“Phaedrus” by Plato (translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff)

This dialogue begins with a discourse on love, with Phaedrus recounting a speech by Lysias about love’s defects, then Socrates responding with a speech of his own. The dialogue then moves to a discussion on the merits and truths of oratory and writing, in general, before concluding. As Phaedrus recounts, “Lysias argues that it is better to give your favors to someone who does not love you than to someone who does.” Socrates’ speech meanders before getting to the theme of love. First he suggests, “each of us is ruled by two principles which we follow wherever they lead: one is our inborn desire for pleasures, the other is our acquired judgement that pursues what is best…. Now when judgement is in control and leads us by reasoning toward what is best, that sort of self-control is called ‘being in your right mind’; but when desire takes command in us and drags us without reasoning toward pleasure, then its command is known as ‘outrageousness’.” Socrates then goes on to define love, specifically, “the unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty, its force reinforced by its kindred desires for beauty in human bodies—this desire, all-conquering in its forceful drive, takes its name from the words for force (rhome) and is called eros.” Socrates goes on to describe the blinding nature of being in love, “it [the soul] forgets mother and brothers and friends entirely and doesn’t care at all if it loses its wealth through neglect. And as for proper and decorous behavior, in which it used to take pride, the soul despises the whole business. Why, it is even willing to sleep like a slave, anywhere, as near to the object of its longing as it is allowed to get! That is because in addition to its reverence for one who has such beauty, the soul has discovered that the boy is the only doctor for all that terrible pain. This is the experience we humans call love.” However, Socrates points out that madness is sometimes beneficial to the soul, but only when provided by the gods. “In fact the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god…. If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.” It is left as questionable if madness is too high a price for the soul to pay, whether in poetry or in love.

Phaedrus and Socrates shift gears towards the end of their dialogue and begin to discuss the merits of rhetoric. Socrates responds that rhetoric is useless and empty without a firm basis in philosophy. “The reason they [orators] cannot define rhetoric is that they are ignorant of dialectic. It is their ignorance that makes them think they have discovered what rhetoric is when they have mastered only what it is necessary to learn as preliminaries…. We need to determine the nature of something—of the body in medicine, of the soul in rhetoric. Otherwise, all we’ll have will be an empirical and artless practice.” Socrates goes on to emphasize that true knowledge cannot be written down in permanence. First, Socrates channels the spirit of Ammon-Ra speaking to Thoth, the inventor and god of writing, “You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention [of writing] will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” Then Socrates, in his own voice, goes on to state that written philosophy cannot truly teach those who are still ignorant. “Those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant…. Otherwise, how could they possibly think that words written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?” Plato, through Socrates, seems to be warning us to take his own dialogues with a grain of salt. Are his own writings, as well, only valuable to those with a previous understanding of their obscure truths? Socrates does seem to caution about the spreading of philosophy to the uninitiated, only through the written word. “When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not.” Socrates ends this dialogue by recapping the basic foundations one needs to first master, before being able to speak wisely. “First, you must know the truth concerning everything you are speaking or writing about; you must learn how to define each thing in itself; and, having defined it, you must know how to divide it into kinds until you reach something indivisible. Second, you must understand the nature of the soul, along the same lines; you must determine which kind of speech is appropriate to each kind of soul, prepare and arrange your speech accordingly, and offer a complex and elaborate speech to a complex soul and a simple speech to a simple one. Then, and only then, will you be able to use speech artfully, to the extent that its nature allows it to be used that way, either in order to teach or in order to persuade.”

“New Science” by Giambattista Vico (translated by David March)

This is a dense tome, often filled with digressions and repetition. It is well worth the read, however. Some scholars regard it as the first book methodologically dealing with cultural studies and sociology. Vico believed in cultural pluralism and that one needed to be fully immersed within a society, its time and place, in order to be able to comprehend its history. “For when nations first became aware of their origins, and scholars first studied them, they judged them according to the enlightenment, refinement, and magnificence of their age, when in fact by their very nature these origins must rather have been small, crude, and obscure…. [Scholars are] incapable of entering into the vast imaginative powers of the earliest people. Their minds were in no way abstract, refined, or intellectualized; rather, they were completely sunk in their senses, numbed by their passions, and buried in their bodies.” Unique geographical circumstances were just as important as age in molding different cultures. “Different climates clearly produce peoples with different natures and different customs, and these in turn produce different languages. Nations with different natures view what is necessary and useful to human life under different aspects. This produces different and even opposite customs.”

In this book, Vico tries nothing less than to dissect the progression of western civilization. But he also puts forth the theme of recurring cycles of history. “At first, people desire to throw off oppression and seek equality: witness the plebeians living in aristocracies, which eventually become democracies. Next, they strive to surpass their peers: witness the plebeians in democracies which are corrupted and become oligarchies. Finally, they seek to place themselves above the laws: witness the anarchy of uncontrolled democracies. These are in fact the worst form of tyranny, since there are as many tyrants as there are bold and dissolute persons in the cities. At this point, the plebeians become aware of their ills and as a remedy seek to save themselves under a monarchy.”

The book’s third edition was published in 1744. Much of the minutia in the book has been disproven and is out of date. But Vico’s general pronouncements for the patterns of society still ring true. Vico covers history, culture, mythology, philosophy, philology, etymology, archaeology, and more. “My New Science is a history of human ideas, which forms the basis for constructing a metaphysics of the human mind…. Metaphysics began when the first men began to think in human fashion, and not when philosophers began to reflect on human ideas.” This is a religious work that seeks to explain pagan origins and history with care and respect for the truth.

Vico begins by discussing the ancients use of poetry, myth, and archetypes. “The first peoples of pagan antiquity were, by a demonstrable necessity of their nature, poets who spoke by means of poetic symbols…. Their symbols were certain imaginative general categories, or archetypes…. We find, then, that the divine and heroic symbols were true myths, or true mythical speech…. These archetypes—which is what myths are in essence—were created by people endowed with vigorous imaginations but feeble powers of reasoning. So they prove to be true poetic statements, which are feelings clothed in powerful passions, and thus filled with sublimity and arousing wonder.” Vico later expounds on myth, “These myths are ideal truths, since they truly conform to the merit of the figures they celebrate. And if they are sometimes false in fact, it is only to the extent that they inadequately recognize such merit. Indeed, if we consider the question carefully, poetic truth is metaphysical truth; and any physical truth which does not conform to it must be judged false.”

Vico lays down a series of axioms, which expound his central thesis. “If philosophy is to benefit humankind, it must raise and support us as frail and fallen beings, rather than strip us of our nature or abandon us in our corruption…. The Stoics…. tell us to mortify our senses; and the Epicureans…. make them the rule of life. Both of them deny providence. The Stoics let themselves be dragged by fate; whereas the Epicureans abandon themselves to chance…. By contrast, this axiom admits to our school the political philosophers, especially the Platonists. For they agree with all legislators on three principle points: that divine providence exists, that human emotions should be moderated to become human virtues, and that human souls are immortal. This axiom thus offers us the three central principles of my New Science: providence, marriage, and burial…. Philosophy considers people as they should be…. Legislation considers people as they really are, in order to direct them to good purposes in society. Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which plague the entire human race, it creates armies, trade, and courts, which form might, affluence, and wisdom of commonwealths. Thus, from three great vices, which otherwise would certainly destroy all the people of the earth, legislation creates civil happiness.”

Vico reveals how poetry must have preceded philosophy. “Imagination is simply expanded or compounded memory… the vividness of the poetic images which the world must have formed in its early childhood…. All the arts serving human need, advantage, comfort, and, to a great extent, even pleasure were invented in the poetic centuries, before philosophers appeared. For the arts are simply imitations of nature and are, in a certain sense, concrete poetry…. People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind.” Vico feels that poetry expressed for the masses what philosophy was later able to codify for the elite. “Everything that the poets sensed in their popular wisdom was later understood by the philosophers in their esoteric wisdom. We may say, then, that the poets were the sense of mankind, and the philosophers its intellect.” In Greek, poet means creator. Vico asserts that Greek poets had three tasks: “(1) to invent sublime myths which are suited to the popular understanding; (2) to excite to ecstasy so that poetry attains its purpose; and this purpose is (3) to teach the masses to act virtuously, just as the poets have taught themselves.”

Vico also returns to the cultural specificity in early poems and myth. “Languages are more beautiful as they are richer in condensed heroic figures of speech. They are more beautiful as they are vivid; and they are more vivid as they are truer and more faithful to their origins…. Human nature determined the creation of poetic style before prose style, just as human nature determined the creation of mythical and imaginative universals before rational and philosophical universals, which were the product of discourse in prose…. Poetic sublimity always contains popular elements…. By the very nature of poetry, it is impossible for anyone to be both a sublime poet and a sublime metaphysician. For metaphysics draws the mind away from the senses, while the poetic faculty sinks the whole mind into them. Metaphysics rises above universals, while the poetic faculty plunges deep into particulars.”

Vico also relates poetry with history. “History was born first, and poetry later. For history is a direct expression of the truth, while poetry is an imitation of the truth…. Poetic archetypes which are the essence of myths, were created by primitive people because their nature was incapable of abstracting forms and properties. As a result, they represent the manner of thinking of entire peoples as expressed within the natural limits of their barbarism…. Aristotle observes that people with limited ideas generalize particulars into maxims…. All ancient secular histories have their origin in myth…. The earliest Roman history was written by poets.”

Vico then stresses that all the Homeric myths contain archetypes. “Myths which had originally been direct and proper reached Homer in a corrupt and indecorous form…. The Greeks assigned to Achilles, who is the principal subject of the Iliad, all the qualities of heroic virtue, and all the emotions and behaviour which spring from these qualities. (Describing Achilles, Horace summarizes these qualities as a quick temper, fastidiousness, irascibility, implacability, violence, and the judging of right by might.) And the Greeks assigned to Ulysses, the principal subject of the Odyssey, all the properties of heroic wisdom, namely, caution, patience, dissimulation, duplicity, deception, and a combination of regard for words with an indifference to deeds which leads others into error and self-deception. Thus, the Greeks assigned to both archetypes the deeds appropriate to each particular hero.”

Much of this book contains Vico’s interpretations of pagan myths, digging for what they reveal about the origins of civil society and the creation of nation states. One particularly illuminating passage is where Vico discusses the aristocratic nature of the Greek goddess Athena, whom the Romans later named Minerva. “Two passages in Homer prove that Minerva signified the armed aristocratic orders. (1) In the contest of the gods, Minerva hurls a stone and wounds Mars, who is an archetype of the plebeians who serve the heroes in war. (2) Later, she seeks to conspire against Jupiter. This is typically aristocratic behaviour, since in aristocracies lords often plan in secret to eliminate rulers who aspire to tyranny. It is only in aristocratic ages that we read of statues erected to tyrannicides, who would would have been thought traitors, if they had lived under monarchies.” Vico does this time and again: a deep read into myth to come up with his own unique interpretation. He pulls out the esoteric truth obscured by years of story layered on top.

A second example of Vico’s textual analysis: “Corsair raids were symbolized by bulls: witness Jupiter abducting Europa, and the Minotaur or bull of Minos abducting youths and maidens from the coast of Attica. (By the same token, sails came to be called ‘the horns of ships’, an expression used by Virgil.)… Theseus must be an archetype of the Athenian youths who, under the law of force practiced on them by Minos, are devoured by his Minotaur, the bull symbolizing the pirate ship. And Ariadne, who represents the art of seafaring, teaches Theseus to use the thread of navigation to escape from the labyrinth of Daedalus. For although labyrinths later became elegant playgrounds in royal villas, the first labyrinth represented the Aegean Sea as it winds among many islands.”

Later Vico goes on to suggest that the historic Homer was not a single man, but that the true Homer was, in fact, all of Greek antiquity itself. “No placid, refined, or meek philosopher could have naturally produced Homer’s statements, similes, and descriptions…. Homer was an idea or heroic archetype of the Greeks who recounted their history in song…. In this sense, Homer composed the Iliad in his youth, when Greece was young and therefore burning with sublime passions, like pride, anger, and thirst for revenge…. In turn, Homer wrote the Odyssey in old age, when the spirits of Greece had been somewhat cooled by reflection, which is the mother of prudence. This older Greece admired Ulysses, the hero of wisdom. In the time of Homer’s youth, the peoples of Greece took pleasure in coarseness, boorishness, ferocity, savagery, and atrocity. In the time of his old age, they delighted in the luxuries of Alcinous, the sensuality of Calypso, the pleasures of Circe, the songs of the Sirens, and the recreations of the suitors, and their attempts (or rather, their siege and assaults) on Penelope’s chastity…. Homer of the Iliad was from northeastern Greece, since he sang the Trojan War as fought in his country. And the Homer of the Odyssey was from southwestern Greece, since he sang of Ulysses, whose kingdom was in that region.”

Vico finally returns to his attempt to depict the natural course of nations. Vico believed that the natural progression of society was from aristocracy, to democracy, and, finally, to monarchy. He begins by detailing the stages of human nature. “The first human nature was a poetic or creative nature produced by the powerful illusions of the imagination, which is most vigorous in peoples whose powers of reasoning are weakest…. First, religion is the only means powerful enough to restrain the savagery of entire peoples. Second, religions prosper when they are deeply revered by the religious leaders themselves…. The second human nature was a heroic nature, based on the heroes’ belief in their own divine origin…. Although they were born human, they justly thought that their heroic status gave them a natural nobility which made them rulers of the human race…. The third nature was the truly human or civilized nature, which is intelligent, and hence moderate, benign, and reasonable. This nature is guided by the laws of conscience, reason, and duty.” Vico goes on by explicating the natural law of nations. He states that all historians ought to recognize the “eternal and natural ‘royal law’, by which the free power of a state, because it is free, must be realized. As the nobles cede power, the people acquire it, and so become free; and as free people cede power, kings acquire it, and so become monarchs. Hence, just as the natural law of philosophers and moral theologians is a law of reason, so the natural law of nations is a law of self-interest and force…. Since both democracies and monarchies are human governments they are readily interchangeable; but our civil nature makes a reversion to aristocracy nearly impossible… for once the plebeians perceive that they are equal in nature with the nobles, they naturally cannot tolerate inequality in civil law, especially when they can obtain equality in democracies or monarchies.” Vico critiques the end of democracy in Rome. “When democracy grew corrupt, so did philosophy, which sank into skepticism. Learned fools took to maligning the truth. And false eloquence arose, prepared to argue opposite sides of a cause with equal force. People now misused eloquence, as did the plebeian tribunes at Rome. And the citizens, being no longer content with wealth as a source of order, resolved to use it as a source of power.”

Vico ends by presciently speculating on a degenerating demos in general. “But if people are rotting in this fatal civil malady, and can neither accept a native monarch, nor tolerate the conquest and protection of a superior nation, then providence may administer an extreme remedy to their extreme illness. Like beasts, such people are accustomed to think of nothing but their own personal advantage, and in their extreme fastidiousness, or rather pride, they are filled with bestial rage and resentment at the least provocation. Although their bodies are densely crowded together, they live like monstrous beasts in the utter solitude of their private wills and desires. Not even two of them can agree, because each pursues his own pleasure and caprice…. Decadent peoples practice ignoble savagery, and use flattery and embraces to plot against the life and fortunes of their intimates and friends…. If peoples lose their religion, nothing remains to keep them living in society. They have no shield for their defence, no basis for their decisions, no foundation for their stability, and no form by which to exist in the world…. Unless one is pious, one cannot be truly wise.”

“The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Graeber was an anarchist and anthropologist, who just passed away, and Wengrow is an archaeologist. They combined to write this big book that seeks to overturn much of the commonly assumed narrative of humanity’s progress through the ages. Graeber and Wengrow make a convincing case against the Whig theory of linear history. “Most people who write history on a grand scale seem to have decided that, as a species, we are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves.” Instead, Graeber and Wengrow argue that humanity’s evolution was full of contingency and active choices made at individual points of time by actual humans, not a preordained path through successive stages of development. “There is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian — or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents, or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even laws of history.”

Graeber and Wengrow first deal with the history of inequality. “‘The origin of social inequality’ is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve…. The terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World…. What we’re going to suggest is that American intellectuals — we are using the term ‘American’ as it was used at the time, to refer to indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and ‘intellectual’ to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas — actually played a role in this conceptual revolution.”

Graeber and Wengrow begin way back. “What the existence of similar patterns in the Paleolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities…. You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.” Graeber and Wengrow suggest that social groups, throughout prehistory, consciously divided their politics, often as seasonal changes demanded and, often, with checks and balances and/or polycentric spheres of order to regulate and curb grabs for power. Some “had self-consciously organized in such a way that the forms of arbitrary power and domination we associate with ‘advanced political systems’ could never possibly emerge.”

Graeber and Wengrow give agency to the prehistoric humans who made active choices about how to organize their own social lives. “One important factor would seem to be the gradual division of human societies into what are sometimes referred to as ‘culture areas’; that is, the process by which neighboring groups began defining themselves against each other and, typically, exaggerating their differences. Identity came to be seen as a value in itself, setting in motion processes of cultural schismogenesis…. It is among such Mesolithic populations that we often find not just the multiplication of distinct culture areas, but also the first clear archaeological indications of communities divided into permanent ranks, sometimes accompanied by interpersonal violence, even warfare. In some cases, this may have already meant the stratification of households into aristocrats, commoners and slaves…. [But] periods of intense inter-group violence alternate with periods of peace, often lasting centuries, in which there is little or no evidence for destructive conflict of any kind. War did not become a constant of human life after the adoption of farming; indeed long periods of time exist in which it appears to have been successfully abolished. Yet, it had a stubborn tendency to reappear, if only many generations later.” Graeber and Wengrow describe an alternative that was also lived by some prehistoric peoples for centuries. “The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence — all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors.”

Graeber and Wengrow insist that it is also important to realize what actual hunter-forager societies were not. They were not filled with Rousseau’s noble savage, living in a state of paradise, free from want. “Since there was no Eden-like state from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of social rank, inequality or private property.” Graeber and Wengrow, again and again, hammer the empirical case for diversity and experimentation among the plethora of populations spanning the globe.

Currently, there are huge gaps in our early history as a species. In “northern Syria, the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC. Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC — that is roughly ten times as long as it need have taken…. We need to understand this 3,000-year period as an important phase of human history in its own right. It’s a phase marked by foragers moving in and out of cultivation.”

Graeber and Wengrow cite play both as a discovery tool and as a keeper of knowledge. “For most of history, then, the zone of ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might or might not be applied to pragmatic problems.” Social realities, for much of prehistory, were fluid. Graeber and Wengrow suggest that the first urban zones could have shrunken from more remote cultural commonalities. “We are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities — but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.” Graeber and Wengrow make the case that some kind of authority was often first established using some combination of styles of power. “Sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics are magnifications of elementary types of domination, grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge and charisma.” The control of violence, the control and dissemination of information, and individual personality are used as bases for political power grabs. “Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together.” There was nothing magical or necessary about the formation of the State. “Cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, and their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a ruler’s actual power…. If ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.”

What might have finally brought about the need to domesticate crops on a massive scale? When did the masses stop simply laughing and walking away from their leaders? Graeber and Wengrow have a guess, “Do ancestors get hungry? And if so, what do they eat? For whatever reasons, the answer that gained traction across the Nile valley around 3500 BC was that ancestors do indeed get hungry, and what they required was something which, at that time, can only have been considered a rather exotic and perhaps luxurious form of food: leavened bread and fermented wheat beer, the pot-containers for which now start to become standard fixtures of well-appointed grave assemblages. It is no coincidence that arable wheat-farming — though long familiar in the valley and delta of the Nile — was only refined and intensified around this time, at least partly in response to the new demands of the dead…. It was not ecological circumstances but the social requirement to provide bread and beer on ceremonial occasions that allowed such divisions to become entrenched. This was not just a matter of access to sufficient quantities of arable land, but also the means to maintain ploughs and oxen — another introduction of the late fourth millennium BC.”

Graeber and Wengrow insist that the path of human history was contingent, not preordained. We, as a species, made choices and we can do so again. “What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken? After all, those things really did exist…. Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating those scales; to reminding us that people did actually live in those ways, often for many centuries, even millennia.”

“Climates” by Andre Maurois (translated by Adriana Hunter)

This novel is a meditation on the nature of love and its myriad of disappointments. The novel is divided into two sections: the first narrated by Philippe, the second by his second wife, Isabelle. Both are stories of doomed love. Maurois’ novel revolves on how romantic relations are necessarily structured around an unequal balance. Between every pair there is always an imbalance. And that is where the power always lies.

In his first marriage, Philippe was the jealous lover, never sure of himself, always in doubt. “Understanding Odile was impossible, and I believe that no man (if he loved her) could have lived with her without suffering…. Just as she had the beauty of a character in a dream, she spent her life in a dream. I have said that she lived mostly in the present moment. She invented the past and the future as and when she needed them, and then forgot what she had invented.” By the time of his second marriage, the power relations in the coupling had reversed. Isabelle hazards, “We are wrong to say love is blind. The truth is that love is indifferent to faults and weaknesses it can see perfectly clearly, if it believes it has found in someone an often indefinable quality that means more to it than anything else.” Nonetheless, she admits, “A man does not gamble his whole life on one love; he has his work, his friends, his ideas. A woman like me lives only for her love.” In the end, however, she has made her peace, “The really important thing I’ve realized in the last year is that if we truly love we mustn’t attach too much importance to the things that the people we love do.... So long as we can keep them, hold on to them, good God, what does the rest matter?”

“Johannes Climacus” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Edna Hong and Howard Hong)

This is basically an attack against Hegel and his foundations of modern philosophy by Kierkegaard, again writing as Johannes Climacus in this eponymous work. Kierkegaard’s theme is doubt, “De omnibus dubitandum est [Everything must be doubted]…. This thesis became for [Climacus’] life what in other respects a name frequently is in a person’s history—everything can be said in all brevity by mentioning this name…. This thesis became a task for his thinking.” Kierkegaard appears to be wrestling with philosophy itself. “Just as one could have an intimation of a necessity in the past, was it not conceivable that one could have an intimation of a necessity in the future. Philosophy, however, wanted to do something even more difficult: it wanted to permeate everything with the thought of eternity and necessity, wanted to do this in the present moment, which would mean slaying the present with the thought of eternity and yet preserving its fresh life…. Perhaps a particular philosopher had doubted for all just as Christ suffered for all, and is one now only supposed to believe it and not doubt for oneself?” Surely not. Kierkegaard continues with his tale of Climacus’ intellectual journeying. “In an old saga, he had read a story about a knight who received from a troll a rare sword that, in addition to its other qualities, also craved blood the instant it was drawn…. It seemed to Johannes that he must have the same experience with that thesis: when one person said it to another, it became in the latter’s hand a sword that was obliged to slay the former, however painful it was for the latter to reward his benefactor in that way…. The very first person who had primitively discovered that one must begin with doubt had not been in that predicament…. But the single individual who is to learn this from another would fall into the predicament, and if his teacher is not quick enough, he is obliged to become a sacrifice to his teaching.”

“Sweet Days of Discipline” by Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Tim Parks)

In this novella, Jaeggy writes about her boarding school days and her first great love, Frederique, “She spoke to no one. Her looks were those of an idol, disdainful. Perhaps that is why I wanted to conquer her. She had no humanity.” Even while living in Appenzell, Frederique lived in a world apart. “She was more interested in ideas than in human beings. Though one can hardly speak of human beings in boarding school. At table sometimes I would hear her laugh her gratuitous laugh that haunted me in my sleep. I turned, and everybody’s face was serious.” For Jaeggy, boarding school was the formative experience. “I see my little companions from when I was eight years old, in bright white sheets, with their smiles, their lowered eyelids; their gaze has slipped away. We shared our beds with them. In prisons too, the prisoners don’t forget their cellmates. They are faces that both fed and devoured our brains, our eyes. There is no time, at that time. Childhood is ancient.”

“God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning” by Meghan O’Gieblyn

O’Gieblyn is an evangelical Christian turned atheist, who writes essays on philosophy, religion, technology, and science. This book is part memoir of her conversion, written as intellectual odyssey, as well as digressive philosophical musings on the nature of the self, modernity, subjectivity, the history of religion, and general artificial intelligence.

O’Gieblyn begins with the state of modernity. “All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.” The possible rise of AGI has forced humanity to re-question what it is that exactly makes us human. The hard problem, as coined by philosopher David Chalmers, is to be able to objectively explain just what the nature of consciousness exactly is. “Today, as AI continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.”

The mind-body dualism espoused by Descartes strikes the modern mind as quaint. Perhaps, we are all materialists now? O’Gieblyn suggests, “Materialism is the only viable metaphysics in modernity.” Consciousness resides in the realm of the subjective. Modernity is objective, if it is anything, right? “Science put a bracket around consciousness because it was too difficult to study objectively, but this methodological avoidance eventually led to metaphysical denial, to the conclusion that because consciousness cannot be studied scientifically, it does not exist. Within the parameters of modern science, subjective experience has come to seem entirely unreal.”

Ray Kurzweil is, perhaps more than any other academic, responsible for popularizing the ideas of transhumanism and the Singularity. “Kurzweil calls himself a “patternist.” He believes consciousness is a pattern of information, a biological configuration of energy and matter that persists over time. It does not reside in the hardware of our brains—the cells and atoms and neurons, which are always changing—but in the computational patterns that make up our sensory systems, our attention system, and our memories, which together form the distinctive algorithm that we think of as our identity.” Norbert Wiener had already suggested, “We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

Transhumanism is materialism all the way down, just with a software and hardware distinction. “A pattern, after all, is essentially computational, which means it can, at least in theory, be transferred onto a computer…. Most transhumanists insist that this understanding of personal identity is fully compatible with physicalism…. Its fundamental ideology is actually nudging us down to a lower ontological level.” Individuality, consciousness, thoughts, feelings, sensation: these all just become patterns in the data. “The promise of a coming Singularity served to justify a technological culture that privileges information over human beings.” This is what computer scientist Jaron Lanier decries as an “antihuman approach to computation [where] bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments.” There are more than faint echoes of religion. “What makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated.” Kurzweil, himself, claims, “The major religions emerged in pre-scientific times so the metaphors are pre-scientific. That the answers to existential questions are necessarily metaphoric is necessitated by the fact that we have to transcend mere matter and energy to find answers…. The difference between so-called atheists and people who believe in “God” is a matter of the choice of metaphor, and we could not get through our lives without having to choose metaphors for transcendent questions.”

O’Gieblyn states that, contrary to popular notions, many of these transhumanists are actually de-anthropomorphizing the world. They are attempting to remove the human subjectivity from objective reality. “Proponents of decentralized intelligence are less interested in projecting human qualities onto nonhuman objects than they are in reconfiguring human intelligence through the lens of these inanimate systems.” Philosopher Philip Goff cautions, “The fact that physical science has been extremely successful when it ignores the sensory qualities gives no reason to think that it will be similarly successful if and when it turns its attention to the sensory qualities themselves.” AGI researchers have chosen to pursue practical results over any understanding of theory. “It turns out that much of life can be “gamified,” reduced to a series of simple rules that enable these machines to build their own models of the world…. Many forms of machine learning are considered “black box” technologies. They are composed of many hidden layers of neural networks, and there’s no way to ascertain what kind of model they are building from their experience…. This metadata—this shell of human experience—becomes part of a feedback loop that then actively modifies real behavior.” O’Gieblyn compares the inscrutable certainty of these neural networks to the Calvinist theology of predestination— able to be taken only on faith alone. And taken only with a measure of doubt too, for the thoughtful, at least, perhaps. “The doctrine [of predestination] eradicated not only free will but any coherent sense of self. To concede that one’s mind is controlled by God is to become a machine. It is to grant that the heart is also a black box, full of hidden desires and shadowy motivations whose true causes remain hidden from the conscious mind.”

Perhaps the most intriguing part of O’Gieblyn’s book is her section on idealism, the belief that consciousness is all that exists. According to O’Gieblyn, philosopher Bernardo Kastrup contends that “the world is just one universal consciousness and that the physical world is the extrinsic appearance of this cosmic mind…. The universal mind—whether it goes by God, Brahman, or some other name—is a common feature of idealism…. All living, conscious creatures were the “disassociated alters” of the cosmic mind.” However, O’Gieblyn makes clear, Kastrup “doesn’t believe the cosmic mind is omniscient, omnipotent, or benevolent; most likely it is not even self-reflective, or self-aware…. Some physicists have suggested that the cosmos is one entangled system.” Anti-materialism is, therefore, not anti-science. “One can speak of the behavior of atoms, their properties, their relationships, regardless of whether one believes they are composed of matter or information or emanations of the cosmic mind.” Kastrup posits, “The meanings we think to discern in the world may not, after all, be mere personal projections, but actual properties of the world…. Each of us, as individuals, can now give ourselves permission to dedicate our lives to finding meaning in the world reassured by the knowledge that this meaning is really there.”

Historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests that when we reach the point where we, as humanity, allow blackbox algorithms to not only choose our movies and restaurants, but also our spouses and occupations, then we will have annihilated the modern project of individualism. “Harari argues that this would officially mark the end of liberal humanism, which depends on the assumption that an individual knows what is best for herself and can make rational decisions about her best interests.” But can we really remove the human perspective from our human reality? O’Gieblyn continues, “A vantage so far removed from human nature cannot account for human agency. The view of earth from the Archimedean point compels us to regard our inventions not as historical choices but as part of an inexorable evolutionary process that is entirely deterministic and teleological…. We ourselves inevitably become mere cogs in this machine, unable to account for our actions in any meaningful way, as the only valid language is the language of quantification, which machines understand far better than we do…. What we are abdicating, in the end, is our duty to create meaning from our empirical observations—to define for ourselves what constitutes justice, and morality, and quality of life—a task we forfeit each time we forget that meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification.”

O’Gieblyn concludes by pointing out that a culture built upon the reliance on digital technology and quantification is an ideology in itself. It has normative implications for the direction of humanity’s future. “The central pillar of this ideology is its conception of being, which might be described as an ontology of vacancy—a great emptying-out of qualities, content, and meaning. This ontology feeds into its epistemology, which holds that knowledge lies not in concepts themselves but in the relationships that constitute them, which can be discovered by artificial networks that lack any true knowledge of what they are uncovering.” This is the brave new world in which AGI suggests and humanity obeys, without question. Hannah Arendt had agreed that consciousness is truly humanity’s hard problem, “It is really as though we were in the hands of an evil spirit who mocks us and frustrates our thirst for knowledge, so that whenever we search for that which we are not, we encounter only the patterns of our own minds.”

“Philosophical Fragments” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Edna Hong and Howard Hong)

In this essay, Kierkegaard writes under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, comparing Socratic and Christian notions of truth, faith, the historical, and the eternal. He asks, “Can the truth be learned? With this question we shall begin. It was a Socratic question or became that by way of the Socratic question whether virtue can be taught—for virtue in turn was defined as insight.” Kierkegaard continues by stating Socrates’ notion of the individual and how its subjectivity relates to the objective world. “In the Socratic view, every human being is himself the midpoint, and the whole world focuses only on him because his self-knowledge is God-knowledge. Moreover, this is how Socrates understood himself, and in his view this is how every human being must understand himself, and by virtue of that understanding he must understand his relation to the single individual, always with equal humility and with equal pride.” Socrates was opposed to notions of individuality espoused by the Skeptics and by arch-subjectivists, “If the Socratic theory of recollection and of every human being as universal man is not maintained, then Sextus Empiricus stands there ready to make the transition implied in “to learn” not merely difficult but impossible, and Protagoras begins where he left off, with everything as the measure of man, in the sense that he is the measure for others, but by no means in the Socratic sense that the single individual is for himself the measure, no more and no less.”

Kierkegaard next compares the Socratic method to the teachings of Christ. “Between one human being and another the Socratic relationship is indeed the highest, the truest…. The presence of the god in human form—indeed, in the lowly form of a servant—is precisely the teaching.” Where Christianity steps beyond the Socratic is in the leap of faith. “Faith is not a knowledge, for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, which excludes the temporal and the historical as inconsequential, or it is purely historical knowledge, and no knowledge can have as its object this absurdity that the eternal is the historical…. The follower, however, is in faith related to that teacher in such a way that he is eternally occupied with his historical existence…. Then the object of faith becomes not the teaching but the teacher, for the essence of the Socratic is that the learner, because he himself is the truth and has the condition, can thrust the teacher away…. Faith, then, must cling firmly to the teacher. But in order for the teacher to be able to give the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in turn the object of faith and is the paradox, the moment…. The contradiction is that he receives the condition in the moment, and, since it is a condition for the understanding of eternal truth, it is eo ipso the eternal condition…. Faith is not an act of will…. But then is faith just as paradoxical as the paradox? Quite so…. Faith itself is a wonder, and everything that is true of the paradox is also true of faith…. The wonder that the eternal condition is given in time.”

Kierkegaard concludes, “Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical—indeed, precisely by means of the historical—has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness, has wanted to interest him otherwise than merely historically, has wanted to base his happiness on his relation to something historical. No philosophy (for it is only for thought), no mythology (for it is only for the imagination), no historical knowledge (for it is for memory) has ever had this idea—of which in this connection one can say with multiple meanings that it did not arise from any human heart…. If in discussing the relation between Christianity and philosophy we begin by narrating what was said earlier, how shall we ever, not finish, but ever manage to begin, for history just keeps on growing.”

“Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher” by Gregory Vlastos

Vlastos was a classics professor at Princeton and Berkeley. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990 and was considered, along with Leo Strauss, the foremost American expert on Socrates in the twentieth century. First, Vlastos tackles the unique double meaning behind some of Socrates’ irony. “We can see how Socrates could have deceived without intending to deceive…. The concept of moral autonomy never surface’s in Plato’s Socratic dialogues—which does not keep it from being the deepest thing in their Socrates, the strongest of his moral concerns…. Socratic irony is not unique in accepting the burden of freedom which is inherent in all significant communication. It is unique in playing that game for bigger stakes than anyone else ever has in the philosophy of the West.”

At the heart of Vlastos’ argument is that while the Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues was the historical Socrates, the Socrates from the middle dialogues onward was a “Socrates” of Plato’s invention, whose espoused metaphysics was actually Plato’s. Vlastos argues, “This is the heart of Plato’s metaphysics: the postulation of an eternal self-existent world, transcending everything in ours, exempt from the vagaries and vicissitudes which afflict all creatures in the world of time, containing the Form of everything valuable or knowable, purged of all sensory content…. Plato’s Form-mysticism is profoundly other-worldly. The ontology of non-sensible, eternal, incorporeal, self-existent, contemplable Forms, and of their anthropological correlate, the invisible, immortal, incorporeal, transmigrating soul, has far-reaching implications for the mind and for the heart…. One could hardly imagine a world-outlook more foreign to that of Socrates…. He is not other-worldly: the eternal world with which Plato seeks mystical union is unknown to him. For Socrates reality—real knowledge, real virtue, real happiness—is in the world in which he lives.”

Vlastos argues that the early Socrates relied on elenctic arguments that consisted strictly of peirastic statements. In the Gorgias, Socrates implores, “By the god of friendship, Callicles, you mustn’t think that you may play with me and say whatever comes into your head, contrary to your real opinion, nor, conversely, must you think of me as jesting. For you see what our discussions are all about—and is there anything about which a man of even small intelligence would be more serious than this: what is the way we ought to live?” Vlastos explains, “When engaged in elenctic argument, searching for the right way to live, he is in dead earnest…. This is my claim: when Socrates is searching for the right way to live, in circumstances in which it is reasonable for him to think of the search as obedience to divine command, his argument cannot involve willful untruth. For elenctic argument is the very process on which he depends to test the truth of his own convictions about the right way to live, no less than those of his interlocutor.” As Socrates, himself, says, “I examine the argument chiefly for my own sake, though no doubt also for the sake of my friends.”

In the rest of this book, Vlastos describes what made Socrates’ morality so original. Vlastos begins, again, with the Gorgias, “The thesis Socrates undertakes to prove to Polus in this section of the Gorgias (474B-475C) is at the heart of his vision of the good life. It is that he who commits injustice inflicts upon himself a greater injury than on the one who he wrongs…. Has any stronger claim been ever made by a moral philosopher? I know of none.” For Socrates, piety is intimately tied with reason. In the Crito, he claimed, “I am the sort of man who is persuaded by nothing in me except the proposition which appears to me to be the best when I reason about it.” The original leap first proposed by Socrates was that even the gods were bound by reason. Vlastos explains, “For [Socrates] the highest form of wisdom is not theoretical, but practical. And it is of the essence of his rationalist program, in theology to assume that the entailment of virtue by wisdom binds gods no less than men. He could not have tolerated a double-standard morality, one for men, another for the gods: this would have perpetuated the old irrationalism…. Piety, and by the same token, every other virtue, has an essence of its own which is as normative for the gods as it is for us.” In the Euthyphro, Socrates asks, “Is piety loved by the gods because it is piety? Or is it piety because the gods love it?”

Socrates’ own conception of his own pious life engaged him in being a gadfly to the community of Athens. Vlastos suggests, “Socrates saw his own work in summoning all and sundry to perfect their soul as work he did at god’s command, as his own service to the god.” Socrates reveals, “I believe that no greater good has ever come to you in the city [of Athens] than this service of mine to the god.” Another of Socrates’ contentions was his refusal to countenance the justice of an eye for an eye. Vlastos “argued for the ground-breaking originality of Socrates’ interdict on retaliation…. If, when we see that an option is unjust, we should reject it instantly without giving any consideration at all to countervailing benefits, then, naturally, we should never commit injustice.” In the Crito, Socrates states, “Therefore, we should not return wrong for wrong nor do evil to a single man, no matter what he may have done to us.” Socrates realizes just how revolutionary this morality is. He continues, “And between those who do believe and those who don’t there can be no common counsel: of necessity they must despise each other when they view each other’s deliberations.”

Vlastos concludes by returning to how Socrates see his own hierarchy of ultimate ends: “The final unconditional good is happiness. It is the only we “pursue” or desire only for its own sake and thus the “end” of all our actions…. The supreme non-final unconditional good, both necessary and sufficient for our happiness, hence the sovereign constituent of our good is virtue…. Regardless of whatever other good we may gain or forfeit, if we achieve this constituent of the good we shall possess the final good: we shall be happy…. The subordinate, non-final and conditional goods: health, wealth, etc. the difference to our happiness these can make is miniscule. But goods they are; we shall be happier with than without them, but only if we use them aright, for they are not “good just by themselves”: if separated from wisdom they will go sour on us and we shall be worse off with them than we would have been without them…. The “intermediaries”, which are reckoned “neither good nor evil” because they are not constituents of the good: their value is purely instrumental; they are never desired for their own sake, but only for the sake of goods.”

“On What Matters: Volume 2” by Derek Parfit

Parfit begins his second volume by giving ample space to his critics. In fact, he publishes four response commentaries to the philosophical system he outlined in Volume 1, by Susan Wolf, Allen Wood, Barbara Herman, and T.M. Scanlon. Parfit comments on each essay in detail before proceeding with his own intellectual project, two hundred and fifty odd pages in. His project was to unite the moral frameworks of deontology, contractualism, and consequentialism in an overarching objective moral system. He comments, “If there is no single supreme principle, that, I agree, would not be a tragedy. But it would be a tragedy if there was no single true morality. And conflicting moralities could not all be true. In trying to combine these different kinds of moral theory, my main aim was not to find a supreme principle, but to find out whether we can resolve some deep disagreements…. If we cannot resolve our disagreements, that would give us reasons to doubt that there are any true principles.”

In the rest of the volume, Parfit fleshes out and wrestles with various aspects of his moral system. He discusses the distribution of the pie. “In assessing the goodness of outcomes, I have claimed, we can plausibly give weight to some distributive principles. We can believe that one of two outcomes would be better, despite giving people a smaller sum of total benefits, if these benefits would be more equally shared, or if more of the benefits would come to people who were worse off. We can also believe that it would be better if people were given equal chances to receive some benefit.” Further on, Parfit discusses retributional justice. “Though there are some normative truths, some of which are moral truths, no punishment could ever be deserved in the retributive sense, or be retributively unjust.”

Most of this book deals with morality and norms within an objective lens. “As realist Objectivists, our maxim isn’t to satisfy our desires. We respond to the facts that give us reasons to have our desires. Our maxim might be: I will make it my end to achieve whatever I have most reason to try to achieve, because these are the ends that are most worth achieving.” Parfit titled these volumes “On What Matters” so one might suspect that Parfit does care deeply that things do, in fact, matter. He is fighting nihilism at every turn of the page. “It matters whether people believe that some things matter.” Parfit believes we must reorient philosophy. “It was philosophers who first claimed that reasons are given only by desires, that all rationality is instrumental, and that no values are facts, because there are no normative truths. Given our increasing powers to destroy or damage the conditions of life on Earth, we need to lose these beliefs. It is not wealth that matters, or mere preference-fulfillment, but happiness, justice, and the other things that can make our lives worth living.”

Parfit passionately believes that there are some objective normative truths that humans can eventually come to agree on. “There are some claims that are irreducibly normative in the reason-involving sense, and are in the strongest sense true. But these truths have no ontological implications. For such claims to be true, these reason-involving properties need not exist either as natural properties in the spatio-temporal world, or in some non-spatio-temporal part of reality…. On our view, since these beliefs are irreducibly normative, they are not about entities or properties that are a part of the causal fabric of the world. Since such normative truths could not have any observable effects, or help to explain what we can observe, we could not have any empirical evidence supporting our belief in these truths…. Since our fundamental normative beliefs are not about contingent features of the world, we don’t need to have empirical evidence for their truths. Nor do we need to be causally affected by these normative truths…. These various beliefs are about what must be true, in the strong sense that applies to every possible world…. I shall call these our modal beliefs…. There cannot be any non-normative facts, such as physical or psychological facts, that directly conflict with our beliefs about practical and moral reasons.”

Parfit settles on his Convergence Claim (CC): “If everyone knew all of the relevant non-normative facts, used the same normative concepts, understood and carefully reflected on the relevant arguments, and was not affected by any distorting influence, we and others would have similar normative beliefs…. CC is an empirical claim…. When we think about cases that involve imprecise cardinal comparisons, we should deliberately avoid thinking in either spatial or numerical terms—except as a form of shorthand that we should remember to be seriously misleading…. The truth would often be that (1) neither of two outcomes would be better, and that (2) these outcomes would be very far from being precisely equally good. Though we can call such outcomes equally good, it is clearer to say that neither would be better…. Similar claims apply to questions about the wrongness of acts, and about what we ought to do, or have most reason to do…. When different people have conflicting beliefs about which of two outcomes would be better, or which of two acts would be wrong, that is often because these people mistakenly assume that such normative truths are more precise than they really are. If these people realized that many such truths are very imprecise, they would often cease to disagree.” Parfit realizes that we are nowhere close to such a reconciliation. “Our normative thinking is still in its childhood.”

Parfit, once again, concludes this volume with a look towards humanity’s future. “After many thousands of years of responding to reasons in ways that helped them survive and reproduce, human beings can now respond to other reasons. We are a part of the Universe that is starting to understand itself…. What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history. If there are no rational beings elsewhere, it may depend on us and our successors whether it will all be worth it, because the existence of the Universe will have been on the whole good.”

“The Cure for Psychoanalysis” by Adam Phillips

This is a collection from a gathering at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis billed as, ‘A Day with Adam Phillips’. The book contains the essay he delivered that day, “Winnicott’s Magic: Playing and Reality and Reality”, along with some commentaries, the transcripts of an interview, conducted by Edward Corrigan, and of a couple Q&A sessions from fellow practicing psychoanalysts, before concluding with a final essay by Phillips. It is all typical Phillips, in the best of ways.

In his lead essay, Phillips quotes Winnicott, “We have yet to tackle the question of what life itself is about. Our psychotic patients force us to give attention to this sort of basic problem. We now see that it is not instinctual satisfaction that makes a baby begin to be, to feel that life is real, to find life worth living. In fact, instinctual gratifications start off as part-functions and they become seductions unless based on a well-established capacity in the individual person for total experience, and for experience in the area of transitional phenomena.” Phillips expands, “For Winnicott the question psychoanalysis addresses is how, if at all, developmentally the individual finds life worth living…. Winnicott is saying that it is not a consensual fact that life is worth living; indeed, finding it worth living is a basic problem…. But we can’t agree about what life is about, or that if we could that it would be worth living; yet each individual given the chance — the chance provided by an early environment, the chance provided by the psychoanalytic setting — can find out for themselves what they feel and think about this…. The individual makes his own original answers to the question out of the cultural traditions he or she has access to.”

Phillips next poses a tangential question. “What would it be like to live in the world less compliantly, or to live in a less compliant world? All the many versions of psychoanalysis, it seems to me — unsurprisingly perhaps, given its historical moment — organise themselves around this question. A question we might think of, historically, as in part the legacy of the reformation.” Phillips pivots to discuss Winnicott’s expertise, play. “Winnicott is saying in Playing and Reality that instinctual gratification is an insufficient substantive belief, norm and value promoted by traditional psychoanalysis. And that what he wants to offer in its place, or additionally, is play.” Winnicott, himself, states, “Psychoanalysts who have rightly emphasised the significance of instinctual experience and of reactions to frustration have failed to state with comparable clearness or conviction the tremendous intensity of these non-climactic experiences that are called playing.” Phillips posits, “Playing was the medium for the true self — the self that could be, feel real, and could find out whether potentially their life was worth living and reality was not merely or solely something demanding compliance…. For Winnicott, playing and reality make each other work, bring out the best in each other like a good couple.”

During the Q&A period, Phillips, in an aside, discusses his overarching project. “My project, so to speak, if I have one, is to work out what it would be to be kind to the patient from the patient’s point of view…. We should be much more curious, in a sense much more curious about what people think they’re coming for and what else they might be coming for apart from what they already know…. This project is about not knowing what you’re talking about and having to work this out collaboratively.” Phillips comments on the superego, “I think it is striking, and it’s what prompted the paper [on Winnicott], how incredibly unimaginative and vicious the superego is. And how much the superego pretends it knows who we really are. So, the superego is an essentialist and a bully and extremely narrow-minded and therefore very stupid…. One of the main things that’s going on in psychoanalysis is an understanding of what this superego’s a self-cure for…. The superego seems to operate as a kind of organiser of one’s life…. And the problem with this part of oneself is that it is omniscient. It really believes that it knows who we are, and it keeps telling us who we really are.” On suicide, Phillips ponders, “What always amazes me is how few people kill themselves, and how much people can put up with, and why they are willing to put up with what they put up with…. Masochism is our greatest device for survival. If you can turn pain into pleasure, you’re ahead…. I’m always wondering what keeps people going. Why they keep at it. Because I mean, I know I want to keep at it, as far as I know, but it’s still, it seems to me an interesting mystery.”

Finally, in the eponymous essay, “The Cure for Psychoanalysis”, Phillips discusses psychoanalysis’ ambivalent relationship with the notion of a cure. “A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption.” What does psychoanalysis have to offer? “Psychoanalytic treatment is an antidote to indoctrination; it is an enquiry into how people influence each other, into the individual’s history of living in other people’s regimes…. When we become aware of what we are not, as yet, aware of, we do not know what will happen, we cannot know what we might do or become. This is the essential, the defining risk of psychoanalysis that concepts of cure attempt to allay or appease: making conscious has unpredictable effects…. Freud’s fiction of the unconscious left him and some of his followers with an abiding and unsettling question: what could the unconscious have to do with the concept of cure?”

“Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism” by James Simpson

Simpson is a Professor of English at Harvard College, specializing in the late Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation. He makes the contention that the Reformation fomented a state of permanent revolution within England between 1517 and 1688, in which each successive generation of puritans sought to purge and purify their predecessors, in what was, more often than not, an illiberal process of righteous certainty. Simpson claims “(i) that dissident, repressive, non-conservative sixteenth-century evangelical religious culture was revolutionary; (ii) that revolutionary evangelical culture was simultaneously a culture of permanent revolution, repeatedly and compulsively repudiating its own prior forms; and (iii) that permanent revolution was, as it always is, punishingly violent, fissiparous, and unsustainable, so much so that it needed to invent self-stabilizing mechanisms.”

The evangelical puritans were crippled by doubt and despair about their own predestination. Thus, they had a complicated relationship with the idea of works on earth. “Magisterial and Reformed Protestants worked hard precisely because they did not value works as currency that can satisfy God and change the future…. Works, that is, did not produce meritoriously deserved election. Early modern Protestants worked hard, instead, because works were understood as the fruit of election; works, that is, were signs of the divine decision already taken.”

Hypocrisy was a charge that Puritans threw around with greater and greater scope and scale as the revolution progressed. “Whereas late medieval hypocrisy discourse had singled out one religious order (especially friars, and the different order of friars) as ecclesiastical hypocrites, by the 1520s the charge was being applied globally to the entire Catholic Church. There was no safe place within that Church, since the entire institution, from its Antichrist papal head down, was thought to be committed to the destruction of Christian souls…. As with individual hypocrites, so too with a hypocritical institution—there was no way of reforming it; revolutionary eradication of the entire corrupt edifice (and not just one corrupt order of the Church) was the only way forward.” Almost from their inception, intra-Protestant charges of hypocrisy overwhelmed the Catholic. Soon, every puritan looked first inward, the most the sincere the most sincerely. The charge and the self-doubt could be crippling. Simpson expands, “The puritan saint’s subjectivity sits on the edge of time, straining for eternity, inevitably vulnerable to the trigger switch of hypocrisy.”

For the Puritans, scripture reigned supreme. “If one believes that Scripture determines the Church, as Luther and the entire evangelical tradition after him did, then Scripture’s authority must eject everything without scripture; authorization—mere human “traditions”—from the Church.” William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible into English, who was burned at the stake for that crime, claimed, “For the whole scripture and all believing hearts testify that we are begotten through the Word.” Luther, himself, before the Emperor at Worms in April of 1521, is purported to have spoken, “I am defeated, the scriptures having been adduced by me, and, with my conscience captured by the words of God, I am unable to retreat.”

Much of Simpson’s argument rests on a deep textual analysis of the fiction of the period. He delves into Marlowe, Shakespeare, and, particularly, Milton. “The word “liberty” is used twelve times within Paradise Lost…. In a poem whose stated theme is disobedience, there are two great disobeyers, Satan and Eve. Both, by Milton’s account, disobey precisely in the name of Liberty. Both Eve and Satan disobey a royal decree in whose making they had no part, and both dismiss that prior condition of their very being as an unjustified, enslaving restraint on their liberty.”

Simpson concludes by trying to encapsulate what the long Puritan Reformation of 1517-1688 meant for England, “No word short of “revolution” will answer to the experience. Once that word is introduced, a range of cultural practices (e.g. predestination and denial of free will; models of singular personal authenticity; image destruction; persecution of “witches”; suppression of drama; literalist reading practice; and absolutist policies) come into view as characteristic of revolutions, and as starkly contrastive with the preceding cultural dispensation…. Revolutions claim to start history afresh, and narrative of the pre-revolutionary period threatens the freshness of that start…. I have called that logic “permanent revolution.” Telling that story points us less to the Catholic/Protestant conflict and more to the much more dynamic energies within Protestantism, that pushed Protestant movements to reject prior versions of themselves.”

“Pessoa: A Biography” by Richard Zenith

Zenith had for years extensively translated Fernando Pessoa before deciding to undertake this 1000 page tome, a biography of Portugal’s greatest poet and, perhaps, its greatest philosopher, as well. Pessoa was an extremely odd man. His poetry was often written by heteronyms, not to be confused with pseudonyms. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities—dreams of mine that were carefully crafted, envisaged with photographic clarity, and fathomed to the depths of their souls.” These were not mere imaginary friends, but embodied lives that lived within Pessoa. “Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I am the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me…. I can remember envisioning the shape, motions, character, and life story of various unreal figures who were as visible and as close to me as the manifestations of what we call, perhaps too hastily, real life.” Pessoa had a humor about it all. “Given the dearth of people he can get along with, what can a man of sensibility do but invent his own friends, or at least his intellectual companions?” Zenith adds, “Pessoa accepted that there was no essential self he would ever know. But he hoped to discover the place and significance of the relative self—the ever-changing person or ensemble of persons called Fernando Pessoa—in the grand scheme of things.”

The heteronyms living inside his head were something that Pessoa actively thought about and cultivated. He digs down into his method, “Let’s suppose that a supremely depersonalized writer, such as Shakespeare, instead of creating the character Hamlet as part of a play, had created him simply as a character, without any play. He would have created, so to speak, a play of just one character—a prolonged analytical monologue.” Zenith compares two of Pessoa’s most prodigious heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro and Bernardo Soares, “Caeiro had celebrated the outer world, all that is knowable through vision, hearing, and the other senses. He prided himself, on being “superficial,” asserting that reality has no inner “depth” except in our confused thinking. Soares, while seeing everything with no less clarity, internalized the world and then—in an instantaneous turnaround—externalized his sensations of it. His world included dreams and imagined things as well as things seen.” Caeiro insisted, “Behold the world!” Soares, “I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write, I unroll myself in sentences  and paragraphs, I punctuate myself…. I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads.” We will give Pessoa the last word,

In this world where we forget,

We are shadows of who we are,

And the real actions we perform

In the other world, where we live as souls,

Are here wry grins and appearances.

Pessoa’s aesthetic and artistic styles were as varied as his stable of heteronyms. Even writing as himself, he often contradicted himself, fibbed, and embellished. He once declaimed, “Superior artistic production is, by its nature, a product of decadence and degeneration.” He was a supreme degenerate, but only in the philosophical sense. He later claimed, “I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth.” As Alberto Caeiro,

If I die very young, take note:

I was never more than a child who played.

I was heathen like the sun and the water,

With a universal religion that only humans lack.

Pessoa’s politics, like everything in his life, were complicated. He was, above all, an individualist and a lover of personal liberty and freedom, both in art and in life. He also loved his homeland, in an abstract sense, though he also did love Lisbon, particularly (and in reality). Pessoa claimed, “My nation is the Portuguese language.” Words were his truths. Zenith expands, “Pessoa rejected fascism and other radical nationalisms for the same reason he rejected ideologies of class struggle such as communism: they reduced the individual to an interchangeable unit at the service of some higher, collective reality such as the nation, or the proletariat…. The only social reality, [Pessoa] insisted, is the individual.” As Alberto Caeiro,

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.

But I’ve never seen people, or humanity.

I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,

Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.

Being Fernando Pessoa was no easy task. “What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life—me, so calm and peaceful?” As Alvaro de Campos, he admits, “In each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.” As Bernardo Soares, “What I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been.” For his entire life, Pessoa also struggled to understand others. It was not for want of trying. As Bernardo Soares, “How other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which—because it’s a consciousness—seems to me like the only one.” Pessoa had enough trouble with the stable of consciousnesses just contained within his own head. “All of us, in our human and realized life, are but the caricature of our soul. We are always less than what we are. We are always a grotesque translation of what we wished to be, of what we inwardly and truly are.”

Pessoa’s reading interests were varied, but he always had a special place in his heart for all things mystical, occult, and esoteric. He often cast horoscopes for himself, his friends, and his heteronyms. He took it all deadly seriously and lived his life by what the horoscopes revealed. He also created and populated various secret societies and orders, complete with their own complex series of rituals, all in his own mind. “My brother, everything in this world is symbol and dream—symbols whatever we have, dreams whatever we desire. The whole universe, to which we belong through error and as punishment, is an allegory whose meaning you understand today since your eyes, being closed, are open, and your ears, being covered, are finally able to hear.” In one of his few book-length works published during his lifetime, “The Message”, Pessoa writes, as Portugal’s mythical long-lost King Sebastian returned,

Without madness what is man

But a healthy beast,

A postponed corpse that breeds?