“Waiting for God” by Simone Weil (translated by Emma Craufurd)

This book contains some of Weil’s thoughts on the nature of God, on the established Church, and on the City of God versus the City of Man. Often, she writes about the proper synthesis and separation between the material and spiritual realms. The book is organized as a collection of letters, followed by a few of her essays, which, in total, detail her conceptualization of the idea of God and how she relates her earthly being to this transcendent spirit. Her writing is deeply moving, personal, and profound.

The first part of this book is a collection of letters that Weil wrote to a Catholic priest and friend, Father Perrin, as she prepared to flee Nazi-occupied France. In them, she explains her conception of her love of God, as well as explaining the reasons she decided not to get baptized into the Church. She writes, “The mere thought that, supposing I were baptized with any sentiments other than those that are fitting, I should ever come to have even a single instant or a single inward movement of regret, such a thought fills me with horror. Even if I were certain that baptism was the absolute condition of salvation, I would not run this risk, even to save my soul.” You can feel her sense of struggle, but also her certainty. Furthermore, her relationship with Christianity is certainly not orthodox. “If it cannot be given me to deserve one day to share the Cross of Christ, at least may I share that of the good thief. Of all beings other than Christ of whom the Gospel tells us, the good thief is by far the one I most envy. To have been at the side of Christ and in the same state during the crucifixion seems to me a far enviable privilege than to be at the right hand of glory.”

Weil also explains her conception of truth to her friend, Father Perrin. “One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.” Weil describes her struggle with the established Church, because of her love and commitments to the variety of earthly things. “Christianity is catholic by right but not in fact. So many things are outside it, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves…. Christianity being catholic by right but not in fact, I regard it as legitimate on my part to be a member of the Church by right but not in fact, not only for a time, but for my whole life if need be. But it is not merely legitimate. So long as God does not give me the certainty that he is ordering me to do anything else, I think it is my duty.”

Weil also feels the presence of God here on earth. For her, there is no reason to hope for an afterlife. “Even if there were nothing more for us than life on earth, even if the instant of death were to bring us nothing new, the infinite super-abundance of the divine mercy is already secretly present here below in its entirety.” She compares the love of Christianity with that of Stoicism. “At any rate if I really have the right to be called a Christian, I know from experience that the virtue of the Stoics and that of the Christians are one and the same virtue. I mean true Stoical virtue of course, which is before anything else love…. When a soul has attained a love filling the whole universe indiscriminately, this love becomes the bird with golden wings that pierces an opening in the egg of the world. After that, such a soul loves the universe, not from within but from without.” In one of her essays she continues, “Christianity will not be incarnated so long as there is not joined to it the Stoic’s idea of filial piety for the city of the world, for the country of here below which is the universe…. The only true beauty, the only beauty that is the real presence of God, is the beauty of the universe. Nothing less than the universe is beautiful…. The universe is a country. It is our only country here below. This thought is the essence of the wisdom of the Stoics. We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtue easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.”

In another essay, Weil describes her idea of worldly justice. There is love contained in just punishment, as there can be justice in forgiveness. Both have their proper place and utility. “Justice in punishment can be defined in the same way as justice in almsgiving. It means giving our attention to the victim of affliction as to a being and not a thing; it means wishing to preserve in him the faculty of free consent.” Sometimes we need punishment and sometimes we need mercy. She continues, “Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may sink as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away.”

Weil also describes the subjective experience of human reality as self-centered, but imaginary. “We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence…. To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world…. Such consent is love.” Later, when discussing the Lord’s Prayer, she concludes, “We cannot prevent ourselves from desiring; we are made of desire; but the desire that nails us down to what is imaginary, temporal, selfish, can, if we make it pass wholly into the petition, become a lever to tear us from the imaginary into the real and from time into eternity, to lift us right out of the prison of self.”

“If Not Critical” by Eric Griffiths

This is a collection of ten of Griffiths’ lectures on literature, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge. Griffiths’ lectures were famous for their erudition and wit. Before a debilitating stroke left him unable to speak, Cambridge students, most of whom were not even enrolled his class, would flock to his lectures for the pure entertainment of hearing him speak. Griffiths spoke often about the power of analogies and he, himself, used them freely. In one lecture, he spoke of Shakespeare’s penchant for coining new words, dressed in the style of ancient language, “Shakespeare engaged in this fabrication of the antique, this production of ‘distressed pine’ or ‘stone-washed jeans’…. So in A Lover’s Complaint and Troilus and Cressida we find new words produced by affixation, particularly with prefixes such as ‘en-’ or ‘em-’…. These affixes all have in common a strongly latinate, and especially frenchified, timbre, and they produce when they appear en masse an air of faded courtliness, a sense of outdated refinement; they have an ‘indexicality’ rather like that which attaches to certain linguistic usages in old families, or families which like to pretend to antiquity, in the Southern United States.” Griffiths manages to poke fun at the seriousness of Shakespeare and get in a dig in at the pomposity of American southern gentility, all while expounding on Shakespeare’s lexical innovations. In another lecture dealing with the reign of Louis XIV, Griffiths offers the caution, “with analogies as with kings, it is important to know how far it is safe to go.” Perhaps he does not always take his own advice (or rather he considers himself at safe temporal distance), “The king and the official imagery which surrounded him are better understood as the seventeenth-century French equivalent of Eric Cartman’s repeated cry ‘RESPECT MY AUTHORITY’, which is not something that someone who unshakeably has authority needs to cry.”

Another of Griffiths’ lectures dissects Shakespeare’s Hamlet in great detail. Griffiths speaks of the distinction between history and poetry- “the boundary between the realm of history, contingent on facts, and that of poetry, of general rules. History tells us what in fact happened, poetry lays out the pattern according to which we could have seen the event coming…. This distinction between history which ‘merely’ records what happened in all its particularity and poetry, which gives, as it were, a template for how in general things happen, the pattern or rule of events, has counted in various ways for a lot in literary history.” Griffiths takes to task much of the modern literary criticism of Shakespeare. “A principal weakness of much comment on Shakespeare’s plays is that the commentators pay little attention to what a figure in the play is doing by uttering these words at this point; commentators are often preoccupied rather with such things as imagery, or with what they take to be the philosophical suggestiveness of what is said, as if it were a secondary consideration who says what when and where to whom, whereas it is not secondary, not at all, but rather the drama itself. Some commentators are so concerned with putting across how deep the plays are that they have no energy to spare to describe how they are deep, but they are deep because of, through, their surfaces.” For Griffiths, the whole mode of much modern criticism entirely misses the point. And the point is that Shakespeare wrote plays for the stage to be spoken by actors out loud. “It is as if the words had been said by nobody to nobody in an atmosphere which exercises no pressure on what is said, or as if they had been whispered by Shakespeare himself directly into our collective ear…. So many essays about Shakespeare’s plays make him sound as if he had been occupied in writing essays rather than plays. My claim is that Shakespeare’s material as an artist is interaction, interaction of two kinds—between the figures on the stage, and between the figures on stage and the audience. These interactions are what he composes, and to neglect them is to neglect an essential of his art.”

Griffiths often speaks of appreciating the technique involved in writing exquisite literature, while impressing on his audience, in a light tone, what the purpose of literature is actually for. In a lecture on Kafka he says, “Our fictions concern individuals…. Most of our fictions concern spatiotemporally unique beings who have proper names…. [However,] in our fictions, as Proust writes, ‘the individual is bathed in something more general than himself’. That is, our fictional personages, events, objects, are not sheerly irreducible particulars, but intimations of what Marx called species-being, sketches of an as yet unrealized humanity, representatives.” Griffiths makes the case that the study of literature is every bit as much a study of humanity as the social sciences. “Realistic fiction, such as Flaubert’s or Kafka’s, is a form of human natural history, and human natural history in the Wittgensteinian sense is something distinct from social or psychological science. The realism of such writing consists in attention to overlooked general facts of human nature—to such things as our experience of time, our capacity to draw rules from instances as also to know when instances do not suggest rules, our abilities to aspire and to concede, our thwartedness…. To observe the connective tissues of realistic story, its ‘he said’s and ‘then’s, ‘at just the moment when’s, is to pay attention to elemental constituents of the fictional worlds and the world outside fiction…. These speech-markers are structural conventions of storytelling, but just because they are conventions it does not follow that they are ‘mere conventions’. On the contrary, again. To the real artist no convention is ‘mere’; convention is rather just where artistry is likely to be most challenged, most at work.”

The final lecture of Griffiths for this collection is on the theme of “Godforsakenness”. He speaks of the Passion of Christ, his last words on the Cross, and of the duality of Christ, as both man and God. Griffiths’ lecture meanders into wondering upon possible ends for this world and on the omnipotence of God. He then ties this all back to the theme of tragedy as a literary form. “In the long run, either God becomes all in all or all becomes nothing, dust and ashes as this earth falls into the sun. Tragedy is quite indifferent to either of these conclusions, not being an art of the ‘long run’ but rather of the ‘from time to time’ realities of human experience and what we believe we can find through or within that experience…. God is essential to tragedy because He is its supreme audience, and it is a fundamental process of tragic art to enable its human audience for a time and from time to time to guess what it might be like to be such a God.”

Griffiths, in speaking of the joys of experiencing literature, supposes, “this is one source of the pleasure we take in works of art, whether comic or tragic: they offer us worlds we cannot change, before which we are without recourse, as we are at times helpless in our own world, but now our incapacities have become a spectacle for us rather than a dilemma or a source of the despair.” Sometimes it is best if we can laugh or cry at our impotence, whether real or imagined.

“The Ambassadors” by Henry James

James’ novel takes place in turn-of-the-century Paris. But the story is just as much about American industry. Strether is tasked with bringing the scion of an American manufacturing fortune, Chad Newsome, back from his extended sojourn in Europe to attend to business back at home. Strether has been led to believe that the completion of this task will result in nuptials between him and the wealthy widow, Chad’s mother. But Chad loves Paris. And has a woman, perhaps, in a complicated situation, perhaps. “‘I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more nor less, and take you straight home; so you’ll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it!’ — Strether, face to face with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone.”

Strether had not sailed across the Atlantic prepared to be converted to the lifestyle of the man he was sent over to escort home. But converted by Paris, as much as Chad, he was. “Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a wonderful smile. ‘He’s not so good as you think!’ They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by something else. What could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense, constantly renewed, that Chad was—quite in fact insisted on being—as good as he thought? It seemed somehow as if he couldn’t but be as good from the moment he wasn’t as bad.”

From the American side of the Atlantic, the Newsome family was certain of a disreputable love interest of some kind or another that was holding Chad in Paris. Strether was to discover, to his initial chagrin, that even more than by Chad, he was being swayed by the personal charms of Madame de Vionnet. “The pressure of want—whatever might be the case with the other force—was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric. He guessed at intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. The general result of this was something for which he had no name on the spot quite ready, but something he would have come nearest to naming in speaking of it as the air of a supreme respectability, the consciousness, small, still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private honour.”

After thoroughly enjoying his months-long visit of Paris, Strether concludes, “I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like—it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth.”

“Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England” by David DeLaura

This is an intellectual and spiritual biography of John Henry Newman, Mathew Arnold, and Walter Pater. Their lives were intertwined by their respective associations with Oxford, both the University and the Movement. While Newman left the Church of England for Rome, Arnold remained nominally Anglican, and Pater moved from years flirting with deism and atheism to the High Church in latter life. Despite these differences, the aesthetic and moral aspects of Christianity played a great role in the lives and works of all three men.

Owen Chadwick reminds us just how Oxford united these disparate individuals, “probably it is this element of feeling, the desire to use poetry as a vehicle of religious language, the sense of awe and mystery in religion, the profundity of reverence, the concern with the conscience not only by way of beauty, but by growth towards holiness, which marks the vague distinction between the old-fashioned high churchmen and the Oxford men.” Their religious differences also did not serve to distance these men from each other, but united them in their struggle for truth, as Newman expressed in one of his sermons, “controversy, at least in this age, does not lie between the hosts of heaven, Michael and his Angels on the one side, and the powers of evil on the other; but it is a sort of night battle, where each fights for himself, and friend and foe stand together. When men understand each other’s meaning, they see, for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless.” This was not a battle between Rome and Westminster, or deism, or doubt, or even atheism, but each individual’s struggle with truth, revealed or not. 

Newman, as the elder statesman, spelled out in his Sunday sermons, which Arnold would have heard and Pater would have read at Oxford, his position on the ideal mind, “the repose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world… [a] habit of mind… of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.” This habit of mind is not for the masses, however, but for a select few. Arnold (and Pater after him) shares in this evaluation, “a very few of mankind aspire after a life which is not the life after which the majority aspire, and to help them to which the vast majority seek the aid of religion… the ideal life- the summum bonum for a born thinker, for a philosopher like Parmenides, or Spinoza, or Hegel- is an eternal series of intellectual acts… this life treats all things, religion included, with entire freedom as subject-matter for thought, as elements in a vast movement of speculation. The few who live this life stand apart, and have an existence separate from the mass of mankind;… the region which they inhabit is a laboratory wherein are fashioned the new intellectual ideas which, from time to time, take their place in the world.” This is not your opium for the masses. It is all rather Straussian really: religion as different things for different people, the same canonical texts read individually and uniquely, for a higher purpose. This theme is repeated again and again by Newman, Arnold, and Pater. There is a supreme life for the select few: the remnant.

Pater, always ambivalent about doctrine, highlights the soundness of a religious character, “longing, a chastened temper, spiritual joy… have an artistic worth distinct from their religious import… [They have value] not because they are part of man’s duty or because God has commanded them, still less because they are a means of obtaining reward, but because like culture itself they are remote, refined, intense, existing only by the triumph of a few over a dead world routine in which there is no lifting of the soul at all.” And it is this higher standing in the world which is of most import. That is why Arnold placed culture even above religion. Culture “is a moral orientation, involving will, imagination, faith… Culture may best be described as religion with the critical intellect super-added.” Religion was the means, but culture was the end. “All forms of religion are but approximations of the truth.” And as Newman writes in an epistle to Arnold, “it is that sympathy you have for what you do not believe, which so affects me about your future.”

But in this effort these men were also against reason as being the final arbiter. For them reason alone was not enough. Newman preached what was lacking, “reason does not, like faith, attend to what is at once so great and so simple. The difficulty about faith is, to attend to what is very simple and very important, but liable to be pushed by more showy or tempting matters out of sight. The marvel of faith is, that what is so simple should be so all-sufficing, so necessary, and so often neglected… [Knowledge] never healed a wounded heart, nor changed a sinful one.” Arnold, quoting Benjamin Jowett, is kinder to reason and knowledge, “the moral and intellectual are always dividing, yet they must be reunited, and in the highest conception of them are inseparable.”

The other great unifying aspect of the three men’s lives was the preeminence that they held for all things beautiful and sublime. It was a particularly Oxford aesthetic, what Arnold referred to as “the sweetness and light.” This came across in their love of poetry, as practitioner and as critic. Arnold described how poetry could rise above even religion, “but for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.” But for him poetry was something not only sublime, but conservative and anti-materialistic. It was against the currents of the age, “poetry has been cultivated and cherished in our later times by the Cavaliers and Tories in a peculiar way, and looked coldly on by Puritans and their modern representatives… Poetry then is our mysticism.” For Arnold, poetry “refreshes, fortifies, elevates, quickens, solaces, relieves, and rejoices; and thus it satisfies man’s deepest needs, both moral and aesthetic, even in the absence of the metaphysical system that once seemed to buttress these emotions.” Pater would agree, even equating the best of scripture with poetic writing, “may not our ‘most cherished sacred writings’ once belief in them has gone, ‘exercise their highest influence as the most delicate amorous poetry in the world?’”

For unsurpassed aesthetic taste there was one place where men of the age looked- and these three were no exception- to Greece. Arnold stated that “the governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.” Newman, in his lecture on the Idea of a University, suggested that the ideal education “is still mainly governed by the ideas of men like Plato” and that all the best of culture was “passed from Greece to Rome to the feudal communities of Europe.” Newman, of course, had a sweet spot for the unifying aspects of Rome, “Jerusalem is the fountainhead of religious knowledge as Athens is of secular… The grace stored in Jerusalem, the gifts which radiate from Athens, are made over and concentrated in Rome… Rome has inherited both sacred and profane learning.”

Pater would give more credit to the Greek forefathers. “Hellenism is not merely an element in our intellectual life; it is a constant tradition in it… [This] element of permanence, a standard of taste [in European art] is maintained in a purely intellectual tradition… [and] takes its rise in Greece at a definite historical period. A tradition for all succeeding generations, it originates in a spontaneous growth out of the influences of Greek society.” For Pater, Greek culture in all its forms is the pinnacle to be strived for in modern aesthetics. In Apollo, Pater finds, “the concentration of mortal achievement, an ideal of human development,” while, in Dionysius, he finds, “the power of a massive vitality external to man” and “the promise of the continuity of life in nature.” As expressions of culture, Pater finds perfection in the medium of sculpture that captures “the Greek spirit, the humanistic spirit” in its most “pure form.”

This Greek spirit is the essence of what Arnold refers to as “the sweetness and light.” It is a “keen desire for beauty” and “a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are.” Pater echoes Arnold in suggesting that for life itself, and not just in art, “not the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end.” And to that end, “the service of philosophy, and of religion and culture as well, to the human spirit, is to startle it into a sharp and eager observation.” Arnold, saw things just a little differently, where “the model is Greek art and poetry”, “in which religion and poetry are one”; the ideal of human life is the aesthetic one of “beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection.”

“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.”

“Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” by Jeremy Adelman

This is a lengthy biography of one of the twentieth century’s most unique economists. In many ways he was a throwback to the Enlightenment thinkers, too cross-disciplined to be pigeon-holed into any one specific genre within the social sciences. Hirschman was a German Jew, a socialist in his youth, who had to flee from Nazi Germany, fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and fled France during its WWII occupation. Before he fled, he allied with an American, Varian Fry at the Emergency Rescue Committee, to help thousands of others flee the Nazis’ grasp, including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Hannah Arendt. Hirschman’s role forging papers, procuring visas and passports under false names, and dodging Vichy spies and police could alone make for a compelling biography. In fact, he would later return to Europe as part of the US Army liberation effort. In Italy, he was assigned as the translator for the first German to be charged, sentenced, and executed for war crimes, General Anton Dostler. However, Hirschman’s role in shaping development economics and the field at large would not even begin until he was finally settled in America. 

His first contribution to the economic literature was the invention of a market concentration index. “This calculation gives an observer a consistent gauge of the size of a firm to a particular industry. Much later, the index became a standard measure for competition and antitrust enforcement.” Hirschman’s first book “National Power” sought to integrate economic policy with a nation’s political regime. Particularly, it showed how fascism, by its nature, sought to dominate others in all spheres of life, both political and economic. However, autarky did not mean that nations only looked inward, but in certain spheres adopted a bullying commercial strategy, instead of free trade. The strong state sought to manipulate trade with weaker states to influence political gain. This was his analysis of Mussolini and Hitler’s colonization policies. Welfare and warfare were inextricably linked. Hirschman concluded that “the exclusive power to organize, regulate, and interfere with trade must be taken away from the bonds of single nations.” After the war, he began work in Washington at the Economic Cooperation Administration. There he would argue for the Marshall Plan and a more integrated approach to Europe, as opposed to separate bilateral deals. He pushed for a European central bank and currency, arguing that a European Union gave “the best hope for a regeneration of Western European civilization and for a new period of stability and growth.”

Because of his past in European socialist youth groups and questions about his loyalty to America, Hirschman was blacklisted for promotion and plumb jobs at the FED or Treasury Departments. Instead, he found himself consulting for the newly formed World Bank in Columbia. In Bogota, he argued for the specificity and uniqueness of development projects and studied private, but collective, ways to help the poor. Instead of compiling national statistics, he pushed for case studies of successful businesses, analyzing the “personality and background of founders and managers.” He sought to affect change on the margins. “I am precisely no creator of systems, but I always only come up with small improvements or criticisms, which give me pleasure while I am doing them, but which, upon their completion, always throw me back into a vacuum in which it seems completely impossible to me to ever have a single new thought again.” He opted for modesty in his field and hated the role of the outsider expert. “Our abilities will sooner or later invite reactions of the type ‘But the Emperor has nothing on!’ [The economist] suffers from the universal desire for power” and fails to “admit that there are limits to his prowess” resulting from “an optical illusion that economics as a science can yield detailed blueprints for the development of underdeveloped societies.” Hirschman advocated a “propensity to experiment and to improvise [instead of] a propensity to plan…. Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan.” 

Hirschman’s next book was “The Strategy of Conflict”. Hirschman was always well spoken and well read. Besides German, he spoke French like a native, from his years as an exile and spy, and he also knew Spanish, Italian, and English fluently. He kept Montaigne’s “Essays” by his bedside and during his time in Bogota he was reading Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China”, Dostoevsky’s “Demons”, Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, and rereading Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.” However, the works that were having the most impact on him were Freud’s insights in psychoanalysis. He came away with the idea that normal anxiety served as a stimulus and a psychic resource to overcome subsequent difficulties. “Failure, and learning from it, was a strategy for success.” He was also focussing on the idea of unbalanced growth. It was the creation of “pressures, tensions, and disequilibrium" that put in motion further tensions and frictions. This chain propelled the economy along, as people were inspired to solve ever-new challenges. “Developing countries were not fragile infants at risk of being choked in the cradle without expanded infrastructures. Better to invest in industries, agriculture, and trade directly; allow them to expand and to create the obstacles and bottlenecks- and therefore create shortfalls in social overheads…. Capital was simply underutilized for lack of perceived opportunities.” The main contribution of this book was Hirschman’s idea of linkages. “There were two kinds of linkages- forward (what happens to a product as it gets refined or marketed to yield subsequent economic activity as it rolls to the consumer?) and backward (what sorts of inputs are necessary for the production and handling of the good?). Each yielded different kinds of activities. What was important was that a push in one industry or sector could set in motion tensions or scarcities and thus new opportunities for lucrative ventures in other industries or sectors “linked” to the original push. It was in the very imbalance and the disequilibrium created by the initial shove that the economy might develop.” Particularly in Latin America, but as a general notion, Hirschman strove for reform and not revolution. However, he saw the “increasing disorder of modernization as a virtue.” Development did not fail because it did not go as planned. Projects might not end up being efficient themselves, but they often would spawn imitators and even competitors in tangential fields. “Resistances propel further pressure to adapt and change.” Hirschman mused, “Instead of asking: what benefits [has] this project yielded, it would almost be more pertinent to ask: how many conflicts has it brought in its wake? How many crises has it occasioned and passed through? And these conflicts and crises should appear both on the benefit and cost side, or sometimes on one- sometimes on the other, depending on the outcome (which cannot be known with precision for a long time, if ever.).” He embraced the uncertainty and the need for adaptation on the fly. “Mankind only takes up those problems it thinks it can solve- and then, once bitten, engage, solves them- or fails.” It was this “hidden hand” that often “stumbled into achievement.” Only by going forth can one get to an end, often not of the original intention or design. “Ignorance of risk can offset usefully aversion to risk.” He viewed, “hope as a principle for action.”

Hirschman next wrote “Exit, Voice, or Loyalty”. One could either defect or speak out. (Loyalty was largely ignored in his book.) People were active actors who decided to choose between courses. He recognized that public institutions, from governments to companies to universities, were all in decline. Faced with decline, inherited patterns of loyalty no longer kept “consumer-members” in place. The choice was between raising hell within or withdrawal to without. When people still have a shred of loyalty they tend to favor voice instead of exit. Related to this was Hirschman’s idea of possibilism. Ever the moderate, he wanted to stake out ground between the revolutionaries and the conservatives. He pondered, “the real criticism of the reformer is not that he is ineffective but that he might just be effective and that he may thereby deprive the oppressed from achieving victory on their own terms.” He urged to push ahead even without complete knowledge, ensuring uncertainty. "Not only is history unpredictable but there can be no change without its unpredictability…. Aren’t we interested in what is (barely) possible, rather than what is probable?” The aim was “the search to invent new channels for voices to be heard.” To the revolutionary he cautioned, “envy is such a mean emotion” (and the “only one of the seven deadly sins from whose practice you don’t ever get any fun or enjoyment.”) He coined the metaphor of “the tunnel effect” for the feeling of drivers stuck in a traffic jam in the Logan Airport tunnel. As long as everyone was inching along everyone felt ok, but as one lane moved faster alone, the drivers in the other lanes felt cheated and their moods got even worse than before, when everyone was stuck together. “They were once gratified and now felt deprived.” Perceptions were as important as reality. Relative gains matter. “The concentration on economic discussions may mislead the government into thinking the principal problem is economic when what the people really want is something quite different.”

Hirschman’s next book was “The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph”. At this time, Hirschman was retreating back to the Enlightenment ideas. He was reading Machiavelli’s “Discourses” and “The Prince”, Adam Smith’s “Lectures on Jurisprudence", Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws”, and also Hume, Ferguson, Mandeville, Helvetius, Vico, Herder, and Max Weber. Hirschman spent his career searching for the dissatisfaction with modernity and capitalism. “In my scheme the ‘distance that makes one gasp’ (the goal of all theory construction) is between the expectations and hopes that helped install & legitimize bourgeois society & capitalist activity, on the one hand, and the desperately disappointing results- so disappointing in fact that we have repressed the consciousness of those expectations & hopes (grundlichvergessen’ Freud)…. Capitalism was born alienated and already repressed and repressing.” He was toying with the tension between private selfishness and the social good- “rebranding personal passions into interests.” Following Machiavelli, he also sensed that the real danger was honor, power, and the fame of state control. “The expansion of commerce and industry is useful because it will deflect men from seeking power and glory, [and] will keep them busily occupied making money which is harmless and perhaps even socially useful.” Commerce and industry would promote the public interest indirectly, in the course of those pursuing personal gain directly. This was Hirschman’s style of republicanism- the balance between the individual and the common good. He always sought checks and balances- to countervail. “He wanted disruption and repression, harmony and  disorder- passions and interests. Each force contained within it its own tendency to resist it.” The passions and the interests were counterpoints to each other, as well as codependent. "The rules of passions could lead, without checks, to horrible utopias; the rein of interests to soulless pragmatism." 

Hirschman’s last major work was “Shifting Involvements”. Disappointment was also a counterpoint to hope. Trying to avoid mistakes led to as much regret and disappointment as action. “While a life filled with disappointment is a sad affair, a life without disappointment may not be bearable at all. For disappointment is the natural counterpart of man’s propensity to entertain magnificent vistas and aspirations." Search for “exits” to unhappiness propelled new success. “These efforts could be either private-pursuing or public-engaging; the point is that they were subject to similar propensities.” Consumer society often led to disappointment, as purchasing goods and luxury services led to diminishing returns. This led the consumer-citizen to “climb gradually out of private life into the public arena.” Public life, in turn, led to its own disappointments. “Casting ballots does not allow for the expression of different “intensities” of convictions. The result: voting has a “dual character"- to defend against the “excessive repressive” state while “safeguarding" it against “excessively expressive” citizens…. The franchise was an “antidote to revolutionary change”…. In short, the trouble with political life is that it is either too absorbing or too tame.” The pendulum was always swinging back and forth between the private and public spheres. The hope for Hirschman was to imagine incremental social change without complete overhauls to society. “Help the fallible citizen, this imperfect subject, to imagine alternatives without making them impossible." Hirschman advocated a morality to social science as distinct from the value-free physical sciences. In fact, morality “belongs in the center of our work, and it can get there only if social scientists are morally alive and make themselves vulnerable to moral concerns- then they will produce morally significant works, consciously or otherwise.” He was also concerned with group identity politics. He was troubled by “the systemic lack of communication between groups of citizens, such as liberals and conservatives, progressives and reactionaries…. The resulting separateness of these large groups from one another seems more worrisome to me than the isolation of anomic individuals in ‘mass society’ of which sociologists have made so much.” 

Hirschman thought his own legacy was not any grand system, but a series of what he called petites idees. “They are like aphorisms, very astonishing remarks, perhaps paradoxical in nature, but which are perhaps true because of it.” His lifetime was spent gathering and mulling over his own petites idees in countless journals and notebooks, sometimes coming back to them for a new insight after decades in the back of his mind. They took time to germinate. These “small ideas, small pieces of knowledge…. do not stand in connection with any ideologies or worldviews, they do not claim to provide total knowledge of the world, they probably undermine the claims of all previous ideologies.” Another term he used was Machiavelli’s “castelluzi” or little castles. “We can be distracted and diverted and divested by small things, since small things are capable of holding us. We hardly ever look at great objects in isolation; it is the trivial circumstances, the surface images, which strike us- the useless skins which objects slough off.” After all, it was not necessary to know everything in advance before making the biggest of decisions.

“Philosophy Between the Lines- The Lost History of Esoteric Writing” by Arthur M. Melzer

Melzer makes the case that many pre-modern philosophers, for various reasons, practiced esotericism in their writings. “An esoteric writer or writing would involve the following characteristics: first, the effort to convey certain truths—the “esoteric” teaching—to a select group of individuals by means of some indirect or secretive mode of communication; second, the concomitant effort to withhold or conceal these same truths from most people; and third (a common but not strictly necessary characteristic) the effort to propagate for the sake of the latter group a fictional doctrine—the “exoteric” teaching—in place of the true doctrine that has been withheld.” Esoteric writing is a mode of communication that hides its true, deeper meaning so that it is not obvious to all.

This tradition of esoteric philosophy started at least as far back as Plato. In the Phaedrus, Plato reports Socrates as saying that “a written text is too univocal, it says the same things to all people whether they can understand and appreciate it or whether they would be corrupted by it.” In the Theaetetus, Plato’s Socrates explains that this mode of esoteric explanation goes back even further in time, “a tradition from the ancients who hid their meaning from the common herd in poetical figures.” Aristotle, as well, is reported to have written to his pupil, Alexander the Great, “You have written me about the acroatic discourses, thinking that they should be guarded in secrecy. Know, then, that they have been both published and not published. For they are intelligible only to those who have heard us.” In other words, if one was not tutored personally by Aristotle on the nature of his true meaning, his philosophy would be obscure and not be understandable.

Melzer next relates the Christian tradition. In Matt 7:6, Jesus states, “Give not that which is holy to dogs; neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” Later in Matt 13:10-12, “Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to [the people] in parables?” And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and they do not hear, nor do they understand.” This form of esoteric teaching was taken as a given by later Christian philosophers. Aquinas states that the common people were “neither able nor worthy to receive the naked truth, which He revealed to His disciples.” Calvin wrote, “Christ declares that he intentionally spoke obscurely, in order that his discourse might be a riddle to many, and might only strike their ears with a confused and doubtful sound.” Augustine stated, “the Lord’s meaning was therefore purposely clothed in the obscurities of parables.”

Because today so many modern philosophers have come to doubt that their predecessors wrote esoterically, Melzer collects even more evidence that this was a common feature of pre-modern philosophy. Epicurus wrote, “I have never wished to cater to the people; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.” Cicero claimed that the faculty of reason was “disastrous to the many and wholesome to but few.” Spinoza wrote of “the masses whose intellect is not capable of perceiving things clearly and distinctly.” Nietzsche stated, “One does not only wish to be understood when one writes, one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention—he did not want to be understood by just “anybody.””

Melzer posits that the entire purpose of philosophy took a great turn with the Enlightenment. For the ancients, there was a renunciation of the political sphere for the life of the mind and personal truth. “For the more a contemplative philosopher understands his own life to be based on the radical rejection and transcendence of the ordinary, political life of those around him, the more he must feel isolated and fear the potential hostility of that community.” There is an inescapable tension between the City and Man (the philosopher). On the contrary, modern philosophy seeks to harmonize the political and the personal. It seeks “to overcome the tension between theory and praxis, to actualize their potential unity…. Enlightenment philosophers seek the best ways to address and transform the political world, in order to bring it into harmony with reason. Counter-Enlightenment philosophers seek the best ways to address and transform other philosophers, in order to bring them and their reasoning into harmony with the political world.” However, on both scores, there is the purpose of bringing philosophy and politics together, one way or another. The ancients believed this was an unresolvable tension, which never could be bridged. The conflict between the City and philosophy “consists in a conflict between two incompatible ways of life. The city requires authoritative settlement and closure; philosophy demands openness and questioning. The city necessarily bases itself on custom, the philosopher seeks to base his life on reason—and these two foundations, custom and reason, are fundamentally opposed.”

Melzer next details his four main suppositions for why esoteric writing was practiced. The first was a fear of persecution. Tacitus wrote, “Seldom are men blessed with times in which they may think what they like and say what they think.” Pierre Bayle agreed, “Those who write with a view to publishing their thoughts accommodate themselves to the times and betray on a thousand occasions the judgement they form of things.”

Melzer suggests a second reason for esoteric philosophy was to protect dangerous truths. Melzer states “there are some important truths that are “inconvenient”—dangerous to society or to ordinary life…. All human beings are not equal in their capacity to handle such difficult truths…. It is morally permissible…. to conceal or dilute the truth.” Aquinas writes, “A teacher should measure his words that they help rather than hinder his hearer…. There are matters, however, that would be harmful to those hearing them if they were openly presented…. These matters, therefore, ought to be concealed from those to whom they might do harm.” Jean d’Alembert commenting on The Spirit of the Laws, states “Montesquieu, having to present sometimes important truths whose absolute and direct enunciation might wound without bearing any fruit, has had the prudence to envelope them, and by this innocent artifice, has veiled them from those to whom they would be harmful, without letting them be lost for the wise.”

A third reason to cloak truths in esoteric writing was as a method of teaching. Melzer states, “The purpose of pedagogical esotericism…. more directly concerns philosophy itself: the transmission of philosophical understanding. In this sense, it is esotericism’s purest form…. One must embrace obscurity (of the right kind) as something essential to effective philosophical communication.” Alexander Herzen wrote of obscure teachings, “In allegorical discourse there is perceptible excitement and struggle: this discourse is more impassioned than any straight exposition. The word implied has greater force beneath its veil and is always transparent to those who care to understand. A thought which is checked has greater meaning concentrated in it—it has a sharper edge; to speak in such a way that the thought is plain yet remains to be put into words by the reader himself is the best persuasion.” In the Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates puts these words into the mouth of the Egyptian god, Thamus, through “[writings] you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction, and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant.” Kierkegaard writes, “One can deceive a person for the truth’s sake, and (to recall old Socrates) one can deceive a person into truth.” Augustine suggests, “Lest the obvious should cause disgust, the hidden truths arouse longing; longing brings on certain renewal; renewal brings sweet inner knowledge…. It is true that any doctrine suggested under allegorical form affects and pleases us more, and is more esteemed, than one set forth explicitly in plain words.” Nietzsche adds, “the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.”

Melzer describes his fourth reason for esoteric writing as political, which he states as a uniquely modern form. It is “defined as esotericism in the service of the newly political goal of philosophy: to actualize the potential harmony of reason and social life through the progressive rationalization of the political world.” It is the goal the ancients viewed with skepticism, if not impossibility. Macaulay writes, “Logic admits of no compromise. The essence of politics is compromise…. Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school, its abstract doctrines for the initiated, its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables for the vulgar.” In a letter to Voltaire, d’Alembert states, “Time will enable people to distinguish what we have thought from what we have said.”

Melzer continues by explaining the proper way to read esoteric texts. Nietzsche suggests when grappling with his own writings, “A book like this, a problem like this, is in no hurry; we both, I just as much as my book, are friends of lento [slowly]…. I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading…. For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow…. It teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.” Montesquieu argues for giving the author the benefit of the doubt and withholding judgement before taking the work as a whole when deeply reading, “When one reads a book, it is necessary to be in a disposition to believe that the author has seen the contradictions that one imagines, at the first glance, one is meeting. Thus it is necessary to begin by distrusting one’s own prompt judgements, to look again at the passages one claims are contradictory…. When a work is systematic, one must also be sure that one understands the whole system. You see a great machine made in order to produce an effect. You see wheels that turn in opposite directions; you would think, at first glance, that the machine was going to destroy itself, that all the turning was going to arrest itself…. It keeps going: these pieces, which seem at first to destroy one another unite together for the proposed object.”

Melzer concludes with a section on Leo Strauss and the opposition between philosophy and poetry. For Strauss, Socrates is the philosopher par excellence. His greatest opponents were not the sophists, but the poets. Strauss wrote, “The great alternative to classical political philosophy is poetry.” Melzer explains the side of the poets, “For the philosophers are typically detached from and contemptuous of the human things, the merely mortal realm; they are rationalists seeking the universal, the necessary, and the eternal. It follows that true wisdom is the preserve not of the philosophers but of the poets who immerse themselves in human life, who know it from the inside, and who are able to imitate and articulate the unique experience of the human in all its inescapable particularity, contingency, and changeableness.” If Socrates was successful it was in defending “the philosophic life successfully against this double challenge to its legitimacy, the religious and the poetic (or “historicist”).” The beauty of Socrates was his ability to return again and again to the dirtiness of the particular world, despite his flights towards eternal truths. “The famous Socratic turn, that is, his return to the human things. No matter how high philosophy, with divine madness, soars toward the sun, it must always recollect its origin in and continued dependence upon the cave, the world of opinion, the average-everyday, the commonsense surface of things.” Melzer suggests, “esotericism is the literary counterpart of the Socratic method. A properly esoteric text does not allow the philosophic reader to form a dependence on the writer or on foundations laid in the past; rather it artfully compels him to develop and rely on his own inner powers.”

“Another Philosophy of History” by Johann Herder (translated by Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin)

Herder was a Lutheran pietist who lived in eighteenth century Prussia. He set himself up as anti-rationalist, but that was too extreme. Rather, he was certainly against the prevailing French philosophes of his day who propounded the ultimate primacy of positivism and Enlightenment thought. Herder was a cultural pluralist, always skeptical of any universal ideal. He believed in a peculiar form of historicism, in which each successive stage of human development was not necessarily better than, just different from the ones that had preceded it. Each age had unique peculiarities imbued in it through a particular culture. His was definitely not a Whig theory of history. He associated the oriental age with one where theology held sway. “Naturally, the most ancient philosophy and forms of government in all countries would originally have had to be theology! A man marvels at everything before he sees.” The next stage of mankind took place in Egypt. “Everyone could be found where he had his property- thus public security, the administration of justice, order, law enforcement came into being, which would never have been possible in the Orient’s nomadic condition…. Thus man was placed under the bondage of the law: the inclinations that had once been merely paternal, child-like, shepherd-like, patriarchal now became civil, village-like, city-like…. The sense of family weakened and became instead concern for the same, social rank, artistic talent that was handed down, along with one’s station, like a house or field.” The next development in history was that of the Phoenicians. “The first commercial state, founded entirely on trade, which expanded the world beyond Asia for the first time, planting peoples and binding them together…. As the hatred of foreigners and imperviousness towards other people faded- even if the Phoenician did not visit other nations out of a love of mankind- a kind of friendship among peoples, understanding between peoples, and law of peoples emerged.” Herder next moved on to Greece. “Their establishment of common games and competitions for even the minutest places and peoples, always with minor differences and variations- all this, and ten times more, gave Greece a unity and diversity that here, too, made for the most beautiful whole. Hostility and assistance, striving and moderating: the powers of the human spirit were most beautifully balanced and unbalanced. The harmony of the Greek lyre!” Finally, Herder proceeded to the Roman peoples. There was “the magnanimous disposition of the soul that looked past lusts, effeminacy, and even the more refined pleasures and acted [instead] for the fatherland. [There was] the composed hero’s courage never to be reckless and plunge into danger, but to pause, to think, to prepare, and to act. There was the unperturbed stride that was not deterred by any obstacle, that was greatest in misfortune and did not despair. There was, finally, the great, perpetually pursued plan to be satisfied with nothing less than their eagle’s dominion over all the world…. The name [of Rome] bound peoples and parts of the world together that had never so much as heard of each other before. Roman provinces! In all of them, Romans trod: Roman legions, laws, ideals of propriety, virtues, and vices. The walls that separated nation from nation were broken down, the first step taken to destroy the national character of them all, to throw everyone into one mold called “the Roman people.”” The importance was not so much the accuracy of Herder’s history, but the cultural pluralism that he expressed. Each epoch was unique and could not have existed except for according to the particularities of that age.

For Herder, however, the individual was the only essence that was whole. “What an inexpressible thing the peculiarity of one human being is; how difficult it is to be able to put the distinguishing distinctively, how he feels and loves, how different and peculiar all things become for him after his eye sees them, his soul measures, his heart senses…. All human perfection is therefore national, secular, and, examined most closely, individual. One does not develop anything but that for which time, climate, need, world, fortune gives occasion: separated from the rest.” The human being is, of necessity, about particulars. “Human nature is no vessel for an absolute, independent, immutable happiness as defined by the philosopher; rather she everywhere draws as much happiness towards herself as she can: a supple clay that will conform to the most different situations, needs, and depressions. Even the image of happiness changes with every condition and location…. Basically, then, all comparison becomes futile.”

Herder takes a step back to describe the triumph of the tribes of Gaul over the decaying Roman Empire. “Of course they despised arts and sciences, luxury and refinement- which had wrought havoc on mankind. But as they brought nature instead of the arts, healthy Northern intelligence instead of the sciences, strong and good, albeit savage customs instead of refined ones, and as everything fermented together- what a spectacle! How their laws breathed manly courage, sense of honor, confidence in intelligence, honesty, and piety! How their institution of feudalism undermined the welter of populous, opulent cities, building up the land, employing hands and human beings, making healthy and therefore happy people. Their later ideal, beyond [mere] needs, tended towards chastity and honor, [and] ennobled the best part of human inclinations.” Herder’s view on religion was as a spur for human agency. “Religion is meant to accomplish nothing but purposes for human beings, through human beings.” The ages of history were moved less by reason and agency than by contingency and fate. Ideas ripened when the time and soil was right. After all, it was the particulars that made the age. “How often had such Luthers stood up before-and had foundered…. Human being, you have always been just a small, blind instrument, [used] almost against your will.”

Herder did not disparage his age, but he always wanted to put its accomplishments in their proper context. “Wisdom was always narrowly national and therefore reached deeper and attracted more strongly.” One thing he vehemently detested was the spirit of colonization, for it broke down proper differences in cultures. “Where are there no European colonies, and will there not be any? The fonder savages grow everywhere of our liquor and luxury, the more ready they also become for our conversion!… The more means and tools we Europeans invent to enslave, cheat, and plunder you other continents, the more it may be left to you to triumph in the end! We forge the chains by which you will pull us [one day], and the inverted pyramids of our constitutions will be righted on your soil- you with us.” The endless search to satisfy Mammon was also a bane to the spirit of the age. “All the arts we practice, how high they have risen! Can one imagine anything above that art of government, this system, this science for the education of mankind? The entire and exclusive driving force of our states: fear and money. Without the least need of religion (the childish driving force!), or honor, or freedom of the soul, or human happiness.” Herder ends by summing up his view of what the nature of history truly is. “What a work it is, this whole containing so many shadowy clusters of nations and ages, colossal figures with barely a perspective or view, so many blind instruments that are acting in a delusion of freedom and yet do not know what or what for, that are unable to survey anything and yet are taking part as eagerly as if their anthill were the universe- what a work!”

“Heidegger’s Ways” by Hans-Georg Gadamer (translated by John W. Stanley)

Gadamer is perhaps Heidegger’s second best known pupil, after Arendt. This book is a collection of his essays and lectures on Heidegger’s philosophical work and his evolving thoughts. Gadamer begins, “The first question of the first beginning was: What is the Being of the human Dasein? Certainly not mere consciousness. But what kind of Being is this that neither lasts nor counts the way that the stars or mathematical truths do, but rather constantly dwindles like all life caught between birth and death, and yet in spite of its finitude and historicity is a “there” [ein Da], a here, a now, a presence in the moment [Gegenwart im Augenblick], not an empty point, but a saturated temporality and a collected totality? The Being of the human Dasein is said to be just such a “Da” in which the future and past are not simply moments rolling toward and then away from the present; rather, the future is each individual’s own future, and each individual’s own history constitutes its own Being from the accident of birth on. Because this Dasein, which projects itself into its own future, must accept itself in its own finitude—a kind of discovery of oneself as “thrown” into Being…. Every “Da,” like all things earthly, dwindles, passes away, and is carried off into oblivion—yet, it is a “Da” precisely because it is finite, that is, aware of its own finitude…. That there is something at all and not nothing—this most radical exaggeration of the question of metaphysics speaks of Being as if it were something known.” Gadamer continues, “The question concerning “nothing” and the thought provoking, fundamental experience of “nothing” were brought up so that thinking would be forced to think the Da of Dasein. This is the mission that Heidegger, in an ever more-conscious turn away from the metaphysical question concerning the Being of beings and the language of metaphysics, recognized as his own. This question preoccupied him his entire life.”

Gadamer discusses Heidegger’s conception of time. “Light is shed not only on the enigmatic irreversibility of time—in that it never emerges, it only passes away—but it also becomes obvious that time does not have its Being in the now or in a series of nows; rather is has its Being in the futurity [Zukunftigleit] that is essential to Dasein…. Forgetting attests to the fact that something happens to us—rather than that we do it. It is a way in which the past and passing away show their actuality and power.” Gadamer continues, “Human Dasein is distinguished by the fact that it understands itself in terms of its Being. In order not to lose sight of the finitude and temporality of human Dasein, which cannot ignore the question of the meaning of its Being, Heidegger defined the question of the meaning of Being within the horizon of time. The present-at-hand, which science knows through its observations and calculations, and the eternal, which is beyond everything human, must both be understood in terms of the central ontological certainty of human temporality.”

One other major concern in Heidegger’s work is the nature of art. Gadamer suggests, “Heidegger asserts that the essence of art is the process of poeticizing. What he means is that the nature of art does not consist in transforming something that is already formed or in copying something that is already in Being. Rather, art is the projection by which something new comes forth as true…. The work of art is an exceptionally tangible event of the “Da” into which we are all placed…. The artwork cannot be considered an object, as long as it is allowed to speak as a work of art…. The thing [das Ding], as something of ours, possesses its own original worldliness and, thus, the center of its own Being so long as it is not placed into the object-world of producing and marketing.”

Finally, Gadamer concludes by, once again, noting the emphasis on the lifespan of the individual human in Heidegger’s work, “We know from our own personal, existential experiences [Existenzerfahrung] of Being how fundamentally interconnected the “Da” of human Dasein is with its own finitude. We know it as the experience of darkness, a darkness in which we stand as thinking beings and back into which all that we raise up into light falls. We know it as the darkness from which we come and into which we pass. But this darkness is not merely a darkness opposed to the world of light; we are ourselves shrouded in darkness, which merely confirms that we are. Darkness plays a fundamental role in constituting the Being of our Dasein.”