“The Anomaly” by Herve Le Tellier (translated by Adriana Hunter)

This novel is a page-turner that is part mystery and part philosophical meditation on the meanings of life. It follows a dizzying cast of characters, most aboard the same Air France flight 006, bound from Paris to JFK, when turbulence ensues and a mysterious event occurs. “To understand why Adrian Miller must answer the bulletproof charcoal-gray smartphone on this June 24, 2021, we must rewind to September 10, 2001, the day when, as the youngest postdoctoral researcher on Professor Robert Pozzi’s probabilities team, he was celebrating his twentieth birthday at MIT…. Adrian and Tina inventoried all the variables that could affect air traffic, and attributed them statistical values. They specified anything that could cause a catastrophe—even simply upsetting traffic flow—and surpassed the Pentagon’s expectations. Their model took into account absolutely everything: chains of events, means of communication, language barriers, different units (feet or meters?), pilot error, mechanical failure, technical problems, weather, sabotage, diversions, software piracy, faulty signaling, shortcomings in maintenance, and so much more … The two researchers identified thirty-seven basic protocols, with, in each case, between seven and twenty contingent pathways, in other words nearly five hundred basic situations, and as many responses…. But in April 2002, ten days after the report was submitted, the DoD sent it back with a question written in red felt pen: “What if we’re confronted with a case that fits none of the situations covered?””

The main conceit of the novel revolves around Nick Bostrom’s idea that all of humanity is actually living in a computer simulation of a higher intelligence. Assuming the energy of compute power in the future is cheap enough, that is actually statistically probable. “Adrian loathes this idea of a simulation, bearing in mind that he adopted Karl Popper as the leading light of his epistemology studies—the stalwart Popper, who felt a theory could be attributed no scientific weight if there was nothing to refute it … But Adrian can look at this question from every angle as much as he likes: all things being equal, the simplest explanation is often the right one. The simplest but the most uncomfortable: this plane’s appearance can’t be a bungle in the simulation—it would have been so easy to “erase” it, to rewind by a few seconds. No, it’s obviously a test: How will billions of virtual individuals react when confronted with their own virtuality?”

In the style of many novels these days, this plot-line goes meta—enveloping a book within the book. At least the fictional author doesn’t share a name with Le Tellier, “The anomaly is unlike anything Victor has produced before. It isn’t a novel, or a confession, or even a succession of unconnected dazzling sentences or brilliant truisms. It’s a strange book, thrillingly fast-paced, unputdownable, and between the lines she could see all of Miesel’s influences: Jankelevitch, Camus, Goncharov, and so many others.” Miesel, himself, later pontificates, “Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we’re fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational.”

“Non-things” by Byun-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This is Han’s latest treatise directed against the age of modernity. The book returns to many of his previous themes—thinking, lingering, ritual, time, community, and technology. Translated from German, it has less of his usual neo-Hegelian influence and more of a Heideggerian flair.

Han begins with his concept of Things and their displacement in modernity, “Things are the calm centres of life. They have now been wholly enveloped by information. Information is anything but a calm centre of life. It is not possible to linger on information. It is relevant only fleetingly. It lives off its capacity to surprise. Information’s fleetingness alone can account for the fact that information destabilizes life. It constantly attracts our attention. The tsunami of information agitates our cognitive system. Information is not a stable, uniform entity. It lacks the solidity of being…. Things are increasingly receding into the background of our attention…. We are obsessed not with things but with information and data. We now consume more information than things. We are literally becoming intoxicated with communication…. The industrial revolution solidified and expanded the sphere of things, distancing us from nature and the crafts. But only digitization puts an end to the paradigm of the thing. It subordinates things to information…. The informatization of the world turns things into infomatons, that is, into information-processing actors.”

Many moderns celebrate the fact that they have become less materialistic. They prefer to live a life of experiences rather than compete with the materialism of their ancestors. Han sees a dark side. “Today, we prefer experiencing to possessing, being to having. Experiencing is a form of being…. We no longer want to be tied to things or people. Ties are untimely. They restrict the space of possible experiences, that is, freedom in the sense of consumption…. We even expect the consumption of things to provide us with experiences. The informational content of things, for instance their brands, is more important than their use value. We perceive things primarily with regard to the information embedded in them…. What determines the value added is the distinguishing information that promises the consumer a special experience — or even the experience of specialness…. The aesthetic-cultural content of a commodity is the actual product. The economy of experiences replaces the economy of things.”

The modern perspective of art has transformed the artistic process. “Artworks are things…. Art that is committed to meaning is hostile to pleasure…. A work of art, being a thing, is not just a bearer of meaning. It does not illustrate anything. The process of expression is directed not by a clear concept but by an indeterminate fever, a delirium, an intensity, an urge or desire that cannot be articulated…. What is problematic about today’s art is its inclination to communicate a preconceived opinion, a moral or political conviction: that is, its inclination to communicate information. Conception precedes execution…. Art is no longer handwork that forms matter, without intention, into a thing, but thought work that communicates a prefabricated idea…. It wants to instruct rather than seduce.”

Han returns to the intimacy of personal ties—between people and objects. “Intense ties are becoming less and less important. First of all, they are unproductive, for consumption and communication can be accelerated only by weak ties. For this reason, capitalism systematically destroys ties. Things that are close to our hearts are also rare today; they are increasingly being replaced by disposable items." Han quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends anymore.” Han concludes, “A re-romanticization of the world would presuppose its re-materialization…. Ecology must be preceded by a new ontology of matter, one that views it as something that lives.”

“Dilla Time” by Dan Charnas

“J Dilla Changed My Life.” Few rap producers have garnered such fervent underground esteem and accolades. James Yancey was a creature of habit. “Every day, no matter how late Jay stayed up, he rose at 7:00 a.m. From 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. he swept, wiped, and dusted every inch of his studio while listening to music, usually records that he had recently purchased, listening for sections to sample and manipulate on his Akai MPC3000 drum machine. He didn’t just skip through the records, “needle-dropping” for interesting parts. He listened to entire songs, listened and listened. His vigilance was almost always rewarded by an element deep within a track. From 9:00 a.m. until noon, he made “beats,” or individual rhythm tracks for rappers to rhyme on or singers to sing over. He created them quickly, one after the other, finished them, and then moved on. At lunchtime, he took a three-hour break. Sometimes he’d use that time to pick up visiting musicians and artists at the airport and take them back to his home studio. Then he’d work again from 3:00 p.m. until 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., and use the rest of the evening to hang out—go eat, go to the strip club—often returning to make more beats.”

In the late 1990s, Dilla invented a whole new style of beat making. “This approach did have a name. Between brothers, James and T3 called it “simple-complex”: If you listen to it casually, it sounds like one thing, something whole; but if you listen more carefully, you hear that it isn’t whole at all—there are many different things going on at the same time. It’s simple: it sounds good, and the rhythm is countable. But it’s complex: it’s really not a straight rhythm. It’s simple-complex…. As this predictable/unpredictable rhythm made its way outward among James’s mentors, collaborators, and admirers, they started giving it their own names: that “Jay Dee swing” or “bounce” or “hump,” designations that would shift to terms like “Detroit swing” a few years later when some of his protégés began using the time-feel…. That time-feel arose not from a musical scene, nor from the conservatory, nor from the avant-garde, but from one man using a machine in a basement in Detroit. That time-feel cannot be understood as either straight or swing time. It is not the median or midpoint or gradation between the two. It is the deliberate juxtaposition of multiple expressions of straight and swing time simultaneously, a conscious cultivation of rhythmic friction for maximum musicality and maximum surprise. It is conflicted time.”

Arguably, the golden moment for Dilla’s career was his teaming up with D’Angelo, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, and James Poyser—the so-called Soulquarians. “As the musicians bounced between Electric Lady’s three studios, A, B, and C, the lines between projects—Common, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, each paid for out of different recording budgets by different labels—were often blurred. They’d jam all day and divvy up the tracks at night…. The sessions at Electric Lady also blurred lines that James had drawn in his own mind. James saw himself as a programmer, but here he found partners who saw serious programming and serious musicianship as one and the same, and thus treated him as a serious musician.”

Even amongst those with years making hits in the music industry, Dilla’s skills in the studio were uncanny. Questlove simply called him “The God.” Dave Cooley, Madlib’s sound engineer, related another story about their first session recording together. “Cooley assumed James would have a heavy hand, like most producers. But James rarely second-guessed members of his team. Even accomplished musicians like [Karriem] Riggins tended to be deferential to the producer—asking James if he wanted them to do things differently, or record another take…. “Nah,” James would often say. “We got it.” James wasn’t being polite. When he said “We got it,” he literally knew he had every single bar that he was going to need for the final mix, and that he already mapped it out in his head during people’s takes. After everyone left, he would rattle off to Cooley how to compile the performance: Use take 1 for bars 1 through 4, use take 2 for bar 5, use take 3 for bars 6 and 7, but cut away halfway through 7 and go back to take 1…. It was the most eerie thing Cooley had ever seen in a recording studio. He’s Yoda, Cooley thought.”

“Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne” by Katherine Rundell

This short biography of the poet John Donne recounts his life from Catholic heretic to privateer in Lord Essex’s fleet to impoverished courtier to resplendent Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and King James I’s personal preacher. He wrote verse all the way. “Even in the early 1590s, Donne’s verse was thought remarkable. The dramatist Ben Jonson, gossiping tipsily over dinner with the Scottish diarist William Drummond of Hawthornden, said that Donne had ‘written all his best pieces ere he was 25’, which would have been 1597…. For Donne, divergence from the accent and peculiar breaks in form contain the very stamp of what he meant: they were never aimless…. Donne’s five Satires are among the hardest to scan and read aloud: deliberately so: they sound exclamatory, darting from expostulation to fluency and back again, poetry that is quick on its feet and angry at you…. He accounts for the first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary of around 340 words in the English language.” Donne wrote, “I sing not siren-like, to tempt, for I/Am harsh.”

Posterity has only an account of one of Donne’s poems written in his own hand. Instead, his verse was scribbled out and copied on looseleaf and saved in private collections. “There are more than four thousand copies of his individual poems, in 260 manuscripts…. Inevitably, the poems vary from copy to copy — sometimes just a letter or two, sometimes whole lines — and are often almost impossible to date…. Titles of Donne’s verse are plain, descriptive and uncomplicated. This is because they were largely not written by him…. His poetry left his hands unnamed, allowing it to gather up titles and edits and little flourishes from each poem’s new owner. The poems were akin to living organisms, changing shape and colour as they were copied and recopied.”

Rundell suggests that the beauty of Donne’s verse was in its surprise and the challenge of struggling with his lines. “The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die. Donne suggests that you look at the world with both more awe and more scepticism: that you weep for it and that you gasp for it…. Your love is almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? It may be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His startling timelessness is down to the fact that he had the power of unforeseeability: you don’t see him coming.” In a sermon, Donne suggests, “Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.” On his deathbed, he framed humanity’s relationship with one another, in some of his most enduring lines, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

“The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” by Erving Goffman

Goffman is considered a founding doyen of American sociology, although originally hailing from Canada. This book, written in 1959, is an example of personal fieldwork mixed with broader anecdotal reporting. It is concerned with the public persona that all humans put on in the face of company. “This mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be.” Goffman conceives of all public interactions as akin to performances. “A performer tends to conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of himself and his products…. A performer often engenders in his audience the belief that he is related to them in a more ideal way than is always the case.” He quotes the authority of William James, “[An individual] has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares…. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends.”

Goffman stresses the tenuousness of the public mask that we are constantly forced to maintain, “The impression of reality fostered by a performance is a delicate, fragile thing that can be shattered by very minor mishaps…. As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable impulse with moods and energies that change from one moment to the next. As characters put on for an audience, however, we must not be subject to ups and downs…. A certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogeneous performance at every appointed time…. A false impression maintained by an individual in any one of his routines may be a threat to the whole relationship or role of which the routine is only one part, for a discreditable disclosure in one area of an individual’s activity will throw doubt on the many areas of activity in which he may have nothing to conceal…. When one’s activity occurs in the presence of other persons, some aspects of the activity are expressively accentuated and other aspects, which might discredit the fostered impression, are suppressed.”

The performative Self is most often the Self that accrues status and recognition in society. “A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be realized.” Goffman furthers James’ observation that any one Self requires multiple masks for each of his multiple settings, which requires a fair amount of juggling. “The answer to this problem is for the performer to segregate his audiences so that the individuals who witness him in one of his roles will not be the individuals who witness him in another of his roles…. Incapacity to maintain this control leaves the performer in a position of not knowing what character he will have to project from one moment to the next.” Even in the most intimate of settings, we all still put on some type of mask. “There are very few friend relationships in which there is not some occasion when attitudes expressed about the friend behind his back are grossly incompatible with the ones expressed about him to his face…. Secret derogation seems to be much more common than secret praise, perhaps because such derogation serves to maintain the solidarity of the team, demonstrating mutual regard [within the friend group] at the expense of those absent.” In fact, roles and performances are always in flux and open for recalibration, based on the facts revealed and the interplay of the performers. “The performance given by a team is not a spontaneous, immediate response to the situation, absorbing all of the team’s energies and constituting their sole social reality; the performance is something the team members can stand back from, back far enough to imagine or play out simultaneously other kinds of performances attesting to other realities. Whether the performers feel their official offering is the “realest” reality or not, they will give surreptitious expression to multiple versions of reality, each version tending to be incompatible with the others.”

Goffman notes that the audience is an active member in any kind of public performance. They can be generous or biting in their understanding of the mask the performer seeks to convey to his public. They can give the benefit of the doubt or act as unbelieving skeptics. “This involves: the giving of a proper amount of attention and interest; a willingness to hold in check one’s own performance so as not to introduce too many contradictions, interruptions, or demands for attention; the inhibition of all acts or statements that might create a faux pas; the desire, above all else, to avoid a scene…. When performers make a slip of some kind, clearly exhibiting a discrepancy between the fostered impression and a disclosed reality, the audience may tactfully “not see” the slip or readily accept the excuse that is offered for it. And at moments of crisis for the performers, the whole audience may come into tacit collusion with them in order to help them out.”

Putting on this constant public performance is not always easy for the Self to maintain. The harder one tries to perform an unreality for the public, the greater the strain to the psyche. “To the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.” This is hard to pull off, in the sense that every Self cannot but help project some sort of public front when in the presence of other humans. The discrepancy might be small or large, but some performative aspect is always there. “When an individual appears before others, he knowingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part.” Goffman concludes, “The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited…. The whole machinery of self-production is cumbersome, of course, and sometimes breaks down, exposing its separate components.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction to the final book of the Torah, “The Book of Deuteronomy is the most sustained deployment of rhetoric in the Bible. It is presented, after all, as Moses’s valedictory address, which he delivers across the Jordan from the promised land just before his death.” Alter goes on to clarify, “If one tries to imagine, however, the actual audience for which Deuteronomy was first framed, it will begin to be evident that its impressive deployment of rhetoric serves another purpose. Rhetoric is an art of persuasion, and the rhetoric of Deuteronomy is meant to persuade audiences in the late First Commonwealth and exilic period of the palpable and authoritative reality of an event that never occurred, or at any rate surely did not occur as it is represented in this text—the national assembly in trans-Jordan that was a second covenant after the covenant at Sinai…. The midrashic notion that all future generations of Israel were already present as witnesses at Sinai is adumbrated, perhaps actually generated, by this rhetorical strategy of the evocation of witnessing in Deuteronomy.”

Alter relates some of the syntactical moves in Deuteronomy. He claims, “The role of stylistic indicators of temporal and spatial location and orientation—those “pointing words” that linguists refer to as deictics—is essential to the creation of this general effect.” Specifically, he points to Deuteronomy 3:12, “And this land we took hold of at that time. One of the earmarks of Deuteronomic style is the fondness it exhibits for demonstrative pronouns. Moses, recapitulating the recent history of the Israelites for the benefit of the people, likes to use what linguists call deictics—“pointing words”—to indicate what is before their eyes, the familiar objects of their collective experience.”

In Deuteronomy 5:12, Alter relates a midrash when explaining a slight variation of word choice in the Biblical text, “Keep the sabbath day. The Exodus version has “remember” (that is, be mindful of) rather than “keep.” The Midrash Mekhilta famously announced, “‘keep’ and ‘remember’ in a singular utterance,” and the two acts are, indeed, joined in a tight nexus: because we remember or are mindful of something, we keep it. But shamor, “keep,” “observe,” “watch,” is a recurrent term in the didactic rhetoric of Deuteronomy, and so it is hardly surprising that this verb would be favored here.”

Alter combines his knowledge of geography, superstition, and literary style in his exposition of Deuteronomy 11:29, “the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal…. In keeping with the orientation to the east, Gerizim is on the favored right hand and Ebal on the suspect left, and Gerizim is covered with vegetation whereas Ebal is desolate. The theology of Deuteronomy is beautifully concretized in the stark opposition of these two mountains, for the book repeatedly stresses the forking alternatives of prosperity and disaster.”

The Book of Deuteronomy is particularly harsh on the pagan practices that predated monotheism. In Deuteronomy 12:2, Alter relates, “You shall utterly destroy all the places…. There have been exhortations earlier in Deuteronomy to eradicate all vestiges of the local pagan cults, but here that imperative of iconoclasm is coupled with a revolutionary insistence on the centralization of the Israelite cult.… In point of historical fact, what the Israelite religion did was to take over places of Canaanite worship and adapt them for the worship of the God of Israel…. For the Deuteronomist, the very existence of such local places of worship carries with it the danger of syncretism—the mingling of pagan rituals and concepts with the worship of the one God, and, especially, a leakage of the adoration of natural deities (“on the high mountains and in the valleys and under every lush tree”) into the cult of YHWH. Thus, the whole apparatus of local cults must be utterly destroyed, and instead, one central, exclusive place is to be designated for the worship of Israel’s God.”

In Deuteronomy 17:18-19, Alter gets into issues of literacy, the primacy of the written word, and the political structure of early Israelite society, “he shall write for himself a copy of this teaching. The king is to be actively engaged in personally producing a text of the teaching…. The location of religious authority in a text, a revolutionary idea, is made dramatically clear…. Many commentators have cited this whole section as a demonstration that the government of ancient Israel was in essence a constitutional monarchy…. This does not make his regime a constitutional monarchy, but one founded on theocratic authority, the Torah or constitution to be expounded by the priests at the central sanctuary.”

Alter notes another aspect of word choice in Deuteronomy 19:1, “the lord your God … the Lord your God. It is a stylistic peculiarity of Deuteronomy that the Lord, YHWH, very rarely occurs without “your God,” and even the substitution of a pronoun, as here, is generally avoided. This linguistic oddity reflects the didactic emphasis of the book, tirelessly reminding Israel that YHWH is its God.”

In Deuteronomy 27:3, Alter relates a bit of historical context, “write on them the words of this teaching. The most plausible reference of this phrase is to the code of laws (chapters 12-26) that has just been enunciated, although it could refer to the whole Book of Deuteronomy. Jeffrey H. Tigay notes that two steles the size on which the Code of Hammurabi are inscribed could contain more than the entire text of Deuteronomy…. Inscribing “the words of this teaching [torah]” on stone is a powerfully concrete image of the idea of the text as the enduring source of authority, which is the central ideological innovation of Deuteronomy.”

Alter makes the case that the Book of Deuteronomy seeks to link the people of Israel for all times—past, present, and future. To that end, in Deuteronomy 29:14, he states, “but with him who is here standing with us this day … and with him who is not here with us this day. This idea is paramount for the whole theological-historical project of the Book of Deuteronomy. The awesome covenant, evoked through Moses’s strong rhetoric, whereby Israel binds itself to God, is a timeless model, to be reenacted scrupulously by all future generations. The force of the idea is nicely caught by the rabbinic notion that all unborn generations were already standing here at Sinai.” Finally, Alter concludes with Deuteronomy 34:4, “the land that I swore to Abraham. This final mention of the promise to the forefathers links the end of Deuteronomy with the beginning of the Patriarchal narrative in Genesis.”

“Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

Jung relates his work on the traditional archetypes with a theory of the nature of the Self. He begins with the role of the unconscious in the human mind, “The contents of the collective unconscious are invariably archetypes that were present from the beginning…. The archetypes most clearly characterized from the empirical point of view are those which have the most frequent and the most disturbing influence on the ego.” For Jung, an understanding of the archetypes is necessary for any understanding of Self, “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge…. Examination of the dark characteristics—that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow—reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality…. It is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting…. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

Much of Jung’s book relates archetypal symbols to Christian and Gnostic theology. Jung posits, “As the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self, and everything that happens to the God-image has an effect on the latter.” Elsewhere, he expands, “Modern psychology is therefore confronted with a question very like the one faced by the alchemists: Is the self a symbol of Christ, or is Christ a symbol of the self? In the present study I have affirmed the latter alternative. I have tried to show how the traditional Christ-image concentrates upon itself the characteristics of an archetype-the archetype of the self…. The Christ-image is as good as perfect (at least it is meant to be so), while the archetype (so far as known) denotes completeness but is far from being perfect. It is a paradox, a statement about something indescribable and transcendental…. The individual may strive after perfection (“Be you therefore perfect as also your heavenly Father is perfect.”) but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness…. Christ is the perfect man who is crucified. One could hardly think of a truer picture of the goal of ethical endeavor.”

Jung next explains the notion of the world-soul, “The ocean is the “spirit of the world”…. The “spirit of the world” is a somewhat unusual term, because the expression more commonly used was the “anima mundi.” The world-soul or, in this case, the world-spirit is a projection of the unconscious…. This idea is nothing more than an analogy of the animating principle in man which inspires his thoughts and acts of cognition. “Soul” and “spirit,” or psyche as such, is in itself totally unconscious. If it is assumed to be somewhere “outside,” it cannot be anything except a projection of the unconscious…. In alchemy “our sea” is a symbol for the unconscious in general, just as it is in dreams…. The symbol of the self appears here as an “extremely small” fish in the vast ocean of the unconscious, like a man alone on the sea of the world.”

In general, for Jung, the symbols in myth play a large role in digesting the meanings of the unconscious. “Cosmogonic myths are, at bottom, symbols for the coming of consciousness…. The dawn-state corresponds to the unconscious, in alchemical terms, it is the chaos, the masa confusa or nigredo…. Oxen stand for the motive power of the plough. In the same way, the fishes represent the driving forces of the coming world of consciousness. Since olden times the plough has stood for man’s mastery over the earth: wherever man ploughs, he has wrested a patch of soil from the primal state and put it to his own use. That is to say: the fishes will rule this world and subdue it by working astrologically through man and moulding his consciousness…. The alchemical work starts with the descent into darkness (nigredo), i.e., the unconscious.”

For Jung, alchemy was the precursor to modern science. He puts heavy stock into alchemy’s symbols and what they foretell about man’s probing of the unconscious and the Self. “Dorn was the first thinker to recognize with the utmost clarity the extraordinary dilemma of alchemy: the arcane substance is one and the same, whether it is found within man or outside him. The “alchymical” procedure takes place within and without. He who does not understand how to free the “truth” in his own soul from its fetters will never make a success of the physical opus, and he who knows how to make the stone can only do so on the basis of right doctrine, through which he himself is transformed, or which he creates through his own transformation…. Dorn came to realize the fundamental importance of self-knowledge…. The expectations you put into the work must be applied to your own ego…. The secret is first and foremost in man; it is his true self, which he does not know but learns to know by experience of outward things…. Anyone who seriously tries to know himself as an object is accused of selfishness and eccentricity. But such knowledge has nothing to do with the ego’s subjective knowledge of itself…. The distinction between “quis” and “quid” is crucial: whereas “quis” has an unmistakably personal aspect and refers to the ego, “quid” is neuter, predicating nothing except an object which is not endowed even with personality…. The difference between knowledge of the ego and knowledge of the self could hardly be formulated more trenchantly than in this distinction between “quis” and “quid.”… Causes and ends thus transcend consciousness to a degree that ought not to be underestimated, and this implies that their nature and action are unalterable and irreversible so long as they have not become objects of consciousness. They can only be corrected through conscious insight and moral determination, which is why self-knowledge, being so necessary, is feared so much.”

Jung expands his theory of the Self by further relating the symbols of fairytales, myths, and religious dogma, “That is why it is so extremely important to tell children fairytales and legends, and to inculcate religious ideas (dogmas) into grown-ups, because these things are instrumental symbols with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized into consciousness, interpreted, and integrated…. For the alchemist it was clear that the “centre,” or what we would call the self, does not lie in the ego but is outside it, “in us” yet not “in our mind,” being located rather in that which we unconsciously are, “the quid” which we still have to recognize. Today we would call it the unconscious, and we distinguish between a personal unconscious which enables us to recognize the shadow and an impersonal unconscious which enables us to recognize the archetypal symbol of the self…. The centre was paradoxically in man and yet at the same time outside him.”

Modernity and tradition do not mix. Today, there has been a tendency to toss out the irrational and the arcane. Jung states, “Like a snake changing its skin, the old myth needs to be clothed anew in every renewed age if it is not to lose its therapeutic effect.” He feels that modernity has gone terribly awry. “Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism.” Elsewhere, he expands, “The destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality. Materialistic atheism with its utopian chimeras forms the religion of all those rationalistic movements which delegate the freedom of personality to the masses and thereby extinguish it.”

Jung puts great stake in the role of opposition in the formation of the Self. “Most people do not have sufficient range of consciousness to become aware of the opposites inherent in human nature. The tensions they generate remain for the most part unconscious, but can appear in dreams. Traditionally, the snake stands for the vulnerable spot in man: it personifies his shadow, i.e., his weakness and unconsciousness. The greatest danger about unconsciousness is proneness to suggestion. The effect of suggestion is due to the release of an unconscious dynamic, and the more unconscious this is, the more effective it will be. Hence the ever-widening split between conscious and unconscious increases the danger of psychic infection and mass psychosis. With the loss of symbolic ideas the bridge to the unconscious has broken down. Instinct no longer affords the protection against unsound ideas and empty slogans. Rationality without tradition and without a basis in instinct is proof against no absurdity.” Jung expounds on the symbol of the snake, “Since the shadow, in itself, is unconscious for most people, the snake would correspond to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious and as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards, and also the reason why the snake signifies evil and darkness on the one hand and wisdom on the other.”

Finally, Jung relates that the Self is ever-changing, “Consciousness and understanding arise from discrimination, that is, through analysis (dissolution) followed by synthesis, as stated in symbolical terms by the alchemical dictum: “Solve et coagula” (dissolve and coagulate)…. The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a static quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process.” The circle is the proper symbol, “The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail…. That is why the lapis, as prima materia, stands at the beginning of the process as well as at the end.”

“Meno” by Plato (translated by G.M.A. Grube)

This short dialogue has Socrates speaking with Meno, a young aristocrat from Thessaly, about the nature of virtue. Particularly, they are interested in figuring out whether virtue is innate or whether it can be learned. In fact, Meno initially asks, “Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way?” After some typically frustrating Socratic back and forth, Meno remains apoplectic, “But, Socrates, do you really not know what virtue is?” Socrates responds typically, “Not only that, my friend, but also that, as I believe, I have never met anyone else who did know.”

Before revealing his answer in his usual roundabout manner, Socrates delves into a couple fruitful asides. The first is on the nature of shape and color. Socrates states, “Let us try to tell you what shape is. See whether you will accept that it is this: Let us say that shape is that which alone of existing things always follows color…. From this you may understand what I mean by shape, for I say this of every shape, that a shape is that which limits a solid; in a word, a shape is the limit of a solid.” Secondly (and more famously), Socrates delves into the paradox of knowledge and learning, the so-called Meno’s Paradox, “Do you realize what a debater’s argument you are bringing up, that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.”

Next, Socrates goes into yet another digression on the Sophists and their inability to teach virtue. He then recites a litany of the great men of Athens and pontificates on their inabilities to teach their own sons virtue, at one point even insulting Anytus, Meno’s host while in Athens. Socrates is not deterred, concluding by speaking about the Athenian statesman (not the historian), “Reflect that Thucydides too brought up two sons, Melesias and Stephanus, that he educated them well in all other things. They were the best wrestlers in Athens…. He belonged to a great house; he had great influence in the city and among other Greeks, so that if virtue could be taught he would have found the man who could make his sons good men, be it a citizen or a stranger, if he himself did not have the time because of his public concerns. But, friend Anytus, virtue certainly cannot be taught.” The implications for the sons of Athens (and their qualities) are left unsaid.

Socrates, finally, wraps up this debate (largely with himself), letting both Anytus and Meno off the hook. Socrates concludes, “True opinion is in no way a worse guide to correct action than knowledge. It is this that we omitted in our investigation of the nature of virtue, when we said that only knowledge can lead to correct action, for true opinion can do so also…. For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man’s mind, so they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. And that, Meno, my friend, is recollection, as we previously agreed. After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion…. And that only these two things, true belief and knowledge, guide correctly, and that if a man possesses these he gives correct guidance. The things that turn out right by some chance are not due to human guidance, but where there is correct human guidance it is due to two things, true belief and knowledge…. Now because it cannot be taught, virtue no longer seems to be knowledge…. Therefore, if it is not through knowledge, the only alternative is that it is through right opinion that statesmen follow the right course for their cities. As regards knowledge, they are no different from soothsayers and prophets…. Virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift from the gods which is not accompanied by understanding.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Numbers” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter states that the Book of Numbers “returns to the narrative impulse that marks the first half of Exodus…. We are repeatedly reminded of the passing of generations as the story carries us to the border of the promised land…. But if Israel is on the move from chapter 11 to the end, it must be said that this text associates movement with trouble…. We have a repetition of the same scene involving the same actors—Israel, Moses, and God—manifesting a certain intensification more than significant variation from one recurrence to the next…. One suspects that all these repetitions of the scene of murmuring are introduced because the writers conceived it as a paradigm for the subsequent history of Israel: recurrent resentment of God’s rule and of the authority of His legitimate leaders, chronic attraction to objects of base material desire, fearfulness, divisiveness, and the consequences of national disaster brought about, in the view of the biblical writers, by this whole pattern of constant backsliding…. This generation that cannot free itself from the slave mentality it brought with it from Egypt also constitutes the beginnings of a people meant to realize a grand historical destiny.”

In his introduction, Alter reveals that the Book of Numbers incorporates much verse into the flow of its narrative. “It is the striking poetic insets in Numbers that account for much of its distinctive quality among the books of the Bible…. It is an interesting question why such scraps of old verse should have been incorporated in the Book of Numbers…. I would like to propose that these fragments of old poems are introduced into the narrative of Numbers at least in part in order to produce an “antiquity effect.” There is no way of knowing whether Hebrew audiences in, say, the ninth century B.C.E. were still familiar with the Book of the Battles of YHWH, or whether it was already a lost work…. The point, in any case, of the fragmentary quotation, triggered in context by the geographical references, would have been to evoke a distant moment in early Israelite history…. The biblical self-perception of the Israelite nation as a latecomer to the historical scene is palpably present here.”

In Numbers 5:2, Alter explains that impurity was not always an issue of morality, “by a corpse: Literally, “for a [dead] person,” lanafesh. All three of these categories of impurity are clearly cultic, not moral. Pathology and death are viewed as contaminants, and the camp of Israel in the wilderness, in which God’s presence dwells with a specific locus in the Tabernacle, must be kept free of them.”

Alter relates both the poetic and historic natures of the blessing in Numbers 6:23-27, “‘Thus shall you bless the Israelites. Say to them: May the Lord bless you and guard you./ May the Lord light up His face to you and grant grace to you;/ May the Lord lift up His face to you and give you peace.’ And they shall set My name over the Israelites, and I myself shall bless them.” This cadenced threefold blessing came to play a central liturgical role for both Jews and Christians, and probably began to serve that function even in the biblical period…. After the pronouncing of the threefold blessing, God’s name, a kind of divine proprietorship, will be set over Israel, and God Himself will carry out the blessing.” Alter relates how the Bible incorporates all the physical senses. In Numbers 10:2, Alter describes the introduction of sound, “two silver trumpets. After all the lists of the early chapters of Numbers, the visual pageantry of the Tabernacle furnishings, and the deployment of the tribal troops with their banners, sound enters the text—in essence, musical flourishes, a pageantry of sound. These particular sounds are in the first instance the signal for the forward movement of the camp, and so propel the whole story from the long stasis of the stay at Sinai into the narrative of wanderings that constitutes much of what follows.”

In Numbers 15:38, Alter details a historical tidbit, which also relates to the issue of word choice in translation, “an indigo twist. Though indigo may be a reasonable approximation of the color in question, it should be noted that the dye is not derived from a plant, as is indigo, but from a substance secreted by the murex, harvested off the coast of Phoenicia…. The extraction and preparation of this dye were labor-intensive and thus made quite costly. It was used for royal garments in many places in the Mediterranean region, and in Israel it was also used for priestly garments and for the cloth furnishings of the Tabernacle. One may infer that the indigo twist was a token of the idea that Israel should become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” and perhaps also that, as the covenanted people, metaphorically God’s firstborn, the nation as a whole had royal status…. The indigo twist—Rashi even seeks to link it with the color of the sky on the night of the Exodus—is thus a reminder not only of the commandments but of the liberation from slavery, prelude to the Sinai epiphany through which Israel took on the obligation to become a kingdom of priests. The once enslaved people is henceforth to wear a constant token of royalty and sanctity.”

The recurrent use of the envelope structure is once again used in Numbers 19:32, “you shall not bear offense for it . . . and you shall not profane the holy things . . . and you shall not die. This whole unit of instructions to the Aaronides closes in an envelope structure: the danger of suffering the consequences of violating the sanctuary, invoked at the beginning, recurs now on a note of reassurance: because these tithes of agricultural offerings are the priests’ just wages for their service in the cult, they run no risk of perishing for having eaten consecrated foodstuffs.”

Alter helpfully points out rare occurrences of all kinds within the biblical narrative. In Numbers 22:28, he notes, “And the Lord opened the ass’s mouth. This is the only talking animal, if one excludes the mythological serpent in the Garden story, in the entire Bible…. The talking ass is perfectly in accord with the theological assumption of the story: if God absolutely controls blessings and curses and vision, He can do the same for speech.” In Numbers 23:23, Alter describes a difference between the monotheism of Israel and their polytheistic neighbors, “Now be it said to Jacob/ and to Israel what el has wrought. This line of verse follows directly from the assertion that there is no divining in Israel. Other nations may foolishly have recourse to soothsayers and word-magic professionals like Balaam, but Israel is immediately informed, whether through prophets or direct divine revelation, what God’s designs are.” Alter admits when a smooth translation is a challenge. In Numbers 24:23-24, he states, “who can love more than El has set him,/ and ships from the hands of the Kittites. An honest translator must admit that the Hebrew text here is not intelligible, and that the nexus between the seemingly philosophical pronouncement of the first verset and the invocation of a Mediterranean fleet in the second verset is obscure.”

In Numbers 28:2, Alter details the issue of biblical chronology. He states, “My offering. The end of the previous chapter was clearly what should have been the penultimate moment of the Moses story: Moses summoned to the mountaintop where he will be gathered to his kin and where he is enjoined to pass the leadership on to Joshua. Now, however, the Priestly redactors, pursuing their own professional concern with the cult, introduce a large block of material stipulating regulations for sacrifices…. One could scarcely find a more emphatic illustration of the rabbinic principle that “there is neither early nor late in the Torah,” i.e., that the text of the Torah passed down to us does not exhibit consistent chronological sequence.” Finally, in Numbers 36:13, Alter concludes, “in the steppes of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho…. It is fitting that “Jericho” should be the last word in the Book of Numbers. Jericho will be the first military objective when the Israelites cross the Jordan, and so the concluding word here points forward to the beginning of Joshua.”

“The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This essay deals with importance of ritual and its disappearance in the modern world. Han begins, “Rituals serve as a background against which our present times may seem to stand out more clearly…. Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based…. Today, the world is symbol poor…. We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.” Han focuses on ritual’s role in lessening the importance of the Self and creating community, “Rituals are also symbolic practices, practices of symballein, in the sense that they bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community…. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.” Han also emphasizes the role of the physical, “Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.”

Han contrasts the modern notion of authenticity with the communal notions of ritual. “The society of authenticity is a performance society…. Authenticity is in fact the enemy of community. The narcissism of authenticity undermines community…. The cult of authenticity shifts the question of identity from society to the individual person. Within the cult of authenticity, the production of self becomes a permanent activity…. Authenticity is a neoliberal form of production. You exploit yourself voluntarily in the belief that you are realizing yourself…. Today, the world is not a theatre in which roles are played and ritual gestures exchanged, but a market in which one exposes and exhibits oneself…. In the name of authenticity or genuineness, the semblance of beauty, the ritual gesture, is today discarded as something purely external. But this genuineness is, in truth, crudeness and barbarity…. We live in a culture of the affect. Where ritual gestures and manners decay, affect and emotion gain the upper hand.”

All rituals of politeness have been discarded by modernity. “A ritual of politeness is not an expression of subjective feeling; it is an objective act. It resembles a magical invocation that produces a positive mental state…. In a society of authenticity, actions are guided internally, motivated psychologically, whereas in ritual societies actions are determined by externalized forms of interaction. Rituals make the world objective…. Politeness is pure form. Nothing is intended by it. It is empty. As a ritual form, it is devoid of any moral content…. As a form of ritual, politeness is without heart and without desire, without wish. It is more art than morality. It exhausts itself in the pure exchange of ritual gestures…. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity. Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer…. The more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is.”

Han also laments the loss of pageantry, play, and festival. Today, all life is mere work. Modernity is the consumption society par excellence. One only stops to rest so that he may work some more. “Rituals and ceremonies are the genuinely human acts which allow life to appear to be an enchanting, celebratory affair…. As forms of play, festivals are self-representations of life. They are characterized by an excess, an expression of an overflowing life that does not aim at a goal…. In the festival, life relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to external purposes…. The time of the festival is time standing still…. It thus makes lingering possible. Time as a sequence of transient, fleeting moments is suspended. There is no goal one walks towards.” To linger and to contemplate has been lost in the hustle and bustle for ever more. “Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion…. Rest belongs to the sphere of the sacred…. It transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work…. Rest and work represent two fundamentally different existential forms.” Ritual, even in the everyday, marks the passage of time. “Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure…. Thresholds, as transitions, give rhythm to, articulate, and even narrate space and time…. What must be won back is contemplative rest. If our life is deprived of all its contemplative elements, we become suffocated by our own activity.”