“The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri (translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

This epic fourteenth century poem is one wild ride from its beginnings in Hell, before passing through Purgatory, and into Paradise. The poem’s hero, Dante, though still mortal, is guided through the lands of the dead by Virgil. “I once was man. Both of my parents came from Lombardy, and both claimed Mantua as native city. And I was born, though late, sub Julio, and lived in Rome under the good Augustus—the season of the false and lying gods. I was a poet, and I sang the righteous son of Anchises who had come from Troy when flames destroyed the pride of Ilium.” Dante is first led by Virgil through the torments in each of the circles of the Inferno. “How many up above now count themselves great kings, who’ll wallow here like pigs in slime, leaving behind foul memories of their crimes!”

Dante, the poet, understandably drops many references to classical myths during the course of the epic. “Within that flame, Ulysses and Diomedes suffer; they, who went as one to rage, now share one punishment. And there, together in their flame, they grieve over the horse’s fraud that caused a breach—the gate that let Rome’s noble seed escape. There they regret the guile that makes the dead Deidamia still lament Achilles; and there, for the Palladium, they pay.” However, this is no doubt a Christian poem and the repeated juxtapositions between God and Lucifer are stark. “If he was once as handsome as he now is ugly and, despite that, raised his brows against his Maker, one can understand how every sorrow has its source in him!”

Another theme that runs through the Comedia is the decay and sinfulness that abounds in contemporary Italy. “Ah, abject Italy, you inn of sorrows, you ship without a helmsman in harsh seas, no queen of provinces but of bordellos! That noble soul had such enthusiasm: his city’s sweet name was enough for him to welcome—there—his fellow-citizen; But those who are alive within you now can’t live without their warring—even those whom one same wall and one same moat enclose gnaw at each other. Squalid Italy, search round your shores and then look inland—see if any part of you delight in peace. What use was there in Justinian’s mending your bridle, when the saddle’s empty? Indeed, were there no reins, your shame were less.” At one point Virgil also explains his own personal circumstances, so to speak. “Before the spirits worthy of ascent to God had been directed to this mountain, my bones were buried by Octavian. I am Virgil, and I am deprived of Heaven for no fault other than my lack of faith.” He continues to describe the fate of all those who also lacked Christian faith, through no fault of their own. “There is a place below that only shadows—not torments—have assigned to sadness; there, lament is not an outcry, but a sigh. There I am with the infant innocents, those whom the teeth of death had seized before they were set from human sinfulness; there I am with those souls who were not clothed in the three holy virtues—but who knew and followed after the other virtues.”

As Dante and Virgil transition from the Inferno to Purgatorio the tone of the whole poem shifts and begins to lighten. “When all the staircase lay beneath us and we’d reached the highest step, then Virgil set his eyes insistently on me and said: “My son, you’ve seen the temporary fire and the eternal fire; you have reached the place past which my powers cannot see. I’ve brought you here through intellect and art; from now on, let your pleasure be your guide; you’re past the steep and past the narrow paths. Look at the sun that shines upon your brow; look at the grasses, flowers, and the shrubs born here, spontaneously, of the earth. Among them, you can rest or walk until the coming of the glad and lovely eyes—those eyes that, weeping, sent me to your side. Await no further word or sign from me: your will is free, erect, and whole—to act against that will would be to err: therefore I crown and miter you over yourself.”” Dante finally catches sight of his beloved, who has brought him on this journey. “Although the veil she wore—down from her head, which was encircled by Minerva’s leaves—did not allow her to be seen distinctly, her stance still regal and disdainful, she continued, just as one who speaks but keeps until the end the fiercest parts of speech: “Look here! For I am Beatrice, I am!””

In Paradiso, the poem shifts tone again and becomes a more overt explication for Christian belief. ‘To mortal eyes our justice seems unjust; that this is so, should serve as evidence for faith—not heresy’s depravity.” Dante feels the awe of Christ himself. “Thus, if the penalty the Cross inflicted is measured by the nature He assumed, no one has ever been so unjustly stung; yet none was ever done so great a wrong, if we regard the Person made to suffer, He who had gathered Himself that nature. Thus, from one action, issued differing things: God and the Jews were pleased by one same death; earth trembled for that death and Heaven opened.” As Dante, the hero, travels through Paradiso, Dante, the poet, tackles the minutia of Christian theology. “How distant, o predestination, is your root from those whose vision does not see the Primal Cause in Its entirety! And, mortals, do take care—judge prudently: for we, though we see God, do not yet know all those whom He has chosen; but within the incompleteness of our knowledge is a sweetness, for our good is then refined in this good, since what God wills, we too will.”

Dante concludes with words of hope for those still living justly, amongst all those who sin. “Oh, in those richest coffers, what abundance is garnered up for those who, while below, on earth, were faithful workers when they sowed! Here do they live, delighting in the treasure they earned with tears in Babylonian exile, where they had no concern for gold. Here, under the high son of God and Mary, together with the ancient and the new councils, he triumphs in his victory—he who is keeper of the keys of glory.” Dante ends with words of love, which triumphs over all. ““O lady, you in whom my hope gains strength, you who, for my salvation, have allowed your footsteps left in Hell, in all the things that I have seen, I recognize the grace and benefit that I, depending upon your power and goodness, have received. You drew me out from slavery to freedom by all those paths, by all those means that were within your power. Do, in me, preserve your generosity, so that my soul, which you have healed, when it is set loose from my body, be a soul that you will welcome.” So did I pray.”

“Timaeus” by Plato (translated by Donald J. Zeyl)

This is not a dialogue, but mainly a long speech delivered by Timaeus, an Italian philosopher, likely invented by Plato. Timaeus attempts to explain the creation of the Universe, followed by the creation of Man. He begins by describing the nature of the universe. “Since the god wanted nothing more than to make the world like the best of the intelligible things, complete in every way, he made it a single visible living thing, which contains within itself all the living things whose nature it is to share its kind.”

After the god formed the lesser gods, the daemons, and the four main elements, next humans were formed. “The first innate capacity they would of necessity come to have would be sense perception, which arises out of forceful disturbances. This they all will have. The second would be love, mingled with pleasure and pain. And they would come to have fear and spiritedness as well, plus whatever goes with having these emotions, as well as their natural opposites. And if they could master these emotions, their lives would be just, whereas if they were mastered by them, they would be unjust. And if a person lived a good life throughout the due course of his time, he would at the end return to his dwelling place in his companion star, to live a life of happiness that agreed with his character.”

Timaeus next speaks of the Soul. “We must pronounce the soul to be the only thing there is that properly possesses understanding. The soul is an invisible thing, whereas fire, water, earth, and air have all come to be as visible bodies. So anyone who is a lover of understanding and knowledge must of necessity pursue as primary causes those that belong to intelligent nature, and as secondary all those belonging to things that are moved by others and that set still others in motion by necessity…. These pursuits have given us philosophy, a gift from the gods to the mortal race whose value neither has been nor ever will be surpassed.” However, Timaeus also speaks of a second Soul housed within man. “And within the body they [the gods] built another kind of soul as well, the mortal kind, which contains within it those dreadful but necessary disturbances: pleasure, first of all, evil’s most powerful lure; then pains, that make us run away from what is good; besides these, boldness also and fear, foolish counselors both; then also the spirit of anger hard to assuage, and expectation easily led astray. These they fused with unreasoning sense perception and all-venturing lust, and so, as was necessary, they constructed the mortal type of soul.”

Timaeus speaks of the dichotomy between the Necessary and the Intellect. “For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of this universe.” Next, Timaeus speaks of the nature of evil. He states, “no one is willfully evil. A man becomes evil, rather, as a result of one or another corrupt condition of his body and an uneducated upbringing. No one who incurs these pernicious conditions would will to have them.”

Timaeus goes on to relate the nature of Forms and detail the difference between Understanding and Belief. “If understanding and true opinion are distinct, then these “by themselves” things definitely exist—these Forms, the objects not of our sense perception, but of our understanding only. But if—as some people think—true opinion does not differ in any way from understanding, then all the things we perceive through our bodily senses must be assumed to be the most stable things there are. But we do have to speak of understanding and true opinion as distinct, of course, because we can come to have one without the other, and the one is not like the other. It is through instruction that we come to have understanding, and through persuasion that we come to have true belief. Understanding always involves a true account while true belief lacks any account. And while understanding remains unmoved by persuasion, true belief gives in to persuasion. And of true belief it must be said, all men have a share, but of understanding, only the gods and a small group of people do.” Timaeus goes into more detail on the nature of Forms. “That which keeps its own form unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed, which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, nor itself enters into anything else anywhere, is one thing. It is invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all—and it is the role of understanding to study it.” Finally, he states, “There are being, space, and becoming, three distinct things which existed even before the universe came to be.”

Finally, Timaeus speaks about the necessity of proportion in the well-ordered life. “Now all that is good is beautiful, and what is beautiful is not ill-proportioned. Hence we must take it that if a living thing is to be in good condition, it will be well-proportioned…. In determining health and disease or virtue and vice no proportion or lack of it is more important than between body and soul…. There is in fact one way to preserve oneself, and that is not to exercise the soul without exercising the body, nor the body without the soul, so that each may be balanced by the other and so be sound.” Timaeus ends by going back to philosophy and the search for the higher truths. “If a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his grasp.” However, we must remember that we cannot ever be sure how much Plato, himself, agreed with this account of Creation, which he has sketched out through the imaginary voice of Timaeus.

“The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka (translated by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir)

Kafka’s most famous short story begins with the classic line, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The story takes place entirely in the Samsa apartment, in which Gregor’s parents and younger sister also live. Much of the tale takes place inside Gregor’s head, as he tries to fully inhabit the being of an insect, while trying to disturb his family as little as possible. This will prove hard to do. After all, they understandably find his new body disgusting. They speak about him as if he can no longer understand them. Of course, he cannot speak in a human tongue anymore to tell them that he does indeed comprehend. Eventually, Gregor gets used to his new form. “For mere recreation he had formed the habit of crawling crisscross over the walls and ceiling. He especially enjoyed hanging suspended from the ceiling; it was much better than lying on the floor; one could breath more feely; one’s body swung and rocked lightly.” Soon, Gregor finds out how tightly bound family bonds actually are. “Grete’s words had succeeded in disquieting her mother, who took a step to one side, caught sight of the huge brown mass on the flowered wallpaper, and before she was really conscious that what she saw was Gregor, screamed in a loud, hoarse voice: “Oh God, oh God!” fell with outspread arms over the sofa as if giving up, and did not move. “Gregor!” cried his sister, shaking her fist and glaring at him. This was the first time she had directly addressed him since his metamorphosis.”

“Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant (translated by Werner S. Pluhar)

This book is a slog, but it rewards with a comprehensive system that pushes the bounds of pure reason to its limits. First, Kant has to define terms. “By critique of pure reason… I do not mean a critique of books and systems, but I mean the critique of our power of reason as such, in regard to all cognitions after which reason may strive independently of all experience. Hence I mean by it the decision as to whether a metaphysics as such is possible or impossible…. Transcendental philosophy is the system of all principles of pure reason…. But the critique is not yet that science itself, because it carries the analysis [of a priori concepts] only as far as is required for making a complete judgement about synthetic a priori cognition. The foremost goal in dividing such a science is this: no concepts whatever containing anything empirical must enter into this science.”

Kant next delineates the terms: experiences, intuitions, categories, concepts, and appearances. “All experience, besides containing the senses’ intuition through which something is given, does also contain a concept of an object that is given in intuition, or that appears. Accordingly, concepts of objects as such presumably underlie all experiential cognition as its a priori conditions. Hence presumably the objective validity of all categories, as a priori concepts, rests on the fact that through them alone is experience possible…. Hence the transcendental deduction of all a priori concepts has a principle to which the entire investigation must be directed: viz., the principle that these concepts must be cognized as a priori conditions for the possibility of experience…. If concepts serve as the objective basis for the possibility of experience, then—precisely because of this—they are necessary…. We have a pure imagination, as a basic power of the human soul which underlies a priori all cognition…. By means of this transcendental function of the imagination the two extreme ends, viz., sensibility and understanding, must necessarily cohere; for otherwise sensibility would indeed yield appearances, but would yield no objects of an empirical cognition, and hence no experience. Actual experience consists in apprehension of appearances, their association (reproduction), and thirdly their recognition; in this third [element] (which is the highest of these merely empirical elements of experience), such experience contains concepts, which make possible the formal unity of experience and with it all objective validity (truth) of empirical cognition. Now these bases of the recognition of the manifold, insofar as they concern merely the form of an experience as such, are the categories. Hence the categories underlie all formal unity in the synthesis of imagination…. We cannot think an object except through categories; we cannot cognize an object thought by us except through intuitions corresponding to those concepts. Now all our intuitions are sensible, and this [sensible] cognition is empirical insofar as its object is given. Empirical cognition, however, is experience. Consequently no cognition is possible for us a priori except solely of objects of possible experience…. As far as pure intuitions as well as pure concepts of understanding are concerned, they are elements of cognition that are found in us a priori.”

Next, Kant explicates the difference between analytic and synthetic judgements. “The supreme principle of all synthetic judgments is this: Every object is subject to the conditions necessary for synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience. Thus synthetic judgments are possible a priori if we refer the formal conditions of a priori intuition, the synthesis of imagination, and the necessary unity of this synthesis in a transcendental apperception to a possible experiential cognition as such.” Next, the difference between understanding and experience. “Everything that understanding draws from itself, rather than borrows from experience, it still has for the sake of nothing other than use in experience only. The principles of pure understanding—whether constitutive a priori (like the mathematical principles) or merely regulative (like the dynamical ones)—contain nothing but, as it were, the pure schema for possible experience. For experience has its unity solely from the synthetic unity that the understanding confers, originally and on its own, on the synthesis of imagination by reference to apperception; appearances, as data for a possible cognition, must a priori already have reference to, and be in harmony with, that synthetic unity. Now, these rules of understanding not only are true a priori; but, by containing the basis for the possibility of experience as the sum of all cognition wherein objects may be given to us, they are even the source of all truth.”

Kant moves on to cognition and reason. “All our cognition starts from the senses, proceeds from there to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which there is found in us nothing higher to work on the material of intuition and bring it under the highest unity of thought…. There is of reason, as there is of understanding, a merely formal—i.e., logical—use, where reason abstracts from all content of cognition. But there is also a real use, where reason itself contains the origin of certain concepts and principles that it borrows neither from the senses nor from understanding…. We shall distinguish reason from understanding by calling it our power of principles…. I would, therefore, call cognition from principles only that cognition wherein I cognize the particular in the universal through concepts. Thus any syllogism is a form of deriving a cognition from a principle…. The understanding may be considered a power of providing unity of appearances by means of rules; reason is then the power of providing unity of the rules of understanding under principles. Hence reason initially never deals with experience or any object, but deals with the understanding in order to provide the understanding’s manifold cognitions with a priori unity through concepts…. The designation, concept of reason, even if considered provisionally, already shows that such a concept refuses to be confined within experience…. Concepts of reason serve for comprehending, whereas concepts of understanding serve for understanding (viz., perceptions). If concepts of reason contain the unconditioned, then they concern something to which all experience is subject but which itself is never an object of experience.”

Kant explains idealism. “The existence of all objects of outer senses is doubtful. I call this uncertainty the ideality of outer appearances, and the doctrine of this ideality is called idealism…. Only what is in ourselves can be perceived directly…. Therefore the existence of an actual object outside me (if this word is taken in its intellectual meaning) is never given straightforwardly in perception. Rather, perception is a modification of inner sense…. Hence, I cannot, in fact, perceive external things, but can only infer their existence from my inner perception…. Hence by an idealist we must mean, not someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses, but someone who merely does not grant that this existence is cognized through direct perception, and who infers from this that we can never through any possible experience become completely certain of their actuality…. By transcendental idealism of all appearances I mean the doctrinal system whereby we regard them, one and all, as mere presentations and not things in themselves.”

Finally, Kant tentatively begins to pick through his theme, pure reason. “Apart from transcendental philosophy, there are two further pure rational sciences, the one having a merely speculative and the other a practical content: pure mathematics and pure morality.” Kant moves on to pure reason’s relationship with time and, therefore, causality and free will. “Pure reason, as a merely intelligible power, is not subjected to the form of time, nor consequently to the conditions of temporal succession. The causality of reason in its intelligible character by no means arises, or starts at a certain time, in order to produce an effect…. Of reason… one cannot say that the state wherein it determines the power of choice is preceded by another state wherein that state itself is determined…. Hence reason is the permanent condition of all the voluntary actions under which the human being appears. Each of these actions, even before it occurs, is predetermined in the human being’s empirical character. But in regard to the intelligible character, of which the empirical character is only the sensible schema, no before or after holds, and every action—regardless of its time relation to other appearances—is the direct effect of the intelligible character of pure reason…. In reason there is no antecedent state determining the subsequent state, and that reason therefore does not belong at all in the series of sensible conditions that make appearances necessary according to natural laws. Reason is present to, and is the same in, all actions of the human being in all circumstances of time…. Pure reason is in fact occupied with nothing but itself. Nor can it have any other business. For what are given to it are not objects for the unity of the experiential concept, but cognitions of understanding for the unity of the concept of reason, i.e., for the unity of coherence in a principle. The unity of reason is the unity of a system.”

Kant now circles back around to the reality of the transcendental and to the nature of God. “One asks, first, whether there is something that is distinct from the world and contains the basis of the world order and of the coherence thereof according to universal laws, then the answer is: without doubt. For the world is a sum of appearances; hence there must be some basis of these appearances that is transcendental, i.e., thinkable only for the pure understanding. If the question is, second, whether this being is substance, and of the greatest reality, and necessary, etc., then I answer that this question has no signification whatever. For all the categories through which I try to frame a concept of such an object have only an empirical use, and have no meaning whatever unless they are applied to objects of possible experience, i.e., to the world of sense.”

Kant explains the differences between philosophy and math. “Philosophical cognition is rational cognition from concepts. Mathematical cognition is rational cognition from the construction of concepts. But to construct a concept means to exhibit a priori the intuition corresponding to it. Hence construction of a concept requires a nonempirical intuition. Consequently this intuition, as intuition, is an individual object; but as the construction of a concept (a universal presentation), it must nonetheless express in the presentation its universal validity for all possible intuitions falling under the same concept…. Hence philosophical cognition contemplates the particular only in the universal. Mathematical cognition, on the other hand, contemplates the universal in the particular, and indeed even in the individual…. Hence the essential difference between these two kinds of rational cognition consists in this difference of form, and does not rest on the difference of their matter or [i.e.] objects…. Philosophy keeps to universal concepts only. Mathematics can accomplish nothing with the mere concept but hastens at once to intuition, in which it contemplates the concept in concreto, but yet not empirically; rather mathematics contemplates the concept only in an intuition that it exhibits a priori.” Kant also breaks down the difference in proofs of affirmation versus those of negation. “For no matter how modest and moderate someone may look who behaves toward the assertions of others in a merely declining and negating manner, yet as soon as he wants to make his objections hold as proofs of the opposite assertion, his claim is always just as haughty and imaginary as if he had adopted the affirming party and its assertion.”

Kant circles back to the relationship between appearances and pure reason. “In appearance, through which all objects are given to us, there are two components: the form of intuition (space and time), which can be cognized and determined completely a priori; and the matter (the physical [component] or content [of intuition], which signifies a something encountered in space and time and hence a something containing existence and corresponding to sensation…. You can say that properly speaking all life is intelligible only and not subjected to changes of time, and that it neither began through birth nor is ended through death; but that this life, on the other hand, is nothing but a mere appearance, i.e. a sensible presentation of the pure spiritual life, and the whole world of sense is a mere image hovering before our current way of cognizing, and like a dream has in itself no objective reality…. This is the fate of all assertions of pure reason: They [are synthetic propositions that] go beyond the conditions of all possible experience—the conditions outside of which no documentation of truth is anywhere to be found. But such assertions must nonetheless employ the laws of understanding; and these laws are determined merely for empirical use, yet without them no step can be taken in any synthetic thought.”

Kant, again, explicitly takes up the transcendental challenges of belief in God, free will, and the soul. “When I hear that an uncommon mind is supposed to have demonstrated away the freedom of the human will, the hope for a future life, and the existence of God, then I am eager to read his book; for in view of his talent I expect him to further my insights. That in fact he will have accomplished nothing of all this—this I already know beforehand with complete certainty…. Metaphysics has only three ideas as the proper purpose of its investigation—God, freedom, and immortality.... Everything else that this science deals with serves it only as a means for arriving at these ideas and at their reality.... Insight into these ideas would make theology, morality, and—through combination of the two—religion and hence the highest purposes of our existence dependent merely on our speculative power of reason and on nothing else.”

Kant concludes with a discussion on morality. “The moral law at least can rest on mere ideas of pure reason and thus be cognized a priori. I assume that there actually are pure moral laws that determine completely a priori (without regard to empirical motives, i.e., to happiness) the doing and the refraining, i.e., the use of the freedom of a rational being as such, and that these laws command absolutely (not merely hypothetically, on the presupposition of other empirical purposes) and are therefore necessary in every regard…. Hence pure reason contains—although not in its speculative use but still in a certain practical, viz., the moral, use—principles of the possibility of experience, viz., of the experience of such actions as could be encountered in accordance with moral precepts…. And hence a particular kind of systematic unity must be possible, viz., moral unity…. Accordingly, the principles of pure reason in its practical use—but specifically in its moral use—have objective reality…. The moral world is a mere idea; yet it is a practical idea that actually can and ought to have its influence on the world of sense…. The system of morality is linked inseparably—but only in the idea of pure reason—with the system of happiness…. The idea of such an intelligence wherein the morally most perfect will, combined with the highest bliss, is the cause of all happiness in the world, insofar as this happiness is exactly proportionate to one’s morality (as the worthiness to be happy), I call the ideal of the highest good…. Hence happiness, in exact balance with the morality of rational beings whereby these beings are worthy of happiness, alone amounts to the highest good of a world into which, according to the precepts of pure but practical reason, we must definitely transfer ourselves. That world, to be sure, is only an intelligible one; for the world of sense does not promise to us, as arising from the nature of things, such systematic unity of purposes. Moreover, the reality of that intelligible world cannot be based on anything other than the presupposition of a highest original good: a good where independent of reason, equipped with all the sufficiency of a supreme cause, establishes, preserves, and completes—according to the most perfect purposiveness—the order of things that is universal although very much concealed from us in the world of sense.”

“Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius” by Ray Monk

This is pretty much a straight biography of Wittgenstein, dealing in equal measure with the personal details of his life and expositions of his philosophy. It does great work putting his ideas into the context of his life. Though Wittgenstein reneged on much of his previous work in the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, some of his basic philosophical tenets remained unchanged throughout his life. In Notes on Logic, Wittgenstein states, “In philosophy there are no deductions: it is purely descriptive. Philosophy gives no pictures of reality. Philosophy can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigations. Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis. Epistemology is the philosophy of psychology. Distrust of grammar is the first requisite of philosophizing.” His philosophy was always concerned with language, meaning, grammar, and propositions. Monk states, “A proposition serves as a model, or picture, of a state of affairs, by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined—the structure of the proposition—depicts a possible combination of elements in reality, a possible state of affairs…. Wittgenstein developed the consequences of this idea, which he called his ‘Theory of Logical Portrayal’. Just as a drawing or a painting portrays pictorially, so, he came to think, a proposition portrays logically…. It is this commonality of structure which enables language to represent reality.”

One neglected area of Wittgenstein’s life that Monk brings into focus is his strained relationship with religion. He was brought up a Catholic in a secular Viennese household. However, depending on who you ask three (or two) of his grandparents were Jews. He seemed to have never wavered in his belief in God, although his conception of the deity might have been unique to himself. Wittgenstein wrote in his diary, “What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life. I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world—and so in a certain sense master it—by renouncing any influence on happenings.” Later, he would further interrogate his own belief, “To believe in a God means to understand the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning. The world is given to me, i.e. my will enters the world completely from the outside as into something that is already there. (As for what my will is, I don’t know yet.) However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God. In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world—which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I…. When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world? Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.” Later in his diaries, Wittgenstein again wrestles with the meaning of life, “The solution to the problem of life is to be seen in the disappearance of the problem. Isn’t this the reason why men to whom the meaning of life had become clear after long doubting could not say what this meaning consisted in?” More than just keeping a belief in a deist God, Wittgenstein continued to consider himself a faithful Christian, though no longer a Catholic. “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith.”

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein famously states, “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” Ethical truths, for him, were unspeakable. But they were the most meaningful part of life. Of many important things, they cannot be said, they can only be shown. Monk remarks, “The nonsense that results from trying to say what can only be shown is not only logically untenable, but ethically undesirable.” Wittgenstein explains of the Tractatus, “It is quite strictly speaking the presentation of a system. And this presentation is extremely compressed since I have only retained in it that which really occurred to me—and how it occurred to me…. The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary, but there is no babbling in it.” He never tried to prove his statements or defend himself. He cut out everything until only the core of his philosophy remained. Monk continues, “Whereas the Tractatus deals with language in isolation from the circumstances in which it is used, the Investigations repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the ‘stream of life’ which gives linguistic utterances their meaning: a ‘language-game’ cannot be described without mentioning their activities and the way of life of the ‘tribe’ that plays it.” Wittgenstein was intent that he had no theory. He tried to dig towards what he called atomic propositions, realizing that he had not, and probably would never, reach them. “We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions. We don’t get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.”

Wittgenstein was worshipped by the positivists of the Vienna Circle led by Moritz Schlick. Despite this, he was highly skeptical of them and of positivism more generally. He feared it led to scientism. In a speech to the Heretics at Cambridge he expounded, “Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” In Vienna, speaking to Schlick and Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein repeated, “I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics—whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable.” Going back to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is clear, “The correct method of philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.” Wittgenstein did not have much faith in modernity. “It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.”

For Wittgenstein, the hard questions were the ones that cannot be said, much less written about. These problems were hard enough just to think to oneself about. Writing to one of his proteges, Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein beseeches, “I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people’s lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important…. If we live to see each other again let’s not shirk digging. You can’t think decently if you don’t want to hurt yourself. I know all about it because I am a shirker.”

“Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism” by Larry Siedentop

Siedentop is a fellow at Kebble College, Oxford. In this book, he posits that it was Western Europe’s Christian roots that paved the way to the preeminence of the individual as the hallmark of the liberal tradition. He begins by contrasting modernity with the basis of society in Ancient Greece and Rome. “At its origin the ancient family was both the focus and the medium of religious belief. It was an instrument of immortality, at once a metaphysic and a cult…. A family was a group of persons whom religion permitted to invoke the same sacred fire, and to offer funeral repast to the same ancestors.” Family was very much the basis of separation and the most basic unit of society. French historian Fustel de Coulanges informs, “In the house of every Greek and Roman was an altar; on this altar there had always to be a small quantity of ashes, and a few lighted coals. It was a sacred obligation for the master of every house to keep the fire up night and day. Woe to the house where it was extinguished.” At the state level, Siedentop continues, “The successive worships into which the ancient citizen was initiated left no space for individual conscience or choice. These worships claimed authority over not just his actions but also his thoughts. Their rules governed his relations with himself as well as others. There was no sphere of life into which these rules could not enter—whether it was a matter of dress, deportment, marriage, sport, education, conversation or even ambition…. The king was hereditary high priest of that association of associations that was the ancient city. The king’s other functions, as magistrate and military leader, were simply the adjuncts of his religious authority…. Later, when kingship gave way to republican regimes, the chief magistrate of the city—the archon in Athens, the consul in Rome—remained a priest whose first duty was to offer sacrifices to the city’s gods…. Laws were the necessary consequences of religious belief. There was nothing like the modern notion of sovereignty, of a merely human agency with the authority to create new law. The priests jealously guarded the laws of the city, for the laws were understood to be the work of the gods.” Ancient liberty meant the liberty of the citizen to partake in the political process. It did not serve as a restraint against the State, the masses, or communal tradition. Fustel states, “If we wanted to give an exact definition of a citizen, we should say that it was a man who had the religion of the city.”

Siedentop makes the case that the advent of Christianity was a huge paradigm shift. “Through the story of Jesus, individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things, into the experience of grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending death. The individual replaced the family as the focus of immortality.” An important adjunct to the rise of Christianity was the democratization of reason. “Rationality loses its aristocratic connotations. It is associated not with status and pride but with humility which liberates. Paul’s conception of the Christ overturns the assumption on which ancient thinking had hitherto rested, the assumption of natural inequality. Instead, Paul wagers on human equality…. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus amounted to the discovery of human freedom—of a moral agency potentially available to each and everyone, that is, to individuals.” Paul, himself, states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Christianity broke down the hierarchy of the ancient family. “By transferring religious authority from the father to a separate priesthood, the Christian church removed the religious basis of the paterfamilias.” There was, therefore, an elevation of the woman into a role as an independent individual and not just a cog in the family machine. “By the third and fourth centuries this new role was confirmed in the role of the ‘dedicated virgin’, a role which did not make any sense unless it was assumed that the woman had a mind and will of her own…. Declarations of independence by women seem to have been especially frequent in upper-class families. It is as if the confidence engendered by the superior status of a family was appropriated by some women and put to a new use…. They became patronesses, disciples and travelers.” Christianity also began the long process of breaking down class distinctions, in word if not in deed. “In contrast to the segregated spaces of the ancient city, the Christian population of the cities began to share the same spaces, hearing the bishops’ ex cathedra words in the basilica or principle church, and taking part in the same rites, that is, baptism, the mass and funerals. Processions to the tombs of local martyrs were for everyone.”

The Holy Roman Empire was by no means liberal. However, Siedentop makes the argument that the Carolingians instituted some policies that further nudged the way towards the increased status of the individual. “Charlemagne’s call for a universal oath of allegiance led to the first serious impinging of Christian moral norms on social roles, a precarious attempt to distance the self (or ‘soul’) from inherited statuses, in order to give those statuses a sanction in consciences.” Bishop Theodulf of Orleans would admonish, “The rich get their riches because of the poor. But nature submits you to the same laws. In birth and death you are alike. The same holy water blesses you; you are anointed with the same oils; the flesh and blood of the lamb (the Christ) nourishes you all together.” Siedentop continues, “Charlemagne tried to combine two visions of the foundations of social order in his rule—lordship and ‘the care of souls’. In the course of pursuing the second vision he had created a far better educated and more cohesive higher clergy, a disciplined Christian elite. It was the elite that survived the decay of his empire…. It pursued that vision with determination, struggling against the consequences of increasingly hereditary local lordships, which were helping to destroy centralized government…. The solidarities of an ancient and urban Christianity were making way for a faith with an increasingly individualist bias.”

It was the Christian notion of the soul and a personal afterlife that gave precedence to the individual after death. “Scenes of the passion of Christ and his resurrection—testified that the immortal soul, rather than the immortal family, was the primary constituent of reality…. But it was not only emphasis on the day of judgement, the new notion of purgatory and wall paintings that drove home a message of hope. Largely illiterate congregations also heard tales of saints’ lives, stories which demonstrated that salvation did not depend upon social status…. The lives of the saints offered a kind of imagined mobility, a moral standing that could be achieved rather than inherited…. They democratized the ancient cult of the hero.”

Another aspect of Christian theism was the concept of natural law. In 1140 AD, Gratian wrote in his Decretum, “Natural law [jus] is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel by which each is to do to another what he wants done to himself and forbidden to do to another what he does not want done to himself.” It was a restating of the Golden Rule in the context of legalism. “By identifying natural law with biblical revelation and Christian morality, Gratian gave it an egalitarian bias—and a subversive potential—utterly foreign to the ancient world’s understanding of natural law as ‘everything in its place’…. An underlying moral equality was now deemed natural.” Pope Innocent III would expand, “But it may be said that kings are to be treated differently from others. We, however, know that it is written in the divine law, “You shall judge the great as well as the little and there shall be no difference in persons.””

Canon law began to assert itself on society at large and with that came greater rule of law and greater rights for the individual. “Canon law became, in that way, the original vehicle of modernity…. The development of canon law and a hierarchy of courts administering it—with the papacy at the apex—created a system that offered litigants coherence, relative predictability and other benefits. It was a system that stood in contrast to the secular courts, in which the application of customary and feudal law allowed recourse to Roman law only intermittently…. Roman law was distrustful of and, indeed, avoided abstractions…. The habitual turn of the canonist mind was different. It sought to identify the shared features of particular legal decisions and raise them to the level of a concept. Behind the rules it sought to identify principles…. Canon lawyers brought to bear not just legal techniques they acquired from the study of Roman law, but a ‘democratized’ interest in generalization and abstraction, an interest combining knowledge of Aristotelian logic with Christian moral intuitions…. The difference sprang from the new concern that law should be understood as applying to ‘all (souls) equally’. Hence it needed to be systematic.”

Another feature of Western modernity was the push towards urbanization. Initially formed as centers of trade, free cities eventually gained in wealth and autonomy. The urban bourgeoisie slowly asserted their rights against kingship, but, particularly, against local feudal lords. “Only later did townspeople relate their new liberty to the moral equality proclaimed by Christian beliefs. Yet that relationship emerged almost immediately in the language they adopted when ‘swearing the commune’ and defending its interests. It was language of brotherhood. Thus, a twelfth-century Flemish borough charter prescribed: ‘let each help the other like a brother’. This language of equality and reciprocity—of moral transparency—was not the language of the ancient polis, but rather of St. Paul…. Unlike in the ancient city, liberty was being claimed, not merely for the borough, but also for the individuals who lived and worked in it…. The first feature of the borough charters was to secure self-government by lodging final authority in the assembly of all citizens. Secularism introduced a formal equality of status for citizens, who had the right to take part in the assemblies. Popular assemblies had the right to legislate, levy taxes and make war…. Boroughs were usually exempt from feudal services and dues, as well as from royal taxes, except those that had been agreed in advance. Their independence emerges especially in the absence of obligation except by prior agreement.” In 1219, the citizens of Marseilles wrote in a joint proclamation, “It is to Jesus Christ that we owe the development of the laws and advantages of our city.”

Theologians and philosophers also played a large part in advancing the notion of individualism in Western society. “The Franciscans Duns Scotus and Ockham put into place the basic building blocks of modern secularism. In refining the idea of Christian liberty—separating the idea of freedom from that of justice and making both conditions of morality as well as distinguishing rights of ownership from a right to rule—they prepared a revolution in the understanding of the ‘proper’ ground of all authority.” Ockham and the Franciscans also fought with Aquinas and the Dominicans over fundamental matters of theology. “Was it plausible that a ‘sovereign’ God’s actions be subject to necessity? As we have seen, Ockham and his Franciscan followers thought not. For them, the core of Christian revelation was the ‘grace’ which the Christ offered to all equally. That grace held out the prospect of an individual relationship with divinity which transcended social relations and required a new understanding of the role of reason. It was this conviction that turned Ockham and his followers into harbingers of ‘modernity’…. They reconstructed the idea of justice and revised the test for scientific truth…. Taking the moral autonomy of individuals as their weapon, the nominalists broke through a set of assumptions which had confined the structure of society and the pursuit of knowledge within an hierarchical or corporate framework. Ockham replaced those assumptions with the assertion of individual rights (justifying a private sphere of choice) and the verification principle (which made knowledge of the external world always subject to disproof by further experience)…. The nominalists, in effect, began to separate ‘culture’ from ‘nature’—emphasizing the central role of reasons and intentions in the former, while driving explanations in terms of purpose from the latter…. Ockham’s emphasis on faith and freedom confronted Aquinas’ rationalist account of natural law…. First is Ockham’s emphasis on natural rights and liberty rather than on traditional natural law…. Second is his insistence on the difference between demonstrative reasoning and causal explanation, between ‘rational science’ and ‘experimental science’…. Ockham’s understanding of justice emerged as the claim for ‘equal liberty’. Freedom became a birthright, a right founded on the nature of human agency…. Thomists fail to understand what Ockham understood, that the theory of natural rights involves subjecting the ancient idea of natural law to a new distributive principle, the biblical golden rule, with its stipulation in favour of equality and reciprocity. Human autonomy is authorized ‘by God and nature’. The golden rule introduced a principle of justice which overthrew the assumption of natural inequality. And, in Ockham’s eyes, that move is at the heart of Christian revelation. It is God’s will…. Individuals cannot alienate their moral autonomy because it is God-given.”

A final piece of the modernization project was the usurpation of authority from feudal lords to the central monarch. For the individual at the bottom of the social order this was not necessarily a loss of rights. “‘Equal Subjection’ to a sovereign was perceived not as loss but as gain…. The church had projected the image of society as an association of individuals, an image which unleashed the centralizing process in Europe…. In the process of centralizing laws, manners and ideas—forging a single society out of what had been separate, parochial societies—the monarchs not only created states, but also the foundation for a ‘public’ or ‘national’ opinion…. If we look at the word ‘individual’ in historical dictionaries of the English or French languages, we will find that it first became current in the fifteenth century. The word ‘state’, with its stipulation of a sovereign authority, became current at about the same time.” The individual’s rise in autonomy was intimately intertwined with the rise of the modern nation-state. Siedentop concludes, “Secularism can be seen as Europe’s noblest achievement, the achievement which should be its primary contribution to the creation of a world order…. Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world.”

“The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han was raised in South Korea, currently teaches philosophy and cultural studies at the University of Arts in Berlin, and writes his published works in German. This book is a study on the nature of time and how its conception has changed over the ages. He begins, “This regime change from God to human is not without its consequences. It de-stabilizes time because God is the authority which confers finality and the seal of eternal truth upon the prevailing order. God stands for a lasting present. With the regime change, time loses this hold…. Historical time can rush ahead because it does not rest in itself, because its centre of gravity is not in the present…. Time is meaningful insofar as it moves towards a goal…. Mythical time is restful, like a picture. Historical time, by contrast, has the form of a line which runs or rushes towards a goal. If this line loses its narrative or teleological tension, it disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction. The end of history atomizes time into point-time. Myth once gave way to history: the static picture turned into a progressive line. Now, history gives way to information. The latter does not possess any narrative width or breadth. It is neither centred, nor does it have a direction. Information falls down on us, so to speak…. Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn, produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety.” From a static sense of ever-lasting religion to the Whig Theory of history marching ever forward to secular points floating about randomly in the universe, humanity’s relationship to the movement of time has defined our conscious embodiment of ourselves in space.

Han suggests that our perception of time’s progress has accelerated in modernity. “The feeling that time passes more quickly now than before is also due to the absence of a pronounced articulation of time. This feeling is intensified by the fact that events follow each other in quick succession without leaving lasting traces, without becoming experiences…. Nothing carries weight.” The dots no longer connect into a meaningful whole. Han starts by riffing on Heidegger, “Modernity is a time of de-factualization and freedom. It frees itself from the throwness whose thrower or projector is called God. De-factualization and secularization rest on the same premises. The human being elevates itself to become the subject of history, confronted by the world as an object that can be produced.” The arrow of time is a modern construct. Time used to move in a cyclical pattern, revolving with the seasons. “In pre-modern times… the human being followed a pre-given path, which, like orbits of the heavenly bodies, repeated itself eternally. The pre-modern human found things which he or she accepted or suffered, into which he or she was thrown: a human being characterized by facticity and repetition.… Modernity remains a narrative age, where the narrative is one of history as progress and development. This age, with its gaze turned towards the immanent world, expects a salvation that lies in the future.” Because God has been replaced with scientific progress, modern man is always in a rush to get where he is going. We cannot accelerate fast enough because the future is bound to be better than the past (and even the present age).

We are no longer content to linger in our experiences, but rush on to the next one. “The impression that time moves considerably faster than before also has its origin in the fact that today we are unable to linger, that the experience of duration has become so rare.” For Han, this is a tragedy. “Whoever tries to live faster, will ultimately die faster. It is not the total number of events, but the experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of another, nothing enduring comes about. Fulfillment and meaning cannot be explained on quantitative grounds. A life that is lived quickly, without anything lasting long and without anything slow, a life that is characterized by quick, short-term and short-lived experiences is itself a short life, no matter how high the ‘rate of experience’ may be.” One sensation that slows you down is your sense of smell. “Scents cannot be presented in as fast a sequence as optical images. In contrast to the latter, they can also not be accelerated. A society dominated by scents would probably also not develop any inclinations towards change or acceleration. It would live off its recollections and its memory, off those things that are slow and long-lasting.” The joy of lingering has that same effect on the mind. “Contemplative lingering presupposes things which last. It is not possible to linger for long on events or images which quickly succeed one another.”

Modern man is dissatisfied because he is atomized. He is unconnected and unmoored. He is bored with his life because he is always acting, always working, and never at rest. He is always rushing about. He never pauses to reflect and absorb. “In the end, the responsibility for profound boredom lies with a life that is fully dominated by the determination to act. Profound boredom is the flip side of excessive activity, of a vita activa that lacks any form of contemplation. A compulsive activism keeps boredom alive.” Modern man has become infected by Weber’s Protestant ethic. He lives for work and does not know what to do without it. When not at work, he wants to be distracted, amused, and entertained. His leisure is mindless. Han contrasts the model of Aristotle where work “takes away freedom, because it is subject to the coercive force exerted by the necessities of life. As opposed to leisure, it does not rest in itself, because it must produce what is useful and necessary…. Aristotle also situated the beautiful and noble outside of what is useful and necessary, that is, outside of work. Only need forces work upon us…. The nature of human existence is not care, but leisure. Contemplative rest enjoys absolute priority…. Aristotle distinguishes three forms of life (bioi) of the free man: the life of striving for pleasure (hedone), that of producing the beautiful and noble deeds in the polis (bios politikos), and that which is dedicated to the contemplation of truth (bios theoretikos). All three of them form the needs and compulsions of life. The life dedicated to making money is set aside on account of its compulsive character. The bios politikos is not dedicated to the organization of communal life, because this would involve man in necessary and useful things. Rather, it strives for honour and virtue…. The highest form of happiness has its source in the contemplative lingering on beauty, the activity that used to be called theoria. Its temporal dimension is duration. It turns towards things that are imperishable and unchanging, the things that rest entirely in themselves. Only the contemplative devotion to truth, not virtue and not prudence, brings man close to the gods…. Thinking, as theorein, as the contemplative consideration of truth, is based on leisure.”

It is activity which holds man’s ambitions back. He is cut off from beauty because he never stops to pause and admire life. What he thinks of as leisure is mere recreation. What he thinks of as work is rushing towards death. Han concludes by contrasting two types of life—the life of the slave and the life of the freeman. “Life dominated by work is a vita activa which is entirely cut off from the vita contemplativa. If the human being loses all capacity for contemplation, it degenerates into an animal laborans.” Modern man has lost sight of the goal. He has become enchanted by consumption, by amassing the devil’s trinkets. “Consumption and duration contradict each other. Consumer goods do not last. They are marked by decay as their constitutive element…. The compulsion to consume is immanent to the system of production…. In the consumer society, one forgets to linger…. What lasts and is slow, however, evades being used up and consumed. It founds a duration. The vita contemplativa is a practice of duration.”

“The Concept of the Political” by Carl Schmitt (translated by George Schwab)

Like Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt was a German philosopher who became a prominent member of the Nazi Party. Because he was a political philosopher and jurist, in many ways, his academic views had much more practical import to the Third Reich. Today, Schmitt remains decidedly relevant as he is actively read and often cited by the Chinese Communist Party inteligencia. In this short book, Schmitt is concerned mainly with external politics—the politics between nations. His philosophy is political realism on steroids.

Schmitt begins by stating that society and the State are not synonymous. Neither is the State exactly politics. “The equation state=politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other.” For Schmitt, the State is always above society, “German political science originally maintained (under the impact of Hegel’s philosophy of state) that the state is qualitatively distinct from society and higher than it. A state standing above society could be called universal but not total,” necessarily.

The single idea that pervades all of Schmitt’s work is the friend versus enemy dichotomy. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy…. The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation…. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor…. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible…. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence…. The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols.”

Politics, for Schmitt, stands above all other cultural standards and those other standards, in fact, cannot exist absent the political. “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.” That is because the political unit, the State, holds the life and death of each of its subjects within its hands. This is the case no matter its form—monarchical, democratic, theocratic, or socialist. “By virtue of this power over the physical life of men, the political community transcends all other associations or societies.”

For Schmitt, it was the pessimistic political philosophers who were on the right track. “Political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and often Fichte presuppose with their pessimism only the reality or possibility of the distinction of friend and enemy. For Hobbes, a truly powerful and systematic political thinker, the pessimistic conception of man is the elementary presupposition of a specific system of political thought. He also recognized correctly that the conviction of each side that it possesses the truth, the good, and the just bring about the worst enmities, finally the war of all against all…. [Pessimist] realism can frighten men in need of security…. As long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists.” However, in the case of any emergency, man reverts to his beastly nature.

In Schmitt’s system, the political entity is opposed by the liberal individual. He stands for his own rights beyond and above the political fray. “The negation of the political, which is inherent in every consistent individualism, leads necessarily to a political practice of distrust toward all conceivable political forces and forms of state and government, but never produces on its own a positive theory of state, government, and politics…. [There exists] absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics. The systemic theory of liberalism concerns almost solely the internal struggle against the power of the state.” The demands of the State cannot help but be anathema to the true liberal for “the political entity must demand the sacrifice of life. Such a demand is in no way justifiable by the individualism of liberal thought.”

According to Schmitt, by way of its self-seeming neutrality the economic sphere has tried to encroach upon the demands of politics. “A domination of men based upon pure economics must appear a terrible deception if, by remaining nonpolitical, it thereby evades political responsibility and visibility.” However, it will not work when push comes to shove. “State and politics cannot be exterminated. The world will not be depoliticized with the aid of definitions and constructions, all of which circle the polarity of ethics and economics…. This allegedly nonpolitical and apparently even antipolitical system serves existing or newly emerging friend-and-enemy groupings and cannot escape the logic of the political.” In the end, pure economic relations merely put on a show, serve the interests of the ruling status quo powers, and sneak politics in through the backdoor.

“The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous” by Joseph Henrich

Henrich attempts nothing less than to trace the roots of cultural progress and how that evolution has shaped human psychology individually, as well as, more importantly, the structures and institutions that have molded modern societies. It is an ambitious project. First, WEIRD stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Henrich makes the case that such people are the exceptions throughout human history, not the rule. To study their psychologies and generalize to all of human nature has been a huge mistake prevalent in academic research. Henrich breaks down his thesis in a nutshell, “The spread of a religious belief that every individual should read the Bible for themselves led to the diffusion of widespread literacy among both men and women, first in Europe and later across the globe. Broad-based literacy changed people’s brains and altered their cognitive abilities in domains related to memory, visual processing, facial recognition, numerical exactness, and problem-solving. It probably also indirectly altered family sizes, child health, and cognitive development, as mothers became increasingly literate and formally educated. These psychological and social changes may have fostered speedier innovation, new institutions, and—in the long run—greater economic prosperity.”

What makes WEIRD people weird? “We WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves—our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be “ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility…. We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time…. We simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discreet constituents and assigning properties or abstract categories to these components…. We often miss the relationships between the parts or the similarities between phenomena that don’t fit nicely into our categories…. WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking. Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification—in financial rewards, pleasure, and security—well into the future in exchange for discomfort and uncertainty in the present…. WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative towards strangers or anonymous others…. We WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do…. WEIRD people are often racked by guilt as they fail to live up to their culturally inspired, but largely self-imposed, standards and aspirations. In most non-WEIRD societies, shame—not guilt—dominates people’s lives…. Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgment.”

One trait that Henrich highlights is impersonal prosociality. “Impersonal trust is part of a psychological package called impersonal prosociality, which is associated with a set of social norms, expectations, and motivations for impartial fairness, probity, and cooperation with strangers, anonymous others, or even abstract institutions like the police or government. Impersonal prosociality includes the inclinations we feel toward a person who is not tied to our social network at all…. Impersonal prosociality also includes motivations, heuristics, and strategies for punishing those who break impartial norms…. [WEIRD people] are also more inclined to punish anyone who violates their impartial norms of fairness and honesty even if the violation isn’t directly against themselves…. Countries where people show more impersonal prosociality have greater national incomes (GDP per capita), greater economic productivity, more effective governments, less corruption, and faster rates of innovation.”

Another trait common among WEIRD societies is the emphasis on people’s intentions, rather than real world outcomes. “Intentions, beliefs, and personal dispositions are so central to WEIRD moral judgments that the idea that people in other societies judge others based mostly or entirely on what they did—the outcome—violates their strong intuition that mental states are primary. But, putting relatively little importance on mental states is probably how most people would have made moral judgements of strangers over most of the last 10 millennia.”

Humans are one of the only species who make use of a cultural toolkit. “Unlike other animals, we have evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire an immense amount of behavioral information, including motivations, heuristics, and beliefs that are central to our survival and reproduction. This ability to learn from one another is so powerful compared to other species that we alone can accumulate increasingly complex bodies of cultural knowledge, related to everything from sophisticated projectile technologies and food-processing techniques to new grammatical tools and expanding packages of social norms.” Humans have also coevolved genetically and culturally, each building upon the other. “We have evolved genetically to learn adaptively in ways that calibrate our minds and behavior to the environments we encounter…. Our evolved capacities for cultural learning have been honed to figure out who to learn from, what to learn, and when to use cultural learning over other informational sources like individual experience or innate intuitions…. To figure out who to learn from, adults, children, and even infants integrate cues related to a potential role model’s skill, competence, reliability, success, prestige, health, age, sex, and ethnicity, among others. By preferentially attending to more successful or prestigious people, learners focus their attention and memory on those individuals most likely to possess useful information…. By combining cues like prestige and success with self-similarity cues like sex and ethnicity (e.g. speaking the same dialect), learners can target their attention on those who possess the skills, strategies, and attitudes most likely to be useful to them in their future roles or communities…. When problems are difficult, situations are ambiguous, or individual learning is costly, people should rely more heavily on learning from others…. The sharpening of our cultural learning abilities further fueled cumulative cultural evolution to generate an ever-broadening array of more complex adaptations, thereby generating autocatalytic feedback between genes and culture. As the importance, diversity, and complexity of cultural products ratcheted up, natural selection gradually strengthened our inclinations to rely on cultural learning over our instincts and individual experiences because the tools, protocols, and practices that we acquired from others became far superior to anything that any single individual could possibly figure out on their own…. Human societies, unlike those of other primates, are stitched together by culturally transmitted social norms that cluster into institutions.”

Within humanity’s great variation, different societies and cultures evolved over time, who then competed with each other evolutionarily at the group level. “Norms that favor success in competition with other groups tend to survive and spread. Such intergroup competition can occur through violent conflict…. But it can also occur when less successful groups copy the practices and beliefs of more successful groups or when more prosperous groups simply grow faster, through higher fertility, lower mortality, or greater net immigration.” The key innovation was agriculture, which allowed societies to scale up exponentially. “The potential for agriculture and herding—food production—created the conditions for fierce intergroup competition to drive up the scale and complexity of societies, generating a coevolutionary interaction between agriculture and societal complexity: the more societies relied on agriculture and herding, the more they needed to scale up…. As populations increasingly relied on farming, archaeological studies reveal that the less nutritious diets derived from cereals and other crops produced people who were shorter, sicker, and more likely to die young. However, the effects of sedentism and the productivity of unskilled (young) labor were such that farmers reproduced more quickly than did mobile hunter-gatherers…. Early farming spread not because rational individuals prefer to farm, but because farming communities with particular institutions beat mobile hunter-gatherer populations in intergroup competition.” 

Henrich makes the case that religion was a crucial aspect of cultural evolution. “Religions have fostered trade by increasing trust, legitimized political authority, and expanded people’s conceptions of their communities by shifting their focus from their own clans or tribes to larger imagined communities…. Cultural evolution, driven by intergroup competition, favored the emergence and spread of supernatural beliefs that increasingly endowed gods with concerns about human action and the power to punish and reward…. By roughly 200 BCE, universalizing religions included variants of three key features, which were psychological game changers. First contingent afterlives…. Second, free will…. Third, moral universalism.”

WEIRD societies have less strong kinship ties than traditional societies. These ties are both fewer and weaker. “Five of the kinship traits that characterize WEIRD societies [are] (1) bilateral descent, (2) little or no cousin marriage, (3) monogamous marriage only, (4) nuclear family households, and (5) neolocal residence.” The weakening of kinship bonds was a long process in the West. “First, between about 400 and 1200 CE, the intense kin-based institutions of many European tribal populations were slowly degraded, dismantled, and eventually demolished by the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church…. Then, from the ruins of their traditional social structures, people began to form new voluntary associations based on shared interests or beliefs rather than on kinship or tribal affiliations…. The dissolution of intensive kin-based institutions and the gradual creation of independent monogamous nuclear families represents the proverbial pebble that started the avalanche to the modern world in Europe.”

Henrich calls the set of marriage decrees by the Roman Catholic Church the “Marriage and Family Program.” Of most import, these rules prohibited marriage to blood relatives, prohibited marriage to affinal kin, prohibited polygynous marriage, prohibited marriage to non-Christians, created spiritual kinship, discouraged the adoption of children, required both the bride and groom to publicly consent to marriage, encouraged (and sometimes required) newly married couples to setup independent households—neolocal residence, and encouraged the individual ownership of property and inheritance by personal testament.

Why was breaking down kinship ties so important? These ties tended to foster conformity. “By embedding individuals within dense, interdependent, and inherited webs of social connections, intensive kinship norms regulate people’s behavior in subtle and and powerful ways. These norms motivate individuals to closely monitor themselves and members of their own group to make sure that everyone stays in line. They also endow elders with substantial authority over junior members. Successfully navigating these kinds of social environments favors conformity to peers, deference to traditional authorities, sensitivity to shame, and an orientation toward the collective (e.g. the clan) over oneself.” This was the opposite of what traits were selected for in proto-WEIRD societies. “Success in these individual-centered worlds favors the cultivation of greater independence, less deference to authority, more guilt, and more concern with personal achievement.”

The Roman Catholic Church, whether it was intentional or not, did effectively break down European kinship bonds over time. “National populations that collectively experienced longer durations under the Western Church tend to be (A) less tightly bound by norms, (B) less conformist, (C) less enamored with tradition, (D) more individualistic, (E) less distrustful of strangers, (F) stronger on universalistic morality, (G) more cooperative in new groups with strangers, (H) more responsive to third-party punishment…. (I) more inclined to voluntarily donate blood, (J) more impersonally honest (toward faceless institutions), (K) less inclined to accumulate parking tickets under diplomatic immunity, and (L) more analytically minded.” Henrich makes the convincing case that this has nothing to do with Christianity as a religion. “The difference between the Orthodox and Western Churches is important, because it shows that psychological variation, and later economic and political differences, aren’t due to something about exposure to Roman institutions or Christianity per se…. The long-term impact of the Western vs. Orthodox Churches lies in policies about, and implementation of, marriage and family practices, especially those related to incest taboos.”

One of the first downstream effects of proto-WEIRD societies was the gradual conception of the rule of law in society. “In assembling these new associations and organizations, the emerging proto-WEIRD psychology—analytic thinking, individualism, and a non-relational morality—would have favored the development of both impartial rules that granted privileges and obligations to individuals (not clans) and impersonal mechanisms for enforcing trust, such as accounting records, commercial laws, and written contracts.” In Europe, this went hand-in-hand with increased levels of individualization, the growth in the formation of voluntary networks, and the urbanization of the population. “The breakdown of intensive kin-based institutions opened the door to urbanization and the formation of free cities and charter towns, which began developing greater self-governance. Often dominated by merchants, urban growth generated rising levels of market integration and—we can infer—higher levels of impersonal trust, fairness, and cooperation. While these psychological and social changes were occurring, people began to ponder notions of individual rights, personal freedoms, the rule of law, and the protection of private property. These new ideas just fit people’s emerging cultural psychology.” In a Europe dominated culturally by the rules first laid down by the Catholic Church, kin-based institutions found it nearly impossible to stay powerful or even relevant. “The Church suppressed nearly all the basic tools of intensive kinship. Under these constraints, family businesses struggled to outcompete other organizational forms. At the same time, politically or economically powerful family lineages were simply more likely to die out without polygyny, customary inheritance, remarriage, and adoption.”

Canon law was another aspect of the Roman Catholic Church that helped shape WEIRD societies. “As analytical thinkers from a moralizing religion, the canonists went looking for universalizing principles…. Since analytical thinkers hate contradictions, much of the development of Western law has been about ferreting out and resolving the contradictions that emerge when one tries to isolate a set of principles and apply them more broadly…. In many [traditional] societies, law is about restoring harmony and maintaining the peace, not, as it is for more analytic thinkers, about defending individual rights or making sure that abstract principles of “justice” are served.”

Henrich concludes by reemphasizing the importance of the ratcheting effects of culture. “The larger the population of engaged minds, the faster the rate of cumulative cultural evolution. That is, the larger the network of people learning or doing something, the more opportunities there will be for individuals to produce improvements…. The greater the interconnectedness among individuals—among learners and their teachers over generations—the faster the rate of cumulative cultural evolution…. Innovation can emerge even in the absence of conscious invention…. Complex innovations almost always arise from the accumulation of small additions or modifications, so even the most important contributors make only incremental additions…. Most innovations are really just novel recombinations of existing ideas, techniques, or approaches…. Lucky mistakes, fortunate misunderstandings, and serendipitous insights play a central role in invention…. Necessity is certainly not the mother of invention. Over the course of human history, people often ignored life-saving inventions for years, sometimes only realizing how much they needed an invention long after its arrival…. Cumulative cultural evolution—including innovation—is fundamentally a social and cultural process that turns societies into collective brains. Human societies vary in their innovativeness due in large part to the differences in the fluidity with which information diffuses through a population of engaged minds and across generations as well as to how willing individuals are to try novel practices or adopt new beliefs, concepts, and tools.”

Henrich makes the case that the cultural evolution of western Europe was uniquely built on circumstances that started with the Roman Catholic Church’s marriage and family program, which then evolved from there to form today’s WIERD societies. Catholic marriage laws were just the first stone in the foundation, however. A unique culture built up from there. “Four voluntary associations—charter cities, monasteries, apprenticeships, and universities—all contributed to broadening the flow of knowledge and technology around Europe…. Breaking kin-groups down into nuclear families would have had complex effects on the collective brain…. Unconstrained by the bonds of kinship, learners can potentially select particularly knowledgeable or skilled teachers from this broader network…. There are many economic and geographic factors that matter too, but if there’s a secret ingredient in the recipe for Europe’s collective brain, it’s the psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries…. People’s psychology is influenced not only by the communities they grew up in but also by the ghosts of past institutions—by the worlds faced by their ancestors around which rich systems of beliefs, customs, rituals, and identities were built.”