“Laws” by Plato (translated by Trevor J. Saunders)

This is Plato’s longest dialogue. It deals with establishing the proper laws for the founding of a hypothetical colony as a new State. An unnamed Athenian gives most of the answers as he debates Clinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan, as they travel along from Cnossus together. First, the Athenian lays out the list of supreme human and divine benefits. “Health heads the list of the lesser benefits, followed by beauty; third comes strength, for racing and other physical exercises. Wealth is fourth—not “blind” wealth, but the clear-sighted kind whose companion is good judgment—and good judgment itself is the leading “divine” benefit; second comes the habitual self-control of a soul that uses reason. If you combine these two with courage, you get (thirdly) justice; courage itself lies in fourth place.” The lawmaker’s role is to encourage these virtues. “At every stage the lawgiver should supervise his people, and confer suitable marks of honor or disgrace…. He must use the laws themselves as instruments for the proper distribution of praise and blame.”

The lawmaker must use education to inculcate these higher virtues in the populus. “The earliest sensations that a child feels in infancy are of pleasure and pain, and this is the route by which virtue and vice first enter the soul…. I call ‘education’ the initial acquisition of virtue by the child, when the feelings of pleasure and affection, pain and hatred, that well up in his soul are channeled in the right courses before he can understand the reason why…. Virtue is this general concord of reason and emotion…. Education, then, is a matter of correctly disciplined feelings of pleasure and pain.” However, there is a difference. "Pleasant and painful things come to a stop simultaneously, whereas good things and bad ones do not, because they are in fact different things.” The proper education of a child is no easy task. “Of all wild things, the child is the most unmanageable: an unusually powerful spring of reason, whose waters are not yet canalized in the right direction, makes him sharp and sly, the most unruly animal there is.” A well-served education must last throughout a man’s life. “We do not hold the common view that a man’s highest good is to survive and simply continue to exist. His highest good is to become as virtuous as possible and to continue to exist in that state as long as life lasts.” 

Next, the Athenian begins by detailing the aims in the basic formation of the State. “A state ought to be free and wise and enjoy internal harmony, and that is what the lawgiver should concentrate on in his legislation…. There are two mother-constitutions, so to speak, which you could fairly say have given birth to all the others. Monarchy is the proper name for the first, and democracy for the second…. It is absolutely vital for a political system to combine them… if it is to enjoy freedom and friendship applied with good judgment.”

The Athenian realizes that in every successful State there must be rulers who stand below the laws. “Such people are usually referred to as ‘rulers’, and if I have called them ‘servants of the laws’ it’s not because I want to mint a new expression but because I believe that the success or failure of a state hinges on this point more than on anything else…. If law is the master of the government and the government is its slave, then the situation is full of promise.” Laws must both be written down and embedded within the traditions of the society. “All the rules we are now working through are what people generally call ‘unwritten customs’, and all this sort of thing is precisely what they mean when they speak of ‘ancestral law’…. Although ‘laws’ is the wrong term for these things, we can’t afford to say nothing about them, because they are the bonds of the entire social framework, linking all written and established laws with those yet to be passed. They act in the same way as ancestral customs dating from time immemorial, which by virtue of being soundly established and instinctively observed, shield and protect existing written law…. We must do our best not to omit anything, great or small, whether ‘laws’, ‘habits’, or ‘institutions’, because they are all needed to bind a state together, and the permanence of the one kind of norm depends on that of the other.”

The Athenian adds some words of caution. “We should treat as the biggest enemy of the entire state the man who makes the laws into slaves, and the state into the servant of a particular interest, by subjecting them to the diktat of mere men.” Men must also know their place in society. “A reckless lack of respect for one’s betters is effrontery of peculiar viscousness, which springs from a freedom of inhibitions that has gone much too far.” The rulers and teachers bare the most responsibility. “Total ignorance over an entire field is never dangerous or disastrous; much more damage is done when a subject is known intimately and in detail, but has been improperly taught.” Vice is common to the common man, but the select few must rise above such pettiness. “Only a small part of mankind—a few highly-educated men of rare natural talent—is able to steel itself to moderation when assailed by various needs and desires; given the chance to get a lot of money, it’s a rare bird that’s sober enough to prefer a modest competence to wealth.”

Finally, the Athenian concludes by detailing the laws relationship to social relations and the common weal. “It is vital that men should lay down laws for themselves and live in obedience to them; otherwise they will be indistinguishable from wild animals of the utmost savagery. The reason is this: no man has sufficient natural gifts both to discern what benefits men in their social relationships and to be constantly ready and able to put his knowledge to the best practical use. The first difficulty is to realize the proper object of true political skill is not the interest of private individuals but the common good. This is what knits a state together, whereas private interests make it disintegrate. If the public interest is well served, rather than the private, then the individual and the community alike are benefited.” That is why, in the ideal State, reason must rule over all. “Knowledge is unsurpassed by any law or regulation; reason, if it is genuine and really enjoys its natural freedom, should have universal power: it is not right that it should be under the control of anything else, as though it were some sort of slave…. Law and regulation, which embody general principles… cannot provide for every individual case.”

In this exemplary society, dictated by the Athenian, obedience and lack of freedom among its citizens is a feature of the system, not a bug. “The vital point is that no one, man or woman, must ever be left without someone in charge of him; nobody must get into the habit of acting alone and independently…. In peace and war alike we must give our constant attention and obedience to our leader, submitting to his guidance even in tiny details…. In short, we must condition ourselves to an instinctive rejection of the very notion of doing anything without our companions; we must live a life in which we never do anything, if possible, except by combined and united action as members of a group…. This is what we must practice in peacetime, right from childhood—the exercise of authority over others and submission to them in turn. Freedom from control must be uncompromisingly eliminated from the life of all men, and of all the animals under their dominion.”

“Eline Vere” by Louis Couperus (translated by Ina Rilke)

This novel, written in the last decade of the nineteenth century, details the milieu of aristocratic fin-de-siecle life in The Hague. The eponymous heroine is a tragic figure, but the story only barely revolves around her, as Couperus offers detailed tangential vignettes of various characters within her social circle. “Eline’s languorous, lymphatic disposition entailed the need of tender reassurance and warm affection, and her nerves, delicate as the petals of a flower, often suffered despite the plush comfort of her surroundings.” The days and nights of her youth were spent wiling away the hours on baubles and entertainments. “True to her dreamy and idealistic nature, Eline had a passion for the opera, not only because it gave her the opportunity to display her languorous elegance, not only because of the music and the chance to hear some celebrated chanteuse sing a particular aria, but also because of the exciting, highly romantic intrigues and melodramatic scenes of hatred and love and revenge. She did not mind the plots being predictable, nor did she aspire to find any truth in them.” Imperceptibly at first, her life would be transformed when her cousin Vincent returned to The Hague from years chasing his fortune abroad. “Once the money ran out, which would be soon, he would see his way to obtaining some more one way or another, and what was wrong with that? Notions of good and evil had no relevance in the real world, things just happened to be the way they were, as the inevitable result of a sequence of causes and effects, everything that was had a right to be; no one could alter that which was, or was to be; no one had free will.” Eline’s sister, Betsy, had married practically and was more rooted to mundane reality than her more sentimental sibling. “Betsy was renowned for her elegant little dinner parties, with never fewer than ten guests and never more than a dozen, and always served with the most munificent refinement. They belonged to a coterie whose members were frequently in company with one another on terms of close familiarity, a state of affairs that caused them considerable satisfaction.” Following the natural course of life, Eline was soon engaged to be married to a stable, if boring, man from her tight-knit circle. “Her Otto! Thinking of him she felt no need whatsoever to conjure up some idealised image of him; she thought of him as he was, manly and strong in his good-natured simplicity, with one single thought governing his mind: the thought of her. His love was so rich, so full, so all-encompassing. And hers was growing by the day she believed.” However, fate would intervene into her idyllic paradise. “Life was so full of sham and make-believe! She had always been someone who pretended, to herself as well as to everybody else, and she was still doing it—she could not do otherwise, so ingrained a habit had it become.” During a tete-a-tete, her uncle’s bohemian young wife, Eliza, would comment to Eline, “I dare say you have some dramatic story to tell, but then who hasn’t? A romantic story, perhaps? If so, I pity you, because you obviously made some foolish mistake…. You’re too sensitive. Altogether too emotional. What you need in life’s struggle is a good dose of indifference. You see, we have little choice: we happen to be among the living, and we must live our lives as best we can.”

“Man and Crisis” by Jose Ortega y Gasset (translated by Mildred Adams).

Gasset writes about the nature of man in the age of modernity and how he can never free himself from the chains of history. He begins, “Man cannot take a single step without anticipating more or less clearly his entire future, what he is going to be; that is, what he has decided to be throughout his life. But this means that man, who is always obliged to do something in the circumstances that surround him, has in deciding what he is going to do no other course than to pose to himself the problem of his own individual being…. For when each one of us asks himself what he is going to be, and therefore what his life is going to be, he has no choice but to face the problem of man’s being, of what it is that man in general can be and what is it that he must be.” Man cannot help but be embedded within the particular milieu in which he happens to be born. “Life is not solely man, that is to say, the subject which lives. It is also the drama which arises when the subject finds himself obliged to fling his arms about, to swim shipwrecked in that sea which is the world. History, then, is not primarily the psychology of man, but the refashioning of the structure of that drama which flares between man and the world.”

History is lived subjectively by each individual, but it is also experienced simultaneously and similarly by each age cohort within society. “Contemporaries are not coevals. In history it is important to distinguish between that which is contemporary and that which is coeval…. This is what I usually call the essential anachronism of history. Thanks to the internal disequilibrium, it moves, changes, wheels, and flows.” It matters if one experiences an historic event when a man is a baby, in the prime of his years, or in his dotage. Coevals live the same factual events in a more similar reality. Man cannot escape his age. “At any given moment man lives in a world of convictions, the greater part of which are the convictions common to all men who dwell together in their era. This spirit of the times we have called the world “in force,” the ruling world, in order to show that it has not only the reality which our conviction lends to it, but also that it imposes itself upon us, whether we like it or not, as the most important ingredient in our surroundings. Just as man finds himself encased within the body which has fallen to him by chance and must live in it and with it, so he finds himself with the ideas of his time, and in them and with them—even though it be in the peculiar fashion of contending against them—must he live.”

Gasset begins to tackle the problems embedded within the twin concepts of modernity and scientific knowledge. “Only theology and philosophy are creators of faith on their own account…. Life is different from the perspective of science. During the modern age, the two have been confused: this very confusion is the modern age. In it man makes science, pure reason, serve as a basis for the system of his convictions. He lives on science…. To confuse the perspective of science with the perspective of life has its inconveniences, that it creates a false perspective, just as did the acceptance of the religious, the theological, perspective as the vital perspective. We will see that life does not tolerate being supplanted either by revealed faith or by pure reason.” In modernity, man is seen through the lens of a scientific species, not as a living individual. “Human life is not more nor less real, it does not cease to have its own exclusive character merely because it happens to be illustrious or mediocre.”

Gasset contends that we have reached the epoch where modernity is gripped in crisis. “An historical crisis occurs when the world change which is produced consists in this: the world, the system of convictions belonging to a previous generation, gives way to a vital state in which man remains without these convictions, and therefore without a world. Man returns to a state of not knowing what to do, for the reason that he returns to a state of actually not knowing what to think about the world…. One does not know what new thing to think—one only knows, or thinks he knows, that the traditional norms and ideas are false and inadmissible. One feels a profound disdain for everything, or almost everything, which was believed yesterday; but the truth is that there are no new positive beliefs with which to replace the traditional ones…. During periods of crisis, positions which are false or feigned are very common. Entire generations falsify themselves to themselves; that is to say, they wrap themselves up in artistic styles, in doctrines, in political movements which are insincere and which fill the lack of genuine convictions.” Man lives outside himself. “We have abandoned ourselves to other people and we live in a state of otherness, constantly deceiving and defrauding ourselves. We are afraid of our own life, which is synonymous with solitude, and we flee from it, from its genuine reality, from the effort it demands; we hide our own selves behind the selves of other people, we disguise ourselves behind society…. Culture is only the interpretation which man gives to his life, the series of more or less satisfactory solutions which he invents in order to handle his problems and the needs of his life.”

Modern man is lost in a sea of technical knowledge. He is so smart that he knows nothing. “The man who knows many things, the cultivated man, runs the risk of losing himself in the jungle of his own knowledge; and he ends up by not knowing what his own genuine knowledge is. We do not have to look very far; this is what happens to the modern average man. He has received so many thoughts that he does not know which of them are those that he actually thinks, those he believes; and he becomes used to living on pseudo-beliefs, on commonplaces which at times are most ingenious and most intellectual, but which falsify his own existence.” Crisis breeds this homogenization. “It is strange that all historical crises produce at the start an age of uniformity, in which everything has in it a little bit of everything, and nothing is boldly and solely something specific and definite.” Society sinks to the lowest common denominator. “The man who despairs of culture turns against it and declares its laws and its norms to be worn out and abolished. The mass man who in these days takes on the directing of life feels himself deeply flattered by this declaration, because culture which is, after all, an authentic imperative, weighs on him too heavily; and in that abolition of culture he sees a permit to kick up his heels, get out himself, and give himself over to a life of licentiousness.”

Man in crisis is always prone to conversion. “Given this mode of life characterized by instability, extremism, controversy, the sudden and complete shifts which are called conversion will be very frequent. Conversion is man’s change not from one idea to another, but from one definite point of view to its exact opposite: life suddenly seems to us turned upside down and inside out. That which yesterday we were burning at the stake we adore today…. Deny what you were up to this very moment and affirm your truth, recognize that you are lost. Out of this negation comes the new man who is to be constructed…. Metanoia, or conversion and repentance, is therefore none other than what I call ensimismamiento—withdrawal into one’s self, return to oneself.”

However, man can never escape from history, even modern man, despite his best attempts. “Man is never original man, the first to arrive on the scene, but always a successor, an inheritor, a son of the human past.” History, and therefore man, moves forward and back again in fits and starts. “The historic reality, the human destiny, advances dialectically, although that basic dialectic of life is not, as Hegel believed, a conceptual dialectic composed of pure reason, but the dialectic of a reason much broader, deeper, and richer than pure reason—the dialectic of life, of living reason.” This is not what modern man wishes to hear. “The modern believes that he can suppress realities and build the world to his liking in the name of an idea.”

“Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad” by Alice Oswald

This is a retelling of the Iliad cut to the bone by Oswald. She explains, “This translation presents the whole poem as a kind of cemetery.” Her poem begins, “The first to die was PROTESILAUS/ A focused man who hurried to darkness/ With forty black ships leaving the land behind/ Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs/ Where the grass gives growth to everything/ Pyrasus    Iton    Pteleus    Antron/ He died in mid-air jumping to be the first ashore… He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years” Throughout the poem, Oswald never sugarcoats the brutality of war. “Meanwhile Diomedes/ Seeing through everything to its inner emptiness/ Killed ECHEMMON killed CHROMIUS/ Tin-opened them out of their armour/ And took for himself their high-stepping horses” Frequently interspersed throughout the death roll, Oswald makes use of repetition through pastoral lyric. “Like an oak struck by lightening/ Throws up its arms and burns/ Terrifying for a man out walking/ To smell that sulfur smell/ And see the fields flickering ahead of him/ Lit up blue by the strangeness of god” A single line often conveys mood through simile. “With weapons cleaned and layed down like cutlery” At points, she abstracts from the particular deaths to pontificate on the nature of war. “Grief is black it is made of earth/ It gets into the cracks in the eyes/ It lodges its lump in the throat/ When a man sees his brother on the ground/ He goes mad he comes running out of nowhere” All the scenes depicting the battlefield of Ilium cast it as a cursed spot. “But this is it now this is the mud of Troy/ This is black wings coming down every evening/ Bird’s feathers on your face/ Unmaking you mouthful by mouthful/ Eating your eyes your open eyes/ Which your mother should have closed” In the constant refrain of death, the soldiers all are eventually cut down to size. “DOLOPS the strongest of Lampus/ Not believing he could die/ Even when his spear hit solid metal/ And banged back again/ Even when a man hacked off his helmet/ And he saw his own eye-holes/ Staring up at him from the ground/ It was not until the beak of death/ Pushed out through his own chest/ That he recognized the wings of darkness”

“Ethics” by Baruch Spinoza (translated by Samuel Shirley)

Spinoza’s treatise builds up a system of ethics from the most basic foundations. His method is to posit definitions, axioms, and propositions, and then validate them through proofs, scholiums, and corollaries. Spinoza begins with Part I, “Concerning God.” First, some definitions: “By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself…. By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence…. That thing is said to be free [liber] which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone.” Proposition 8 states: “Every substance is necessarily infinite.” Scholium 2 of that proposition expounds, in part: “Those who do not know the true causes of things confuse things…. So too, those who confuse the divine nature with human nature easily ascribe to God human emotions…. But if men were to attend to the nature of substance, they would not doubt at all the truth of Proposition 7…. For by substance they would understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that the knowledge of which does not require the knowledge of any other thing.” Spinoza’s proofs are very detailed and build brick by brick from the ground up. The treatise also gets a little tedious at the start. Later, Spinoza states, “All things depend on the power of God. For things to be able to be otherwise than as they are, God’s will, too, would necessarily have to be different. But God’s will cannot be different (as we have just shown most clearly from the consideration of God’s perfection). Therefore, neither can things be different.” Proven.

Part II concerns “Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind.” Here Spinoza delves a bit into the nature of the will and its freedom. “If by intellect is meant clear and distinct ideas only, I grant that the will extends more widely than the intellect, but I deny that the will extends more widely than perceptions, that is, the faculty of conceiving…. Suspension of judgment is really a perception, not free will…. I grant that the imaginings of the mind, considered in themselves, involve no error (see Sch. Pr. 17, II). But I deny that a man makes no affirmation insofar as he has a perception…. The will is a universal term predicated of all ideas and signifying only what is common to all ideas, namely, affirmation, the adequate essence of which, insofar as it is thus conceived as an abstract term, must be in every single idea, and the same in all in this respect only…. There is nothing in ideas that constitutes the form of falsity…. It is important to note here how easily we are deceived when we confuse universals with particulars, and mental constructs [entia rationis] and abstract terms with real.” He concludes Part II by dealing with virtue, fortune, and contingency. “We clearly understand how far astray from the true estimation of virtue are those who, failing to understand that virtue itself and the service of God are happiness itself and utmost freedom, expect God to bestow on them highest rewards in return for their virtue and meritorious actions as if in return for the basest slavery…. [Virtue] teaches us what attitude we should adopt regarding fortune, or the things that are not in our power, that is, the things that do not follow from our nature; namely, to expect and to endure with patience both faces of fortune.”

Part III is titled “Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emotions.” Spinoza believes that the only three basic emotions are pleasure, pain, and desire. All the other emotions derive from these three. He begins with a definition, “By emotion [affectus] I understand the affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections.” He believes that the conatus, the tendency toward self-preservation and activity, is the most basic purpose of man. “The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.” For man, desire precedes the good. “We do not endeavor, will, seek after or desire because we judge a thing to be good. On the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seek after and desire it.” He states, “Pleasure is man’s transition from a state of less perfection to a state of greater perfection…. Pain is man’s transition from a state of greater perfection to a state of less perfection…. I say “transition,” for pleasure is not perfection itself. If a man were to be born with the perfection to which he passes, he would be in possession of it without the emotion of pleasure.”

Part IV deals with the topic, “Of Human Bondage, Or the Strength of the Emotions.” We are beginning to delve into Spinoza’s system of ethics proper. He feels that there is a tug between the reason of the mind and the base emotions. “I assign the term “bondage” to man’s lack of power to control and check the emotions. For a man at the mercy of his emotions is not his own master but is subject to fortune, in whose power he so lies that he is often compelled, although he sees the better course, to pursue the worse.” Spinoza continues, “Desire is the very essence of man…. Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it therefore demands that every man should love himself, should seek his own advantage (I mean his real advantage), should aim at whatever really leads a man toward greater perfection, and, to sum it all up, that each man, as far as in him lies, should endeavor to preserve his own being…. Since virtue (Def. 8, IV) is nothing other than to act from the laws of one’s own nature, and since nobody endeavors to preserve his own being (Pr. 7, III) except from the laws of his own nature, it follows firstly that the basis of virtue is the very conatus to preserve one’s own being, and that happiness consists in a man’s being able to preserve his own being. Secondly, it follows that virtue should be sought for its own sake, and that there is nothing preferable to it or more to our advantage, for the sake of which it should be sought.”

Next, Spinoza seeks to spell out the advantages of civil society between men. “Nothing is more advantageous to man than man. Men, I repeat, can wish for nothing more excellent for preserving their own being than that they should all be in such harmony in all respects that their minds and bodies should compose, as it were, one mind and one body, and that all together should endeavor as best they can to preserve their own being, and that all together they should aim at the common advantage of all…. It follows that men are governed by reason, that is, men who aim at their own advantage under the guidance of reason, seek nothing for themselves that they would not desire for the rest of mankind; and so are just, faithful, and honorable…. Knowledge of good and evil is (Pr. 8, IV) the emotion of pleasure or pain insofar as we are conscious of it, and therefore every man (Pr, 28, III) necessarily seeks what he judges to be good and avoids what he judges to be evil. But this appetite is nothing other than man’s very essence or nature.”

Spinoza also deals with the concepts of natural rights and their diminution in society. “Every man exists by the sovereign natural right, and consequently by the sovereign natural right every man does what follows from the necessity of his nature…. In order that men may live in harmony and help one another, it is necessary for them to give up their natural right and to create a feeling of mutual confidence that they will refrain from any action that may be harmful to another…. Society can be established, provided that it claims for itself the right that every man has of avenging himself and deciding what is good and what is evil; and furthermore if it has the power to prescribe common rules of behavior and to pass laws to enforce them, not by reason, which is incapable of checking the emotions (Sch. Pr. 17, IV), but by threats…. Wrongdoing is therefore nothing other than disobedience, which is therefore punishable only by the right of the State…. In a state of nature nothing can be said to be just or unjust; this is so only in a civil state…. Justice and injustice, wrongdoing and merit, are extrinsic notions, not attributes that explicate the nature of the mind.”

Spinoza, nonetheless, next posits on right conduct, obeying proper reason. “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life.” He has a practical concept of dealing with the masses of the ignorant. “The free man who lives among ignorant people tries as far as he can to avoid receiving favors from them…. Every man judges what is good according to his own way of thinking (Sch. Pr. 39, III). Thus the ignorant man who has conferred a favor on someone will value it according to his own way of thinking…. To avoid both the hatred of the ignorant and the need to comply with their expectations, and so as to make reason his sole ruler, he will endeavor as far as he can to avoid their favors.” Spinoza is also practical in the application of courage. “For a free man timely retreat is as much a mark of courage as is fighting, the free man chooses flight by the same courage or spiritedness as he chooses battle.”

Finally, Spinoza returns to the idea of external fortune, contingency, and fate. “Human power is very limited and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes, and so we do not have absolute power to adapt to our purposes things external to us. However, we shall patiently bear whatever happens to us that is contrary to what is required by consideration of our own advantage, if we are conscious that we have done our duty and that our power was not extensive enough for us to have avoided the said things, and that we are a part of the whole of Nature whose order we follow…. We can desire nothing but that which must be, nor, in an absolute sense, can we find contentment in anything but truth.”

The final Part V of Spinoza’s treatise is titled, “Of the Power of the Intellect, Or of Human Freedom.” He advises following fixed rules in governing one’s day to day affairs. “The best course we can adopt, as long as we do not have perfect knowledge of our emotions, is to conceive a right method of living, or fixed rules of life, and to commit them to memory and continually apply them to particular situations that are frequently encountered in life, so that our casual thinking is thoroughly permeated by them and they are always ready to hand.” He ends with a last bit of healthy advice and an exultation, “If the road I have pointed out as leading to this goal seems very difficult, yet it can be found. Indeed, what is so rarely discovered is bound to be hard. For if salvation were ready to hand and could be discovered without great toil, how could it be that it is almost universally neglected? All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

“Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke

This book might be labeled a mystery novel, of sorts. Or perhaps science fiction or fantasy. It is fantastical. And deeply mysterious. Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an eighteenth century Italian polymath who drew etchings of imaginary prisons. The eponymous hero of Clarke’s novel lives within a giant decaying house, made of stone, with endless halls adorned by giant statues and lapping tides of water that rise and recede with regularity. The novel is written as a series of diary entries, written by the protagonist, as he struggles to make sense of his world. He believes himself to be some sort of scientist. Or, at least, a man of reason and logic. He meets bi-weekly with the Other, the only other person he presumes to be living somewhere within the house, to exchange knowledge and insights into the mysteries of their home. “I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery…. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.”

“Lectures and Conversations: On Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein (edited by Cyril Barrett)

These were notes of lectures, primarily taken by Yorick Smythies, given by Wittgenstein to a small group of students in his private rooms at Cambridge, during the summer of 1938. Wittgenstein began by trying to clarify that language should be looked at in regards to its use and not to its form. “I have often compared language to a tool chest, containing a hammer, chisel, matches, nails, screws, glue. It is not a chance that all these things have been put together—but there are important differences between the different tools—they are used in a family of ways.” Pertaining to aesthetics proper, he begins on the importance of a system of rules. “If I hadn’t learnt the rules, I wouldn’t be able to make the aesthetic judgment. In learning the rules you get a more and more refined judgement. Learning the rules actually changes your judgment.” Aesthetics is not purely personal. It is not simply a matter of taste. “To describe a set of aesthetic rules fully means really to describe the culture of a period.” Aesthetics also involves tradition and conventions. “In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living.” However, there is also a subjective component. It is by no means scientific. “The sort of explanation one is looking for when one is puzzled by an aesthetic impression is not a causal explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by statistics as to how people react…. You cannot arrive at the explanation by means of psychological experiment…. The puzzles which arise in aesthetics, which are puzzles arising from the effects the arts have, are not puzzles about how these things are caused.”

The notes on Freud were taken by Rush Rhees after conversations with Wittgenstein between 1942 and 1946. Wittgenstein thought Freud always had “something to say,” even when he was completely wrong. Freud was one of the few people in any field whom Wittgenstein deigned to read, in fact. On Freud’s theory of anxiety, Wittgenstein states that it has a similar usefulness to it as did ancient myths. “Take Freud’s view that anxiety is always a repetition in some way of the anxiety we felt at birth. He does not establish this by reference to evidence—for he could not do so. But it is an idea which has a marked attraction. It has the attraction which mythological explanations have, explanations which say that this is all a repetition of something that has happened before.” For Wittgenstein, the genius of Freud was in the prism with which his theories allowed you to reimagine the world. The process was a new presentation of established facts. “It makes certain ways of behaving and thinking natural for them [his patients]. They have given up one way of thinking and adopted another.” However, Wittgenstein felt that Freud pushed his theories too much to the extreme. “It seems muddled to say that all dreams are hallucinated wish fulfillments…. It is probable that there are many different sorts of dreams, and that there is no single line of explanation for all of them…. [Freud] wanted to find some one explanation which would show what dreaming is. He wanted to find the essence of dreaming. And he would have rejected any suggestion that he might be partly right but not altogether so.”

Wittgenstein begins his lectures on religion by stating the different ways in which the term belief may be used. “There are instances where you have a faith—where you say “I believe”—and on the other hand this belief does not rest on the fact on which our ordinary everyday beliefs normally do rest. How should we compare beliefs with each other? What would it mean to compare them?” He goes on to question those who believe in the Last Judgment. “Am I to say they are unreasonable? I wouldn’t call them unreasonable. I would say, they are certainly not reasonable, that’s obvious. ‘Unreasonable’ implies, with everyone, rebuke. I want to say: they don’t treat this as a matter of reasonability. Anyone who reads the Epistles will find it said: not only that it is not reasonable, but that it is folly. Not only is it not reasonable, but it doesn’t pretend to be.” Finally on God, “If the question arises as to the existence of a god or God, it plays an entirely different role to that of the existence of any person or object I ever heard of…. One talks of believing and at the same time one doesn’t use ‘believe’ as one does ordinarily.”

“The Milk of Dreams” by Leonora Carrington

This is Carrington’s book of original children’s stories, complete with her own surreal illustrations. While the stories are child appropriate, most would also be appropriate for an adult tripping on acid. In one story, “Headless John,” a boy with wings for ears loses his head as it flies off. “With no head he couldn’t even cry.” In another, “The Monster of Chihuahua,” there is a character named “Senor Mustache Mustache who has two faces—eats flies, dances—here is his turkey.” Others of her stories have a taco vendor who “smelled of caca” and sold rotten meat that could talk, an angel who drinks camomile tea and pees on old women, sofa holes that grow teeth, and even more children getting decapitated. The stories draw on both her English upbringing and her time living in Mexico City. This short book is well worth a read just for the crazy drawings.

“The Complete Works of Zhuangzi” by Zhuang Zhou (translated by Burton Watson)

Zhuang Zhou was a Daoist philosopher, who probably lived in the fourth century BC. He was also probably an official in a place called Meng, in the state of Song. Probably. The Zhuangzi was almost certainly not entirely written by him, but was added onto and amended by his followers over the centuries. Even within the text considered most likely to be authentically his, he admits to a method of using imputed words, repeated words, and goblet words—basically, putting words into the mouths of famous people to help make a point more compelling, repeating the sayings of historic figures to add weightiness, and using ambiguous words, whose meanings could fluctuate over time and context. With those caveats, Zhuang Zhou has clearly written a masterful philosophical treatise with subtle nuggets of wisdom, intriguing paradoxes, and much to mull over. Also of some dispute was his relationship with Lao Tzu, his fellow Daoist, as well as with Confucius and Mozi. He writes about them a lot, and even quotes from them liberally, in what is sometimes a clearly nonfactual (imputed) manner to make his points.

Zhuang Zhou begins, “Liezi (Lao Tzu) concluded that he had never really begun to learn anything. He went home and, for three years, did not go out. He replaced his wife at the stove, fed the pigs as though he were feeding people, and showed no preferences in the things he did. He got rid of the carving and polishing and returned to plainness, letting his body stand alone like a clod. In the midst of entanglement he remained sealed, and in this oneness he ended his life.” Zhou continues by describing the ways of the sage, in general, “The sage contemplates Heaven but does not assist it. He finds completion in Virtue but piles on nothing more. He goes forth in the Way but does not scheme. He accords with benevolence but does not set great store by it. He draws close to righteousness but does not labor over it. He responds to the demands of ritual and does not shun them. He disposes of affairs and makes no excuses. He brings all to order with laws and allows no confusion. He depends on the people and does not make light of them. He relies on things and does not throw them aside. Among things, there are none that are worth using, and yet they must be used.”

Essential to Daoist philosophy is the concept of the Way. “He who holds fast to the Way is complete in Virtue; being complete in Virtue, he is complete in body; being complete in body, he is complete in spirit; and to be complete in spirit is the Way of the sage. He is content to live among the people, to walk by their side, and never know where he is going. Witless, his purity is complete. Achievement, profit, machines, skill—they have no place in this man’s mind! A man like this will not go where he has no will to go, will not do what he has no mind to do. Though the world might praise him and say he had really found something, he would look unconcerned and never turn his head; though the world might condemn him and say he had lost something, he would look serene and pay no heed. The praise and blame of the world are no loss or gain to him. He may be called a man of Complete Virtue.”

Zhou continues with some specific advice. Be wary of those who claim that they have found the answers to life’s mysteries. “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know. Therefore the sage practices the teaching that has no words.” Inaction is paramount to Zhou’s worldview. The true sage practices inaction. “He who practices the Way does less every day, does less and goes on doing less until he reaches the point where he does nothing; does nothing and yet there is nothing that is not done.” Acceptance of the interconnectedness of the world also leads to wisdom. “You have only to comprehend the one breath that is the world. The sage never ceases to value oneness.” Zhou then quotes Chizhang Manqui on the paradox of virtue. “In an age of Perfect Virtue, the worthy are not honored; the talented are not employed. Rulers are like the high branches of a tree; the people, like the deer of the fields. They do what is right, but they do not know that this is righteousness. They love one another, but they do not know that this is benevolence. They are truehearted but do not know that this is loyalty. They are trustworthy but do not know that this is good faith. They wriggle around like insects, performing services for one another, but do not know that they are being kind. Therefore they move without leaving any trail behind, act without leaving any memory of their deeds.” Zhou also brings in Confucius, who, in this case, appears to agree with Zhou’s conception of the true sage. “To understand that hardship is a matter of fate, that success is a matter of the times, and to face great difficulty without fear—this is the courage of the sage.”

Zhou also quotes Confucius in cautioning against the unabashed goodness of knowledge. “The sacred turtle could appear to Lord Yuan in a dream, but it couldn’t escape from Yu Ju’s net. It knew enough to give correct answers to seventy-two queries, but it couldn’t escape the disaster of having its belly ripped open. So it is that knowledge has its limitations, and the sacred has that which it can do nothing about.” In general, Zhou cautions against being the nail that sticks out. He quotes Taigong Ren, “The straight-trunked tree is the first to be felled; the well of sweet water is the first to run dry. And you now--you show off your wisdom in order to astound the ignorant, work at your good conduct in order to distinguish yourself from the disreputable.” It is far better to know your nature and be true to it. Zhou quotes Man Goude, “The petty man will die for riches, the gentleman will die for reputation. In the manner in which they alter their true form and change their inborn nature, they differ. But insofar as they throw away what is already theirs and are willing to die for something that is not theirs, they are identical.... Do not strive to make your conduct consistent; do not try to perfect your righteousness, or you will lose what you already have. Do not race after riches; do not risk your life for success, or you will let slip the Heaven within you.”

Finally, Zhuang Zhou advises on setting limits, knowing oneself, and being content without external trifles. “He who has mastered the true nature of life does not labor over what life cannot do. He who has mastered the true nature of fate does not labor over what knowledge cannot change. He who wants to nourish his body must, first of all, turn to things. And yet it is possible to have more than enough things and for the body still to go unnourished.” He suggests that wisdom is always hard to find among the living. “The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?”

“Philebus” by Plato (translated by Dorothea Frede)

In this dialogue, Socrates debates two Athenian youths, Philebus and Protarchus, on whether pleasure or knowledge is the greater Good. Socrates begins, “Philebus holds that what is good for all creatures is to enjoy themselves, to be pleased and delighted…. We contend that not these, but knowing, understanding and remembering, and what belongs with them, right opinion and true calculations, are better than pleasure and more agreeable to all who can attain them.” Socrates later continues, “Philebus says that pleasure is the right aim for all living beings and that all should try to strive for it, that it is at the same time the good for all things, so that good and pleasant are but two names that really belong to what is by nature one and the same. Socrates, by contrast, affirms that these are not one and the same thing but two, just as they are two in name, that the good and the pleasant have a different nature, and that intelligence has a greater share in the good than pleasure.”

Socrates proceeds to relate the defining quality of the Good. “Any creature that was in permanent possession of it, entirely and in every way, would never be in need of anything else, but would live in perfect self-sufficiency.” Because of this nature, Socrates already conceded that neither pleasure nor intelligence alone, unmixed, can be called the absolute highest Good. “Let him put memory, intelligence, knowledge, and true opinion into one class, and ask himself whether anybody would choose to possess or acquire anything else without that class. Most particularly, whether he would want pleasure, as much and as intensive as it can be, without the true opinion that he enjoys it, without recognizing what kind of experience it is he has, without memory of this affection for any length of time. And let him put reason to the same test, whether anyone would prefer to have it without any kind of pleasure, even a very short-lived one, rather than with some pleasures, provided that he does not want all pleasures without intelligence rather than with some fraction of it…. So neither of these two would be perfect, worthy of choice for all, and the supreme good?… We ought not to seek the good in the unmixed life but in the mixed one.”

Socrates points out that knowledge, in all its degrees, from the highest to the lowest forms, is beneficial to ignorance. “Our love for every kind of knowledge has made us let them all in together.” However, he posits that this is not so with pleasure. He rhetorically addresses knowledge, ““Will you have any need to associate with the strongest and most intensive pleasures in addition to the true pleasures?”…. [Knowledge] might reply, “They are a tremendous impediment to us, since they infect the souls in which they dwell with madness or even prevent our own development altogether. Furthermore, they totally destroy most of our offspring, since neglect leads to forgetfulness. But as to the true and pure pleasures you [Socrates] mentioned, those regard as our kin. And besides, add the pleasures of health and of temperance and all those that commit themselves to virtue as to their deity and follow it around everywhere. But to forge an association between reason and those pleasures that are forever involved with foolishness and other kinds of vice would be totally unreasonable for anyone who aims at the best and most stable mixture or blend.”” Pleasure, unlike knowledge, is unwise to imbibe in to an extreme. “It is obvious that it is in some vicious state of soul and body and not in virtue that the greatest pleasures as well as the greatest pains have their origin.”

Socrates posits that the Good requires three forms. “If we cannot capture the good in one form, we will have to take hold of it in a conjunction of three: beauty, proportion, and truth.” He states how these three are all interrelated, “That any kind of mixture that does not in some way or other possess measure or the nature of proportion will necessarily corrupt its ingredients and most of all itself…. But now we notice that the force of the good has taken refuge in an alliance with the nature of the beautiful. For measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas as beauty and virtue.” Finally, Socrates gets Protarchus to compare pleasure to reason using these three forms. “Pleasures are perhaps rather like children who don’t possess the least bit of reason. Reason, by contrast, either is the same as truth or of all things it is most like it and most true…. I don’t think that one could find anything that is more outside all measure than pleasure and excessive joy, while nothing more measured than reason and knowledge could ever be found…. No one, awake or dreaming, could ever see intelligence and reason to be ugly; no one could ever have conceived of them as becoming or being ugly, or that they ever will be…. In the case of pleasures, by contrast, when we see anyone actively engaged in them, especially those that are most intense, we notice that their effect is quite ridiculous, if not outright obscene; we become quite ashamed ourselves and hide them as mush as possible from sight, and we confine such activities to the night, as if daylight must not witness such things.” So while Socrates concedes that knowledge, alone, is not the greatest Good, for it must be mixed with a little bit of pleasure, he posits that it is, nonetheless, far superior as a Good than pleasure ever will be. “Whatever the ingredient in the mixed life may be that makes it choiceworthy and good, reason is more closely related to that thing and more like it than pleasure.”