“The Party’s Interests Comes First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun” by Joseph Torigian

Torigian’s massive tome cannot be read without reflecting on Xi’s most famous son, Jinping. That said, this is a biography of Zhongxun in his own right: a famous Chinese revolutionary, an underling of Mao’s, and a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist. Xi had no problems with breaking a few eggs in the name of communism, “Revolution demands killing, but in the process of killing, it is still necessary to maintain a principle of caution: resolutely kill those who should be killed; don’t kill those who could either be killed or not killed; and don’t kill those who should not be killed. We need to expand propaganda to make people understand that every killing should have an educational effect…. As long as reactionary forces exist inside and outside the country, the struggle will remain. Moreover, as the counterrevolutionary forces come closer to annihilation, the struggle will intensify and become more brutal.”

After the victory over the Japanese military and the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Communists consolidated their power in Beijing. “When Mao asked Bo what he thought of Xi, Bo answered that he was “a promising youth.” Mao shook his head and said Xi was instead “a pure blue flame in the stove”—an expression that refers to Daoist priests making pills of immortality, meaning someone with extremely high talent…. Mao brought Xi to Beijing to assume work as part of one of the most famous personnel reassignments in Chinese history, known as “the five horses entering the capital.” Gao Gang, Rao Shushi, Deng Zihui, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Zhongxun all left their positions as powerhouse figures in the regional bureaus to take up new positions in the capital…. Born in 1913, [Xi] was eight years younger than Gao Gang and nine years younger than Deng Xiaoping. Xi became vice-minister of the Culture and Education Committee, a member of the new State Planning Commission (which was chaired by his former leader Gao) and minister of propaganda.”

Xi was always concerned that the Chinese Communist Party act in concert with the peasants and not act above them. “If we party cadres oppose the masses, then we should worry that the masses will beat us with poles. This is the lesson of the collapse of the Nationalist regime…. After victory in the entire nation and after the leading organs entered the cities, the living and work environments changed. This kind of change had a definite influence on the thinking of our cadres. A real change occurred. What was the nature of this change? It was a move far away from the masses, a weakening in the consciousness of the masses, and a cooling in the care for the difficult living conditions of the masses…. It is necessary to be emotionally prepared, to strengthen ideological thinking, to stand up, and to take responsibility for solving the problems. There is no other way. Otherwise, our days will be numbered.”

Just before the Cultural Revolution got under full-swing, Xi ran afoul of Mao with the publication of the novel, “Liu Zhidan”, a historical fiction tale, loosely biographical, about a hero of the northwest campaign. Xi did not write or edit the novel, but he was given drafts ahead of time and it came out with his tacit blessing. ““Isn’t writing novels very popular now?” Mao began sardonically. He said that “using a novel to engage in antiparty activities [was] a great invention…. Whenever there is a desire to overthrow a regime, it is necessary to first shape public opinion, to conduct ideological work, to engage in the superstructure—both revolution and counterrevolution are like this.”” Xi would spend the next sixteen years doing hard labor in the countryside and in and out of prison, including years in solitary confinement. “As time passed, Xi would also face charges of smoking opium, inappropriate relations with women, and spying for the Soviets…. The fall of Xi Zhongxun was a turning point in Chinese history.”

Upon Xi’s rehabilitation, he worked hard to heal the scars of the Cultural Revolution throughout China. “In the past, he killed your family; today, we kill his family…. In this way, you start a feud between your two families. You start a grudge, and then it will never end—it will last forever. When does such a circle of vengeance end?” Xi continued, “How many people joined in the struggles during the Cultural Revolution? How many people have to be executed before it will be enough? During the Cultural Revolution, so many people were beaten to death; our government can no longer kill people in that way! Things cannot be done like that anymore, otherwise what would be the difference between then and now?” He ended by telling his personal history, “Today, I came to help you solve this problem as a representative of the province, but do you know what? It was only a little while ago that I too was sent down. I was sent down for sixteen years, and I also experienced a great injustice. But what is to be done? The Cultural Revolution already caused such great losses. But we still have to live, we have to live happily, and we have to look to the future.”

Xi was one of the critical government officials tasked with establishing the Special Economic Zones in southeastern China. “Xi even said that if “Guangdong were an independent country,” it would be able to develop more quickly.” He stated, “Guangdong is planning to copy the form of foreign-processing zones to observe, study, test, and use foreign practices, to set aside a place in areas bordering Hong Kong and Macau, such as Shenzhen and Zhuhai, and Shantou—a city with important connections to overseas Chinese—to engage in independent management, to serve as a venue for investment by foreign businessmen in the Chinese diaspora and compatriots from Hong Kong and Macau, to organize production according to the demands of the international market, and initially to call these areas ‘trade-cooperation zones.’” However, “Xi emphatically stated that the purpose of the zones was only to obtain foreign currency, solve employment problems, and learn advanced technology and management practices. He called for ideological vigilance: “When using Hong Kong and Macau, there inevitably will be struggle. The special economic zones mean directly interacting with the capitalists too, and that means even more struggle.””

By the summer of 1982, Xi had once again climbed the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. “At the Twelfth Party Congress, Xi was elected to both the politburo and the secretariat…. He was placed in charge of personnel, the United Front, ethnic policy, and religion, as well as given responsibility for specific bodies like the General Office, the Organization Department, and the United Front Work Department. He was also assigned to be in charge of liaison work with the National People’s Congress, Chinese People’s Political Consultive Conference, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the trade unions, Youth League, and Women’s Federation. He was even entrusted with arranging for the meetings of the secretariat and the politburo…. The secretariat ran the country, and Xi ran the secretariat.”

Like many so-called reformers within the CCP, Xi had a nuanced view of democracy, “There is no socialism without democracy. There is no socialist modernization without democracy. Chaos and arbitrariness were the rule during the Cultural Revolution…. Even though the Party plays a leading role, any cult of personality is forbidden, and activists are not above the law. The Constitution widens the role of various mechanisms. The role of mass organizations and spokespersons for the people is also improved. The union between the Party and the democratic parties and personalities without parties is therefore strengthened…. The Party is not above the law and on the contrary must respect it in an exemplary fashion.”

Similarly, Xi’s views on socialism, especially doctrinaire Maoism and Marxism, were equally nuanced. “In the past, we did not understand socialism enough. We saw it too narrowly…. Is it better to do socialism with full stomachs or empty stomachs? Only full stomachs can manifest the superiority of the socialist system…. That was learned through decades of struggle.”

Finally, Torigian ends his biography of Xi Zhongxun with a coda on the thoughts of his son, Jinping. “My father entrusted me with two things: don’t persecute people and tell the truth. The first is possible, while the second is not.” In a speech to the military in 2012, Jinping stated, “An old leader said to me that we comrades who are governing must always remember three things: five thousand years of excellent culture must not be lost, the political system established by the old generation must not be damaged, and the territory left by the ancestors must not shrink.”

“The Open Society and Its Enemies- Volume 1: The Spell of Plato” by Karl Popper

Popper makes the case that Plato, especially in his later writings, as in “The Republic”, was diametrically opposed to the ideal of an open society. Plato felt all social change was decay. Political degeneration followed from moral degeneration. Plato’s perfect State, the form or idea of the State, was free from all change and corruption. “The original or primitive form of society, and at the same time, the one that resembles the Form or Idea of a state most closely, the ‘best state’, is a kingship of the wisest and most godlike men…. First after the perfect state comes ‘timarchy’ or ‘timocracy’, the rule of the noble who seek honour and fame; secondly, oligarchy, the rule of the rich families; ‘next in order, democracy is born’, the rule of liberty which means lawlessness; and last comes ‘tyranny…. the fourth and final sickness of the city’.” Furthermore, Plato viewed class conflict as both inevitable and the main cause of degeneration within the State. The origins of class conflict begin through divisions within the ruling class, “between virtue and money, or between the old-established ways of feudal simplicity and the new ways of wealth.” Plato’s ideal State had rigid class distinctions- between rulers and those being ruled; between masters and slaves; between law-giving guardians, developed and selected from amongst the warriors, and menial workers. There would be common ownership of property, including of women and children. Plato stated, “each should look upon all as if belonging to one family.” Furthermore, “the race of the guardians must be kept pure.” Among contemporary Greek city-states, Sparta exemplified Plato’s ideal.

For Plato, man was social by nature. This was because the human individual was imperfect by necessity. Human nature insured that the individual could not be self-sufficient. Even “rare and uncommon natures”, the best of the best, depend on society to reach towards perfection. “The state therefore must be placed higher than the individual since only the state can be self-sufficient (‘autark’), perfect, and able to make good the necessary imperfection of the individual.” For Plato, it followed that “the wise shall lead and rule, and that the ignorant shall follow.” He believed in the division of labor. “Is it better that a man should work in many crafts or that he should work in one only?…. Surely, more will be produced and better and more easily if each man works in one occupation only, according to his natural gifts.” These gifts were immutable and assigned to man at birth.

Plato’s ideal State was homogenous. It should remain small, lest size endanger unity. The whole State should be as one. In this sense, it was anthropomorphic. The State was the perfect individual and all its individual citizens were imperfect copies of it. Plato was reaching back in time for a lost tribalism, displaced by the humanism and democracy of the Athens of his day. Plato writes that the law “is designed to bring about the welfare of the state as a whole, fitting the citizens into one unit, by means of both persuasion and force.” Additionally, by “persuasion” Plato does not just mean the use of argument and debate, but also duplicitous means such as lies and propaganda.

Popper makes the case that Plato’s ideal State was a totalitarian reactionary one, in which all change is evil and stasis, alone, is divine. Popper also asserts that Plato’s conception of justice, in his later works, especially in “The Republic”, is defined as “that which is in the interest of the best state.” It is not the conception of individual justice, stressing equality before the law, that is common today and was even in Plato’s time. Plato states, “when each class in the city minds its own business, the money-earning class as well as the auxiliaries and the guardians, then this will be justice.” The State is just that is “healthy, strong, united- stable.” This was in contrast to equalitarians of his day, such as Democritus and Pericles. Pericles stated, “our laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes.” Plato claimed, “equal treatment of unequals must beget inequity.” For him, justice meant to keep one’s place in the rigid structure of society.  Plato wrote that in the ideal State, “you are created for the sake of the whole and not the whole for the sake of you…. Everything possible has been done to eradicate from our life everywhere and in every way all that is private and individual. So far as it can be done, even those things which nature herself has made private and individual have somehow become the common property of all…. The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative…. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it. In this way the life of all will be spent in total community.”

Plato felt that the common herd must be ruled and those best qualified to do the ruling were philosopher-kings. These philosophers must be educated and trained by the State not in free inquiry, but to follow its diktat. Plato stated, “it is the business of the rulers of the city, if it is anybody’s, to tell lies, deceiving both its enemies and its own citizens for the benefit of the city.” However, the philosopher must not be ambitious but merely “destined to rule, he the least eager for it.” Popper makes the case that the ideal State of Plato’s was a utopia. Popper writes, “the Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship.” Plato’s utopia, as all utopias, rests on the assumptions that the ends of society are never changing and that there are rational means, also never changing, of getting to them. Popper proposes that Plato yearned to go back in time to the unified tribal communities of the early Greeks. However, the Athens of Plato’s day was in the process of making the transition from a tribal community to humanitarianism, where individualism had primacy. Society was losing its organic character. Groups and classes were not unified and fixed. Social bonds were fraying. In this kind of open society “personal relationships of a new kind can arise where they can be freely entered into, instead of being determined by the accidents of birth.” Sea communication and trade were major factors accelerating these new connections both within and between city-states. According to Popper, philosophy bloomed in this transitional period. “It is an attempt to replace the lost magical faith by a rational faith; it modifies the tradition of passing a theory or a myth by founding a new tradition- the tradition of challenging theories and myths and of critically discussing them.”

“Evolution of Desire- A Life of Rene Girard” by Cynthia L. Haven

This biography of Girard reviews his major body of work and gives background to the man behind the philosophy. The book is a good introduction to Girard’s main ideas and is also useful for those who have already read Girard, by delving behind the scenes. Starting with his birth in Avignon and ending with his death in Palo Alto, Haven details moments in Girard’s life and professional career that lend insight to the development of his theories on mimetic rivalry, the scapegoat, and sacrifice.

Haven recounts Girard’s view of Faulkner as a way of describing his general method of reading the texts of novels for greater truths. “Many people believe that Christianity is embodied by the South. I would say that the South is perhaps the least Christian part of the United States in terms of spirit, although it is the most Christian in terms of ritual…. [In the distant future,] if a Faulkner novel survived, telling the truth that is not in the archives, but rather the truth as it is in the Faulkner novel— nobody would believe it. They would all be wrong, obviously. They would lack the essential thing, the social scheme, the psychological scheme, in terms of everyday life, which determined the country at this time.” Girard’s reflection combines both his skill in deep contextual reading of fiction, which digs for truth beneath the text, with his year observing the South while teaching at Duke University in 1952.

Girard also dismantled the “Romantic lie” of an “authentic Self” who is free from the bounds of society at large, which was prevalent in so many novels of the nineteenth century. “Even the most passionate among us never feel they truly are the persons they want to be. To them, the most wonderful being, the only semi-god, always is someone else whom they emulate and from whom they borrow their desires, thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those whom they simultaneously hate and admire.” No one can escape mimetic desire for it is in the best, as well as the worst, of human nature to imitate and copy models, who we are bound to aspire to and resent. The object of desire is often incidental and in time actually dissolves away as the model and the subject battle as doubles, escalating their rivalry tit for tat against each other. Girard cites Wagner’s Ring Cycle, “The gold is nothing, clearly, since it’s the ray of sunshine that alights on it and transfigures it. And yet the gold is everything, since it’s what everyone is fighting over; it’s the fact of fighting over it that gives it its value, and its terror.”

Girard also cites Dostoevsky in describing man’s futility in replacing religion with secular humanism on Earth. “Man possesses either a God or an idol…. The false prophets proclaim that in tomorrow’s world men will be gods for each other. This ambiguous message is always carried by the most blind of Dostoevsky’s characters. The wretched creatures rejoice in the thought of great fraternity. They do not perceive the irony of their own formula; they think they are heralding paradise but they are talking about hell, a hell into which they themselves are already sinking.” Girard decries “nihilistic individualism” of all stripes, feeling that “the romantic does not want to be alone, but to be seen alone.” He asks, “why do we, all of us, have to keep judging and being judged?” We are addicted to our obstacles, but hide it, even from ourselves. According to Girard, the novelist has a penchant for lying, even to his own Ego, “which in fact is made up of nothing but a thousand lies that have accumulated over a long period, sometimes built up over an entire lifetime.”

Girard’s conversion back to the tepid Catholicism of his youth was a seminal event in his life and career. For him, “conversion is a form of intelligence, of understanding.” It is not an event or a single moment in time, but a continual process. “Metaphysical desire brings into being a certain relationship to others and to oneself. True conversion engenders a new relationship to others and oneself.” He viewed religion as seminal to his understanding both of world history and the events of his day. “If I am right, we’re only extricating ourselves from a certain kind of religion so as to enter another, one that’s infinitely more demanding because it’s deprived of sacrificial crutches. Our celebrated humanism will turn out to have been nothing but a brief intermission between two forms of religion.” He goes on, “It is because we have wanted to distance ourselves from religion that it is now returning with such force and in a retrograde, violent form…. it will perhaps have been our last mythology. We ‘believed’ in reason, as people used to believe in the gods.”

Girard saw a commonality in human behavior that he traced from archaic rituals through modern religions to our secular age. “Human society begins the moment symbolic institutions are created around the victim, that is to say when the victim becomes sacred.” That act is the founding murder of society and the great lie, when the mob convinces itself of its innocence and the scapegoat is turned into savior, by ending the escalating violence and reinstating unanimity and unity within the community. “Human beings fight not because they’re different, but because they’re the same, and in their accusations and reciprocal violence have made each other enemy twins.” He sees the downside to imitation as well as its glory. “When we describe human relations, we lie. We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion.”

Girard sees Christ’s teachings as the only path forward. “It is the absolute fidelity to the principle defined in his own preaching that condemns Jesus. There is no other cause for his death than the love of one’s neighbour lived to the very end, with an infinitely intelligent grasp of the constraints it imposes.” Christ alone has exited the cycle of violence. “It is not the Father whom we should imitate, but his Son, who has withdrawn with his Father. His absence is the very ordeal that we have to go through…. To imitate Christ is to do everything to avoid being imitated. Imitating Christ thus means thwarting all rivalry, taking distance from the divine by giving it the Father’s face.”

Girard sees the danger in majority rule unbound by tradition. “Intelligent democracies can last only if they are aware of the mob and take great precautions against it, but these precautions are not always effective.” Towards the end of his life, Girard became ever more cognizant that total war, escalating by degrees, could end all of humanity. He warned, “we accept to live under the protection of nuclear weapons. This has probably been the greatest sin of the West. Think of its implications. The confidence is in violence. You put your faith in that violence, that that violence will keep the peace.” When the apocalypse comes, it will be justified as a defensive response.

“The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (translated by Lucia Graves)

This is a mystery story designed to be devoured by lovers of books. Zafon’s novel has books wrapped within books, mysterious libraries, and book burnings. It is a strange tale where fact and fiction blur and the reader sometimes struggles to keep solid footing. The setting of post-World War II Spain, with Franco’s despotic rule hanging in the background, lends to the somber mood. There are flashbacks to the Civil War, which all the characters seem to want to forget. The plot has love, young and old, betrayal between childhood friends, and plenty of deaths all around. At the heart of this novel is the story of the power of books, reading, and fiction. Even Zafon’s title for his actual novel is the imaginary title of the most important novel in his book. This is a true page turner, which blends murder mystery and historical fiction with characters that you root and ache for as the plot unwinds page by page.

“God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human” by Dominic Johnson

Johnson posits that far from religion being a by-product or parasite of other evolutionary features, it actually was an adaptive trait that was selected for in our evolutionary progress. It was the advent of a fear of supernatural punishment that advanced humanity. Advanced societies developed “theory of mind”- the ability to put oneself in the shoes of the other. They also developed language- the ability to communicate and, thus, the ability to inform on or gossip about those not present as well as strangers. This allowed for an increase in group size and changed group dynamics. In a band of just 50 individuals, there are 1,225 one-on-one relationships. These two traits combined made it very costly to act selfishly consistently or deviant to societal norms. These traits are also unique to humans, absent even among our fellow primates. From this point forward in homo sapiens development, it evolutionary did not pay to act selfishly. Instead, one had to act against his own urges and suppress what often came most naturally. Self control became advantageous to the individual and humans who could adapt to this new feature of the landscape would tend to be more attractive to mates and to reproduce more. The ability to cooperate well with others became a dominant attribute. Formal religion, or belief in karma, or in a cosmic order, or in simple fate became mechanisms to act as if someone was watching you even when you thought you were alone and your actions were undetectable. Fear of supernatural punishment was adaptive to social cohesion and to repression of selfish behavior. Furthermore, at the group level, religion allows for in-group solidarity, puts the group above the individual, unites people of different ethnicities and languages, and, in general, makes quick friends among strangers. Societies with high levels of religiosity (all things being equal) grew bigger and were more technologically, culturally, and economically advanced.

“Possession” by A.S. Byatt

Byatt describes her novel as a romance. It won the Booker Prize in 1990. It is about literature, poetry, myth, love, betrayal, longing, penitence, and devotion. The plot jumps between the academic milieu of England in the 1980s and the literary scene of London in the 19th century. Many of the chapters are simply poems, diary entries, or travelogues. At the heart of the story are two 19th century British poets: one an obscure lady, Christabel LaMotte, whose family originally hailed from Brittany and who was only recognized by twentieth century scholars of feminism and lesbianism for her epic poem, Melusina, and one a famous man, Randolph Henry Ash, whose volumes of poetry made him famous in his day and later stood the test of time, “Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them.”

It was discovered by Roland Michell, a toiling post-doc in 1980s London, that Ash, though married to his wife Ellen for over forty years, had a secret epistolary correspondence with LaMotte. This discovery threatened to upend what modern scholarship thought of both poets. “The truth is—my dear Miss LaMotte—that we live in an old world—a tired world—a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning—by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos—are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision.”

In an other letter, Ash writes to LaMotte of poetry, “You know how it is, being yourself a poet—one writes such and such a narrative, and thinks as one goes along—here’s a good touch—this concept modifies that—will it not be too obvious to the generality?—too thick an impasto of the Obvious—one has almost a disgust at the too-apparent meaning—and then the general public gets hold of it, and pronounces it at the same time too heartily simple and too loftily incomprehensible—and it is clear only that whatever one had hoped to convey is lost in mists of impenetrability—and slowly it loses its life—in one’s own mind, as much as in its readers…. The only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination…. When I write I know. Remember that miraculous saying of the boy Keats—I am certain of nothing, but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—Now I am not saying—Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker’s imagination nothing can live for us.”

In the course of the novel, Christabel LaMotte finds herself at the home of an aristocratic cousin and his lone daughter, Sabine de Kercoz, in the family’s ancestral home in Brittany. Sabine’s diary reveals, “I sat by her side and whispered to her that I had hopes of being a poet. She said, ‘It is not the way to happiness, ma fille.’ I said on the contrary, it was only when writing that I felt wholly living. She said, ‘If that is so, fortunately or unfortunately, nothing I can say will dissuade you.’” In another diary entry, Sabine writes, “She talked of Melusina and the nature of epic. She wants to write a Fairy Epic, she says, not grounded in historical truth, but in poetic and imaginative truth…. She says Romance is a land where women can be free to express their true natures, as in the Ile de Sein or Sid, though not in this world. She said, in Romance, women’s two natures can be reconciled. I asked, which two natures, and she said, men saw women as double beings, enchantresses and demons or innocent angels.”

“The Gay Science” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Josefine Nauckhoff)

Nietzsche published the first edition of this treatise in 1882 and the second expanded edition in 1887. In between, he had published both “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and “Beyond Good and Evil”. This book largely consists of a set of aphorisms, paragraph-length topical discussions, and a collection of poems. Nietzsche begins, “What distinguishes the common nature is that it unflinchingly keeps sight of its advantage…. The unreason or odd reason (Unvernunft oder Quervernunft) of passion is what the common type despises in the noble, especially when this passion is directed at objects whose value seems quite fantastic and arbitrary…. The higher nature’s taste is for exceptions, for things that leave most people cold and seem to lack sweetness; the higher nature has a singular value standard…. The most industrious age—our own—doesn’t know how to make anything of all its industriousness and money except still more money and still more industriousness…. The opposite of the world of the madman is not truth and certainty but the generality and universal bindingness of a faith; in short, the non-arbitrary in judgment. And man’s greatest labour so far has been to reach agreement about very many things and to lay down a law of agreement—regardless of whether these things are true or false. This is the discipline of the head which has preserved humanity…. The most select minds bristle at this universal bindingness—the explorers of truth above all!”

Nietzsche pontificates on the necessity of aesthetics to achieve meaning in life, “As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon ourselves.” This goes, hand in hand, in opposition to his conception of morality. “As soon as we see a new picture, we immediately construct it with the help of all the old experiences…. There are no experiences other than moral ones, not even in the realm of sense perception…. Wherever we encounter morality, we find an evaluation and ranking of human drives and actions. These evaluations and rankings are always the expression of the needs of a community and herd: that which benefits it the most…. With morality the individual is instructed to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function.”

Finally, Nietzsche often deals head-on with the problems of modernity and God, “Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition?—Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us?” He gives some suggestions for living the best life, “Either one does not dream, or does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one’s waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.” Nietzsche concludes, “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge!”

“The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart” by Meister Eckhart (translated by Maurice O’Connell Walshe)

This is a collection on the Dominican priest, Meister Eckhart’s, sermons to his flock. His notions of God and the Trinity were somewhat eclectic in his time, if not, heretical. In fact, he was on trial, in danger of excommunication, when he died. Eckhart begins with the notions of grace, the intellect, the soul, and the nature of God, “When a man is dead in imperfection, the highest intellect arises in the understanding and cries to God for grace. Then God gives it a divine light, so that it becomes self-knowing. Therein it knows God. I say the intellect alone can receive the divine light…. The man in the soul, transcending angelic being and guided by intellect, pierces to the source whence the soul flowed. There, intellect must remain outside, with all named things. There the soul is merged in pure unity. This we call the man in the soul…. This is the light of truth…. You should understand it thus: they practice inwardly in the man of the soul. Indeed that kingdom is blessed in which one such person dwells! They do more eternal good in an instant than all outward works that were ever performed externally.”

Eckhart chooses to expound on the topic of angels in another sermon, “A master says an angel is the image of God. A second says he is fashioned like God. A third says he is a clear mirror which contains and carries within itself the reflection of God’s purity, the divine purity of the stillness and mystery of God, as far as that may be. Yet another says he is a pure intellectual light, detached from all material things…. But an angel perceives in a light that is beyond time and eternal. He therefore perceives in the eternal Now. But man knows in the now of time. The now of time is the least thing there is…. Cease to be this and that, and have this and that, then you are all things and have all things and so, being neither here nor there, you are everywhere.” Next, Eckhart preaches on the logos, “There are three things that prevent us from hearing the eternal Word. The first is corporeality, the second is multiplicity, the third is temporality. If a man had transcended these three things, he would dwell in eternity, he would dwell in the spirit, he would dwell in unity and in the desert…. For to hear the Word of God demands absolute self-surrender. The hearer is the same as the heard in the eternal Word.” Finally, Eckhart concludes, “Understand: all our perfection and all our bliss depends in our traversing and transcending all creatureliness, all being and getting into the ground that is groundless.”

“Pond” by Claire-Louise Bennett

This collection of short stories is one of the gems of Fitzcarraldo Editions. It is a continual bestseller. In the title story, Bennett declares, “If it were left up to me I wouldn’t put a sign next to a pond saying pond, either I’d write something else, such as Pig Swill, or I wouldn’t bother at all…. It’s not that I want children to fall into the pond per se, though I can’t really see what harm it would do them; it’s that I can’t help but assess the situation from the child’s perspective. And quite frankly I would be disgusted to the point of taking immediate vengeance if I was brought to a purportedly magical place one afternoon in late September and thereupon belted down to the pond, all by myself most likely, only to discover the word pond scrawled on a poxy piece of damp plywood right there beside it. Oh I’d be hopping. That sort of moronic busy-bodying happens with such galling regularity throughout childhood of course.”

An unnamed female narrator voices all of the stories in this collection. She is a writer, living at the farthest edge of western Ireland, near Galway, in a leased ramshackle stone cottage away from the world. The stories vary in length from a single paragraph to twenty or so pages. They detail everyday life and thought. Each is tight, in a sense, and yet, these stories are full of asides, digressions, loops, and quick mental jumps. “English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all. I’m not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” The luxury, enchantment, and precision of Bennett’s prose make the mundane as propulsive to read as any teleological plot, which seems completely besides the point. “And even though it was almost completely dark by now I opened a notebook by the fire and wrote some things down…. There were lines across the pages but they were imperceptible because of how dark it had become and once a word was written it was quite irretrievable, as if abducted. I went on, sinking words into the pages.”

“Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind” by Johann Gottfried Herder (translated by Gregory Martin Moore)

Herder originally published this massive tome in four volumes, between 1784 and 1791. One could think of this book as a selective history of the span of human history, delving into civilizations as diverse as the Chinese, Indians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Tatars, Goths, Normans, Gauls, and much more. He was a cultural pluralist and his main theme is that geography, culture, and genetics all interact together to make every peoples unique from one another. First, Herder gives nature its do, “All outer form in Nature is the index of her inner workings; and so, great Mother, we step before your most hallowed earthly creation, the laboratory of the human understanding…. Nature fashioned man for language…. It is in language that his reason and culture have their beginning…. Only with his organization for speech did man receive the breath of divinity, the seed of reason and of eternal perfection, an echo of that creative voice that he should have dominion over the earth, the divine art of ideas, the mother of all arts…. Thus, man has not so much been deprived of his instincts as these have been suppressed and subordinated to the governance of the nerves and finer senses.”

Common in the milieux of German Pietists of Herder’s era, he discusses the concept of idealism that floated in the air since the speculations of Kant. “Indeed, to one convinced of this inner life of the self all external states in which the body, like all matter, is subject to constant change will in time seem as mere transitions that do not affect his essential being: he passes as insensibly from this world into the next as he passes from night into day and from one stage of life into another…. The purpose of our present existence is the formation of humanity: all the baser wants of this earth shall be subservient and conducive to this end. Our capacity for reason shall be formed to reason, our finer senses to art, our instincts to genuine freedom and beauty, our motive powers [Bewegungskrafte] to love of mankind…. And how seldom is this eternal, this infinite purpose realized in this world! In whole nations reason lies trapped beneath layers of brutishness…. Few men take godlike humanity, in both the strict and extended sense of the term, as the proper study of life.”

Herder returns again and again to the theme that it is humanity’s ability to reason, through the knowledge of languages, that makes us superior to the beasts of the earth. Reason also gives each civilization, when combined with their own geography, history, and culture, their own specialness. “Reason is the aggregate of the observations and exercises of the mind, the sum of the education of our species…. Born almost without instinct, we are raised to manhood only by lifelong practice, on which both the perfectibility as well as the corruptibility of our species rests, so it is precisely thereby that the history of mankind is made a whole: that is, a chain of sociability and formative tradition from the first link to the last…. Hence there is an education of the human species: precisely because every man becomes a man only through education and the whole species lives solely in this chain of individuals…. Hence the education of our species is in a twofold sense genetic and organic: genetic by the communication, organic by the reception and application of that which is communicated. Call this second, lifelong genesis of man what we will: whether culture [Cultur], by analogy with the tillage of the land, or enlightenment, after the operation of light; it matters not, for the chain of culture and enlightenment reaches to the ends of the earth.”

Later, Herder returns to one of his biggest preoccupations, language. “Language alone has made man human, by damming the vast torrent of his emotions and with words erecting rational monuments to them…. Through language, men extended a welcome to one another, entered into society, and sealed the bonds of love. Language framed laws and united the generations; only through language, in inherited forms of the heart and mind, did a history of mankind become possible…. Whatever the mind of man has devised, what the sages of old had contemplated, reaches me, if it pleases Providence, by way of language. Through language my thinking mind is linked to the mind of the first man who thought and possibly the last; in short, language is the character of our reason, by which alone it is given shape and propagated.”

Herder next directly addresses the history of humanity. “Everywhere on our earth whatever can, will come into being; partly according to the situation and the requirements of the locality, partly according to the circumstances and opportunities of the age, and partly according to the native or acquired character of nations…. Time, place, and national character alone—in short: the cooperation as a whole of living forces in their most distinctive individuality—determine, as all productions of Nature, so all events in the human realm…. The ancient character of peoples derived from the tribal features, climate, way of life and education, early activities and occupations that were peculiar to them. Ancestral customs penetrated deeply and became the intrinsic pattern of the tribe…. Tradition in itself is an excellent ordination of Nature and indispensable to our species; but as soon as it shackles all power of thought, both in the institutions of state and in education; as soon as it inhibits all progress of human reason and improvement according to new circumstances and times; then it is the true opium of the mind, for states as well as for sects and individuals.”

Finally, Herder stresses, again, what makes humans the only species capable of history, while discrediting a Whig theory of historical progress. “Everything in history is therefore transitory; the inscription on her temple reads: vanity and decay. We kick the dust of our forefathers and walk on the crumbled ruins of human states and kingdoms…. The cause of the impermanence of all terrestrial things lies in their essence, in the place that they inhabit, in the whole law that binds our nature…. We fancy ourselves self-sufficient and yet are dependent on all in Nature: woven into the web of things mutable, we too must follow the laws governing their repeated course…. Everywhere we observe destruction in history without perceiving that what is renovated is better than what was destroyed. Nations flourish and then fade; but a faded nation does not bloom again, let alone more beautifully than before. Culture continues on its path; but it does not become more perfect.”