“Unfabling the East” by Jurgen Osterhammel

The thesis of Osterhammel’s massive tome is that “the Enlightenment’s discovery of Asia entailed a more open-minded, less patronizing approach to foreign cultures than suggested by those who see it as a mere incubation period of Orientalism.” He considers the Enlightenment to be the timespan of the long eighteenth century, from around 1680 through 1820. Osterhammel’s breath and depth in this book is impressive. It is a comprehensive survey of European Enlightenment thought on Asia, taken from a plethora of primary sources: explorers, merchants, and expats, as well as from contemporary social scientists and theorists who relied on these travelogues to expound more sweeping pronouncements. Osterhammel is candid when authors might be embellishing the truth or spinning complete yarns from cloth. He is also a keen judge of their prejudices and strengths. Osterhammel also spends a great deal of space comparing and contrasting what different Europeans thought of differences between Asian cultures. Through the course of the book, Osterhammel seamlessly weaves between large themes and a minutia of facts in a coherent fashion. Among the larger topics discussed are border policy, urban planning, language and translation barriers, despotic governance, aesthetics, religious differences, slaves, treatment of women, social stratification, and political modernization. 

Osterhammel begins by conceding that “Asia” itself was a European term. “In the eighteenth century the individual peoples of Asia did not identify themselves as “Asians”…. Societies on the Asian continent were considerably more heterogeneous than their contemporary European counterparts.” There also was not a homogenous pattern of thought from the European minds regarding Asia. It’s thinkers were diverse and nuanced. When discussing India, he mentions, “no accusation hit Warren Hastings harder than Burke’s claim that he adhered to a relativist “geographical morality” in his dealings with the Indians, treating them in ways that would be proscribed in Europe as tyrannical and criminally reprehensible.”

However, as an interesting general statement, Osterhammel describes the difference in cultures many Enlightenment thinkers felt there was between the countries of Asia deemed most relevant to European outsiders. “Nobody in Europe dreamed of calling the Japanese “barbarians.” Japan was the only country in Asia that was always recognized as a civilization in its own right. Differing opinions could be expressed about China, even if the voices proclaiming it to be barbarian remained at all times in a minority. The opposite held true of the Turks, who were respected by Europeans for their military prowess far more than they were admired for their cultural achievements. Even their most vocal champion, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, ultimately saw the conflict between Austria and the Ottoman Empire as one “between civilization and barbarism.”… The Persians, conversely, had been regarded since the days of Herodotus as a highly civilized nation, an appraisal that their political renaissance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century seemed only to confirm. The chaos that descended on the land in the eighteenth century cast doubt on this judgement. Persia now became the only Asiatic country in which a Hobbesian state of nature—the war of all against all—appeared to have been realized in the present…. No contemporary inhabitants of Asia fitted the eighteenth century’s image of “barbarian” better than the Tatars.… Unlike the desert Arabs, the competing candidates for the role, the Tatars not only fulfilled the criterion of nomadic people who had moved beyond the stage of primitive savagery; they also embodied the raw forces of history that had been pacified not long before.”

In regards to the nomadic lifestyle of many in the Near East, Osterhammel makes an astute point. He states, “because nomads are not tied to any fixed place, temples as well as immobile images of the divine are foreign to them. As a consequence of their way of life, they therefore possess fairly abstract ideas about god, making them receptive to monotheistic religion, particularly Islam, the most aniconic among them.” However, throughout most of his book, Osterhammel tries to let his sources do the talking, battling out competing theories between themselves, with little commentary from Osterhammel in between. He reports what Enlightenment contemporaries thought about the East without value judgement and in the context of the times. Osterhammel commends Montesquieu as “the creator of a general framework of a general social science…. [Montesquieu] also never plays off a specific concept of anthropology as the science of “them,” the exotic others, against something like “sociology” as the science of “us.” Montesquieuean social theory is transcultural and universal, comparative and counter-teleological, empirical and nonnormative. Societies in all civilizations are studied as they are or as they appear to be; they are not assigned to one of the stages preordained for them by a philosophy of progress.”

Osterhammel also points to how European scholars contrasted the lack of an aristocratic class throughout most of Asia with their own cultures. “Had not Francis Bacon and Niccolo Machiavelli already taken the absence of a nobility to be a chief characteristic of despotic states?” Now, during the Enlightenment, “the seventeenth-century insight [was] that highly sophisticated civilizations could survive and even flourish without an aristocracy…. There was no such thing as aristocracy in China. There were no dynastic magnates, no vassals, no patrimonial privileges, no feudal dues, no great landholdings, no courtly society outside the imperial power center, no code of chivalry, and no estates-general or parliaments…. The bureaucratic hierarchy (which was indeed made up of nine ranks) fulfilled many of the functions performed by the aristocracy…. The “mandarins” [Europeans] encountered at court had spent years mastering the classical texts in preparation for the grueling and highly competitive state examinations…. The scholar could now take his place in the legally privileged elite group of the shenshi or “gentry.” Only if he went on to achieve success in the central examination, gaining his “doctoral degree” in the presence of the emperor himself, was he now qualified—although by no means guaranteed—to secure one of the few bureaucratic offices in the territorial administration of this enormous country and at the imperial court. These coveted offices, like the title of gentry, were nonhereditary.” As a contemporary German scholar put it, the Chinese “associate nobility with the person and not with his blood.”

Osterhammel points out that Europe, educated and modernized by Enlightenment thought, was poised to takeover after Asia’s own self-inflicted decline. “When early modern Asian states did collapse, this was hardly ever the result of European intervention; the Crimean Khanate was a notable exception. The British, for example, played no part in the breakup of Aurangzeb’s Mughal Empire; they merely understood how to take advantage of it…. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Europeans, now armed with the highly efficient institution of the militarized chartered company, set about integrating Asia’s coastal regions into worldwide trading networks.”

Throughout Osterhammel’s book he stresses that, for the most part, the cross-cultural learning was a one-sided affair. Scholars and travelers from Europe explored, studied, and debated the merits of Asian cultures. For much of the Enlightenment, Asia was viewed in the West as different and exotic, but not necessarily inferior. In contrast, Asians, for most of the long eighteenth century, rarely showed the slightest curiosity towards the Other. “Asian interest in Europe was desultory. Phases of mental opening to the West, such as the high water mark of Chinese curiosity about Europe reached in the second half of the Kangxi emperor’s reign (circa 1690-1720) and the Ottoman “Tulip Period” shortly thereafter (1718-30), proved short-lived. Only in Japan, the most inaccessible of all Asian countries after Korea, was Europe studied in anything like a systematic way on the basis of imported books, mainly in Dutch. This willingness to learn from the outside world was the legacy of a centuries-long absorption of Chinese civilization…. The anticolonial self-strengthening reforms undertaken by Haidar Ali in India, later pursued with similar intent by Pasha Muhammad Ali in Egypt, belong to a new era: they are already reactions to Europe’s burgeoning power.”

“The Complete Works of Alvaro de Campos” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari)

Pessoa wrote under many heteronyms. Campos was a poet and a sensualist. He did not intellectualize, but felt. “May God either change my life or end it.” In another poem, Campos again pontificates on death, “Once the session is over and we leave,/ There’s no house to go home to, no car to take us anywhere,/ but only Absolute Night and God perhaps like a Vast Moon/ signifying”

Campos was also a subjectivist, “Everything we’ve ever seen is us, we alone experience the world./ We have only ourselves inside and outside,/ We have nothing, we have nothing, we have nothing…” He was a dreamer, not a doer, “No, I don’t believe in me./ The lunatic asylums are full of madmen brimming with certainties!/ And since I have no certainty, am I more right than them or less?/ No, I don’t even believe in me… The world is for those born to conquer it/ And not for those who dream they might conquer it, even if they’re right./ I’ve dreamed far more than Napoleon ever did./ I’ve clutched to my hypothetical bosom more humanities than Christ ever did./ I’ve secretly written philosophies that no Kant ever wrote./ But I am, and perhaps always will be, a tenant in one of those garrets,/ even if I don’t live in one;/ I will always be one of those not born to do this.”

In his poetry, Campos also stressed the reality of the mind, “We all have two lives:/ The real one, which is the one we dreamed when we were children,/ And which we continue to dream as adults, in a substratum of mist;/ The false one is the life we live in the company of others,/ Which is the practical, the useful life,/ The one where they end up, putting us in a coffin./ In the other life there are no coffins, no deaths./ There are only illustrations from childhood:/ Big colored books, to look at rather than read;/ Big colorful pages to remember later on./ In that other life, we are us,/ In that other life, we live;/ In this one we die, which is what living means.”

Finally, Campos also wrote prose, which justified and explained both his poetry and the differences between himself and Pessoa, along with the other heteronyms. Campos expressed his own philosophy to life, “No age can pass its sensibility on to another age; it can only pass on the intelligence implicit in that sensibility. It is through emotion that we become ourselves, whereas through intelligence we become other…. Each age gives to subsequent ages only what it was not.” In prose, Campos also gave his literary opinions, “The superior poet says what he actually feels. The average poet says what he decides to feel. The inferior poet says what he thinks he should feel…. Most people feel conventionally, albeit with great human sincerity, not, however, with any kind or degree of intellectual sincerity, that is what matters to the poet.”

“Aspiration- The Agency of Becoming” by Agnes Callard

Callard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Strictly, her book is narrowly focused on the subject of aspiration, but I often found as I read my mind wandering to larger themes of the human experience, in general. She stresses that aspiration is a process, taking place over a period of time, and which results in a complete transformation of the Self, with a new values, ethics, and beliefs. Callard uses aspiration as her lens to wrestle with philosophical issues such as decision theory, moral psychology, and moral responsibility.

Callard begins by making the point that aspiration is something you do, not something that is passively done to you. It is a change in values that is actively sought, if not yet gained. “Agency, as distinct from mere behavior, is marked by practical rationality. Insofar as becoming someone is something someone does, and not merely something that happens to her, she must have access to reasons to become the person she will be…. Gaining a value often means devoting to it some of the time and effort one was previously devoting elsewhere…. Aspiration, as I understand it, is the distinctive form of agency directed at the acquisition of values.” Importantly, aspiration is an ongoing process, not a single event. “More generally, if I cannot know in advance what a transformative experience will be like, I also cannot know how transformative it will be…. Our point of view on the matter changes little by little, and we transition slowly from someone who is relatively indifferent to the preferences, values, and interests of the new way of being to someone for whom they figure as the centerpiece of her life…. Sometimes one’s character and values change (“drift”) in incremental steps, so that one can see only in retrospect the magnitude of the change that those steps have added up to.” There is agency throughout this process, however. Aspiration is not an act of submission. The aspirant might not know exactly where she is going, but she is working hard to get there all the same. “Coming to acquire the value means learning to see the world in a new way…. [Aspiration] challenges the prevailing assumption that basic or fundamental preferences (desires, values, etc.) are the kinds of things you can only reason from, by exposing a way we have of reasoning towards them…. On an aspirational model, these decisions are best understood as climactic moments embedded in a longer transformative journey, marking neither its beginning nor its end…. The one making the decision is, therefore, not entirely an outsider to the life she may opt into.” The aspirant does not aspire alone. She is often helped by a mentor, a role model, her family, or a community. “Aspirational agency is distinctly dependent on such environmental support…. Original contact with the values that will eventually become objects of aspirational pursuit” is critical to the process.

Callard makes the case that it is possible to reason one’s way towards values that one does not at present fully hold. That is the process of aspiration and part of its ongoing nature. ““Bad” reasons are how she moves herself forward, all the while seeing them as bad, which is to say, as placeholders for the “real” reason…. She sees her own motivational condition as in some way imperfectly responsive to the reasons that are out there…. Something can be imperfect in virtue of being undeveloped or immature, as distinct from wrong or bad or erroneous…. The agent who can give an account of what is to be gotten out of what she is doing grasps the value of what she will (if successful) achieve through her action.” There is a hope in the aspirant’s mind that there is more still to come. “You can act rationally even if your antecedent conception of the good for the sake of which you act is not quite on target—and you know that…. Proleptic reasons are provisional in a way that reflects the provisionality of the agent’s own knowledge and development: her inchoate, anticipatory, and indirect grasp of some good she is trying to know better…. Proleptic reasons are double…. The reason on which she acts has two faces: a proximate face that reflects the kinds of things that appeal to the person she is now and a distal one that reflects the character and motivation of the person she is trying to be. Her reason is double because she herself is in transition.”

Aspiration deals with wholesale changes in someone’s life. Often, during the process, one loses values one held dear, while gaining new ones. It is a moral transformation. “Aspiration is the diachronic process by which an agent effects change on her own ethical point of view. Aspirants aim to direct their own ethical attention in such a way as to more fully appreciate one value or set of values and to become immune or insensitive to those values that intrinsically conflict with the first set. An aspirant is someone who works to improve her desires, her feelings, her ethical evaluations, and, more generally, her own capacity for responding to reasons.” Again, there is agency in this transition. “The aspirant has marked out one attitude as a kind of target toward which she orients herself, and another (or others) as a danger from which she must turn herself away…. Intrinsically conflicted agents interfere in their own thinking; intrinsically conflicted aspirants interfere for the sake of effecting long-term change…. Her goal is to handle these conflict situations in such a way as to eventually mitigate their occurrence…. Deciding to aspire doesn’t resolve anything. What resolves conflict is aspiration itself, the temporally extended work of changing ourselves, our values, our desires, our outlook…. Aspirants externalize the desire all the way into nonexistence.”

Callard next looks into akrasia: weakness of will or lack of self-restraint. There is a difference between “acting on a reason and acting on one’s best reason…. Akrasia is understood as acting on a reason that is worse or weaker than another reason one could have acted on.” Callard resolves the conflict found in akrasia by relying on the aspiring Self. “Because we can be intrinsically conflicted, we are not trapped in the evaluative condition we happen to be in. The fact that we can be akratically insensitive to our dominant evaluative perspective is the flip side of the fact that we can be sensitive to evaluative content that doesn’t fit into that perspective. We are not restricted to taking the reasons we currently have the framework for processing…. Human progress in value depends on our openness to feeling some goodness before we can make reflective sense to ourselves of that goodness. The possibility of akrasia is thus tethered to the possibility of aspiration…. The akratic and the enkratic have an important common ground in the experience of intrinsic conflict that precedes their bad (akratic) or good (enkratic) action. Both characters are distinct from the paragon, and thus neither fully inhabits the evaluative perspective from which they deliberate…. Enkratics know why they are doing what they are doing, and akratics know why they should have acted otherwise…. Aspirants try to resolve their intrinsic conflicts; akratics and enkratics try to act in spite of them. Aspirants try to get a better grasp of the target value, so as to approach the paragon; akratics and enkratics make do with whatever grasp they have, by deliberating as though they were the paragon…. Akratics act from a grasp of value, however partial. Aspirants act toward a grasp of value…. We cannot hold off from making use of our values until such time as they are securely in our possession; for what happens in the meanwhile is also life…. We reason, locally, from the very values we may, more globally, also be reasoning toward.”

Callard also looks into the moral responsibility of aspiration. “Our interest is in self-directed value-acquisition, which is, first and foremost, a change of a person in the ethical dimension.” She focuses on the idea of the transforming Self. Although, a single person is a continuous entity, the Self, nonetheless, is changing throughout the process of aspiration. She is creating her new Self. “The aspirant does not see herself as fashioning, controlling, sanctioning, making, or shaping the self she creates. Instead, she looks up to that self, tries to understand her, endeavors to find a way to her.” She is grasping for a value she admires, but does not quite know the true value of, yet. “In aspiration, it is the created self who, through the creator’s imperfect but gradually improving understanding of her, makes intelligible the path the person’s life takes.” Again, agency is intimately involved in this value acquisition process. It is purposeful and self-directed. “The fact that there is no vantage point one can simply adopt outside one’s character doesn’t entail that one couldn’t arrive at the vantage point that is outside one’s current character by working toward that condition…. This kind of work involves both moving toward and moving away from a perspective on value. When engaged in it, not only are we gaining something, we are also often losing something.” There is a relationship between the two Selves that continues through the process. “Instead of imagining my future self as beholden to my past self, I suggest we imagine my past self as looking forward, trying to live up to the person she hopes to become…. If you are trying to get better acquainted with some value, then you take your antecedent conception of that value to be inadequate. You act in order to grasp the value better, but your reason for wanting to grasp that value must be the very value you don’t yet fully grasp…. We work to appreciate them, and this work is rationalized and guided by the values we are coming to know…. It is the end that provides the normative standards for assessing what comes before it…. If practically rational guidance required an agent to know exactly what she wanted out of the outcome, aspiration could not qualify as rationally guided. The aspirant fails to grasp the full normative grounding of her project until it is completed.” The aspirant does not yet possess the normative value she seeks, and yet she is not flailing in the dark. She has an imperfect picture, which she is actively striving to gradually improve. “The aspirant…. is someone whose grasp both is, and is known by her to be, inadequate…. [She] is aware of the defectiveness of her grasp of some value. She is unable to engage in the relevant activity purely for its own sake, precisely because she does not yet value it in the way that she would have to in order to do so.”

Callard contrasts aspiration with ambition, which she calls “the kind of pursuit that is large in scale but is not directed at producing a change in the self.” Ambition is different from aspiration because it is not a process of learning. Ambition is directed towards some sort of success, but the value of which is already fully grasped by the agent at the start of the process. “While the ambitious person may receive assistance from others in achieving his goal, the aspirant needs others to help her with the project of grasping her goal.”

Callard ends by reemphasizing that aspiration is a process that takes place over time. It is not a single act, with a distinct before and after. “Large-scale transformative pursuits often involve a kind of rebirth even with respect to those values that straddle the transformative event.” Aspiration is the process of transforming the entire Self into something new. It is a becoming. “A proleptic reasoner will have trouble explaining exactly why she is doing what she is doing, though once she gets to her destination she will say, “This was why.”"

“The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy” by Jacob Burckhardt (translated by S.G.C. Middlemore)

Burckhardt’s treatise on the Italian Renaissance is a comprehensive history of the cultural transition from the Middle Ages. He also seeks to explain why, in his view, the Renaissance started in Italy, as opposed to elsewhere in Europe. He begins, “The worst that can be said of the movement is that it was anti-popular, that through it Europe became for the first time sharply divided into the cultivated and uncultivated classes…. The civilization of Greece and Rome, which, ever since the fourteenth century, obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life, as the source and basis of culture, as the object and ideal of existence, partly also as an avowed reaction against preceding tendencies—this civilization had long been exerting a partial influence on medieval Europe…. That an age existed which idolized the ancient world and its products with an exclusive devotion was not the fault of individuals. It was the work of an historical providence, and all the culture of the ages which have followed, and of the ages to come, rests upon the fact that it was so.”

For Burckhardt, the prime example of the Renaissance artist was Dante Alighieri. “With unflinching frankness and sincerity he lays bare every shade of his joy and his sorrow, and moulds it resolutely into the strictest forms of art. Reading attentively these sonnets and canzoni, and the marvelous fragments of the diary of his youth which lie between them, we fancy that throughout the Middle Ages the poets have been purposely fleeing from themselves, and that he was the first to seek his own soul. Before his time we meet with many an artistic verse; but he is the first artist in the full sense of the word—the first who consciously casts immortal matter into an immortal form. Subjective feeling has here a full objective truth and greatness…. More than a century elapsed before the spiritual element in painting and sculpture attained a power of expression in any way analogous to that of the Divine Comedy.”

The twin aspects of the culture of the European Middles Ages that the Renaissance rebelled against were the primacy of State and Church. Burckhardt states that the conscience of the individual citizen first butted up against the demands of the Italian states, whether ruled as a principality or republic. “The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. The individual first inwardly casts off the authority of a state which, as a fact, is in most cases tyrannical and illegitimate…. The sight of victorious egotism in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm…. But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault of his own, but rather through an historical necessity…. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but necessary…. The Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging of a new age. Through his gifts and his passions, he has become the most characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of his time. By the side of profound corruption appeared human personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor medievalism either could or would bestow upon it.”

The Italian man of the Renaissance took it upon himself to wrestle free from the control of the Church. The individuality of his belief would no longer allow for him to bend his knee unflinchingly to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the Roman Pope. “The Italians were the first modern people of Europe who gave themselves boldly to speculations on freedom and necessity, and since they did so under violent and lawless political circumstances, in which evil seemed often to win a splendid and lasting victory, their belief in God began to waver…. Distinguishing keenly between good and evil, they yet are conscious of no sin. Every disturbance of their inward harmony they feel themselves able to make good out of the plastic resources of their own nature, and therefore they feel no repentance. The need of salvation thus becomes felt more and more dimly, while the ambitions and the intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether every thought of a world to come, or else caused it to assume a poetic instead of a dogmatic form…. That religion should again become an affair of the individual and of his own personal feeling was inevitable when the Church became corrupt in doctrine and tyrannous in practice.” 

Finally, Burckhardt returns full circle, to the Italian humanists’ love of the classics as a model for living the best life. “Ancient literature now worshipped as something incomparable, is full of the victory of philosophy over religious tradition. An endless number of systems and fragments of systems were suddenly presented to the Italian mind, not as curiosities or even as heresies, but almost with the authority of dogmas, which had now to be reconciled rather than discriminated.”

“Four Reigns” by Kukrit Pramoj (translated by Tulachandra)

This novel is a Siamese classic. It follows the life of a minor royal courtier, Phloi, from her birth to her death, through the reigns of the four monarchs she lives under. A reoccurring theme of the novel is the nature of life’s impermanence. As a child, Phloi was assigned to one of the minor Princesses in Rama V’s court. ““I am not all that fond of jewelry,” Sadet said with a plaintive sigh. “But you can imagine how tongues would wag if I went about unornamented. So I wear them, without much enjoyment, which doesn’t prevent me from fussing and fuming when they get lost or broken. Aren’t we funny creatures, Phloi? How we cling to our possessions! And be it a precious gem or worthless pebble, if we let ourselves become too attached to it we suffer when it’s gone.”” Years later, in the reign of Rama VI, speaking to her husband, Prem, Phloi maintains her reverence and respect for the monarchy. “It’s only because I don’t like flatterers and fawners that I don’t want to become one myself. You and I, Khun Prem, will always be loyal to the throne, as were our grandfathers and grandmothers before us. We are Nai Luang’s loyal subjects and it follows that we’re going to be loyal subjects to his wives and children.”

In Rama VII’s reign, her youngest son, Ot, explains to his uncle, Phoem, what he appreciates about Siam after returning from his studies in England, “The muang nok rich are many times richer; that’s the difference. The very rich over there are so monumentally, colossally rich that they would consider what we call a very large fortune here somewhat laughable. On the other hand, our poor people are much more fortunate than theirs. Life in a cold climate can be brutal when you don’t have money. Here food is easy to come by—fish in the water everywhere, fruit and vegetables growing wild, a bowl of rice-and-curry costing practically nothing. Here with the sun shining a poor man in a loin cloth sitting under a shady tree is cool and comfortable. His wealthier neighbor may even be dressed the same way, for rich or poor, we all like our cool comfort, don’t we?” However, Ot’s older brother, An, upon his return from studying law in France, has a slightly different view, “There are enough men with ability and expert knowledge in this country, but they don’t rise to where that can exercise effective leadership because they haven’t got the push and pull needed in our society. So what have we got? We’ve got men with little competence but lots of family influence together with old men with obsolete ideas running the country for us.” Perhaps Phloi’s brother, Phoem, puts living through the ups and downs of life’s challenges the best, “The world turns and turns, Mae Phloi. The pendulum swings. Let us enjoy our roast duck.”

“American Pastoral” by Philip Roth

This is a grotesque Jewish-American bildungsroman of sorts. Roth’s novel depicts the inner and outer nature of man and his utter infathomablity to other humans. We are completely alone in this world, incomprehensible to even those closest to us, all the while going through our own lives. We, humans, are utterly unknowable to each other. “The Swede had got up off the ground and he’d done it—a second marriage, a second shot at a unified life controlled by good sense and the classic restraints, once again convention shaping everything, large and small, and serving as barrier against the improbabilities—a second shot at being the traditional devoted husband and father, pledging allegiance all over again to the standard rules and regulations that are the heart of family order…. He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again…. Stoically he suppresses his horror. He learns to live behind a mask. A lifetime experiment in endurance. A performance over a ruin. Swede Levov lives a double life…. The brutality of the destruction of this indestructible man. Whatever Happened to Swede Levov…. And in the everyday world, nothing to be done but respectably carry on the huge pretense of living as himself, with all the shame of masquerading as the ideal man.”

“A History of the Island” by Eugene Vodolazkin (translated by Lisa C. Hayden)

This is an odd novel-length parable, told as a centuries-long history about a fairytale island, often enmeshed in political strife, strange rivalries, occasional conspiracies, on-and-off-again civil wars, and, occasionally, threatened by its mainland enemies, such as France. The royal couple, Prince Parfeny and Princess Ksenia, whose commentary is interspersed within this history of the island, are three hundred and fifty years-old and have lived through every change in the island’s history, political and otherwise. Princess Ksenia remembered, “Agafon the Forward-Looking spoke reluctantly to the princes about the impending pestilence and he said nothing about their deaths. He did not like looking ahead. Strictly speaking, the very nickname “Forward-Looking” was not given to him entirely fairly. Agafon looked in all directions simultaneously…. He saw coming events with the same clarity as he saw events that had already arrived. Possibly even more clearly because the imperfections of the human memory had not distorted them. History, Agafon taught, tells much more about the present than the past.” The court historian relates, “In our land, nothing worthy of notice happened during all those years. Is that not a sign of the authorities’ wisdom? Happy are the times that do not enter the annals. Blessed is he whose rule is unmarked by historical events, for nearly all of them are born of blood and suffering.” Prince Parfeny concludes, “Our discovery seemed so beautiful to us that we had no doubt of its truthfulness since beauty and truth accompany one another.”

“The Custom of the Country” by Edith Wharton

This is Wharton’s masterful portrayal of the social-climbing gold-digger par-excellence, Undine Spragg. The aristocratic New York world of old money that she is, at first, so eager to enter is best described through the eyes of her first husband, Ralph Marvell. “Ralph sometimes called his mother and grandfather the Aborigines, and likened them to those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race. He was fond of describing Washington Square as the “Reservation,” and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries…. Small, cautious, middle-class, had been the ideals of aboriginal New York; but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies…. Nothing in the Dagonet and Marvell tradition was opposed to this desultory dabbling with life. For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. The only essential was that he should live “like a gentleman”—that is, with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting.”

Throughout Wharton’s novel, it seemed that being entranced by Undine’s charms was many a man’s undoing, including her own husband, Ralph Marvell’s. “It was a point of honour with him not to seem to disdain any of Undine’s amusements…. He told himself that there is always a Narcissus-element in youth, and that what Undine really enjoyed was the image of her own charm mirrored in the general admiration. With her quick perceptions and adaptabilities she would soon learn to care more about the quality of the reflecting surface…. She would not take more risks than she could help, and it was admiration, not love, that she wanted. She wanted to enjoy herself, and her conception of enjoyment was publicity, promiscuity—the band, the banners, the crowd, the close contact of covetous impulses, and the sense of walking among them in cool security…. And with the sense of inevitableness there came a sudden wave of pity. Poor Undine! She was what the gods had made her—a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure…. That the reckoning between himself and Undine should be settled in dollars and cents seemed the last bitterest satire on his dreams: he felt himself miserably diminished by the smallness of what had filled his world.”

For all intents and purposes, Undine lived on a different plane than those with whom she inhabited her life. Her conceptions of reality simply did not always conform to theirs and life was often just a contest of wills. “It was impossible for Undine to understand a social organization which did not regard the indulging of woman as its first purpose, or to believe that any one taking another view was not moved by avarice or malice…. She could never be with people who had all the things she envied without being hypnotized into the belief that she had only to put her hand out to obtain them, and all the unassuaged rancours and hungers of her early days in West End Avenue came back with increased acuity. She knew her wants so much better now, and was so much more worthy of the things she wanted!”

“Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy” by Leo Strauss

This is a short collection of essays that Strauss had been compiling when he passed away. Although published posthumously, most of these pieces had been previously published in other venues and Strauss had already selected the order for their presentation in this collection. As usual, these essays mostly deal with a deep reading of the pre-modern philosophers, often with an esoteric interpretation. Strauss begins by stating that “political philosophy was concerned with the best or just order of society which is by nature best or just everywhere or always. [It] presents the relatively most perfect solution of the riddles of life and the world.”

Looking at Plato’s “Apology of Socrates,” Strauss begins by discussing philosophy beyond politics and on how a man must live virtuously, in general. He makes the assertion that Socrates insisted that “one must not when suffering injustice do injustice in turn…. Inflicting evil on human beings, even if one has suffered evil from them, is unjust, for inflicting evil on human beings differs in nothing from acting unjustly…. The cleavage among men is no longer that between knowers and ignoramuses, or between the philosophers and the non-philosophers, i.e., between the few who hold and the many who do not hold that the unexamined life is not worth living, but that between those who hold that one may not requite evil with evil and those who hold that one may, or even ought to, do it.”

In Strauss’ essay “On the Euthydemus” he discusses Socrates’ views on wisdom. When talking to his friend and patron Kleinias, Strauss interprets Socrates as claiming, “in all cases wisdom makes human beings fortunate…. Wisdom is, humanly speaking, omnipotent…. The mere use of good things will not suffice for making a man happy; the use must be right use; while wrong use is bad, non-use is neither good nor bad; right use is brought about by knowledge…. No possession whatever is of any benefit if its use is not guided by prudence, wisdom, intelligence; a man possessing little but using it intelligently is more benefited than a man possessing much but using it without intelligence…. Wisdom—and of course not honor or glory—is not only the greatest good; it is the sole good; only through the presence of wisdom and the guidance by it are the other goods good…. Since our happiness depends altogether on our wisdom and if virtue can be acquired by learning, learning, striving for wisdom, philosophizing is the one thing needful.”

Finally, Strauss moves his discussion to political philosophy, specifically. He states that Socrates felt that “justice seems to be the only good, the only virtue that is beneficent (on the whole) even if not guided by intelligence, perhaps because the laws which the just man obeys supply the lack of intelligence in the man himself…. Justice in contradistinction to courage and moderation cannot be misused.” However, Strauss ends his essay “On the Euthydemus” by stating that Socrates might have been a better cheerleader than teacher. “Socrates’ effort to determine the science which makes human beings happy has ended in complete failure. He has confirmed by deed the view of some of his critics that he was most excellent in exhorting men to virtue but not able to guide men to it.” Strauss finishes with a tantalizing thought about majorities and the politics of democracy. He states, “According to Socrates, the greatest enemy of philosophy, the greatest sophist, is the political multitude, i.e. the enactor of the Athenian laws.” Given Socrates’ end, this seems apt, even if in tension with his previous thoughts on just laws.

Strauss’ essay, “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” deals further with the practicalities of politics. Strauss contends that Xenophon often puts words in different speakers mouths for effect and that the “character” of “Themoistogenes of Syracuse is a pseudonym for Xenophon of Athens”, himself. Strauss states that Xenophon reports the Athenian Theopompos as saying, “the only good things which they have are arms and virtue, but their virtue would not be of any avail without the arms.” The speaker, “Theopompos,” is making the point echoed by Aristotle, “virtue, and especially moral virtue, is in need of external equipment.” Especially in politics, it does not do to have the moral high ground if you cannot execute your virtue.

Elsewhere in "Xenophon’s Anabasis,” Strauss discusses the role and comportment proper to a gentleman, by way of Proxenos. He states that Proxnos “believed to acquire through his actions with Cyrus [the Persian usurper] a great name and great power and much money; but he was obviously concerned with acquiring those things only in just and noble ways. He was indeed able to rule gentlemen but he was unable to inspire the soldiers with awe and fear of himself…. Proxenos seems to be more attracted to the noble acquisition of fame, great power and great wealth anywhere on earth to than to his fatherland,” Greece, whom he betrays. Two points of interest here are that Proxenos, the gentleman, is far from patriotic to his country of birth, but views his allegiance to whatever cause would advance him, with honor. Secondly, Proxenos might have been a great leader of gentlemen, but not of a mob of soldiers. In politics, one must tailor one’s words and actions to the situation. There are no absolutes.

Later in this essay, Strauss describes the scene after Xenophon has taken effective control of the entire mercenary Greek army on Asia Minor. Strauss speaks of interactions between “barbarous men whom [the Greek soldiers] had met on their march, the most remote from the Greek laws, for they did in public what others would do only when they are alone.” There was the idea of the Laws as being above private virtue and discretion for the Greeks but not for barbarians.

Strauss spent much of his career teasing out the implications of natural law. In his essay, “On Natural Law,” he states “by natural law is meant a law which determines what is right and wrong and which has power or is valid by nature, inherently, hence everywhere and always.” However, he then continues, “the primary question concerns less natural law than natural right, i.e. what is by nature right or just: is all right conventional (of human origin) or is there some right which is natural (physei dikaion)?” Did rights and law come to man when he created a society by covenant or were there laws and rights even within a state of nature? Strauss begins with Plato. “While Plato cannot be said to have set forth a teaching of natural law, there can be no doubt that he opposed conventionalism; he asserts that there is a natural right, i.e. something which is by nature just. The naturally just or right is the “idea” of justice…. A man (or rather his soul) or a city is just if each of its parts does its work well…. Only the wise man or the philosopher can by truly just…. Natural right in Plato’s sense is in the first place the natural order of the virtues as the natural perfections of the human soul…. Such assigning requires that the men who know what is by nature good for each and all, the philosophers, be the absolute rulers and that absolute communism (communism regarding property, women and children) be established among those citizens who give the commonwealth its character…. This order is the political order according to nature, as distinguished from and opposed to the conventional order.”

Strauss next contrasts a few other philosophers’ views of natural law. In Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” he defines ““the law according to nature” as the unchangeable law common to all men.” In “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle writes “natural right is that right which has everywhere the same power and does not owe its validity to human enactment.” As far as politics, Aristotle believed, “natural right is that right which must be recognized by any political society if it is to last and which for this reason is everywhere in force. Natural right thus understood delineates the minimum conditions of political life…. Natural right in this sense is indifferent to the difference of regimes whereas positive right is relative to the regime.”

The Stoics were the first Greek philosophers to make natural law an explicit theme of their works. For them, “the natural or divine or eternal law is identified with God or the highest god (fire, aether, or air) or his reason…. The virtuous life as choiceworthy for its own sake comes to be understood as compliance with natural law.” For the Stoics, all study of philosophy was a study in moral virtue. Positive laws that contradict the natural laws were invalid and must not be obeyed.

Finally, Strauss compares the ancient Greek conception with the Christian teachings of Thomas Aquinas. “In the Christian version, Stoic corporealism (“materialism”) is abandoned…. [However,] natural law retains its status as rational…. Natural law is clearly distinguished from the eternal law—God Himself or the principle of His governance of all creatures—on the one hand, and the divine law, i.e. the positive law contained in the Bible, on the other. The eternal law is the ground of the natural law…. As a rational being man is by nature inclined toward acting according to reason; acting according to reason is acting virtuously; natural law prescribes therefore the acts of virtue.” Just like for the Stoics, Aquinas, in the “Summa Theologica,” states that “a human law which disagrees with natural law does not have the force of law.”

Another one of Strauss’ recurring themes in his writings was the tension between Jerusalem and Athens. In this collection’s essay, “Jerusalem and Athens,” he comes about the conflict from a slightly different angle than his previous works. “According to the Bible, the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord; according to the Greek philosophers, the beginning of wisdom is wonder.” Strauss also contrasts the two viewpoints according to Nietzsche. “The peculiarity of the Greeks is the full dedication of the individual to the contest of excellence, distinction, supremacy. The peculiarity of the Hebrews is the utmost honoring of father and mother.” Strauss takes a close look at Genesis. He concludes, “man was not denied knowledge; without knowledge he could not have known the tree of knowledge nor the woman nor the brutes; nor could he have understood the prohibition. Man was denied knowledge of good and evil, i.e., the knowledge sufficient for guiding himself, his life. While not being a child he was to live in child-like simplicity and obedience to God.” Strauss contrasts Socrates with the Prophets. “The perfectly just man, the man who is as just as is humanly possible, is according to Socrates the philosopher and according to the prophets the faithful servant of the Lord. The philosopher is the man who dedicates his life to the quest for knowledge of the good, of the idea of the good; what we would call moral virtue is only the condition or by-product of that quest. According to the prophets, however, there is no need for the quest for knowledge of the good: God “hath shewed thee, o man, what is good.”” Finally, there is the question of their audience. “The prophets as a rule address the people and sometimes even all the peoples, whereas Socrates as a rule addresses one man.”

Strauss also included his essay, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” in this collection. “For Nietzsche, as distinguished from the classics, politics belongs from the outset to a lower place than either philosophy or religion.” It is not a subset of philosophy, but below it. “Whereas according to Plato the pure mind grasps the truth, according to Nietzsche the impure mind, or a certain kind of impure mind, is the sole source of truth.” There is no natural law. “The world in itself, the “thing-in-itself,” “nature” is wholly chaotic and meaningless. Hence all meaning, all order originates in man, in man’s creative acts, in his will to power.” The world does not exist objectively, but must be interpreted. “The world of any concern to us is necessarily a fiction, for it is necessarily anthropocentric; man is necessarily in a manner the measure of all things.” Nietzsche contradicts Socrates about the nature, purpose, and goodness of knowledge. For Nietzsche, “knowledge cannot be, or cannot be good, for its own sake; it is justifiable only as self-knowledge: being oneself means being honest with oneself, going the way to one’s own ideal.” Nietzsche believed in different morals for different human beings. He despised “the morality stemming from timidity; that morality is the morality of the human herd, i.e. of the large majority of men.” He spoke of the “herd-instinct of obedience which is now almost universally innate and transmitted by inheritance.” Nietzsche denied that there is one true nature to man. “All values are human creations.” Passivity and amelioration will make man weak. “Suffering and inequality are the prerequisites of human greatness…. Hitherto suffering and inequality have been taken for granted, as “given,” as imposed on man. Henceforth, they must be willed.”

Strauss dives back into political philosophy proper with his essay, “Niccolo Machiavelli.” Strauss makes the case that Machiavelli’s ethics are a return to the ancients, to a pagan ethics. “That rediscovery which leads up to the demands that the virtue of the ancients be imitated by present-day men, runs counter to the present-day religion [Christianity]…. the virtues of the pagans are only resplendent vices.” For Machiavelli, Livy’s histories are his Bible. “Our religion has placed the highest good in humility, abjectness, and the disparagement of the human things, whereas the ancient religion has placed the highest good in greatness of mind, strength of body, and in all other things apt to make men most strong.” The Christian virtues might be fine for the individual, but not for politics and not for the ruler of men. “If one wishes that a sect or a republic live long, one must bring it back frequently to its beginning.” For Machiavelli, that beginning was ancient Rome. “Men were good at the beginning not because of innocence but because they were gripped by terror and fear.”

The final essay in this collection is Strauss’ introduction to a new edition of Hermann Cohen’s book, “Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism.” This neatly essay brings together Strauss’ passions for religion, reason, esoteric writing, deep reading, and the Jewish traditions. In Cohen’s discussion on the fellowship of man, Strauss brings out the point that “for the prophets and the psalms it is poverty and not death and pain that constitutes the great suffering of man or the true enigma of human life…. Poverty becomes the prime object of compassion.” On prayer, Strauss states, “the soul and inwardness of the Law is prayer. Prayer gives life to all actions prescribed by the Law…. Prayer is the language of the correlation of man with God. As such it must be a dialogue while being a monologue…. If all other purposes of prayer could be questioned, its necessity for veracity, for purity of the soul cannot.” Finally, Strauss ends, “truthfulness requires knowledge, and our knowledge is imperfect. Therefore truthfulness must be accompanied by modesty, which is the virtue of skepticism…. He who is humble before God is modest toward men.”

“Stoner” by John Williams

This is a tragic novel that details the course of a man’s life. William Stoner grew up on a small farm, was the first in his family to attend college, and became a Professor of Literature at the University of Missouri. However, there is extreme melancholy that seems to follow Stoner as he progresses through each stage of his life. First, he comes to the realization that he wants to study literature and not agriculture at university, therefore, never returning to help his parents on the family farm. “He thought of his parents, and they were nearly as strange as the child they had borne; he felt a mixed pity for them and a distant love…. But he found that he had nothing to say to them; already, he realized, he and his parents were becoming strangers; and he felt his love increased by its loss.” The plot weaves its way through life on the university campus during both World Wars, as well as the Great Depression. “A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back.” Personally, Stoner is trapped in a strangely loveless marriage. “Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.” Stoner makes only two friends during the course of his life: fellow graduate students, one who dies at the front during the First World War, and another, who, surviving, returns to the same university to become an assistant dean. “While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.” The novel is a grand meditation on the nature of man and what makes life worthwhile. For Stoner, the world is literature and knowledge. “Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.” For him, life was also a war and one that he was gradually but perceptibly losing. He had a wife who did not love him, a daughter who grew more distant by the day, a best friend who died in his prime, a department chair who dumped upon him the worst classes every semester, and, most troubling of all, an internal emptiness that he could not escape. His old literature mentor had told Stoner, when he was deciding whether to enlist or stay on campus as a doctoral candidate, “You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history.”

“Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences” by Alex Mesoudi

Darwin posited that three factors were needed for successful biological evolution: variation, competition, and inheritance. Mesoudi makes the case that these same factors are necessary to effectively transmit traits culturally. However, “two societies living in the same environment can have entirely different behavioral practices,” especially the more limited their amount of inter-group contact. Cultural adaptation is favored over innate change in environments that are rapidly transforming because genes cannot adapt as quickly in the span of one biological generation. Cultural learning is also favored over individual learning because one does not need to bear all the costs of trial and error and one can benefit from piggybacking on new inventions and techniques not developed by oneself. Evolution, biological and cultural, however, is not a predetermined path that is ever progressing. “Humans are not at the top of the evolutionary ladder, because there is no ladder of which to be at the top. There is only local adaptation to local environments, which does not necessarily translate into global increases in fitness, and does not result in inevitable and entirely predictable evolutionary change along a prespecified course.”

Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” to refer to a discreet unit of cultural inheritance or a cultural replicator, akin to a gene in biological evolution. “In culture, on the other hand, one can learn beliefs, ideas, skills, and so forth, not just from one’s biological parents (termed “vertical cultural transmission”) but also from other members of the parental generation (“oblique cultural transmission”) and from members of one’s own generation (“horizontal cultural transmission”)…. People might preferentially copy very prestigious models who have high social status or excel in a particular skill (prestige bias). Alternatively, they might preferentially copy models who are similar to them in dress, dialect, or appearance (similarity bias) or preferentially copy older models (age bias).”

Finally, when looking at a particular set of cultures “within-group diversity and between-group diversity should be inversely correlated.” One specific area where Mesoudi stresses cultural evolution is language. In fact, Darwin stated, “a struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand.” There is also an interplay back and forth between biological and cultural adaptation and evolution. “The social brain hypothesis holds that the large brains of primates, including and especially humans, evolved to deal not primarily with ecological problems such as finding food or using tools, but rather to solve social problems…. Social interactions give rise to a range of particularly challenging problems, such as coordinating actions with others, successfully communicating intentions, forming coalitions and alliances, deception, trying not to be deceived by others, and so on, which demand quite sophisticated cognitive abilities.” The more social interactions and bigger the social group of a particular species of primate the bigger the brain, with humans having the biggest brains of all. We are the paramount social animal and we have achieved our primacy through a cultural inheritance that was the work of human cooperation without any explicit human design.

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

This semi-drunken dinner party is perhaps Plato’s most famous dialogue. All the guests speak on the theme of love and Socrates gets the last word, at least before a fall-down drunk Alcibiades stumbles into the party. Socrates begins by relating the words of a woman, Diotima, who has taught him the true meaning of love. He relates that she said, “Those who love wisdom fall in between those two extremes [of being wise and ignorant]. And Love is one of them, because he is in love with what is beautiful, and wisdom is extremely beautiful. It follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom and, as such, is in between being wise and ignorant.” She continues speaking to Socrates, “I conclude that you thought Love was being loved, rather than being a lover. I think that’s why Love struck you as beautiful in every way: because it is what is really beautiful and graceful that deserves to be loved, and this is perfect and highly blessed; but being a lover takes a different form.” Love has two parts- the object being loved and the lover. One has attained its perfection and one is still striving.

Diotima also speaks of life having a continuity without necessarily a connectedness in a similar vein to Derrick Parfit. She states, “Even while each living thing is said to be alive and to be the same—as a person is said to be the same from childhood till he turns into an old man—even then he never consists of the same things, though he is called the same, but he is always being renewed and in other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones and blood and his entire body. And it’s not just in his body, but in his soul, too, for none of his manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, or fears ever remains the same.” We might seem to be the same person, but we are continually changing, while maintaining some continuity with our previous selves.

When Alcibiades makes his speech he talks about the man he wishes he was. He says, “All that matters is just what I most neglect…. The moment I leave [Socrates’] side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd…. I’m doing nothing about my way of life, though I have already agreed with him that I should.” As Agnes Callard has stated, Alcibiades aspires to be a different man. His moral compass is in the process of changing. He is fighting to become a better man, but he cannot let go of his lust for fame and public glory.

Finally, Alcibiades praises the unique wisdom of Socrates. He states, “If you were to listen to his arguments, at first they’d strike you as totally ridiculous; they’re clothed in words as course as the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs. He’s always going on about pack asses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners; he’s always making the same tired old points in the same tired old words. If you are foolish, or simply unfamiliar with him, you’d find it impossible not to laugh at his arguments. But if you see them when they open up like the statues [of Silenus], if you go behind their surface, you’ll realize that no other arguments make any sense. They’re truly worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside. They’re of great—no, of the greatest—importance for anyone who wants to become a truly good man.” True praise for the esoteric philosophy of Socrates.

“Waiting for God” by Simone Weil (translated by Emma Craufurd)

This book contains some of Weil’s thoughts on the nature of God, on the established Church, and on the City of God versus the City of Man. Often, she writes about the proper synthesis and separation between the material and spiritual realms. The book is organized as a collection of letters, followed by a few of her essays, which, in total, detail her conceptualization of the idea of God and how she relates her earthly being to this transcendent spirit. Her writing is deeply moving, personal, and profound.

The first part of this book is a collection of letters that Weil wrote to a Catholic priest and friend, Father Perrin, as she prepared to flee Nazi-occupied France. In them, she explains her conception of her love of God, as well as explaining the reasons she decided not to get baptized into the Church. She writes, “The mere thought that, supposing I were baptized with any sentiments other than those that are fitting, I should ever come to have even a single instant or a single inward movement of regret, such a thought fills me with horror. Even if I were certain that baptism was the absolute condition of salvation, I would not run this risk, even to save my soul.” You can feel her sense of struggle, but also her certainty. Furthermore, her relationship with Christianity is certainly not orthodox. “If it cannot be given me to deserve one day to share the Cross of Christ, at least may I share that of the good thief. Of all beings other than Christ of whom the Gospel tells us, the good thief is by far the one I most envy. To have been at the side of Christ and in the same state during the crucifixion seems to me a far enviable privilege than to be at the right hand of glory.”

Weil also explains her conception of truth to her friend, Father Perrin. “One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.” Weil describes her struggle with the established Church, because of her love and commitments to the variety of earthly things. “Christianity is catholic by right but not in fact. So many things are outside it, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves…. Christianity being catholic by right but not in fact, I regard it as legitimate on my part to be a member of the Church by right but not in fact, not only for a time, but for my whole life if need be. But it is not merely legitimate. So long as God does not give me the certainty that he is ordering me to do anything else, I think it is my duty.”

Weil also feels the presence of God here on earth. For her, there is no reason to hope for an afterlife. “Even if there were nothing more for us than life on earth, even if the instant of death were to bring us nothing new, the infinite super-abundance of the divine mercy is already secretly present here below in its entirety.” She compares the love of Christianity with that of Stoicism. “At any rate if I really have the right to be called a Christian, I know from experience that the virtue of the Stoics and that of the Christians are one and the same virtue. I mean true Stoical virtue of course, which is before anything else love…. When a soul has attained a love filling the whole universe indiscriminately, this love becomes the bird with golden wings that pierces an opening in the egg of the world. After that, such a soul loves the universe, not from within but from without.” In one of her essays she continues, “Christianity will not be incarnated so long as there is not joined to it the Stoic’s idea of filial piety for the city of the world, for the country of here below which is the universe…. The only true beauty, the only beauty that is the real presence of God, is the beauty of the universe. Nothing less than the universe is beautiful…. The universe is a country. It is our only country here below. This thought is the essence of the wisdom of the Stoics. We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtue easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.”

In another essay, Weil describes her idea of worldly justice. There is love contained in just punishment, as there can be justice in forgiveness. Both have their proper place and utility. “Justice in punishment can be defined in the same way as justice in almsgiving. It means giving our attention to the victim of affliction as to a being and not a thing; it means wishing to preserve in him the faculty of free consent.” Sometimes we need punishment and sometimes we need mercy. She continues, “Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may sink as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away.”

Weil also describes the subjective experience of human reality as self-centered, but imaginary. “We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence…. To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world…. Such consent is love.” Later, when discussing the Lord’s Prayer, she concludes, “We cannot prevent ourselves from desiring; we are made of desire; but the desire that nails us down to what is imaginary, temporal, selfish, can, if we make it pass wholly into the petition, become a lever to tear us from the imaginary into the real and from time into eternity, to lift us right out of the prison of self.”