The papers may be taken to reach the following conclusions: 1. Ancient novels provide convincing ways of exploring the challenge of conducting a philosophical life .... 2. Ancient novels offer necessary (Smith) or effective (Fletcher) ways to identify tensions within philosophical theories that abstract analyses may overlook. 3. Ancient novels show that in the Greco-Roman world assessments of philosophical theories often extended beyond the limited confines of philosophical works .... 4. The literary genre of the ancient novel is an excellent vehicle to convey philosophical ideas in more accessible or entertaining ways ....
Zadie Smith on Schopenhauer. I've heard that Tolstoy was into Schopenhauer while writing Anna Karenina. Here's a Schopenhauerian passage from that novel (Rosamund Bartlett's translation):
[Vronsky] soon began to feel that the fulfilment of his desires had given him
no more than a grain of sand from the mountain of happiness he had been
expecting. This fulfilment had shown him the error people invariably
make when they imagine happiness to be the fulfilment of desires. In the
initial period after joining his life to hers and putting on civilian
clothes, he experienced the full delights of freedom in general, which
he had not known before, and also the freedom of love, and he was
content, but not for long. He soon felt desires for desires, and tedium
arising in his soul. Independent of his will, he began grasping at every
passing whim, perceiving it as a desire and a purpose. (Oxford University Press, trans. Rosamund Bartlett [2014], p. 467)
In the latest issue of Philosophy and Literature, Theodore Ziolkowski has a brief item called 'Philosophers into Fiction', in which he documents fictional treatments of philosophers (esp. Heidegger and Wittgenstein). Both Pea Soup and (more recently) Daily Nous have threads on philosophers in fiction (to which I contributed under my tag 'praymont'). Here's another instance: Andre Malraux's novel Man's Fate includes a character based on Bernard Groethuysen (according to p. 292 of a piece by Daniel Gordon in History & Theory 36 [1997]).
From Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993), with Karl Johnson as Ludwig and Tilda Swinton as Lady Ottoline Morrell:
Lady ConstanceMalleson (Colette), an actress and writer who was romantically involved with Bertrand Russell, wrote a roman à clef which featured Russell, Joad, Lady Ottolline Morrell and others. Here's a decoder key for the novel from John Slater's biographical article (in Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies [1975]):
'In fact the book is a very thinly disguised account of her
relationship with Russell. He appears as Don Gregorio
del Orellano,a Cambridge astronomer;... Lady Ottoline is Magdalena, the
Marquesa de Santa Segunda; C.E.M. Joad is
Owen West; Dora Black, Russell's second wife, is Gertrude West; T. S.
Eliot is T. C. Maynard; Clifford Allen is Jevons; and Maurice Elvey, a
director of silent pictures in whose [film] Hindle WakesColette starred, ... is Marcus Beazely.'
'Stanford scholar explores Arabic obsession with language....Key also found that the early scholars benefited from a holistic perspective. The ancients lacked the modern methodological divide between arts and sciences, and so were able to see language as a cognitive function shared between poetry and logic.'
Steven Shapin: 'The new scientism, for all its claims that there is a way science can make you good, shares one crucial sensibility with its opponents: having secularized nature, and sharing in the vocational circumstances of late modern science, the proponents of the new scientism can make no plausible claims to moral superiority, nor even moral specialness.'
Winthrop Pickard Bell: 'Husserl asked his Canadian student to write his dissertation on Royce, and when completed he praised it. ... [Bell] received his degree in 1922. Bell was the first teacher of phenomenology at Harvard from 1922-1927; his students included Dorion Cairns and Charles Hartshorne.' More about Bell:
During the fall of 1921 [Bell] returned to academia and taught philosophy at the University of Toronto and within the same time frame made an application to have his doctorate from Göttingen University re-instated. The formal doctorate was finally issued to Dr. Bell in May of 1922. His tenure in Toronto was to be short-lived and he resigned after the spring semester. In the fall of 1922 he took up teaching in the philosophy department at Harvard University.
Rebecca Suter reviews Matthew Strecher's The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami: 'According to Strecher, the metaphysical realm in Murakami’s work is the place where individual subjects are able to connect to their “inner narrative,” get in touch with their innermost feelings and (re)construct a worldview that is closer to their true self than the false myths or “collective narratives” produced by society.'
John Gray on a ghost story by Walter de la Mare: 'When he encounters the visitor, the traveller realises that "this being, in human likeness, was not of my kind, nor of my reality". ... [W]hat the traveller has experienced leaves him with the suspicion the world that's normally given us through the senses may itself be an illusion. No assurances are given him regarding any other world.'
Censoring Anton Platonov's Soviet surrealism: '“On the surface, Platonov is the least ‘literary’ of writers," [Robert] Chandler said "His language can seem crude, elemental; it has been described as ‘the language that might be spoken by the roots of trees.’ At the same time, however, this language is extraordinarily subtle, packed with the most delicate of puns and allusions.”'
In this next quotation, Tolstoy's describing a military theorist, but his words seem especially apt for some economists of the not so distant past and perhaps even (gasp!) some philosophers. The quoted passage appears in War and Peace (Book 9, Ch. 10); I've used the words in the Pevear & Volokhonskytranslation, although the link is to the older on-line trans. by the Mauds).
Is Japan's own version of War and Peace a 6-volume work about the Russo-Japanese War? Here's Hiroaki Sato: 'I asked a Japanese friend how he would characterize Shiba Ryotaro’s famous historical novel, Clouds Above the Hill. I’ve known its immense popularity, but Shiba had started its newspaper serialization after I left Japan in 1968, and the size of the finished work — six volumes in book form — had daunted me, so I’d never read it. My friend’s reply: “The nation’s favorite book.” Now it’s in English translation, in four large volumes — two of them out, the remaining two to come out later this year.'
Sebald’s subjects in this volume, first published in German in 1998 under the title Logis in einem Landhaus, are the dialectal poet, storyteller and pedagogue Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826); Rousseau; poet and novelist Eduard Mörike (1804-1875); novelist and short story writer Gottfried Keller (1819-1890); novelist Robert Walser (1878-1956) and painter Jan Peter Tripp (1945- ).
Let's introduce a new category: found poetry in novels. I found part of this passage in Blunden's Undertones of War. It has a nice deployment of Heraclitus' image and is taken from 'Night Thoughts' by Edward Young:
Life glides away, Lorenzo, like a brook;
For ever changing, unperceived the change.
In the same brook none ever bathed him twice:
To the same life none ever twice awoke.
We call the brook the same; the same we think
Our life, though still more rapid in its flow; ...
Noga Arikha on Robert Burton's great work: 'Melancholy is an old concept; in ancient Greek, melan means black, and hole is the word for bile. Melancholy literally means black bile: however ancient, we still know what that means.'
I noted that in Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden juxtaposes the pastoral landscape and its wreckage by modern, industrial warfare. He also juxtaposes different time-scales, gliding between the daily minutiae of his army life and larger time-frames that dwarf such mundane events. This is evident from his use of the term 'ancient', which serves usually to cast our view back to the medieval and early modern life of the French churches and towns along the front.
Present events are made to seem even more trivial when Blunden gestures at the vast stretches of nature's prehistory. Take this passage, for instance:
Date yourself 1916, and come, little as you wanted to stir this
afternoon; the autumn day is moody, the ground churned and greasy; leave
Martinsart Wood, and the poor dear platoon scrubbing equipment, coaxing
stray dogs, hunting for canteens and scrawling letters. We cross the
Nab, that sandy sunk road, and, if we are not mad, the ancient
sequestered beauty of an autumn forest haunts there, just over the far
ridge. Aveluy Wood, in thy orisons be all our sins remembered. (Blunden, Undertones of War)
But, as Blunden adds, 'Within, it
is strangely uninhabited.' There is nothing in the Wood that will say prayers ('orisons') or remember him. There, in the Wood, is only indifference to his travails.
Consider the nuances of this next passage, in which Blunden mentions a train schedule from the recent past, something that has been suspended in the present geopolitical crisis:
But here we leave the road, and file along the railway track, which, despite all the incurable entanglements of its telegraph wires, might yet be doing its duty; surely the 2.30 for Albert will come round the bend puffing and clanking in a moment? Below, among mighty trees of golden leaf, and some that lie prone in black channels as primeval saurians, there is a track across the lagooned Ancre. (Blunden, Undertones of War)
The present crisis sends him away from the recent past of train schedules and closer to a prehistoric, and even pre-human, time.
The larger time-frame can be a refuge. When Blunden is dodging enemy fire, his attention is locked within the present instant as he flees into a subterranean shelter. He there finds that 'time-values have changed for a moment from furious haste to geological calm when one enters that earthy cave with its bunk beds, squatting figures under their round helmets, candles stuck longways on the woodwork, ....' (Blunden, Undertones of War)
Blunden's focus is repeatedly expelled from its refuge, cast away from an ancient, other existence of geological calm and back into the violence of the present. As his unit marches back to the front after some R & R, Blunden observes that 'the failing ancient sun shone on the wide and shallow Ancre by Aveluy,
and the green fancy-woodwork of the mill belonged to another century,
indeed another existence, as we crossed the long causeway leading from
the pleasures of rest, and turned along the opposite hillside with its
chalky excavations, old trenches and spaces of surviving meadow-like
green, towards the new arena.' His trajectory from the rest site towards the front is in parallel with the temporal references: from the ancient age of the sun to the more recent century in the mill's past to the still more recent signs ('old trenches') of earlier stages in the War to their next arena.
Hans Blumenberg described our attempts to fend off time's indifference -- its 'eternal silence' -- by using the narratives of myth and history to blanket time with meaning. But what if the present is unbearable? Time's indifference might then seem like solace. Perhaps it appeared so to Blunden, and perhaps he fixated on the indifference by resorting to the larger time-scale of prehistory.
These excerpts from Blunden's book echo an episode in Tolstoy's War and Peace. When Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, up to that moment an enthusiastic soldier, lies injured at the Battle of Austerlitz he gazes at the sky -- 'that lofty, righteous and
kindly sky' (as Tolstoy says). The lofty sky with its ancient sun dwarfs the battlefield. The war now seems pointless, and its great practitioners (or Napoleon at least) are exposed as vain and trivial men.
There are, of course, differences between this episode and the above passages from Blunden's book. After all, a 'kindly' sky can't be wholly indifferent. Still, in both books the traumatized soldier finds succour in a larger perspective from which present crises 'are as nothing'.
I recently read some of ArthurSchopenhauer'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.]
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.
