“Some Trick” by Helen DeWitt

This is a collection of short stories. DeWitt’s stories are ostensibly unrelated, but many focus on the themes of writing, artistic creation and integrity, and the business side of art. Being DeWitt, she throws in more than a few references to philosophy, mathematics, and the classics, as well as inserting her biting wit often. She comments of one character, “he wore a suit because hacks must dig for dirt in a suit.” Philosophizing on death, she has another character pontificate, “Nobody thinks God actually died: they think it was never alive in the first place.” Another character comments on the Japanese aesthetic, “haiku- it is an art of subtraction, an art with a horror of the extraneous, but it’s not so much that it has a horror of the extraneous as that it avoids histrionics, Western art gives the impression by contrast of being saturated with sincerity.” Not many characters in this collection are likable. Many seem to be trying too hard. Most are pompous, pedantic, and/or money grubbing. A few are memorable in their outrageousness. The depictions of the creative world DeWitt chose to display in this collection are of a most unflattering light.

“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” by Kiran Desai

Desai’s epic novel is a story about love’s triumphs and failures, a story cloaked in mystery, a story of rigid class divisions, a story of how ethnic stereotypes and rivalries destroy, a tale about the travails of immigration, and a tale of generational traumas and heartbreaks. It is a story of not knowing quite where one is from or where one is going in the modern globalized world. It takes place at the turn of the 21st century and flits back and forth primarily between India and America, with stops to Italy and Mexico in between. “One thing seemed certain: If India existed, then America could not, for they were too drastically different not to cancel each other out.”

At the crux of the novel’s plot is that feeling immigrants have of being a part of two different worlds, but belonging to neither. “Sunny registered himself hypocritical, too, when he looked away from other Indians he saw on the street—Indians who were also avidly ignoring him, trying to make it in America by avoiding one another, better to be two Indians than three Indians. And better an Indian in New York than an Indian in India.” India, despite everything, however, always felt like one’s first home. “After a day when everything was at odds—full of obstacles and irritations—dusk in India felt always settled, ancient, a civilization that had come to fullness.”

Even the older generation, the ones who were children raised in the shadow of Partition, felt the tug and pull on their lives as well. “All of us Indians who are educated to be Westernized are fated to make the same journey. If we have any intelligence or any heart, we have to search for ourselves backward.” But for the youth straddling the 21st century, globalization had allowed for so much, yet also allowed for the  confusion only to grow. “Seeing her in her grandfather’s bungalow—with her eccentric father lecturing me on mystic poetry and her divorced aunt in a nightgown up to her neck and down to her toes, the bad-tempered cook chopping onions on the floor of a black kitchen lit by a candle—it was like walking into a book from the past. I don’t want to live in the present anymore, and I certainly don’t want to live in the future—it hurts my eyes just to look at what the world is becoming. So that only leaves the past, no matter its obscenities.” However, every coin has two sides. "Western psychology is no match for an Indian family. We are too slippery, we change shape, we don’t distinguish truth from lies. Lies are truth and truth are lies—you can’t pin us down.”

In the end, Desai’s novel is a story about searching for companionship in the modern world and the particular struggles for immigrants in navigating their path to love. “Maybe all you needed was to be loved once. It was too much to ask to be loved all the way through life, and you could return to the memory for sustenance.” Finding oneself, first, and then finding another becomes life’s impossible task. “The universe tries everything it can to prevent love. If one thing doesn’t work to keep two people apart, then it tries another. Darkness follows darkness, across geographies, across centuries. It has its own life, unspooling.”

“Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000-2000” by Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini

This book is a comparative institutional analysis between the economies of China and Western Europe from 1000-2000 AD. As such, it paints in rather broad strokes. Still, some common themes resound. But first, some facts on the ground. “China’s population had grown from about 50 or 60 million in the early 700s AD to about 100 million toward the turn of the millennium. During the Northern Song period (960–1127 AD), population growth is estimated to have averaged around a rate of 0.87 percent per year…. The capital city of the Northern Song Empire, Kaifeng, had reached 1 million inhabitants…. [In contrast, the] European population in 1000 AD was about the same as in 200 AD…. Song China employed advanced agricultural techniques, including the use of new rice varieties, extensive irrigation systems, terrace farming, crop rotation, and fertilizers. Its canals and waterways supported an extensive trade network. Northern China was not only the world’s most populous trading area, it also produced large amounts of iron, much of it for military use…. The compass, gunpowder, and the printing press—that Francis Bacon famously coined as the major inventions of the millennium—all originated in China…. As early as the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), Chinese ships navigated to India and to East Africa…. Foreign trade was a major source of revenue, and the government issued paper money…. China had a strong and effective unitary state, while Europe was virtually stateless…. China was able to preserve its state infrastructure despite frequent and intense internal wars. The state had maintained its coercive capacity and was able to subordinate and force cooperation from Chinese elites…. During the Song Dynasty, central tax revenue is estimated to have approached one-tenth of the country’s total output, and it could support an army of about 1 million soldiers.”

How did the Great Reversal occur? First, more basic facts. “Around 1850, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in China was about one-fifth of that in Great Britain, one-fourth of the Netherlands’, and less than half of Italy’s…. Several European nation-states had developed sophisticated and inclusive political institutions and boasted significant state capacity, with tax revenues around 10 percent of national GDP in the second half of the nineteenth century…. By contrast, Chinese state capacity had declined, with tax revenues falling below 2 percent of GDP (Zhang 2022, p. 4), and political institutions remaining autocratic.” 

Mokyr et al. begin to tease out the why of this Great Reversal. “When nation-states finally began to emerge in the late Middle Ages, European rulers had to bargain with a plurality of local elites to earn their cooperation, leading to the formation of more inclusive political institutions. In China, despite frequent internal struggles, centralized and autocratic state infrastructure never disappeared…. In Europe, for example, innovators found it easier to escape censorship and the persecution of so-called heretics because sovereign states competed for intellectual and economic supremacy and were often in conflict with each other.… Scientists and innovators, when at risk of persecution, could flee to neighboring countries for refuge. In a similar vein, frequent wars forced emerging European states to invest in tax capacity (Gennaioli and Voth 2015) and in military technology (Hoffman, 2015), both of which accelerated the process of urbanization.”

One major area of difference between Western Europe and China was their system of ethics and morals. “A universalistic value system is one where altruism and moral sentiments are not very sensitive to social distance: moral beliefs are applied with similar strength in interactions with friends and strangers. By contrast, in a communitarian value system, altruism and moral sentiments are much stronger toward socially close people than toward strangers.”

Which moral system a community believes in has a large effect on their cultural and institutional development. “In China, cooperation was increasingly sustained by kin-based social networks, the clan being the prototypical organization. In Europe, a different kind of social organization gradually emerged among unrelated individuals…. We refer to these organizations as “corporations.” Examples of such corporations can be traced all the way to the Middle Ages and thereafter: fraternities, guilds, monastic and religious orders, universities and academic associations, self-governing cities, and the modern business corporation…. Chinese kin-based organizations and European corporations performed seemingly similar functions essential to the effective organization of social life: they shared risk, provided individual protection, facilitated market transactions, provided financing, organized education, provided religious services, settled disputes, and assisted the state in collecting taxes and providing military resources. Yet they differed in one key respect: with whom one cooperated. Chinese clans and lineages were associations of individuals who claimed to descend from a common patrilineal ancestor. European corporations were associations of individuals unrelated by kin, who got together for a specific purpose…. Chinese clans and lineages were multipurpose organizations: the same kin-based network provided a variety of local public goods and club goods: ancestral ceremonies and worship, risk sharing and protection, financing, dispute settlement, and so on. Many (but not all) European corporations were instead formed for a primary specific purpose…. Chinese kin-based organizations created a firm partition of society along the lines of mutually exclusive and ascriptive dynastic groups, which often competed with each other. For all intents and purposes, there were no exit options…. European society was formed by dense overlapping networks and associations, which fostered a cultural practice of cooperation and conflict resolution among unrelated individuals in a variety of domains…. Chinese clans were typically hierarchical organizations based on seniority…. European corporations, instead being associations of unrelated individuals, carefully regulated collective decisions through consensual practices.”

Mokyr et al. continue by stressing the cultural differences that influenced the interpersonal interactions within the societies of China and Western Europe. “During the Song Dynasty, neo-Confucianism became the dominant social and intellectual culture in China…. A series of doctrines governing both personal and public life, neo-Confucianism emphasized kin-based values as the basis of social order. Interpersonal relations, including cooperation, were to be governed by filial loyalty, strict gender hierarchy, and respect among relatives…. Beginning in the early Middle Ages, the Latin (Catholic) Church actively discouraged a variety of practices that had traditionally strengthened and consolidated kin networks, such as adoption, polygamy, concubinage, consanguineous marriage, and nonconsensual marriage. Violating these bans carried the threat of harsh punishment, including social sanction and religious excommunication…. These Church policies influenced the European family structure: the extended family gradually became less important and was replaced by the smaller nuclear family…. Christian culture, as elucidated by the Church, also strongly rejected the values associated with patrilineal descent groups and strengthened the commitment toward bilateral descent (i.e., from both parents), which was already part of the post-Roman Germanic tradition.”

The laws of China and Western Europe, themselves shaped by culture, in turn shaped the societies they governed in a self-reenforcing loop. “In China, where the state was stronger from the beginning, the legal system was designed top-down with two main goals: to maintain peace and stability and to govern the relations between the public administration and its subjects. Civil law played only a secondary role because commercial disputes were primarily resolved by clans through arbitration and compromise…. In Europe, by contrast, where the state was initially much weaker, the legal system had a bottom-up origin, and corporations influenced its evolution both on the demand and the supply side. The prevalence of impersonal exchange and contractual arrangements among unrelated individuals created a demand for external enforcement and well-functioning legal institutions, which provided the basis for the evolution of commercial and civil law. Legal principles first appeared in private contractual agreements within and between corporations. Over time, they evolved as best practices in communities of merchants…. First, the legal system defined and clarified the nature of corporations as separate legal entities and holders of specific rights…. Second, the emergence of legal institutions very early in European history coincided with the beginning of the formation of states. Their coevolution thus influenced how political institutions developed. The administration of justice and law enforcement was among the first functions performed by European sovereigns…. The legislative and executive sovereign authority would be limited by a preexisting body of law, and the courts would uphold the principle (if not the practice) of equality before the law. The early emergence of judicial state functions in Europe also explains the growing influence acquired by national parliaments.”

Furthermore, state capacity was wielded in different manners in China and Western Europe. “The Chinese state had a long tradition of relying on a powerful and effective central bureaucracy to fulfill its aims…. They were selected through a demanding civil service exam that required lengthy preparation and extensive training in Confucian doctrine. This meritocratic process had several advantages from the perspective of regime stability. It created a cohesive social group of talented administrators who shared a basic ethic and a very similar education, all with a large stake in preserving the regime…. [In Europe,] the Church deliberately enhanced European political fragmentation by strategically undermining the centralization of political powers between and within emerging nation-states…. Self-governing cities, too, exerted a key influence over the evolution of

European political institutions, enhancing the effects of political fragmentation. Like Chinese clans, autonomous cities in Europe—known as

“communes”—enforced tax collection and contributed to other aspects of

decentralized administration. Unlike Chinese clans, however, communes enjoyed exclusive control over their territories. This feature enhanced their bargaining power against sovereigns…. Sovereigns had to concede political rights to self-governing cities in exchange for the additional tax resources. Often, these political rights took the form of representation in national parliaments…. China too had large urban centers, but they had little autonomy and did not play an important role in decentralized state administration.”

Mokyr et al. discuss why the Industrial Revolution took place in Western Europe. They stress that although many major advances first happened in England, it was a Europe-wide phenomenon, the rest of Western Europe was never far behind. “The Industrial Revolution was driven by a host of scientific and technological innovations. European corporations were at the heart of the creation and accumulation of knowledge, following centuries-old norms and traditions. Monasteries, universities, and later scientific societies—all corporate organizations—played a crucial role in creating the conditions that made the Industrial Revolution possible…. The polycentric nature of political power and competition among fragmented states allowed innovators to escape censorship and suppression. Second, the Catholic Church, despite its ambiguous and often inconsistent relationship with useful knowledge, on balance created conditions that proved conducive to technological progress…. [Third,] the state had conceded some manner of political representation to business interests, which limited state interference with wealth accumulation and the functioning of markets…. In China, by contrast, knowledge accumulation and education were largely controlled by the state administration…. Mandarins and other government officials largely controlled the market of ideas and the course of intellectual innovation. Moreover, the Chinese bureaucracy increasingly privileged the study of traditional Confucian doctrine, bent primarily on social peace and preserving regime stability…. European corporations contributed to economic progress in two additional ways. First, they facilitated the creation of thick and well-functioning financial markets and the diffusion of long-distance trade…. The second way that the corporation facilitated European industrialization was via its model for the organization of production. In a capitalist firm, investment decisions are made by capital owners who are also the residual claimants of the returns from investment, while labor earns a fixed wage. This organization of production creates strong incentives to invest in labor-saving innovations because the returns accrue to those who control the investment decisions.”

Finally, Mokyr et al. conclude by reasserting their broader thesis for how Western Europe was able to leapfrog China during the course of the second millennium. “Current cultural traits often reflect features of a more distant social and political environment. Our analysis of the Great Reversal points to another mechanism of cultural persistence and influence: the embedding of specific cultural traits into social organizations…. The effects of culture are not only direct; they are also mediated by social organizations that are complementary with specific cultural traits. Once in place, these social organizations are hard to dismantle, and they contribute to the spread and maintain the cultural foundations on which they are built…. The fundamental challenge of state formation is how to scale up cooperation from the local to the national level…. Scaling up cooperation among strangers poses new challenges and requires different social arrangements…. In Europe, peaceful resolution of internal political conflicts and the emergence of inclusive institutions were facilitated by social practices that encouraged cooperation among strangers.”

“The Metaphysics of Morals” by Immanuel Kant (translated by Mary Gregor)

This is Kant’s take on a system of morality derived solely from a priori logic. “The concept of freedom is a pure rational concept, which for this very reason is transcendent for theoretical philosophy, that is, it is a concept such that no instance corresponding to it can be given in any possible experience…. But in reason’s practical use the concept of freedom proves its reality by practical principles, which are laws of a causality of pure reason for determining choice independently of any empirical conditions…. On this concept of freedom, which is positive (from a practical point of view), are based unconditional practical laws, which are called moral…. Moral laws are imperatives (commands or prohibitions) and indeed categorical (unconditional) imperatives…. By categorical imperatives certain actions are permitted or forbidden, that is, morally possible or impossible, while some of them or their opposites are morally necessary, that is, obligatory. For those actions, then, there arises the concept of a duty, observance or transgression of which is indeed connected with a pleasure or displeasure of a distinctive kind (moral feeling), although in practical laws of reason we take no account of these feelings.” Kant continues by stressing his concept of the categorical imperative, “A categorical (unconditional) imperative is one that represents an action as objectively necessary and makes it necessary not indirectly, through the representation of some end that can be attained by the action, but through the mere representation of this action itself (its form), and hence directly. No other practical doctrine can furnish instances of such imperatives than that which prescribes obligation (the doctrine of morals)…. A categorical imperative, because it asserts an obligation with respect to certain actions, is a morally practical law…. A categorical imperative is a law that either commands or prohibits, depending upon whether it represents as a duty the commission or omission of an action.” Finally, in Kant’s deontological system, people are always ends unto themselves and never just a means to another’s own ends. “For a human being can never be treated merely as a means to the purposes of another or be put among the objects of rights to things: his innate personality protects him from this, even though he can be condemned to lose his civil personality.”

Kant stresses the a priori nature of his moral system. “But in fact no moral principle is based, as people sometimes suppose, on any feeling whatsoever. Any such principle is really an obscurely thought metaphysics that is inherent in every human being because of his rational predisposition…. But his thought must go all the way back to the elements of metaphysics, without which no certitude or purity can be expected in the doctrine of virtue…. If one departs from this principle and begins with pathological or pure aesthetic or even moral feeling (with what is subjectively rather than objectively practical); if, that is, one begins with the matter of the will, the end, instead of with the form of the will, the law, in order to determine duties on this basis, then there will indeed be no metaphysical first principles of the doctrine of virtue…. After it has been made so clear that the principle of duty is derived from pure reason, one cannot help wondering how this principle could be reduced again to a doctrine of happiness.”

Furthermore, Kant parses out the difference between the external law that governs us, from the internal duties that must govern each individual unto himself. “In ancient times “ethics” signified the doctrine of morals (philosophia moralis) in general, which was also called the doctrine of duties. Later on it seemed better to reserve the name “ethics” for one part of moral philosophy, namely for the doctrine of those duties that do not come under external laws…. The very concept of duty is already the concept of a necessitation (constraint) of free choice through the law. This constraint may be an external constraint or a self-constraint. The moral imperative makes this constraint known through the categorical nature of its pronouncement (the unconditional ought)…. It is this self-constraint in opposite directions and its unavoidability that makes known the inexplicable property of freedom itself…. Only an end that is also a duty can be called a duty of virtue…. What essentially distinguishes a duty of virtue from a duty of right is that external constraint to the latter kind of duty is morally possible, whereas the former is based only on free self-constraint.”

Finally, Kant stresses that each man must know himself. “Know your heart – whether it is good or evil, whether the source of your actions is pure or impure, and what can be imputed to you as belonging originally to the substance of a human being or as derived (acquired or developed) and belonging to your moral condition…. Moral cognition of oneself, which seeks to penetrate into the depths (the abyss) of one’s heart which are quite difficult to fathom, is the beginning of all human wisdom…. Impartiality in appraising oneself in comparison with the law, and sincerity in acknowledging to oneself one’s inner moral worth or lack of worth are duties to oneself that follow directly from this first command to cognize oneself.”

“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. II” by Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara Haveland)

This novel continues the themes of Balle’s previous volume, heavy on pondering the philosophy of time and of self. The conceit of Tara repeating the day of November 18 again and again despite where she wanders in the world continues. “Time passes, but all it does is pour day after day into my world, it goes nowhere, it has no stops or stations, only this endless chain of days…. I feel out of sorts, superfluous, bedraggled, wrong. I am no longer Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller with an eye for detail and an instinct for collectable works. I am not Tara Selter at work. I am not a buyer for a company by the name of T. & T. Selter. She is no more…. It is the Tara Selter with a future who is gone. It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.”

Time, the lack of change, and the lack of seasons begins to take its toll on her psyche. “Maybe I should just go over to the enemy. Maybe I ought to just live with the world as it is and accept that there will never be an Oktoberfest, that there are no longer any festivals, no Christmas, no New Year, and that I will never again see winter or spring, no Easter, no summer. Only November and November. In any case, I’m not in the mood for festivities.” The quirks of her world confuse her. “The eighteenth of November is a loose world, I know, it is impossible to get a firm grip on it. It contains phones that stop working, empty memory sticks, passwords that have to be keyed in again and again, searches that disappear overnight. Each morning everything is gone and the eighteenth of November wakes up fresh and unused again.” But she survives and makes a new life for herself, the best life she can think to create. “That is how my days are spent. One after another, I wake up and roam around history. I can feel my brain growing. It grows through remembering and it grows through all the things I find. It grows through forgetting, it lets go, it leaves spaces to stand empty and the next day I search for new knowledge to fill the empty spaces.”

“The Red and The Black” by Stendhal (translated by Catherine Slater)

Stendhal’s masterpiece is a bildungsroman of a peasant, a poor carpenter’s son, who makes good in Paris, through his smarts, luck, and ambition. “For Julien, making his fortune meant first and foremost getting out of Verrières; he loathed his native town. Everything he saw there froze his imagination…. He imagined with rapture that one day he would be introduced to the pretty women of Paris, and would succeed in drawing himself to their attention by some glorious deed. Why shouldn’t he be adored by one of them, just as Bonaparte, still penniless, had been adored by the dazzling Mme de Beauharnais? For years now, Julien had never let an hour of his life pass without telling himself that Bonaparte, an obscure lieutenant without fortune, had made himself master of the globe with his sword.”

Julien’s first break in life was being plucked out of the sawmill to become a tutor to the children of the mayor of Verrieres. He was soon on intimate terms with the mayor’s pretty wife. “Mme de Rênal had had enough sense to reject as absurd everything she had learnt at the convent, and to forget it pretty rapidly; but she did not replace it with anything, and ended up totally ignorant…. The flattery which had come her way very early on as the heiress to a large fortune, together with a marked bent for fervent religious zeal, had set her upon a completely inward-looking way of life…. After all these years Mme de Rênal was still not accustomed to the ways of these money-driven folk in whose midst she had to live…. Little by little she formed the view that generosity, nobility of soul and humanity only existed in this young abbe. She felt for him all the sympathy and even the admiration which these virtues inspire in someone of good breeding…. In Paris, Julien’s situation with regard to Mme de Rênal would very soon have become more straightforward; but in Paris, love is born of fiction…. Beneath our more sullen skies, a young man without means, who is only ambitious because his delicate sensibility makes him crave some of the pleasures afforded by money, has daily dealings with a woman of thirty, genuinely virtuous, absorbed by her children, and never looking to novels for examples on which to model her conduct. Everything proceeds slowly, everything develops gradually in the provinces; it is all more spontaneous.”

Julien is offered a choice. To stay in the employ of rich benefactors by continuing in the employ of the Catholic Church or to strike out with an established partner in the timber trade. Father Chelan, the priest who first taught the boy Latin, offers this advice, “If you’re thinking of courting men in high office, it’s a sure road to eternal damnation. You’ll be able to make your fortune, but you’ll have to trample on the poor and wretched, flatter the sub-prefect, the mayor—anyone held in esteem—and serve their passions. Such conduct, which is known in society as worldly wisdom, need not for a layman be totally incompatible with salvation; but with our calling, we have to choose; you either make your fortune in this world or the next, there’s no half-way house.” Julien contemplates, “Just think, I’d feebly go and lose seven or eight years of my life! I’d end up being twenty-eight; but at that age Bonaparte had his greatest achievements behind him. By the time I’ve earned a bit of money as a nobody by going from one timber auction to the next and winning favours from a handful of subordinate rogues, who can guarantee that I’ll still have the sacred fire you need to make a name for yourself?” Our narrator adds, “Like Hercules he found himself with a choice—not between vice and virtue, but between the unrelieved mediocrity of guaranteed well-being, and all the heroic dreams of his youth.” The narrator continues, “What made Julien a superior being was precisely what prevented him from savouring the happiness which came his way. Every inch the young girl of sixteen who has delightful colouring, and is foolish enough to put on rouge to go to a ball.”

Eventually, Julien makes his fateful choice about the direction of his life and he even finds a more powerful patron, the Marquis de la Mole, who makes him his private secretary, moving him to Paris. “What presumption I had in Verrières! Julien said to himself; I thought I was living, when all I was doing was preparing myself for life; here I am at last in the world as I shall find it for as long as I play this part, surrounded with real enemies.” 

Class, nobility, and titles, a life even beyond simple wealth, are all themes that recurs throughout Stendhal’s novel. Throughout the plot, as men gain in riches and opportunities they still are held back, they strive to push beyond the bounds of society, and, eventually, they try to obscure their humble beginnings. Nineteenth century France, and Paris in particular, is a milieu where class might not be as rigid as in centuries past, but there are those in society that still strive to put one in their proper place. “This is the tremendous advantage they have over us, said Julien to himself when he was left alone in the garden. The history of their ancestors lifts them above vulgar sentiments, and they aren’t always obliged to be thinking about their livelihood!” At a secret meeting of the high clergy and nobility a Bishop gives voice to the expressions of their class, “Guaranteeing this support is a burden, you’ll tell me; gentlemen, our heads remain on our shoulders at this price. It’s war to the death between freedom of the press and our existence as gentlemen. Become manufacturers or peasants, or take up your guns…. In fifty years time there will only be presidents of republics in Europe, and not a single king. And with those four letters K-I-N-G, gone are priests and gentlemen. All I can see is candidates currying favour with grubby majorities.” Julien’s benefactor, the Marquis de la Mole, himself, could feel the times rapidly changing. “To give in to necessity, to fear the law struck him as an absurd and demeaning thing for a man of his rank. He was paying dearly now for the bewitching dreams he had indulged in for the past ten years about the future of this beloved daughter. Who could have foreseen it? he said to himself. A daughter with such an arrogant character, with such a superior cast of mind, more proud than I am of the name she bears! Whose hand had been requested of me in advance by all the most illustrious nobles in France! You have to throw caution to the winds. This century is destined to cast everything into confusion! We’re heading for chaos.”

“The Victorians and Ancient Greece” by Richard Jenkyns

Jenkyns is an Oxford fellow, well versed in his ancient Greek and Latin originals, but also British literature and history. The book begins with the initiation of Greek revival architecture in the England of the 18th century following the “rediscovery” of Athens from within the Ottoman domain. Ionic, doric, and corinthian columns soon became the vogue. Many Victorians saw clear lines of descent from Greek democracy and liberty to their pinnacle in Albion. John Stuart Mill even suggested, “that battle of Marathon even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.” Oscar Wilde recommended skipping from ancient Athens past the next couple thousand years to Victorian England, “whatever…. is modern…. we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is anachronism is due to medievalism.” And it was primarily Greek tragedy and poetry that captivated the hearts of so many Victorian writers. In fact, poets from Byron to Tennyson to Arnold to Shelley despaired in writing their own epics for perfection had already been reached, to be unmatched, by Homer. Roman history, poetry, and literature were viewed as poor copies of the Greek originals (as Virgil and Cicero would have readily acknowledged). Even the Aeneid was poor copy of the Greek master. Gladstone remarked, “Homer walks in the open day, Virgil by lamplight… from Virgil back to Homer is a greater distance, than from Homer back to life.”

The Victorians were also fond of their dichotomies- the rugged, industrious North contrasting with the languid, pleasant South and the aesthetics of Athens contrasting with the spirituality of Jerusalem. However, Victorians also strained to place the Greek tragic dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides into their world as pre-Christians, who either espoused proto-Christian morals or at least presaged the way for the Christian epoch. There was many a Victorian vicar who knew his Prometheus Bound, his Oedipus and his Medea, as well as his New Testament. Cardinal Newman went so far as to suggest, “pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology…. were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets.” Even in myth, Victorian believers strained for connections. Alford, when thinking of Prometheus, claimed, “this benefactor of human kind…. thus crucified on high- bears he not a dim resemblance to the One other whom we know?” Gladstone compared Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades to the Holy Trinity.

Novels of the period were often interspersed with ancient Greek in their original alphabet. It was a mark of sophistication, but also a common way to denote good breeding in a character. One of George Eliot’s characters declares, “No man is held worthy of the name of scholar who has merely the …. derivative literature of the Latins;…. the Romans themselves…. frankly replenished their urns at the fountainhead.” Victorians were also fond of Greek sculpture, in no small part because of their nakedness. They found in them something safely erotic, but also simple and childlike. S. C. Hall suggested that “French nudes looked as if they had taken their clothes off, Greek ones as if they had never thought of clothes.” But it was Homer and Plato who towered above the rest in the Victorian imagination. On the Albert Memorial it is Homer, not Shakespeare, who is given pride of place. Mathew Arnold claimed, “Homer has not Shakespeare’s variations: Homer always composes as Shakespeare composes at his best.” From radicals like Shaw to Whigs like Macauley to arch-Tories like Carlyle the verdict was the same.

Until the Victorians, Aristotle had commanded the high ground in Oxbridge philosophy. He was clearheaded and rational. However, the Romantics did much to tilt the scales towards Plato and along with him Socrates. When an Italian peasant asked Symonds, “who was Socrates?” He replied, “he was the Jesus Christ of Greece.” Arch-Anglican Thomas Arnold did his best to place Plato in the pantheon of the prophets, “not the wildest extravagance of atheistic wickedness in modern times can go further than the sophists of Greece went…. whatever audacity can dare…. to make the words “good” and “evil” change their meaning, has already been tried in the days of Plato, and by his eloquence…. and faith unshaken, has been put to shame.” Even the agnostic John Stuart Mill suggested, “Christ did not argue about virtue, but commanded it; Plato, when he argues about it, argues for the most part inconclusively, but he resembles Christ in the love which he inspires for it, and in the stern resolution never to swerve from it.” It is not so much Plato’s conclusions, but his method that appealed to questioning Victorians such as Mill. “I have ever felt that the title of Platonist belongs by far better right to those who have been nourished in, and have endeavored to practice Plato’s mode of investigation, than to those distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions.” Victorians, even as their empire grew abroad to resemble Rome, sought at home to emulate the liberty, democracy, and love of literature and learning they so admired in ancient Greece. 

“The Therapy of Desire” by Martha Nussbaum

Nussbaum compares and contrasts the three schools of Hellenistic philosophy, Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Stoicism, with each other and also with Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies. The “therapy” referred to in the book title is an acknowledgement that all three schools viewed the role of philosophy as helping in the everyday life of the person/patient. As the doctor helps to heal the body, so would philosophy help to heal the mind. “They saw the philosopher as a compassionate physician whose arts could heal many pervasive types of human suffering. They practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual technique dedicated to the display of cleverness but as an immersed and worldly art of grappling with human misery… For all three, philosophy is above all the art of human life… Philosophy is an activity that secures the flourishing [eudaimon] life by arguments and reasonings.” Therefore, philosophy must be achievable and practical for every man, unlike for Aristotle and Plato who viewed it as only the purview of an elite. 

Epicurus believed that “the central cause of human misery is the disturbance produced by the seemingly “boundless” demands of desire, which will not let us have any rest or stable satisfaction.” Life is insatiable. But the one true end for life is pleasure. As Diogenes Laertius recounts Epicurus saying, “as proof for the fact that pleasure is the end, he points to the fact that animals, as soon as they are born, are well contented with pleasure and fight against pain, naturally and apart from discourse. For we flee pain by our very own natural feelings.” Epicurus makes the point that feelings precede any kind of logical reasoning. Cicero reports, “so [Epicurus] denies that there is need for argument [ratione] or dialectical reasoning [disputatione] to show that pleasure is to be pursued and pain avoided. He thinks these things are perceived by the senses [sentire], the way we perceive that fire is hot, that snow is white, that honey is sweet. None of these things needs to be supported by fancy arguments.” The senses are the only things reliable and all error comes from (false) beliefs. As such, Epicurus denies the reliability in the mores and institutions of culture and society. The only truth is in one’s own body. Reason is not an end, but it can be a means. “A tutored use of reason can help the adult to avoid these pains.” The societal ends that he most stresses to avoid are a hope for immortality, money, fame, and luxuries, because these are truly insatiable desires. “Frugal meals deliver a pleasure that is equal to that of an expensive diet, when once all the pain of need is removed; and bread and water give the very summit of pleasure, when a needy person takes them in.” On death he states, “the correct recognition that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding on an infinite time, but by removing the longing for immortality.” Elsewhere he flirts with reincarnation describing the cycle of life, “there is need of matter, so that future generations may grow. They too, having lived out their lives, will follow you. Generations before this perished just like you, and will perish again. Thus one thing will never stop arising from another. Life is nobody’s private property, but is everyone’s to use.” The Epicureans were atomists, they believed every bit of matter could be reduced to atoms at heart and therefore nothing was created or destroyed, but just transformed. Epicurus was also the first western philosopher to deal with the unconscious- that the real desires and problems in life often reside below the surface and deep within the mind. The Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius also suggested being leery of love. ““They believe that a wise man will not fall in love,” Diogenes tells us, “Nor do they believe that love is something sent by the gods.” Epicurus’ definition of eros was, apparently, “An intense desire for intercourse, accompanied by agony and distraction.”” However, later Lucretius tempers this view. He states that, despite the risks of passion, a life worth living is a life shared by another. “Attachment to marriage and the family leads Lucretius to defend as valuable a way of life that does not seem to be the one best suited for individual ataraxia [freedom from distress and worry], since it includes many risks and possibilities for loss and grief.” The Epicurean belief in the gods is complicated. They were certainly opposed to organized religion. “Religious belief is bad, Lucretius persistently argues, because it is superstitious and irrational, built upon false and groundless beliefs about the gods and the soul. It is also bad because it makes people dependent on priests, rather than on their own judgement.” Epicureans looked upon both anger and gratitude as equally bad flipsides to the same coin. They believed in self-sufficiency and both were expressions of outward emotion. “The wise man, the Letter to Herodotus informs us, will avoid being in any condition of weakness or need toward his fellow humans.”

The Skeptics felt that “the disease is not one of false belief; belief itself is the illness- belief as a commitment, a source of concern, care, and vulnerability.” Sextus Empericus defines his own Skepticism as “an ability to set up an opposition of appearances and thoughts, in any way at all, an ability from which we come, through the equal force of the opposing statements and states of affairs, first into suspension, and after that into freedom from disturbance.” The goal is to, no matter the belief, set up oppositions among impressions and beliefs. “The Skeptic does not express objections to natural and necessary bodily pain. What, after all, is the point of having objections to something that we cannot help?… Pain is part of nature; the real disease is the setting oneself up against nature, the theorizing about pain that sooner or later compounds pain.” The Skeptic does not try to change his life, but come to terms with it. “The Skeptic gives up all commitments that take him beyond the way life actually goes; he has no theory that makes him fight the ordinary.” It is better to act without any fixed beliefs. Humans should “go on using their faculties. The world strikes them now this way, now that; they are influenced by their desires, their cognitive activities, even their memories. But they do not bother inquiring into truth or sorting things out.” Skeptics criticized the other philosophies, “to say that one should avoid this as base, but incline to this as nobler, is the way of men who are not undoing disturbance, but are simply changing its position… so that the philosopher’s discourse creates a new disease in place of the old one… not freeing the pupil from pursuit, but only shifting her over to a different pursuit.” It is change without a cure. Life, for Skeptics, is all subjective. “For, strictly speaking, he can have neither a committed view as to what eudaimonia [human flourishing] is, nor a committed causal belief as to what does or does not secure it… Skeptical argument opposes only that which has been asserted and believed- and the Skeptic tells us that he asserts nothing.” The Skeptic’s life is unnatural and he knows it. “Pyrrho talks of “altogether divesting ourselves of the human being”; Sextus describes the Skeptic as a eunuch with respect to rational desires. This is revealing talk: for it concedes, perhaps, that even if what we have left is a part of our natural constitution, what we have cut off or purged away is also a part of what it is to be naturally human.” The traits Skeptics admire are calmness, gentleness, tolerance, and non-conformity.

Stoics believe in individual reason above all else. Reason has not only instrumental, but intrinsic worth. For Seneca the whole point of philosophy is “that you should make yourself better every day.” This is not easy because, as Epictetus relates, the starting point of philosophy is “our awareness of weakness and incapacity in respect of the most important things.” It is, nonetheless, a worthwhile endeavor because, Seneca again, “no one can live happily, or even tolerably, without the study of wisdom.” As such, philosophy is the domain of every man and woman, no matter their birth. “The guiding principle of Stoicism is respect for humanity wherever it is found.” All the evil in the world is due to false beliefs and mistaken impressions, not original sin. Therefore, it is the intent not the action that truly matters. “To become a fully virtuous act, an action must be done as the wise person would do it, with the thoughts and feelings appropriate to virtue… For, like Epicureanism, Stoicism views the soul as a spacious and deep place, a place with many lofty aspirations but also many secrets, a place of both effort and evasion. Much that goes on in it escapes the notice not only of the world at large, not only, even, of the teacher, but also of the person himself… The self must acknowledge itself; only this brings peace and freedom. But this requires assiduous daily litigation, in a darkened room, as the soul, in the absence of external light, turns its vision on itself.” The Stoics consider philosophy by thinking and then by doing it. It is fine to read books and quote others, but unless you are actually practicing philosophy in your daily life you are not making it your own. Seneca declaimed, “I have not sold myself as a slave to anybody; I bear no master’s name. I have much confidence in the judgement of great men, but I claim something for my own judgement also.” Stoicism is fundamentally inward looking. Stoics, too, feel that the wise man must be completely self-sufficient. The only thing important in life is virtue and that is completely unaffected by external contingencies. Wealth and honor, but also courage, justice, and equanimity are worthless in and of themselves. But virtue is not static: it is an internal striving and straining. Where Stoics really differ from the Epicureans is the passions. Stoics wish to remove all passion from life completely. Seneca writes, “it is often asked whether it is better to have moderate passions or none. Our people drive out the passions altogether; the Peripatetics [Aristotelians] moderate them.” Stoics seek to maintain a passive stance towards the outside world to remain unaffected by any external whims. Again, Seneca affirms, “he retreats into himself and lives with himself. [His highest good] seeks no equipment from outside. It is cultivated at home, and is entirely developed from within him. He begins to be the subject of fortune, the minute he looks for some part of himself outdoors.” Life is a continual struggle for this mastery of internal virtue. Seneca explains, “evils that are continuous and prolific require slow patient resistance- not in order that they should cease, but in order that they should fail to conquer.” But there is no excuse for not living a life of virtue. A life which is not lived everyday for the philosophical ideal is not a life worth living. Controversially, Seneca extolls the benefits of suicide as opposed to a compromised life, “do you see that precipice? That way you can descend to liberty. Do you see that sea, that river, that well? Liberty sits there in the depths. Do you see that tree, stunted, blighted, barren? Liberty hangs from its branches. Do you see your throat, your gullet, your heart? They are escape routes from slavery. Are the exits I show you too difficult, requiring too much courage and strength? Do you ask what is the straight road to liberty? Any vein in your body.” Seneca practiced what he preached. After he was implicated in a plot to assassinate his pupil Nero, he slit his own wrists rather than beg for forgiveness.

Epicureanism and Stoicism, particularly, share some features not present in Aristotelian philosophy- preeminent among them that existing desires, intuitions, and preferences are socially formed, but they might not be ideal or reliable to the good life. The Skeptics “see a remarkable fact: that the philosophical pursuit of truth, praised by the Platonist tradition as the most stable and risk-free life of all, is actually not so free from danger- for it makes our good depend on the way reality is outside ourselves, and on the ability of a finite mind to grasp that reality.” All three Hellenistic schools held in common, however, that the student of philosophy was like a medical patient- in need of a cure. Their philosophies were therapeutic and practical- intended to teach a man how to live a better life.

“Ants Among Elephants” by Sujatha Gidla

This is a quasi-biography of K.G. Satyamurthy, the renowned poet and Communist organizer from Andhra, India, written by his niece. The family are dalits or untouchables. As such, this book also serves as a window into the lives of untouchables and the caste system in general in post-colonial India. One sees how untouchables are still discriminated against both in the rural villages and the modern cities. One out of every six Indians is born an untouchable. Gidla’s family was well-educated, not unusual for untouchables, many of whom converted to Christianity during the colonial period and, therefore, were taught in missionary schools. Despite being practicing Christians, untouchables never can escape their caste, which is considered a social institution as opposed to a religious one. They are forced to live outside the village proper or segregated in urban ghettos, must kowtow to any caste Hindu of whom they cross paths, must eat from separate bowls, and drink from separate wells. Even untouchables with money or doctorates do not escape these indignities. Often those most brutal to untouchables were not the highest caste Brahmins, but those from the lowest castes, such as ditch diggers and barbers. Even within the untouchables there are subcastes such as the “malas’, who were servants, and the “madigas” who hauled away dead animal carcasses to make leather goods. Perhaps the vilest tradition was “vetti”, where every untouchable family had to give up its first born son, as soon as he learned to walk and talk, to the “dora”, the local landlord, as his household slave. This was not an ancient tradition, but was instituted, with British acquiescence, in the late 19th century. Untouchables generally despised Indian leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru, who supported the traditions of the caste system. Their hero was Ambedkar, a fellow untouchable, who fought for equal rights both socially and politically. Under this oppressive background, the Communist Party grew. Its first slogan was, “land to the tiller!” K.G. Satyamurthy, known as Satyam, joined the Party while studying at A.C. College. He was also enamored by the traditional poems in his native Telugu langauage, as well as contemporary poets such as Sri Sri. His motto from college was “write like Sri Sri. Fight like Lenin. A pen and a gun.” Satyam would end up organizing students in universities across his state, as well as railway workers, dung collectors, and field laborers over the years. Eventually, he was forced underground, hiding in the forests, not able to see his own wife, children, or the rest of his family for many decades. Before his marriage, he had warned his wife that his life’s work might require this fate. As Satyam put it, “only revolution is truth. Everything else may come or go.”

“Friedrich Holderlin’s Life, Poetry, and Madness” by Wilhelm Waiblinger (translated by Will Stone)

Holderlin was one of the greatest German poets of the late 18th and early 19th century. He studied Lutheran theology in a seminary along with Hegel and Schelling, before writing the epistolary novel “Hyperion” as well as his major odes. He sustained himself with various jobs from being a tutor to the German nobility to being appointed court librarian for a German prince. However, the last thirty-six years of his life he spent raving mad, in the care of a kindly carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, in his hometown of Tubingen. His family refused all contact with him and he spent most of his days locked up in the carpenter’s tower, part of the old city’s fortifications. This short book is a memoir of Waiblinger’s effort to meet with Holderlin from the years 1822-1826. Waiblinger was a young Romantic poet, with anti-establishment tendencies, who was to die of syphilis in Rome, before his memoir was published. According to Stone, for Waiblinger, as well as other Romantics, “Holderlin was a lesson, a terrifying example of the physical and mental health potentiality of imaginative thought unrestrained.”

Waiblinger begins his memoir by recounting what was known of Holderlin’s youth. “This soul then was composed of an infinite delicateness, noble, fine, deep of feeling but all too sensitive, with an audacious and daring imagination…. constructing a world in which the most bitter sufferings were perceived as the necessary creative element of inwardness.” By the time Holderlin reached seminary, he was still suffering bouts of melancholy, along with producing first drafts of what would become some of his greatest works of poetry. “He would sometimes retire for weeks on end and converse only with his mandolin…. his sufferings exacerbated by a love too delicate and sentimental, by his zeal and impetuous cravings for fame and honour, the loathing of his circumstances, the aversion to his course of study.” Throughout his life, “it was nature itself which he most worshipped and adored.” After two doomed love affairs, Holderlin was already teetering on insanity. “He took on a translation of Sophocles, which proved a curious blend of the wondrous and the deranged.”

Soon, Holderlin had been committed to an asylum, where he spent two years, only let out under the care of the carpenter Zimmer, who was a fan of his poetry. When, in 1822, Waiblinger was to first meet Holderlin he was already thoroughly insane. Waiblinger rented rooms in Tubingen and venturing to introduce himself to his hero, went “to the room of Herr Librarian—for this is how Holderlin prefers to be addressed…. The visitor now finds himself addressed as ‘Your Majesty’, ‘Your Holiness’ and ‘Merciful Father’.” Holderlin talked to himself incessantly, repeated the same simple tunes on his piano for days on end, babbled incoherently, and invented new words and languages. Waiblinger recounts, “I gave him paper to write on. Then he would sit at his desk and produce a few lines, metrically rhymed. Admittedly they were senseless, particularly the last ones, but at least they were consistent in their rhyming form…. His head is still brimming with a host of sublime metaphysical notions, indeed even original poetic expressions, but can only communicate them in the most obscure and fantastical manner. He lacks the capacity to retain his vaporous imaginings.” Zimmer summed up Holderlin’s existence, “It was too much inside him that caused his mind to give way.” Towards the end of his days, Holderlin, himself, wrote, “Now for the first time I understand humankind, because I dwell far from it and in solitude.”