“Hippias Minor” by Plato (translated by Nicholas D. Smith)

In this dialogue Socrates asks questions of Hippias, a sophist visiting Athens. The discussion is ostensibly about the moral differences between Achilles and Odysseus, but the argument turns to much larger themes of truthfulness in the context of voluntary action, degrees of knowledge, and the wholeness of man.

Socrates begins by stating something of his method, “But it is always my custom to pay attention when someone is saying something, especially when the speaker seems to me to be wise. And because I desire to learn what he means, I question him thoroughly and examine and place side-by-side the things he says, so I can learn. If the speaker seems to me to be some worthless person, I neither ask questions nor do I care what he says. This is how you’ll recognize whom I consider wise. You’ll find me being persistent about what’s said by this sort of person, questioning him so that I can benefit by learning.” Socrates is both stating the modesty in his method of interrogating others for the truth, while he is praising the worthiness of Hippias, even as he contradicts him at the same time. Throughout this dialogue, one gets the feel that Socrates’ praise for Hippias is faint indeed.

However, Socrates is nothing if not always modest. Later he states, “But I have one wonderfully good trait, which saves me: I’m not ashamed to learn. I inquire and ask questions and I’m very grateful to the one who answers…. I’ve never denied it when I’ve learned anything, pretending what I learned was my own discovery.” Finally, Socrates admits that philosophy is hard and one should be expected to waver, to struggle, and to change one’s mind. Speaking directly to Hippias (and more generally about sophists), Socrates says, “On these matters I waver back and forth and never believe the same thing. And it’s not surprising at all that I or any ordinary person should waver. But if you wise men are going to do it too—that means something terrible for us, if we can’t stop our wavering even after we’ve put ourselves in your company.”

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

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

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

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

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

“The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (translated by Gregory Rabassa)

This is a fictional memoir written by a corpse. That should make this novel weird enough. The eponymous hero, Cubas, also has a flippant way of recapitulating the details of his life. He writes of his undertaking, “this book is written with apathy, with the apathy of a man now freed of the brevity of the century, a supinely philosophical work, of an unequal philosophy, now austere, now playful, something that neither builds nor destroys, neither inflames nor cools, and, yet, it is more than a pastime and less than an apostolate.” Cubas was a life-long bachelor and an aristocratic layabout in 19th century Rio de Janeiro. He does not claim to be anything more or less. He gives an idea of his philosophy of life when he writes, “tight boots are one of the best bits of good fortune on earth, because making one’s feet hurt they give occasion to the pleasure of taking them off. Punish your feet, wretch, then unpunish them and there you have cheap happiness, at the mercy of shoemakers and worthy of Epicurus.” He is marvelously self-centered. He is not overly proud, but unrepentant. He often expounds on (in order to relieve?) his own conscience, “Ventilate your conscience! That’s all I can tell you…. So I, Bras Cubas, discovered a sublime law, the law of equivalencies of windows, and I established the fact that the method of compensating for a closed window is to open another, so that morality can continuously aerate one’s conscience.” Later, when reflecting on the religious compunctions of a poor old maid he has put up in a house as cover for his liaisons with his married lover Cubas again reflects, “vice many times is manure for virtue. And that doesn’t prevent virtue from being a fragrant and healthy bloom. My conscience agreed and I went to open the door for Virgilia.”

Much of his memoir focuses on his intimate escapades with this one true love of his life, the one who got away, Virgilia. Initially, after he was spurned as her suitor, he writes, “I’d stayed awake a good part of the night. Because of love? Impossible. One doesn’t love the same woman twice, and I, who would love that one some time later, wasn’t held at that time by any other bond than a passing fantasy.” Cubas often talked about how little he liked to talk about money. Reflecting on an incident with a beggar, “I took out my wallet, picked a five mil-reis note—the least clean one—and gave it to him.” Throughout much of his memoir Cubas digresses into his method of writing it. “I went on my way, unraveling an infinite number of reflections that I think I’ve lost completely. They would have been material for a good and maybe happy chapter. I like happy chapters, they’re my weakness.” Later on in his memoir, he self-edits, justifying his previous word choice, “If the reader remembers Chapter XXIII he will observe that this is the second time I’ve compared life to an overflow, but he must also notice that this time I add an adjective: perpetual. And God knows the strength of an adjective, above all in young, hot countries.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Man Tiger” by Eka Kurniawan

Normally murder mysteries do not reveal the names of the corpse and the murderer in their first sentence. This novel has elements of pure fantasy mixed with a realistic window of modern day Indonesia. The scenes of rural life, the natural beauty of the countryside, and the vibrancy of the ordinary villagers all keep you enthralled the whole way through. And the plot still does manage to keep you guessing. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Existentialism is a Humanism” by Jean-Paul Sartre

This short lecture really sums up Sartre’s version of existentialism. It starts with the fact that existence precedes essence foremost in man. Man chooses. Life is all about choices made and choices abandoned, but in all that man is the chooser. “Reality exists only in action…. Reality alone counts.” Furthermore, in choice there is responsibility: a responsibility for one’s own actions affecting the self, but also a responsibility affecting mankind. In one’s conception of the self, in one’s morals, in one’s subjectivity one is also affecting humanity at large. There is a commitment to live authentically in the world and primarily not to live in bad faith with oneself.

“Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England” by David DeLaura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A Million Windows” by Gerald Murnane

As is the case with many of Murnane’s works of fiction, this novel has layers of story built upon layers. The stories are embedded within stories. “For the sake of the undiscerning reader, I shall repeat the simple fact that I am the narrator of this work and not the author.” Also similar to some of his previous work, this novel is more about the craft of writing than any so-called plot. In fact, Murnane repeatedly mines the same basic facts about his family and his past, all completely fictionalized, of course. “I recall no reviewer or critic who insisted that fictional characters ought not to be discussed as though they are persons living in the world where books of fiction are written and read.” The beauty of Murnane is that the reader gets so wrapped up in the asides and tangents that if one is not careful one can lose track of who exactly is speaking and what is story and what is commentary. “For him, the personages who had first appeared while he was reading some or another fictional text were no less alive after the text itself had come to an end than while he pored over it.” Of course, nothing is real. It is all fiction. “Fiction, even what I call true fiction, is fiction. An author demeans fiction if he or she requires the reader to believe that what happens in his or her mind while reading is no different from what happens over his or her shoulder or outside his or her window.” Murnane spends the most time in this novel ruminating on the art of narration. “The narrator of the this present work of fiction is one who strives to keep between the actual self and his seeming self and his seeming reader such seeming-distances as will maintain between all three personages a lasting trust.” He reveals on the very first page of this novel, “one of the commonest devices used by writers of fiction is the withholding of essential information.” This is sort of like a magician revealing his trick right before he goes ahead and deceives you. “Even the discerning reader who is also a student of narration — even he or she might struggle so far to classify the narrator of this present work and might struggle further as the work becomes more complicated in later pages. It is not for me to define myself, as it were.” The mystery should satisfy the reader even to the very last page. “But what could I have been hoping to learn about the flesh-and-blood author, the breathing author of these and who knows how many other pages of true fiction?”