“The German Sturm und Drang” by Roy Pascal

Pascal's book is a history of the Sturm und Drang movement, which took place in Germany roughly between 1770 and 1778. Although relatively brief, the movement was to have a large impact on the contemporary debates about social criticism, morality, the role of government, religion, poetry, and, in particular, it was to presage the ideas of the German Romantic movement in many ways. “Associates of the Sturm und Drang were urged on by the desire to live according to instinctive feeling, to fashion their lives according to intuition and ‘revelation’, not social norms and practical reasonableness.” There was a general unease and restlessness about the current epoch that helped mold the Sturmer und Drangers. Hamann, Herder, Goethe, and Lenz were the movement’s most enduring members.

Hamann was the eldest of the group. He was a pietist, hated the French bureaucracy, installed by Frederick the Great, despite holding a minor post under it, was a thoroughly impractical man, and, finally, was an obscure writer, known for his Biblical allusions. He despised public affairs and social conventions. He prized intuition over reason. This led to a “repudiation of the claims of all political and social organization, an expression of his conviction that only religious faith, and private life in which religious belief can be fostered, have real value.” Thus he was “against the authority of all impersonal forces, whether of state or metaphysics, against all formalism in religion and secular life.” His was a spiritual, subjective individualism. Hamann espoused, “Everything that man undertakes, whether it be produced in action or word or anything else, must spring from his whole united powers; all separation of powers is to be repudiated.” He valued experience and personal feelings above all else.

Herder considered Hamann a friend and a mentor. However, he was not as doctrinaire as him. Herder sought a synthesis of theory and practice, of thought and action. However, he too prized feelings, intuition, perception, and using one’s senses as a means of discovering reality. Herder, alone in the movement, was “to construct a general philosophy of life, embracing the scientific, practical and intuitive faculties of man…. a philosophy of man which would justify all his capacities, including the senses, that would give all his faculties more intense life and vibration.” He had manic and depressive spells in which he alternated between rapturous enthusiasm and hypochondria.

Goethe is perhaps the most famous of the Sturmer und Dranger. Although his views would significantly change as he got older, in this period of his life, he prized feelings over science and reason. As he put it, he was “surrendering himself from moment to moment.” Herder would say to him, “everything with you is vision.” He lived an intense life in which experience dominated and he was able to express both his feelings and imagination ably. During the Sturm und Drang period, Goethe exclaimed, “I am delighted! I am happy! I feel it, and yet the whole content of my joy is a surging longing for something I do not possess, for something I do not know.” His happiness was buoyed by the search of something indescribable. He was  a man of extremes, who lurched from one intense experience to another. “Goethe lives in a constant inward war and rebellion, since all things have a most violent effect on him.” He did not respect the normal social and moral values, and so “he sought in his works not to teach or preach, but to find a form for his experience of the world, and through this form to grow in range and depth.”

Lenz is perhaps the least well known major character in the Sturm und Drang movement. He was an emotional man. He felt, “the greatest misfortune is lack of capacity for feeling…. My greatest sufferings are caused by my own heart, and yet, in spite of all, the most unbearable state is when I am free of suffering.” He was a man who suffered much, but who knew that his greatest thoughts were propelled by such suffering. He revealed to a colleague, “my philosophical reflections must not last more than two or three minutes, otherwise my head aches.” His thoughts could be profound. Lenz pondered, “the more I investigate myself and reflect on myself, the more reasons I find to doubt that I am really an independent being, despite the burning desire within me to be so.” Yet, he was a man crippled by his own doubts and insufficiencies, “give me more real sorrows so that the imaginary ones don’t overwhelm me.”

What united the Sturm und Drang? There was a conviction that life was all about feelings and intuition above reason and metaphysics. They also buckled against the social mores and general morality of their age. “They suffer continually under the pressure of practical life, not only in the form of routine work but also in that of social morality. The normal definitions of good and evil are irrelevant to their values, for they seek above all intense life, joy and woe, without which all human relationships are meaningless for them. They are tossed about by their emotions and imagination, are unstable, can see no perspective for the realisation of their ideals, and often feel themselves to be prey to forces within them which they worship even in their destructive power.” Theirs was a quest for “personal significance within an environment they considered worthless.”

The members of the Sturm und Drang movement were opposed to all absolutism. They did not believe in universal values. They buckled under the rule of an absolute monarch and impersonal laws. They were concerned with a national culture. However, this was far from the racist nationalism that sprung up and corrupted their thoughts later in the 20th century. Theirs was an appreciation for the forms of life and art that were grounded in the nation. Hamann would always stress the primacy of family versus the State as an organizing social institution. Leisewitz would ask, “And must the whole human race, in order to be happy, be locked up in states- where each man is a slave to others, and no-one is free- where each is riveted to the other end of the chain by which he holds his slave fast? Only idiots can dispute whether society poisons mankind- both sides admit that the state murders freedom.”

The Sturm und Drang praised the simple morality of the common folk that was unreflecting and unsophisticated. They particularly found sympathy with the Volk, the poorest of the laborers and peasants. The Sturm und Drang praised practical work, free from the learned society of professionals and bureaucrats. The Volk possessed a simple wisdom, spoke with unvarnished speech, and often felt and believed without having to espouse a reason. “Here sturdy individualism and communal ties, realism and religion were reconciled.” Moser would emphasize, “learning has weakened and perverted all human pleasures.” Herder, particularly, saw folksongs as embodying latent knowledge and national culture, passed down through the generations. The national poetry was embedded in folksong. For Herder, folksong was “the impression of the nation’s heart, a living grammar, the best dictionary and natural history of the people.”

Most of the Sturmer und Dranger were Pietists or, at least, viewed Christian religion with respect and awe.  “Religion as they understood it is not a mere code of belief in a supernatural reality, a mere discipline or rule of behaviour, but the expression of a total relationship between man and the universe, man and his fellows, and between the different faculties of man; it embraces theory and practice.” The Sturmer und Dranger felt obliged to surrender to their innermost feelings, often expressed in their religious devotion. Merck would chastise the Deists, who “have deprived religion of all its sensuous elements, that is, of all its relish.” Hamann’s world was “a living web of meanings, instead of an objective, impersonal structure.” Hamaan would insist, “our own existence and the existence of all things outside us must be believed, and can be proved in no other way.” Herder would ask, “but what is a God, if he is not in you and you do not feel and taste his Being in an infinitely inward fashion?” Goethe did not consider himself a believer and yet he found “love and tolerance towards religion, a friendly feeling towards the Gospel, a holier veneration for the Word.” Faith, for Goethe, was the inner expression of the good life. He stated, “in religious faith, I used to say, the important thing is that one should believe; what one believes is of no concern…. Whether [children] believe in Christ, or Gotz, or Hamlet, it’s all one, but see that they do believe in something. If you don’t believe in something you despair about yourself…. The only useful religion must be simple and warm.” Lavater also believed in “the immediate feeling of Christ” that was a “sensuous experience.” He stated, “religion is the need for higher invisible things and a faith in them; religion is always sense, feeling, genius for the invisible, the higher, the superhuman, supermundane; religion is always faith!” Lenz would agree, “the soul creates itself and therewith its future state…. So all our independence, our whole existence is based on the number, the scope, the truth of our feelings and experiences, and on the strength with which we face up to them, think about them or, what is the same, are conscious of them.”

The Sturm und Drang struggled to find a purpose in the harsh reality in which they lived. “Obscurely but determinedly they refuse to see man as the instrument of external forces or as chained to external purposes, be they religious, metaphysical, physical, or social; they refuse to exalt one side of man, his soul or reason or sense, at the expense of others; they destroy the image man made of himself as an abstract intelligence, or a sentimental idealist, or a sensual egoist in the Mandeville or Helvetius sense. Man exists, in their view, to be himself most intensely, to develop all his powers to the full.” Goethe would summarize, “All that a man undertakes, whether it be by deed or word or anything else, must spring from his whole united powers; all separation is to be rejected.” Herder would emphasize, “The development of the forces of our soul is the purpose of our existence on earth…. Everyone’s actions should arise utterly from himself, according to his innermost character, he should be true to himself: that is the whole of morality.” Herder espoused a moral pluralism as well as a cultural pluralism. He stated, “each nation has its centre of happiness in itself, as a sphere its centre of gravity…. We live in a world we ourselves create.” Herder would go on, “The ideal of happiness changes as circumstances and regions change- for what else is it but the sum of fulfillment of wishes, of the purposes, and the gentle surmounting of wants, which all are transformed according to land, time and place.” Each culture is unique and cannot be judged by the criteria of another. There is no single purpose to life. Klinger would say, “I live like all true sons of Prometheus in the inward war of energies and activity with the bounds which men have imposed on demi-gods for their own comfort, for otherwise they would be crushed for ever.” Lenz would emphasize, “that action, action, is the soul of the world, not enjoyment, not sentimentality, not ratiocination, and only so do we become images of God, who incessantly acts and incessantly rejoices over his works. This we learn: that the active force within us is our spirit, our highest portion, which alone gives our body with all its sensory properties and feelings a true life, and true consistency, and true value, and without which all our enjoyment, all our feelings, all our knowledge are merely passive, merely a postponed death.” Goethe would say of man, “Nature is the source of his being, as it is the limit; what is beyond is meaningless, is unreal.” Herder sums up the Sturm und Drang’s feelings that man “is but an ant, that crawls on the wheel of fate.”

The Sturm und Drang movement is perhaps best expressed through their poetry. Herder would claim that poetic beauty is “what raises me above myself, what sets in motion all my powers.” He speaks to the poet, “for you, as a dramatic poet, no clock strikes on tower and temple, but you have to create space and time; and if you can produce a world and it cannot exist but in time and space, lo, your measure of time and space lies within you.” On language, Herder hypothesizes, “in a sensuous language there must be unclear words, synonyms, inversions, idioms…. Idioms are patronymic treasures of beauty, like the palm trees round the academy of Athens which were dedicated to Minerva.” He concludes, “the object of poetry is the energy that adheres to the inner meaning of words, the magic power which works upon my soul through fancy and memory.” Hamann would intone, “Speak so that I can see you…. Senses and passions speak and understand nothing but images. In images rests the whole treasury of human knowledge and understanding.” Lavater felt there was something divine expressed in poetry. He asks and answers himself, “Who is a poet? A spirit who feels that he can create, and who does create, and whose creation does not only please himself as his work, but of whose creation all tongues must witness: Truth! Truth! Nature! Nature! We see what we never saw, and hear what we never heard, and yet, what we see and hear is flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone!” Poetry, above all, must have realism; it must be lived within you. Burger would write, “in poetry, in spite of all divine sublimity, everything must be tangible and visual; if not, it is no poetry for this world, but perhaps for a different world which, however, does not exist.” Lenz summarizes the aims of the poetry of the Sturm und Drang, “We would like to penetrate with one glance into the innermost nature of all beings, to absorb with one feeling all the joy that is in nature and combine it with ourselves.”

“One Way and Another” by Adam Phillips

Phillips is truly the master of the essay. Whether primarily about psychoanalysis, literature, or just the quirks of life, he combines pithy epigrams, keen observations, and beyond-the-surface commentary in a succinct and funny way. His essays allow him to ramble, to meander, and to explore a subject, while always circling back to the heart of the matter, in a thoroughly enlightening trip. In this collection of essays Phillips writes deeply about the craft of analysis and the process of psychoanalysis, while referencing the points of view of both the analyst and the analysand. He quotes Freud on the unconscious, “everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable.” He discusses the theory of the Self, “one’s history, of course, never begins with oneself.” On the subjectivity of memory, “memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience.” On childhood, “every child grows up in the climate of his parents’ mostly unconscious history.” On the Self as seen by the Other, “other people see us in ways that we cannot anticipate; we cannot know ourselves because we cannot be everyone else in relation to ourselves.” On self-betrayal, “people who believe too much in compromise believe too much in not getting what they want.” On the purpose of dreaming, “awake or asleep we do not want to be awakened to, or by, our wishes, the wishes that represent our unconscious forbidden desire. Dreams just help us to stay asleep when we are asleep.” On our ideals, “we are tyrannized by our picture of ourselves as we would prefer to be; we organize our lives around it.” On the nature of our preoccupations, “our preoccupations are the way our pasts go in search of a future.” On the role of accidents in interpreting life, “it may not be that all accidents are meaningful, but that meaning is made out of accidents.” On imagining one’s inhibitions, “if we can’t to some extent imagine it- whether consciously or unconsciously- we wouldn’t know not to do it, or how to go about avoiding doing it.” On what failing in life actually means, “to fail at one thing is to succeed at another.” Each essay muses on a different subject matter, but the book is held together by the process of exploring the Self as a continual project that may or may not be helped through analysis. He does not judge and hopes the reader does not judge either.

“One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment” by Samuel Scheffler

Scheffler begins this philosophical treatise with a question, “What is it to lead a human life?” More precisely, perhaps, Scheffler is concerned with the idea of human flourishing and what it means to have led a good life. “The attachment-sensitive conception that I will be developing affirms the importance of the temporal and interpersonal dimensions of human life, and it sees these two dimensions as being intimately related…. Both dimensions are fundamental features of human experience.”

First, Scheffler seeks to dispel the notion of temporal neutrality. “I have three aims. The first is to argue that temporal neutrality, if thoroughly internalized, would compromise our ability to form and sustain the personal and social relationships we most value. The second is to argue that temporal neutrality is not a general requirement of rationality, so the fact that future bias represents a departure from neutrality does not make it irrational. The third is to argue that an excessive reliance in the framing distinction between temporal neutrality and temporal bias is liable to distort our understanding of the diachronic dimension of our lives…. Properly understood, the very idea that one has a life to lead depends on one’s viewing the past and the future asymmetrically…. The phenomenon of future bias is best seen as a special case of a more general phenomenon, which is that various of our attitudes change with the passage of time…. The puzzle is why our prospective and retrospective attitudes toward purely pleasurable and purely painful episodes differ so greatly in their intensity…. I don’t think that our aim, in trying to answer it, should be to establish that a bias toward the future is rationally required or rationally defensible. I am sympathetic to the bias where it exists and is deeply entrenched, and I am disinclined to criticize it in the name of an abstract norm of rationality. But my inclination to defend the bias, or at least not to criticize it, has less to do with a belief that it is endorsed by such a norm than with a conviction that it is woven into the fabric of human life in such a way that dislodging it would compromise much that we care about and much that makes us  recognizable to ourselves.”

Scheffler discusses the persistence of a life and how that reality stands in contrast to the fact that we can only live in the present moment. “The fact that our emotions and feelings have different diachronic profiles is symptomatic of the complexity of our response to the temporal dimension of our lives. We are, after all, persisting beings. We live always in the present, yet at each moment most of our lives lie either in the future or in the past…. Through the establishment of patterns of activity that express our values or desires or preferences, we mark the world with continuities that are expressive of ourselves…. When, as agents, we direct our actions in accordance with our personal portfolio of values, desires, and aims, we create and extend a record of our distinctive presence in the world. In this sense, we are all performers. What we perform are actions, countless actions, day after day, month after month, year after year. And what guide those actions are not scripted roles but rather our values and aims. Taken together, these performances provide much of the content of our lives…. And the lives we shape testify to our persistence over time.”

Despite living in the constant present, Scheffler recognizes the asymmetry between the life that has happened and the life that is to come. “We confront the future as agents: our agential capacities are essentially forward-looking, and by exercising those capacities we seek to influence or shape the future, or at least some portion of the future. Things are different when we look back to the past. Here our epistemic position is improved but our practical position is much weaker. We generally know more about our pasts than we do about our futures, yet we cannot change the past through the exercise of our agential capacities.”

Next, Scheffler discusses our role as social beings, leading our lives through interpersonal interactions. “It is in the company of the people who matter most to us that we experience and interpret the world around us…. And it is, to a great extent, through communication and interaction with the people who matter most to us that we make sense of the world and our place in it…. Our relationships with the people to whom we are most deeply bound serve to structure and to shape our engagement with the world, and one of the primary ways in which we lead our lives is by forming and sustaining such relationships.”

For Scheffler, our nature as temporal beings is as important to our lives, as our interpersonal relations. “One of the most basic challenges of living is to come to terms with the temporal dimension of our lives. Our temporality is as fundamental a feature of us as our embodiment…. I believe that our sense of ourselves as persisting creatures goes hand in hand with a sense of ourselves as participants in an ongoing chain of generations…. We have lost a sense of ourselves as being involved in a kind of notional partnership with our ancestors and descendants, as participants in a common enterprise. And we have lost the sense that one of our important roles, whether we play it wittingly or unwittingly, is to transmit cultural materials, including knowledge, skills, values, and understanding, from our ancestors to our descendants…. It is humanity as a biologically grounded, interpretively rich, historically situated, and temporally persisting form of life—a form of life in which we ourselves are participants—that we want to survive under conditions conducive to human flourishing…. We face the future, not as independently defined agents confronting an array of actual and possible beneficiaries, but as creatures whose values and self-understanding already incorporate, if only implicitly, a rich set of assumptions about our place in history and our relations to our predecessors and successors.”

Partiality towards one’s relations is, for Scheffler, a reasonable aspect of living a particular human life, across time and space. “In general, to value one’s relationship with another person non-instrumentally is, in part, to see that person’s needs, interests, and desires as providing one, in contexts that may vary depending on the nature of the relationship, with reasons for action that one would not otherwise have…. If I have a relationship with you, and if I attach non-instrumental value to that relationship, then I will see myself both as having reasons to do things on your behalf that I have no comparable reason to do for others, and as having reason to give your interests priority over theirs…. Valuing a relationship is not best thought of as an alternative to valuing the person with whom one has the relationship…. One’s emotions, when one values a relationship, are sensitive to what happens both to the person with whom one has the relationship and to the relationship itself…. What contributes to a good or successful life is not the mere existence of people one admires, but one’s relationships with (some of) those people…. It is both because they are sources of contentment and because estrangement is so painful that people make such efforts to sustain relationships…. The people with whom we have close relationships matter a great deal to us, but so do our relationships with those people…. A personal relationship is a joint human creation or construction, and each particular relationship has its own distinctive qualities and character. To suppose that valuing a relationship is self-referential is to elide the distinction between this joint creation and oneself.”

Scheffler concludes with a note on objective morality in the face of this particularism, “Although my participation in valuable relationships gives me special reasons to do things for the people with whom I have those relationships, it does this not because those people are more valuable than other people but despite the fact that they are not…. Thorough internalization of a utilitarian or consequentialist theory of justification, with its associated commitment to interpersonal neutrality, would jeopardize our capacity to form and sustain the personal attachments that matter to us most…. The only way that one can engage with the world is to engage with particular bits of it…. An estrangement from one’s own standpoint would be a form of estrangement from life itself: or, more precisely, from the enterprise of leading a life.”

“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!”