“Parfit” by David Edmonds

This is a biography of Derek Parfit, written by Edmonds, who studied philosophy under Parfit’s wife, Janet Radcliffe Richards. Renowned as an intellectual giant from his days at Eton and Oxford, there seemed to be little academically that Parfit could not do with ease. His pivot to devote his life to philosophy as a fellow at All Souls College seemed natural, even though he had never studied philosophy formally before applying. Parfit explained, “I remember wondering whether it was more likely that the continental philosophers would change, by discussing their important subjects in a clearer and better argued way, or that the analytical philosophers would change, by applying their clarity and logic to important subjects. I decided that the second seemed more likely, and I think I was right.” Parfit never finished beyond his undergraduate degree in history. But he saw this as a plus, “Because I never took a degree in philosophy, I have only read those books and articles that I wanted to read. That has helped me to love the subject.”

Parfit’s eccentric personality actually meshed well with his philosophy. His most famous book, only one of two he published, was Reasons and Persons. “Parfit once summed up the entire history of ethics in four neat steps: 1. Forbidden by God. 2. Forbidden by God, therefore wrong. 3. Wrong, therefore forbidden by God. 4. Wrong.” Parfit thought that humanity was relatively new in working out the implications for step 4, a secular morality that was objective. “Reasons and Persons would apply reason and logic to ethics without the distorting influence of God.” Parfit was very hard on himself and his intellect. As he aged, he maniacally focussed more and more on meta-ethics, because he felt that was all that really mattered in life. He truly believed that “everything he had written to date, every philosophical argument he had ever made, every conclusion he had ever reached, was pointless, worthless, and illusory, unless moral reasoning could be moored to solid ground. The solid ground had to be moral objectivity…. If morality was not objective, there was no reason to act in one way rather than another. He went further. If morality was not objective, life was meaningless. His own life was meaningless, and every human and animal life was meaningless.” Parfit explained, “I got increasingly disturbed and alarmed by the number of good philosophers who just assumed that there couldn’t be any normative truths.”

In the final decades of his life, Parfit was consumed by the fact that other very smart philosophers could not see his points and still disagreed with him. He revealed, “I am deeply worried by disagreements with people who seem as likely as I am to be getting things right.” Edmonds explains, “Parfit came to believe that dissent about ethics—especially dissent between leading philosophers—was evidence for its relativism. And he thought that relativism essentially collapsed into nihilism…. For Parfit, the thought that moral values might be merely something we project onto the world caused almost existential anguish. If moral values were relative, then we must conclude, he believed, that almost everything in his life was pointless…. Parfit needed his morality to be anchored in bedrock. There had to be an objective reason to relieve from suffering someone who is needlessly in pain…. It is not mere opinion. It is to do with our relationship to the world.”

Parfit also had a unique perspective on death. Upon a friend’s wife’s death, Parfit tried to console him, “When I think of someone dead whom I loved, it helps me to remember that this person isn’t less real because she isn’t real now, just as people far away aren’t less real because they aren’t real here.” Much of his philosophy was focussed on the nature of persons, the individual, and the continuity of personality. Parfit reassured himself, “I find it very comforting to think that all [death] means is that there will be no future person who is related to me in a certain way.” Finally, Parfit explained, “My life is my work. I believe I have found good reasons for believing that values aren’t just subjective and that some things really do matter. If my arguments don’t succeed, my life has been wasted.”

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

Alter does not mince words. “Ezekiel is surely the strangest of all the prophets.” Next, he gives a little background. “He was a Jerusalem priest, in all likelihood part of the group of an exiled elite that was deported to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in 597 B.C.E., a decade before the destruction of Jerusalem and the more general exile. His entire activity as a prophet took place in Babylonia.” Ezekiel’s prophecies reflect his vocation in the priesthood. “Ezekiel often exhibits distinctively priestly concerns—with purity and impurity, with the Temple and architectural configurations, and with the regimen of sacrifices. But what most distinguishes Ezekiel is that so much of his prophesying is conducted in a condition that looks like God-intoxicated derangement…. His power as a prophet stems from the hallucinatory vividness and utter originality of his visions.”

In Ezekiel 1:4, Ezekiel seems to see an image of God. Alter explains the uniqueness of Ezekiel’s specific prophecy, “a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud, and fire flashing, and radiance all round it…. God reveals himself in fire and lightning and cloud…. It combines the pyrotechnic paraphernalia of divine revelation with imagery evidently borrowed from sundry Mesopotamian sources—the wheeled throne, the four faces of the creatures like the four faces of the Babylonian god Marduk, the iconic animals…. It is visibly poetic prose…. The words do not scan as poetry, yet some of the diction is poetic…. Ezekiel has devised a prophetic prose-poetry that has scant precedents.” Alter then details, in Ezekiel 1:28, exactly how unique this vision is, “the look of fire with radiance all round. Like the look of the rainbow that is in the clouds on a day of rain, this was the look of the radiance all round, the look of the likeness of the glory of the Lord…. Never before in biblical literature has God’s “glory,” kavod, been given such visual realization.”

Alter gives a little historical background and a linguistic lesson in Ezekiel 3:15, “Tel Abib. Though this looks like a Hebrew name, “mound of the sprouting season,” and modern-day Tel Aviv drew the name from here, it is actually Akkadian and means “mound of the flood.”” Ezekiel often repeated himself. In Ezekiel 7:4, Alter relates one such echo, “you shall know that I am the Lord. This is a virtual refrain in Ezekiel. The idea behind it is that until now the people, pursuing its refractory ways, behaved as though YHWH did not exist, but as they bear the terrible punishment for their acts, they will be forced to recognize His existence and power.” Alter describes some more linguistics of note in Ezekiel 9:4, “trace a mark on the foreheads. The word for “mark,” taw, is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In paleo-Hebrew script, the form of this letter was an X. The saving mark on the forehead recalls the mark that saves Cain from retribution.”

In Ezekiel 20:12, Alter details the history of the time period, “And My sabbaths, too, I gave to them to be a sign between Me and them. In the late monarchic period and on into the era of exile, there was an increasing emphasis on the centrality of the sabbath, as attested in passages in Jeremiah and Trito-Isaiah as well as in Ezekiel. The portability of the sabbath as a community-affirming observance may have made it especially appealing in a time when the Temple was no longer accessible.”

Alter is quick to point out a poetic flourish. In Ezekiel 26:16, he states, “They shall don shuddering. In a shrewd metaphorical move, the Tyrian princes, having shed all their finery, clothe themselves not in garments but in shudders.” In Ezekiel 27:11, Alter points out another bit of poetry—or, rather, lack there of, “Men of Arvad. One should note that Ezekiel readily slips from poetry—virtually required by the qinah, the lament form—into prose, with no real change in content. This is not a prophet who is entirely comfortable in verse.”

In Ezekiel 33:16, Alter describes a finer point of theology, “All his offenses that he committed shall not be recalled for him. In Ezekiel’s vision of divine justice, a person lives in a condition of constant existential choice: the wicked man can reverse the dire consequences of all his previous trespasses by deciding to do what is right, and the righteous man can cancel all the good effects of his acts of justice by sliding into acts of wickedness.” Alter also notes when previous books of the bible are referenced. In Ezekiel 36:10, it is Genesis, “I will multiply humankind upon you. The mountains have been shorn of human population by the devastating conquest. Now they will again abound with people. The verb “multiply” and the term for “humankind,” ‘adam, obliquely recall the Creation story: the national restoration is to be a second Genesis.”

Finally, Ezekiel spends the last few chapters of the book going through the minutia of a second Temple is mystifying detail. In Ezekiel 41:2, Alter helps break it down, “And the width of the entrance was ten cubits, and the supports of the entrance five cubits on each side. Most modern translations seek to impart coherence to this whole account of the layout of the Temple by choosing terms familiar in our own architecture—“vestibules,” ledges,” “porticoes,” and the like—and rearranging the tangled syntax. But, in fact, even if we knew the precise meaning of these architectural terms, which we do not, Ezekiel’s report of spatial entities and their dimensions is quit bewildering. The clarity, then, of the modern translation is illusory, and the present translation is meant to replicate the bewilderment conveyed in the Hebrew.”

“Writings on Philosophy and Language” by Johann Georg Hamann (translated by Kenneth Haynes)

Hamann is an esoteric writer. He peppers in obscure references to biblical passages and philosophical tracts on every page, sometimes even multiple times in one rambling sentence. He had to obfuscate cleverly to say what he wanted to say, to be able to bash the contemporary rationalizing trends of Frederick II, and to not get in trouble. Frederick II was, after all, the man who paid his keep. And Hamann would insist—not well. Therefore, he used allegory and subterfuge to hide his true meanings. Hamann toiled in relative obscurity compared to his friend, Johann Herder, and his most frequent sparring partner, Immanuel Kant. Nonetheless, he was known by some, in his time, as the Magus of the North.

Hamann’s writings are hidden with jewels for those inclined to suffer over the lines and dig them out. He wrote much on the origins of culture and, especially, language. “There must be similarities among all human languages based on the uniformity of our nature…. The natural mode of thinking has an influence on language…. The lineaments of a people’s language will therefore correspond with the orientation of its mode of thinking, which is revealed through the nature, form, laws, and customs of its speech as well as through its external culture and through a spectacle of public actions…. From this orientation of the mode of thinking arises the comparative wealth in some areas of the language and the poverty that runs parallel to it in other areas.”

Hamann was a pietist and a traditionalist. He despised the modern trends towards the primacy of reason cleft from culture. “The man to whom history (by virtue of its name) yields science, and philosophy knowledge, and poetry taste not only becomes eloquent himself but almost always the equal of the ancient orators…. Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance…. The senses and passions speak and understand nothing but images. All the wealth of human knowledge and happiness consists in images…. Is all your human reason anything other than tradition and inheritance, and is anything much involved in tracing the pedigree of your trite, bald, and twice dead opinions to the roots of the family tree?”

Tradition, for Hamann, was the wellspring of all morality. Free will was also a necessary condition of humanity. “Without the freedom to be evil there is no merit, and without the freedom to be good no responsibility for one’s own guilt, and indeed no knowledge of good and evil. Freedom is the maximum and minimum of all our natural powers as well as both the fundamental drive and the final goal of their entire orientation, evolution, and return…. Everyone is his own legislator but also the first-born and the neighbor of his subjects…. Without fire and hearth, one is no citizen; without land and people, no prince; and the priestly nation of a mere bookbag-religion is, according to the expression of Scripture, a reproach to God and to divine reason.”

Despite being a Christian preacher and bashing Moses Mendelssohn mercilessly, Hamann had immense respect for Jewish tradition and, especially, the Old Testament. “A philosopher and citizen of the world ought to value the most ancient document because it concerns the entire human race and also because Moses illuminates the human race’s true relationships to his people without selfish prejudices…. However favorable the most recent etymology of the word Adel [“nobility”] from an Arabic root may be to the European centaur-knighthood, the Jew nevertheless is still the authentic first nobleman of the entire human race, and the prejudice of their family and ancestral pride is grounded more deeply than all the titles in the ludicrous chancery style of heraldry.”

Finally, Hamann blends reason and faith into a true complete knowledge. “The spirit of observation and the spirit of prophecy are the wings of human genius. All that is present belongs to the domain of the former; all that is absent, the past and the future, belongs to the domain of the latter. Philosophical genius expresses its power through striving, by means of abstraction, to make what is present absent; it disrobes actual objects into naked concepts and merely conceivable attributes, into pure appearances and phenomena. Poetic genius expresses its power through transfiguring, by means of fiction, visions of the absent past and future into present representations. Criticism and politics resist the usurpations of both powers and ensure that they are balanced, through these positive forces and means of observation and prophecy…. Since the sum of the present is infinitely small as against the manifold aggregate of the absent, and since the spirit of prophecy is infinitely superior to the simple spirit of observation, it therefore follows that our faculty of knowledge depends on the many-headed modifications of the inmost, darkest, and deepest instincts of approbation and desire, to which it must be subject.”

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

In Alter’s introduction he points out a few traits that are unique about the Book of Jeremiah. First, Alter gets into a bit of history. “Of all the prophets, Jeremiah is the one who conveys to us the most vivid sense of the man behind the words…. Jeremiah, a priest from the town of Anathoth near Jerusalem who was active from the 620s B.C.E. until the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586, tells us a good deal about himself because of his continual anguish over his prophetic calling…. A century before the beginning of Jeremiah’s mission, the northern kingdom of Israel had been overwhelmed by Assyrian invaders. A large part of the population was deported to sundry locations elsewhere in the Assyrian empire…. The other major event that stamped a strong mark on Jeremiah’s prophecies was the sweeping religious reforms instigated by King Josiah beginning around 622 B.C.E…. The exclusive centralization of the cult was thus associated with Deuteronomy’s persistent preoccupation with backsliding into paganism and with the notion that the worship of strange gods would lead directly to national disaster and exile as punishment for the people’s failure to honor the covenant with its God…. All this is translated into Jeremiah’s central message…. So often Jeremiah’s prophecies are bitter denunciations of the people’s wayward behavior accompanied by dire predictions that this will lead to scorched earth for the kingdom of Judah and exile for its inhabitants…. This sort of message, delivered at a time when Babylonian forces (597 B.C.E. and again in 587-586) were besieging Jerusalem, could not have made Jeremiah a very popular figure.” Alter describes the language in the Book of Jeremiah specifically, “As a poet he does not exhibit a great deal of either the verbal virtuosity of Isaiah son of Amoz or the metaphoric brilliance of Second Isaiah…. Many of the poems use stereotypical phrases, and a considerable portion of the prophecies is delivered in prose.”

In Jeremiah 1:15, Alter relates what he sees as the deficient poetical style of this prophet, “each set his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem…. What emerges is a rather surrealistic picture of kings on their thrones sitting in siege against Jerusalem. It should be noted that many scholars, including the editors of the Biblia Hebraica, read all or most of the section beginning with verse 14 as poetry. To this translator, however, all these verses do not seem to be sufficiently tight metrically to qualify as verse; however, as is often the case with high-rhetorical prose, they exhibit loose approximations of the parallel structures of poetry.”

The Book of Jeremiah, like the Book of Deuteronomy, is focused on blasphemous and idolatrous acts more than worldly wrongs. Alter states of Jeremiah 2:34, “the lifeblood of the innocent poor. Remarkably, this is the very first reference in the book to a sin of perpetrating injustice rather than a cultic trespass.” The notion of exile first comes up in Jeremiah 5:19. Alter relates, “thus shall you serve strangers in a land that is not yours. Here the prophecy of exile—an immanent threat throughout Jeremiah’s career—is made explicit. Serving strangers is measure-for-measure retribution for serving alien gods.”

The issue of the worship of pagan gods is a theme that is returned to again and again. In Jeremiah 10:6, Alter points out, “Because none is like you, O LORD. In antithesis to the absurdity of idol worship, the prophet launches on a kind hymn to God’s greatness. The phrase “none like you, O LORD” echoes the “Who is like You among the gods, O LORD” of the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:11), but, significantly, “among the gods” is deleted because Jeremiah, at this relatively late moment, no longer imagines that there may be other, punier gods alongside YHWH.”

Alter kindly details random points of interest in his footnotes. In Jeremiah 10:11, “Thus shall you say to them. This entire verse is in Aramaic, being the only complete sentence in Aramaic in the Hebrew Bible apart from the Aramaic sections of Nehemiah and Daniel. There have been suggestions from Late Antiquity onward that Jeremiah is addressing the group of Judahites exiled to Babylonia in 597 B.C.E., who would have been constrained to speak Aramaic to their pagan captors.” Alter also describes translation decisions and his reasonings in his detailed notes. In Jeremiah 17:9, he reveals, “More crooked the heart than all things. While the adjective ‘aqov certainly suggests “deceitful,” as many translations reflect, the root meaning of “crooked” is worth preserving. This is an etymology of Jacob’s name, as the angry Esau reminds us in Genesis 27:36.” Alter also notes when the scripture holds greater historical significance. In Jeremiah 18:6, he relates, “like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand. This entire sentence was imported for an impressive liturgical poem in the Yom Kippur service. The symbolic use of the potter harks back to the version of creation of humankind in Genesis 2, where God fashioned—the potter’s verb yatsar is used—the human creature from the soil.”

In Jeremiah 25:17, Alter describes an unusual occurrence in prophecy, “And I took the cup from the hand of the LORD. This is a bold and quite uncommon move: the metaphoric cup of wrath seems to become an actual cup that the prophet takes from God’s hand. Such quasiphysical proximity between God and prophet is altogether unusual. But since the cup is, after all, symbolic, the prophet’s taking it from the hand of the LORD finally must be understood as a purely figurative act, and that understanding is confirmed by his making the nations drink from it, an act that could not be literally performed.”

Finally, Alter notes a poetic exception from common biblical form in Jeremiah 50:25, “for the LORD of Armies has a task / in the land of the Chaldeans. This is a striking instance in which instead of the usual semantic parallelism in the second half of the line of poetry, a surprise is sprung. The word “task” in itself might seem innocuous, but when it is followed by “in the land of the Chaldeans,” and after the mention of weapons of wrath, the task turns out to be a grim mission of destruction throughout Babylonia.”