Stendhal’s Passages on Battle of Waterloo

The passages on the battle of Waterloo, narrated from the perspective of the young Italian aristocrat Fabrizio Del Dongo who is in search of his life’s purpose, are the most interesting elements in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. Fabrizio is an idealist, he is inspired by Napoleon, but he is untrained in the arts of war. He tries to be brave in the front, but instead of displaying valor he ends up getting drunk and sleeping through much of the battle.

Here’s an excerpt from Stendhal’s battle of Waterloo scene:

But the din at that moment became so terrific that Fabrizio could not answer him. We must admit that our hero was very little of a hero at that moment. However, fear came to him only as a secondary consideration; he was principally shocked by the noise, which hurt his ears. The escort broke into a gallop; they crossed a large batch of tilled land which lay beyond the canal. And this field was strewn with dead.

“Red-coats! red-coats!” the hussars of the escort exclaimed joyfully, and at first Fabrizio did not understand; then he noticed that as a matter of fact almost all these bodies wore red uniforms. One detail made him shudder with horror; he observed that many of these unfortunate red-coats were still alive; they were calling out, evidently asking for help, and no one stopped to give it them. Our hero, being most humane, took every possible care that his horse should not tread upon any of the red-coats. The escort halted; Fabrizio, who was not paying sufficient attention to his military duty, galloped on, his eyes fixed on a wounded wretch in front of him.

“Will you halt, you young fool!” the serjeant shouted after him. Fabrizio discovered that he was twenty paces on the generals’ right front, and precisely in the direction in which they were gazing through their glasses. As he came back to take his place behind the other hussars, who had halted a few paces in rear of them, he noticed the biggest of these generals, who was speaking to his neighbour, a general also, in a tone of authority and almost of reprimand; he was swearing. Fabrizio could not contain his curiosity; and, in spite of the warning not to speak, given him by his friend the gaoler’s wife, he composed a short sentence in good French, quite correct, and said to his neighbour:

“Who is that general who is chewing up the one next to him?”

“Gad, it’s the Marshal!”

“What Marshal?”

“Marshal Ney, you fool! I say, where have you been serving?”

Fabrizio, although highly susceptible, had no thought of resenting this insult; he was studying, lost in childish admiration, the famous Prince de la Moskowa, the “Bravest of the Brave.”

Suddenly they all moved off at full gallop. A few minutes later Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead of him, a ploughed field the surface of which was moving in a singular fashion. The furrows were full of water and the soil, very damp, which formed the ridges between these furrows kept flying off in little black lumps three or four feet into the air. Fabrizio noticed as he passed this curious effect; then his thoughts turned to dreaming of the Marshal and his glory. He heard a sharp cry close to him; two hussars fell struck by shot; and, when he looked back at them, they were already twenty paces behind the escort. What seemed to him horrible was a horse streaming with blood that was struggling on the ploughed land, its hooves caught in its own entrails; it was trying to follow the others: its blood ran down into the mire.

“Ah! So I am under fire at last!” he said to himself. “I have seen shots fired!” he repeated with a sense of satisfaction. “Now I am a real soldier.” At that moment, the escort began to go hell for leather, and our hero realised that it was shot from the guns that was making the earth fly up all round him. He looked vainly in the direction from which the balls were coming, he saw the white smoke of the battery at an enormous distance, and, in the thick of the steady and continuous rumble produced by the artillery fire, he seemed to hear shots discharged much closer at hand: he could not understand in the least what was happening.

Maimon’s Acrimonious Correspondence With Reinhold

Maimon; Reinhold

Karl Leonhard Reinhold received a copy of Salomon Maimon’s book on Kantian philosophy Worterbuch der Philosophie in 1791 through a mutual friend K. P. Moritz, and he promised to review the book and also expressed a willingness to get into correspondence with Maimon. As Reinhold was the foremost Kantian scholar of that period, Maimon, eager to prove his superior understanding of Kant, immediately wrote to him. But their correspondence did not go well; it quickly deteriorated into an acrimonious exchange in which the two Kantians disagree over a number of issues.

Their correspondence has been described by Frederick C. Beiser, in his essay “Maimon’s Critical Philosophy” (Chapter 10; The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte). Here’s an excerpt:

Maimon and Reinhold's acrimonious correspondence ranges over a number of issues, but perhaps the most important concerns the justification of Reinhold's first principle, the proposition of consciousness. In his opening letter Maimon bluntly tells Reinhold that this principle is vulnerable to skepticism. It cannot answer the simple skeptical question 'How do I know this?' he claims. Of course, this principle is supposed to describe 'a fact of consciousness'. "But," Maimon asks Reinhold, "how do you know that it describes a fact? ... And, indeed, how do you know that it describes a primary and immediate fact rather than a derived and mediate one?"  

Reinhold's response to these aggressive and difficult questions did not satisfy Maimon, who quickly insinuated that his correspondent was being deliberately evasive. In his first reply Reinhold proudly states that his first principle could demonstrate the fundamental beliefs of morality and religion. "But that is not the question," Maimon impatiently answers. "The issue is not whether this principle can demonstrate others, but whether it is true." Reinhold seemed to be forgetting that we might deduce true propositions from false premises. After further attempts by Maimon to pin him down, Reinhold finally states his bottom line: "All philosophy must begin with self-evident facts," he writes, "and these are indemonstrable since they are the basis of all demonstration.” But this stance only increased Maimon's exasperation. He again protests that this was not the point. "Of course all philosophy must begin with self-evident facts," he concedes, "but the question is how we know the principle of consciousness expresses such a fact." In the end the debate reached a stalemate. Reinhold assured Maimon that it was just a fact that the proposition of consciousness expresses a fact; and he pleaded that it would be self-defeating for him to justify this. But Maimon dug in his heels and refused to accept Reinhold's assurances, which he regarded as dogmatic. 

With the conservation having degenerated into mutual recrimination, in a fit of anger Maimon published their conversation (with Reinhold’s permission), leaving the public to decide who was right and who was wrong. They broke off their correspondence, but Maimon did not stop thinking about the difference between his philosophical position and that of Reinhold. In his later works, he further clarified his views and accused Reinhold of being dogmatic.

Marcel Proust’s Reminiscences of a Church

In Swann’s Way, (Chapter 2: “Combray”), Marcel Proust reflects on a church from the narrator’s youth in a beautiful sentence of 432 words:

All these things and, still more than these, the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people’s supernatural passage — all these things made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space — the name of the fourth being Time — which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where, near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat’s wing of stone, Théodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert’s little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, “by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way.”

Maimon’s Critical Commentary on Kantian Philosophy

Salomon Maimon

In April 1789, Immanuel Kant received a large manuscript from his old student and friend Marcus Herz. The manuscript was a critical commentary of Kant’s first Critique written by Salomon Maimon.

Frederick C. Beiser, in his essay “Maimon’s Critical Philosophy” (Chapter 10; The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte) says that “Kant, who was sixty-six, in failing health, and eager to finish the third Kritik, nearly returned the parcel, citing his age and health as an excuse. After a glance, however, he was so convinced of the quality of the manuscript that he felt compelled to read through several sections and to write a lengthy reply.”

In his May 26, 1789, letter to Hertz, Kant gave this verdict on Maimon’s manuscript: "... but a glance soon enabled me to recognize its merits and to see not only that none of my opponents had understood me so well, but that very few could claim so much penetration and subtlety of mind in profound inquiries of this sort.”

Here’s Beiser’s description of Maimon:

The author of this strange manuscript was himself a very strange character. A Polish-Russian Jew, in fact, a rabbi, he came from the most humble circumstances and was then leading a precarious existence in Berlin. Having never received a university education, his only philosophical training came from the Talmudic tradition. His native language was an almost incomprehensible combination of Hebrew, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and Polish, so that upon his arrival in Berlin only such a skilled linguist as Mendelssohn could understand him. His life had been a long tale of woe: he had lived in constant poverty; he had a broken marriage behind him; he was exiled from his community because of his unorthodoxy; and for several years he was even a wandering beggar. Understandably, he was a man of few social graces. He was crude, naive, and simple, and frequently embarrassingly outspoken in expressing his radical views. Since he often drank away his misery, he spent most of his time in taverns, where he would write his philosophy on wobbly tables, and where anyone could buy his amusing conversation for a few drinks. In short, this character was the Rameau's nephew of eighteenth-century Berlin. But we must not forget: he was also the man whom Kant regarded as his best critic. This was Salomon ben Joshua, or as he liked to call himself in honor of Moses Maimonides, the twelfth-century Spanish-Jewish philosopher, Salomon Maimon. 

On Maimon’s contribution to Kantian philosophy, Beiser says:

Just as Kant was awakened by Hume's skepticism, so Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were challenged by Maimon's skepticism. What shook them out of their Kantian slumbers was Maimon's attack upon the transcendental deduction. According to Maimon, the central question behind the deduction—How do synthetic a priori concepts apply to experience?—could not be resolved on Kantian premises. Kant had created such an unbridgeable dualism between understanding and sensibility that it became impossible for synthetic a priori concepts to correspond to experience. This argument created a new and daunting task for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel: to find a more plausible solution to the problem of the deduction. Like Kant, they were eager to defend the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge; but they had to admit Maimon's point that such knowledge is not possible given Kant's dualism.

In his essay Beiser shows that there is some kind of coherence in Maimon’s philosophical thought. He credits Maimon with developing a critical middle path between skepticism and dogmatism, even though Maimon did not carefully articulate his pivotal ideas. The task of developing the full implications of Maimon’s thought fell on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Maimon’s great successor.

Maxim Gorky’s Notes on Lev Tolstoy

Tolstoy with Gorky (1900)

Lev Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky met frequently when the former was living in Oleise and the latter was living in Gaspra, in the Crimea. Gorky made some notes of their interactions on scraps of paper which have been bound together in a book called Reminiscences of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.

Gorky’s notes have great merit as was jotting them down for his personal use,  and he had no reason to develop a false narrative of any kind or embellish his conversations with Tolstoy. He offers a convincing picture of Tolstoy’s bearing, inner thoughts, and habits.

To Gorky, Tolstoy was almost a God, not the God of Greece or Judea, but a Russian God. In one of the notes, Gorky writes:  “He is like a god, not a Sabaoth or Olympian, but the kind of Russian god who "sits on a maple throne under a golden lime tree," not very majestic, but perhaps more cunning than all the other gods.”

In the same note, Gorky praises Tolstoy’s hands and speculates if Leonardo da Vinci too had such hands: “He has wonderful hands—not beautiful, but knotted with swollen veins, and yet full of a singular expressiveness and the power of creativeness.  Probably Leonardo da Vinci had hands like that.  With such hands one can do anything.  Sometimes, when talking, he will move his fingers, gradually close them into a fist, and then, suddenly opening them, utter a good, full-weight word.”

Here’s an entry from the book in which Tolstoy is talking about Dickens and Balzac:

“Dickens said a very clever thing: ‘Life is given to us on the definite understanding that we boldly defend it to the last.’ On the whole, he was a sentimental, loquacious, and not very clever writer, but he knew how to construct a novel as no one else could, certainly better than Balzac. Some one has said: ‘Many are possessed by the passion for writing books, but few are ashamed of them afterwards.’ Balzac was not ashamed, nor was Dickens, and both of them wrote quite a number of bad books. Still, Balzac is a genius. Or at any rate, the thing which you can only call genius…”

Marcel Proust’s 960 Word Marathon

Marcel Proust’s 7-volume novel In Search Of Lost Time (sometimes translated as Remembrance of Things Past) has several sentences of more than 200 words. The long sentences demand extra attention from the reader, but the effort is worth it as you get the chance to appreciate the literary skill with which Proust describes, through a single sentence, the multiple aspects of something. The long sentences can be broken up into 10 or more shorter sentences, but then the beauty of the novel will be lost.

In Swann’s Way (Volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time), the longest sentence of 601 words occurs in the opening section of the first chapter, “Overture”:

But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold — or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam — or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling.

But the longest sentence in the 7-volume set is of 960 words. It appears in the Introduction of Volume 4 In Search Of Lost—Sodom and Gomorrah (sometimes translated as Cities of the Plain):

Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy — at times from the society — of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.

Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre

Marcel Proust

Jean-Paul Sartre was an admirer of Marcel Proust’s literature. He saw Proust as not only a great fiction writer but also as a philosopher of subjective mental experience and its corollaries, such as consciousness and identity.

In his Being and Nothingness, Sartre makes several references to Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past. I think the most interesting reference is on pages 168—169 where Sartre offers his perspective on the following passage from Swann’s Way (Remembrances of Things Past; Volume 1; Chapter 3: “Swann in Love”):

For the moment that Swann was able to form a picture of her without revulsion, that he could see once again the friendliness in her smile, and that the desire to tear her away from every rival was no longer imposed by his jealousy upon his love, that love once again became, more than anything, a taste for the sensations which Odette’s person gave him, for the pleasure which he found in admiring, as one might a spectacle, or in questioning, as one might a phenomenon, the birth of one of her glances, the formation of one of her smiles, the utterance of an intonation of her voice. And this pleasure, different from every other, had in the end created in him a need of her, which she alone, by her presence or by her letters, could assuage, almost as disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse as another need which characterised this new period in Swann’s life, when the sereness, the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a sort of spiritual superabundance, without his knowing to what he owed this unlooked-for enrichment of his life, any more than a person in delicate health who from a certain moment grows stronger, puts on flesh, and seems for a time to be on the road to a complete recovery:— this other need, which, too, developed in him independently of the visible, material world, was the need to listen to music and to learn to know it.

Here’s Sartre’s analysis of the above passage:

This passage is obviously concerned with the psychic. We see feelings which, individualized and separated by nature, are here acting one on the other. But Proust is trying to clarify their actions and to classify them in the hope that he may thereby make understandable the fluctuations which Swann experiences. Proust does not limit himself to describing the conclusions which he himself has been able to make (e.g., the transition through "oscillation" from hate-filled jealousy to tender love); he wants to explain these findings. 

What are the results of this analysis? Is the unintelligibility of the psy­chic removed? It is easy to see that on the contrary this somewhat arbi­trary reduction of the great psychic forms to more simple elements ac­centuates the magic irrationality of the interrelations which psychic objects support. How does jealousy "add" to love the "desire to take her away from everyone else?" And how does this desire once added to love (always the image of the cloud of cream "added" to the coffee) prevent it from becoming again "a taste for the sensations which Odette's person gave him?" And how can the pleasure create a need? And how does love manufacture that jealousy which in return will add to love the desire to take Odette away from everyone else? And how when freed from this desire, is it going to manufacture tenderness anew? Proust here attempts to constitute a symbolic chemistry, but the chemical images which he uses are capable only of disguising the motivations and irrational acts. It is an attempt to draw us toward a mechanistic interpretation of the psychic which, without being any more intelligible, would com­pletely distort its nature. And yet Proust cannot keep from showing us between the estranged states almost interhuman relations (to create, to manufacture, to add), which would almost allow us to suppose that these psychic objects are animated agents. In his descriptions the intellectualis­tic analysis shows its limitations at every instant; it can effect its dis­tinctions and its classifications only superficially and on the basis of total irrationality. It is necessary to give up trying to reduce the irrational ele­ment in psychic causality. This causality is a degradation of the ekstatic for-itself, which is its own being at a distance from itself, its degradation into magic, into an in-itself which is what it is at its own place. Magic action through influence at a distance is the necessary result of this re­ laxation of the bonds of being. The psychologist must describe these ir­rational bonds and take them as an original given of the psychic world.

On page 366, Sartre talks about the relationship between Albertine Simonet (who first makes an appearance in Remembrances of Things Past, Volume 2, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) and the narrator in Proust’s novel, who is Proust himself. Sartre writes:

If Love were in fact a pure desire for physical posses­sion, it could in many cases be easily satisfied. Proust's hero, for example, who installs his mistress in his home, who can see her and possess her at any hour of the day, who has been able to make her completely dependent on him economically, ought to be free from worry. Yet we know that he is, on the contrary, continually gnawed by anxiety. Through her consciousness Albertine escapes Marcel even when he is at her side, and that is why he knows relief only when he gazes on her while she sleeps. It is cer­tain then that the lover wishes to capture a "consciousness." But why does he wish it? And how?


Sartre is full of praise for Proust’s literature. In his Introduction to Being and Nothingness, titled “The Pursuit of Being,” Sartre says: “The genius of Proust is neither the work considered in isolation nor the subjective ability to produce it; it is the work considered as the totality of the manifestations of the person.” There are references to Proust’s work in 13 pages of Being and Nothingness.

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

I read Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s seven volume novel Remembrances of Things Past, about five years ago. Then I could not make an investment of time and attention that is required for reading the entire set of seven volumes (which consists of about 3000 pages). Now I am seriously thinking of finishing the six volumes that I couldn’t read earlier.

The title of Proust’s novel is inspired by the Shakespearean sonnet: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought; I summon up remembrance of things past.” Proust loved music, and the first chapter of Swann’s Way, titled “Overture,” is designed to serve as an introduction to the drama that follows in rest of the opera (in this case the novel). “Overture” ends with the famous madeleine scene in which the narrator (Proust) offers a perspective on involuntary memory which contains the essence of the past.

Here’s an excerpt:

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. 

And once I had recognised the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

In the above scene the involuntary memory of the narrator comes back while he is eating tea soaked madeleine, and he finds himself reminiscing the time from his childhood when he used to eat tea soaked madeleine with his aunt.

Giordano Bruno’s Bad Experience at Oxford

Stature of Bruno, Rome

Giordano Bruno went to England in April 1583 with royal letters of recommendation to the French Ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau, Marquis de Mauvissièr. Before he had settled down in the home of the ambassador, he was invited to participate in a discussion at the Oxford University. The results were disastrous.

In Go To Oxford, Bruno offers his perspective on the kind of discussion that he had with the Oxford intellectuals. Here’s an excerpt:

and let them recount to you what happened there to the Nolan when he disputed publicly with those doctors of theology in the presence of the Polish prince Alasco [sic] and others of the English nobility. Would you hear how they were able to reply to his arguments? How fifteen times, by means of fifteen syllogisms, a poor doctor whom on this solemn occasion they had put forward as a very Corypheus of the Academy, was left standing like a chick entangled in tow? Would you learn with what incivility and discourtesy that pig comported himself, and the patience and humanity of him who shewed himself to be born a Neapolitan and nurtured under a more benign sky? Are you informed how they closed his public lectures, both those on the Immortality of the Soul and on the Five-fold Sphere?

“The Pig” that Bruno talks about is Doctor John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and Chaplain to Her Majesty. But in the archives of Oxford there is no record of Bruno’s visit to the university. This is probably because his visit did not create any significant impression on the officials there. Bruno also tried to seek a teaching position at Oxford, but was unsuccessful.

In his Explanation of the Thirty Seals, published in London in 1583, there is brief letter which he wrote a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. In the letter he asserts that his philosophical claims are right and those who reject him are propagators of folly and hypocrites. “[Bruno] whom only propagators of folly and hypocrites detest, whom the honourable and studious love, whom noble minds applaud."

Mordechai Feingold, in his essay, “The occult tradition in the English universities of the Renaissance: a reassessment,” says that "Both admirers and critics of Giordano Bruno basically agree that he was pompous and arrogant, highly valuing his opinions and showing little patience with anyone who even mildly disagreed with him.” Feingold also notes that the cause behind Bruno's bad experience at Oxford “might have been his manner, his language and his self-assertiveness, rather than his ideas.”

The Translation of Corpus Hermeticum

The Hermetica is reputed to contain the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (the thrice born Hermes), who is associated with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, and is regarded as the scribe of the gods, the inventor of writing, and the patron of all the arts.

Several philosophers, including Augustine of Hippo, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno have written about the legend and philosophy of Hermes. Cicero in his De Natura Deorum says that there were five deities named Hermes. The fifth Hermes killed Argus and consequently fled to Egypt where he gave to the Egyptians their laws and letters, and took the Egyptian name Thoth.

The Greek literature under the name of Hermes Trismegistus is concerned mainly with theology, astrology, astral magic, and occult sciences. But there has also developed a philosophical literature under the name of Hermes Trismegistus. The Corpus Hermeticum is one of the most important philosophical Hermetica to come down to us. It is thought to have been composed between the 1st and the 3rd century A.D.

Frances A. Yates in her book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, (Chapter 1, “Hermes Trismegistus”), offers a description of how the Corpus Hermeticum was translated by Marsilio Ficino, working under the instruction of Cosimo de' Medici, in the 15th century. Here’s an excerpt:

About 1460, a Greek manuscript was brought to Florence from Macedonia by a monk, one of those many agents employed by Cosimo de' Medici to collect manuscripts for him. It contained a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum, not quite a complete copy, for it included fourteen only of the fifteen treatises of the collection, the last one being missing. Though the Plato manuscripts were already assembled, awaiting translation, Cosimo ordered Ficino to put these aside and to translate the work of Hermes Trismegistus at once, before embarking on the Greek philosophers. It is Ficino himself who tells us this, in that dedication to Lorenzo de' Medici of the Plotinus commentaries in which he describes the impetus given to Greek studies by the coming of Gemistus Pletho and other Byzantine scholars to the Council of Florence, and how he himself was commissioned by Cosimo to translate the treasures of Greek philosophy now coming into the West from Byzantium. Cosimo, he says, had handed over to him the works of Plato for translation. But in the year 1463 word came to Ficino from Cosimo that he must translate Hermes first, at once, and go on afterwards to Plato; "mihi Mercurium primo Termaximum, mox Platonem mandavit interpretandum". Ficino made the translation in a few months, whilst the old Cosimo, who died in 1464, was still alive. Then he began on Plato.  

It is an extraordinary situation. There are the complete works of Plato, waiting, and they must wait whilst Ficino quickly translates Hermes, probably because Cosimo wants to read him before he dies. What a testimony this is to the mysterious reputation of the Thrice Great One! Cosimo and Ficino knew from the Fathers that Hermes Trismegistus was much earlier than Plato.

Yates points out that Ficino translated Corpus Hermeticum first because Hermes came earlier than Plato:

Renaissance respect for the old, the primary, the far-away, as nearest to divine truth, demanded that the Corpus Hermeticum should be translated before Plato's Republic or Symposium, and so this was in fact the first translation that Ficino made.  

Ficino gave his translation the title of Pimander, which is really the tide of only the first treatise in the Corpus Hermeticum, but which he extended to cover the whole Corpus, or rather the first fourteen of its items which were all that his manuscript contained. He dedicated the translation to Cosimo, and this dedication, or argumentum as he calls it, reveals the state of mind, the attitude of profound awe and wonder, in which he had approached this marvellous revelation of ancient Egyptian wisdom. 

Yates notes that the discovery of the Corpus Hermeticum demonstrated the piety of Hermes and associated him intimately with the reigning Platonic philosophy which resulted in rehabilitation of Asclepius, who had been condemned by Augustine as containing bad demonic magic.

Heidegger’s Philosophical Opposition to Space Travel

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger, in his interview to Der Spiegel magazine on September 23, 1966, articulated his philosophical opposition to the idea that human beings might one day travel to other planets, leaving earth behind. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Der Spiegel: Well, we have to say that indeed we prefer to be here, and in our age we surely will not have to leave for elsewhere. But who knows if man is determined to be upon this earth? It is thinkable that man has absolutely no determination at all. After all, one might see it to be one of man's possibilities that he reach out from this earth toward other planets. We have by no means come that far, of course -- but where is it written that he has his place here?  

Heidegger: As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition. Contemporary literature, for example, is largely destructive. 

In the interview Heidegger also says that he was "shocked to see pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] — the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today." He was appalled by the idea of any man venturing too far from his place of birth.

For Heidegger, philosophy is all about preserving the traditions and coming home in the end. He insisted that in the time of death, a man must return to soil of his home. When he died, following his wish, his body was buried in the Church cemetery at Messkirch, the town of his birth, despite the fact that he had long since left the faith.

Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Sartre’s Ultrabolshevism

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The French existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre. Like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was a strong supporter of the Soviet Communism. In his 1947 book Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty justifies the totalitarian methods that the Soviet regime was using, the show trails, prison camps, and the executions.

But in the 1950s, Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy underwent a complete transformation. He became a vocal critic of communism.

He was on the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes, the leftist magazine established by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945. In 1953, when the magazine came up with a pro-Soviet piece, Merleau-Ponty wrote an editorial remark to clarify that the views are not that of the magazine. But Sartre removed the remarks without informing Merleau-Ponty. When Merleau-Ponty came to know about the removal of his remarks, he had an acrimonious telephonic conversation with Sartre and with that their friendship came to an end.

In his 1955 book Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty offers his final rejection of Soviet Communism. In this book’s Chapter 5, “Sartre and Ultrabolshevism,” which is the longest chapter, he attacks Sartre for his support of communism. Here’s an excerpt:

If Sartre would openly give his reasons, if he would say that communism is a more profound pragmatism, he would expose to broad daylight the divergence between theory and practice, the crisis of communist philosophy, and, beyond philosophy, the change in meaning of the whole system. If he "understands" communism correctly, then communist ideology is deceitful, and we can ask the nature of the regime which hides itself in the philosophy it teaches instead of expressing itself there. If Sartre is right in grounding communism as he does, communism is wrong in thinking of itself as it does; it is not, then, entirely what Sartre says it is. Ultimately, if Sartre is right, Sartre is wrong. Such is the situation of the loner who incorporates communism into his universe and thinks of it with no regard for what it thinks of itself. In reading The Communists and Peace, one often wonders—without finding an answer, since the quotations from Marx are so equitably distributed—what distinction Sartre makes between Marx, the ideologies of Soviet communism, and his own thought. 

He goes on to attack Sartre’s dualism, Cartesianism, and his ontological conception of freedom:

In Sartre's thought, as in The Critique of Pure Reason, the consciousness of a connection comes from the consciousness of a pure connecting principle. From there comes the Kantian question which he always asks: Who will decide? Who will judge? From where does the syntheSiS come? And if one wants to measure the Party against a historical norm: "Who will unify the unifying principle?" The absolute authority of the Party is the purity of the transcendental subject forcefully incorporated into the world. This Kantian or Cartesian thought sees only organicism in the idea of an unconstructed unity.

In his later works, Sartre became critical of what he called the “stoical” and “Cartesian” view of freedom, but he stayed loyal to his ontological view of freedom.

Ancients, Modernists, and Postmodernists

Many members of the postmodernist movement have emerged from the Marxist and post-Marxist groupings in France. Intellectuals like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard were reacting against the totalitarianism within the Soviet Union and the authoritarianism in the French communist party. Postmodernists can be seen as Marxists who have stopped believing that a better world, or a utopia, can be created by using authoritarian means.

Lloyd Spencer, in his essay, “Postmodernism, Modernity, and The Tradition of Dissent,” (Chapter 19; The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism; edited by Stuart Sim), offers the following perspective on the connection between modernity and postmodernism:

The very term 'postmodern' is a paradox and a provocation. Modernity, in the sense of the 'now' which surrounds us is not something we can be 'post'. But the modernity referred to is not the 'now' of the thoroughly modern. Modernity is a long epoch of historical change, fuelled by scientific and technological development and dominated by the spread — extensively across the world and intensively into every nook and cranny of the soul — of the capitalist market economy. Throughout the modern era, cultural, philosophical and political debate have marked out an intellectual space between the declining authority of the church on the one hand and, on the other, the economic and technical imperatives forcing the pace of change. 

Modernity even in this sense, of a centuries-old tradition of change and debate about change, can hardly be said to have come to an end. In the industrial West the declining role of religion and the pace of economic and technological change are factors that will shape the future as decisively as they have shaped our past. But something has changed in the very nature of tradition and in the way that we relate to the past. Every aspect of the past is made accessible, available. But it is made available, mediated, packaged, presented and re-presented. Postmodernism could be described as that variant of modernism which has given up hope of freeing itself from the ravages of modernity or of mastering the forces unleashed by modernity. 

Spencer points out that even thought the postmodernists have moved away from modernism, they continue to make use of the ideas of modern and even the ancient age. Postmodernism thrives by citing, parodying, pastiching and using the past. He points out that in the 18th century, the modernists were seeped in ancient classics even though they were devoted to developing new standards.

At the start of the eighteenth century a great debate raged between the 'ancients' and 'modems'. The 'ancients' held that the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome were the source of all standards and all literary ideals. The 'modems' contended that new times required new standards and new forms of expression. What we should remember in this context is that this was a debate between men raised on Greek and Latin. Even those who belonged to the 'modem' camp, from whom emerged the leading figures of the Enlightenment, were steeped in the classics. All the participants to the debate were on familiar terms with Aristotle and Aristophanes, with Tacitus and Cicero. 

Postmodernism aspires to be anti-authoritarian. It can be seen as the critical, skeptical, dissenting, and even nihilistic reaction against the authoritarian trends, such as Marxism, in modernity. 

Heidegger On Why He Misunderstood Nazism

Heidegger in 1960

Martin Heidegger hated to talk about his engagement with the nazis; he never came up with satisfactory explanation for why he appeared to be sympathetic to nazism, particularly in 1933 when the nazis acquired power in Germany.

In 1945, he wrote an essay, “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” to explain what happened in 1933. He says in the essay that at that time he saw in the Nazi Party “the possibility of an inner self-collection and of a renewal of the people, and a path toward the discovery of its historical-Western purpose. I believed that the university, renewing itself, might also be called to significantly participate in the inner self-collection of the people.”

But he insists that he was never asked by any agency of the Nazi Party for any kind of political advise, and he never tried to have such a political participation, and that he never maintained any personal or political relations with the Party. He clarifies that as soon as he became aware that he had misunderstood the nature of nazism, he moved away from the Nazi Party. He portrays himself as a victim of nazis, claiming that after he resigned from the position of University Rectorate in 1934, he was attacked by the nazis in a disgusting manner.

The central message of Heidegger’s essay can be summed up as “I was too naive to understand nazism in the early 1930s, so please don’t blame me.”

In his book, A la rencontre de Heidegger. Souvenirs d'un messager de la Forêt-Noire, Frédéric de Towarnicki reminisces the conversation that he had with Heidegger while they were having wine in 1945. Towarnicki asked Heidegger why he was close to nazism in the early 1930s. Heidegger replied, “Dummheit.” (Stupidity). Heidegger also said that the political engagement with the nazis was "the greatest stupidity of his life" ("die größte Dummheit seines Lebens”).

However, many of the Heidegger’s former admirers and students, people like Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Herbert Marcuse, and several others, were not satisfied with the explanation that he offers in his 1945 essay. They insist that it was something other than “stupidity” that drew Heidegger to the nazis.

Horkheimer and Critical Theory

Horkheimer (front left); Adorno (front right); 1965

Often referred to simply as ‘theory,’ critical theory seeks to critique society and culture by applying knowledge gained from humanities. The critical theorists claim that they want to explain and reform all the circumstances that lead to enslavement of human beings. They are close to the Western European Marxist think-tank known as the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in 1923.

Max Horkheimer, who took up the directorship of the Frankfurt School in 1930, is credited with first coning the term critical theory. In his 1937 book Critical Theory: Selected Essays, (Chapter 6, “Traditional and Critical Theory”), Horkheimer explains the difference between traditional and critical theories. He notes that while traditional theory is devoted to analysis and understanding of the social problems, the critical theory “urges a transformation of society as a whole.” He also points out that critical theory is “dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life.”

Here’s excerpt from Horkheimer’s essay, where he is suggesting that since critical theory deals with the actual and present condition of mankind, it always starts with the exchange economy:

The critical theory of society also begins with abstract determinations; in dealing with the present era it begins with the characterization of an economy based on exchange. The concepts Marx uses, such as commodity, value, and money, can function as genera when, for example, concrete social relations are judged to be relations of exchange and when there is question of the commodity character of goods. But the theory is not satisfied to relate concepts of reality by way of hypotheses. The theory begins with an outline of the mechanism by which bourgeois society, after dismantling feudal regulations, the guild system, and vassalage, did not immediately fall apart under the pressure of its own anarchic principle but managed to survive. The regulatory effects of exchange are brought out on which bourgeois economy is founded. The conception of the interaction of society and nature, which is already exercising its influence here, as well as the idea of a unified period of society, of its self-preservation, and so on, spring from a radical analysis, guided by concern for the future, of the historical process. The relation of the primary conceptual interconnections to the world of facts is not essentially a relation of classes to instances. It is because of its inner dynamism that the exchange relationship, which the theory outlines, dominates social reality, as, for example, the assimilation of food largely dominates the organic life of plant and brute beast. 

He also claims that critical theory offers the possibility of improving social relations:

There is still need of a conscious reconstruction of economic relationships. Indiscrim­inate hostility to theory, therefore, is a hindrance today. Unless there is continued theoretical effort, in the interest of a ration­ally organized future society, to shed critical light on present-day society and to interpret it in the light of traditional theories elaborated in the special sciences, the ground is taken from under the hope of radically improving human existence. The demand therefore for a positive outlook and for acceptance of a subordinate position threatens, even in progressive sectors of society, to overwhelm any openness to theory. The issue, how­ever, is not simply the theory of emancipation; it is the practice of it as well. 

Horkheimer’s critical theory can be seen as an attempt to achieve Marxist sociological and cultural aims without unleashing state oppression and violence on society. He denounces some of the Marxist concepts and combines several Marxist viewpoints with other philosophical and sociological systems. In the final paragraph of his essay, he expresses his concern for social justice: “The future of humanity depends on the existence today of the critical attitude.”

Today critical theory is no longer a homogeneous discipline or a unified movement. The modern critical theorists are active in several left-leaning social, political and artistic movements: Structuralism, Narratology, Marxism, Poststructuralism, Historicism, Psychoanalytic criticism, Deconstruction, Feminism, Gender and Queer theory, and Postmodernism.

Sartre’s Search for a Title: from Melancholia to Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre had given the name Melancholia to the novel on which he was working in the 1930s. But his publisher for the book, Gaston Gallimard, felt that Melancholia was not commercial enough and he advised Sartre to find a better title.

Sartre suggested Factum on Contingency as an alternative. This had been the title that he had given to his earliest notes for his book in 1932. He also came up with a longer title, Essay on the Loneliness of the Mind. But Gallimard was repelled by these suggestions. Sartre then suggested a new kind of title: The Extraordinary Adventures of Antoine Roquentin. He told Gallimard that the blurb would offer an intricate explanation of there being no adventures.

Finally Gallimard himself came up with a uncomplicated and riveting title Nausea. Sartre liked the suggestion and Nausea became the title of his book. When the book was published in 1938, it was well received by critics and readers. In my opinion, there is little literary value in Sartre’s novel. Albert Camus and even Simone de Beauvoir are more natural fiction writers. However, I think Nausea is a better title than Melancholia. Gallimard did a service to Sartre by suggesting this title.

Kant and Altruism: The Man and the Myth

By Roger E. Bissell

Leonard Peikoff has long propagated the myth that Kant is an altruist who advocates that one do one’s duty and sacrifice one’s values because they are one’s values, of “sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, as an end in itself” (1982, 82). This is a serious distortion of Kant’s views. Doing one’s duty, for Kant, does not require setting aside one’s values, but merely one’s personal inclinations and desires, and then acting according to moral principle. One of his chief illustrations of this point is quite revealing, particularly in comparison to Rand’s “ethics of emergencies” (and please bear in mind, this is Kant writing in 1785 in Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. His later, more evolved thinking on this is even more revealing, as I’ll show shortly):

To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations, e.g. the inclination to honor, which, if happily directed to which is in fact of public utility and accordant with duty and consequently honorable, deserves praise and encouragement, but not esteem. For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination. Put the case that the mind of that philanthropist were clouded by sorrow of his own, extinguishing all sympathy with the lot of others, and that, while he still has the power to benefit others in distress, he is not touched by their trouble because he is absorbed with his own; and now suppose that he tears himself out of this dead insensibility and performs the action without any inclination to it, but simply from duty, then first has his action its genuine moral worth. (Kant [1785] 1952, 258; emphasis in original)

Note carefully here that Kant is not saying that acting benevolently when one is so inclined is per se without moral worth, but only when one so acts out of that inclination, rather than setting it aside and acting instead from duty, that is, from one’s awareness and acceptance that this is the morally right thing to do, that one should “be kind where one can,” regardless of the personal feelings of honor, inner satisfaction, and so on that one may also experience as a result.

Now, it is true that Rand does not advocate being kind to others as a moral duty. The term “duty” is, in fact, anathema to her, for it signifies an obligation that is necessarily divorced from one’s values. But as we’ve seen, Kant does not regard moral obligation in this way either, and to claim that this is what he means by “duty” is a gross misrepresentation of his views. Instead, as already noted, “duty” for Kant means acting according to moral principle, regardless of your feelings and personal inclinations—of “doing the right thing,” even if you don’t feel like it. How different is this from what Rand advocates in the Objectivist ethics?

Moreover, Rand does embrace the concept of an “obligation” to help others, which though not altruistic is very real and rationally justifiable. In fact, though nothing like an altruistic duty, Rand’s humanitarian “obligation” to help others is very much like Kant’s non-altruistic “duty” to help others. Helping others, for Rand, is a highly conditional, contextual matter, tied firmly to one’s self-interest, values, and happiness, and she discusses it at length, expressing principles such as the following: “If one’s friend is in trouble, one should act to help him by whatever non-sacrificial means are appropriate” (Rand 1963, 53; emphasis in original). “It is only in emergency situations that one should volunteer to help strangers, if it is in one’s power. For instance, a man who values human life and is caught in a shipwreck, should help to save his fellow passengers (though not at the expense of his own life)” (55; emphasis in original).

But observe that though these are conditional imperatives, they are imperatives, that is, moral principles. The “should’s” she uses multiple times in this essay are not a cynical ploy in order to deflect criticism that Objectivism is morally egocentric or sociopathic. When Rand says you should help others, she is making an emphatic statement of what as what she regards as morally right for you to do for others, given certain conditions. Not morally permissible, but morally required, obligatory. And these acts of helping others are not the right thing to do because one will get a heroic or warm-and-fuzzy feeling out of doing them—though one indeed may get such a feeling or other—but because they are virtuous acts, moral actions. Specifically, Rand says, they are acts of integrity, which she defines as “loyalty to one’s convictions and values…the policy of acting in accordance with one’s values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality” (52–53).

Also, Rand insists, there are limits on such moral obligations. As she colorfully illustrates this point: “…a man who values human life and is caught in a shipwreck, should [there’s that word again] help to save his fellow passengers (though not at the expense of his own life). But this does not mean…that he should spend his life sailing the seven seas in search of shipwreck victims to save” (55).

Now, considering what a vicious, sacrificial, duty-driven altruist that Rand and Peikoff paint Kant as being, you’d think Kant would have had nothing to do with such rational limits on the obligation to help others in need. Just give and give and give—and don’t ask if you can stop. Well, if your reading of Kant’s ethical writings never progressed beyond 1785, you might be excused for thinking this (though even then, only by overlooking the egregious misrepresentation of what Kant means by “duty” and “sacrifice”). However, consider this from Kant’s Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (1797):

If happiness, then, is in question, which it is to be my duty to promote as my end, it must be the happiness of other men whose (permitted) end I hereby make also mine. It still remains left to themselves to decide what they shall reckon as belong to their happiness; only that it is in my power to decline many things which they so reckon, but which I do not so regard, supposing that they have no right to demand it from me as their own (370, emphasis added).

And just to make absolutely clear that “permitted” end does not involve a blank check (compare to Rand’s rejection of the obligation to sail the seven seas!), Kant adds: “…no one has the right to demand from me the sacrifice of my not immoral ends” (370, emphasis added). Instead, deciding when and how much one is to “sacrifice” (give up) on behalf of another is a highly individual, open-ended matter, to be decided by the giver, not the receiver, of assistance.

As Kant says: “I am only bound then to sacrifice to others a part [note: not all or without limits] of my welfare without hope of recompense; because it is my duty [translate: my moral obligation], and it is impossible to assign definite limits how far that may go. Much depends on what would be the true want of each according to his own feelings, and it must be left to each to determine this for himself” (372, emphasis added). In other words, each person must be free to deter mine for himself when giving to others does or does not require “sacrifice of [his] not immoral ends,” and to be free to not go beyond the limits of non-sacrificial action.

True altruism, according to Kant, is simply not viable as a moral principle: “For that one should sacrifice his own happiness, his true wants, in order to promote that of others, would be a self-contradictory maxim if made a universal law” (373, emphasis added). This ought to be conclusive proof to Objectivists that Kant has been very unjustly portrayed as a moral monster by Rand and her followers. But of course, it won’t be, because Kant is such a convenient person to demonize and hold up as the root cause of all of our social problems, and recycling the distortions and context-dropping of Rand et al is so much easier than doing the heavy lifting of reading and truly trying to understand what Kant had to say.

The Problem of Pessimism in Postmodernists

Christopher Butler, in his book Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, (Chapter 5, “The Postmodern Condition”), points out that the thought and work of the postmodernists is consumed by pessimistic assumptions about the inevitability of class or psychological conflict. Here’s an excerpt (Page 115-116):

Postmodernists are by and large pessimists, many of them haunted by lost Marxist revolutionary hopes, and the beliefs and the art they inspire are often negative rather than constructive. Mass affluence is not good, because when people have what they basically need, advertising and marketing move into the gap to synthesize and define our (materialist) values for us, and those who do need are the more easily forgotten. Marketing thus takes precedence over production. We have the sense that even justice is or can become a media event — as in the trial of O. J. Simpson shown on TV, so clearly influenced by the exaggerated play-acting of advocates, the carefully chosen clothing of the actors in the drama, and the politically slanted, stereotypically prejudiced sound-bite summaries of lawyers and TV journalists. The whole thing can seem sickeningly fictional, as all participants manipulate opinion, through the media, by hypocritically approximating themselves to what they believe to be approved role models and fictional stereotypes. We may well ask, how is justice of a disinterested kind to be done on such a stage? Are judge and jury, who are after all in the end only one of us, really going to be taken in by all this shameless role-playing? Or are the procedures of justice in court somehow to be thought of as more reliable than that? There is room for doubt about this in all of us, and it is that doubt that postmodernists (and, indeed, the writers of many court-room thrillers) rightly insist upon. 

Butler goes on to note that the pessimism of the postmodernists is in many cases unjustified. They often blur out the differences between truth and fantasy and develop imprecise inferences about the problems of politics, culture, history and art:

But they also tend to give a misleadingly pessimistic account of the information we receive and of conflict and its resolution. Many of them in fact belong to a long post-Nietzschean tradition of despair about reason. In correctly seeing all discourses as inherently related to the power systems that might be thought to back them up — as expressing power — they can give the impression that our culture is not much more than a complex interaction of opposing threats of force. Their skepticism about truth often deprives them of a proper concern for the activities of reason-giving and rational negotiation and for procedural justice. The background influence of Marx and Freud too often implies that everything we say carries the authority and the threat of race, class, rank, and sexual power-play. But this hardly allows for the function in democratic societies of legal agreements and restraints, or of the moral considerations that lead to the protection of human rights which really are meant to be universal and not culturally relative or the property of any one group. Nor does it allow for the fact that the attempt to be reasonable, and truthful, to back up assertions by verifiable evidence, and so on, is essential if we are to come to the negotiating table with something other than implied threats (or to treat the writing of history or theology or the novel as something better than the entrapment of the reader in a mythical narrative). Imagine someone who thought that anything that any (American, or Israeli, or Russian, and other) politician said was always a form of imperialist, or theological, or ‘rogue state’ bullying, simply because it implicitly reflected, say, the power of that nation’s political institutions and armed forces. 

The influence of postmodernism is now on the wane. The new generation is already treating the founding fathers of postmodernist thought with a great deal of skepticism.

What Exactly is Deconstruction?

Jacques Derrida

The movement of “deconstruction” was developed by Jacques Derrida. John Searle, in his essay, “The World Turned Upside Down,”  tries to find out what exactly is deconstruction and why it has become so influential in American literary criticism. Searle writes:

I think if you asked most practicing deconstructionists for a definition they would not only be unable to provide one, but would regard the very request as a manifestation of that "logocentrism" which it is one of the aims of deconstruction to, well, deconstruct. By "logocentrism" they mean roughly the concern with truth, rationality, logic, and "the word" that marks the Western philosophical tradition. I think the best way to get at it, which would be endorsed by many of its practitioners, is to see it, at least initially, as a set of methods for dealing with texts, a set of textual strategies aimed in large part at subverting logocentric tendencies.

Here’s an excerpt from Searle’s description of the methodology of the deconstructionists:

To deconstruct a discourse is to show how it undermines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies, by identifying in the text the rhetorical operations that produce the supposed ground of argument, the key concept or premise. There are numerous such strategies but at least three stand out. First, and most important, the deconstructionist is on the lookout for any of the traditional binary oppositions in Western intellectual history, e.g., speech/writing, male/female, truth/fiction, literal/metaphorical, signified/signifier, reality/appearance. In such oppositions, the deconstructionist claims that the first or left-hand term is given a superior status over the right-hand term, which is regarded "as a complication, a negation, a manifestation, or a disruption of the first" (p. 93). These hierarchical oppositions allegedly lie at the very heart of logocentrism with its obsessive interest in rationality, logic, and the search for truth. 

The deconstructionist wants to undermine these oppositions, and so undermine logocentrism, by first reversing the hierarchy, by trying to show that the right-hand term is really the prior term and that the left-hand term is just a special case of the right-hand term; the right-hand term is the condition of possibility of the left-hand term. This move gives some very curious results. It turns out that speech is really a form of writing, understanding a form of misunderstanding, and that what we think of as meaningful language is just a free play of signifiers or an endless process of grafting texts onto texts.

Searle goes on to note that deconstruction is a game that anyone can play:

One sometimes gets the impression that deconstruction is a kind of game that anyone can play. One could, for example, invent a deconstruction of deconstructionism as follows: In the hierarchical opposition, deconstruction/logocentrism (phono-phallo-logocentrism), the privileged term "deconstruction" is in fact subordinate to the devalued term "logocentrism," for, in order to establish the hierarchical superiority of deconstruction, the deconstructionist is forced to attempt to represent its superiority, its axiological primacy, by argument and persuasion, by appealing to the logocentric values he tries to devalue. But his efforts to do this are doomed to failure because of the internal inconsistency in the concept of deconstructionism itself, because of its very self-referential dependence on the authority of a prior logic. By an aporetical Aufhebung, deconstruction deconstructs itself.

Michel Foucault was very hostile to Derrida’s deconstruction. Searle points out in his essay that once when he was having conversation with Foucault in French, Foucault characterized Derrida's prose style as "obscurantisme terroriste” (terrorism of obscurantism). Derrida writes so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is, and then when one criticizes it, Derrida can always say, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot" ('You didn't understand me; you're an idiot'). That's the terrorism part.

Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl

Franz Brentano

David Bell’s biography of Edmund Husserl, Husserl, begins with a section on Franz Brentano. Bell justifies his digression into Brentano’s work by pointing out that a large number of doctrines, methods and assumptions that Husserl makes in his works will appear arbitrary and unjustified unless we have a basic understanding of the work that Brentano has done in psychology and philosophy. He writes in the Preface:

“Brentano stands to Husserl in very much the same relation in which, say Frege stands to Wittgenstein: one can no more hope to gain a sympathetic understanding of Wittgenstein’s presuppositions, preoccupations, and procedures in ignorance of his inheritance from Frege than one can hope to gain an understanding of Husserl’s in ignorance of his inheritance from Brentano. And in both the cases the reason is the same: neither Wittgenstein nor Husserl enjoyed a widely-based, formal education or training in philosophy; on the contrary, their respective philosophical outlooks were initially formulated in the context of, and in response to, an extremely narrow set of philosophical concerns—the concerns, predominantly, of a single philosopher. Husserl’s early philosophy is Brentanian through and through (though this is not of course to deny the influence of others on him—Bolzano, Lotze, Stumph, Kant, and Frege, amongst others).”

In the chapter, “Prolegomenon: Brentano’s Legacy,” Bell says that “at the most general level Husserl inherited from Brentano a vision of the nature, the goals, and the methods of philosophical enquiry; and more specifically he inherited from him doctrines concerning, for example, phenomena, intuitions, language, logic, science, truth, certainty, evidence, and analysis.”

Brentano was primarily a psychologist and his work was devoted to investigating the empirical laws which govern mental phenomena. However, most of his books are inclined more towards philosophy than empirical psychology. According to Bell, Husserl was introduced to the word “phenomenology” by Brentano:

“Although Husserl was undoubtedly influenced, and formatively, by Brentano’s so-called ‘psychology’, and although, more generally, Husserl was clearly excited by the revolutionary new ways of studying the human mind that were beginning to emerge at precisely the time he became interested in philosophy, it was not at all ‘empirical psychology’ which captured his imagination; rather he was fired by a distinctively philosophical discipline which Brentano liked to call ‘descriptive psychology’, or ‘psychognosy’, or, sometimes, “descriptive phenomenology’.

It is noteworthy that in the time of Brentano, phenomenology was primarily a discipline of empirical psychology—it was strictly focused on the study of mental and physical phenomena which means to the mental acts and their contents. It had very little to do with philosophy.