“Essays and Aphorisms” by Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)

This is a short collection of some of Schopenhauer’s lesser known works and sayings. A lot of its themes retread ground from his greatest treatise, “The World as Will and Representation.” Some view Schopenhauer as a pessimist. “If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world…. Misfortune in general is the rule….Work, worry, toil and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all men their whole life long. And yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time?”

Schopenhauer spent much of his time reconciling the freedom of the will with the grounding of the causal chain of history and how both relate to ethics. “For will itself and in itself—even when it appears as an individual and thus constitutes the individual’s original and fundamental volition—is independent of all knowledge, because it precedes all knowledge…. Will itself, since it lies outside of time, is unchangeable for as long as it exists at all…. Consequently the entire empirical course of a man’s life is, in great things and in small, as necessarily predetermined as clockwork…. The outcome however is a moral one, namely this, that by what we do we know what we are, just as by what we suffer we know what we deserve.” He also discusses justice, the law, as well as natural and prescribed rights in society, “The concept of justice is, like that of freedom, a negative concept: its content is a pure negation…. It is accordingly easy to define human rights: everyone has the right to do anything that does not injure another…. Although men possess unequal powers, they nonetheless possess equal rights. Rights are not based on powers: because of the moral nature of justice, they are based on the fact that in each man the same will to live appears at the same stage of its objectivization. Yet this is valid only in respect of original and abstract rights, which men possess as men.”

Often, Schopenhauer compares eastern with the desert religions. “If this Augustinian dogma of the tiny number of the elect and the great number of the eternally damned is understood merely sensu allegorico and interpreted in the sense of our own philosophy, then it agrees with the fact that only very few achieve denial of the will and thereby redemption from this world (as in Buddhism only very few achieve Nirvana). What, on the other hand, this dogma hypostatizes as eternal damnation is nothing other than this world of ours…. Buddha’s Sansara and Nirvana are identical with Augustine’s two civitates into which the world is divided, the civitas terrena and coelestis (The City of this world and the City of God).”

Finally, Schopenhauer urges every philosopher to think for themselves. “The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time…. He who writes for fools always finds a large public…. As a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents…. Students and learned men of every kind and every age go as a rule in search of information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything: it does not occur to them that information is merely a means towards insight and possesses little or no value in itself…. Oh, how little such a one must have had to think about, since he had so much time for reading!”

“The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics” by Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Christopher Janaway)

Schopenhauer wrote these two essays on ethics in response to prize contests. The first one was offered by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences on the question of morality and free will. He suggests, “Our deeds are truly no first beginning, and so in them nothing really new attains existence: but rather through what we do, we merely come to experience what we are…. The character is the empirically cognized, enduring and unalterable constitution on an individual will…. The strict necessity of our actions nonetheless co-exists with that freedom of which the feeling of responsibility provides evidence, and by means of which we are the doers of our deeds and they are morally attributable to us…. The perfect empirical reality of the world of experience is compatible with its transcendental ideality, in just the same way the strict empirical necessity of acting is compatible with its transcendental freedom. For as an object of experience the empirical character is, like the whole human being, a mere appearance, and so bound to the forms of all appearance, time, space, and causality, and subordinate to their laws; by contrast, that which as thing in itself is independent of these forms and so subordinate to no time distinction, is therefore the enduring and unalterable condition and foundation of this whole appearance, is his intelligible character, i.e. his will as thing in itself, to which, in this capacity, there certainly pertains absolute freedom…. This freedom is, however, transcendental…. By this freedom all deeds of the human being are his own work…. Consequently the will is indeed free, but only in itself and outside of appearance…. We have to seek the work of our freedom no longer in our individual actions, as the common view does, but in the whole being and essence (existentia et essentia) of the human being himself…. Thus freedom, which cannot be encounterable in the operari, must reside in the esse…. In what we do, we come to know what we are…. In one word: a human being does at all times only what he wills, and yet does it necessarily. But that rests on the fact that he is what he wills.”

Schopenhauer’s second prize essay was offered by the Royal Danish Society of Sciences on the topic of the grounding basis of moral laws. The society did not grant the prize to Schopenhauer, nor to anyone else. He was understandably sore about this result. Schopenhauer began, “So in philosophy the ethical foundation itself, whatever it may be, must in turn have its basis and its support in some metaphysics, i.e. in an explanation given of the world and existence in general—seeing that the ultimate and true revelation concerning the inner essence of the entirety of things must necessarily cohere tightly with that concerning the ethical meaning of human acting.” Next, he gets into the grounding of human ethics, as he sees it. “The principle or the highest basic proposition of an ethics is the shortest and most concise expression of the way of acting that it prescribes…. So it is the instruction to virtue as such that ethics gives, expressed in a single proposition, in other words the ‘what’ of virtue—The foundation of an ethics, by contrast, is the ‘why’ of virtue, the ground of that obligation or recommendation or approbation.” The what, for Schopenhauer, is simple, “Harm no one; rather help everyone to the extent that you can.” He continues, “It is the ‘what’ for which the ‘why’ is still being sought.” Furthermore, “Every other moral principle is to be regarded as a circumlocution, an indirect or oblique expression of that simple proposition.” Schopenhauer explains, “The individual—with his unalterable, inborn character, strictly determined in all its manifestations by the law of causality, which here, being mediated by the intellect, is called motivation—is only the appearance. The thing in itself that lies at the basis of this, situated as it is outside of space and time, is free from all succession and plurality of acts, one and unalterable. Its constitution in itself is the intelligible character…. This doctrine of Kant’s of the co-existence of freedom and necessity I hold to be the greatest of all achievements of human profundity…. Freedom belongs not to the empirical but solely to the intelligible character…. In his esse, that is where freedom resides. He could have been another: and in what he is resides blame and merit…. With regard to the matter and the occasion, in other words objectively, a completely different action, even an opposed one, was perfectly possible and would have come about, if only he had been another. But that he is such a one and no other, as emerges from his action—that is what he feels responsible for. Here, in his esse, lies the place where the sting of conscience hits home. For conscience is in fact just acquaintance with one’s own self.” Schopenhauer concludes, “If the ultimate motivating ground for an action, or an omission, resides directly and exclusively in the well-being and woe of someone other who is passively involved in it, so that the active party has in view in his acting, or omitting, simply and solely the well-being and woe of another and has nothing at all as his end but that that other should remain unharmed, or indeed receive help, support and relief. This end alone impresses on an action or omission the stamp of moral worth.”

“All Desire is a Desire For Being” by Rene Girard

This is a posthumous collection of Girard’s essays, interviews, and speeches chosen by his biographer, Cynthia Haven. True to form, almost all of the selections center around Girard’s themes of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. Girard suggests, “Even the most passionate among us never feel they truly are the persons they want to be. To them, the most wonderful being, the only semi-god, is always someone else whom they emulate and from whom they borrow their desires, thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”

One of Girard’s essays revolves around Nietzsche and his concept of the death of God, while also discussing the eternal return, organized religion, and the scapegoat function. “Nietzsche defines in rigorous fashion the passage of disorder to the sacrificial order through the mediation of the collective murder and the rituals which spring from it. One cannot kill the gods, any gods, without engendering new ones…. Nietzsche designates it as ‘the most elevated philosophy,’ the philosophy of eternal recurrence…. The philosophy of the eternal recurrence is a reflection on the identity of the forces of life and death in antique and primitive religion. Every dissolution is a new creation…. One must lift oneself above current history to see the totality of cycles and to recognize linear time as illusory.”

Girard admired Freud’s conceptual framework, while considering his theories to be incomplete, if not off-base. Here, Girard riffs on the dance of Salome, “Contrary to what Freud believes, to what we all believe, there is no preordained object of desire. Children in particular have to be told what to desire…. Children are taught desire through example or speech, or both. Children imitate the desire of prestigious adults…. The imitation is fiercer than the original…. The child asks the adult, not to fulfill some desire that would be hers, but to provide her with the desire she lacks…. Our sacrosanct cult of desire prevents our recognizing this sameness. Desire is supposed to generate differences…. Far from individualizing its victims, as our modern cult of desire demands, mimetic desire makes them interchangeable…. As desire intensifies, it renders its victims increasingly interchangeable…. Desire has no worse enemy than its own truth. Desire does its best to turn the truth into a scandal…. The child inevitably takes the nearest adult as his model. If he encounters only people already scandalized, too busy with their scandalous desire to respond positively, he takes their behavior as a model and turns him- or herself into a mimetic reproduction of it, a grotesque caricature.”

In a digression from his usual hobbyhorses, Girard discusses constancy in the thought of the intellectual. “We live in an age of middle-class ‘individualism’ in which self-consistency is rated as a major virtue. But a thinker is not bound by the same rules as a statesman or a banker…. Progress in matters of the spirit is often a form of self-destruction; it may entail a violent reaction against the past.”

Haven ends by selecting a few choice maxims coined by Girard. Girard had little time for politics. “Democracy is one vast middle-class court where the courtiers are everywhere and the king is nowhere.” On society being enraptured by violence, he states, “Violence, far from serving the interests of whoever exerts it, reveals the intensity of his desire; thus it is a sign of slavery.” He pontificates on the tendency of all to scapegoat, “The best way not to be crucified, in the final analysis, is to do as everyone else and join in the cruxifixction.” He elaborates, “The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.” Girard suggests, “Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them.” He continues, “The rules of the Kingdom of God are not at all utopian: if you want to put an end to mimetic rivalry, give way completely to your rival.”

“Thinking and Being” by Irad Kimhi

This type of formal philosophy is a little above my pay grade. Most of the logic and technical terms I had to push through to get even a sliver of understanding. Nonetheless, since this is a short book and Kimhi is seen as such an influential contemporary philosopher, I tried to slog on. It helps that Kimhi grounds his thoughts in philosophical history, particularly the logic of Aristotle and the dialogues of Plato. Kimhi also uses Frege as a foil. Or better put perhaps, this book seems to be an attempt to show that Frege and his disciples’ conception of philosophy is completely wrong. Of the modern philosophers, Kimhi most often builds upon the foundations laid down by Wittgenstein to assert his own conceptions of the nature of being and thinking.

Kimhi begins by asserting that Parmenides’ poem “On Nature” is the first work of philosophy, “where this is to be understood as the logical study of thinking and what is (being)…. Philosophical logic, so understood, is a first-personal engagement from within the activity of thinking.” Much of Kimhi’s work deals with differences (and similarities) between judgment and truth. “The transition from a judgment to a truth-assessment of that judgment is not based on a recognition of any new fact. A proper philosophical account of this matter must allow us to say that the assessment of one’s judgment as true is internal to the very act of judging…. The overarching unity internal to any judgment is its compossibility with other judgements in a single consciousness…. Here, thinking, in the first instance, means judging or asserting that such-and-such is the case, or that such-and-such is not the case…. A major concern of this book is the different ways in which philosophers have failed to acknowledge—or even denied—the uniqueness of thinking in philosophy…. In coming to appreciate this difference between thinking and acting, we are able to detect the logical uniqueness of thinking.”

One of the differences that Kimhi keeps going back to is between categorematic and syncategorematic expressions. “A categorematic expression can be a component of a predicative proposition, whereas a syncategorematic expression cannot be a component of a predicative proposition. The basic syncategorematic expressions are predicative propositions themselves…. The difference between “p” and “I think p” (and hence the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness) is syncategorematic—and so too is the difference between p and not-p.” To put it another way, the basic difference between categorematic and syncategorematic expressions “can be described simply as the difference between expressions that can and cannot be functionally embedded as part of a larger significant expression…. Among the candidates for being classed as syncategorematic are logical connectives such as … and__, and …. or__, expressions of propositional attitudes such as … believes__, and truth-value predicates such as … is true and … is false. We can describe these expressions as propositional connectors, since they govern propositions that have other propositions as their subclauses…. A predicative proposition is a categorematic unit if something can be predicated of it, or if it can be predicated of something—in other words, if it can stand as a subject or a predicate in a proposition. A proposition is a syncategorematic unit if it cannot play a categorematic role, namely, if it cannot occur within a predicative proposition.”

Kimhi agrees with Aristotle’s conception of the nature of being. Kimhi asserts, “Aristotle singles out simple propositions as revealing something. In other words, only simple propositions are representations. They alone say—or display the judgment—that something is (or is not) the case. They alone reveal a being…. For Aristotle, the predicative form displays the assertoric act of predication, which he associates with the verb. Accordingly, in traditional Aristotelian logic, the verb (i.e. the predicate) in a simple proposition is marked as the locus of predication and thus the locus of assertoric force.” Finally circling back again to the nature of being, Kimhi, adds “the syncategorematic sense of being as being-true, and non-being as being false, is in fact the dominant sense.”

Kimhi ends his work by discussing the Stranger’s conversation with Theaetetus in Plato’s “Sophist”. Kimhi quotes the Stranger directly, “Whenever we speak of not being (so it seems), we don’t speak of something contrary to being, but only different…. So, when it is said that a negative signifies a contrary, we shan’t agree, but we’ll allow only this much—the prefixed word “not” indicates something different than the words following the negative, or rather, different than the things which the words uttered after the negative apply to.” Kimhi expounds, “the negation of a predicative proposition negates the predicate, i.e., the verb. The mistake that the Stranger identifies is that of supposing that the addition of “not” to a predicate yields an expression for the contrary of what is meant by the original predicate…. The negation sign, according to Plato, is attached to a predicate and thereby makes a new complete phrase, i.e., the Stranger emphasizes that the negated expression is one verb.” Plato also uses the term “Otherness”. Kimhi states, “the use of “Otherness” reveals that a particular X and not-X are not opposed as a pair of contraries…. The not-X is rather a construct, derived from the “X”.”

Kimhi goes on to contrast the two notions in “Sophist” of “the place of activity within being” of the Gigantomachia, the materialists, and the immaterialists, the friends of the forms. Kimhi states, “the exclusion of activity from being, and thus from knowledge, renders knowledge unintelligible…. Soul, knowledge, and form must be associated with a certain notion of activity in a way that will allow us to understand forms as immanent to the soul’s activity, rather than external to it…. The notion of a syncategorematic form allows philosophers to hold onto that which is—being—in both ways, as “both unchanging and that which changes.”” Finally, Kimhi asserts, “to recognize the validity of the syllogisms of thinking and being, we must come to see that the very same proposition occurs both when it is negated and when it is ascribed as a judgment: namely, in not-p and in A judges that p. This perspective is attained by combining the lessons of partition of knowledge and the partition of Otherness.”

Kimhi concludes his work with a lengthy statement worth quoting at length, “quietism does not seek to reduce not-being to being through an analysis of negation and truth- and falsity conditions, or to show that the point of view from which the use of negation appears unintelligible rests merely on a confusion about the actual use of words. Instead, the quietist seeks to render the unity of thinking and being (and non-being) self-evident by attaining clarity concerning the way logical unity is revealed through the occurrence of propositions or predicates inside and outside negations and other logical contexts…. Metaphysics—correctly understood—is quietism, by learning from within quietism, how to read the “meta-” of the “metaphysics.” The lesson of quietism is that “meta-” does not point toward a science that comes “after” physics, nor does it point toward supernatural entities such as divine substances, or a region of facts that lie “beyond” or “over and above” nature. Instead, we can conclude from quietism that the “meta-” is the beyond of the syncategorematic relative to the categorematic; in particular, it is the syncategorematic unity of simple contradictory pairs, the unity of determination and the nothing (or Otherness) of determination, which dominates the positive members of the pair. The philosophical logic that removes the Parmenidean puzzles and renders apparent the truistic unity of thinking and being must therefore be, in this sense, metaphysical.”

“Under Three Flags” by Benedict Anderson

As a natural law anarchist I tend to take a dim view of nationalism. However, I am a bit more ambivalent about anti-colonial national movements. Their tendencies to strike at rigid, racist imperial structures certainly seem like a step in the right direction. Especially when they achieved pan-ethnic unity, their amorphous, decentralized, and horizontal leadership structures often created the kind of polycentric institutions I am most fond of. This book combines anti-colonialism, nationalism, anarchism, journalism, art, and literature from the Third World in the nineteenth century. Anderson uses as a focus the Philippine struggle for independence against imperial Spain, but in doing so also traverses the globe from Manilla to Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, London, Cuba, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, and America. He discusses trends from high journalism and art that encouraged anarchist actions to actual “propaganda of the deed” where assassins killed in the name of furthering and publicizing their cause. He concentrates on a couple of Filipino writers and activists not well known to history. Isabelo de los Reyes was a collector of Philippine folklore: not just folklore as in myths and fairy tales, but “saber popular” or indigenous, local knowledge that survived westernization and colonization. He spoke Ilocano, as well as Tagalog, Spanish, English, and French and would slip between them in his stories as he slipped between life in Manilla, Madrid, and Paris. Jose Rizal is more well known today: a hero still, in the Philippines at least, as a poet and their first novelist. His second novel, depicting a strange jeweled bomb placed at a colonial ball, presaged the wave of anarchist and nationalist bombings that were to later rock Europe and colonial outposts in the fin de siecle period. These Filipino writers were cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, and avid readers, imbuing their own writings and philosophies with anarchist luminaries like Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin. They mingled with anarchists from the Continent and Cuba in their several stints in Montjuich Prison, the most notorious in Spain and an incubator and meeting place for radicalism. A motto, taken from Kropotkin, was “permanent revolt by means of the spoken word, writing, the dagger, the gun, and dynamite…. For us everything good which is outside legality.” This book is a detailed history of the last days of the Spanish Empire as told through the lens of Filipino revolutionaries.

“The One by Whom Scandal Comes” by Rene Girard

In this book Girard updates and revises some of his framework of mimetic rivalry. But as he makes clear at the outset, he still feels, “mimeticism is the very substance of all manner of human relations…. Passion, intense desire, is born the moment our vague longings are trained on a model that suggests to us what we should desire, typically in desiring the model itself. This model may be society as a whole, but often it is an individual whom we admire. Everything that humanity endows with prestige it transforms into a model…. Far from being the most personal emotion there is, our desire comes from others. Nothing could be more social.” This is how rivalry develops. Once I desire what a model who is close to me desires we both covet the same object. The model has become the obstacle. Furthermore, “desire becomes more intense on both sides. The model becomes the imitator of his imitator.” The spiral escalates as desire grows. “Human relations are the unending exercise in mutual imitation- the essence of which is perfectly captured by a not wholly transparent word, reciprocity.” 

Culture was founded to restrict the escalation of rivalry into violence. It deescalates conflict and puts people in their proper hierarchy. “The prohibition always falls on a family’s nearest, most accessible possessions- which are therefore the ones likeliest to arouse conflict.” In the olden times this was often the womenfolk of the family. “In several languages the word meaning “gift” also means “poison.” In very, very remote times all gifts…. were poisoned: their original owners gave away only things that were a source of trouble and annoyance to them, and that they therefore sought to rid themselves of, in exchange for things that were just as useful but less bothersome, for the simple reason that they came from elsewhere…. The reciprocal exchange of gifts proved to be a workable system because gifts that were poisoned to begin with became harmless once they were transferred to a foreign community.” Still, in the process of gift giving we see the mimetic process involving similarities and differences at work. One has to try hard to get the balance just right. “Prudence requires no less strict equivalence in the giving of gifts than in the bartering of goods. Each party must imitate the other as closely as possible, while at the same time giving the impression of spontaneity.” The right gift must not show up the other party, nor give offense at being too paltry. It must be equivalent, yet unique. “One escapes the Charybdis of insufficient difference only in order to fall into the Scylla of excessive difference.”

Modernism destroyed many of the bounds set up by hierarchy. “Mimetic theory reveals the true reason for the cyclical conceptions one finds among the Hindus and the pre-Socratic philosophers.” Modernism, in contrast, sought to champion equality and reciprocity in their good forms, destroying both the bad and the good of social taboos. “Modernism’s wager is that good reciprocity will win out in the end.” The problem with mimetic violence is that when one is trapped in its spiral neither party is often aware of its onset. “No one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to violence committed in the first instance by someone else.” One must act above the fray if one is to end the cycle of violence. An eye for eye might be justice, but it will only inflame the mimeticism. “For if we treat them as they treat us, they will be able to disguise their own injustice by means of reprisals that are fully warranted by the violence we have committed. It is therefore necessary to deprive them of the negative collaboration they demand of us. Violent persons must always be disobeyed, not only because they encourage us to do harm, but because it is only through disobedience that a lethally contagious form of collective behavior can be short-circuited.”

Girard’s other major idea is that of the founding myth created by violence towards scapegoats. This is the very act that initially unites a peoples and creates a culture. “All other members of the society will unite against them by reproducing the founding act of violence, the act that serves as a model for all sacrifices, for all religious rites of purification. The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures.” This scapegoat is not an actual perpetrator. He does no wrong. He is arbitrary. He merely serves the purpose of the community. “Behind the ritual of the scapegoat, there is something more than mere superstition; there is also the tendency, universal among human beings, to take out their anger on a substitute, on an alternative victim…. Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.” This process works as long as the myth is not revealed. Only through utter unanimity in the community does the lie succeed in becoming a founding truth. “There is no human society that is not liable to break down as a result of its own violence. Every society seeks to thwart this tendency through a specific behavior of which it resolutely remains unaware…. the spontaneous, mimetic convergence of an entire community upon a single victim- the descendant of an original scapegoat- on whose head all hatreds are discharged so that they will not spread with catastrophic effect, destroying the community.”

Girard makes effort to look at myth through a biblical lens. Myth preceded, and in many ways was shattered by, the Abrahamic traditions. “In biblical texts, victims are innocent and collective violence is to blame. In myths, the victims are to blame and communities are always innocent…. Myths are rooted in crowd phenomena, which fool both the makers of myths and their audience.” The Bible is more moral than myths in the sense that it is reality. “It is more moral because it is the truth. Victims are scapegoats who have been selected solely through a process of violent mimeticism, which is why they are truly innocent. The role of unanimity ensures the victim will be a scapegoat. The “sins” of mythical heroes are too reminiscent of the ones associated with bloodthirsty crowds not the be the product of the same mentality.” The Bible was different because, for the first time, unanimity was broken. The lie was revealed.  Disunion ensued. “The sudden intrusion of the truth destroyed a social harmony that depended on the lie of unanimous violence…. In mythic accounts, the opinion of the crowd is never subjected to criticism from a dissident minority. Conversely, many psalms describe the narrator as being hounded by a crowd, without any provocation on his part.” The Bible takes the perspective of the victim. It calls truth to the violence of the crowd, the founding lie. “The New Testament completes the process of desacralization by revealing what is revealed nowhere else- the mimetic genesis of scapegoats, and their founding and organizing role in human culture.” Jesus “sacrificed” himself, but was not “sacrificed” for he would not allow the community to turn him into the scapegoat. The lie was exposed through his death. “What Jesus proposed to men so that they might escape violence [was he] invited them to be done with mimetic rivalries. Each time a potential rival makes unreasonable demands of us, or what seem to be unreasonable demands, instead of treating him in the same manner one must yield on the issue in dispute; one must avoid escalating violence, which leads directly to scapegoating…. To protect itself against its own violence, mankind had ended up directing it against innocents. Christ did just the opposite. He offered no resistance. It was not in order to play the game of his enemies that he gave himself up to be sacrificed, but in order to put an end to sacrifice…. Christ died so that humanity might abandon the habit of violent sacrifice.” He tried to end the habit of sacrifice of another by assuming a sacrifice of himself. In doing so he not only put a lie to him being the scapegoat, but of all the scapegoats who had preceded him in the archaic past. “Christ is not simply another sacralized scapegoat. Christ became a scapegoat in order to desacralize those who came before him and to prevent those who come after him from being sacralized.” Jesus put an end to God’s responsibility for violence and put it squarely on the heads of man. Collective human violence was shown for what it was: not a sacrifice on behalf of the Gods, but collective murder of an innocent victim.

The second half of the book takes the form of a discussion, where Girard discusses with a colleague the finer points of his mimetic theory. “Knowing the emissary victim requires a certain kind of conversion, namely, that one has to come to see oneself as a persecutor…. What we call conversion is, finally, the experience of the scapegoat becoming the subjective experience of the persecutor.” We finally see the other side of the coin. This is destabilizing for the community, however. “Since the victim is not guilty, he no longer has the power to absorb violence.” Girard discusses the role of submission to tradition in the Catholic Church. “Paul was more radical than Peter. He lectured Peter, and often strongly disapproved of him. But in the end Paul always gave into him because he knew that Christ had wanted Peter to speak for him. Paul went right to the heart of the matter in everything, and here he recognized the authority of tradition- a tradition that had only been in existence for a quarter-century! And it is because he was perfectly aware of what was at stake that he acted as he did. If he hadn’t, Christianity would never have survived; it would have fallen apart at once. To understand Christianity and orthodoxy one must think of Paul. Paul was indeed stronger than Peter, better educated, more cosmopolitan, but he always yielded to Peter’s primacy.”

Girard on Judaism and the history of Jewish people in the world, “the universality of Judaism comes from the fact that the Jews exemplify the experience of all peoples; that is, they resemble all the scapegoats of history.” On the domestication of animals, “why did people keep animals with them? Surely in order to make sacrificial victims of them. It is sacrifice that taught human beings to eat meat, to drink milk, and so on. And it is sacrifice that led to the domestication of those animals that could be domesticated.” The process began in prehistory, but it is first recorded in “the theory and practice of sacrifice in the Brahmanas. Everything is there: doubles, sacrifice as a form of lottery, the creative character of sacrifice, and so on. The explanation of sacrifice, in the strict sense, is inextricable from the reality of evolution. Sacrifices had to be repeated over hundreds of thousands of years in order to produce sacred kings, animal domestication, and many other human institutions. All these things came out of sacrifice just as the Hindus said.” On Tocqueville’s prescient analysis of American republicanism, “he was the first to perceive the difference between democracy and monarchy, which he rightly saw as being based on a unique kind of sacrificial animal, the king. Democracy, although it contains as many obstacles as there are individuals in society, leads people to believe that there are no more obstacles, because the king has been overthrown. No one before Tocqueville saw that, to the contrary, if the shadow of the cripple is no longer cast over the world, it is because the world is on its way to becoming a cemetery.” On modern consumerism, “people say, we all want the same thing; and the economy says, you shall have the same thing…. Mimetic desire is satisfied only for a time, which grows ever shorter. New toys must always be found, and that’s getting harder and harder to do.”

On the prevalence of twins in myth, “the troubling identity of mythic twins is a metaphor for the conflictual collapse of differences, a source of infinite disorder…. Mimetic crisis sharpens oppositions- not by reinforcing differences, as the dominant ideology of individualism claims, but by emptying them of their content, by undifferentiating them.” On the crippled victims of animal and man, “predators typically choose the weakest members of a troop of antelopes, for example, since wounded, injured, or otherwise disabled individuals are always easier to capture than healthy ones. Later they were to be found in human cultures, in the form of the archaic divinities- Greek, Hindu, and so on- to which collective murder gave birth. Human beings in search of scapegoats prey upon this same type of individual, which is why so many of the archaic and ancient gods are lame or crippled. The mimetic genesis of religion may be situated in the seemingly interminable transition between animal and man.” On managing violence in society, “it isn’t consciousness that keeps violence at bay in archaic religion, but prohibitions, which are aimed at eliminating opportunities for violence, and rites, which, in furnishing violence with an outlet that is itself violent, only to a smaller degree, transform the most lethal violence into a less lethal form.” On reason and the mob, “the informative function of reason has no effect on the crowd, which is governed instead by the scapegoat mechanism. Either this mechanism operates as it should and produces unanimity, in which case witnesses are false witnesses, or it fails to produce unanimity and ceases to operate.” Girard sums it all up, “but if you ask me what mimeticism is, I will tell you: it’s pride, anger; it’s envy, jealousy- these are the cardinal sins. It’s lust as well. Human sexuality is very important, because it’s a permanent impulse, not something episodic or intermittent. There are no tranquil interludes in human life. Rivalry is what sustains desire.”

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

Alter begins his introduction, “The Book of Proverbs is not merely an anthology but an anthology of anthologies. It is made up of six discrete units, each marked editorially as such at the beginning, with notable differences of emphasis and style among the units…. By and large, the underlying conception of wisdom is thoroughly pragmatic, and, in keeping with the characteristic direction of Wisdom literature, it does not reflect particular Israelite interests…. The book is poetry from end to end…. The one-line proverbs are either didactic admonitions or, somewhat less frequently, observations about social and ethical behavior…. Within the tight formal constraints of the one-line aphorism, dynamic and revelatory relationships emerge between the two halves of the line, generating what I have elsewhere called a poetry of wit…. The book as a whole, after all, works on the assumption that knowledge and experience are eminently transmissible and teachable and that everyone draws on the same fund of set moral principles…. The more pervasive challenge to the translator of Proverbs is that the expressive vigor of these sayings depends to such a large degree on their wonderful compactness, an effect reinforced by sound-play (alliteration, assonance, an occasional ad hoc internal rhyme). Most of this sound-play inevitably disappears in the English…. I have sought to narrow the gap between the two languages by avoiding (with just a few exceptions) polysyllabic words, by trying wherever possible to keep the number of accents—typically, three per verset—close to that in the Hebrew, and by reproducing something of the compression of formulation of the Hebrew without resort to explanatory or paraphrastic maneuvers in translation.”

In Proverbs 4:3, Alter discusses the role of tradition and the recurring theme of teaching wisdom to the young, “For I was a son to my father. In the tradition-oriented framework of Proverbs, wisdom is a quality that age imparts to youth…. That idea is reinforced here by the introduction of a third generation, the grandfather of the young man who is the object of instruction. Just as the Mentor was taught by his father, whose words he goes on to quote, he will teach the young man.” Alter describes, in Proverbs 10:25, another recurring motif in the book, “When the storm passes. This is a bedrock assumption of Proverbs—vehemently contested by Job—that adversity sweeps away the wicked while the righteous endure.”

Wordplay is another common theme of the Book of Proverbs. In Proverbs 11:22, Alter explains, “A golden ring in the snout of a pig. This is another proverb cast in riddle form. This first verset gives us a bizarre and rather shocking image. The second verset spells out the referent of the image, the beautiful woman devoid of sense, and thus becomes a kind of punch line.” In Proverbs 16:1, Alter returns to the main theme of wisdom, “from the Lord is the tongue’s pronouncing. Throughout Proverbs, apt and articulate speech is conceived as a key to relationships among people and as the indispensable instrument of wisdom. Thus, a person orders his own thought because the autonomy of consciousness is not questioned, but it is a gift from God when thought is translated into fitting speech.”

Finally, Alter points out, in Proverbs 18:24, one of the recurring formulas of Biblical writing, the envelope structure, but with a twist, “There is a companionable man to keep company with/ and there’s a friend closer than a brother…. The textual unit from verse 1 to verse 24 is neatly marked by an antithetical envelope structure: in the first verse, we see someone who is isolated or separated from others, focusing on his own desire, and who consequently gets into trouble; this last verse affirms the sustaining power of friendship.”

“The World as Will and Representation: Volume 2” by Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Christopher Janaway, Judith Norman, and Alistair Welchman).

This second volume of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus is mainly footnotes, expositions, and addendum to his main treatise. It does contain a multitude of hidden gems. Schopenhauer states, “Our whole consciousness, with its inner and outer perception, always has time as its form. Concepts on the other hand, as representations that have arisen through abstraction and are thoroughly general and distinct from all particular things, have (in this quality) a being that is certainly objective to a certain extent, and yet does not belong to any temporal sequence…. They must to a certain extent be reduced again to the nature of particular things, individualized and thus linked to a sensible representation: i.e. to a word. The word is therefore the sensuous sign of the concept and as such the necessary means of fixing it, i.e. of making it present to consciousness (bound up as this is with the form of time), and hence creating a connection between reason (whose objects are merely general universals that know neither time nor place) and consciousness (which is sensible, bound up with time, and to this extent merely animal)…. Only this makes possible other operations such as judging, inferring, comparing, restricting, etc…. Word and language are thus the indispensable means of clear thinking.”

Next, Schopenhauer takes a step back in scope to describe the object of philosophy. “The truly philosophical state consists in the first instance in being able to entertain a sense of wonder about habitual and everyday things, since this causes one to problematize the universal aspects of appearance…. The lower a person’s intellectual stature, the fewer riddles existence itself holds for him: everything for him seems self-evident, both as it is and that it is…. The philosophical sense of wonder that arises from this in certain individuals is conditioned by a higher development of intelligence, and yet not only by this; doubtless it is knowledge of death, together with reflection on suffering and the needs of life, that give a strong impetus to philosophical deliberation and metaphysical interpretations of the world. If our lives were endless and painless, it might never occur to anyone to ask why the world exists and precisely the nature it does.”

Schopenhauer’s great insight was distinguishing between the nature of appearances and the things in themselves. “The thing in itself can, as such, enter consciousness with complete immediacy only by becoming itself conscious of itself…. And since intuition can provide only appearances, not things in themselves, it follows that we have absolutely no cognition of things in themselves…. I accept this for everything except the cognition everyone has of his own willing…. It is more real than any other cognition. It is also not a priori…. In fact, our willing is the only opportunity we have to understand the interior of a process that also presents itself externally, and hence it is also the only thing that we are acquainted with directly and not, like everything else, given merely in representation…. We must learn to understand nature through ourselves, and not the other way around.”

The law of causation also plays an integral role in Schopenhauer’s philosophical system. “No truth is more certain than this, that everything that happens, be it small or great, happens with complete necessity…. Every being in the world is on the one hand appearance, and necessarily determined by the law of appearance, but on the other hand is in itself will, and in fact absolutely free will, since any necessity arises only through the forms that belong entirely to appearance, namely through the principle of sufficient reason in its different configurations…. Therefore people really only have the choice either to see the world as a mere machine that necessarily runs down, or to recognize as its essence in itself a free will that does not express itself directly in the effects of things but, in the first instance in their existence and essence. This freedom is therefore a transcendental freedom, and coexists with empirical necessity just as the transcendental ideality of appearances coexists with their empirical reality…. Every being, without exception, acts with strict necessity, but exists and is what it is by virtue of its freedom.”

Throughout this volume, the difference between the world of appearances and the things in themselves is drummed in again and again. “When directly intuiting the world and life, we usually consider things only in their relations, and consequently in accordance with their relative rather than absolute essence and existence. We look, for instance, at houses, ships, machines and such with the thought of their purpose and their suitability for that purpose. We look at human beings with the thought of their relation to us, it they have one; next we look at them with the thought of their relation to each other…. This is the consideration of things in their relations, indeed, by means of these relations, according to the principle of sufficient reason…. But if, by way of exception, we experience a momentary increase in the intensity of our intuitive intelligence, then all at once we see things with completely different eyes: we no longer grasp them according to their relations but rather grasp what they are in and of themselves…. Then each particular thing is the representative of its species: accordingly, we now grasp the universal in each essence. What we recognize in this way are the Ideas of things.”

Morality for Schopenhauer was a relation of the will and not, therefore, merely in the world of appearances. “Morality is what everything depends on, according to the testimony of our innermost consciousness: and morality lies only in the individual, as the direction of his will. In truth only the life course of each individual has unity, coherence, and true significance: life should be viewed as teaching us a lesson and the meaning of the lesson is a moral one. Only inner processes, to the extent that they concern the will, have true reality and are actual events; because only the will is the thing in itself.”

Finally, Schopenhauer riffs more on the true nature of the will. “In self-consciousness, the subject of cognition, as the only source of cognition, confronts the will as a spectator and, although it arose from the will, it cognizes the will as something different from it and foreign; thus, it cognizes the will only empirically, in time, and piecemeal in its successive acts and affects, and so experiences the will’s decisions only a posteriori and often very indirectly. This is why our own being is a riddle to us (i.e. to our intellect) and the individual views itself as newly created and transient although its being in itself is timeless and hence eternal.” He continues poetically, “Awoken to life from the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in a world without end or limit, among countless individuals who are all striving, suffering, going astray; and it hurries back to the old unconsciousness, as if through a bad dream. — But until then its desires are unlimited, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one. No possible worldly satisfaction could be enough to quiet its longing…. Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is ordained to be in vain or recognized as an illusion…. What is promised is not delivered, unless it is to show how undesirable the desired thing was…. And so happiness always lies in the future, or in the past, and the present is like a small dark cloud.”

“Metaphysics and Nihilism” by Martin Heidegger (translated by Arun Iyer)

This is the gist of Heidegger’s two complimentary essays, taken from his lecture notes, in a nutshell, “In the instant that metaphysics is overcome through beyng, things get serious with philosophy because a decisive moment in the history of beyng arrives…. That which is to be overcome must now be placed into its essence, which has been veiled so far; it must be elevated to its essentiality…. The decisive aspect of the overcoming lies in a rift that is opened between the beingness of beings and the truth of beyng…. It is from this point on that the differentiation between beyng and beings is first grounded in an abyss as that which belongs to the history of beyng.”

Heidegger questions the theology (and ontology) beyond the act of overcoming, “Overcoming metaphysics—does this not mean creating “new,” different gods? But who creates them? Or indeed going beyond gods—that we no longer need them, in turn to be enslaved more than ever by such a lack of need…. Or is over-coming completely different—not an elevated-beyond of a super-metaphysics, but an acceptance and recognition of a lapse—something very slight and peculiar and simple, whose continued existence makes “demands” on the more essential capacities of the human being than the ascent into the making and despising of gods, both of which belong together, balancing each other out.”

Heidegger refines his definition of metaphysics. Metaphysics is removed from the chain of causation and, therefore, from history as experienced, “Metaphysics is not doctrine and opinion. It is also not just a basic stance of the thinking human, but the truth of beings; however here the essence of truth in ungrounded…. Ungrounding from early on unfolds a peculiar predominance of beings over being.” Heidegger contrasts nihilism, “The essence of nihilism lies in the neglect of the nothing, which comes from nihilism’s incapacity to grasp its own essence as the essentially “corrupted essence” of beyng and to experience the inception of the grounding to come,  in the abyss of the truth of beyng…. The errancy of metaphysics consists in this: it is familiar with only one way out of being lost in the emptiest-most universal, which is to flee into the “particular” and the concrete, whether this be the positivity of the sciences or the “praxis” of so-called “life” or the moral “appeal” to individual existence (“anthropology”)…. We are seeking the “ground,” not some particular ground for some particular being, but the ground for beings as such…. One may say that [Being and Beings] are infinitely distinct—distinguished by an abyss—separated from each other by an abyss, which is beyng itself…. Metaphysics projects the beingness of beings without grounding it…. Indeed the a priori character shows that being is no more and will henceforth never at all be interrogated in all of metaphysics, that is to say, will never at all be creatively questioned from itself and back into itself—The a priori denies being its own essencing back into itself.”

Heidegger circles back to the history of metaphysics, “Metaphysics begins with Socrates insofar as we mean metaphysics in the narrow sense as the establishment of the truth about beings…. With the evolved “doctrine of ideas,” Plato created the instrument for all metaphysics…. Socrates brought philosophy from heaven to earth and turned it against metaphysics in order to “care” for the human being alone. This opinion is erroneous on two counts. For one, there was still no metaphysics before Socrates; the thought of Heraclitus and Parmenides is “physics”…. Secondly, the turn toward the human being is, however, precisely the precondition for all metaphysics. Prior to this, the human being, as in any inceptual (i.e. non-metaphysical) philosophy, was inessential and not more essential than the gods, who remained out of consideration. Socrates makes it his business to strive after the good and with this metaphysics is first posited…. Absolute knowledge as the truth of beings as a whole knows itself and thus excludes any questionability. From this, we can see in historical reflection that metaphysics, as soon as it becomes the thinking of thinking, distances itself, if anything, from reflecting on the truth of being.”

Heidegger moves on to nihilism by first defining it, “Nihil (nothing) exists essentially in what it names. Nihilism means: there is nothing with respect to a being…. There is nothing with respect to beings as such as a whole…. Not every metaphysics has experienced nihilism, only the metaphysics of Nietzsche…. “God is dead.” With this expression Nietzsche gives a theological and, seemingly, only a negative formula for what he, thinking metaphysically, understands under nihilism. Nihilism, thought positively, is metaphysics understood as the truth of a being (of what is actual) in terms of the will to power from the eternal recurrence of the same…. The happening whereby the supersensible world falls away and loses its binding-formative essence is construed as the act of the human being. Nihilism, understood as the history of the devaluation of the highest values, is the work of humans…. The name God stands, metaphysically speaking, for the supersensible world. Since Plato, it is the realm of the “ideas.”… The murder of God, metaphysically speaking, consists in wiping away the entire horizon. The horizon of the supersensible is erased.”

The experienced world is nothing but history traced back to the ground. Heidegger states, “Because there is nothing permanent and everything “is” a becoming-having-become, “permanence” remains something only imagined in fancy. Indeed, this imagination is necessary, as the positing of the permanent, for assuring the continued existence of the will to power…. What is actual is only what becomes…. Nietzsche thinks what becomes in its becoming as the will to power…. Nietzsche himself figured it out because he experienced Western history in its occurrence as nihilism. Nihilism, as the process of the devaluation of the highest values, the murder of God, must lead to the revaluation of all values…. Nietzsche experiences nihilism as the history of the devaluation of the highest values…. Nietzsche’s fundamental experience says: a being is, and as such it is not nothing. As a consequence, nihilism, according to which there is nothing with respect to beings as such, is excluded from the foundations of metaphysics. Thus, it has overcome nihilism…. Yet, does he also recognize in such a recognition the being of beings and indeed being itself, namely, as being? By no means…. Being is not recognized as being…. It is as if it is nothing: being is a nihil…. There is nothing with respect to being in Nietzsche’s metaphysics. We therefore say: Nietzsche’s metaphysics is nihil proper.”

Heidegger concludes by contrasting metaphysics with nihilism. “Metaphysics itself thus blocks the path toward the experience of the essence of nihilism. Metaphysics, at any time, puts the affirmation or the denial of beings as such up for decision and sees its alpha and omega in the relevant explanation of beings on the basis of their ground, a ground that also exists as a being…. Being abandons its own nature to the thinking of metaphysics, which omits this staying-away as such and also does not admit to this omission…. The essence of nihilism is not a matter pertaining to human beings at all, but to beyng itself…. The dignity of being does not consist in being considered as a value, even if it be the highest value. Rather, the dignity of being consists in being the freedom, which frees all beings as such into itself…. The fact that beings exist as if being were not the unrelenting and the one requiring accommodation, as if it were not the urgency of the truth itself that urges, is the dominance of the lack of urgency, which is reinforced in the metaphysics that has reached consummation.”

“The Transparency Society” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

Han often complains about modernity. In this short monograph he takes on the modern pose of transparency. He asserts that the trend towards greater transparency is far from positive. “The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control…. Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long-term planning impossible…. Compulsive conformity proceeds from transparency. In this way, transparency stabilizes the dominant system.”

For Han, the transparent society is one of enforced intimate relations with strangers. “In modernity, theatrical distance is increasingly abandoned in favor of intimacy…. The world today is no theater where actions and feelings are represented and interpreted, but a market on which intimacies are exhibited, sold, and consumed. The theater is a site of representation, whereas the market is a site of exhibition…. Intimacy is the psychological formula of transparency…. The tyranny of intimacy psychologizes and personalizes everything…. The public sphere becomes an exhibition space…. As a society of revealing and denuding, the society of transparency works against all forms of the mask…. The mounting deritualization and denarrativization of society also strip it of forms of symbolic appearance and render it naked…. Human beings become sociable when they preserve distance from one another. Intimacy, in contrast, destroys distance…. The society of intimacy is a psychologized, deritualized society. It is a society of confession, laying-bare, and the pornographic lack of distance…. Narcissistic subjects who lack the ability of scenic distantiation populate the society of intimacy…. Experience [Erfahrung] means facing the Other. Experiencing [Erlebnis], in contrast, means encountering oneself everywhere.”

Magic and enchantment are lost in a world of transparency. It only produces a world burdened by facts and data. “The society of transparency is a society without poets, without seduction or metamorphosis. After all, it is the poet who produces scenic illusions, forms of appearance, and ritual and ceremonial signs: he sets artifacts and antifacts against hyperreal, naked evidence…. Today’s society of transparency lacks divine light inhabited by metaphysical tension. Transparency has no transcendence…. The society of transparency not only lacks truth; it also lacks symbolic appearance. Neither truth nor symbolic appearance are see-through. Only emptiness is entirely transparent…. The mass of information and imagery offers fullness in which emptiness is still noticeable…. Transparency also does not entail clairvoyance. The mass of information produces no truth.”

Finally, Han compares the world of transparency to Bentham’s vision of the panopticon. “The digital panopticon of the twenty-first century is aperpectival insofar as it no longer conducts surveillance from a central point, with the omnipotence of the despotic gaze. The distinction between center and periphery, which is fundamental to the Benthamian panopticon, has disappeared entirely…. The inhabitants of today’s panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Not lonesomeness through isolation, but hypercommunication guarantees transparency. Above all, the particularity of the digital panopticon is that its inhabitants actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance by putting themselves on display and baring themselves. They display themselves on the panoptic market…. The society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the feat of having to abandon one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame…. No community, in the strong sense, can form in the society of transparency. Instead chance gatherings [Ansammlungen] or crowds [Vielheiten] of isolated individuals, or egos, emerge…. Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon. There is no outside space. The panopticon is becoming total. No wall separates inside from outside.”