“On Giving Up” by Adam Phillips

This is another short collection of essays by Phillips around the theme of giving up. Phillips begins, “We give up, or give something up, when we believe we can no longer go on as we are. And so a giving up is always some kind of critical moment…. Giving up, in other words, is an attempt to make a different future…. Giving up is at once a risk and a prediction.” He continues by describing the feeling of wanting, “It would be crude, but not wildly inaccurate, to see human history as a history of creatures tormented by their appetites…. Acculturation, we can see, has now become the really quite quick proliferation of wants…. Parenting and education teaching us what to want, and what to not want…. Modern people, we take it—at least in so-called detraditionalized societies—leave home to find, and to find out, what their parents can’t give them; the family circumscribes and defines and tries to fashion the child’s wanting, and then the modern child’s wanting exceeds what the family can provide…. Anyone who can satisfy us, anyone who can make us feel better, is going to be the same person who frustrates us and can make us feel worse…. In this account, we are always found wanting—in a state of dependent, and therefore ambivalent, need for others—and we are always and only preoccupied by what we need and want.” Phillips always selectively riffs (and attempts to modernize?) Freud, while paying due respect to the master, “Fulfillment and non-fulfillment of a vital necessity or desire, Freud suggests, may not be as different as they seem; the satisfaction of a wish and the frustration of a wish both entail suffering…. If wanting sustains us, it also threatens to destroy us; if not wanting starves us, it keeps us safe. In the Freudian story, what you most want is what you must not have.”

Phillips has an essay on the feelings involved with being left out. He explains, “It was Freud’s contention that we are involved in the lifelong project of leaving ourselves out of our own lives, that we can only survive by exclusion. Our unconscious includes us and excludes us at the same time…. In Freud’s view, people want to have as little in common with themselves as possible…. No one is remotely acceptable to themselves. Human beings, as Freud sees it, are radically at odds with who they take themselves to be…. He was looking at what we are tempted to leave unattended to in ourselves and others, at our passion for ignorance, our fear of our own desire…. Already knowing, or thinking we know, what we want is the way we manage our fear of freedom. Wanting not to be left out may tell us very little about what we want, while telling us a lot about how we evade our wanting…. There are all the ordinary accidents and catastrophes and frustrations of childhood: being left out of the satisfactions one seeks, the safety one requires, the unmet needs, the unrecognized preoccupations that will inform the child’s entire life…. We are likely to imagine that we are left out of the thing we think we most need. Tell me what you feel left out of and I will tell you what you think you want…. An identity is what you are left with, what you come up with, after being left out: it is a self-cure for alienation. Desiring and thinking and questioning and imagining are what we do after the catastrophe of exclusion. We are shocked into necessary forms of self-identification. We try to make ourselves recognizable to ourselves and others.”

Finally, Phillips deals with the concept of projection, “From a psychoanalytic point of view traditional distinctions begin to attenuate and blur; there is no them and us, the sane and the mad, the good and the evil, the primitive and the sophisticated, reality and fantasy; or there is no them and us now, because we are described, by Freud, as projecting the unacceptable, the inadmissible, parts of ourselves, of which there are many, into other people. That what we are also really up against is the unacceptable and inadmissible in ourselves.” Freud, himself, proclaims, “We have recognized that it is not scientifically feasible to distinguish between what is psychically normal and psychically abnormal.” Phillips concludes, “What would it be, Freud gets us to wonder, to live in a society that believed in the unconscious? What could it possibly mean to believe in the unconscious? Which, of course, is not like believing in God, or love, or justice. It would be to believe that we are largely unaware of who we are, and that we mostly want to keep it that way because we are too disturbed by who we experience ourselves as being.”

“The Renaissance” by Walter Pater

Pater was an Oxford fellow in the nineteenth century. This a collection of essays on his somewhat idiosyncratic conception of the Renaissance. Foremost, he uses the history of the period for a larger discussion on his views of art, aesthetics, criticism, and the good life. He begins, “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative…. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics…. The first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is.” Next, Pater defines his conception of the Renaissance, “For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, makes themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment…. In their search after the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival to religion.”

Pater discusses what makes the different forms of artistic expression similar and unique. “It is a mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought…. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations…. Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material.”

Next, Pater takes on the spirit of aesthetic criticism. “Criticism must never for a moment forget that ‘the artist is the child of his time.’ But besides these conditions of time and place, and independent of them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard of taste, which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in a purely intellectual tradition. It acts upon the artist, not as one of the influences of his own age, but through those artistic products of the previous generation which first excited, while they directed into a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a series of elevated points, taking each from each the reflexion of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. The standard of taste [for the Renaissance] was fixed in Greece…. Pagan and Christian art are sometime harshly opposed, and the Renaissance is represented as a fashion which set in at a definite period. That is the superficial view: the deeper view is that which preserves the identity of European culture. The two are really continuous; and there is a sense in which it may be said that the Renaissance was an uninterrupted effort of the middle age, that it was ever taking place.”

Finally, Pater concludes a bit philosophically, “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end…. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life…. We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve…. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song…. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most…. The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the inward becomes thinner and thinner…. It has the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the range and seriousness of culture without its strain and over-consciousness. Such a habit may be described as wistfulness of mind, the feeling that there is ‘so much to know,’ rather as a longing after what is unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear…. The nature before us is a revolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth…. It is not the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself.”

“The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig (translated by Anthea Bell)

Zweig wrote this memoir in the midst of the Second World War. He would commit suicide before its end. He grew up in a prosperous Jewish family, at perhaps the pinnacle of the Habsburg Empire, in the heart of its capital, Vienna. “Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.” He was also raised with art at his bosom, “Austrian art had lost its traditional guardians and protectors: the imperial house and the aristocracy…. It was the particular pride and indeed the ambition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to maintain the reputation of Viennese culture in its old brilliance…. It was their love of Viennese art that had made them feel entirely at home, genuinely Viennese…. It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights, because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone in the city.”

Zweig first moved to Paris shortly after finishing university and quickly ran in a bohemian circle. Of his friends, he remembers, “They were not ashamed to live in a modest way so that they could think freely and boldly in their artistic work…. No money was wasted on prestige and outward show.” Eventually moving back to Salzburg, he still traveled back and forth between all the great European cities. Zweig reminisces on his greatest writing mentors, “Think how inspiring it was for us young people to be in the presence of such stern servants and guardians of language, admirably true to themselves, loving only the resonant word, a word meant not for today and the newspapers but for what would last and endure…. One lived in Germany, another in France, yet another in Italy, but they all inhabited the same homeland, for they really lived only in their poetry…. Each also made a work of art out of his own life.”

The interwar years were a time of turmoil for Zweig and his family. With the rise of Hitler and Nazism next door in Germany, Zweig realized his time living in Austria was numbered. “For the first time I really came to understand the eternal character of the professional revolutionary who feels that he is raised from his personal insignificance merely by adopting a stance of opposition.” On persevering in his craft, Zweig offers, “Art was never more popular in Austria than at that time of chaos. Money had let us down; we sensed that what was eternal in us was all that would last.” Eventually emigrating permanently to London, he still stayed away from involvement in politics, “Nothing in me has been stronger since my early youth than an instinctive wish to stay free and independent.” Zweig concludes, “If there is one new art that we have had to learn, those of us who have been hunted down and forced into exile at a time hostile to all art and all collections, then it is the art of saying goodbye to everything that was once our pride and joy…. In the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Ezra—Nehemiah” (translated by Robert Alter)

In Alter’s translation he chooses to combine the introduction to these two books of the Hebrew Bible. However, in the text he separates the books. As he explains, “There is a tradition going back to Late Antiquity that sees Ezra and Nehemiah as a single book, often simply referred to as “Ezra.” The two books, however, differ in form and are certainly not the work a single writer. Ezra is a third-person narrative reporting historical—at least possibly historical—events affecting the returned exiles in the fifth century B.C.E. It includes the only extended passage (chapters 4-6) in the Bible outside of Daniel written in Aramaic…. In all likelihood, it was composed at the very end of the fifth century…. Nehemiah was probably written a little earlier, in the last quarter of the fifth century. A good portion of it consists of Nehemiah’s memoirs, written in the first person, and there is no equivalent to this form elsewhere in the Bible. It also incorporates Persian imperial documents, and these are probably authentic.”

In his introduction, Alter next explains what unites these two books, “All this writing, moreover, is driven by a powerful political motive, which is not exactly the case in earlier Hebrew narrative…. Political power is divided between two figures working in complementary fashion—Ezra the scribe and priest, who is concerned with the all-important project of the restoration of the cult and the canonization of the newly redacted Torah through the institution of its public reading, and Nehemiah, coming to Jerusalem from a high position in the Persian court, the political leader who addresses security issues of rebuilding the walls of the city and confronting armed enemies…. The community of returned exiles found itself in sharp conflict with other groups in the country, and the ideology promoted by both Ezra and Nehemiah was stringently separatist…. Another policy dictated by Ezra and Nehemiah’s separatist view was the sweeping resistance to intermarriage…. The separatist view embodied in Ezra and Nehemiah is the one that seems to have prevailed in its time: no foreign wives, no Samaritans or others of uncertain ethnic and religious background, were tolerated in the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem and the renewal of the Temple.”

In Ezra 2:1, Alter points out the historical and linguistic fact of the returned Jews being a subject people within the Persian Empire, “the people of the province. The “province” would be Yehud, or Judah, now having the status of a province in the Persian empire.” In Ezra 2:63, he notes another linguistic point, “the satrap. The Hebrew tirshata is clearly a loanword, probably Persian, designating a high official. One may infer that the official in question was Nehemiah, appointed to govern the province of Judah.”

Alter explains the possible background process behind the canonization of the Torah detailing Ezra 7:10, “the teaching of the LORD. It is possible that this phrase, torat YHWH, is an explicit designation of the Torah, or Pentateuch, especially in light of Ezra’s role in making it canonical for the returned exiles.” Alter continues his historical explanation of Ezra 10:3, “the Teaching. By this late date, “the Teaching” (torah) was probably coming into use as a designation for the Five Books of Moses, which Ezra would endow with canonical authority.”

In Nehemiah 2:8, Alter annotates another linguistic tidbit, “the king’s park. The Hebrew term pardes is a loanword from the Persian and has entered many languages, including English, where it occurs as “paradise.” In modern Hebrew it means “orchard.”” In Nehemiah 5:4, he adds a historical note to his explanation of vocabulary, “money. In earlier texts, this Hebrew word, kesef, is consistently translated as “silver,” but the archaeological evidence is that by the fifth century B.C.E. coins were used in Judah and elsewhere in the region.”

Finally, in Nehemiah 8:1, Alter again describes the process of the canonization of the Torah, “the Book of the Teaching of Moses. The Hebrew is sefer torat mosheh. This is probably still a descriptive rubric rather than a true title. The word for teaching, torah, would in time become the standard designation for the Five Books of Moses. The Torah was evidently edited in the Babylonian exile, with Ezra perhaps playing a key role in the final compilation, and this is the text now presented to the people. If rebuilding the walls and the Temple consolidates the physical security and the cultic viability of the people returned to its land, the public reading of the Torah—essentially, a confirmation of its newly minted canonicity—consolidates the spiritual coherence of the people.”

“Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” by Immanuel Kant (translated by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann)

This short treatise is Kant’s explication of his categorical imperative and the basis for his entire system of morals. He begins by explaining why morality is only linked with duty, “To do the action without any inclination, solely from duty; not until then does it have its genuine moral worth…. It is just there that the worth of character commences, which is moral and beyond all comparison the highest, namely that he be beneficent, not from inclination, but from duty.” He continues with a definition of duty, “Duty is the necessity of an action from respect for the law…. Only what is connected with my will merely as ground, never as effect, what does not serve my inclination, but outweighs it, or at least excludes it entirely from calculations when we make a choice, hence the mere law by itself, can be an object of respect and thus a command. Now, an action from duty is to separate off entirely the influence of inclination, and with it every object of the will; thus nothing remains for the will that could determine it except, objectively, the law and, subjectively, pure respect for this practical law…. I ought never to proceed except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law…. The necessity of my actions from pure respect for the practical law is that which constitutes duty, to which every other motivating ground must give way, because it is the condition of a will good in itself, whose worth surpasses everything.”

Kant continues by asserting that it is not consequentialism, but the inner motive of the individual that pertains to morality, “When moral worth is at issue what counts is not the actions, which one sees, but their inner principles, which one does not see.” He continues on the concept of the Will, “Only a rational being has the capacity to act according to the representation of laws, i.e. according to principles, or a will. Since reason is required for deriving actions from laws, the will is nothing other than practical reason…. The will is a capacity to choose only that which reason, independently of inclination, recognizes as practically necessary, i.e. as good.”

The categorical imperative is the central concept of Kant’s entire moral system. He begins, “The categorical imperative would be the one that represented an action as objectively necessary by itself, without reference to another end…. All imperatives are formulae for the determination of an action necessary according to the principle of a will that is good in some way…. The categorical imperative, which declares the action to be of itself objectively necessary without reference to any other purpose, i.e. even apart from any other end, holds as an apodictically practical principle…. There is therefore only a single categorical imperative, and it is this: act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law…. So act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.”

Next, Kant discusses treating every rational agent as an end. “A human being and generally every rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means for the discretionary use for this or that will…. Rational beings are called persons, because their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves, i.e. as something that may not be used merely as a means…. These are therefore not merely subjective ends, the existence of which, as the effect of our action, has a worth for us; but rather objective ends, i.e. entities whose existence in itself is an end…. The ground of this principle is: a rational nature exists as an end in itself…. So act that you use humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” Kant connects this back with his categorical imperative, “Autonomy is thus the ground of the dignity of a human and of every rational nature…. The categorical imperative can also be expressed as follows: act according to maxims that can at the same time have as their object themselves as universal laws of nature. Such, then, is the formula of an absolutely good will…. A rational nature is distinguished from the others by this, that it sets itself an end.”

Kant might be described as the progenitor of German idealism. He talks of the world of appearances, where humans rely on their senses, and the world of things in themselves, defined through reason and understanding, but never quite grasped. “A human being cannot even—according to the acquaintance he has with himself by inner sensation—presume to cognize how he himself is in himself.” Kant concludes, “As a rational being, hence as one that belongs to the intelligible world, a human being can never think of the causality of his own will otherwise than under the idea of freedom…. When we think of ourselves as free, we transfer ourselves as members into the world of understanding, and cognize autonomy of the will, along with its consequence, morality; but if we think of ourselves as bound by duty we consider ourselves as belonging to the world of sense and yet at the same time to the world of understanding…. Categorical imperatives are possible, because the idea of freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world.”

“The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought” by Wang Hui (translated by Michael Gibbs Hill et al.)

In Wang’s treatise, he seeks to show how different Chinese dynasties adopted the precepts of Confucius’ philosophy to their own times and made his thoughts their own, through interpretation and selection of emphasis. Wang begins by discussing the School of Principle, during the Song Dynasty, reinterpreted Confucius from the older tradition, “Confucian learning starts off centered on morality, with an epistemology linking government, economy, culture, and nature in one basic framework of rites and music, a moral-political narrative centered on renewing the connection between Heaven and humanity…. In the categories of Confucianism, morality had strong and specific relationships with systems of ritual, institutions, and customs…. Among Confucian ideological stances, the School of Principle especially emphasized the internal aspect of the evaluative process…. The Ru learning of Confucius took ritual, “the rites and music” (liyue) as its core…. But the Song and Ming School of Principle takes Heavenly Principle, Mind, and Nature as its core…. To the School of Principle, moral evaluations are produced within an order that is universal and yet internal. This order is called “internal” because it cannot be equated to the existing rituals, institutions, or laws, but rather emerges only in subjective cognition and embodied awareness…. The School of Principle turns the central issue away from rites/music and institutions and toward methods to attain knowledge.”

Wang next discusses how the Confucian disciple, Mencius, viewed humaneness as compared to his mentor. “In contrast to how Confucius interpreted humaneness between ritual and humaneness, Mencius connects humaneness directly to Heaven…. Mencius’s system of thought, humaneness, righteousness, ritual propriety, and wisdom all accrue to the “nature of the superior man,” or else are “rooted in the mind.”” Mencius elaborated, “To preserve one’s mind, and cultivate one’s nature, is the way to serve Heaven.” Mencius continued, “Humaneness, righteousness, ritual propriety, and wisdom are not infused into us from without. We are certainly furnished with them.” Wang explains, “Ascribing the inner strength of humanity directly to ontology or the Way of Heaven and not to institutions of rites and music also meant rejecting Confucius’s ideas about adhering to Western Zhou ritual forms.”

As earlier stated, the Song Dynasty scholars interpreted Confucius in a new manner. They viewed morality, ethics, and humaneness in a more subjective light. “From Han-dynasty cosmology to the establishment of the Northern Song Way of Heaven was a transition, with the center of focus no longer on the correspondence of Heaven and human, but rather on the internal moral qualities of humans, and their conduct…. Cosmology took an inward turn, and moral and political practice went from following the mastery or commands of Heaven to following internal nature…. For the Song and Ming Confucians, however, principle took on a distinctly secular orientation…. Heavenly Principle and the Heavenly Way were absolute truths that transcended and yet were also internal to the myriad things of the universe. The function of understanding and the internal turn of moral judgment were products of the historical judgment that institutions had separated from morality…. In the eyes of Confucians, the so-called connection between institutions and ritual reflected the historical evolution from enfeoffment to the system of centralized administration. Their theory of institutions took the imperial power-centered system of centralized administration as legitimate, while School of the Way scholars took ritual views of the patriarchal clan system and enfeoffments as the basis for moral-political judgment. Here, the propensity of the times had become an element internal to Heavenly Principle…. Oppositions between “is” and “ought,” and “fact” and “value,” in Song and later Confucian theory were products of historically evolving moral-political judgment, namely the separation of institutions from ritual.”

Confucius was interpreted yet differently in the times of the Qing Dynasty. Wang contrasts Qing Confucian thought with that of the Song, “Critiques of Song Confucianism were mainly focused on methods of pursuing learning, and were definitely not directed at such universally recognized concepts and presuppositions of Qing Confucianism (including Zhu Xi learning) as the unity of governance and the Way, the unity of principle and ritual, and the unity of ritual and ceremonial implements…. From the standpoint of this “unity,” both equally rejected the Cheng-Zhu dualisms of li and qi, of governance and the Way, and of principle and ritual, and through arguments about the connections between ritual and principle, governance and the Way, and the Way and its vessels, they rejected Lu-Wang explanations of principle as grounded in the heart…. Song Confucianism used Heavenly Principle to stand in opposition to the actual order of things, and thereby manifested a world in which ritual and music and institutions, status identity, and moral condition were separated from each other; for them, the opposition between Heavenly Principle and the actual world was precisely the source of criticism.”

The crux of the Qing Dynasty was that, for many ethnically Han scholars, it was viewed as foreign. “For a Han literatus during the Qing dynasty, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the Qing was a foreign regime: without the Will of Heaven…. Force alone could not legitimize the “new king.” By starting with terms “Receiving the Mandate of Heaven” and “Emperor,” the Rectification clearly implies that imperial power is the highest authority. “Royal affairs” are simply a substitute for Heaven. If the ruler were to violate the Will of Heaven and thus anger All-under-Heaven, he would have lost his legitimacy…. The Qing was widely regarded as a conquest dynasty…. The Qing empire’s erasure of the inner-outer divide, and its treatment of Manchu and Han as one, could not fit with the principle of patriarchal inheritance, as the privileges of the Manchu nobility were based precisely on blood lineage.” Wang continues, “After the first Opium War, the Sino-British Treaty of Nanjing, and a series of subsequent wars and treaties, the “internal-external” categories as they had been understood in late-Qing society underwent fundamental change. No longer did they refer to internal and external relationships with the empire or in the tributary system, but rather to those between nation-states…. Late-Qing scholar-officials saw clearly that if Confucian thought could only establish a Doctrine for All (wanshi fa) within China, then China’s only option in an era of competition among states would be to close off its borders and, even then, eventually lose the doctrinal and practical basis for gaining a foothold in this competition.”

Finally, Wang exposits on the only recourse available to late Qing-Confucian scholars, universal Confucianism. “If one views the rites-centric Confucian knowledge system as a kind of universal knowledge, then one must establish universal connections between rites and the world, thereby also subverting the intrinsic or historical connection between the Confucian rites and China…. Venerating the rites does not mean adhering to the old ways. This therefore relaxed the relationship between the universal nature of the rites and specific code of rites.” Kang Youwei stated, “Rites are established by the ruler and serve as a model for all.” Wang explains, “The universal nature of knowledge or rites did not originate from authoritative practice but from an a priori and abstract essence.” Kang Youwei recounts, “Confucius said: “For setting the rulers at peace and making the people orderly, nothing compares to the rites.” Rites are the natural human way and a necessity in the laws of nature…. Although ancient times are different from the present, China and the external tribes are different, and the rites cultivate good and eliminate evil. Their principles are the same.”

“The Anti-Christ” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)

This short treatise is Nietzsche basically ripping everything about Christianity. He begins, “Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations…. I call an animal, a species, an individual depraved when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers what is harmful to it…. Where the will to power is lacking there is decline.” He continues by ripping into Kantian morality, “Each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes if it mistakes its own duty for the concept of duty in general…. What destroys more quickly than to work, to think, to feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice, without joy? as an automaton of ‘duty’? It is virtually a recipe for decadence, even for idiocy.”

Nietzsche contrasts Christianity with Buddhist philosophy, “Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity—it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems in its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept ‘God’ is already abolished by the time it arrives. Buddhism is the only really positivistic religion history has to show us, even in its epistemology (a strict phenomenalism—), it no longer speaks of ‘the struggle against sin’ but, quite in accordance with actuality, ‘the struggle against suffering’. It already has—and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity—the self-deception of moral concepts behind it—it stands, in my language, beyond good and evil…. Prayer is excluded, as is asceticism, no categorical imperative, no compulsion at all…. He demands no struggle against those who think differently; his teaching resists nothing more than it resists the feeling of revengefulness…. In the teaching of the Buddha egoism becomes a duty…. The precondition for Buddhism is a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and that it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home. The supreme goal is cheerfulness, stillness, absence of desire, and this goal is achieved…. In Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come to the foreground: it is the lowest classes which seek their salvation in it. Here the caustic business of sin, self-criticism, conscience-inquisition, is practiced as a power…. Here the highest things are considered unachievable, gifts, ‘grace’…. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind is Christian; hatred of the senses, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian.”

Science is also opposed to Christianity by Nietzsche, “A religion like Christianity, which is at no point in contact with actuality, which crumbles away as soon as actuality comes into its own at any point whatever, must naturally be a mortal enemy of the ‘wisdom of the world’, that is to say of science…. ‘Faith’ as an imperative is a veto against science.” Nietzsche continues by invoking Genesis, “God had created himself a rival, science makes equal to God—it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden in itself—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sins, original sin…. Happiness, leisure gives room for thought—all thoughts are bad thoughts…. Man shall not think…. The beginning of the Bible contains the entire philosophy of the priest.—The priest knows only one great danger: that is science—the sound conception of cause and effect. But science flourishes in general only under happy circumstances—one must have a superfluity of time and intellect in order to ‘know’…. ‘Consequently man must be made unhappy’—this has at all times been the logic of the priest.—One will have already guessed what only came into the world therewith, in accordance with this logic—‘sin’…. The concept of guilt and punishment, the entire ‘moral world-order’, was invented in opposition to science—in opposition to the detaching man from the priest…. The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of ‘grace’, of ‘redemption’, of ‘forgiveness’—lies through and through and without any psychological reality—were invented to destroy the causal sense of man: they are an outrage on the concept cause and effect!”

To that end, Nietzsche extols the virtues of skepticism, “Great intellects are sceptics. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The vigour of a mind, its freedom through strength and superior strength, is proved by scepticism…. A spirit which wants to do great things, which also wills the means for it, is necessarily a sceptic. Freedom from convictions of any kind, the capacity for an unconstrained view, pertains to strength…. The man of faith, the ‘believer’ of every sort is necessarily a dependent man—such as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he has to be used, he needs someone who will use him.”

Finally, Nietzsche pontificates on the natural class divisions amongst men, “The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in attempting; their joy lies in self-constraint: with them asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct. They consider the hard task a privilege, to play with vices which overwhelm others recreation…. Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most venerable kind of human being: this does not exclude their being the most cheerful, the most amiable. They rule not because they want to but because they are.”

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

Alter begins his introduction with an intriguing opinion, along with some history, “Daniel is surely the most peculiar book in the Hebrew Bible. It is also clearly the latest…. It is almost certain that the second half of Daniel was written between 167 and 165 B.C.E. because it refers in detail to the persecutions initiated by Antiochus IV Epiphanes and his suppression of the Temple cult.” Alter continues, “Daniel seems less an interpreter of than a decipherer of divine codes…. It is no wonder that both Christians and Jews used the Book of Daniel as their point of departure for intricate calculations about the end of days…. The other unusual feature of the book is that it is written in two languages. The opening is in Hebrew—the first chapter and the four initial verses of chapter 2. At this point, the text switches to Aramaic, the language in which it continues uninterrupted until the end of chapter 7. The rest of the book is in Hebrew…. In style, its Hebrew sections are seriously flawed. Its narrative is primarily a vehicle for laying out tales of miraculous aid that demonstrate God’s power…. In strictly literary terms, it is a book that falls far below what earlier biblical texts, both narrative and Prophetic, would lead us to expect. And yet Daniel is also a book fraught with religious importance for its age and beyond.”

In Daniel 3:25, Alter points out the unique description of a miracle, “I see four men walking unbound within the fire. Although there are from time to time miraculous events in earlier biblical narrative, this late text drastically steps up the supernatural nature of the miracle…. Human figures living in the here-and-now walk about in the intense flames, accompanied by a divine being.” In Daniel 5:24, Alter points to an instance of indirect action from God, which was becoming the norm for later biblical writing, “Then before Him was sent the palm of a hand. This formulation of indirect agency with the passive mode of the verb reflects a growing tendency in the Late Biblical period to avoid attributing anthropomorphic acts directly to God: it is God’s initiative, but the disembodied hand is somehow “sent” from before the divine presence.”

There are more instances of unique writing in the Book of Daniel. In Daniel 8:16, Alter relates, “Gabriel. It is only in this late period that angels are given names.” In Daniel 12:1, Alter notes, “all who are found in the book. The strong scholarly consensus is that this is the book of life. There are some brief hints in earlier biblical literature of such a book kept on high, but here it is made dramatically explicit.” Finally, in Daniel 12:2, Alter explains, “And many of the sleepers in the deep dust shall awake—some for everlasting life and some for disgrace and everlasting shame. This is famously, the first and only clear reference to the resurrection of the dead in the Hebrew Bible…. Bodily resurrection after burial here is accompanied by the idea of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked.”

“Spinoza: Life and Legacy” by Johnathan I. Israel

This biography of the philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, checks in at over twelve hundred pages. It has many digressions—about the two seventeenth century Anglo-Dutch wars, disputes amongst the many Protestant sects in Holland, a history of the Sephardim in Europe, as well as potted histories of Descartes and Hobbes, amongst others. All the asides give relevant, if excessive, background into Spinoza’s milieu.

To contemporaries, Spinoza was considered a heretic and an atheist, kicked out of his own synagogue in Amsterdam for his radical beliefs. He believed that all of nature was God. “Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.” Furthermore, he did not believe in free will, but instead a completely necessary consequentialism. “All things which follow from the absolute nature of any of God’s attributes have always had to exist and be infinite…. In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way…. The will cannot be called a free cause, but only a necessary one.” Israel expands, “Spinoza is especially concerned to reject all aspects of theological thinking that envisage mankind as a privileged segment of nature…. Hence, an important general consequence of Spinoza’s identifying God with nature is the removal of all conscious intent or purpose from God’s creative power, his sweeping denial of all divine teleology.”

Spinoza broke off from writing his great philosophical treatise, “The Ethics,” because he felt the political situation in the Netherlands demanded an immediate response in the kind of his “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.” This book was a mix of biblical hermeneutics combined with anti-monarchist politics. Spinoza states, “If, finally, we remember that everybody’s loyalty to the state, like their faith in God, can only be known from their works, that is, from their charity toward their neighbor, it will not be doubted that the best state accords everyone the same liberty to philosophize as we showed that faith likewise allows.” He continues, “It is not the purpose of the state to turn people from rational beings into beasts or automata, but rather to allow their minds and bodies to develop in their own way in security and enjoy the free use of reason…. Therefore the true purpose of the state is in fact freedom…. [The] chief feature of a democratic state is that its excellence is valued much more highly in peace than in war.” Spinoza believed in a overriding social contract amongst citizens of a democratic republic. “No one can rightly obey God if they do not adapt pious observance to the public interest to which everyone is bound, and do not, as a consequence, obey all the decrees of the sovereign power.”

Spinoza believed scripture, whether Christian or Jewish, properly understood, is universal in its teachings. “What is most universally declared in Scripture (whether by prophets, scribes, or Christ) is that God exists, is one, and omnipotent, that he alone should be venerated and cares for all, favouring above others those who venerate him and love their neighbour as themselves, etc.” Spinoza sought to debunk the relevance of all occurrences of miracles in the Bible. “Miracles and ignorance I equate because those who try to erect the existence of God and religion on miracles seek to reveal something obscure by something more obscure which they are completely ignorant of.” On Jewish law, Spinoza opined, “With their state now dissolved, there is no doubt the Jews are no more bound by the Law of Moses than they were before the commencement of their community and state. For while dwelling among other peoples, before the Exodus from Egypt, they possessed no special laws, being bound only by the natural law along with the law of the state in which they were living, so far as it did not conflict with the natural divine law.” He continues by stressing that the Christian Apostles were simply teachers who were trying to convince others through philosophy, “The Apostles always employ arguments, so that they seem to be engaged in a debate rather than prophesying.” On Paul of Tarsus, Spinoza declares, “The long deductions and arguments of Paul, such as in the Epistle to the Romans, were not written on the basis of supernatural revelation. Rather, the Apostles’ modes of discourse and discussion very plainly reveal that they wrote their Epistles not on the basis of divine command and revelation, but simply that of their own natural judgment…. Finally, [Paul] says no one is blessed unless he has the mind of Christ in him (Romans 8:9) whereby undoubtedly one may understand God’s laws as eternal truths.” Spinoza continues, “All Christ’s teaching consists primarily of moral doctrine…. There can be no doubt that many disputes and schisms have arisen because different Apostles constructed religion on different foundations.”

In “The Ethics,” Spinoza describes the good life, “It is the part of a wise man, I say, to restore and refresh himself with moderate and pleasant food and drink, and also pleasant smells, with the beauty of vigorous plants, with decoration, music, games that exercise the body, theatre and all else of this sort which we all can enjoy without causing harm to another…. Such a style of life accords best both with our principles and the common practice…. The greater the joy we are affected with, the higher the perfection to which we ascend, that is the more we participate in the divine nature…. Nothing forbids our pleasure except a grim and sad superstition. For why is it more proper to relieve our hunger and thirst than to rid ourselves of melancholy?” Furthermore, for Spinoza, ethics is in harmony with human nature, rightly reasoned. “Virtue is nothing but acting from the laws of one’s own nature…. [Reason only requires] everyone love himself, seek his own advantage, what is really useful to him, and desire what will really lead men to greater perfection, and finally, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can…. We ought to want virtue for its own sake.”

On the foundational basis of morality, Spinoza concludes, “For whether or not the moral teachings themselves receive the form of law, or are legislation from God himself, they are nevertheless divine and salutary, and the good stemming from virtue and love of God will be just as desirable whether we receive it from God as judge, or from the necessity of the divine nature. Nor are the bad things ensuing from evil actions and passions any less fearful because they follow from them necessarily. Thus, whether we do those thing that we do necessarily or contingently, we are still led by hope and fear.” His last words on the good life were, “No life, therefore is a life worth living without understanding, and things are good only insofar as they aid men to enjoy the life of the mind, which is defined by knowledge; while, on the contrary, only those things hindering man from perfecting his reason and leading a rational life can by us be called bad.”

“The Blue Flower” by Penelope Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s novel is historical fiction based on the life and loves of the Romantic poet and philosopher, Novalis, whom Fitzgerald refers to by his Christian name, Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenberg. Fritz’s father was a member of the impecunious aristocracy, who had turned pious late in life, after a religious awakening. “While they were living at Oberweiderstadt, the Hardenbergs did not invite their neighbors, and did not accept invitations, knowing that this might lead to worldliness…. As a member of the nobility, most ways of earning money were forbidden to the Freiherr.”

In college, Fritz fell in with the so-called Jena circle, led by the Schlegels and mentored by Goethe and Schiller, “They were all intelligent, all revolutionaries, but since each of them had a different plan, none of it would come to anything. They talked continually of going to Prussia, to Berlin, but they stayed in Jena…. To the Jena circle Fritz was a kind of phenomenon, a country boy, perhaps still growing, capable in his enthusiasm of breaking things, tall and awkward.” As a poet, he professed, “Politics are the last thing that we need. This at least I learned with the Brethren at Neudietendorf. The state should be one family, bound by love.”

Fritz was apprenticing to become a salt mine inspector, one of the few occupations open to the nobility. On a business trip he fell in love with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie, on first sight, from across the sitting-room of an old manor home. “I can’t comprehend her, I can’t get the measure of her. I love something that I do not understand. She has got me, but she is not at all sure she wants me.” Fritz was much more confident about his philosophy, “I think, indeed, that women have a better grasp on the whole business of life than we men have. We are morally better than they are, but they can reach perfection, we can’t…. Furthermore, I believe that all women have what Schlegel finds lacking in so many men, a beautiful soul. But so often it is concealed.” The philosophy of Fritz borrowed much from Fichte, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, and others in his orbit, who had learned idealism from reading Kant and hearing Fichte lecture. Fritz pontificated, “The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light…. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inwards, always inwards.”

His friends knew Fritz lived life on another plane of reality. Johann Wilhelm Ritter said of him, “Hardenberg could not be judged by any ordinary standards.” Speaking to Caroline Schlegel, he continued, “For him there is no real barrier between the unseen and the seen. The whole of existence dissolves itself into a myth.” The great man himself, Goethe, tried to explain Fritz’s unusual love for the young Sophie to Fritz’s brother, Erasmus, thus, “Rest assured, it is not her understanding that we love in a young girl. We love her beauty, her innocence, her trust in us, her airs and graces, her God knows what—but we don’t love her for her understanding—nor, I am sure, does Hardenberg.”

Fritz, himself, concludes, “We think we know the laws that govern our existence. We get glimpses, perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime, of a totally different system at work behind them…. As things are, we are enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. Through estrangement itself I earn my living from day to day…. This is waking, that is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that the one cannot be measured without the other. I want to exert myself to find a different kind of measurement.”