“Euthydemus” by Plato (translated by Rosamond Kent Sprague)

In this dialogue Socrates discusses with his friend, Crito, the teachings of two Sophists, Euthydemus, and his brother, Dionysodorus. On the surface, Socrates seems to be praising their style of argumentation. He even recommends that he and Crito go to the brothers to take lessons in reasoning. Socrates states, “These two are first of all completely skilled in body, being highly adept at fighting in armor and able to teach this skill to anyone else who pays them a fee; and then they are the ones best able to fight the battle of the law court and to teach other people both how to deliver and how to compose the sort of speeches suitable for the courts…. They have now mastered the one form of fighting they had previously left untried; as a result, not a single man can stand up to them, they have become so skilled in fighting in arguments and in refuting whatever may be said, no matter whether it is true or false.” The reader might already question whether this is damning them with faint praise.

In the course of relating to Crito the back and forth between the Sophists and him, Socrates describes the preeminent value of the right kind of wisdom. He argues, “Even if all the gold in the world should be ours with no trouble and without digging for it, we should be no better off—no, not even if we knew how to make stones into gold would the knowledge be worth anything. For unless we also knew how to use the gold, there appeared to be no value in it…. Nor does there seem to be any value in any other sort of knowledge which knows how to make things, whether money making or medicine or any other such thing, unless it knows how to use what it makes…. Again, if there exists the knowledge to make men immortal, but without the knowledge of how to use this immortality, there seems to be no value in it, if we are to conclude anything from what has already been settled.”

Socrates also discusses with Crito those advisors to politicians who wish to dip their toes into both the worlds of knowledge and action. “These are the persons, Crito, whom Prodicus describes as occupying the no-man’s-land between the philosopher and the statesman. They think that they are the wisest of men, and that they not only are but seem to be so in the eyes of so many, so that no one else keeps them from enjoying universal esteem except the followers of philosophy…. They regard themselves as very wise, and reasonably so, since they think they are not only pretty well up in philosophy but also in politics. Yes, their conceit of wisdom is quite natural because they think they have as much of each as they need; and, keeping clear of both risk and conflict, they reap the fruits of wisdom…. Plausibility, is just what it does have, Crito, rather than truth. It is no easy matter to persuade them that a man or anything else which is between two things and partakes of both is worse than one and better than the other in the case where one of the things is good and the other evil; and that in the case where it partakes of two distinct goods, it is worse than either of them with respect to the end for which each of the two (of which it is composed) is useful…. Now if philosophy is a good, and so is the activity of the statesman (and each has a different end), and those partaking of both are in between, then these men are talking nonsense, since they are inferior to both.”

Socrates concludes by defending philosophy from the philosophers, not to mention the Sophists. “In every pursuit most of the practitioners are paltry and of no account whereas the serious men are few and beyond price…. Pay no attention to the practitioners of philosophy, whether good or bad. Rather give serious consideration to the thing itself.”

“Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s novel is about the birth of the nation of India, as told through the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, the day of Indian independence. In fact, Saleem often switches between first and third person narration when recounting his tale, as much as he switches back and forth between the history of his family and the history of India. “Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale.” In Rushdie’s novel, one man’s history is used as a lens to chronicle the birth-pangs of a new nation, ever-shaped by its colonial past. ““Bad business, Mr. Sinai,” Methwold, sips his Scotch amid cacti and roses, “Never seen the like. Hundreds of years of decent government, then suddenly, up and off. You’ll admit we weren’t all bad: built your roads. Schools, railway trains, parliamentary system, all worthwhile things. Taj Mahal was falling down until an Englishman bothered to see it. And now, suddenly, independence. Seventy days to get out. I’m dead against it myself, but what’s to be done?”” The narrator, Saleem, looks back on the day of his birth as well. “A nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth—a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivaled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”

Throughout the tale, Rushdie seamlessly weaves together historical truth with mystical fantasy. “So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry … but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose … to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could draw the undrawable bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!) … and to me, the greatest talent of all—the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.” Islam and Hinduism also play indispensable roles in the story’s telling. “But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s (like India’s first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country whose population of deities rivaled the numbers of its people, so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body was to show a marked preference for the impure. Mopla-like, I was doomed to be a misfit; but, in the end, purity found me out, and even I, Saleem, was cleansed of my misdeeds.”

In Rushdie’s telling, it is impossible to separate the single life of Saleem with that of the life of India writ large. “Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” As the narrator, Saleem, looks back on his past, now the manager of a chutney factory in Bombay, he realizes that it all might not make much sense after all. “Sometimes, in the pickles’ version of history, Saleem appears to have known too little, at other times, too much … yes, I should revise and revise, improve and improve; but there is neither the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that’s how it happened.”

“Stages of Life” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

This book is divided into four parts, each with their own fictitious author, each complete with their own backstory and persona, in the style common to Kierkegaard. The first section is titled “In Vino Veritas” and it is an account of a decadent banquet held in an exotic locale, in the depths of the woods, outside of Copenhagen. It is attended only by a small group of men, who have all pledged to get drunk and give soliloquies on the nature of love. “For anyone who has once understood what recollection is has been captured for all eternity and is captured in it; and anyone who possesses one recollection is richer than if he possessed the whole world.”

The first to speak is an unnamed young bachelor. “I have renounced all erotic love, for my thought is everything to me. If love is the most blissful desire, then I renounce the desire without wishing either to offend or to envy anyone; if love conditions the highest benefaction, then I reject the occasion for it, but my thought is saved. Not that I am without an eye for beauty, not that my heart is unmoved when I read the poets’ songs, not that my soul is without sadness when I indulge in that beautiful representation of love, but I refuse to be unfaithful to my thought, and what would be the use of it, because for me there is no bliss where I have not saved my thought…. I do, of course, perceive that if anything may be sacred, then it is love, that if faithlessness is debased anywhere, it is in love, that if any deceit is abominable, it is in love. But my soul is pure; I have never looked at any woman to desire her.” Johannes, known to readers of “Either/Or” as the seducer, responds thus, “For what else is woman but a dream, and yet the highest reality…. With man the essential is the essential and thus always the same; with woman the accidental is the essential and in this way an inexhaustible heterogeneity. Brief is her glory, but the pain is also quickly forgotten, and when the same glory is offered to me again, it is as if I had not even felt the pain.”

The second section was written by the devoted Judge, again from “Either/Or”, titled “Some Reflections on Marriage in Answer to Objections.” He opines, “A married man who is that with his whole life and soul is certainly the one who has ventured and ventured most of all. He ventures out of infatuation’s hiding place with the beloved one…. He does not know what would happen, but this he does know—he can lose everything; and this he does know—he cannot evade a single thing, for the resolution holds firmly there where his love imprisons him but also holds him undaunted there where falling in love laments.” He goes on to expound on his conception of the internal versus the external. “From a purely external point of view, there certainly are hundreds and hundreds more who have risked more than a married man, risked kingdoms and countries, millions and millions of millions have lost thrones and principalities, fortunes and prosperity, and yet the married man risks more. For the person who loves risks more than all these things, and the person who loves in as many ways as it is possible for a man to love risks most of all.” He concludes on the love of the married man versus the lust of the poetic lover, “A married man risks every day, and every day the sword of duty hangs over his head, and the journal is kept up as long as the marriage keeps on, and the ledger of responsibility is never closed, and the responsibility is even more inspiring than the most glorious epic poet who must testify for the hero. Well, it is true that he does not take the risk for nothing—no, like for like, he risks everything for everything, and if because of its responsibility marriage is an epic, then because of its happiness it certainly is also an idyll…. Marriage is the fullness of time.”

By far the longest section of Kierkegaard’s book is ““Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?””, in which a gentleman, who has broken off his engagement to the sweetheart he still desperately loves, debates within his diary the consequences of his actions. (One should, of course, keep in mind Kierkegaard’s actual personal history when reading this section, particularly.) The diary entries alternate between his reflections during the day, which look back on his thoughts in the immediacy of his decision to separate, and those written at midnight, which reflect back through time on the separation with the benefit of months of hindsight. He begins with sorrow, “To want to proceed jointly along this path will produce again that dreadful misrelation that I already feared in that two-month period: that we would jointly sorrow over an unhappy love affair. It cannot be. What similarity is there between her sorrow and mine, what solidarity is there between guilt and innocence, what kinship is there between repentance and an esthetic sorrow over life, when that which awakens repentance is that which awakens her sorrow? I can sorrow in my way; if she must sorrow, she must also do it on her own account.”

Writing in his dairy by the light of day, the gentleman immerses himself in the moments just before the affair was broken off. “Happy with me she will never be—no, never! It is possible that she can make herself believe it, but I do not understand it, and that, too, certainly belongs to her happiness. And if we are united, it will eventually come to the point where she will someday sense with terror what I ought to have prevented…. What to me is the vital force of my spiritual existence—equality in the essentially human—she destroys. She does not care at all about the infinite passion of this freedom; she has erected an illusion, and she is satisfied with that. I, too, believe that one can love, can sacrifice everything for one’s love, but whether I am going to see good days or am going to risk my life, the deepest breathing [Aandedraet] of my spirit-existence [Aands-Existents] I cannot do without, I cannot sacrifice, because that is a contradiction, since without it I indeed am not. And she feels no need for this breathing.”

At heart, the difference in the two lovers is their conceptions of the meanings of the finite and the infinite. “One may die, one may become unhappy, but one can still preserve meaning in one’s life and faithfulness to the idea. Now that is at an end. And who is to blame for that? Someone else would perhaps say: It is she, to whose apron strings you still are tied. But I would not say that, for I usually refrain from such nonsense, that someone else is to blame when I do something wrong. I prefer to say that I myself am at fault. The fault is mine, is my weakness, and the difficulty is that my understanding guarantees me that it can be beneficial to her in the finite sense, whereas my sympathy would rather love her in the infinite sense. This relationship has humbled me.”

The gentleman describes an internal faith, well beyond public professions. “A skipper can go on swearing all day without giving it a thought, and in the same way an enthusiast can be solemn all day long without a complete or sound idea in his soul. That Gothic king refused to be baptized when he learned that he would not be together with his forefathers. The natives in America feared heaven more than hell and wished to remain pagans lest they be together with the orthodox Spaniards in heaven.” Faith and prayer must be about more than wishing and hopeful dreams. “Although I have the most inspired conception of God’s love, I also have the conception that he is not an old fussbudget who sits in heaven and humors us, but that in time and temporality one must be prepared to suffer everything…. The person who wills religiously must have receptivity precisely for the terrible; he must open himself to it and needs only to take care that he does not stop halfway, but that it leads him unto the security of the infinite.”

The gentleman knows that by breaking off the engagement he looks horrible to the outside world and, most of all, to his beloved. That is not his concern. “Even if I fall where no one dreams that a field of honor can be, even if I am buried in the graveyard of the dishonorable, if there nevertheless is one individual who, passing by my grave perhaps thinking other thoughts, suddenly stops and delivers this funeral oration to me, “How did this person come to lie here? Can one then lie without disgrace among the dishonored—and he certainly lies here with honor”—then I ask no more.”

Kierkegaard is a master of embedded fictions within fictions. In the coda to this book, he writes a “Letter to the Reader”, which is a fictional account of the writing of ““Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?””, where he reveals that the diary entries are fictional, but were written by the person of Frater Taciturnus, another fictional character himself. Taciturnus writes of the gentleman in his story, “His affront was not breaking the engagement but, with such a life-view, to want to fall in love.” Taciturnus then debates the merits of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious frameworks for going through life. “The ethical cannot regard the esthetic in any other way than to regard a direct union with it as a misalliance…. The ethical only asks about guilt or not guilty, is itself man enough to be a match for men, has no need for anything external and visible, to say nothing of something as ambiguously dialectical as fate and chance or the tangibility of some verdict document. The ethical is proud and declares: When I have judged then nothing more is needed…. The religious then plays the same role as the esthetic, but as the superior; it spaces out the limitless speed of the ethical, and development takes place. But the scene is the internal…. The principle of the spirit is that the external and the visible (the world’s gloriousness or its miserableness for the existing person, a result in the external or the lack of it for the one acting) exist to try faith, consequently not to deceive but in order that the spirit can be tested by placing it in the realm of the indifferent and taking itself back again…. Indifferent towards the externals, which the esthetic needs in the result, the religious disdains anything like that and proclaims, jointly and individually, that the person who believes he has finished (that is, fancies that he has, for such things cannot be believed because faith is expressly the infinite)—has lost…. What is expressed here about the lack of a result in the religious, I can also say in this way: the negative is higher than the positive…. For the finite being, and that, after all, is what human beings are as long as they live temporally, the negative infinity is the higher, and the positive is a dubious reassurance. Spiritual existence, especially the religious, is not easy; the believer continually lies out on the deep, has 70,000 fathoms of water beneath him. However long he lies out there, this still does not mean that he will gradually end up lying and relaxing onshore. He can become more calm, more experienced, find confidence that loves jest and a cheerful temperament—but until the very last he lies out on 70,000 fathoms of water.”

Taciturnus concludes the exposition of his thoughts on his fictional gentleman by dealing with the act of repentance. “A person’s highest inward action is to repent. But to repent is not a positive movement outwards or off to, but a negative movement inwards, not a doing but by oneself letting something happen to oneself…. Just as Jehovah in the Old Testament visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the latest generations, so repentance goes backward, continually presupposing the object of investigation. In repentance there is the impulse of the motion, and therefore everything is reversed…. The infinite annihilating power of this repentance is best seen in the sympathetically dialectical character that it also has.”

“The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard

This novel is a love story, tragedy, and unforeseen mystery all rolled into one. There are untimely deaths, love triangles, and astronomical observations. The protagonists are two orphaned sisters from Australia, Grace and Caro, who have made their way to London to seek a better life through job and marriage prospects. “You could see the two sisters had passed through some unequivocal experience, which, though it might not interest others, had formed and indissolubly bound them. It was the gravity with which they sat, ate, talked and, you could practically say, laughed. It was whatever they exchanged, not looking at one another but making a pair.” The younger, Grace, before too long, found herself engaged into a properly distinguished middle class English family— the paterfamilias, an astronomer, the betrothed, a bureaucrat in the Africa section of the foreign service on the come. “Australia required apologies, and was almost a subject of ribaldry. Australia could only have been mitigated by an unabashed fortune from its newly minted sources—sheep, say, or sheep-dip…. Sefton Thrale would explain, “Christian has got himself engaged”—implying naive bungling—“to an Australian girl.” And with emphatic goodwill might add that Grace was a fine young woman and he himself was delighted, “Actually.””

The hero of the novel is Ted, a young astronomer, born into poverty, but plucked from toil, given scholarships, and recognized as a future genius within the scientific community. “Ted Tice already understood his attachment to Caro as intensification of his strongest qualities, if not of his strengths: not a youthful adventure, fresh and tentative, but a gauge of all effort, joy, and suffering known or imagined. The possibility that he might never, in a lifetime, arouse her love in return was a discovery touching all existence. In his desire and foreboding, he was like a man awake who watches a woman sleeping.” His foil and competitor for Caro’s love is Paul. “Paul Ivory was a man of promise in a literal sense: circumstances had made a solemn understanding to see Paul prosper. His play would be widely and justly praised. Provincial towns and foreign cities would clamor for it, and a famous director would make a successful film. The radiant pre-eminence of Paul’s engagement with events was far more bridal than his prospective betrothal to Tertia Drage.” Again, the elder Thrale sets the scene, “Sefton Thrale told Ted Tice, “Paul will make his mark.” Like praising a pretty girl to a plain one. And yet there was the sense that Paul Ivory and Ted Tice were both marked men, and symbolically opposed. It was not merely that the world had set the two of them at odds. More irrationally, it seemed that one of them must lose if the other were to win.”

“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro

This novel, by Ishiguro, is a consideration on what it is to be human. It is narrated by an Artificial Friend, Klara, an AI, who is brought home by a sickly teenage girl, Josie. However, the first part of the novel takes place in the AF store, before she is bought. Klara, at this time, is still using her machine learning skills to decipher the human world. She is curious about everything. “When AFs did go by us they almost always acted oddly, speeding up their walk and keeping their faces turned away. I wondered then if perhaps we—the whole store—were an embarrassment to them. I wondered if Rosa and I, once we’d found our homes, would feel an awkwardness to be reminded that we hadn’t always lived with our children, but in a store.” Behind the plot, Ishiguro makes the reader wonder about the nature of consciousness. The novel is a meditation on materialism vs. Cartesian dualism and, also, even determinism. A scientist, Mr. Capaldi speaks to Josie’s mother, “We’re both of us sentimental. We can’t help it. Our generation still carry the old feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now.” Later in the novel, Josie’s father admits, “I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond a doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know any better.” It takes Klara, in the end, to perhaps straighten them all out, “Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong.”

“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.”