Rilke on the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32):
“We don’t know whether he stayed there; we only know that he came back.”
(To paraphrase my previous post, Rilke’s remark is actually more suggestive than propositional, a good tool for the creative reader/writer to run with.)
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Different things work for different people. Which makes it hard to respond when people say, “I wish I could understand poetry.” They sense they are missing out on something but don’t know where to start. Different things work for different people. But here’s a suggestion that I think might work for some of them.
If poetry gives you difficulty, it could be that you’re accustomed to think of knowledge as something that comes in the scientific way. You study the evidence closely and find the answer. But poetry has a whole different epistemology. You might think of it this way: The language of poetry is not propositional but suggestive. Propositional language, as you see in most of your school subjects, looks for solid, fixed answers. Poetry often avoids solid, fixed answers. It is not about solutions but about suggestiveness. It’s a way of liberating you from fixed meanings and stimulating the imagination to explore possibilities, even contradictory possibilities.
So don’t try too hard to figure it out, just let yourself get carried away into the landscape of the poem. Think of a garden. When you walk through a garden, you don’t ask what the flowers mean. You just enjoy the beauty, the smells, the contrasts and surprises as you turn down a path. Think of poetry that way. Let yourself get lost in it.
Some poetry, of course, does rely on meaning, but it’s usually not a fixed meaning. It’s more like a cloud of meaning that condenses around the words, the history of words and phrases, the lines, the sounds. A well-written poem is layered with possible meanings, many of which the poet knew nothing about. Each reader brings the poem to life and imbues it with meaning from their own orientation point on life.
To use another metaphor, a poem is a toolbox readers can use to create beauty and/or meaning. So don’t worry too much over what the poet intended. What really counts it what you can do with it. Has the poet given you a rich set of materials – images, sounds, ideas, emotional triggers – for reflection? If so, run with it. If you really want to, you can go back later and revisit those building blocks, the tools in the toolbox, to see how they fit together and carry possible meanings and values. But you don’t have to😊
Forgive me if this seems patronizing. It’s just that the question comes up often from friends who are not as invested in poetry as I am, so I thought I’d give it a try 😊
* * * Click covers for links * * *
I recently read Mary Klages’s Literary Theory, a great introduction to one of the hottest academic topics of the past few decades. Klages does a good job explaining the modernism/humanism of the 20th-century, the push-off point for postmodernism, which itself emerged largely after 1980, and of explaining the main theorists of postmodernism (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and those who came in their wake). When she started assigning political values to these theories, though, I’m not so sure.
Her link of (pre-postmodern) modernity to Enlightenment thinking (i.e., using reason as a primary tool to establish order and to determine universal principles) is clear and convincing. But let me quote one paragraph at length (a postmodern critique of modernity) because I think it encapsulates one of the key problems with postmodernist discourse.
Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating order out of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is, the better it will function (the more rationally it will function). Because modernity is about the pursuit of ever-increasing levels of order, modern societies constantly are on guard against anything and everything labeled as ‘disorder,” which might disrupt order. Thus, modern societies rely on continually establishing a binary opposition between ‘order’ and ‘disorder,’ so that they can assert to superiority of ‘order.’ But to do this, they have to have things that represent ‘disorder’ — modern societies thus continually have to create/construct ‘disorder.’ In Western culture, this disorder becomes ‘the other’ — defined in relation to other binary oppositions. Thus anything non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-hygienic, non-rational (etc.) becomes part of ‘disorder,’ and has to be eliminated from the ordered, rational modern society. (p. 168)
The paragraph begins harmlessly enough. Modernity privileges order and rationality as things that make for a better society. Point well-taken. But then, in a move that I suspect is common in postmodernist writing (my readers can weigh in here), Klages rather quickly gets on a slippery slope toward sweeping generalizations. First, the baby steps into unproven generalization, as believing in an orderly society is conflated with a more pathological obsession with “ever-increasing levels of order.” And then to the claim that “modern societies constantly are on guard against anything and everything labeled as ‘disorder.'” It is rhetorical snowballing into more and more sweeping generalizations without evidence. My own life in US ‘modern society,’ from classrooms to blues clubs, sometimes aligning with and sometimes breaking with community standards and laws, leads me to think that yes, some value is placed on order, but the rest of the passage seems basically a fictional flight into generalization. It’s a bit like Ayn Rand’s critique of compassion (e.g., in Ellsworth Toohey), wherein she argues that if we consider compassion a virtue, then we must wish others to suffer so we can express that virtue. Of course, this is nonsense. Of course, I can feel compassion for my daughter when she is sick without “wishing” her to be sick. Likewise, one can value order without sinking into the pathological rigmarole of continually constructing disorder.
The paragraph concludes with a breathtaking leap of logic — a society that values order and reason, through the paragraph’s slippery slope of “thus” and “thus,” is doomed to end up trying to eliminate anything non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-hygienic, non-rational, etc. Not only is it a leap in logic, but also seems empirically false. Enlightenment-based societies, with their core tenet of reason-based universal rights that apply irrespective of one’s identity group, seem to fare better at inclusiveness and multiculturalism than the non-Enlightenment, tribal societies that don’t share that core tenet.
This leads me to question another of Klages’s assumptions (though I think she presents it as an inference rather than as an assumption) that I think is probably widespread in postmodernist circles. She allows that both modernism/humanism and postmodernism might have diverse political uses (good), but that “the desire to return to the pre-postmodern era (modern/humanist/Enlightenment thinking) tends to be associated with conservative political, religious, and philosophical groups” (175).
This assumption that anyone critical of postmodernism is probably conservative seems false to me. It seems more accurate, or at least equally accurate, to say that the Enlightenment view of equal rights based on rational principles that apply to all, regardless of race, gender, etc.; the confidence in scientific inquiry to approach more universal truths by a scientific method that tends over time to eliminate tribal bias — these are still the tenets of a liberal world view. The pre-postmodern conservatives resisted these ideas in favor of racist/tribal/religious world views. And postmodernists, by attacking the “totalizing” tenets (universal rights discoverable through reason, universal truths discoverable through science) of Enlightenment thinking, seem a throwback to pre-Enlightenment tribal thinking — conservatism on steroids if you will.
So if I resist a movement that sorts people into identity groups and denies the “totalizing” claims of the Enlightenment (per scientific method and universal human rights), does that, as Klages and the postmodernists suggest, make me a conservative? I don’t think it does. I don’t think their conclusion here follows from the premise. But I am not an expert in postmodernism, so I’m open to clarifications (or amens or corrections or ad hominem attacks or what-have-you) from any readers who may have given more thought to, or thought differently about, these matters.
P.S. To shift the context slightly, I’m reminded of a question that came up on Twitter per what the difference might be between a “liberal social justice” platform and a “woke social justice” platform. A tweeter named Tim Urban (whom I don’t otherwise know but has a lot of followers) had the following to say, and I wonder what readers might think about (1) the accuracy of Urban’s list (he’s obviously more polemical than I), and (2) whether postmodernism aligns with “woke,” whereas Enlightenment humanism aligns with the “liberal” social justice side:
LIBERAL SOCIAL JUSTICE : WOKE SOCIAL JUSTICE ::
Pro free speech : anti free speech
Achieves goals using persuasion : achieves goals using coercion
Interested in dissent : tries to punish dissenters
Wide and diverse : narrow and conformist
Thinks America should be improved : thinks America is fundamentally evil
Treats issues as nuanced : treats issues as black and white
Treats people as individuals : treats people as monolithic groups
Strives for unity : strives for division
Fosters compassion : fosters resentment
Truth matters most : activist goals matter more than truth
Thinks liberalism is good : thinks liberalism is the problem
Historically effective at making positive change for disadvantaged people : historically ineffective at making positive change for disadvantaged people
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Ferdydurke, Witold Gombrowicz, English translation by Danuta Borchardt
Commentary by Gary Gautier
Soon after the 1937 publication of Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz found himself exiled in Buenos Aires, where he was at pains to distinguish himself from Jorge Luis Borges. According to Susan Sontag’s introduction, Gombrowicz said of Borges: “He is deeply rooted in literature, I in life. To tell the truth I am anti-literature.” My reaction after reading Ferdydurke is that this 90% false, with a dramatic 10% swing toward truth at the end. Let me explain.
First, the statement resonates ironically in my own reading. Besides the explicit references to Wilde, Shaw, et al., Ferdydurke is a veritable pinball ringing all the bells and whistles of literary history – past, present, and future – as it bumps along.
These are just a few of the shadows cast forward and backward by the book, but note that at least the last three, though each carries a separate weight, can be linked broadly to existentialism – the anxiety of facing a world that has been drained of all meaning; the total randomness, moral and otherwise; the simultaneous desire and fear of human contact. And these elements of existentialism might broadly be linked to modernism – not just Kafka and Eliot, but James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner.
To me, though, the most interesting anchor of Ferdydurke is not modernism but postmodernism. The distinction between the two is not objectively fixed and must be tentative, so here, tentatively, is my working distinction. Modernism, a la Woolf or Lawrence or Faulkner, shifts the basic playing field of the novel from the age of realism, with its nuanced detailing of objective reality, to a nuanced detailing of subjective reality. This is the age of Freud (and Virginia Woolf’s press, besides being offered Joyce’s Ulysses among other future modernist classics, was publishing English translations of Freud in real time). The stream of consciousness. The marvelous plumbing of subjective spaces within and between characters that you get, e.g., in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In a way, modernism was trying to seize human experience in a way that was more realistic than realism, by capturing the fluid subjective experience that runs underneath the superficial string of objective events.
Postmodernism is something different. It does not, in effect, try to capture human experience objectively, as in the age of realism, or subjectively, as in the age of modernism. To the postmodernist, both of those styles are naïve, presuming a coherence and depth to human identity that is false. Lacking any coherent identity to play with, postmodernism often appears as colliding fragments with no deep structure to bind them to a frame of meaning, no characters with the kind of emotional depth (for better or for worse) you would find, e.g., in Charles Dickens. To borrow Gombrowicz’s quote about Borges, both realism and modernism are deeply rooted in life; postmodernism pulls the rug out and expresses itself in surface play.
For present purposes, and perhaps contentiously, I’d say James Joyce, after Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which I’d consider modernist), plunges ahead into postmodernism – first with Ulysses, which somewhat leaves the old sense of character and coherent meaning behind in the clutter of surface fragments, and then with Finnegans Wake, which totally leaves the old sense of character and coherent meaning behind, leaving us only with musical phrases and half-heard words, obscure references, misleading phonetic spellings in multiple languages, flows of language that follow no discernible logic.
Much of the first half of Ferdydurke likewise gropes toward postmodernism, as Gombrowicz throws in dialogues and duels that are clearly intellectual allegories with little pretense to the status of real characters in real situations; he constantly reminds us of how he is struggling to write the book, digresses to ponder whether we should evaluate the book’s genesis by the primary thoughts in his psyche, the themes that emerge in development, or by genre, or etc. Not to mention all the tidbits of wisdom thrown in along the shoulder of the narrative road.
Make no mistake. The tidbits of wisdom, though extraneous to the narrative core (at least if we view the narrative core from the vantage of realism or modernism), often meet the Horatian standard: they delight and instruct. One example is when he points the recurring issue of fragmentation toward a digression on the genesis of this book (or any book): “Our mind catches a certain part, let’s say an ear or a leg; then, right at the beginning of the work, the ear or the leg drifts under our pen … it imposes on us all the remaining body parts” (Chap. 4).
This recognition of the random fragment as the inescapable base of the complete work leads him to hunt for “the book’s primeval torment … the primary thought from which all other thoughts in this book originate” (Chap. 4). Of course, the number of possible answers is like Kant’s mathematical sublime – so overwhelmingly numerous (“the torment … of innocence … maturity … idealism … modernity … of bad form …”) as to paralyze the subject.
This comment on the creative process becomes even more interesting when we apply it to human relations, as when he meets his homestay mother, Mrs. Youngblood: “This fat woman could have actually picked any other basis for her relationship with me, and not necessarily predicated it on the formula of modernity versus the old-fashioned, yet it was all contingent on the first chord” (Chap. 6). Thus the bits of shrewd psychological wisdom enter the story by means of the narrator’s unconventional style and rambling obsessions.
A caveat: Although elements associated with postmodernism enable some of the novel’s beauties, I am not predisposed favorably toward postmodernism. I prefer relatable characters with emotional depth and some kind of substructure – symbolic or otherwise – to pull me in deeper to the world of the novel. With this in mind, Ferdydurke comes in three stages: (1) Joey suddenly goes from his stagnant 30-year-old life to being a teenager at the school with Mr. Pimko; (2) Joey’s homestay with the Youngbloods; and (3) Joey and Kneadus’s stay at the aristocratic manor of Joey’s uncle and aunt.
The first part to me is most postmodern – lots of intellectual surface play of fragments and ideas weaving in and out of the actual storyline. In parts 2 and 3, I become fully invested in the characters and the plot, although the intellectual play continues around the edges.
So does Gombrowicz veer around from postmodernism back to the playing field of realism or modernism? Certainly there is some of that. In parts two and three, the objective series of events is much stronger (as in realism), and the weird, quirky corners of Joey’s subjectivity finely detailed, sometimes in a marginally frantic stream-of-consciousness sort of way (as in modernism). But by the time I get to the final scene, when Joey and Zosia leave Kneadus, the farmhand, and everything else behind to run away across the field and into the villages, I sense something still more interesting going on. I’m not sure, but just as Joyce had pushed from modernism to a postmodernism ahead of its time, I suspect a push in Gombrowicz’s final chapter into post-postmodernism, for lack of a better word.
To wit, one of the dominant threads in the book is about how human identity lacks any internal depth. Human identity is forged by relations with other people and how they see us – particularly humorous when we get to the country manor, with servants and masters each having only the “form” assigned the them by the other. We have a series of “mugs” (in my translation) or masks – not masks that we put over our real face – the masks ARE the real face; there is no coherent self-defined face underneath.
The final sequence begins the night that Uncle Konstanty and Aunt Hurlecka catch Valek (the farmhand servant, Kneadus’s newfound gay lover, who is to be fired in the morning) in the kitchen. He is preparing to run away with Joey and Kneadus, but this doesn’t fit the “form,” so the good lord and lady of the house conclude that he was sneaking to steal the silverware, which suits the inherited “form” of their identities, making “everyone, Valek included, feel better.”
Joey, who had randomly considered kidnapping Zosia instead of the farmhand, merely because it would better fit the “mature, lordly” form of how things work in society, suddenly runs away on his own. “Run run run … I was totally infantilized. Run, but where?… Where am I in this world? Where do I put myself? … I had become like a child … I ran down the road … seeking a connection with something, a new if temporary order, so that I wouldn’t stick out in space any longer.” Then, out of nowhere, Zosia appears. “She grabbed me! … Together, we ran through the fields and meadows into an unknown expanse” (Chap. 14).
At first, it is surely a continuation of forms – “still in the matrix,” we might say in the post-Keanu Reeves era. “She was as if the kidnapped, and I as if the kidnapper.” Of course, they both freely join in the run, but the kidnapping motif keeps them within the semblance of “form” – at least for a while.
But even as they play to form, something pathetic, something sentimental, seems to be leaking in: “We spent the rest of the night in a tiny meadow by a pond’s edge, buried in bulrushes, shivering with cold, our teeth chattering. Grasshoppers shrilled. At dawn another pupa, red, and a hundredfold more magnificent, made its appearance on the horizon and filled the world with its rays.”
They seem a bit like Milton’s Adam and Eve, cast out of the known world, ashamed at having broken with the forms, standing east of Eden, with all their choices spread before them:
“I could neither explain nor express in any way what had happened at the manor because I was ashamed, I couldn’t find the right words. She probably guessed more or less what had happened because she too was ashamed and couldn’t express it either. She sat among the reeds by the water…”
If form – or the matrix, if you will – is what keeps us locked into the world of human identity as colliding surface fragments, with no authentic depth of emotion or meaning, breaking through the form would mean a shocking discovery of something real and sentimental in our connection to another human being. I can’t tell if Gombrowicz is more at ease poking fun at the sentimentalists or at the anti-sentimentalists, but here, in terms of the narrative form, it is a break from postmodernism, a rediscovery of something authentic and coherent underneath in the human heart. If they can pull it off. It’s certainly not a once-and-you’re-done epiphany. In the next paragraph, Joey says: “I pressed a kiss on both her cheeks, and I confessed my passion for her, I began to apologize that I had kidnapped her…” Maybe just me (I’m unfamiliar with Ferdydurke criticism), but I sense an inner struggle here as Joey plays to form but feels something real. And they continue to play the roles of kidnapper and kidnapped who fall in love (much like in gentry-set 18th-century novels by Sterne and Fielding).
Of the pretense to form – to being the kidnapper in love – Joey says, “What torture I had to endure to save this pretense of maturity, while yonder, peasants and lordships were tumbling and kneading one another without shame.” Is the tortuous pretense the pretense that he loves Zosia (when he feels no love) or the pretense of maintaining the superficial cover story (when he feels something deeper)? He certainly treats his love for Zosia as pretense, and yet his resentment of peasants and lordships is that they pursue their love games without shame (i.e., without the embarrassment of breaking form). The shame that persists for Joey suggests that his feelings really have broken form. He struggles to “save this pretense of maturity” (i.e., the form-fitting, all-surface relationship), but as he has often suggested, he is just too immature to do anything with maturity. He is stuck with feelings beyond the scope of form, and “all the while Zosia snuggled ever closer, bonded with me more and more, she led me into her.”
The shift in world view is cataclysmic for Joey. He wants to escape and get back to form, to “hit her with fury, say something unkind … But how can I be unkind when I am kind – while she’s charming me, suffusing me with her kindness and I’m suffusing her with mine … no help from anywhere! In these fields and meadows, among timid grasses just the two of us – she with me and I with her – and nowhere, nowhere anyone to save us … My strength failed me, dream assailed reality, and I couldn’t help it.”
To me this means his immature dream of real human connection, of a persistent depth to human experience, systematically pooh-poohed as naïve by the mature postmodernists, overpowers his “mature” faith in form. The world for him is no longer a brittle surface of colliding fragments. He has broken that brittle postmodern shell to emerge in the “unknown expanse” with Zosia. He has achieved depth, and has done it in the most (God forgive his immaturity) sentimental of ways, through a romantic connection to another human being. Note that Zosia never really attains depth of character, which means that the redemptive turn (or the “damning” turn from the point of view of those mature people in whose face Joey feels ashamed – in any event, the falling out of form) is not the result of inner depth so much as the result of what theologian Martin Buber (with whom Gombrowicz later corresponded) calls the “I-thou” relationship.
One could thus almost read this novel as the allegory of a man, a self-conscious narrator of his own story, who spends his life trapped in a postmodernist world view and finally breaks out through human contact. The final paragraph encapsulates both the knotty predicament of human identity and the absurd, irrational, random mode of escape: “There is no escape from the mug, except into another mug, and from a human being one can only take shelter in the arms of another human being.”
But the last paragraph is more than a cryptic thematic finale. Here, Gombrowicz turns to the reader, as a Shakespeare character often does in an epilogue, and says, “Chase me if you want. I’m running away, mug in my hands.” It sounds like he is absconding to a new world where the mug can be taken off, at least temporarily – or perhaps a world where we don’t have to play all the postmodern intellectual games about the lack of emotional depth or meaning in the human experience, a world where we can bask in our immature dream of love and connection without fear of the “mature” philosophers bringing us down. So, perhaps a place where the mug is not worn, but carried, and where it may be hard for us (mature readers that we are) to follow. 😊
* * * Click covers for links * * *
I don’t get the fascination with Nietzsche. I just read Beyond Good and Evil, and it is entertaining for the over-the-top bravado, but it seems all attitude and no substance. Or what substance there is comes in a kind of rambling teenage blog – this and that about philosophy, a dozen or so pages devoted to witty but dubious generalizations about race and nationality, occasional 2- or 3-page romps into witty but dubious generalizations about women, a sudden chapter on music. If you enjoy the bullying wit of a Simon Cowell or a Gordon Ramsay (or Trump for that matter), Nietzsche is your guy. But I can’t figure out how to take him seriously as a philosopher.
When he does venture into critiquing previous philosophers, it again seems all attitude and no substance. In sweeping dismissals, he attacks Kant, Plato, et al., not with argument but with attitude – as if being critical with enough attitude, enough wit and passion, will, in the absence of any real argument, bully people into agreeing with you for fear of your ferocious wit – your ill-natured “will to power” (if you will). It’s like Trump mowing over his opponents by name-calling and verbal bullying.
This approach might partly be explained by one of Nietzsche’s well-taken points – that psychology is the hidden key to philosophy and other quests for knowledge. “Every great philosophy up to now has consisted of … unconscious autobiography,” in which the philosopher “creates the world in [his] own image” (Chap. 1).
When Nietzsche turns this shrewd analytical model on his favorite nemesis, “old Kant” as Nietzsche flippantly likes saying, some elements of Beyond Good and Evil become clear to me. Regarding Kant’s categorical imperative, Nietzsche says: ”Apart from the value of such assertions as ‘there is a categorical imperative in us,’ one can always ask: What does such an assertion indicate about him who makes it?” (Chap. 5)
Two things here. First is Nietzsche’s dismissal of the cornerstone of Kant’s ethics, the “categorical imperative” – not because he has any argument against it, but merely because a universal ground of ethics is anathema to Nietzsche’s pet theory of one morality for the master class and a different morality for the slave class. Kant’s universal ground of ethics – basically behaving in a way that is universalizable – the way that you would wish all people to behave in similar circumstances, irrespective of any ‘interest’ you may have in the situation – this might lead one, in Nietzsche’s words, to treat “public spirit, kindness, deference, industry, temperance, modesty, indulgence, sympathy … as the peculiarly human virtues” (Chap. 5). Of course, for Nietzsche these are NOT human virtues generally but virtues that apply to the slave-morality, to we everyday sufferers who would value sympathetic relations with our fellow sufferers. For those “destined to command,” a different morality applies, a morality that values “certain strong and dangerous instincts, such as the love of enterprise … revengefulness … rapacity, and love of power” (Chap. 5). These qualities, which were considered good in the old heroic age and are now considered “evil” in our debauched age of democracy and mediocrity, need to be restored as applicable for the “higher orders of men” (Chap. 3) while the great mediocre majority sticks to their slave morality of compassion and so forth. On this issue, I’ll take Kant over Nietzsche – not only because Kant at least takes the time to make a logical argument for his case, but also because a Kantian world where people treat each other as they would like to be treated just sounds better than a Nietzschean aristocracy equipped “to accept with good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments”; i.e., an aristocracy whose “fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves” (Chap. 9). It sounds a little bit like roaming gangs in the service of strongmen plundering the rest of society at will. It seems this has been tried, e.g., in medieval times before the great monarchies rose to establish widespread law and order, albeit through absolutist rule, or in more modern times, the battling warlords of Somalia, each following his own “will to power,” believing in “rank and NOT in equality” (Chap. 1) and rising above the “shallow-mindedness” of “equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations” (Chap. 7). I am as amused as the next reader at Nietzsche’s bracing bravado, but forgive me if it all sounds a little dystopic if taken seriously.
The second takeaway from Nietzsche’s dismissal of the categorical imperative arises from his psychological focus. “Every great philosophy …[is] unconscious autobiography” indeed. Nietzsche’s rejection of the categorical imperative, though no argument against it, reveals Nietzsche’s own attachment to his double morality for master and slave classes, just as his grounding of human nature to the “will to power” says more about him than about human nature generally. (Might not others be driven by a will to love or will to harmony or Nietzsche’s much-maligned will to truth?) One suspects that as a child he was chastised to obey the rules of good behavior and not throw tantrums to put his own will above the rights and well-being of others. Consequently, he devoted his life’s work to justifying his own impetuous will to power. Good for him. But don’t drag the rest of us into the same dark and narcissistic space. (One similarly imagines Ayn Rand being told as a child not to be so selfish and hence devoting her life’s work to a justification of selfishness.)
Nietzsche’s autobiographical/psychoanalytical caveat may further explain his appeal. Most kids want to be “in” with the bully who exhibits the most bravado in the schoolyard. And most do not outgrow this with age (witness Trump’s popularity). The masses have no interest in systematic argument. They prefer an autocrat’s withering derision of “the idiot masses,” as it (1) makes them feel aligned with the autocrat’s power, and (2) makes them feel that they themselves are superior to “the masses.” #1 might at first seem to support of Nietzsche’s view of the primacy of “will to power,” but — sadly for “old Nietzsche” — it is specifically the “lower order of human beings,” not his “higher order,” who get suckered in on #1. D. H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse, a death-bed plea for a spiritual and cultural rejuvenation, shares much of Nietzsche’s world view, but Lawrence is much clearer about this latter point — that the “will to power” crowd are not the cream of the crop, as Nietzsche presumes.
Let me pause to say that there are parts of the book I appreciate. The willingness to defy convention and carve your own path – e.g., the push to liberate sensuality from conventional moralities – is certainly admirable to me. Some of the historical looks at morality are good. The emphasis on the psychology behind philosophical systems is indeed enlightening and still underworked as far as I can see in my limited view of modern philosophy. Some of his critical points about religion and the soul seem well-taken, though they don’t require much heavy lifting intellectually. But even the solid points suffer from the megalomaniacal side of his thought. E.g., that untruth (as well as truth, one might say) is a condition of life (Chap. 1) is an interesting and solid point, but that “a philosophy which ventures to” base itself on that proposition “place[s] itself beyond good and evil” is a huge leap in logic, although Nietzsche treats it as if the one follows seamlessly from the other – a willingness to play sloppy with logic that you would never find in Plato or Kant.
Along these lines, the emphasized “will to power” seems all too often to simply mean that bluster is sufficient, without logic or evidence. And indeed, his critique of other philosophers is largely just that – bluster without argument. It’s like Trump giving second-grade name tags to his opponents – fallacious at best, but a good way to hook the masses. Most Trumpian/Orwellian of all, Nietzsche reviles Kant’s pride – here, in the midst of a book that opens with a breathtaking dismissal of all Platonists, Stoics, Kantians, etc., as idiots who stand to be corrected in this volume!
When he does seem to make an argument against Kant (though not mentioning Kant in this passage), his argument seems an almost childlike misunderstanding of Kant. “Others say even that the external world is the work of our organs. But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs … reductio ad absurdum” (Chap. 1). One would have to misunderstand the relation between noumenal and phenomenal worlds in a very fundamental way to think this is a critique of Kant.
The same with cogito ergo sum. He mocks those who say “I think” presupposes an “I” (Chap. 1). His point that too much, post-Descartes, has been presumed about this subjective ‘I’ doing the thinking and doubting may be well-taken and yet his adolescent need for bluster takes the reins, and here too he lets what could have been a good argument devolve into an exercise in attitude. To give Nietzsche his due, bluster gets ratings with the masses, whether it’s the bluster of Simon Cowell, Chef Gordon Ramsay, or Donald Trump. These public figures may have bits of good as well as bad to offer, but it’s the bluster that gets the ratings. In the case of Nietzsche and Descartes, the idea that even if I deny reality exists, I cannot dispute that ‘I’ am denying it – in terms of reasoned argument, this idea seems more convincing than Nietzsche’s mockery of it.
A common defense of Nietzsche on this issue is that he is deliberately unsystematic and should not be judged by the terms of systematic philosophers like Plato or Kant. I am unconvinced. This is like a student in an academic writing class saying, “I don’t believe in systematic reasoning so you can’t judge me on whether I actually support my claims with logic or evidence.” I suspect that would not fly, even in Nietzsche’s own courses in classical philology. So why do people tolerate it in Nietzsche’s philosophy? Because people tend to give a wide berth to the schoolyard bully. And then they find a rationalization.
It may be that how we choose to define philosophy is what’s at stake here, so let me be clear. To me, philosophy is (1) partly defined by the kind questions you ask — not what is the speed of light but questions about the nature of reality, of human experience, of ethics, knowledge, values, etc.; and (2) partly defined by the process you follow. Even if we grant there’s no absolute truth, philosophy should be reasoning things forward, drawing upon logic and evidence to get closer and closer to a more accurate or useful endpoint. So, yes, for me, Plato and Kant are definitive philosophers; Nietzsche is just a blogger before his time. (Nothing against bloggers — I am a blogger myself — but if you want to disregard systematically supporting your claims, just admit you are a blogger and not a philosopher — you cannot compete with Plato and Kant on their own turf.)
Returning to Nietzsche’s caveat, “Every great philosophy …[is] unconscious autobiography,” I believe that is indeed the keynote of the book. Nietzsche is perhaps more of a psychoanalyst of philosophy than a philosopher himself. And when one turns the psychoanalysis back upon Nietzsche, the rest of the book does make more sense. It is by using himself as a standard that he concludes that the “will to power” is the cardinal instinct of humankind (Chap. 5), that as one of “the higher class of men,” he has a RIGHT to ramble through generalizations about nationalities, women, music, whatever, and no need to justify any of it to the mediocre masses of the slave morality (presumably, us).
It is demagoguery in the manner of Trump. For the noble man, “morality equals self-glorification” (Chap. 9). “Egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul, I mean the unalterable belief that to a being such as ‘we’, other beings must naturally be in subjection, and have to sacrifice themselves” (Chap. 9). You can’t find a better definition of Trump narcissism than that.
And if the bravado of these quotes seems over the top, there are plenty more.
“A man who has depth of spirit … can only think of women as orientals do; he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined to service ….[The problem today is] she is unlearning to fear man: but the woman who ‘unlearns to fear’ sacrifices her most womanly instincts … she is daily being made more hysterical and more incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that of bearing robust children” (Chap. 7).
“Resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression … exploitation” (Chap. 9).
These passages sound an awful lot like what we would today call social media trolling.
I suppose the clearest counterpoint to the ethical base of Beyond Good and Evil is the Dalai Lama:
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
Ah, compassion! The bete noire of Beyond Good and Evil, the lynchpin to the democratic forces “threaten[ing] a new Buddhism” in Europe, with their belief “in the herd … in their religion of sympathy, in their compassion for all that feels, lives, and suffers” (Chap. 5). Sorry, but as with Kant above, I’ll take the Dalai Lama over Nietzsche on this one.
And at the end, a curiosity. The final passage of the book throws in a disarming bit of humility. “I, the last disciple and initiate of the God Dionysus: and perhaps I might at last begin to give to you, my friends, as far as I am allowed, a little taste of this philosophy? In a hushed voice, as is but seemly…” (Chap. 9). After a text of breathtaking arrogance in its dismissal of all previous philosophers and of equal rights for all but the master class, it is hard to tell if this humble bit is tongue-in-cheek or a revelation that the real Nietzsche is not the pompous bully who just delivered the book-length harangue but a companionate fellow traveler who was just bantering us the whole time. I tend to favor the “pompous bully” theory, but the trolling nature of the outlandish rhetoric gives me second thoughts. Maybe he was just trolling, bantering. Maybe the whole thing was ironic. I don’t know. For one thing, I haven’t read other bits and books by Nietzsche in many years, so I’m just giving my own bemused reactions to this one. Some of you Nietzsche supporters and scholars can reply with chuckles, clarifications, or merciless attacks. Anything to liberate my readers from the now-public quagmire of my own thoughts.
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Review of New Orleans: A Writer’s City, T. R. Johnson (Cambridge UP, 2023)
by Gary Gautier
A massive archeological dig through the local history of a mysterious and fascinating city so rich in cultural textures that the surprises keep coming. More than just a good narrative history, Johnson’s book is a chock-full reference archive for students of literary history — not just the many writers, from world-class literati to dive bar poets, who crossed paths in these neighborhoods like ships in the night, but also the musicians and artists and cultural forces that added the juice to the narratives. With the historical flow punctuated by granular details and quick bits of literary analysis, you see not just books and writers, but the soil from which they sprung — the pain and nuance and rough joys driven by local circumstance, the addictions and excess and freewheeling play of identities – all the chaotic vanity fair of life that New Orleans offers to its long line of home-bred writers and smitten transients.
For the scholar, all this is perfect, and Johnson’s command of his material is nothing if not scholarly, but for the lay reader it may seem at times bogged down in minutiae, a kind of Old Testament overload of names and references. And the addition of music history as context is good, but to some it will seem digressive, an end in itself – understandable since Johnson, besides being a professor of English at Tulane University, hosts a jazz show on New Orleans’ local WWOZ radio. Between the moments of full engagement, there are moments where the reading seems laborious. So be it. The mass of accumulated value is worth it.
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Walt Whitman’s robust spirit is an inspiration, a celebration of vitality and fellowship in every direction without shame or hesitation. It is a feeling for life that too many have forgotten, especially those who align with politics, left or right, those who need to shake off that dead snakeskin of politics and return to the heart’s direct embrace of the world and of each other
I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough …
(from “Song of Myself”)
poems for the coming age
* * * Click covers for links * * *
FREE instant download today. A post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale by two-time Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist, Gary Gautier
Get it HERE while it’s free. Read it later. Tell your friends.
#1 Bestseller on Amazon’s Metaphysical Fiction (free) list
#2 Bestseller on Amazon’s Literary Fiction (free) list
* * * Click covers for links * * *
“A foray into the human condition … Gabriel tells the story of several important relationships that unfolded through the course of his adult life … complex, caring, and tinged with flaws and regrets … A well-written and touching read recommended for fans of character studies.”
D. Wallace Peach, author of The Necromancer’s Daughter, The Ferryman and the Sea Witch, and many more (https://mythsofthemirror.com/)
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Love, Stars, and Paradigms. Poems by Swarn Gill. Literary Revelations Press, 2023.
Reviewed by Gary Gautier
Swarn Gill’s book of poems has a bit of everything, from politics to interesting conceptual hooks (“the love of time not noticed”; “we are the moment time vibrates”; “your life / in a groove no wider than a dime”) to the one-lining bravado of Allen Ginsberg (“Melville’s Ahab’s got nothing on me”; “capitalism has its eye on you”). Mostly though, these are intimate poems of human feeling, best when they settle into pockets of suggestive imagery (“a galaxy of gold / through curved lenses / of glass and tissue”). Interestingly, the intimacy is sometimes carried in panoramic Whitmanesque sweeps (“static electricity felt everywhere … the trees, the towers / the peaceful church steeples / me standing tall in a field”; “my carbon is breathed in the trees … I glide through time with magnificent ease.” Or in the imagery of physics and astronomy (“the quartz of you / crystallizing before my eyes”; “I rotate on my axis”; “I marvel at Saturn’s rings”). The collection was a little uneven for me – some poems captivated me less than others, and I struggled at times with the rhyming poems – but I found it strong overall, with lots of poems and hooks and closures I will long remember. Definitely worth reading more than once.
prostrate me
among the daisies
let emerald butterflies
send me to slumber
* * * Click covers for links * * *
shakemyheadhollow 