“Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics” by Martin Heidegger (translated Richard Taft)

This is a collection of lectures that Heidegger gave, primarily on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, through the winter of 1927. It is dense stuff. It also often strays from the consensus into Heidegger’s own unique interpretations. Heidegger quotes Kant first, “I entitle all knowledge transcendental that is occupied in general not so much with objects as with the kind of knowledge we have of objects, insofar as this is possible a priori.” Heidegger adds, “Hence, transcendental knowledge does not investigate the being itself, but rather the possibility of the preliminary understanding of Being…. The Critique of Pure Reason has nothing to do with a “theory of knowledge.”” He continues, “With the problem of transcendence, a “theory of knowledge” is not set in place of metaphysics, but rather the inner possibility of ontology is questioned…. The transcendental problem of the inner possibility of a priori synthetic knowledge is the question concerning the essence of the truth of ontological transcendence. It is a matter of determining the essence of “transcendental truth, which precedes all empirical truth and makes it possible.””

Kant begins with pure reason, according to Heidegger, “The ground for the source [Quellgrund] for laying the ground for metaphysics is human pure reason, so that it is precisely the humanness of reason, i.e., its finitude, which will be essential for the core of this problematic of ground-laying…. Finitude lies in the essential structure of knowledge itself.” Heidegger continues, “Pure intuition is required as the one essential element of ontological knowledge in which the experience of beings is grounded…. In this way both pure intuitions, space and time, are allotted to two [different] regions of experience.” Kant states, “Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever.” Heidegger explains, “Hence, time has preeminence over space. As universal, pure intuition, it [time] must for this reason become the guiding and supporting essential element of pure knowledge, of the transcendence which forms knowledge…. The object of an intuition, which is always a particular, is nevertheless determined as “such and such” in a “universal representation,” i.e., in the concept. The finitude of thinking intuition is therefore a knowing through concepts; pure knowing is pure intuition through pure concepts…. Ontological knowledge is rightly termed knowledge, however, if it attains truth. But it does not just “have” truth; rather, is is the original truth, which Kant therefore terms “transcendental truth.”… Ontology is none other than the explicit unveiling of the systemic whole of pure knowledge, to the extent that it forms transcendence.”

Kant wants to separate a priori knowledge from the realm of empirics, “Now, because what matters first and foremost to Kant is to make transcendence visible once in order to elucidate on the basis of it the essence of transcendental (ontological) knowledge, that is why the Objective Deduction is “also essential to my purposes. The other seeks to investigate pure understanding itself, according to its possibility and the powers of knowledge upon which it itself rests, and, consequently, seeks to consider it in a more subjective relationship…. The chief question always remains: What and how much can understanding and reason know, free from all experience?””

Heidegger views the subject, the I, as integral to Kant’s metaphysics, “The pure, finite self has, in itself, temporal character. However, if the I, pure reason, is essentially temporal, then it is precisely on the basis of this temporal character that the decisive determination which Kant gives of transcendental apperception first becomes understandable…. Time and the “I think” no longer stand incompatibly and incomparably at odds; they are the same. With his laying of the ground for metaphysics, and through the radicalism with which, for the first time, he transcendentally interpreted both time, always for itself, and the “I think,” always for itself, Kant brought both of them together in their original sameness—without, to be sure, expressly seeing this as such for himself…. Precisely because in its innermost essence the self is originally time itself, that I cannot be grasped as “temporal,” i.e., as within time. Pure sensibility (time) and pure reason are not just of the same type; rather they belong together in the unity of the same essence, which makes possible the finitude of human subjectivity in its wholeness…. Kant’s laying of the ground for metaphysics leads to the transcendental power of imagination. This is the root of both stems, sensibility and understanding. As such, it makes possible the original unity of ontological synthesis. This root, however, is rooted in original time. The original ground which becomes manifest in the ground-laying is time.”

Finally, Heidegger explicitly brings in the concept of Dasein, “The problem of the laying of the ground for metaphysics is rooted in the question concerning Dasein in man, i.e., concerning his innermost ground, concerning the understanding of Being as essentially existent finitude…. Insofar as its essence lies in existence the question concerning the essence of Dasein is the existential question…. The unveiling of the constitution of the Being of Dasein is Ontology. Insofar as the ground for the possibility of metaphysics is found therein—the finitude of Dasein as its fundament—it is called Fundamental Ontology…. The basic fundamental-ontological act of the Metaphysics of Dasein as the laying of the ground for metaphysics is hence a “remembering again.”” Heidegger concludes, “[It is] because the understanding of Being must be projected upon time from out of the ground of the finitude of the Dasein in man, that time, in essential unity with the transcendental power of imagination, attained the central metaphysical function in the Critique of Pure Reason.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Esther” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction to the Book of Esther, “Of the several biblical books that test the limits of the canon, Esther may well be the most anomalous. It is the only scriptural text of which no scrap has been uncovered at Qumran…. The likely date of the book’s composition would be sometime late in the fifth century B.C.E. or perhaps slightly later…. In all likelihood, then, the book was written not long after the return to Zion authorized by the Persian emperor Artaxerxes and led by Ezra and Nehemiah.”

Alter alerts us to the uniqueness of Esther, “The most unusual aspect of Esther, for a book that made it into the biblical canon, is that it offers very strong evidence of having been written primarily for entertainment. It has variously been described as a farce, a burlesque, a satire, a fairy tale, and a carnivalesque narrative, and it is often quite funny, with sly sexual comedy.” One theme repeats itself, “Reversal is the key to the plot of Esther.”

In Esther 2:5, Alter gives us the history of the name, “Mordecai son of Jair. His father has a good Hebrew name, but his own name is derived from that of the Babylonian god Marduk…. Similarly, Esther (who also is given a Hebrew name, Hadassah) has a name deriving from that of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar.” Alter continues with the derivation of words in Esther 3:7, “a pur. This is a Persian loanword, and thus it is immediately glossed by the Hebrew word for “lot,” goral. The Hebrew plural form of the word, Purim, becomes the name of the carnivalesque holiday for which the Book of Esther serves as rationale.”

Alter points out one striking aspect of the book in his comments on Esther 4:14, “relief and rescue will come to the Jews from elsewhere. The early rabbis understood this to be God, but the expression is quite vague, and as throughout the book, God is not mentioned.” Throughout the book, te theme of reversal returns again and again. In Esther 7:9, “Look, there is actually a stake that Haman has prepared for Mordecai…. In the fairy-tale logic of this narrative, that action is a neat reversal: the very instrument of the would-be executioner is used to execute him.”

Finally, in Esther 8:15, there is reference to earlier biblical canon, “And Mordecai came out before the king in royal garb…. Behind Mordecai’s being clothed in regal garments (earlier he was in sackcloth) lies the Joseph story, in which the former Hebrew prisoner is dressed by Pharaoh in regal clothing after he is invested with power as vice-regent.”

“The Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James

Arguably James’ best known novel, this is a tale of love, duty, wealth, and mores. The heroine, Isabel, is an American lady, who comes into a great fortune while visiting her aunt in England. “The pessimism of this young lady was transient; she ultimately made up her mind that to be rich was a virtue, because it was to be able to do, and to do was sweet. It was the contrary of weakness. To be weak was, for a young lady, rather graceful, but, after all, as Isabel said to herself, there was a larger grace than that.”

Isabel had her hands full of eligible suitors, but her love found its own path. “Her mind contained no class which offered a natural place to Mr. Osmond — he was a specimen apart. Isabel did not say all these things to herself at the time; but she felt them, and afterwards they became distinct. For the moment she only said to herself that Mr. Osmond had the interest of rareness. It was not so much what he said and did, but rather what he withheld, that distinguished him; he indulged in no striking deflections from common usage; he was an original without being an eccentric.” For his part, Gilbert Osmond might not have been in love, but he was intrigued from the start. “Osmond was in his element; at last he had material to work with. He always had an eye to effect; and his effects were elaborately studied. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great.” James’ cutting description of the man continues, “Under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values, Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master, as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success…. Everything he did was pose…. His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world’s curiosity and then declining to satisfy it.”

The marriage of Isabel and Gilbert was not a success. “It was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one…. She knew of no wrong that he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel; she simply believed that he hated her. That was all she accused him of…. He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship, any more than she. But she had only seen half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now — she saw the whole man.”

After her marriage, Isabel was still not forgotten by a few of her past loves. One was a Bostonian, Caspar Goodwood, who travelled to Rome to call on her and assess for himself her nuptial situation. “To-night what he was chiefly thinking of was that he was to leave her to-morrow, and that he had gained nothing by coming but the knowledge that he was as superfluous as ever. About herself he had gained no knowledge; she was imperturbable, impenetrable. He felt the old bitterness, which he had tried so hard to swallow, rise again in his throat, and he knew that there are disappointments which last as long as life.” Adding to the insult, her husband, Mr. Osmond, had befriended him on his many social calls to their palatial residence and once tried to give marital advice. Whether genuine or not, it was hard to judge, “Ah, you see, being married is in itself an occupation. It isn’t always active; it’s often passive; but that takes even more attention. Then my wife and I do so many things together…. If you are ever bored, get married. Your wife indeed may bore you, in that case; but you will never bore yourself. You will always have something to say to yourself — always have a subject of reflection.”

Gilbert Osmond could be profound, even when not sincere. In speaking to Isabel, he offered, “You smile most expressively when I talk about us; but I assure you that we, we, is all that I know. I take our marriage seriously; you appear to have found a way of not doing so. I am not aware that we are divorced or separated; for me we are indissolubly united. You are nearer to me than any human creature, and I am nearer to you. It may be a disagreeable proximity; it’s one, at any rate, of our own deliberate making. You don’t like to be reminded of that, I know.”

“Metaphysics” by Aristotle (translated by W.D. Ross)

Aristotle is never an easy read. Some might say he is boring, repetitive, arcane, and dense. This treatise is the Master getting into first principles. He begins by defining philosophy. “It is right also that philosophy should be called knowledge of the truth. For the end of theoretical knowledge is truth, while that of practical knowledge is action (for even if they consider how things are, practical men do not study what is eternal but what stands in some relation at some time). Now we do not know a truth without its cause…. So that that which causes derivative truths to be true is most true. Therefore the principles of eternal things must be always most true.”

Aristotle discusses Plato’s concepts of the Forms, which he calls Ideas. “Nor is it possible to define any Idea. For the Idea is, as its supporters say, an individual, and can exist apart…. If the Ideas consist of Ideas (as they must, since elements are simpler than the compound), it will be further necessary that the elements of which the Idea consists, e.g. animal and two-footed, should be predicated of many subjects…. But this is not thought possible—every Idea is thought to be capable of being shared…. Now of these things being and unity are more substantial than principle or element or cause, but not even the former are substance, since in general nothing that is common is substance; for substance does not belong to anything but to itself and to that which has it, of which it is the substance…. Clearly no universal exists apart from the individuals…. The proximate matter and the form are one and the same thing, the one potentially, the other actually. Therefore to ask the cause of their being one is like asking the cause of unity in general; for each thing is a unity, and the potential and the actual are somehow one…. All potentialities that conform to the same type are starting points, and are called potentialities in reference to one primary kind, which is a starting-point of change in another thing or in the thing itself qua other…. The terms ‘being’ and ‘non-being’ are employed firstly with reference to the categories, and secondly with reference to the potentiality or actuality of these or their opposites, while being and non-being in the strictest sense are truth and falsity.”

Aristotle circles back again to the purpose of philosophy. “One might discuss the question whether the science we are seeking should be said to deal with the principles which are called elements. All men suppose these to be present in compound things; but it might be thought that the science we seek should treat rather of universals; for every formula and every science is of universals and not of particulars, so that as far as this goes it would deal with the highest classes. These would be being and unity; for these might most of all be supposed to contain all things that are, and to be most like principles because they are first by nature; for if they perish all other things are destroyed with them; for all things are and are one…. It is in general hard to say whether one must assume that there is a separable substance besides the sensible substances (i.e. the substances in this world), or that these are the real things and philosophy is concerned with them. For we seem to seek another kind of substance, and this is our problem, i.e. to see if there is something which can exist apart by itself and belongs to no sensible thing.” Aristotle returns next to substance. “Substance is the subject of our inquiry; for the principles and the causes we are seeking are those of substances. For if the universe is of the nature of a whole, substance is its first part; and if it coheres by virtue of succession, on this view also substance is first, and is succeeded by quality, and then by quantity. At the same time these latter are not even beings in the unqualified sense.”

Finally, Aristotle introduces his concept of the first mover. “There is, then, something which is always moved with an unceasing motion, which is motion in a circle; and this is plain not in theory only but in fact. Therefore the first heavens must be eternal. There is therefore also something which moves them. And since that which is moved and moves is intermediate, there is a mover which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality. And the object of desire and the object of thought move in this way; they move without being moved. The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of wish…. Therefore if the actuality of the heavens is primary motion, then in so far as they are in motion, in this respect they are capable of being otherwise,—in place, even if not in substance. But since there is something which moves while itself unmoved, existing actually, this can in no way be otherwise than as it is…. The first mover, then, of necessity exists; and in so far as it is necessary, it is good, and in this sense a first principle…. On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature…. There is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things. It has been shown also that this substance cannot have any magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible. For it produces movement through infinite time, but nothing finite has infinite power…. But it is also clear that it is impassive and unalterable.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Qohelet” (translated by Robert Alter)

Qohelet is more commonly referred to as Ecclesiastes. Alter suggests, “Qohelet is in some ways the most peculiar book of the Hebrew Bible. The peculiarity starts with its name. The long tradition of translation into many languages, beginning with the ancient Greek version, uses some form of “Ecclesiastes” for the title. The Septuagint translators chose that title because it means “the one who assembles.”” The exact meaning behind Qohelet, however, remains a mystery. “It is best to think of Qohelet as the literary persona of a radical philosopher articulating, in an evocative rhythmic prose that occasionally scans as poetry, a powerful dissent from the mainline Wisdom outlook that is the background of his thought…. His unblinking, provocative reflections on the ephemerality of life, the flimsiness of human value, and the ineluctable fate of death read like the work of a stubborn and prickly original—one who in all likelihood wrote in the early or middle decades of the fourth century B.C.E.”

Alter continues by laying out the background of the book, “The stringing together of moral maxims in concise symmetrical or antithetical formulations, sometimes with rather tenuous connections between one maxim and the next, is clearly reminiscent of the Book of Proverbs…. The central enigma, then, of the Book of Qohelet is how this text of radical dissent, in which time, history, politics, and human nature are seen in such a bleak light, became part of the canon…. Qohelet has enough of a connection with tradition that he never absolutely denies the idea of a personal god, but his ‘elohim often seems to be a stand-in for the cosmic powers-that-be.”

Breath is the recurring theme of the Book of Qohelet. Alter begins, in discussing Qohelet 1:2, by detailing this subject matter and relating why some other translations have missed the mark, “merest breath. The form of the Hebrew, havel havalim, is a way of indicating a superlative or an extreme case. Rendering this phrase as an abstraction (King James Version, “vanity of vanities,” or Michael Fox’s more philosophically subtle “absurdity of absurdities”) is inadvisable, for the writer uses concrete metaphors to indicate general concepts, constantly exploiting the emotional impact of the concrete image and its potential to suggest several related ideas. Hevel, “breath” or “vapor,” is something utterly insubstantial and transient, and in this book suggests futility, ephemerality, and also, as Fox argues, the absurdity of existence.”

In Qohelet 1:5, Alter describes how jarring some philosophical ideas in this book are, “The sun rises and the sun sets. The cyclical movement of day and night is taken as prime evidence in nature of the repetitive cyclical character of reality. This notion is a radical challenge to the conception of time and sequence inscribed in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible, where things are imagined to progress meaningfully (as in the seven days of creation) toward a fulfillment.” Another theme of the Book of Qohelet is the contingency of life. In Qohelet 3:13, Alter relates, “this is a gift from God. Qohelet repeatedly urges us to enjoy the pleasures of life here and now, but he is perfectly aware that it is a matter of luck, or God’s unfathomable determination, whether we are given the time and means to enjoy the good things of life, or whether we are condemned to die, to uproot, to rip down, to mourn.”

Death is another recurring motif. Alter relates in Qohelet 7:1, “and the day of death and the day one is born. Many commentators understand this to mean that one can never be sure of one’s good name until the end of life, but this make Qohelet blander than he actually is. He begins with a rather anodyne proverbial saying, that a good name (shem) is better than precious oil (shemen), but then he goes on to say that departing life is better than entering it, for life itself, whatever one’s reputation, is a miserable affair from one end to the other.”

In Qohelet 11:8, Alter recounts yet another return to the concept of breath, “Whatever comes is mere breath. It is unlikely that this refers to death, as some have claimed, because in Qohelet it is darkness that is associated with death, whereas “mere breath” is rather the futile substance of worldly experience. Whatever happens, then, in our lives is mere breath—fleeting, insubstantial, without meaning—and all we can do is to take pleasure in what seems pleasurable.” Finally, Alter details a kind of envelope structure framing the book in Qohelet 12:8, “Merest breath, said Qohelet. In a gesture of tight closure, Qohelet repeats precisely the refrain with which he began the book.”

“Athens and Jerusalem” by Lev Shestov

This is a deep work in which Shestov contrasts the knowledge of Athens, philosophy governed by reason, with the knowledge of Jerusalem, faith in revelation. Shestov begins, “the task of philosophy consists in teaching men to submit joyously to Necessity which hears nothing and is indifferent to all.” He quotes Spinoza, who he considers a second embodiment of Socrates, the paragon of Greek philosophy, “Contentment with one’s self can spring from reason, and that contentment which springs from reason is the highest possible.” Shestov recounts, “when Leibniz set out on the search for truth, he always armed himself with the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.” Shestov contrasts reason with Kant’s conception of individual experience, “It tells us indeed what is but it does not tell us that it must necessarily be so and not otherwise. Therefore it does not give us any true universality, and reason which aspires so avidly to this kind of knowledge is more irritated than satisfied by it.” Shestov continues, “Reason avidly seeks the universal and the necessary…. But Kant thinks only of pleasing reason, to which God, the soul and free will matter little—provided only that one does not offend Necessity! The positive sciences have justified themselves in the eyes of Necessity.” Kant himself states, “Necessity and strict universality are sure signs of a priori knowledge.” Hegel agrees, “Man must raise himself to the abstract generality in which it is really indifferent to him whether he does or does not exist.” Aristotle comments, “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded, it does not even listen.” Shestov concludes, “Not only the good but the truth as well wishes man to bow down before it…. We are asked not only to submit to Necessity but to adore it: such always has been, and such is still, the fundamental task of philosophy.”

Shestov questions this quest for knowledge as the only legitimate means to truth. “In the world where the fruits of the tree of knowledge became the principle not only of all philosophy but of being itself, thinking humanity dreamed of the possibility of the greatest victories and conquests…. According to the wisdom of Socrates, the greatest good for man is to feed on the fruits of the tree of knowledge…. Socrates repeats Adam…. The philosopher is obliged, like everyone else, to accept reality; before reality the philosopher finds himself as impotent as anyone. The only thing then that the philosopher can and must do is to teach men how they should live in the midst of this nightmarish reality from which one cannot awaken because it is the only reality. What this means is that the aim of truth is not truth but edification, or, to put it differently, not the fruits of the tree of life but the fruits of the tree of knowledge.”

Shestov contrasts Socrates’ quest with the work of Luther. “The virtue and happiness of the man who by his own powers can turn neither to God nor to immortality, for reason has enchained his will and obliged him to go where Necessity pushes him, appeared to Luther as the fall of man, as original sin.” Luther states, “Thus the gospel leads us beyond and above the light of law and of reason into the darkness of faith, where light and reason have nothing to do…. So let the conscience be free from the law, but let the body obey it.” Nietzsche puts it somewhat differently, “The freedom of thought of our scientists is in my eyes only a jest—they lack in these things my suffering, my passion.” Kierkegaard expounds, “Innocence is ignorance. In the state of innocence man is determined not as mind but as soul, in unmediated union with his nature. The mind is still dormant in man. This idea is in harmony with the Bible which denies to man in the state of innocence knowledge of the difference between good and evil.” Shestov continues the thought, “The Bible says, on the contrary, that all misfortunes of man come from knowledge…. In its very essence knowledge, according to the Bible, excludes faith and is the sin par excellence or the original sin.” This constitutes “the only true critique of pure reason that has been formulated here on earth.” Shestov goes on, “freedom does not consist in the possibility of choosing between good and evil, as we today are condemned to think. Freedom consists in the force and power not to admit evil into the world.”

For Shestov this all goes back to philosophy’s worship of necessity. “The horror of the fall, the horror of the original sin of which Nietzsche and Luther have told us, consists precisely in the fact that man seeks his salvation just where his ruin awaits him. Necessity does not offend the fallen man. He loves it, he venerates it, and this veneration is in his eyes the testimony of his own grandeur and virtue, as Nietzsche who reproved Socrates’ decadence has himself confessed. And Spinoza, following the thought of the wisest of men, sings the glory of Necessity. The capacity “to endure with equanimity” everything that fate decrees no longer offends him, it even rejoices him…. Knowledge and virtue have paralyzed our will and have plunged our spirit into a somnolence such that we see our perfection in impotence and submission.”

Shestov continues by describing the debate in the Middle Ages reconciling the philosophy of the ancient Greeks with the truth of the Bible. He states that “the essential thing for metaphysics is not only to present us with truths but to do it in such a way that these truths are irrefutable and that there be no place beside them for other truths contradicting them.” In contrast, “all the fundamental truths of revelation have come to man without “a shadow, without a trace of proof.”… The God of Scripture is above the truth as well as the good.” Aquinas states, “The meaning of knowledge is that, of what is known, it is believed impossible for it to be otherwise.” Aristotle teaches in his Metaphysics, “For the practical man well knows the ‘that’ but not the ‘why’; but the theoretical man knows the why and the causal relationship.”

Shestov again recounts the story of the fall of man. ““Your eyes will be opened,” says the serpent. “You shall die,” says God. The metaphysics of knowledge in Genesis is strictly tied to the metaphysics of being. If God has spoken truly, knowledge leads to death; if the serpent has spoken truly, knowledge makes man like God…. The Gnostics declared openly that it was God and not the serpent who had deceived man. In our age Hegel was not at all embarrassed to say that the serpent had spoken the truth to the first man and that the fruits of the tree of knowledge became the source of philosophy for all time.” Going back to Aristotle, Shestov continues on the journey of man, “the “that” (hoti) did not suffice for him; he desired the “why” (dioti).” In contrast to the eternal truths of knowledge, Tertullian proclaimed, “The son of God was crucified: it does not shame because it is shameful; and the son of God died: it is absolutely credible because it is absurd; and having been buried, he rose from the dead; it is certain because it is impossible.” Shestov writes, “Tertullian’s declaration must serve as the introduction or prolegomenato the organon of the Judeo-Christian philosophy, which was called to proclaim to the world the new notion, completely ignored up until then, of “created truth.””

Shestov contrasts this “created truth” with Greek philosophy’s two pillar principles, 1# “There is no greater misfortune for a man, we read in the Phaedo, than to become a hater of reason, a misologos. [2#] The holy is not holy because the gods love it, but it is precisely because the holy is holy that the gods love it, says Socrates in the Euthyphro.” This is a view that Augustine, Aquinas, and later Christian philosophers struggled to reconcile with their faith. When put to the test, they often submitted God’s will to reason and necessity. However, there were Christian philosophers who adamantly disagreed. Duns Scotus wrote, “As God therefore can act otherwise, so can he also give another law as right which becomes right if it is given by God, for no law is right except insofar as it is accepted by the divine will…. There is no cause why His will willed this except that His will is His will.” William of Occam concurred, “God can be obliged to nothing and therefore the occurrence of what God wishes is just.” Kierkegaard stated, “I have faith by virtue of the Absurd, for to God everything is possible.”

Shestov returns to the juxtaposition of the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. “The basic objection that the Greeks, as well as St. Augustine and later the Scholastics, made to the fruits of the tree of life was that these fruits are not in our power: the possibility of obtaining them, and still more of preserving them, does not depend on us.” Life is up to fate and/or contingency. Therefore, for the Greek philosophers “to escape from the Necessity which rules the world, there is no other means of salvation…. than to turn toward the intelligible world. It is there that the wise man seeks refuge against the sufferings, the horrors, the injustices of the real world…. For our reason faith is darkness, it is the lower degree which must be transcended in order to obtain clear and distinct knowledge. The apostles and the prophets were content with faith; the philosopher wishes more—he wishes to know.” Pascal does not deny this distinction, but comes to the opposite conclusion, “Nothing is more strongly opposed to faith than law and reason, nor can these two be overcome without great effort and labor; yet they must be overcome if you wish to be saved.” Kant (somewhat disingenuously) declares in his preface to The Critique of Pure Reason, “I had to renounce knowledge (Wissen) in order to make room for faith (Glauben).” Spinoza writes, “Philosophy has no end in view but truth, faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.” Descartes tries to reconcile the eternal and created truths, “If I affirm that there cannot be a mountain without a valley, this is not because it is really impossible that it should be otherwise, but simply because God has given me reason which cannot do other than assume the existence of a valley wherever there is a mountain.”

Shestov recounts the story of Moses coming face to face with God on top of Mount Sinai. “Where God is there is no law, there is freedom.” He also explains the revolutionary nature of Abraham. “In Abraham faith was a new dimension of thought that the world had not known before, that did not find any place on the level of ordinary consciousness, and that exploded all the “constraining truths” which our “experience” and our “reason” have whispered to us. Only such a philosophy can call itself Judeo-Christian, a philosophy which proposes not to accept but to overcome the self-evidences and which introduces into our thought a new dimension—faith.” Dostoevsky, too, would rebel against the bounds of necessity. “Two times two makes four (that is, the self-evident truths) is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. In any case, man has always been afraid of the two times two makes four and I am still afraid of it now…. Of course, I shall not break the wall with my head, if I really have not the power to break it, but I shall not accept it, I shall not resign myself to it, merely because it is a stone wall and I lack power. As if such a stone wall were an appeasement and contained but a word of peace merely because it is two times two makes four…. I wish to live according to my foolish will and not according to the rational will.” 

Shestov states that man must make a choice- it is either Jerusalem or Athens. “It is necessary to choose between Abraham and Socrates, between him whom Scripture declared a righteous man and him whom the pagan god proclaimed the wisest man.” Kierkegaard states, “Faith is the paradox that the individual as individual is above the universal.” Shestov continues, “religious philosophy is the final, supreme struggle to recover original freedom and the divine valde bonum [very good] which is hidden in that freedom and which, after the fall, was split into our powerless good and our destructive evil. Reason, I repeat, has ruined faith in our eyes; it has “revealed” in it man’s illegitimate pretension to subordinate the truth to his desires, and it has taken away from us the most precious of heaven’s gifts—the sovereign right to participate in the divine “let there be”—by flattening out our thought and reducing it to the plane of the petrified “it is.”… Human wisdom is foolishness before God and the wisest of men…. is the greatest of sinners. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” Shestov concludes, “Philosophy must not, then, be a looking around, a turning backwards (Besinnen), as we have become accustomed to think—to look backward is the end of all philosophy—but it must go forward fearlessly, without taking account of anything whatever, without turning around to look at anything whatever…. Philosophy is not Besinnen but struggle.”

“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (translated by John E. Woods)

This tome is considered by most to be Mann’s magnum opus. It would be fair to say it is a philosophical novel. It has little in the way of action, although it might be unfair to say it has absolutely no plot. There is intrigue, clandestine love affairs, and even a near death experience in a blizzard. But most of the story takes place inside a tuberculosis sanatorium up in the mountains. Mann introduces the novel’s protagonist with a philosophical flair, “A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries…. For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him—even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why—he needs either a rare heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.”

Mann’s novel plays with the idea of the subjectivity of time. “Looking back, the time he had spent here thus far seemed unnaturally brief and at the same time unnaturally long. It seemed everything to him, in fact, except how it really was—always presuming, of course, that time is part of nature and that it is therefore permissible to see it in conjunction with reality.” Castorp originally had intended to merely visit his cousin Joachim, who was a patient at the sanatorium, for a three week vacation, but Castorp ends up staying for quite awhile longer, after being admitted as a patient himself. “We would like to suggest that Hans Castorp would not have stayed with the people up here even this long beyond his originally planned date of departure, if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.”

While staying at the sanatorium, Castorp meets a fellow patient, an Italian humanist named Settembrini, who takes him under his wing and warns him of the dangers of staying too long up in the mountains. A bit of a pedagogue, he also tries to impart a bit of his enlightened rationality and humanist philosophy on his young pupil. Settembrini expresses, “A man of the West, despite all other propositions, has only one concern: reason, analysis, deeds, progress.” His sparring partner, a Jesuit named Naphta, attempts to sway Castorp in a different direction, “Allow me to remark, that every sort of torture, every bit of bloody justice, that does not arise from a belief in the next world is bestial nonsense. And as for the degradation of man, its history coincides exactly with the rise of the bourgeois spirit. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the teachings of nineteenth-century science and economics have omitted nothing, absolutely nothing, that seemed even vaguely useful for furthering such degradation, beginning with modern astronomy—which turned the focal point of the universe, that sublime arena where God and Satan struggled to possess the creature whom they both ardently coveted, into an unimportant little planet.” Debate after debate between the two combatants ensues and, needless to say, things eventually become a little more heated. Herr Settembrini will have the last word, “The duel, my friend, is not just any ‘arrangement.’ It is the final arrangement, a return to the primal state of nature, only slightly moderated by certain chivalrous, but purely superficial rules. The essence of the situation remains what it has been since the beginning, a physical struggle, and it is each man’s duty, however far he may be from nature, to keep himself equal to the situation. Whoever is unable to stand up for an ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of that ideal, and no matter how intellectual one may become, what matters is that one remains a man.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Lamentations” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction with some basic facts, “The only reasonably safe conclusion one can draw about the origins of the Book of Lamentations is the likelihood that it was composed in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C.E.” Next, he delves into its format, “Lamentations is unique among books of the Bible in that four of its five chapters are composed as alphabetic acrostics, with the third chapter being a triple acrostic…. It is unclear why the alphabetic acrostic form was felt appropriate for these laments. Could it be that the progress from aleph to taw was felt to imply a comprehensive listing of all the disasters that had befallen the people?” Finally, Alter delves into Lamentations’s modern liturgical usage, “One readily understands why it is that Jewish tradition fixed the recitation of these five laments as an annual ritual, not merely in commemoration of the destruction of the First Temple or the Second but also as a way of fathoming the ghastly recurrent violence that has darkened two millennia of history.”

In Lamentations 1:21, Alter details a poetic formula common in much biblical verse, “May they be like me. This line and the preceding one incorporate an implied causal sequence: first the enemies gloat over the destruction of Judah; then the speaker registers the fact that the catastrophe was God’s doing and the foe was only His instrument; finally, the speaker hopes that the same dire fate will overtake Zion’s conquerers. This is in fact a recurrent idea in Prophetic literature: that Judah’s enemies may be God’s “rod” of punishment but will in turn suffer for the terrible harm they have inflicted on Judah.”

Alter describes the clever use of metaphor in Lamentations 4:1, “How has gold turned dull. The first two verses of this lament are an interesting instance of literal statement that is then revealed to be a metaphor. Verse 1 appears to present a concrete image of precious materials debased—gold tarnished, gems spilled to the ground. Then, in verse 2, with the representation of Zion’s children “worth their weight in gold” (literally, “weighed in gold”), it becomes evident that they are the treasures now counted as worthless.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Ruth” (translated by Robert Alter)

The provenance of this short book of the Bible is somewhat disputed. Alter weighs in in his introduction, “Is Ruth in fact a Late Biblical book? Although this is the consensus of biblical scholars, there are some vocal dissenters. These tend to take at face value the assertion of the opening verse that we are reading a story that goes back to the period of the Judges…. But style is actually the clearest evidence of the lateness of Ruth. The writer took pains to create a narrative prose redolent of the early centuries of Israelite history, but it is very difficult to execute such a project of archaizing without occasional telltale slips…. There are at least a dozen terms that reflect distinctive Late Biblical usage…. The other strong sign of Ruth’s composition in the period after the return from Babylonian exile in the fifth century B.C.E. is its genre…. Harvesting and agriculture are a palpable presence in the story. Unlike the narratives from Genesis to Kings, where even pastoral settings are riven with tensions and often punctuated with violence, the world of Ruth is a placid bucolic world, where landowner and workers greet each other decorously with blessings in the name of the Lord.” Alter also throws in a bit of history, “Ruth’s Moabite origins have led many interpreters—convincingly, in my view—to see this story as a quiet polemic against the opposition of Ezra and Nehemiah to intermarriage with the surrounding peoples when the Judahites returned to their land in the fifth century B.C.E.”

In Ruth 1:1, Alter details the historic setting for the book and thus the dispute of its provenance, “when the judges ruled. The “judges” (shoftim) are tribal chieftains, as in the Book of Judges. This initial notice led the Septuagint and the Christian canon afterward, to place the Book of Ruth in the Former Prophets, after Judges.” In Ruth 1:17, Alter describes a common Biblical literary technique, “Wherever you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. Ruth’s moving speech, with its fine resonance of parallel clauses, appropriately ends on the note of death: she will always remain with Naomi in the trajectory of a whole life until death. The procedure of biblical narrative of defining character by his or her initial speech is vividly deployed here, showing Ruth as the perfect embodiment of loyalty for her mother-in-law.”

Alter details another striking literary detail in relating Ruth 2:11, “you left your mother and your father and the land of your birth. These words are the most significant literary allusion in the book. They explicitly echo God’s first words to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house.” Now it is a woman, and a Moabite, who reenacts Abraham’s long trek from the east to Canaan. She will become the founding mother of the nation as he was the founding father.” Finally in Ruth 4:18, Alter again reflects on Ruth’s future progeny, “And this is the lineage of Perez. In careful emulation of the Book of Genesis, the writer weaves together narration with genealogy to pointed thematic purpose. Here he aligns the son Ruth bears both back to Judah’s son, Perez, and forward to the founder of the divinely authorized dynasty, David.”

“The Hebrew Bible: The Song of Songs” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction, “The Song of Songs stands out in its striking distinctiveness—a distinctiveness that deserves to be called wondrous. The delicate yet frank sensuality of this celebration of young love, without reference to God or covenant or Torah, has lost nothing of its immediate freshness over the centuries: these are among the most beautiful love poems that have come down to us from the whole ancient world…. Famously, the erotic nature of the Song constituted a challenge for the framers of the canon, both Jewish and Christian, and their response was to read the poems allegorically…. Both religious traditions, however fervently they clung to this allegorical vision, never succeeded in entirely blocking the erotic power of the text…. Little is known about the origin of these poems…. The book as a whole has an anthological look.”

Alter continues by discussing the poetry. “These poets are finely aware of the long tradition of Hebrew poetry, but notably there is little in the way of allusion to earlier Hebrew texts…. The formal system of parallelism between versets—that is, parts of the line—that governs Hebrew poetry from its earliest extant texts going back to around 1100 B.C.E. is still very much in evidence…. What is remarkable is how consistently the figurative language of these poems evokes the experience of physical love with a delicacy of expression that manifests the poet’s constant delight in likening one thing to another. (The Hebrew verb damah, “to be like,” is repeatedly flaunted.)”

In Song 2:2, Alter describes the simile that introduces the two lovers in these poems, “Like a lily among the thorns. This particular poem unfolds through statement and response in a lovers’ dialogue. She announces herself as a flower; he goes her one better by answering that she is like a flower among the thorns in comparison to other young women.” Next, Alter gives a bit of historical context to Song 2:11, “the winter has passed. The love poetry of the Song of Songs is preeminently poetry of the verdant world of spring. Jewish tradition fixed it to be read on the Sabbath of springtime Passover because of the allegorical interpretation in which the two lovers are identified with God and Israel celebrating their nuptials after the exodus from Egypt, which occurred in early spring.”

Alter details the use of poetic technique in Song 4:4, “Like the tower of David your neck. This simile, like a good many others in the poem, is “Oriental,” reflecting an aesthetic in which the poet pursues the momentum of the object of comparison, half forgetting the thing to which it is compared.” Alter also details the probable provenance of the composition of the book. From Song 6:5, “Your hair is like a herd of goats. This line, together with everything in verses 6 and 7, is a reprise of 4:1-3, though here 4:3a does not appear. This sort of near verbatim recurrence of lines may reflect the anthological nature of the Song of Songs, in which two or more lines of poetry might have migrated from one poem to another.”

Finally, Alter relates what has been a notable absence in this book’s themes. In Song 8:6, he points out, “a fearsome flame. The word for “flame” has the theophoric suffix yah, but this translation follows the scholarly consensus that it is used here as an intensifier, with no theological implication. This would be consistent with the rest of the Song of Songs, where God is neither mentioned nor at issue in the poems.”

“The Maniac” by Benjamin Labatut

This book is classified as fiction, but it is based on fact. It is a bit of a weird book, broken up into three parts. It has no storyline, but is more like three potted biographies. The first section is on the Austrian physicist, Paul Ehrenfest. He went crazy and killed his own son, Vassily, who had been living with Down Syndrome, before shooting himself in the head. The ideas of quantum physics were deeply unsettling for Paul. He mused, “Reason is now untethered from all other deeper, more fundamental aspects of our psyche, and I’m afraid it will lead us by the bit, like a drunken mule…. We lie on our knees, praying to the wrong god, a childish deity who hides at the center of a corrupted world that he can neither govern nor understand.” Labatut reports, Paul “tried to calm down and develop his ideas serenely, but his enthusiasm, and the joy of working once more, free from the heavy fog of melancholia, was simply too much for him to contain. It was this work, and this alone, that would tie his name to history; a solution to the irregular and unpredictable behavior of turbulence, a law behind its irreducible randomness.”

The bulk of Labatut’s book is about John von Neumann. Each chapter in this second section is told in the voice of one of his friends or family members. It is a subjective imagining of the facts of Neumann’s life. The first chapter is told by Eugene Wigner. “There are two kinds of people in this world: Jansci von Neumann and the rest of us…. Did I know what went on inside the mind of Janos von Neumann? No, I can’t say that I did…. Jansci was trying to make sense of the world. He was searching for absolute truth, and he really believed that he would find a mathematical basis for reality.” Theodore von Karman expands, “What von Neumann had tried to do was to find the purest and most basic truths of mathematics, and to express them as unquestionable axioms, statements that could not be denied, disproven, or contradicted, certainties that would never fade or become distorted and so would remain—like a deity—timeless, unchangeable, and eternal. On this solid core, mathematicians could then construct all their theories, unfolding the diverse beauty of quantity, structure, space, and change without fear that they might encounter a monster, some awful chimera born of paradox and contradiction that, once awakened, could tear their tidy, ordered cosmos apart.”

Kurt Godel ripped this dream apart. At the Sixth Congress of German Physicists and Mathematicians, according to Neumann, he said, stuttering, “I b-believe that we can p-postulate, within any consistent f-formal system, a statement that is t-true but that can never be pr-proven within the rules of said system.” The remarks were informal so the exact record is lost to time. According to Wigner, “It was the end of Hilbert’s program…. Janos never worked on the foundations of mathematics again. He remained in awe of Godel for the rest of his life.” Neumann, himself, gushed about Godel, “His achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental…. It will never be possible to acquire with mathematical means the certainty that mathematics does not contain contradictions…. Godel is irreplaceable; he is the only mathematician alive about whom I would dare to make this statement.” Wigner concludes, “From Godel onward, I was always afraid of [Neumann], because once he abandoned his juvenile faith in mathematics he became more practical and effective than before, but also dangerous. He was, in a very real sense, set free.”

Later, Wigner summarizes, “I have always resisted condemning Jansci, or judging him too harshly, because I believe that a mind like his—one of inexorable logic—must have made him understand and accept many things that most of us do not even want to acknowledge, and cannot begin to comprehend. He did not see the way the rest of us do, and this colored many of his moral judgments. With his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, for example, he wasn’t trying to fight a war, or beat the casino, or finally win a game of poker; he was aiming at nothing less than the complete mathematization of human motivation, he was trying to capture some part of mankind’s soul with mathematics.”

Sydney Brenner reveals, “I was part of the group of scientists that discovered the role that messenger RNA plays in all living cells. Essentially, it’s like a minuscule machine that copies information from DNA and then carries it to a structure that uses it to make proteins, the building blocks of life…. I always confess that it came from one of von Neumann’s lesser-known articles, a very short but powerful thought experiment about what it takes to make a self-reproducing machine…. He managed to determine the logical rules behind all modes of self-replication, whether biological, mechanical, or digital…. Von Neumann demonstrates that you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being. You need both things: to make a copy and to endow it with the instructions needed to build itself…. Right there, in that paper written in the late 1940s, he depicts the way in which DNA and RNA work…. Thanks to him, in modern biology we have this very peculiar situation: its most fundamental and precise mathematical basis was established first, and then we found out how life on Earth had actually gone about implementing it. That’s not the way things go.”

Labatut’s third section is about the Go champion, Lee Sedol, and his battle against AlphaGo, designed by Demis Hassabis’ Deep Mind. Lee, himself, enthuses, “If someone was somehow capable of fully understanding Go, and by that I mean not just the positions of the stones and the way they relate to one another but the hidden, almost imperceptible patterns that lie beneath its ever-changing formations, I believe it would be the same as peering into the mind of God.” Labatut explains, “While the total number of possible chess games is somewhere close to 10^123, which is one followed by a hundred and twenty-three zeros, the number of all possible Go games is almost unimaginably larger: over 10^700 potential games.” Labatut continues, “When future historians look back at our time and try to pin down the first glimmer of a true artificial intelligence, they may well find it in a single move during the second game between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, played on the tenth of March 2016: move 37…. It was unlike anything a computer had ever done before. It was also different from anything that a human being had ever been known to consider. It was something new, a complete break from tradition, a radical departure from thousands of years of accumulated wisdom.” Lee concludes, “I thought I was the best, or at least one of the best. But then this artificial intelligence  put the final nail in my coffin. It is simply unbeatable. In that situation, it doesn’t matter how much you try. I don’t see the point. I started playing when I was five. Back then, it was all about courtesy and manners. It was more like learning an art form than a game. As I grew up, Go started to be seen as a mind game, but what I learned was an art. Go is a work of art made by two people. Now it’s totally different. After the advent of AI, the concept of Go itself has changed.”