“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.”