is supposed to be noumenal (hence beyond time and plurality) and ideal in Plato's sense (also beyond time but apparently plural despite the Form of the Good's best efforts) and volitional (and thus essentially temporal). Moreover, for Schopenhauer, each person's deeds arise from her character. But character, for Schopenhauer, is noumenal, which puts it beyond the reach of causation and, indeed, beyond any application of the principle of sufficient reason. So how can anything 'arise' from it? Also, being noumenal, it admits of no plurality. But then how can there be several characters, each accounting for our diverse acts? Perhaps the really real was also beyond arithmetic. Ah well, whereof one cannot speak ....

[Update (added Feb. 23): The status of Platonic Ideas in Schopenhauer's system is tricky, to say the least. They're the focus of pp. 232-4 of v. 1 of the World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer there says that the Platonic Ideas are beyond any application of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which, in his system, suggests that they're noumenal. Nevertheless, he also says that that the Ideas are essential to an objectification of the will, which suggests that they're phenomenal. The most thorough investigation of this matter that I know of is in a paper by James and Dale Snow: 'Was Schopenhauer an Idealist?' (Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (4) 1991). They conclude that Schopenhauer's 'Platonic' Ideas are meant to be in time; the Ideas are sempiternal rather than eternal.]

Still, the metaphysical train wreck should not detract so much from Schopenhauer's accomplishment. He advanced good criticisms of Kant's ethics (and anticipated some of G. E. M. Anscombe's points) and developed our notion of the unconscious (along with Fichte and Schelling). No other second-rate philosopher (but first-rate aphorist) has had such a profound influence. Among those whom Schopenhauer influenced the most are Wagner, Wittgenstein, Borges, Burckhardt, Turgenev, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Richard Taylor, and Thomas Mann. (Mann wrote an adulatory piece about Schopenhauer in 1938.) And on and on. Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Huysmans had intense Schopenhauer phases but eventually opted for more life-affirming views. And though he denied it, there has long been a suspicion that Freud must have read Schopenhauer earlier in his life. Finally, here's Albert Einstein in 1933 with one of my favourite Shopenhauer quotations:

I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense…. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humour its due.

Schopenhauer was one of the earlier western philosophers to take seriously an eastern philosophical tradition and he was among the first prominent intellectuals to take seriously the ethical status of animals. These advances, together with the list of luminaries who admired Schopenhauer, lead me to suspect that the above metaphysical objections may well derive from misunderstandings on my part. 

Frye, YouTube intelligence, & a new Schrödinger bio

Northrop Frye in 1970: 'All the mass media have a close connection with the centres of social authority, and reflect their anxieties. ... [Such] communication is a one-way street. Wherever we turn, there is that same implacable voice, unctuous, caressing, inhumanly complacent, selling us food, cars, political leaders, culture. ... It is not just the voice we hear that haunts us, but the voice that goes on echoing in our minds, forming habits of speech, our processes of thought.' Of course, the RCMP kept a file on Frye, as they did on Sartre and Tommy Douglas.

From David Winters' review of Marek Bieńczyk's Transparency: 'Nowadays, as with shop windows, seeing through things is what stops us from seeing beyond them.'

Here's a neat new YouTube channel: the Intelligent Channel, which features Richard Belzer's interviews and Paul Holdengräber's new show (in which he interviews Colum McCann, Elizabeth Gilbert, etc.).

'There's nobody who writes better about failure than Thomas Bernhard':


Piece of Monologue quoting Claire Messud on Bernhard: 'Then I picked up The Loser, and was not only mesmerized, and horrified, but felt, also, profoundly spoken to: here was a book — a ranting monologue, more naturally than a novel — obsessing unflinchingly about the things that have always obsessed me. About art, and ambition, and failure, and delusion, and death. It is a book about anger. A book without paragraphs, which in its very form enacts anger. A book prone to wildly long sentences, preposterously violent judgments and enraging constructions.'

From Johns Hopkins University Press, Steven Gimbel has a new book called Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion: 'You cannot understand Einstein's science, Gimbel declares, without knowing the history, religion, and philosophy that influenced it.'

A review of John Gribbin's new biography of Erwin Schrödinger: 'Gribbin’s coup is to trace the origins of what is now called the Many-Worlds Interpretation to a lecture delivered by Schrödinger in Dublin in 1952, some five years before a paper by Hugh Everett more usually credited with the idea.'

Jennifer Egan's 'Book Bag' at Daily Beast.

I made my first Amazon list, in which I listed great non-fiction works that are available on Kindle for less than $20 and that were published between 1970 and 1985 (with one Bill Bryson exception). I focused on books that are accessible to non-specialists and that were produced by good publishers (as opposed to the e-book publishers who sell typo-ridden, public domain works).

The Complete Review rates Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the novel on which the amazing Hitchcock movie was based.


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Gödel, Platonov, Brautigan, Goldstein and more

Kurt Gödel, whom P. D. Smith described as 'an uneasy amalgam of Einstein and Kafka'

Alan Saunders interviews Mark Colyvan on Aussie radio about Gödel. There's also this BBC4 radio interview on Gödel, but I can't get it to play

Can you imagine walking with Gödel and Einstein while they talked about Kant? Ah, but, you see, it is doubtful in our enlightened day that Kant was such a great philosopher after all

Peter Smith's site is the go-to resource for those who want an introduction to Gödel's theorems

Rebecca Goldstein recommends five novels of ideas -- Synchronicity! It so happens that I had just begun reading two of her picks, Herzog and Middlemarch, when I saw this. Herzog is among the many US bestsellers in this impressive database

Here are two reviews of Goldstein's book against God. She also had a book about Gödel, and here she is in dialogue with David Eagleman

And here are two reviews of Jerry Fodor's (and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's) book against some elements of evolutionary theory, presaged by Fodor's 2007 article in the LRB. According to the publisher's page, Noam Chomsky likes this book (which isn't to say that he agrees with its arguments). More here

Here's an Antipodean radio interview of Tzvetan Todorov about his defence of the Enlightenment, and here's John Gray dissecting the saccharine distortions in Todorov's book

Was Andrei Platonov Russia's greatest modern prose stylist? His book Soul was among Elif Batuman's four alternative modern Russian classics

Thomas Bernhard's publisher correspondence

Stephen Mitchelmore on Bernhard, Sebald and M. Amis

Last year, I linked to a spate of posts about Richard Brautigan and now there's been another spate, with pieces by Michelle Quinn, Robert Pincus and Billy Colllins

Fearing anarchy, Hobbes embraced tyranny

Fed up with tyranny, 19th-Century anarchists resorted to terrorism. Here are two reviews of Alex Butterworth's new book on them

Andrew Pessin's book, The God Question, looks like a good introductory text

Diarmid MacCulloch's History of Christianity looks good, too

Seamus Heaney interviewed

Travel stories by poets and novelists

Joseph Epstein on Svevo's novel Zeno's Conscience (ht Books, Inq.)

Literary translators in Germany face funding cuts

"To illustrate just how big this unresolved debt threat has become, [John] Lanchester (along with others) estimated that the total cost of the financial system bailout in the United States is bigger, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the combined cost of the Louisiana Purchase (in 1803, by President Thomas Jefferson), the New Deal (the 1930s), the Marshall Plan (1948-52), the Korean War (1950-53), the Vietnam War (1961-75), the savings and loan crisis (the 1980s), the invasion of Iraq (2003) and the entire NASA program, including the moon landings."

Update (March 15, 2010): WRW on Daniel Medin's TLS review of Robert Walser's The Tanners

Godel's Viennese Hangouts -- Cafes Arkaden, Josephinum and Reichsrat

These two photos are of the building in Vienna in which the Cafe Arkaden was located. It's across the street from the Votivkirche. Today, this space is occupied by the Votiv Cafe.

The Arkaden was patronized by members of the Vienna Circle. Here's a relevant description from Wittgenstein in Vienna by Allan S. Janik and Hans Veigl ([New York: Springer, 1998] p. 188): "[Kurt Godel] sat frequently with [Rudolf] Carnap in this cafe, which was in the arcaded building built in 1883 ... opposite the university's stately old main building. ... We even see in Carnap's notebook: '[...] In the morning Arkadencafe. Discussion: Godel on propositions of language. Feigl, Waismann, [Marcel] Natkin present (30.11.1928).'"

Members of the Vienna Circle also frequented the Cafe Josephinum. I walked right past its old site without realizing it, which is strange since the same building housed one of Godel's apartments, and his old residences in Vienna have plaques indicating his residency. The building is still there, but is now the Hotel Atlanta (address: 33 Wahringerstrasse). In the 1920's this rather plain-looking structure was an apartment building. Among its residents (from October 1927 until July 1928) were the brothers Kurt and Rudolf Godel (according to John Dawson, Jr. in his biography, Kurt Godel [Logical Dilemmas, p. 33]).

The Cafe Josephinum makes an appearance at the beginning of Janna Levin's novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines: "At the centre of the Circle is a circle: a clean, round, white marble tabletop. They select the Cafe Josephinum precisely for this table. ... The first mark is made, an equation applied directly to the tabletop, a slash of black ink across the marble..." (A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, p. 8).

Another hangout for members of the Vienna Circle was the Cafe Reichsrat (also no longer in existence). In this cafe Alfred Tarski met with Godel on the former's visit to Vienna. The Reichsrat is also notable for being the first place where Godel presented some of his incompleteness results. This is according to John W. Dawson, Jr., who writes, "Specifically, on August 26, 1930, Godel met Carnap, Feigl and Waismann at the Cafe Reichsrat in Vienna, where they discussed their travel plans to Konigsberg. Afterward, according to Carnap's [diary] entry for that date, the discussion turned to 'Godel's Entdeckung: Unvollstandigkeit des Systems der PM; Schwierigkeit des Widerspruchsfreiheitbeweises.' Three days later another meeting took place at the same cafe. On that occasion, Carnap noted 'Zuerst [before the arrival of Feigl and Waismann] erzahlt mir Godel von seiner Entdeckungen'" (quoting from Dawson's article, 'The Reception of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems', PSA, vol. 2 (1984): 253-71).

Cafe Reichsrat is hard to locate, partly because the street name has been changed (from Reichsrat to Rathausplatz). According to Matthias Baaz, the old cafe's site is now occupied by the Konditorei Sluka. I wasn't sure about this at first, since the Sluka itself dates from 1891 (it was mentioned in a play by Thomas Bernhard); but it looks like the Sluka expanded at some time into the Cafe Reichsrat's location. Compare this photo of the Reichsrat's door to this picture of the Sluka's patio. The door under the window in the background of the latter shot (towards the right, behind the lamp) appears to be the same door that appears in the old Cafe Reichsrat picture. More pictures of the Sluka are available at Merisi's Vienna For Beginners.

I wonder if Cafe Reichsrat was owned by Walther Mayer. Mayer was a Privatdozent in mathematics at the University of Vienna, and he later moved to Princeton University as Albert Einstein's assistant. Mayer owned a small cafe near the university. According to Maria Rentetzi (in her article 'The City as a Context for Scientific Activity', Endeavour 28 [March, 2004]), Mayer's cafe was across the campus from the Schottentor cafe, which could put it near the Rathaus. However, Retentzi adds that Mayer's cafe was near the Institute for Mathematics, the current location of which is far from the Rathaus.

Update (Aug 23, 2008): The math institute in Vienna seems to have had the same location when the Vienna Circle was meeting. Karl Menger says, "The meeting place of the Schlick Kreis was a rather dingy room on the ground floor of the building in the Boltzmanngasse that housed the mathematical and physical institutes of the University." (quoted from Friedrich Stadler's The Vienna Circle [Springer, 1997], p. 204 -- Stadler's book includes a photo of the entrance to the math seminar room where the Vienna Circle met)

Update (Sept. 11, 2008): I just bought Kurt Godel: Das Album/The Album (Karl Sigmund, John Dawson and Kurt Muhlberger), a bilingual book with many photos of Godel's old haunts, associates, etc. On p. 27 of this book, there is a picture of the interior of Cafe Josephinum, accompanied by the following description: "The ground floor of Godel's apartment house was occupied by the Cafe Josephinum, which was frequented by students and academics and hosted the post mortem discussions following scientific talks." The authors add that in addition to this cafe, members of the Vienna Circle liked to visit the Arkaden, the Reichsrat, Cafe Central and Cafe Herrenhof. The book also includes a picture of the Reichsrat's main doorway (to which I linked above) on p. 32.

Update (July 24, 2014): I was wrong about the Reichsrat's location. Richard Zach has found its place.