“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is the first book in a long time that I have given a reread. On a second read, it did not disappoint. I was tempted to give another translation a whirl, but who are we kidding? Pevear and Volokhonsky might not be as unanimously praised for their Tolstoy as their Dostoyevsky, but they are still the gold standard. At heart, this is a story of a society bound by conservatism, tradition, and honor. The plot also relates how the Russian aristocracy acts and reacts to those who do not know their place and push the bounds of polite company’s limits. “Vronsky’s life was especially fortunate in that he had a code of rules which unquestionably defined everything that ought and ought not to be done. The code embraced a very small circle of conditions, but the rules were unquestionable and, never going outside that circle, Vronsky never hesitated a moment in doing what ought to be done…. These rules might not all be very reasonable or very nice, but they were unquestionable.”

Tolstoy is also telling a love story, or, in fact, two love stories, two very different stories, though intimately intertwined. “As a bachelor, seeing the married life of others, their trifling cares, quarrels, jealousy, he used only to smile scornfully to himself. In his own future married life, he was convinced, there not only could be nothing like that, but even all its external forms, it seemed to him, were bound to be in every way completely unlike other people’s lives. And suddenly, instead of that, his life with his wife did not form itself in any special way, but was, on the contrary, formed entirely of those insignificant trifles he had scorned so much before, but which now, against his will, acquired an extraordinary and irrefutable significance. And Levin saw that to arrange all those trifles was by no means as easy as it had seemed to him before.”

Living up to society’s moral codes and hypocrisies was even harder for a noblewoman. “Abstractly, theoretically, she not only justified but even approved of what Anna had done. Weary of the monotony of a moral life, as irreproachably moral women in general often are, she not only excused criminal love from a distance but even envied it. Besides, she loved Anna from the heart. But in reality, seeing her among these people she found so alien, with their good tone that was so new to her, she felt awkward…. In general, abstractly, Dolly approved of what Anna had done, but to see the man for whose sake she had done it was unpleasant for her. Besides, she had never liked Vronsky.” Anna, speaking to Levin, shall get the last word herself, “Tell your wife that I love her as before, and if she cannot forgive me my situation, I wish her never to forgive me. In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.”

“Strangers to Ourselves- Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious” by Timothy D. Wilson

Wilson is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. In this book, he ponders the question of how well do we really know ourselves. He states, “an important part of personality is the ability to respond in quick, habitual ways to the social world. It also means having a healthy psychological defense system.” Wilson suggests that our adaptive unconscious plays a large part in regulating our interactions with the outside world. All humans exhibit “selective attention. We are equipped with a nonconscious filter that examines the information reaching our senses and decides what to admit to consciousness. We can consciously control the “settings” of the filter to some degree…. The operation of the filter, however—the way in which information is classified, sorted, and selected for further processing—occurs outside of awareness…. [The adaptive unconscious] also monitors what we are not paying attention to.”

The adaptive unconscious interprets behavior and presents it as a singular reality. However, behavior is open to many interpretations. Expectations color these interpretations. That is why “first impressions are powerful, even when they are based on faulty information…. The adaptive unconscious is thus more than just a gatekeeper, deciding what information to admit to consciousness. It is also a spin doctor that interprets information outside of awareness. One of the most important judgements we make is about the motives, intentions, and dispositions of other people, and it is to our advantage to make these judgments quickly…. Accessibility is determined not only by the self-relevance of a category but also by how recently it has been encountered…. Another determinant of accessibility is how often a concept has been used in the past…. Our nonconscious minds develop chronic ways of interpreting information from our environments; in psychological parlance, certain ideas and categories become chronically accessible.”

Our brains are evolutionarily adapted to interpret reality “correctly”. But they also have a bias to interpret a pleasant worldview. “People go to great lengths to view the world in a way that maintains a sense of well-being. We are masterly spin doctors, rationalizers, and justifiers of threatening information.” We tell stories to ourselves about the facts at hand to interpret them in the most pleasant possible light. Wilson suggests that our adaptive unconscious follows this rule of thumb: “Select, interpret, and evaluate information in ways that make me feel good.” However, our conscious selves never like to feel we are massaging the facts. “Psychological defenses work best when they operate in the back alleys of our minds, keeping us blind to the fact that any distortion is going on.” Unfortunately, our adaptive unconscious is often a rigid system. “A disadvantage of a system that processes information quickly and efficiently is that it is slow to respond to new, contradictory information. In fact we often unconsciously bend new information to fit our preconceptions.”

A person’s personality is a combination of their conscious and unconscious selves. “It makes little sense to talk about a single “self” when we consider that both the adaptive unconscious and the conscious self have regular patterns of responding to the social world.” All humans essentially have a self that is beyond their conscious control. “Chronic dispositions, traits, and temperaments are part of the adaptive unconscious, to which [humans] have no direct access.” Walter Mischel stated, “personality is better conceived as a set of unique cognitive and affective variables that determine how people construe the situation. People have chronic ways of interpreting and evaluating different situations, and it is these interpretations that influence their behavior.” Wilson continues, “My central thesis is that human personality resides in two places: in the adaptive unconscious and in conscious construals of the self. The adaptive unconscious…. has distinctive, characteristic ways of interpreting the social environment and stable motives that guide people’s behavior…. They are rooted in early childhood, are in part genetically determined, and are not easily changed…. The constructed self consists of life stories, possible selves, explicit motives, self-theories, and beliefs about the reasons for one’s feelings and behaviors…. These two selves appear to be relatively independent…. The adaptive unconscious is more likely to influence people’s uncontrolled, implicit responses, whereas the constructed self is more likely to influence people’s deliberative, explicit responses.”

Humans develop different heuristics to guide us efficiently through everyday life. Scanning patterns “guide our construals of our social environments…. [They] allow people to pick up information from their social environments quickly…. We have our antennae up for certain information about other people, depending on which categories are accessible to us…. As a result of [our] background and learning history, people develop regular, idiosyncratic ways of construing the world.” Because of the pasts that we bring to the present, two people will interpret and then remember the same event drastically differently. Humans also use transference as a heuristic device. “Our mental representations of other people are stored in memory like any other chronic category. Because representations of relationships with significant others are self-relevant and frequently brought to mind, they become chronically accessible and are often used to interpret and evaluate new people we meet…. This transference process, which occurs outside of awareness, appears to be an important source of individual differences in how people react to new acquaintances.”

Humans often act first and rationalize their actions only after the fact. They create post-hoc stories. “The conscious verbal self often does not know why we do what we do and thus creates an explanation that makes the most sense.” Humans, in actuality, have little access to the internal causes of their responses. “It is true that people have privileged access to a great deal of information about themselves, such as the content of their current thoughts and memories and the object of their attention. But these are mental contents not mental processes. The real action in the mind is mental processing that produces feelings, judgments, and behaviors.” These processes all take place in the adaptive unconscious.

Even one’s feelings are not always properly interpreted by the conscious self. “The conscious system is quite sensitive to personal and cultural prescriptions about how one is supposed to feel…. People might assume that their feelings conform to these prescriptions and fail to notice instances in which they do not…. When people are uncertain about how they feel, they use behavior and bodily reactions as a guide.” Humans have a baseline of emotion that we revert back to with the passage of time. Both positive and negative shocks are processed and transformed “from the extraordinary to the ordinary, in a way that robs them of their emotional power…. Doing this often involves a reconstrual of the event to make it seem more understandable and predictable…. When an event is not easily explained by what we know, we alter what we know to accommodate the new event. We change our worldview in ways that make the event seem relatively normal and predictable.” Often, people overestimate the duration of their emotional responses to any one specific “life-changing” event, because “they fail to take into account the extent to which [other] external events will influence their thoughts and feelings (the focalism bias). Perhaps more importantly, they also fail to anticipate how quickly the novel events will come to seem mundane through the psychological process of ordinization.”

Wilson makes the case that introspection is of limited value. “Introspection is more like literary criticism in which we are the text to be understood. Just as there is no single truth that lies within a literary text, but many truths, so are there many truths about a person that can be constructed.” Introspection, according to Wilson, is more like a personal narrative, not the unvarnished truth. It “does not open magic doors to the unconscious, but is a process of construction and inference.” No matter how much one tries to introspect, the conscious mind does not have access to the adaptive unconscious. Instead, people “construct a story about how they feel that is based on reasons that are not entirely trustworthy. The story has the ring of truth to people, but because they have used faulty information (reasons that happened to be on their minds), it often misrepresents how they really feel.” Attempting to analyze one’s reasons biases the self towards those that are easiest to put into words, those that seem culturally appropriate, and those that first pop to mind.

Wilson suggests trying to look to how others see you in order to better see yourself. In “this form of self-knowledge the “looking glass self” we see our reflection in other people’s eyes, namely how they view our personalities, preferences, and behaviors, and often adopt that reflection—called the reflected appraisal—as part of our self-concept.” It is “self-knowledge by consensus, whereby we adopt the majority opinion of what we are like.” The downsides are “other people often hide their impressions from us…. [and] even when people are giving us signals about what they really think, we often have a hard time seeing them…. This is especially true when reading other people correctly would threaten a positive self-theory.” However, “by being careful observers of our own actions, we can learn a lot about ourselves…. If we want to change some aspect of our adaptive unconscious, a good place to start is deliberately to begin acting like the person we want to be…. People infer their internal states just as an outside observer would, by seeing how they behave and guessing what feelings or traits must underlie that behavior…. The difference between self-revelation and self-fabrication is crucial from the point of view of gaining self-knowledge. Inferring our internal states from our behavior is a good strategy if it reveals feelings of which we were previously unaware. It is not such a good strategy if it results in the fabrication of new feelings…. [People] underestimate the power of the situation over their behavior and mistakenly infer they they did what they did because of their inner feelings or attitudes…. It is quite common for people to overlook situational influences on their actions and infer they acted on the basis of their internal states—so common this phenomenon is called the fundamental attribution error.” Internal states are also open to many stories. When someone’s heart is pounding and they become short of breath, “the way they interpret this arousal will determine the emotion they experience.” Emotions are not a given, they are created by us, by our own interpretation of the interoceptive facts of our body into a coherent story. 

In closing, Wilson goes back to the nature of the self. He suggests, “There is no “true self”; rather, in modern life people live in multiple crosscurrents of conflicting social forces, and they construct many narratives specific to particular relationships and cultural circumstances. It makes no sense to judge one of these narratives as “truer” than another…. People can adopt different personas in different circumstances…. Self-stories should be accurate in a simple sense: they should capture the nature of the person’s nonconscious goals, feelings, and temperaments. In short, there must be some correspondence between the story and the person’s adaptive unconscious…. The better a story does at accounting for the “data” of the person’s adaptive unconscious, the better off the person is. By recognizing their nonconscious goals, people are in a better position to act in ways to fulfill them, or try to change them.”

“Gorgias” by Plato (translated by Donald J. Zeyl)

On the surface, this dialogue deals with the merits of oratory, but, more deeply, it also delves into how a man should live and what role justness plays in this good life. Through the course of this dialogue Socrates deals with three sophist interlocutors in succession, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. In turn, they make the case that the powerful live the good life. These sophists argue, particularly, that it is the successful politicians, rulers, and tyrants who truly live well. Socrates disagrees. He states, “Doing what’s unjust is actually the worst thing there is…. I wouldn’t want either, but if had to be one or the other, I would choose suffering over doing what’s unjust…. I say that the admirable and good person, man or woman, is happy, but that the one who’s unjust and wicked is miserable.” Socrates will not be swayed by the consensus of the crowd. “Nevertheless, though I’m only one person, I don’t agree with you. You don’t compel me; instead you produce many false witnesses against me and try to banish me from my property, the truth…. I disregard the things held in honor by the majority of people, and by practicing truth I really try, to the best of my ability, to be and to live as a very good man, and when I die, to die like that…. Choose the orderly life, the life that is adequate to and satisfied with its circumstances at any given time instead of the insatiable, undisciplined life.” 

Callicles denigrates philosophers as skilled in practicing an art only fit for children. For him, greatness lies in the oratory of politicians, skilled in the practice of persuading the masses. Socrates, in turn, questions how Callicles judges what makes a life worthy of being deemed good. “Do you also think as we [philosophers] do that the end of all action is what’s good, and that we should do all other things for its sake, but not it for their sake?… So we should do the other things, including pleasant things, for the sake of good things, and not good things for the sake of pleasant things…. As long as [the soul is] corrupt, in that it’s foolish, undisciplined, unjust and impious, it should be kept away from its appetites and not be permitted to do anything other than what will make it better…. So to be disciplined is better for the soul than lack of discipline.”

Finally, Socrates tries to get at the purpose of oratory, its uses, and how it jives with both the truth and the good. Socrates is particularly concerned with the effect of politician’s speeches on the mass of citizens and on the good of the city as a whole. “Do you think that orators always speak with regard to what’s best? Do they always set their sights on making the citizens as good as possible through their speeches? Or are they, too, bent upon the gratification of the citizens, and, slighting the common good for the sake of their own private good, do they treat the people like children, their sole attempt being to gratify them?” Socrates makes the distinction between the common will and the common weal. For Socrates, it is a great stain on even those Athenian politicians deemed great by posterity, such as Pericles and Cimon, that they left the citizenry in poorer shape than how they found them. “Shouldn’t he [the politician], according to what we agreed just now, have turned [the citizens] out more just instead of more unjust?… I’m not criticizing these men either, insofar as they were servants to the city. I think rather that they proved to be better servants than the men of today, and more capable of satisfying the city’s appetites. But the truth is that in redirecting its appetites and not giving in to them, using persuasion or constraint to get the citizens to become better, they were really not much different from our contemporaries.” Socrates contrasts the purpose of his own speeches with those of all these politicians. “I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians—so as not to say I’m the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries—to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics. This is because the speeches I make on each occasion do not aim at gratification but at what’s best.”

Socrates ends by recapping his view on the just and noble life. “For it’s a difficult thing, Callicles, and one that merits much praise, to live your whole life justly when you’ve found yourself having ample freedom to do what’s unjust…. Doing what’s unjust is more to be guarded against than suffering it, and that it’s not seeming to be good but being good that a man should take care of more than anything, both in his public and his private life.” For Socrates, these are the skills that all men must aspire to before they even contemplate a life concerned with politics. A citizenry composed of men unconcerned with justice is bound to be rotten, no matter their political system. Each man should first concern himself with his own soul, before trying to persuade others. “Nothing terrible will happen to you if you really are an admirable and good man, one who practices excellence. And then, after we’ve practiced it together, then at last, if we think we should, we’ll turn to politics, or then we’ll deliberate about whatever subject we please, when we’re better at deliberating than we are now. For it’s a shameful thing for us, being in the condition we appear to be in at present—when we never think the same about the same subjects, the most important ones at that—to sound off as though we’re somebodies. That’s how far behind in education we’ve fallen.”

“Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom” by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (translated by Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt)

This short treatise is the summation of Schelling’s reconciliation between causal necessity and freedom. Thus, it is also a meditation on theodicy, individual free will, and the capacity for evil. He begins, “The concept of freedom is in fact said to be completely incompatible with [a philosophical] system.” Schelling continues on the matter of individual freedom, “But the real and vital concept is that freedom is the capacity for good and evil…. It affects most noticeably the concept of immanence; for either real evil is admitted and, hence, it is inevitable that evil be posited within infinite substance or the primal will itself, whereby the concept of a most perfect being is utterly destroyed, or the reality of evil must in some way be denied, whereby, however, at the same time the real concept of freedom vanishes…. God appears undeniably to share responsibility for evil in so far as permitting an entirely dependent being to do evil is surely not much better than to cause it to do so.”

Schelling relates his view on the nature of philosophy in general. “Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is the body; only both together can constitute a living whole. The latter can never provide the principle but must be the ground and medium in which the former makes itself real and takes on flesh and blood.” He continues by defining his dual concepts of general and individual will, “The understanding as universal will stands against this self-will of creatures, using and subordinating the latter to itself as a mere instrument…. In man there is the whole power of the dark principle and at the same time the whole strength of the light. In him there is the deepest abyss and the loftiest sky or both centra. The human will is the seed—hidden in eternal yearning—of the God who is present still in the ground only; it is the divine panorama of life, locked up within the depths, which God beheld as he fashioned the will to nature.”

Finally, Schelling returns to the concept of individual freedom, “Man is placed on that summit where he has in himself the source of self-movement toward good or evil in equal portions: the bond of principles in him is not a necessary but rather a free one. Man stands on the threshold [Scheidepunkt]; whatever he chooses, it will be his act…. The intelligible being can, as certainly as it acts as such freely and absolutely, just as certainly act only in accordance with its own inner nature; or action can follow form within only in accordance with the law of identity and with absolute necessity which alone is also absolute freedom. For free is what acts only in accord with the laws of its own being…. True freedom is in harmony with a holy necessity, the likes of which we perceive in essential cognition, when spirit and heart, bound only by their own law, freely affirm what is necessary.”

“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.”