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

The provenance of this short book of the Bible is somewhat disputed. Alter weighs in in his introduction, “Is Ruth in fact a Late Biblical book? Although this is the consensus of biblical scholars, there are some vocal dissenters. These tend to take at face value the assertion of the opening verse that we are reading a story that goes back to the period of the Judges…. But style is actually the clearest evidence of the lateness of Ruth. The writer took pains to create a narrative prose redolent of the early centuries of Israelite history, but it is very difficult to execute such a project of archaizing without occasional telltale slips…. There are at least a dozen terms that reflect distinctive Late Biblical usage…. The other strong sign of Ruth’s composition in the period after the return from Babylonian exile in the fifth century B.C.E. is its genre…. Harvesting and agriculture are a palpable presence in the story. Unlike the narratives from Genesis to Kings, where even pastoral settings are riven with tensions and often punctuated with violence, the world of Ruth is a placid bucolic world, where landowner and workers greet each other decorously with blessings in the name of the Lord.” Alter also throws in a bit of history, “Ruth’s Moabite origins have led many interpreters—convincingly, in my view—to see this story as a quiet polemic against the opposition of Ezra and Nehemiah to intermarriage with the surrounding peoples when the Judahites returned to their land in the fifth century B.C.E.”

In Ruth 1:1, Alter details the historic setting for the book and thus the dispute of its provenance, “when the judges ruled. The “judges” (shoftim) are tribal chieftains, as in the Book of Judges. This initial notice led the Septuagint and the Christian canon afterward, to place the Book of Ruth in the Former Prophets, after Judges.” In Ruth 1:17, Alter describes a common Biblical literary technique, “Wherever you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. Ruth’s moving speech, with its fine resonance of parallel clauses, appropriately ends on the note of death: she will always remain with Naomi in the trajectory of a whole life until death. The procedure of biblical narrative of defining character by his or her initial speech is vividly deployed here, showing Ruth as the perfect embodiment of loyalty for her mother-in-law.”

Alter details another striking literary detail in relating Ruth 2:11, “you left your mother and your father and the land of your birth. These words are the most significant literary allusion in the book. They explicitly echo God’s first words to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house.” Now it is a woman, and a Moabite, who reenacts Abraham’s long trek from the east to Canaan. She will become the founding mother of the nation as he was the founding father.” Finally in Ruth 4:18, Alter again reflects on Ruth’s future progeny, “And this is the lineage of Perez. In careful emulation of the Book of Genesis, the writer weaves together narration with genealogy to pointed thematic purpose. Here he aligns the son Ruth bears both back to Judah’s son, Perez, and forward to the founder of the divinely authorized dynasty, David.”

“The Hebrew Bible: The Song of Songs” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction, “The Song of Songs stands out in its striking distinctiveness—a distinctiveness that deserves to be called wondrous. The delicate yet frank sensuality of this celebration of young love, without reference to God or covenant or Torah, has lost nothing of its immediate freshness over the centuries: these are among the most beautiful love poems that have come down to us from the whole ancient world…. Famously, the erotic nature of the Song constituted a challenge for the framers of the canon, both Jewish and Christian, and their response was to read the poems allegorically…. Both religious traditions, however fervently they clung to this allegorical vision, never succeeded in entirely blocking the erotic power of the text…. Little is known about the origin of these poems…. The book as a whole has an anthological look.”

Alter continues by discussing the poetry. “These poets are finely aware of the long tradition of Hebrew poetry, but notably there is little in the way of allusion to earlier Hebrew texts…. The formal system of parallelism between versets—that is, parts of the line—that governs Hebrew poetry from its earliest extant texts going back to around 1100 B.C.E. is still very much in evidence…. What is remarkable is how consistently the figurative language of these poems evokes the experience of physical love with a delicacy of expression that manifests the poet’s constant delight in likening one thing to another. (The Hebrew verb damah, “to be like,” is repeatedly flaunted.)”

In Song 2:2, Alter describes the simile that introduces the two lovers in these poems, “Like a lily among the thorns. This particular poem unfolds through statement and response in a lovers’ dialogue. She announces herself as a flower; he goes her one better by answering that she is like a flower among the thorns in comparison to other young women.” Next, Alter gives a bit of historical context to Song 2:11, “the winter has passed. The love poetry of the Song of Songs is preeminently poetry of the verdant world of spring. Jewish tradition fixed it to be read on the Sabbath of springtime Passover because of the allegorical interpretation in which the two lovers are identified with God and Israel celebrating their nuptials after the exodus from Egypt, which occurred in early spring.”

Alter details the use of poetic technique in Song 4:4, “Like the tower of David your neck. This simile, like a good many others in the poem, is “Oriental,” reflecting an aesthetic in which the poet pursues the momentum of the object of comparison, half forgetting the thing to which it is compared.” Alter also details the probable provenance of the composition of the book. From Song 6:5, “Your hair is like a herd of goats. This line, together with everything in verses 6 and 7, is a reprise of 4:1-3, though here 4:3a does not appear. This sort of near verbatim recurrence of lines may reflect the anthological nature of the Song of Songs, in which two or more lines of poetry might have migrated from one poem to another.”

Finally, Alter relates what has been a notable absence in this book’s themes. In Song 8:6, he points out, “a fearsome flame. The word for “flame” has the theophoric suffix yah, but this translation follows the scholarly consensus that it is used here as an intensifier, with no theological implication. This would be consistent with the rest of the Song of Songs, where God is neither mentioned nor at issue in the poems.”

“The Maniac” by Benjamin Labatut

This book is classified as fiction, but it is based on fact. It is a bit of a weird book, broken up into three parts. It has no storyline, but is more like three potted biographies. The first section is on the Austrian physicist, Paul Ehrenfest. He went crazy and killed his own son, Vassily, who had been living with Down Syndrome, before shooting himself in the head. The ideas of quantum physics were deeply unsettling for Paul. He mused, “Reason is now untethered from all other deeper, more fundamental aspects of our psyche, and I’m afraid it will lead us by the bit, like a drunken mule…. We lie on our knees, praying to the wrong god, a childish deity who hides at the center of a corrupted world that he can neither govern nor understand.” Labatut reports, Paul “tried to calm down and develop his ideas serenely, but his enthusiasm, and the joy of working once more, free from the heavy fog of melancholia, was simply too much for him to contain. It was this work, and this alone, that would tie his name to history; a solution to the irregular and unpredictable behavior of turbulence, a law behind its irreducible randomness.”

The bulk of Labatut’s book is about John von Neumann. Each chapter in this second section is told in the voice of one of his friends or family members. It is a subjective imagining of the facts of Neumann’s life. The first chapter is told by Eugene Wigner. “There are two kinds of people in this world: Jansci von Neumann and the rest of us…. Did I know what went on inside the mind of Janos von Neumann? No, I can’t say that I did…. Jansci was trying to make sense of the world. He was searching for absolute truth, and he really believed that he would find a mathematical basis for reality.” Theodore von Karman expands, “What von Neumann had tried to do was to find the purest and most basic truths of mathematics, and to express them as unquestionable axioms, statements that could not be denied, disproven, or contradicted, certainties that would never fade or become distorted and so would remain—like a deity—timeless, unchangeable, and eternal. On this solid core, mathematicians could then construct all their theories, unfolding the diverse beauty of quantity, structure, space, and change without fear that they might encounter a monster, some awful chimera born of paradox and contradiction that, once awakened, could tear their tidy, ordered cosmos apart.”

Kurt Godel ripped this dream apart. At the Sixth Congress of German Physicists and Mathematicians, according to Neumann, he said, stuttering, “I b-believe that we can p-postulate, within any consistent f-formal system, a statement that is t-true but that can never be pr-proven within the rules of said system.” The remarks were informal so the exact record is lost to time. According to Wigner, “It was the end of Hilbert’s program…. Janos never worked on the foundations of mathematics again. He remained in awe of Godel for the rest of his life.” Neumann, himself, gushed about Godel, “His achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental…. It will never be possible to acquire with mathematical means the certainty that mathematics does not contain contradictions…. Godel is irreplaceable; he is the only mathematician alive about whom I would dare to make this statement.” Wigner concludes, “From Godel onward, I was always afraid of [Neumann], because once he abandoned his juvenile faith in mathematics he became more practical and effective than before, but also dangerous. He was, in a very real sense, set free.”

Later, Wigner summarizes, “I have always resisted condemning Jansci, or judging him too harshly, because I believe that a mind like his—one of inexorable logic—must have made him understand and accept many things that most of us do not even want to acknowledge, and cannot begin to comprehend. He did not see the way the rest of us do, and this colored many of his moral judgments. With his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, for example, he wasn’t trying to fight a war, or beat the casino, or finally win a game of poker; he was aiming at nothing less than the complete mathematization of human motivation, he was trying to capture some part of mankind’s soul with mathematics.”

Sydney Brenner reveals, “I was part of the group of scientists that discovered the role that messenger RNA plays in all living cells. Essentially, it’s like a minuscule machine that copies information from DNA and then carries it to a structure that uses it to make proteins, the building blocks of life…. I always confess that it came from one of von Neumann’s lesser-known articles, a very short but powerful thought experiment about what it takes to make a self-reproducing machine…. He managed to determine the logical rules behind all modes of self-replication, whether biological, mechanical, or digital…. Von Neumann demonstrates that you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being. You need both things: to make a copy and to endow it with the instructions needed to build itself…. Right there, in that paper written in the late 1940s, he depicts the way in which DNA and RNA work…. Thanks to him, in modern biology we have this very peculiar situation: its most fundamental and precise mathematical basis was established first, and then we found out how life on Earth had actually gone about implementing it. That’s not the way things go.”

Labatut’s third section is about the Go champion, Lee Sedol, and his battle against AlphaGo, designed by Demis Hassabis’ Deep Mind. Lee, himself, enthuses, “If someone was somehow capable of fully understanding Go, and by that I mean not just the positions of the stones and the way they relate to one another but the hidden, almost imperceptible patterns that lie beneath its ever-changing formations, I believe it would be the same as peering into the mind of God.” Labatut explains, “While the total number of possible chess games is somewhere close to 10^123, which is one followed by a hundred and twenty-three zeros, the number of all possible Go games is almost unimaginably larger: over 10^700 potential games.” Labatut continues, “When future historians look back at our time and try to pin down the first glimmer of a true artificial intelligence, they may well find it in a single move during the second game between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, played on the tenth of March 2016: move 37…. It was unlike anything a computer had ever done before. It was also different from anything that a human being had ever been known to consider. It was something new, a complete break from tradition, a radical departure from thousands of years of accumulated wisdom.” Lee concludes, “I thought I was the best, or at least one of the best. But then this artificial intelligence  put the final nail in my coffin. It is simply unbeatable. In that situation, it doesn’t matter how much you try. I don’t see the point. I started playing when I was five. Back then, it was all about courtesy and manners. It was more like learning an art form than a game. As I grew up, Go started to be seen as a mind game, but what I learned was an art. Go is a work of art made by two people. Now it’s totally different. After the advent of AI, the concept of Go itself has changed.”

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

lter begins by introducing the anomalies in the Book of Job. “The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon. Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers…. The Book of Job belongs to the international movement of ancient Near Eastern Wisdom literature in its universalist perspective—there are no Israelite characters in the text, though all the speakers are monotheists…. It is equally linked with Wisdom literature in its investigation of the problem of theodicy.”

Alter describes the majestic beauty of the Job poet’s verse. “The Book of Job is, of course, a theological argument, but it is a theological argument conducted in poetry…. Biblical poetry in general works through a system of intensifications, heightening or focusing or concretizing the utterance of the first verset of a line in the approximate semantic parallelism of the second verset…. All biblical poetry, because it is formally based in part on semantic parallelism, is driven to search for synonyms. No other biblical poet, however, exhibits the virtuosity in the command of rich synonymity that is displayed by the Job poet…. The other chief resource deployed in the poetry that Job speaks is its extraordinary metaphoric inventiveness…. The fecundity of metaphor, moreover, is allied with a keenly observant interest in the processes of nature that is also rather unusual for a biblical poet…. Still another source of metaphor tapped by the Job poet, beyond quotidian reality and nature, is mythology…. The third—and, ultimately, decisive—level of poetry in the book is manifested when the Lord addresses Job out of the whirlwind. Here, too, the Job poet’s keen interest in nature is evident…. God’s thundering challenge to Job is not bullying. Rather, it rousingly introduces a comprehensive overview of the nature of reality that exposes the limits of Job’s human perspective.”

Beautiful and arresting metaphors abound in the Book of Job. In Job 3:9, Alter relates, “the eyelids of dawn. This exquisite and surprising image—another hallmark of this poet’s originality—simultaneously indicates the first crack of light on the eastern horizon and the movement of the awakening person’s eyes taking in the first light of day.”

In Job 9:22-24, Alter details Job’s main argument against the Lord, “the blameless and the wicked he destroys. This single verset compactly summarizes Job’s argument against the mainline biblical notion of God’s justice. Observing the reality of human events, including, of course, the disasters that have beset him, he sees no neat system of reward for the virtuous and punishment for the transgressor: the purported system of divine justice is essentially arbitrary…. He mocks the innocent’s plight…. God’s mockery of the innocent makes him not just arbitrary but sadistic…. The earth is given in the wicked man’s hand. Job now steps up his argument. God is not merely arbitrary; he actually tilts the conduct of the world to favor the wicked.”

Alter points out the aspects of Wisdom literature that appear in the book. In Job 37:24, he relates, “He does not regard all the wise of heart. As the Hymn to Wisdom concluded in Job 28:28, “fear of the Master, that is wisdom,” and God has no special regard for those who imagine they have attained understanding independently through the exercise of intellect. This final line would be a last rebuke to Job, who has had the presumption to think he knows how the system of divine justice should work and hence dared to challenge God.”

In Job 39:30, Alter describes the brutal honest reality that the Job poet versifies, “His chicks lap up blood. One of the remarkable aspects of the Job poet’s vision of nature is that it is so completely unsentimental…. The concluding image, then, of God’s first speech is of the fledgling eagles in the nest, their little beaks open to gulp down the bloody scraps of flesh that their parent has brought them. The moral calculus of nature clearly does not jibe with the simple set of equations and consequences laid out in Proverbs and Psalms.”

“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.”