“Speaking About God” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Wieland Hoban)

As often in Han’s short treatises, his philosophy retreads familiar ground, but always with subtle new insights. He often makes similar points with nuance, circling back on well-worn themes. The subtitle of this book is “A Dialogue with Simone Weil” and throughout he references her thoughts on almost every page.

The newest facet of Han’s philosophical life is that he has personally seemingly found some sort of religion, explicitly, perhaps explaining his occupation with Weil. His first chapter is on the concept of attention, “Religion presupposes an attention to the things that elude availability, elude consumption, elude ‘eating’. Unavailability is precisely what constitutes the Other, the object of our contemplative attention. Contemplative attention is the opposite of the hunter’s vigilance. It does not seek or hunt, but rather listens and lingers.” He continues by riffing on the poles of good and evil, “We encounter good primarily in contemplative non-action, in inactivity. Evil, on the other hand, is expressed as blind action.” He quotes Weil, “Good is essentially other than evil. Evil is multifarious and fragmentary, good is one; evil is apparent, good is mysterious; evil consists in action, good in non-action or in non-active action.”

As is often the case in his works, Han’s philosophy critiques the failures of the modern age, “Today, we are addicted to searching. The soul itself is changing into a search engine. That rids it of any calm, any quiet. It loses contemplative attention as a negative effort that waits rather than searching actively. Weil attributes all missing presence of mind to the fact that ‘we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out a search’. No doubt she would agree with Kafka: ‘Whoever searches will not find; whoever does not search will be found.’ Whoever searches will fail to find grace.” Han then circles back to attention, “Our attention has become so dull that it lacks this highest part which could make contact with God. It lacks verticality. Our attention is absorbed by the consumption of stimuli. That makes it flat; it loses all depths and peaks…. Both empathy and respect rest on attention to the Other. Society grows desensitized if it loses its attention to the Other…. Emptiness is the guesthouse that receives the Other as they are, in their otherness, without any interference or admixture of the self.”

Throughout this short book, Han often quotes Weil directly before himself commenting. In his chapter on emptiness, Weil states, “I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.” Han suggests, “Weil’s ethics of the Other is based on emptiness. It requires me to read the Other against my will, against my imagination, renouncing myself and my expectations. Only attention to the Other does justice to it.”

Han relishes a world of silence. “Digital hypercommunication destroys the silence. Information as such is a noise. Today we perceive everything in terms of information; thus information and communication waste covers the world in noise. Information as noise wrecks our attention. Only contemplative attention has access to silence…. The spirit requires silence in order to produce or receive something entirely other. There is silence in the place of creation…. Contemplative silence also enables thinking to observe itself and thus produce new forms of thought. In this, philosophy resembles poetry. The spirit is only receptive to something completely other if it is emptied and is reborn from silence.” He quotes Weil directly, “Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything.”

Han expounds on the purpose of beauty in the world, “For Weil too, beauty is a sacrament: ‘Beauty is really, as Plato says, an incarnation of God.’ Beauty is ‘the real presence of God in matter’. Of all God’s characteristics, it is the only one that is incarnated in the universe. The sight of beauty gives us the certainty that God exists.” Again, Han quotes Weil directly, “The fact that man can pass into a state of aesthetic contemplation before a spectacle of nature as before a Greek statue is a proof of God.” She continues, “In everything which rouses in us a pure and genuine feeling for beauty, God is really and truly present. There is, as it were, a sort of incarnation of God in the world (Timaeus) of which beauty constitutes the sign…. Beauty is the experimental proof that the Incarnation is possible. It follows that all art of the first order is, in essence, religious.” Han chimes in, “Only contemplative, lingering attention can access beauty.” Weil states, “The attitude of looking and waiting is the attitude which corresponds with the beautiful.” She continues, “The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation…. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be…. It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it.” Weil posits, “It is because beauty has no end in view that it constitutes the only finality here below. For here below there are no ends. All the things that we take for ends are means. That is an obvious truth.” Han elaborates, “The means without an end frees us from activity as production. Only contemplative viewing has access to beauty…. Beauty brings science and art into proximity. Art reveals beauty as the incarnation of God.”

Both Han and Weil assert that pain is a necessity of the truly lived life. Weil suggests, “On the plane of physical sensibility, suffering alone gives us contact with that necessity which constitutes the order of the world…. In order that a new sense should be formed in us to enable us to hear the universe as the vibration of the word of God, the transforming power of suffering and of joy are equally indispensable.” Han continues, “Profound happiness is only possible in a broken form. The negativity of pain characterizes this brokenness. Today’s culture of smoothness, however, distrusts any form of brokenness…. Pain is an ‘instrument for separating the authentic and the inauthentic in the manifestations of the living’. It is only through pain that we can distinguish between truth and untruth.”

Finally, Han turns explicitly to the problems of modernity, “We no longer live in a disciplinary society. The disciplinary regime gives way to the neoliberal regime, which is not determined by orders and obedience, but rather exploits freedom itself. In neoliberal performance-oriented society, slave and master become one…. We exploit ourselves in the belief that we are realizing ourselves…. Digitalization, which promises us more freedom, ultimately produces a panoptic prison. We are reduced to a data package…. Unlike the disciplinary society, where one is ordered to keep silent, the neoliberal information regime involves a compulsion to communicate that proves to be a very efficient means of control. And the compulsive acceleration inherent in digital communication destroys not only thought but also attention…. The universe is not a dead quantum. Rather, it is something living and spiritual. Weil imagines a kind of panpsychism: everything has a life and a soul…. Beauty eludes any form of efficiency or effectiveness. It is a quality without quantity. It is above all something on which we can linger. Only contemplative inactivity, which does not subordinate anything to a purpose, work or produce, opens up the world as beauty: ‘The goods of this world are like flowers which only retain their scent and beauty so long as they are not picked.’”

Han concludes, “Transcendent poetics saves work and life from total meaninglessness, from the domination of the pure quantum…. The pure economy of production, performance and efficiency deconsecrates and disenchants work. It prevents the symbolic, poetic elevation of work, which ensures that work enters a relationship with a higher reality beyond itself. Economy is the opposite of poetry…. Poeticized, spiritualized work approaches inactivity. Only purposeless doing, doing without an in-order-to, is poetic. Inactivity produces nothing. It eludes performance and efficiency…. Any activity that does not preserve a contemplative stillness at its centre amounts to slavery. It is stillness that spiritualizes human doings.”

“Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger (translated by Cyril Welch)

Welch has provided a new annotated translation to Heidegger’s magnum opus. It is still almost impossible to penetrate. One major project for any reader is simply remembering how Heidegger defines his terms, “Ontology and phenomenology are not two differing disciplines among others belonging to philosophy. The two terms characterize philosophy itself, the one its object and the other the way it proceeds.”

Being-there (dasein) is the term that this work will circle around again and again, “The for-the-sake-of-which signifies (points toward) an in-order-to, this signifies a toward-what, this a near-what of letting-be-bound, this a with-what of the bound-up-ness. These interrelations are interlocked among themselves as a primordial wholeness; they are what they are as the signifying within which being-there provides itself precedently with its understanding of being-in-world. The relational whole of this signifying we call signification. This constitutes the structure of world—the structure in which being-there as such in any instance is…. Insofar as it is, being-there has in each instance already submitted itself to a “world” arising for encounter.” Being-there is intimately associated with his world. “Neither the seemingly self-evident procedure of starting with the things of the world, nor the orientation toward the supposedly most rigorous knowledge of beings, guarantees the achievement of a foothold allowing us to meet up phenomenally with the closest ontological constitutions of world, of being-there, and of inner-worldly beings.”

Next, Heidegger refines what exactly the means by the term being-there, “Being-there is a being that is in each instance I myself, its being is in each instance mine. This determination does indicate an ontological constitution…. One may well reject soul-substance as well as thing-likeness of consciousness and object-likeness of person; it remains the case that, ontologically, one starts out with something whose being retains, expressly or not, the meaning of on-hand-ness. Substantiality is then the ontological guideline for determining the being that serves as the answer to the question of who…. The ontic self-evidence of the assertion that it is I who am in each case being-there should not mislead us into the opinion that the path for an ontological interpretation of what is thus “given” has been mapped out.” Throwness is another term of importance for Heidegger, “This characteristic of being-there—one veiled in its wherefrom and its whereto, but in itself all the more unveiledly disclosed—, this “that it is”: this we call its thrownness into its there. This one being is thrown in such a way that, as being-in-world, it is the there. The term “thrownness” intends to suggest the facticity of consignment.”

It would not be an exaggeration to state that Heidegger, throughout this work, continues to refine his definition of being-there, “The fundamental ontological characteristics of this one being are existentiality, facticity, and collapsedness. These existential determinations do not belong to a composite as its pieces, such that one or another might on occasion be missing; rather, there is a primordial interconnection spun in them, one constituting the searched-for wholeness of the structural whole. In the unity of those essential determinations of being-there the being of being-there can be grasped as such, and ontologically.”

Next, Heidegger defines truth, “The “definition” of truth as uncovered-ness and being-uncovering is, moreover, not a mere clarification of a word. It rather grows out of the analysis of those comportments of being-there that we customarily call “true” in the first place…. Being-true, this as being-uncovering, is a manner in which being-there is. What makes such uncovering possible must necessarily be called “true” in a still more primordial sense. The most primordial phenomenon of truth first gets shown by the existential-ontological foundations of uncovering.”

Digging down further into the nature of being-there, Heidegger next defines the terms authentic and conscience, “When being-there thus gets brought back from the one, the one-self is modified in an existentiell manner so that it becomes authentic being-itself. This must be accomplished by making up for not choosing. But making up for not choosing signifies choosing to make this choice—deciding, from its very own self, for an ability-to-be. In choosing to make this choice, being-there makes possible, for the first time, its authentic ability-to-be…. But because being-there is lost in the “one,” it must first find itself. In order to find itself at all, it must be “shown” to itself in its possible authenticity…. We shall claim that this ability is attested by what, in the everyday interpretation of itself, being-there is familiar with as the “voice of conscience.”” He continues, “Conscience offers “something” to understand, it discloses. From this formal characteristic arises the directive to take this phenomenon back into the disclosedness of being-there. This fundamental constitution of the being that we ourselves in each case are is constituted by attunement, understanding, collapsing, and talk. A more penetrating analysis of conscience reveals it as a call. Calling is a mode of talk. The call of conscience has the character of summoning being-there to its ownmost ability-to-be-itself…. Conscience speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence. Thus it not only loses none of its perceptibility, but forces being-there, thus summoned and called upon, into the reticence of itself…. The call we designate as conscience is a summons to the one-self in its self; as this summons, the summons is the call of the self to its ability-to-be-itself, and thus a calling forth of being-there into its possibilities.”

Other terms of import for Heidegger are dread, death, resoluteness, care, and temporality, “The reticent projecting of oneself upon one's ownmost being-guilty, prepared for dread—we call resoluteness…. Resoluteness is a pre-eminent mode of the disclosedness of being-there…. Henceforth, with resoluteness, [we can say] we have reached the most primordial, because authentic truth of being-there…. If resoluteness constitutes the mode of authentic care, and care itself is only possible through temporality, then the phenomenon at which we arrived when examining resoluteness must present only a modality of temporality—a modality that makes care at all possible. The essential wholeness of being-there as care means: ahead-of-itself-already-being-in (a world) as being-near (encountered inner-worldly beings)…. The primordial unity of the structure of care lies in temporality…. The primary meaning of existentiality is the future.”

Of course, it all circles back to being-there. Now how it explicitly relates to temporality, “Being-there is historical: this will be confirmed as an existential and ontological statement of foundational significance…. Being-there expends itself, as the being whose being is at issue for it, primarily and whether explicitly or not, for itself. Initially and mostly, care takes the form of circumspect taking care of things. Expending itself for the sake of itself, being-there “uses itself up.” Using itself up, being-there needs itself, i.e., it needs time…. Reckoning with time is constitutive for being-in-world. Reckoning with its time, the care-bound uncovering essential to circumspection allows beings to arise for encounter, to be discovered as at hand or on hand.”

Heidegger returns to the themes of fear and dread, “The forgetting that constitutes fear confuses being-there and lets it stray back and forth between ungrasped “worldly” possibilities. In contrast to this frantic finding-present, the presence engendered by dread is held in bringing one back to one's ownmost thrownness. In accordance with its existential meaning, dread cannot lose itself in anything taken care of…. Dread only brings one into the mood for a possible resolution. The present of dread holds the moment, as which the present itself is possible (and only so), in abeyance…. In the temporality peculiar to dread (that dread is primordially grounded in been-ness and that future and present fructify themselves only out of this been-ness) it becomes evident just how powerful the mood of dread can be, and how distinctive it is. In it, being-there is taken back fully to its naked uncanniness and taken over by it…. Fear is occasioned by beings taken care of in a circum-world. In contrast, dread arises from being-there itself. Fear comes over us from inner-worldly beings. Dread arises from being-in-world as thrown being-toward-death….. He who is resolute knows no fear, but understands the possibility of dread as the mood that does not hinder or confuse him. Dread frees us from “null” possibilities and sets us free for authentic ones.”

Finally, Heidegger concludes by returning once again to how it all relates to being-there, “As thrown, being-there is indeed consigned to itself and its ability-to-be, but still as being-in-world. As thrown, it is dependent upon a “world,” and ex-sists factically with others. Initially and mostly, the self is lost in the one. It understands itself in terms of the possibilities of ex-sistence that “circulate” in the “average” public interpretedness of being-there that reigns day by day…. Authentic existentiell understanding, far from extricating itself from the received interpretedness, always grasps its chosen possibility in a resolution from it, against it, and yet again for it…. The resoluteness in which being-there comes back to itself discloses the reigning factical possibilities of authentic ex-sisting from the inheritance it takes over as thrown…. The more authentically being-there resolves itself, i.e., understands itself unambiguously in terms of its ownmost pre-eminent possibility in readying for death, the more unequivocal and inevitable is the choice in finding the possibility of its ex-sistence…. Only being free for death gives being-there its one goal and casts ex-sistence into its finitude. The finitude of ex-sistence thus seized upon rips one back out of the endless multiplicity of possibilities offering themselves right off—those of comfort, taking things easy, shirking obligations—and brings being-there to the simplicity of its destiny. With this term we designate the primordial happening of being-there, a happening embedded in authentic resoluteness, one in which being-there consigns itself to itself, free for death, within a possibility inherited and yet chosen.”

“Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy” by Frank McLynn

I knew this was going to be a detailed book when over fifty pages in McLynn hadn’t even mentioned one individual person or even a tribe. Instead, he spent time detailing the peculiarities of nature in the steppe region. The Gobi desert, the mountains, the lakes and rivers that made the terrain formidable. For a nomadic peoples the areas where horses, camels, goats, sheep, yak, bison, and cattle could survive during the harsh winters were of utmost importance. Finally, he began to describe the clans of the steppe from the Mongols where Temujin would emerge to the many other ethnicities, from the Chinese Jin, the Uighers, the Tartars, the Ongud, the Kereit, the Naiman, the Merkit, the Cuman, and other minor tribes who encompassed the steppe region.

It was no sure thing that Temujin would become Genghis Khan. He was born into a poor sub-tribe and numerous times escaped execution, starvation, and battle wounds by the closest of hairs. However, time and time again he escaped formidable odds to survive. He was a great warrior, but also a great strategist, and also a deviously cunning foe. He also knew how to delegate and choose his subordinates. He played off opponents against each other, retreated when he didn’t have the numbers, pushed the advantage when he sensed weakness, married off friends into alliances, allied with enemies to defeat common foes, forgave his bitterest rivals when the time was right, and brutally executed enemies when he had the upper hand. Perhaps, his most creative innovation was the breaking down aristocratic lines to form a society based on groupings of the decimal system that gave leadership roles based on meritocratic worth, regardless of ethnicity or age. He united what was once the many disparate peoples of the steppe into one united Mongol “race”. From there he systemically turned his war machine outside the steppe, first towards the Jin in China and then against the Islamic Khwarezmian Empire, who ruled from the Caspian sea to modern Afghanistan and (nominally) Iraq, and finally back to western China to destroy the Hsi Hsia Empire. Perhaps Genghis Khan’s greatest legacy was that his realm was the only “great man’s empire” to actually expand after his death. His third son, Ogedei, was named the next Khaghan, but his other son’s were given divided shares of the empire to rule under him as governors.

The Mongols were vicious warriors who often killed every last man, woman, and child in the towns they conquered. Mass rape, torture, and the slitting of fetuses from pregnant women were not uncommon. However, they also invented and improved on forms of warfare. For one, they often took the best artisans and military engineers from those they conquered and coopted them into their army. Therefore, they added Chinese siege weapons as well as river fording floats to their repertoire. The feigned retreat, the dispersal and lightening fast reuniting of the flanks of their formations, the use of prisoners as the vanguard of siege batteries (and human fodder), and the use of subterfuge in negotiations with towns considering surrender were all Mongol specialities. And throughout the centuries, even as they became more sedentary and accustomed to the finer delicacies of food and drink, their armies could still withstand tremendous hardships, forced marches, and bitter weather to make sure that they were always attacking the enemy at the time and on the ground of their choosing, creating strategic advantage despite most often their large numerical inferiority.

The culture of warfare was so engrained in the Mongols that it was able to survive the death of Genghis. Ogedei’s first campaigns were to destroy what was left of the Jin Empire in northern China and to repacify Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula. Perhaps the Mongol Empire’s most impressive feat was the establishment of their postal/courier service, the yam, established by Genghis, expanded by Ogedai, and reaching its apogee under Qubilai. At its peak the yam had over 10,000 staging posts for over 200,000 horses. A rider could be expected to ride over 250 miles a day and at night was accompanied by runners with torches between staging posts to supplement the moonlight. The yam was a unifying force that was also integral for tax collection. By 1230’s Ogedei had to deal with the fracturing of his own empire as his brothers and their sons vied for more power and riches. His solution was ever more war- this time with the principalities of the Rus. By 1241, the Mongols had conquered the entire western steppe, all of Russia including the great southern city of Kiev, the great northern city of Novgorod, and what was then the small village of Moscow, and were firmly entrenched in eastern Poland and Hungary. However, after reaching the border of Western Europe within a couple of years the Mongols would withdraw back to the steppes. Internecine fighting finally broke into the open with the Golden Horde faction taking control of Russia and the western steppe for the next two hundred years, while the official Khaghan in Mongolia would focus on defeating the Song in southern China, eventually ruled by Qubilai in what would become the Yuan Dynasty by 1279. The Chagatai Khanate would carve out central Asia- most of the modern Stans and parts of modern Mongolia, China, India, and Russia, while the Ilkhanate founded in 1256 would encompass eastern Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Armenia, and some of the other modern Stans. Genghis’ empire had finally split into four, but not before reaching a land mass covering twelve million contiguous square miles, bigger than North America or Africa.

“I and Thou” by Martin Buber (translated by Walter Kaufmann)

Importantly, Kaufmann chooses to translate the German Du as You, instead of Thou throughout this work. One could contest that Thou/You is the most vital word in Buber’s short work. Buber begins, “The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two basic words he can speak…. The basic words are not single words but word pairs…. One basic word is the word pair I-You…. The other basic word is the word pair I-It…. Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence…. Basic words do not signify things but relations…. Whoever says You does not have something for his object. For wherever there is something there is also another something; every It borders on other Its…. But where You is said there is no something. You has no borders. Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation.”

Buber stresses that the I-You is an actuality in the lived world of individuals, not a concept of the forms, appearances, or ideas expressed by the likes of Plato or Kant. “I speak only of the actual human being, of you and me, of our life and our world, not of any I-in-itself and not of any Being-in-itself.” He stresses that the I-It is a necessary, but not a sufficient, relationship, “This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world…. The human being who but now was unique and devoid of qualities, not at hand but only present, not experienceable, only touchable, has again become a He or She, an aggregate of qualities, a quantum with a shape…. Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter into thinghood again and again.”

The second part of Buber’s treatise, amongst other things, details his position on the juxtaposition between necessity and free will, “The unlimited sway of causality in the It-world, which is of fundamental importance for the scientific ordering of nature, is not felt to be oppressive by the man who is not confined to the It-world but free to step out of it again and again into the world of relation. Here I and You confront each other freely in a reciprocity that is not involved in or tainted by any causality; here man finds guaranteed the freedom of his being and of Being. Only those who know of relation and who know of the presence of the You have the capacity for decision…. The man to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality. He knows that his mortal life is by its very nature an oscillation between You and It, and he senses the meaning of this…. Fate and freedom are promised to each other. Fate is encountered only by him that actualizes freedom…. Freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate—with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light—looks like grace itself. No, the man who returns into the It-world, carrying the spark, does not feel oppressed by causal necessity.”

Finally, in the third part of the book, Buber concerns himself with the individual’s relationship with God, the eternal You, “For whoever pronounces the word God and really means You, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true You of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others. But whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless—when he addresses with his whole devoted being the You of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God…. The You confronts me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationship is at once being chosen and choosing, passive and active…. This is the activity of the human being who has become whole…. One does not have to strip away the world of the senses as a world of appearance. There is no world of appearance, there is only the world—which, to be sure, appears twofold to us in accordance with our twofold attitude. Only the spell of separation needs to be broken. Nor is there any need to “go beyond sense experience”; any experience, no matter how spiritual, could only yield us an It. Nor need we turn to a world of ideas and values—that cannot become present for us. All this is not needed. Can one say what is needed? Not by way of a prescription…. Going forth is unteachable in the sense of prescriptions. It can only be indicated—by drawing a circle that excludes everything else. Then the one thing needful becomes visible: the total acceptance of the present…. What has to be given up is not the I, as most mystics suppose: the I is indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes an I and You. What has to be given up is not the I but that false drive for self-affirmation which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things…. One does not find God if one remains in the world; one does not find God if one leaves the world. Whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being and carries to it all the being of the world, finds him whom one cannot seek…. For the sake of this there are I and You, there is dialogue, there is language, and spirit whose primal deed language is, and there is, in eternity, the word.”

“Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist” by Robert Travers

A memoir by an amazing evolutionary biologist. You get some of his life’s work primarily studying lizards in Jamaica, but for much more of the book you get a bunch of crazy stories, from smoking ganga with Peter Tosh backstage at his concert in Sanders Theater while Travers was a professor at Harvard, to almost getting killed by a machete wielding burglar in Kingston, to Travers’ bouts fighting insanity in mental asylums while in college and after, to chasing away hyenas from pack dog kills in the Serengeti with a Land Rover, to getting mugged outside a brothel in Jamaica, to comforting Jane Goodall when her favorite chimp dies in a jungle stream. The book reads like a catalogue of near-death experiences told with humor.

“The Pillow Book” by Sei Shonagon (translated by Meredith McKinney)

Sei was a gentlewoman at the court of Empress Teishi, who lived at the end of the tenth century in what was then Japan’s capital, Kyoto. This book is similar to a journal, broken off into sections of varying lengths and subject matter—each section might be full of an anecdote, a reminisce of a memorable event, personal opinions, explanations of court etiquette, and gossip. Sei claims, “I have written in this book things I have seen and thought, in the long idle hours spent at home, without ever dreaming that others would see it.”

Much of courtly life in Japan revolved around religious ceremonies, festivals, and the readings of the Buddhist sutras. Sei had a unique opinion on what made these go best, “A priest who gives a sermon should be handsome. After all, you’re most aware of the profundity of his teaching if you’re gazing at his face as he speaks. If your eyes drift elsewhere you tend to forget what you’ve just heard, so an unattractive face has the effect of making you feel quite sinful.”

Amongst the book’s sections, Sei often included short lists, “Refined and elegant things – A girl’s over-robe of white on white over pale violet-grey. The eggs of the spot-billed duck. Shaved ice with a sweet syrup, served in a shiny new metal bowl. A crystal rosary. Wisteria flowers. Snow on plum blossoms. An adorable little child eating strawberries.” These lists were often quite funny, “Worthless things – Someone who’s both ugly and unpleasant.… And why should I avoid mentioning here the fire tongs that are burned in the post-funeral fire? After all, these are things that exist in the world. I never intended this book to be seen by others, so I’ve written whatever came into my mind, without worrying about whether people would find it strange or unpleasant.”

Other sections of Sei’s book are detailed vignettes typical to courtly life, “Another scene of fascinating elegance – it’s very late at night, Her Majesty has retired to her chamber, everyone is asleep and outside a lady is sitting talking with a senior courtier. From within comes the frequent sound of go stones dropping into the box. Delightful too to hear the soft sound of fire tongs being gently pushed into the ash of the brazier, and sense from this the presence of someone who isn’t yet asleep…. A person who stays up late is always elegantly intriguing. You wake in the night to lie there listening through the partition, and realize from the sounds that someone is still up. You can’t hear what is said, but you catch the sound of a man’s soft laugh, and you long to know what they’re saying together.”

Sei’s family were renown for their skill at poetry. Throughout her book, Sei alludes to many poems, as well as often interspersing snippets within her stories. This tale involves Sei escorting the Empress to the Emperor’s quarters for the night before returning home, “‘Are you going back?’ inquired the Grand Counsellor. ‘Let me see you home.’ I hung my train and Chinese jacket on the standing screen, and we set off. His cloak glowed wonderfully white in the bright moonlight, and he trod the loosened hems of his gathered trousers as he walked. ‘Don’t fall,’ he said, taking hold of my sleeve, and then he delighted me by reciting ‘The wanderer sojourns on beneath the late moon.’ ‘You do get pleasure out of that sort of thing, don’t you!’ he remarked with a smile – but really, how could you not find it enchanting?”

Towards the end of this book (and also probably towards the end of life when the Empress is already dead and she is no longer living at court), Sei ponders, “Is there any occasion to match a moonlit night for sending your thoughts winging to distant places, and recalling past moments, their sorrows and joys and pleasures, as if it were today?”

“Essays in Idleness” by Yoshida Kenko (translated by Meredith McKinney)

Kenko took the tonsure to become a Buddhist monk in his thirties, but never joined a monastery or left urbanity for the life of a recluse, instead maintaining a home in greater Kyoto. “What kind of man will feel depressed at being idle? There is nothing finer than to be alone with nothing to distract you.” 

This collection is broken into numbered sections, varying from aphorisms, short tales, court gossip, and life advice. Kenko often warned of wasting ones life, “What happiness to sit in intimate conversation with someone of like mind, warmed by candid discussion of the amusing and fleeting ways of this world . . . but such a friend is hard to find, and instead you sit there doing your best to fit in with whatever the other is saying, feeling deeply alone.”

Kenko warned of being distracted by wealth and worldly desires, “Great wealth will drive you to neglect your own well-being in pursuit of it. It is asking for harm and tempting trouble. Though you leave behind at your death a mountain of gold high enough to prop up the North Star itself, it will only cause problems for those who come after you. Nor is there any point in all those pleasures that delight the eyes of fools. Big carriages, fat horses, glittering gold and jewels – any man of sensibility would view such things as gross stupidity. Toss your gold away in the mountains; hurl your jewels into the deep. Only a complete fool is led astray by avarice…. A dull, stupid person can be born into a good house, attain high status thanks to opportunity, and live in the height of luxury, while many wonderfully wise and saintly men choose to remain in lowly positions, and end their days without ever having met with good fortune. A fierce craving for high status and position is next in folly to the lust for fortune…. Desire for a good reputation is merely revelling in the praise of others. Neither those who praise us nor those who denigrate will remain in the world for long…. There is nothing to be gained from leaving a lasting name…. Knowledge leads to deception; talent and ability only serve to increase earthly desires. Knowledge acquired by listening to others or through study is not true knowledge…. One who is truly wise has no knowledge or virtue, nor honour nor fame…. All things of this phenomenal world are mere illusion. They are worth neither discussing nor desiring.”

An ambivalence and reluctance with knowledge is a recurring theme of this essay, “Sometimes a man can genuinely impress you with how well informed he is, but on the whole such people appear stupidly complacent and self-satisfied…. It is truly impressive to speak only reluctantly about something you thoroughly understand, and not to mention it at all unless asked.” Kenko later continues, “Even people who seem eminently intelligent will judge others yet have no knowledge of themselves. It makes no sense to lack self-knowledge while understanding those around you. He who knows himself must be said to be the man of real knowledge…. People yearn for the unattainable, bewail matters beyond their power, wait for things that will never come, fear others or fawn on them. The shame in all this is not caused by others. You bring it on yourself by your own greed. This insatiable desire is due to a lack of real understanding that the end of life, that tremulous thing, is at this very moment as good as upon us.”

Kenko suggests to concentrate one’s energy on the few things that are truly important in life, “None of the requirements of human interaction and etiquette can be easily avoided. If we insist on being punctilious in all those worldly demands so difficult to ignore, it will only add to desires, shackle our lives and leave no space in our hearts for calm detachment, and we will end up wasting our entire life being driven to distraction by trivial matters.” Furthermore, he states, “The joys, angers, sorrows, and pleasures of adults too are all based on illusion, but who among us is not attached to the seeming reality of this life?”

The impermanence of the world is a major theme of Buddhist teaching, “In this transient phenomenal world with its constant change, what appears to exist in fact does not. What is begun has no end. Aims go unfulfilled, yet desire is endless. The human heart changes ceaselessly. All things are passing illusion. What is there that remains unchanging? The folly of such beliefs springs from people’s inability to understand this.”

Finally, Kenko concludes by reiterating the ephemerality of life, “The way people struggle to get along in the world strikes me as like fashioning a buddha from snow on a spring day…. So many strive in hopes of the future, even as the life still in them is daily dissolving away like snow from beneath the snowman.”

“Also A History of Philosophy Vol. 3” by Jurgen Habermas (translated by Ciaran Cronin)

Habermas’ final edition to his history of philosophy begins with the Scottish philosopher, David Hume. “By consistently maintaining that our only contact with the world is through our impressions, Hume makes short shrift of the concept of these two substances – mind and matter…. Hume uses subtle arguments to show that, under empiricist premises, the primary qualities ascribed to bodies in space and time as objective – i.e. the properties of motion, extension or weight – can also be traced back to subjective sensations. And just as there is no material substance, so there is no mental substance. If all that is evidently given to us are ephemeral sensory impressions, and if all individual contingent impressions, which are in turn suppressed by other perceptions, are different both from each other and from the objects reflected in them, how can such an impression represent a substance?” Habermas continues by detailing Hume’s skepticism, "The rejection of the substantialization of mind and body is a consequence of Hume’s epistemologically grounded scepticism concerning ontological statements about the constitution of the world…. Hume shares the common-sense notion of a world that exists independently of consciousness, but concerning the intrinsic constitution of which we can only speculate. Scepticism about cognitive access to nature as it is in itself does not forbid us from assuming the existence of nature in everyday life…. Hume aligns the psychology of cognition, which is supposed to explain the subjective conditions of possible knowledge of causal relations – and the meaning of causality itself – with the model of modern empirical science.”

Next, Habermas contrasts Hume with Kant, “Kant continues to treat the question of the human vocation and practical self-understanding as the central problem of philosophy. Now, however, this question has to be answered without the basic concepts of metaphysics and the corresponding fallacious inferences from ‘is’ to ‘ought’…. For him philosophy of religion and enlightenment are one and the same subject…. The enlightened person lives in an awareness of the tension between the indispensability of the exacting demands of reason and the finiteness of his capacities. Kant’s way of thinking is shaped by the unavoidability of this excessive demand on oneself and the awareness that human beings are dependent on the encouragement of their own powers. The centre of gravity of his work, therefore, is the tenacious struggle against the defeatism of reason and the equally tenacious search for stabilization through a ‘rational faith’ that inspires self-confidence…. In order to make room for practical knowledge, this theoretical cognition must be restricted to the realm of objects of possible experience and refrain from answering metaphysical questions, while rational orientation in action, in order to be able to count on justifiable practical knowledge, must be limited to well-defined questions of justice…. The subject can only ascertain the spontaneity of its independent thinking and of the autonomy of its actions in the light of its ‘self-made ideas’ and the laws it gives itself…. For the transcending power of reason, Kant paid the price of an abstract opposition between intelligible and phenomenal nature, an opposition reflected in the noumenal-empirical duality of human nature. This tension inevitably perturbs practical reason, which is now aware not only of its own finitude but also of the resistance of natural motives…. Kant believed that he could establish a ‘faith’ on the basis of practical reason…. With its power to transcend experience, reason first teaches human beings the limits of what they can know theoretically; then, with its normative power, practical reason challenges them to follow the moral law and to use their autonomy to morally overcome the resistance of their inner nature and to work politically to bring about a cosmopolitan condition…. This confirms the point on which a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking turns: the questions of religion and metaphysics that continue to resonate are, as it were, the tuning fork that produces the triad of rationally justified answers in the subject, who is completely reliant on himself and his ability to think for himself.” Kant states, “So far as morality is based on the conception of the human being as one who is free but who also, just because of that, binds himself through his reason to unconditional laws, it is in need neither of the idea of another being above him in order that he recognize his duty, nor, that he observe it, of an incentive other than the law itself.”

Habermas stresses the roles of culture and language in forming common knowledge, “The emerging economic and social sciences registered the increasing tendency of capitalist economic cycles to develop a life of their own and the emergence of new social classes and class conflicts. These developments reveal the weakness of a philosophy of the subject that was insensitive to the distinctive social-ontological character of the historically experienced reality of symbolically structured lifeworld contexts and had assimilated this reality of society and culture to that of nature as objectified by natural science…. Herder, Schleiermacher and Humboldt took up and developed Johann Georg Hamann’s basic idea that language, viewed as coeval with reason, possesses world-constituting power.”

For Habermas, Hegel is a return of philosophy to the metaphysical realm, “Hegel does not suppress the ritual core of the sacred, but makes the philosophical interpretation of the figure of Jesus – i.e. the earthly embodiment of the one and invisible God in the Son of Man – the fulcrum of the dialectical self-movement of an absolute spirit, which in turn comprises subjective and objective spirit within itself. With this understanding of the incarnation of the absolute as a simultaneously natural and symbolic embodiment, he lays the groundwork for an idealism that appropriates, in an individualizing Christian way, the Plotinian, but performatively interpreted, figure of thought of the self-externalization of the One – and thus merges the ancient understanding of the world with the modern self-understanding influenced by Christianity…. Hegel is the first philosopher to take ‘history’ seriously as the resistant medium in which the formation processes of finite rational beings take place. Starting from crises of social integration, he understands practical reason as a mediating force between the particular and the universal, which also overcomes the divisions [Entzweiungen] of modernity in the ethical figure of the modern constitutional state.”

Perhaps undervalued, and predating Hegel and Herder, Vico also stressed the roles of particularity, culture, and language in forming reason and common knowledge within a peoples, “Vico (1668–1744) had already understood why the social-ontological constitution of the object domain is such that the scientization of history cannot conform to the pattern of the objectification of nature as interpreted by the philosophy of the subject. His bold anti-Cartesian project for a ‘new science’ – the first edition of Vico’s Scienza Nuova appeared in 1725 – emphasizes that the historical formations of society and culture are object domains created by human beings themselves according to their own concepts…. An empirical science of the rise and fall of cultures must not assimilate the conceptually realistic structure of the human world to the nominalist natural scientific conception of nature…. The cultural and social objects of experience encountered in the lifeworld – communication processes, languages, documents, narratives, texts, works of art, styles and general cultural traditions, not to mention artefacts, procedures and technologies, actions, contexts of interaction, conventions, rights and institutions, and organizations and systems – are inherently conceptually structured…. Culture and society consist of symbolic products of subjective mind, congealed into objectivity, so to speak.”

Habermas returns to Hegel, “Hegel is a postmetaphysical thinker insofar as he no longer takes totality as such as his object – in the form of being, or the one, or of God-and-the-world – but conceives it in the shape of the performance [Performanz] of the acts of ‘sublation’ through which all the transitory particularizations and individuations of the universal are mediated in the concrete universal. The universal marks the semantic shape of the contents of thought…. Hegel understands the unity of thoughts and thinking in turn as the cycle of continuous steps of reflection of an all-encompassing subject…. Hegel now transforms the metaphysical idea of the ontological difference between the unifying and inherently infinite totality of that which is, on the one hand, and the many finite entities in the world, on the other, into the idealist notion of a process of reflection that runs through everything that exists in the world; this process in its entirety takes the place of the absolutely one and infinite subject…. He conceives of the comprehension that creates unity in performative terms, as the execution of a logical concatenation of all the individual steps of thought, progressing through affirmation and negation and ending in absolute knowledge.”Hegel, himself, states, “There lies in empiricism this great principle that what is true must exist in actuality and be there for perception. This principle is opposed to the ought, with which reflection inflates itself and looks down on actuality and the present in the name of a beyond, which is supposed to have its seat and existence in subjective understanding alone.”

Habermas stresses the lineage implied by the concept of postmetaphysics, “The genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking will come down to the practical alternative between whether, following the historical traces of the learning process of finite subjects and aware of our fallibility, we can still try to make autonomous use of our reason, guided by self-given norms, in order to retain some shaping practical influence, however exiguous, on our social existence; or whether there is no scope for such an exercise of autonomy, so that we are forced to come to the fatalistic or ‘realistic’ realization that all we can do is use technologically exploitable objectifying scientific knowledge to skillfully adapt given preferences to the self-generated social complexity of uncontrollable systemic contexts…. Under the conditions of postmetaphysical thinking, these two dependencies of which the subjective mind becomes aware in reflection – on its own organism, on the one hand, and on history, culture and society, on the other – stand out against the resistant objective world of sense experience which has always been thematized by the philosophy of the subject…. It experiences its lived bodily [leiblich] existence performatively in an intersubjectively shared sociocultural form of life as a form of dependence on organic and spiritual resources that empowers from behind.”

Finally, Habermas concludes with Peirce and pragmatism, “The idea of a definitive agreement on what is true and what is false, to be reached in the long run, only makes sense if the collective research process itself has characteristics that justify the prospect of a progressive elimination of errors and a cumulative learning process. The spontaneous achievements of the transcendental subject are replaced by the cooperative search for truth by empirical subjects, so that the expectation of a continuous increase in knowledge can only be justified by the procedural rationality of the research process in conjunction with the categorial framework of the language in which reality is represented…. It is crucial for the progress of knowledge that the current generation of the community of investigators is not confronted with a tabula rasa, but is embedded in a context of past interpretations to which it can refer when forming its hypotheses…. The logical framework of the forms of inference is thus intended to regulate a practice consisting of background beliefs, discourses, interpretations and tests in such a way that the unfinished sequence of constantly revised interpretations can be understood as the expression of learning processes of the community of investigators….. This is more reminiscent of the hermeneutic approach, which seeks to gain a better understanding of a text of which we have a prior understanding – to exhaust its potential for meaning more thoroughly.” Peirce states, “The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge.”

“Kusamakura” by Natsume Soseki (translated by Meredith McKinney)

This short novel by Soseki is narrated by an artist, who is the only visitor to a hot spring inn up in the mountains far off from his home in Tokyo. “Yes, here among these mountains, in immediate contact with the phenomena of the natural world, everything I see and hear is intriguing for me. No special suffering can arise from simply being beguiled like this—at worst, surely, it is tired legs and the fact that I can’t eat fine food…. But why is there no suffering here? Simply because I see this scenery as a picture; I read it as a set of poems. Seeing it thus, as painting or poetry, I have no desire to acquire the land and cultivate it, or to put a railway through it and make a profit. This scenery—scenery that adds nothing to the belly or the pocket—fills the heart with pleasure simply as scenery, and this is surely why there is neither suffering nor anxiety in the experience…. If I picture myself, a sodden figure moving in this vast ink-wash world of cloud and rain shot through diagonally with a thousand silver arrows, not as myself but as some other person, there’s poetry in this moment.”

The unnamed narrator spends much of his time on his retreat contemplating life, worldly attachments, and the beauty of art, “While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust. The reputation we grasp at, the glory that we seize, is surely like the honey that the cunning bee will seem sweetly to brew only to leave his sting within it as he flies. What we call pleasure in fact contains all suffering, since it arises from attachment. Only thanks to the existence of the poet and the painter are we able to imbibe the essence of this dualistic world, to taste the purity of its very bones and marrow. The artist feasts on mists, he sips the dew, appraising this hue and assessing that, and he does not lament the moment of death.”

At a tea ceremony at the inn, the narrator meets his host’s young nephew, who is about to depart to the war in Manchuria, “I’ve been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man’s arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming.”

Finally, our narrator contemplates the life of the aesthete, “Only by bringing myself to this unknown mountain village and steeping myself deep in its late spring world have I at last found within me the attitude of the pure artist. Once I have crossed this frontier, all the beauties of the earth become mine. Though no drop of paint nor iota of brushstroke ever meets the pure white canvas before me, I am nevertheless an artist of the highest order. I grant I do not equal Michelangelo in artistry, nor Raphael in skill, but my artist’s soul can take its place alongside those of the great men of antiquity, proud and equal. I have not made a single painting since arriving, indeed I almost feel that to have brought the painting box along at all was a mere whim. And you call yourself a painter? you may say with a sneer. But sneer though you may, I am for the present a true artist, a magnificent artist.”