“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” by Susanna Clarke

I was not sure I would enjoy a thousand page novel about magicians set in a slightly skewed Napoleonic England. But to call this playful historical fiction would not be a stretch. British ministers like Wellington and Canning all dip into the story, but Norrell and his pupil, Strange, take center stage throughout. By the turn of the nineteenth century, all of British magic had been lost and forgotten. People still remembered the tales of the Raven King, John Uskglass, who swept down with his fairy armies to conquer the north of England, but the practice of contemporary magic had long ceased. The fun thing about Clarke’s novel is it is interspersed with footnotes for the reader to dig deeper into the history of magic in England. For instance, in chapter 23 footnote 6, we learn, “There have been very few magicians who did not learn magic from another practitioner. The Raven King was not the first British magician. There had been others before him—notably the seventh-century half-man, half-demon, Merlin—but at the time the Raven King came into England there were none.” Active magic dipped into and out of the realm, preserved only in the realm of fairies. In another footnote we learn, “Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic come very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.” Clarke’s dedication to the backstories and fake histories of magic is what makes this novel so memorable. She really builds the edifice on which the story of the novel rests. It becomes just one story within the history of magic in England.

By the nineteenth century, there were only a handful of theoretical magicians, who only studied the history of magic, and a few more charlatans, who claimed to read futures and conjured simple love spells. Norrell was the first practicing magician of his age. A country gentleman, he had acquired every book on magic he could get his hands on from the old aristocratic libraries and made it his task, not just to study, but to do magic. Norrell also hid his books and his spells from almost everyone. That changed with Strange. The brilliantly talented, but unread, Strange became his first pupil. The relationship was always tense. “The silence which followed was peculiarly awkward. Here sat the only two English magicians of the Modern Age. One confessed he had no books; the other, as was well known, had two great libraries stuffed with them. Mere common politeness seemed to dictate that Mr Norrell make some offer of help, however slight; but Mr Norrell said nothing.” Nonetheless, Strange slowly improved his skills through trial and error and was eventually sent to the Peninsular War to help Wellington in action. ““Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”” Throughout the book, fairies play tricks, ladies return from the dead, and widows speak to cats. Eventually, there would be a falling out between the two magicians. Strange kept pushing the limits of practical magic further than Norrell was comfortable. Nonetheless, even after their parting, Strange admitted, “One can never help one’s training, you know. As a magician I shall never quite be Strange—or, at least, not Strange alone—there is too much Norrell in me.”

“Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy” by Wolfram Eilenberger (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

This is popular philosophical biography at its finest—a group portrait of four of the twentieth century’s most profound Germanic philosophers. Eilenberger weaves back and forth between the four men, comparing and contrasting their lives, their struggles, their thoughts on metaphysics, and their place in the Weimar Republic, Austria, and the world of the 1920s at large.

Eilenberger begins with Ludwig von Wittgenstein, “The Tractatus is a therapeutic contribution to the question of what one can meaningfully talk about as a human being and what one cannot.” As Wittgenstein, himself, concludes his book, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Wittgenstein was not the most easy man to deal with, either personally or philosophically. Initially, he also had a high idea of the Tractatus. In fact, after he finished writing the book, he thought that it had solved all of philosophy’s problems. Nonetheless, he realized that it would be hard to comprehend, even for great minds like Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. “This book will perhaps be understood only by those who have already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts.” He is even more explicit in the forward to the Tractatus, but also states the essential limits inherent in all philosophy. “I am therefore of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in showing how little has been done when this problem has been solved.” Trying to explain more to his publisher, Wittgenstein continues that the “meaning of the book is an ethical one: the present one, and everything that I have not written. And that second part, [the part not written,] is the important one. The ethical is delimited by my book so to speak.”

Wittgenstein clarifies what he feels is the difference between science and philosophy, as well as the limits of both. “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.” Wittgenstein remains enigmatically esoteric to the last, “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions, then he sees the world rightly.” Eilenberger explains Wittgenstein’s thoughts at the time. “The conviction that language, out of its internal logic, bears within itself at every stage and every state of culture the forces needed to heal those very misunderstandings and misinterpretations that language itself constantly provokes and creates was already the foundation of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic program in the Tractatus.”

After returning to Cambridge in 1929 and debating with Frank Ramsey and Piero Sraffa daily, Wittgenstein would largely repudiated his whole masterwork. “I used to believe that there was the everyday language in which we all speak normally and a primary language that expresses what we really know, namely phenomena…. Now I would like to explain why I no longer maintain that view. I believe that in essence we only have one language and that is ordinary language. We do not need to find a new language or construct a set of symbols, rather everyday language is already the language, provided that we can liberate it from the obscurities that lie within it. Our language is already completely in order if only we are clear about what it symbolizes. Other languages than the ordinary ones are also valuable… for example artificial symbolism is useful in the depiction of the processes of deduction…. But as soon as one sets about considering real states of affairs, one sees that this symbolism is at a disadvantage compared to our real language. Of course it is quite wrong to talk about a subject-predicate form. In reality, there is not one, but very many.”

Much of Eilenberger’s book builds up to the famous 1929 debate at Davos between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. Eilenberger builds it as a clashing of two worlds. And philosophically speaking, it was the staid and dull Neo-Kantism of Cassirer being challenged and usurped by a full frontal phenomenological attack by Heidegger, which even paid no respect to his friendly predecessors like Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s former mentor.

But first, Cassirer’s philosophy, “According to Cassirer, the human being is above all a sign-using and sign-making creature—an animal symbolicum…. We give ourselves and our world meaning, support, and orientation through the use of signs… symbolic forms in Cassirer’s terminology—those of myth, art, mathematics, or music. These symbols, be they linguistic, pictorial, acoustic, or gestural, are never self-explanatory; they need interpretation by other human beings. The process by which signs are placed into the world, interpreted, and augmented by others is the process of culture, and it the ability to use signs that enables human beings to ask metaphysical questions.” Cassirer writes, “If all culture is manifested in the creation of specific image-worlds, of specific symbolic forms, the aim of philosophy is not to go behind all these creations, but rather to understand and elucidate their basic formative principle.” Eilenberger expands, “Cassirer sees philosophy more as one innovative voice among many, and one with the function of connecting different disciplines…. One of philosophy’s essential tasks lay in identifying, beyond different disciplines, a common core that runs from one era to the next…. This culture is a continuous process of symbolically guided orientation.”

Heidegger was a protege of Husserl. Heidegger also “stresses the importance of the medium of language in human existence. He sees the actual foundation for humanity’s metaphysical essence as lying not in a distributed system of signs, however, but in a distinctly individual feeling—anxiety. More precisely, the anxiety that grips individuals when they become fully aware that their existence is essentially finite.” The human, gripped with that inescapable fact, then starts “working toward a goal that Heidegger calls authenticity.” According to Heidegger, “it is the role of philosophy to keep human beings open to the true abysses of their anxiety and thus, in an authentic sense, to liberate them.” Eilenberger explains further, “For human Dasein, in the end, there is only one fact that is truly unavoidable and at the same time always certain: the approach of death, which accompanies us as a possibility at all times…. The essential characteristic of Heideggerian “Dasein” is the fact that it is not and cannot ever be plural. “Dasein” is always only something individual, discrete, or, as he puts it, “in each case mine” (Jemeiniges).” Eilenberger stresses that Heidegger’s metaphysics was profoundly a “metaphysics of experience, the experience of Dasein, finite and aware of the fact…. What underlies our metaphysical questioning and hence metaphysics itself is not a foundation but an abyss…. Only the gaze of the abyss produces authenticity.”

Eilenberger writes of Walter Benjamin, “His worldview is profoundly symbolic: for him each person, each artwork, each object is a sign to be deciphered. And each sign exists in dynamic interrelation with every other sign. And the truth-oriented interpretation of such a sign is directed precisely at demonstrating and intellectually elaborating its integration within the great, constantly changing ensemble of signs: philosophy…. The most deviant statements, objects, and individuals, which were for that reason often ignored, contained the whole of society in microcosm…. Free human beings who thirst for knowledge must with every fiber of their being “open themselves up to remote extremes” and cannot “consider themselves successful” in their lives until they have examined, walked, or at least tried out all extremes of possibility.” Benjamin, unlike the other three philosophers, was never an academic. He was best known as a critic. But a very unique kind of critic, practicing what he saw as the only true kind of criticism. Eilenberger writes of Benjamin’s views, “The activity of criticism—if understood correctly—leaves neither the criticizing subject (the art critic) nor the criticized object (the work of art) unaffected. Both are transformed in the process—ideally toward truth…. The function of art criticism lies “not in judgment, but on the one hand [in] completion, consummation, systematization.” Second is the elevation of the art critic to the status of partial creator of the work of art. Third is the recognition that an artwork is fundamentally unstable, and changes and rejuvenates its nature and possible significance across history. Fourth, following from the thesis of the self-reference of all things, is the understanding that any criticism of a work of art can also be seen as the artwork’s criticism of itself. Critics and artists, correctly understood, thus exist on the same creative plane.” Benjamin expounds, “Thus, criticism is, as it were, an experiment on the artwork, one through which the latter’s own reflection is awakened, through which it is brought to consciousness and to knowledge of itself…. Insofar as criticism is knowledge of the work of art, it is as its self-knowledge; insofar as it judges the artwork, this occurs in the latter’s self-judgement.”

Benjamin also paid the bills through translation. Similarly to criticism, he felt, “To grasp the genuine relationship between an original and a translation requires an investigation analogous to the argumentation by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of an image theory…. No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.” Benjamin spent many years painstakingly translating Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Benjamin posited, “Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain?”

For Benjamin, to get to metaphysical truth one needs to dig deep into language and meaning. “Whereas all individual elements of foreign language—words, sentences, associations—are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. This law is one of the fundamental principles in the philosophy of language, but to understand it precisely we must draw a distinction, in the concept of “intention,” between what is meant and the way of meaning it.” Eilenberger explains, “For Benjamin this ideal language is that of the Old Testament God… what he called “pure language,” or indeed “true language,” was the language of God.”

Davos, Switzerland: March 26, 1929. The debate at last begins: Heidegger opens,”What remains of philosophy if the totality of beings has been divided between the sciences? All that remains is knowledge of science, not of entity…. Kant sought not to provide a theory of the natural sciences, but to demonstrate the problems of metaphysics, and indeed of ontology.” Cassirer rebuts, “If we consider Kant’s work overall, major problems arise. One problem is that of freedom. That has always been the actual main problem for me: How is freedom possible? Kant says the question cannot be grasped, we grasp only the ungraspability of freedom…. The categorical imperative must be constituted in such a way that the law thus established applies not only to human beings but to all rational beings…. Morality as such leads beyond the world of phenomena. That is the decisive metaphysical aspect, that the breakthrough occurs at this point…. Heidegger has stressed that our cognitive power is finite. It is relative and it is bound. But then the questions arises: How does such a finite being come by knowledge, reason, truth?… How does this finite being reach a definition of objects which are not as such bound to finitude?… Does Heidegger want to give up all of this objectivity? Does he want to withdraw entirely to this finite being. Or if not, where does he see the breakthrough into that sphere as taking place?” Heidegger responds, “Cassirer, then, wants to show that finitude becomes transcendent in the ethical writings. There is something in the categorical imperative that goes beyond finite being. But precisely the concept of the imperative as such shows the inner reference to a finite being…. This transcendence, too, still remains within creation and finitude…. Now to Cassirer’s question about universally valid external truths. If I say: Truth is relative to Dasein, that proposition… is a metaphysical one: truth can only be as truth and as truth has only one meaning, if Dasein exists. If Dasein does not exist, there is no truth, there is nothing at all. But it is only with the existence of something like Dasein that truth enters Dasein itself…. An inner transcendence lies within the essence of time; that time is not only what makes transcendence possible, but that time itself has a horizontal character; that in future, recollected behavior I always have at the same time a horizon of present, futurity, and been-ness in general; that a… definition of time is found here, within which something like permanence of the substance is constituted for the very first time.” Cassirer again, “Philosophy must allow humans to become sufficiently free, to the extent that they can just become free. While it does that, I believe, it frees human beings—in a certain radical sense, to be sure—from anxiety as a mere disposition…. Freedom can properly be found only along the path of progressive liberation, which indeed is also an infinite process for him… I would like the sense, the goal, in fact the freeing, to be taken in this sense: ‘Anxiety throws the earthly from you.’ That is the position of idealism, to which I have always pledged myself.” Heidegger concludes, “Humans exist only in very few glimpses of the summit of their own possibility, but otherwise move in the midst of their entity…. The question of the essence of human beings… makes sense and can be justified only insofar as it derives its motivation from philosophy’s central set of problems, which leads human beings back beyond themselves and into the totality of beings in order to make manifest to them there, with all their freedom, the Nothingness of their Dasein. This Nothingness is not cause for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity happens only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing human beings back, so to speak, into the harshness of their fate from the shallow aspect of human beings who use only the work of the spirit.”

Where did all these four great philosophers actually agree? Not in much, but in profound things. Eilenberger states, “A philosopher who had nothing to say about the role of language in knowledge and life in fact had actually nothing whatsoever to say. This was true for Cassirer, and if there was a conviction that Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Benjamin all embraced unreservedly and unconditionally at this stage (and every other stage) of their thought, it was this: The human form of life is one of speech. In this sense language is not one symbolic form among many, but the most important, and elemental, of all. It is the foundation of our understanding of the self and the world.” Benjamin, speaking of humanity through the ages, states, “At the height of their cultivation… [men] are subject to the forces that cultivation claims to have mastered, even if it may forever prove impotent to curb them.” Eilenberger expands, “Benjamin is thus expressing the suspicion, shared by Cassirer, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, that the modern subject’s emphasis on consciousness, precisely where it imagines itself to be entirely free and sovereign, masks only processes of repression and obscurity that, if they are not worked through, can only lead to misery, if not social destruction.” It all sounds a bit Freudian, which, of course, it is. Eilenberger reveals, “None of these thinkers ever wrote about ethics in the conventional sense, or even tried to do so.” Wittgenstein, at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club of the Heretics in November 1929, perhaps sums it up best, “My tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever wanted to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind, which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” All four of these men thought about the world a little askew from most. They were all geniuses in every sense of the word. But they were also all troubled (aside perhaps Cassirer). An anecdote that Hermine Wittgenstein told of her brother, Ludwig, perhaps, might sum them all up in some regard, “I told him during a long conversation that when I imagined him with his philosophically trained mind as a primary school teacher it felt to me as if someone were trying to use a precision instrument to open crates. Ludwig replied with an analogy that silenced me. He said, “You remind me of someone who is looking through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passerby; he doesn’t know what sort of storm is raging outside and that this person is perhaps only with great effort keeping himself on his feet.””

“The Origins of You” by Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, & Richie Poulton

This book uses case studies, natural experiments, and longitudinal data to identify and dig into a multitude of variations in human development. Its method is mainly prospective, gathering data in real time, as humans age, to be analyzed later, only using retrospective data to confirm results. It was co-written by four scientists, who primarily used the wealth of information from The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, supplemented by the British Environmental-Risk Study and The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. The scientists begin by recognizing that human development is a complex phenomenon. “There are many factors and forces to consider that interact in complex ways over time and space…. We focus on cognitive, social, emotional, behavioral, biological, and physical development, including health, from birth to midlife, while considering the influence of nature and nurture…. It is probabilistic, not deterministic science.”

One thing the authors stress is that people have agency in how they develop, but also that relationships interact back and forth. “The child’s temperament evoking responses from others… contribute[s] to maintaining and even amplifying the child’s early disposition…. The child can be said to be a “producer of his own development.”” When further discussing the development of temperament, the authors parse out the difference between reactive and proactive person-environment processes. In a reactive process, “individuals with different psychological and behavioral inclinations experience, interpret, and react to the same situation differently.” A proactive process “involves individuals selecting or creating their own experiences and thereby maintaining, perhaps even amplifying, their early dispositions.” The authors refer to this as “niche picking.” This proactive process “challenges notions of children as wet clay, shaped exclusively by experiences that others generate.” Genes also play a formative role in temperamental development, even as they interact with and help shape environmental choices. “Development is a dynamic, ongoing process whereby things occurring within the child and/or within the environment in which the child develops after childhood serves as a pathway that accounts for how childhood functioning comes to predict adult functioning.” Human development is continuous. “Because the effects of early life and most experiences growing up are not deterministic but instead are likely to exert their effects in a probabilistic manner, in part because of the role of various mediators in maintaining or deflecting established development trajectories, we should not expect a single intervention effort at any point in time to get the entire developmental job done when it comes to promoting future well-being.”

This book is filled with numerous examples of how genes and environment together shape human development. One particular finding that I found intriguing was the difference between how mothers and fathers raise their children, at least early on in life. “How mothers in our study who had three-year-olds behaved towards their children systematically related to their experiences as children in their families while growing up, but in the case of study members who were fathers, there was, somewhat surprisingly, no such evidence of intergenerational transmission.”

Another issue the authors raise is the metrics by which traditional human developmental researchers measure success. “For most psychologists, sociologists, economists, educators, policymakers, and parents, life is about health, wealth, and happiness. This leads many to conceptualize development as healthy versus unhealthy or “optimal” versus “compromised.”” This does not necessarily make sense from an evolutionary perspective. “What succeeds in passing on genes to the next generation is best, and, critically, that depends on the context or circumstances in which a living organism exists, including those in which it develops…. What will prove most successful in passing on genes to descendants when growing up under one set of conditions, such as in a well-functioning harmonious family, should not be presumed to do so under different conditions, such as when there is much family conflict and limited attention paid to children. This evolutionary-biological view of life implies that the forces of Darwinian natural selection have adapted our species to respond to its experiences growing up in a manner that would increase the chances of the developing child surviving, maturing, and reproducing…. From this perspective, what has long been regarded as evidence of “compromised” development may be actually anything but…. What many today regard as compromised, troubled, or problematic development may well have evolved as a strategic response to adversity…. Our species, like many others, evolved the capacity to vary its development depending on early-life experiences and exposures…. Because evolution typically takes a great deal of time, we retain the responsiveness built into our species over the eons even though it is no longer as reproductively beneficial as it once was…. The fast [female] developer should… produce more children, even while “investing” less in them in terms of energy, time, and economic resources.” The authors suggest this is why, empirically, they found that girls who grew up in dysfunctional homes experienced puberty, on average, one to two years sooner than more advantaged girls. “The more parents regarded and treated their four-and-a-half-year-old harshly, the earlier their daughters had their first period…. By age fifteen, girls who matured earlier had engaged in more sexual risk taking than other girls…. They were not more likely, however, to engage in other risk-taking behavior, such as drinking and drug taking.”

The authors next tackle the issue of genotype relating to phenotype. “There is a long chain of biological (and sometimes psychological and behavioral) events linking genotype with phenotype.” Environmental exposures and experiences are often necessary before a phenotype manifests. The authors refer back to niche-picking in suggesting agency is critical to human development. “Central to the niche-picking idea is an appreciation that individuals are often producers of their own development.” They use the particular example of intellectual development. “In the niche-picking case, genetics and intelligence may go together because those with certain genes find reading and learning more interesting, fun, and thus attractive than do others of a different genetic makeup. As a result, they end up more intelligent not simply because it is in their genes but rather because there is something about their genes that inclines them to do things—such as go to the library and be attentive in school—that foster intellectual development.” Again, the authors also stress the back and forth interplay with others in their environment. “How others react to a person’s behavior and how this feeds back to shape the person’s development and functioning” reinforce each other. “How genotypes can require certain contextual conditions to develop into phenotypes make[s] clear… that genes operate in an environmental context.”

The authors stress that any one individual gene plays a minimal role in almost all phenotype expression. “Because whole-genome research is identifying so many genes related to virtually all phenotypes investigated, there is ever more reason to believe that many genes exert only a very small effect on the phenotype in question, if it is actually causally influencing the phenotype [at all] (and not just correlated with it)…. Many, even most, genes are systematically related to many different phenotypes. Pleiotropy is the scientific term used to refer to this biological reality…. Given pleiotropy, even if specific genes are associated with a particular phenotype, it does not logically follow that all these genes are exclusively associated with that one phenotype.”

The book backtracks somewhat to discuss single gene-environment interaction (GXE). Particularly, they look at the effect of serotonin on depression as expressed through the gene 5-HTTLPR. “Not everyone reacts the same way to the same adversity…. Serious negative life events are a “risk factor” for depression…. Such risks are typically realized when other risk conditions co-occur…. Because of differences in their genetic makeup some people succumb to adversity whereas others do not.” This is called the diathesis-stress (or dual risk) model of psychopathology. “Instead of thinking about genes for this or that illness or psychopathology, we thought about genes for susceptibility to potential environmental influences…. Some individuals are more susceptible than others to both positive and negative environmental exposures and developmental experiences. Thus, imagine a science that sought to identify not just genes that supposedly “code” for some illness or malady but also genes that shape the way we respond to environmental insults—such as toxins or life stressors—and/or supports, such as high-quality schooling or positive life events.”

Finally, the authors sought to establish links between childhood socio-economic class origins and adult health. “Results revealed that three of four measurements of physical health—body-mass index, waist-hip ratio, and cardiorespiratory fitness, but not systolic blood pressure—showed a graded, dose-response relation with a child’s social-class origin…. The same proved true of dental health, indexed by amount of plaque on teeth, bleeding of gums, periodontal disease, and decayed tooth surfaces…. The fact that all these detected effects of childhood economic disadvantage on physical and dental health remained even when study members’ own occupational status at age twenty-six was controlled meant that the findings could not be the result of their social-class “destination.”” However, the authors caution that there could be confounding variables involved and, again, not to assume causation. “Even though adversity in childhood predicted poorer objective health in midlife, the possibility remains that other factors—third variables—might have influenced both the predictor and outcomes.”

The scientists also focused their analysis on the pace of aging versus chronological age. “Cells “turn over,” with existing ones eventually dying and being replaced by new ones through a process of cell division and thereby replication. Every time this occurs, that cap on the end of the chromosome—the telomere—shortens…. A cell line exists for only so long, and after enough cell divisions have occurred, the telomere no longer caps the end of the chromosome and cell death occurs…. [Therefore] the shorter the telomere, the older the cell and thus the older the individual…. It also turns out that they are shorter in adults suffering from age-related diseases than in their healthy counterparts of the same chronological age…. Children whose childhoods are characterized by adversity have shorter telomeres than those of other children of the same chronological age…. [Even] newborns whose mothers have experienced more stress during pregnancy have shorter telomeres than other newborns…. [Furthermore,] our study was the first to shed light on how adversity affects the development of telomeres…. Exposure to adversity in the form of psychological and physical violence predicts the actual shortening or erosion of telomeres over time…. Cells were aging, biologically speaking, faster than their agemates’ cells.” The authors conclude by cautioning, however, that, in general, although “individual differences in children within the first decade of life can forecast how they will function decades later, the power to predict later development from childhood measurements is often, though not always, limited…. The predictive power of any one force or factor will be limited most of the time.”

“Answer to Job” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

In this short book, Jung brings his close reading of Biblical texts to an esoteric interpretation of the story of Job. He begins by putting himself in Job’s head. “[Job] has to admit that no one except Yahweh himself is doing him injustice and violence…. This is perhaps the greatest thing about Job, that, faced with this difficulty, he does not doubt the unity of God…. As certain as he is of the evil in Yahweh, he is equally certain of the good…. [Yahweh] is both a persecutor and a helper in one, and the one aspect is as real as the other. Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy—a totality of inner opposites—and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence.” This dualism in no way contradicts monotheism, the opposites are contained within one god. “The Book of Job places this pious and faithful man, so heavily afflicted by the Lord, on a brightly lit stage where he presents his case to the eyes and ears of the world. It is amazing to see how easily Yahweh, quite without reason, had let himself be influenced by one of his sons, by a doubting thought, and made unsure of Job’s faithfulness.” Jung makes the case that Yahweh wantonly chooses not to consult his own omniscience and, instead, is swayed by his son, Satan. “His faithful servant Job is now exposed to a rigorous moral test, quite gratuitously and to no purpose, although Yahweh is convinced of Job’s faithfulness and constancy, and could moreover have assured himself beyond all doubt on this point had he taken counsel with his own omniscience.”

Jung goes into more detail about the nature of God. “It is behaviour of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is a phenomenon and, as Job says, “not a man.”” In a footnote, Jung expands, “The naive assumption that the creator of the world is a conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible dislocations of logic…. Divine unconsciousness and lack of reflection, on the other hand, enable us to form a conception of God which puts his actions beyond moral judgment and allows conflict to arise between goodness and beastliness.” This god-beyond-morality is how Jung allows evil and suffering into our world.

Job is singled out as the scapegoat. As with the Girardian scapegoat mechanism, here the scapegoat is the most innocent among men. He is the victim and the one who is wronged. “One cannot doubt Yahweh’s connivance. His readiness to deliver Job into Satan’s murderous hands proves that he doubts Job precisely because he projects his own tendency to unfaithfulness upon a scapegoat…. This vaguely suspected unfaithfulness causes him, with the help of Satan, to seek out the unfaithful one, and he infallibly picks on the most faithful of the lot, who is forthwith subjected to a grueling test. Yahweh has become unsure of his own faithfulness…. Self-reflection becomes an imperative necessity, and for this Wisdom is needed. Yahweh has to remember his absolute knowledge; for, if Job gains knowledge of God, then God must also learn to know himself…. The failure of the attempt to corrupt Job has changed Yahweh’s nature.”

Man was first corrupted when he chose knowledge over faith in the Garden. Wisdom has become a corrective for Yahweh’s wrath. “Fear of God is regarded by man in general as the principle and even as the beginning of all wisdom.” Jung posits that after Job, Yahweh has changed. He wants to feel human. “There is no evidence that Christ ever wondered about himself, or that he ever confronted himself. To this rule there is only one significant exception—the despairing cry from the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Here his human nature attains divinity; at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer…. Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.”

Jung makes much of opposites in his discussion of Saint John’s Revelation and the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, he also brings the unconscious to the fore. “But in the unconscious is everything that has been rejected by consciousness, and the more Christian one’s consciousness is, the more heathenishly does the unconscious behave.” John tries to see only a loving God, but must resign himself to his terrible nature, as well. “Just because John loved God and did his best to love his fellows also, this “gnosis,” this knowledge of God, struck him. Like Job, he saw the fierce and terrible side of Yahweh. For this reason he felt his gospel of love to be one-sided, and he supplemented it with the gospel of fear: God can be loved but must be feared.” God is the totality of consciousness and the unconscious. “God acts out of the unconscious of man and forces him to harmonize and unite the opposing influences to which his mind is exposed from the unconscious. The unconscious wants both: to divide and to unite…. The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite…. The God-concept, as the idea of all-embracing totality also includes the unconscious, and hence, in contrast to consciousness, it includes the objective psyche, which so often frustrates the will and intentions of the conscious mind. Prayer, for instance, reinforces the potential of the unconscious.” The human quest for enlightenment is bound to fail, because it can never be the complete totality of experience. “Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowledge boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”

“Antkind” by Charlie Kaufman

It would not be hyperbole to say that I have never read a novel quite like this. It is Kaufmanesque in the very best sense. It is hilarious and intellectual and uncomfortable and very very weird. The pace is surprisingly plodding, because each scene is so disjointedly odd. The words need time to be savored. The novel is disorienting. Somehow, just like in Kaufman’s screenplays, the novel just works as a whole though. Did I mention it is over seven hundred pages long? The plot plays with the nature of time, of self, of memory, of consciousness, and of art.

The anti-hero of the novel is R. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a vehemently non-Jewish film critic living in New York City.  He is opinionated, well read, and woke. “What I do, what I give to the world, is that I watch. I observe. I perceive. I take it inside me. In this way, I represent the Universal Feminine. I am not ashamed to be a feminine man. I take creative work inside me like semen. I allow it to impregnate my egg-like mind, to gestate. And what is born is the intercoiling of these two consciousnesses. Without sperm, there is no impregnation, but without the egg, the sperm is useless, hardened into an old sock. I am receptive to true art, to true creativity.”

Traveling down to St. Augustine, Florida on assignment, Rosenberg bumps into his neighbor in a ratty apartment complex. An elderly man of mystery, Ingo, who has created a claymation movie over the course of ninety some years, offers to show Rosenberg his masterpiece, “The film runs for three months including predetermined bathroom, food, and sleep breaks. My idea is the restlessness of the movie will cause it to enter your psyche and thus infect your dream life. It is a filmic experiment of sorts that posits an equal relationship between artist and viewer, in that the viewer will not, after viewing it in its entirety, be certain where the film has left off and his own dreams have taken over. Or hers.” Ingo dies during the course of the screening, extracting a promise from Rosenberg, before they began, that he will never show the film to another living soul.

Ingo has also made a whole world of clay puppets who never make it into his actual three-month-long film, but who, nonetheless, exist, off camera, residing in his film world. Rosenberg extols, “That all these puppets are so delicately and tenderly animated in their pain and that they were meant never to be seen—as most of us are meant never to be—brings an overwhelming pathos to the imagery.” He recounts the words of Ingo, ““Most of us are invisible,” he said. “We live our lives unrecorded. When we die, it’s soon as if we never lived. But we are not without consequence, because, of course, the world does not function without us…. The existence of us, the unseen people, must be acknowledged, but the dilemma is that once acknowledged, we are no longer truly those same unseen people…. Once the Unseen are seen, they are no longer Unseen. These [movie director] men have perpetuated a fiction. I have struggled with this issue, and my solution is to build and animate the world outside the view of my camera. These characters exist and are as carefully animated as those seen in the film. They are just forever out of view.”” Ingo poignantly echoes the end of Eliot’s “Middlemarch”.

One of Kaufman’s reoccurring gags is to have Rosenberg rip on Kaufman. He rips on his movies, his writing, and his comedy. “Who I do not honor are the comedians who condescend, the Charlie Kaufmans, the Pee-wee Hermans, the Robert Downey Seniors (Junior is a genius). These three men (and I use that term in the most derisively contemporary way) have sextuple-handedly corrupted the noble tradition of gentle humor that stretches back time immemorial, by inserting their toxic masculinity, their white cis privilege, their faux concern for the little man, their misogyny, into what was once a pure and delightful form that stretches back time immemorial. Why can’t they see women as a people rather than mysteries and saviors and manic pixie dream whatevers? Maybe they could start by having women as friends. Or maybe they need to get laid.”

Rosenberg’s bildungsroman ends as mysteriously as it began. A memory, perhaps false, of Ingo waxes philosophical, parroting Heraclitus, “Everything is different, always. That’s what I’ve concluded on this journey of mine. The trees along the road may look the same, but they’re not. They change. You can’t see again what you saw yesterday. It’s no longer here and neither are you. We are all of us the victims of the illusion of constancy. I may seem like a continuation of who I was a second ago, but that is only a trick, like a motion picture trick. And we humans do love to be tricked…. Look, you saw then what you could see then. After, you remembered what you could remember. Now you see what you can see now. This is what I call the human condition.”

“Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger (translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

This is highly dense stuff. Each page was a struggle for me to read. And not just because the book was written by a Nazi. Nonetheless, there were more than a few valuable nuggets sprinkled throughout which rewarded careful parsing. More importantly, the overall framework gave a new sense of seeing the subjective Self as embedded within a world in which it is forced to live. The most important concept for Heidegger is Dasein. “There is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly. It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being…. Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.” Further along in his introduction he continues, “Dasein is in such a way as to be something which understands something like Being…. It does so with time as its standpoint. Time must be brought to light—and genuinely conceived—as the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it…. The fact remains that time, in the sense of ‘being [sein] in time’, functions as a criterion for distinguishing realms of Being.”

Heidegger next defines what he means by phenomenology. Hegel is always implicit in this analytical dive, eventually coming to the fore in Heidegger ’s final pages. “Thus the term ‘phenomenology’ expresses a maxim which can be formulated as ‘To the things themselves!’ It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; it is opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as ‘problems’, often for generations at a time.” Next, Heidegger defines philosophy, “Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. These terms characterize philosophy itself with regard to its objects and its way of treating that object. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein.”

Moving forward, we have to define the ‘world’ (or not), as according to Heidegger. “Neither the ontical depiction of entities within-the-world nor the ontological Interpretation of their Being is such as to reach the phenomenon of the ‘world.’ In both of these ways of access to ‘Objective Being’, the ‘world’ has already been ‘presupposed’, and indeed in various ways.” Moving in the world we are bound to encounter others. “The Others, moreover, are not definite Others. On the contrary, any Other can represent them. What is decisive is just that inconspicuous domination by others which has already been taken over unawares from Dasein as Being-with. One belongs to the Others oneself and enhances their power. ‘The Others’ whom one thus designates in order to cover up the fact of one’s belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most part ‘are there’ in everyday Being-with-one-another. The ‘who’ is not this one, not that one, not oneself [man selbst], not some people [einige], and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the “they” [das Man]…. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more…. Being-with-one-another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the “they”…. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the “leveling down” [Einebnung] of all possibilities of Being.”

Heidegger moves back to the purpose of authentic Being and care. “Cognition [for the ancient Greeks] was conceived in terms of the ‘desire to see’…. The care for seeing is essential to man’s Being…. Being is that which shows itself in the pure perception which belongs to beholding, and only by such seeing does Being get discovered. Primordial and genuine truth lies in pure beholding.” However, inauthentic Being happens to the fallen Dasein. “Dasein has… fallen away [abgefallen] from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the ‘world’. “Fallenness” into the ‘world’ means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity…. “Inauthenticity” does not mean anything like Being-no-longer-in-the-world, but amounts rather to a quite distinctive kind of Being-in-the-world—the kind which is completely fascinated by the ‘world’ and by the Dasein-with of Others in the “they”…. In falling, Dasein itself as factical Being-in-the-world, is something from which it has already fallen away. And it has not fallen into some entity which it comes upon for the first time in the course of its Being, or even one which it has not come upon at all; it has fallen in the world, which itself belongs to its Being. Falling is a definite existential characteristic of Dasein itself…. Falling Being-in-the-world is not only tempting and tranquilizing; it is at the same time alienating…. This alienation drives it into a kind of Being which borders on the most exaggerated ‘self-dissection’, tempting itself with possibilities of explanation…. This alienation closes off from Dasein its authenticity and possibility…. Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness…. This downward plunge into and within the groundlessness of the inauthentic Being of the “they”, has a kind of motion which constantly tears the understanding away from the projecting of authentic possibilities.”

Heidegger next gets into Dasein and its possibilities. “In every case Dasein exists for the sake of itself. ‘As long as it is’, right to its end, it comports itself towards its potentiality-for-Being…. The ‘ahead-of-itself’, as an item in the structure of care, tells us unambiguously that in Dasein there is always something still outstanding, which, as a potentiality-for-Being for Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’. It is essential to the basic constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled [eine standige Unabgeschlossenheit].” These possibilities lead inextricably towards death. “Death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost possibility—non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped. Death is, as Dasein’s end, in the Being of this entity towards its end…. When we say that Dasein is factically dying, we are saying at the same time that in its Being-towards-death Dasein has always decided itself in one way or another. Our everyday falling evasion in the face of death is an inauthentic Being-towards-death. But inauthenticity is based on the possibility of authenticity. Inauthenticity characterizes a kind of Being into which Dasein can divert itself and has for the most part always diverted itself; but Dasein does not necessarily and constantly have to divert itself into this kind of Being…. Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualized’, nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be. It is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, of every way of existing…. Anticipation turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being—that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence…. Here it can become manifest to Dasein that in this distinctive possibility of its own self, it has been wrenched away from the “they”. This means that in anticipation any Dasein can have wrenched itself away from the “they” already…. All Being-alongside the things with which we concern ourselves, and all Being-with Others, will fail us when our ownmost potentiality-for-Being is the issue. Dasein can be authentically itself only if it makes this possible for itself of its own accord…. Dasein is authentically itself only to the extent that, as concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self…. When, by anticipation, one becomes free for one’s own death, one is liberated from one’s lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped.”

Heidegger moves on to conscience and the call that we all must deal with as Dasein moves through the possibilities towards death. “Conscience gives us ‘something’ to understand; it discloses. By characterizing this phenomenon formally in this way, we find ourselves enjoined to take it back into the disclosedness of Dasein. This disclosedness, as a basic state of that entity which we ourselves are, is constituted by state-of-mind, understanding, falling, and discourse…. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self…. The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent. And it does this only because, in calling the one to whom the appeal is made, it does not call him into the public idle talk of the “they”, but calls him back from this into the reticence of his existent potentiality-for-Being…. The call of conscience, existentially understood, makes known for the first time what we have hitherto merely contended: that uncanniness pursues Dasein and is a threat to the lostness in which it has forgotten itself.”

Heidegger looks at resoluteness and guilt as integral parts of authentic Dasein. “We have characterized resoluteness as a way of reticently projecting oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, and exacting anxiety of oneself. Being-guilty belongs to Dasein’s Being, and signifies the null Being-the-basis of a nullity. The ‘Guilty!’ which belongs to the Being of Dasein is something that can be neither augmented nor diminished…. The existential way of taking over this ‘guilt’ in resoluteness, in its disclosure of Dasein, has become so transparent that Being-guilty is understood as something constant…. By “resoluteness” we mean “letting oneself be called forth to one’s ownmost Being-guilty”…. Being-guilty is not just an abiding property of something constantly present-at-hand, but the existential possibility of being authentically or inauthentically guilty.”

Here Heidegger returns to the nature of Being and care. “The entity which in every case we ourselves are, is ontologically that which is farthest. The reason for this lies in care itself. Our Being alongside the things with which we concern ourselves most closely in the ‘world’—a Being which is falling—guides the everyday way in which Dasein is interpreted, and covers up ontically Dasein’s authentic Being, so that the ontology which is directed towards this entity is denied an appropriate basis…. The laying-bare of Dasein’s primordial Being must rather be wrested from Dasein by following the opposite course from that taken by the falling ontico-ontological tendency of interpretation…. Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing violence [Gewaltsamkeit], whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquilized obviousness.”

Heidegger concludes with some words on the nature of science. “The existential conception understands science as a way of existence and thus a mode of Being-in-the-world, which discovers or discloses either entities or Being…. The meaning of Being and the ‘connection’ between Being and truth have been clarified in terms of the temporality of existence…. The explicit suggestion that scientific behaviour as a way of Being-in-the-world, is not just a ‘purely intellectual activity’, may seem petty and superfluous. If only it were not plain from this triviality that it is by no means patent where the ontological boundary between ‘theoretical’ and ‘atheoretical’ behaviour really runs!” He continues, “When the basic concepts of that understanding of Being by which we are guided have been worked out, the clues of its methods, the structure of its way of conceiving things, the possibility of truth and certainty which belongs to it, the ways in which things get grounded or proved, the mode in which it is binding for us, and the way it is communicated—all these will be Determined. The totality of these items constitutes the full existential conception of science…. Science has its source in authentic existence.”

Heidegger circles back on some themes, but now with the emphasis on temporality and historicality. He begins, “All our efforts in the existential analytic serve the aim of finding a possibility of answering the question of the meaning of Being in general…. Our analysis of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole has revealed that in care is rooted an equiprimordial connectedness of death, guilt, and conscience…. But death is only the ‘end’ of Dasein; and, taken formally, it is just one of the ends by which Dasein’s totality is closed round. The other ‘end’, however, is the ‘beginning’, the ‘birth’. Only that entity which is ‘between’ birth and death presents the whole which we have been seeking…. Dasein has been our theme only in the way in which it exists ‘facing forward’, as it were, leaving ‘behind it’ all that has been…. The ‘connectedness of life’, in which Dasein somehow maintains itself constantly, is precisely what we have overlooked in our analysis of Being-a-whole.” It is birth that we must circle back to in completing the analysis of the whole of Dasein. “Understood existentially, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand; and death is just as far from having the kind of Being of something still outstanding, not yet present-at-hand but coming along. Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of Being-towards-death. As long as Dasein factically exists, both the ‘ends’ and their ‘between’ are, and they are in the only way which is possible on the basis of Dasein’s Being as care…. As care, Dasein is the ‘between’.”

Finally, we come explicitly to the nature of Dasein and Time. “When Dasein talks of time’s passing away, it understands, in the end, more of time than it wants to admit; that is to say, the temporality in which world-time temporalizes itself has not been completely closed off, no matter how much it may get covered up…. The awaiting of inauthentic existence—the awaiting which forgets as it makes present—is the condition for the possibility of the ordinary experience of time’s passing-away…. In the kind of talk which emphasizes time’s passing away, the finite futurity of Dasein’s temporality is publicly reflected…. In the ordinary interpretation, the stream of time is defined as an irreversible succession. Why cannot time be reversed? Especially if one looks exclusively at the stream of “nows”…. The ordinary way of characterizing time as an endless, irreversible sequence of “nows” which passes away, arises from the temporality of falling Dasein.”

“Milkman” by Anna Burns

This novel is set in northern Ireland during the Troubles. The presence of violence is ever-lurking in the air. It is narrated by an eighteen year-old girl, living in renouncer-controlled territory, who is a bit of an outsider in her tight-knit community. While in the past her eccentric behavior had kept her out of neighborhood scrutiny, her world comes crashing down when she gains the wrong man’s attention. “Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century. I suppose now, looking back, this milkman knew all of that as well.”

The unnamed mob plays as much of a role in the novel as any character. The neighborhood always had eyes on everyone. Everyone had to be careful what they revealed in public. Preference falsification was the communal norm. “Everybody read minds—had to, otherwise things got complicated. Just as most people here chose not to say what they meant in order to protect themselves, they could also, at certain moments when they knew their mind was being read, learn to present their topmost mental level to those who were reading it whilst in the undergrowth of their consciousness, inform themselves privately of what their true thinking was about.”

Life in the neighborhood was consumed by the violence. And the violence was caused by the occupation and the border. “You couldn’t just die here, couldn’t have an ordinary death here, not anymore, not of natural causes, not by accident such as falling out a window, especially not after all the other violent deaths taking place in this district now. It had to be political, he said. Had to be about the border, meaning comprehensible.” The community had its own language, its own norms, and its own justice. “‘Mark our words,’ said people, and again this all made sense within the context of out intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district.” The narrator is as much trapped by the encroachment of the judgmental mob, as by her actual pursuer. “I was being sick because of Milkman stalking me, Milkman tracking me, Milkman knowing everything about me, biding his time, closing in on me, and because of the perniciousness of the secrecy, gawking and gossip that existed in this place.” In a place where gossip often got spun into truth, one would often have to lie to the entire world for fear of just who was listening in. “In a district that thrived on suspicion, supposition and imprecision, where everything was so back-to-front it was impossible to tell a story properly, or not tell it but just remain quiet, nothing could get said here or not said but it was turned into gospel.”

“Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Power” by Cheryl Misak

Ramsey was more than a polymath, he excelled in every field that he pursued. In fact, he made groundbreaking advancements in pure math, mathematical logic, foundations of math, probability theory, decision theory, philosophy, and economics. He also contributed to applied math, ethics, and psychology. Misak’s biography details his academic contributions, his personal relationships with Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Sraffa, and other Cambridge luminaries, as well as his open marriage to Lettice and his eccentric friendships with the rest of the Bloomsbury set.

Ramsey was universally respected by his academic peers. G.E. Moore recalls teaching him as an undergrad at Trinity College, “In the early twenties, F.P. Ramsey attended at least one course of my lectures. I had soon come to feel of him, as of Wittgenstein, that he was very much cleverer than I was, and consequently I felt distinctly nervous in lecturing before him: I was afraid that he would see some gross absurdity in things which I said, of which I was quite unconscious.” This from the man who Bertrand Russell considered the greatest philosopher at Cambridge. Ramsey’s classmate (and later a colleague as a Fellow at King’s College) R.B. Braithwaite remembered, “By his second year he was accepted as the arbiter of good reasoning on every abstract subject: for eight years, if an abstruse point arose in philosophy, psychology, logic, economics, the question was ‘What does Frank Ramsey think of it?’ At conferences of philosophers, at the High Table or at undergraduate parties, his opinion on the value or relevance of an argument carried a peculiar and decisive authority.”

Ramsey began his professional career as a Fellow at King’s College by taking on Russell, the recognized preeminent mind in formal logic at Cambridge. “Ramsey found ‘important defects’ in Principia. Most important was the ‘failure’ of Russell’s Theory of Types to overcome the difficulties generated by the paradoxes…. Ramsey began ‘The Foundation of Mathematics’, by agreeing with the logicians that mathematics is a part of logic…. Against the formalist view of Hilbert, he said that mathematics does not consist of ‘meaningless formulae to be manipulated according to certain arbitrary rules’…. Against the intuitionists Brouwer and Weyl, he asserted that in restricting themselves to what can in principle be constructed by human mathematicians, they give up ‘many of the most fruitful methods of modern analysis, for no reason, as it seems to me, except that the methods fail to conform to their private prejudices’…. He thought the first part of Russell’s Theory of Types was fine. It asserted that to apply a predicate to the wrong type of subject does not produce a falsehood—rather, it produces something that is literally nonsense.” However, Ramsey found an error in “the introduction of the axiom of reducibility, which asserts that for any predicate of a higher order there is a predicate of a lower order which applies to the same set of subjects. But, as Ramsey noted (following something Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus), this is a genuine proposition, set out in words, ‘whose truth or falsity is a matter of brute fact, not of logic’. This so-called axiom ‘is certainly not self-evident, and there is no reason whatever to suppose it true’…. Russell had introduced an axiom that was not a tautology, in order to save the theory from contradiction. But in doing so, he had abandoned the project of building a self-evidently true theory…. Paradoxes belonging to the second category ‘contain some reference to thought, language, or symbolism’, hence are ‘due not to faulty logic or mathematics, but to faulty ideas concerning thought and language’…. For contradictions of a purely mathematical nature, such as paradoxes that arise by considering classes that are members of themselves, Ramsey held that Russell’s Theory of Types would suffice. But Russell’s theory doesn’t work for the second category of paradoxes, which involve ‘meaning’ or ‘ambiguities of language’.” In an important move, “Ramsey argued that mathematical truths, like logical truths, are tautologies in Wittgenstein’s sense.”

Ramsey would next defend his philosophic worldview that included personal feelings and ethics as in some ways objective. Again, his jumping off point would be Russell, while also taking on Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well. “Ramsey returned, as promised, to Russell’s ‘What I believe’. He says that if he were to write such a Weltanschauung (a world-view) he would call it ‘What I Feel’…. Wittgenstein’s position in the Tractatus was that the world of the happy person is simply a different world to that of the sad person, with no discussion possible as to the merits of either world.” Ramsey argued, “Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does…. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.” This argument of Ramsey’s relied on his position on beliefs. Misak notes, “This view of the objectivity of questions about the meaning of life, and ethical questions more generally, is perfectly in line with Ramsey’s view on beliefs arrived at by inductive inference…. His point in ‘On There Being No Discussible Subject’ is that our fundamental attitudes toward life can be debated, justified, and criticized according to whether they promote or hinder human flourishing.”

Ramsey’s next seminal paper, ‘Universals’, was on the nature of particulars and universals. “Ramsey sets out and expands upon a position he discerned in Wittgenstein’s work: that we cannot solve the question of universals and particulars by doing a priori metaphysics…. Wittgenstein was confused and conflicted on the issue of the structure of logical form. Was it subject-predicate in nature? Did it have to bottom out in particular, actually existing things?” Ramsey contended, “The whole theory of particulars and universals is due to mistaking for a fundamental characteristic of reality what is merely a characteristic of language.” Misak expands, “Our language uses subject-predicate constructions, but we mustn’t be misled by that accidental fact into thinking that the entities in the world must be of two distinct types: particulars and universals. We cannot read an ontology (the nature of the world) off our language…. [In Principia,] Russell grounds the distinction of universals and particulars not on an objective but on a subjective property—the mathematician’s purposes…. Philosophers might well have other purposes.” Ramsey concluded, in agreement with Wittgenstein, “The truth is that we know and can know nothing whatever about the forms of atomic propositions.”

Ramsey was a moderate utilitarian. At the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, the meeting’s minutes attest, Ramsey “maintained that degrees of belief were to be measured by reference to willingness to bet, and that the laws of probability were laws of consistency in partial belief, and so a generalization of formal logic. Mr. Ramsey also asserted that induction, like memory, could not be justified by formal logic or formal probability.” Ramsey thought that he had solved a major problem for utilitarians with his “general psychological theory” when he stated, “We act in the way we think most likely to realize the objects of our desire, so that a person’s actions are completely determined by his desires and opinions…. We seek things which we want, which may be our own or other people's pleasure, or anything else whatever, and our actions are such as we think most likely to realize these goods.” There are no such things as full beliefs and full desires, partial beliefs, based on our own probabilities, are the best we can hope to do. Colin Howson expounds on Ramsey’s subjective Bayesianism, “The novelty of Ramsey’s…. approach lay in regarding probabilities simply as measures of agents’ degrees of belief subject to what appears to be a rather weak consistency requirement…. [This was] a powerful new epistemology called Bayesian epistemology…. [in which] in fairly general circumstances agents with different initial, or prior, probability functions will, with enough new information, find their updated probabilities converging; in this way, it is claimed objectivity is realized as an emergent property of consistent subjective assignments.” Nils-Eric Sahlin chimes in on Ramsey’s Probability Theory, “Ramsey showed that people’s beliefs and desires can be measured with a betting method, and that given some principles of rational behaviour (e.g. that preferences are transitive) a measure of our ‘degrees of belief’ will satisfy the laws of probability. He gave us the theory of subjective probability; was the first to state the Dutch book theorem; laid the foundations of modern utility theory and decision theory; had a proof of the value of collecting evidence; took higher order probabilities seriously; and, in a derivation of ‘the rule of succession’, he introduced the notion of ‘exchangeability’. Ramsey’s theory is about as complete as any such theory can be…. Ramsey’s use of preferences among bets to quantify value differences requires the states defining the bets to be value-neutral…. Ramsey is using utilities to scale probabilities.”

Ramsey evolved into a pragmatist, who avoided reaching for claims of scientism. He stated, “The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and wooliness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category.” He became attracted to the pragmatist tradition founded by the American C.S. Peirce, which Ramsey described thusly, “We have… to consider the human mind and what is the most we can ask of it. The human mind works essentially according to general rules or habits…. We can therefore state the problem of the ideal as ‘What habits… would it be best for the human mind to have?’” He continues, “This is a kind of pragmatism: we judge mental habits by whether they work, i.e. whether the opinions they lead to are for the most part true, or more often true than those which alternative habits would lead to…. We are all convinced by inductive arguments, and our conviction is reasonable because the world is so constituted that inductive arguments lead on the whole to true opinions…. Induction is such a useful habit, and so to adopt it is reasonable. All that philosophy can do is analyse it, determine the degree of its utility, and find on what characteristics of nature it depends. An indispensable means for investigating these problems is induction itself, without which we should be helpless. In this circle lies nothing vicious.” Therefore, induction and memory become the “ultimate sources of knowledge.”

As his time at King’s wore on, Ramsey grew more disillusioned with his responsibilities teaching math. Misak recounts, “His work in pure mathematics was quite literally an aside. He had to prove a theorem on the way to solving a fragment of the Entscheidungsproblem in ‘On a Problem in Formal Logic’. So he stepped away from the core of his argument and proved it, in eight pages. Those eight pages are Ramsey Theory, and they are the sum total of his publications in pure mathematics. What an astounding ratio of pages to importance.”

Ramsey also paid minimal effort to economics, despite his vast contributions. His two most important papers were on optimal taxation, ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Taxation’ and the optimal savings rate for a society, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Savings’. Misak recounts, “Decades later in Cambridge, if economists employed an optimization model, they were said to be ‘doing a Ramsey’. In France the expression was ‘à la Ramsey’. When the Economic Journal celebrated its 125th anniversary with a special edition in 2015, both of Ramsey’s papers were included. That is, looking back over a century and a quarter, one of the world’s best journals of economics decided that two of its thirteen most important papers were written by Frank Ramsey when he was twenty-five years old…. Both initiated ‘entirely new fields’.” As usual, Ramsey was concerned with figuring out what was best out of what was possible, not pie in the sky speculations. Paul Samuelson would later comment that Ramsey provided “an analysis that still remains about the only substantive contribution to the theory of the second best (a subject better titled the ‘theory of the feasible fist best’).” Keynes’ obituary perhaps sums up Ramsey’s contributions to economics the best, “When he did descend from his accustomed stony heights, he still lived without effort in a rarer atmosphere than most economists care to breathe, and handled the technical apparatus of our science with the easy grace of one accustomed to something far more difficult.”

Upon Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge from Austria, he was Ramsey’s most frequent sparring partner, with whom he argued almost daily for the last year of his life. They again parsed the Tractatus line by line, with Ramsey slowly pulling Wittgenstein away and towards a pragmatism of sorts. (Years before, as an undergraduate, Ramsey had translated the English edition of the Tractatus and was the only man Wittgenstein felt truly understood the work—a distinction he did not bestow on either Moore or Russell.) Ramsey claimed, “Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must be clear our thoughts and so our actions, Otherwise it is mere chatter. or else it is a disposition we have to check… i.e. the chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. And again we must then take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense!” He further ribs Wittgenstein by adding, “What we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.” (Wittgenstein would, famously, unconsciously whistle whole operas while he was lost in his thoughts.) Ramsey was objecting to the solipsism of Wittgenstein who stated, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ramsey argued that we have to look at facts as also human and not abstract them away from human understanding. “We are forced to look not only at the objects we are talking about, but at our own mental states.” Furthermore, “We cannot really picture the world as disconnected selves; the selves we know are in the world. What we can’t do we can’t do and it’s no good trying. Philosophy comes from not understanding the logic of our language; but the logic of our language is not what Wittgenstein thought. The pictures we make to ourselves are not pictures of facts.” Philosophy had a subjective side that it neglected at its own peril.

At the end of his life, Ramsey was working on the fundamental nature of truth. He asserted that true beliefs were mental states with “affirmative or assertive character.” A true belief had “the felt quality… characteristic of assertion as opposed to doubt or inquiry… [and the] effects on subsequent thought and conduct.” He claimed, “A belief is true if it is a belief that p, and p.” This statement “is merely a truism, but there is no platitude so obvious that eminent philosophers have not denied it.” He continued that it was impossible to understand “truth or falsity of thoughts without considering the effects they have on our acting either directly or indirectly through dispositional beliefs.” General claims were not superfluous. “Apart from their value in simplifying our thought, they form an essential part of our mind. That we think explicitly in general terms is at the root of all praise and blame and much discussion.” Laws, rules, and general truths are needed to assess singular statements. An open generalization “expresses an inference we are at any time prepared to make, not a belief of the primary sort.” Belief can be evaluated in terms of whether it fits with experience—whether it is reliable. Beliefs “form the system with which the speaker meets the future.” Misak sums it up, “If you and I meet the future with different systems, then we disagree—we assume that the future will be compatible with one of our systems but not the other. Our beliefs are not subjective…. Knowledge… is what enables us to reliably act in the future, consolidating all our various kinds of belief. It is to be thought of in terms of good habits with which to meet the future…. We get reliability, or we increase the weight of our probabilities, by experimenting and measuring success. Probability and experimentation are at the very heart of knowledge.”

“The Eighth Life” by Nino Haratischvili (translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin)

This is a modern epic that weaves over a hundred years of Georgian history through the tale of six generations of a family. The novel unfolds as a series of eight overlapping family biographies, as told by Niza to her adolescent niece, Brilka. “Carpets are woven from stories. So we have to preserve and take care of them. Even if this one has spent years packed away somewhere for moths to feast on, it must now come to life again and tell us its stories. I’m sure we’re woven in there, too, even if we never suspected it.” The family comes from the poor Georgian nobility, who managed to maintain an aura of respectability even as the winds of fortune changed in their homeland. “And so for me, my life begins right there, in the year 1900, in that bitterly cold winter when Stasia came into the world. I was born then, too, just as you were, Brilka. My childhood didn’t start in 1974 — no, it began much earlier, it reaches much deeper. My childhood, when I thought myself free and happy, because I was so sure of Stasia’s love, is these stories. Where they begin, I begin. All these places, towns, houses, people — they are all part of my childhood. The Revolution as much as the War, the dead as much as the living. All these people, lives, places burned themselves so firmly into my brain, they were so present there, that I began to live with them. I still needed Stasia if I wanted to wander around in these times, to pass through them, dive into them. But soon, I hoped, I would be capable of telling the stories myself, telling them anew, completing them.”

The paterfamilias was a chocolatier who learned his secrets in Budapest before the Great War. “Like all members of the Georgian elite, my great-great-grandfather was afraid of the proletariat. He was happy to make charitable donations to them, but he still liked to keep them at arm’s length whenever possible.” By the time of Niza’s grandfather, Kostya, the family had become safely integrated into the Communist system that ruled their homeland from Moscow. Kostya had distinguished himself in the navy during the siege of Leningrad, before joining the dreaded Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD. Like so many other survivors of the war years, though, it was like he was walking through the rest of his life partially dead. “Kostya Jashi understood what it was to lose. He had lost. He was fatally wounded, but his death throes would last a lifetime. For this war was not a war against enemies; it was a war he had waged against the people he loved.” There is an air of melancholy and deep heartbreak that is thick throughout the entire novel. “I owe these lines to a century that cheated and deceived everyone, all those who hoped. I owe these lines to an enduring betrayal that settled over my family like a curse. I owe these lines to my sister, whom I could never forgive for flying away that night without wings; to my grandfather, whose heart my sister tore out; to my great-grandmother, who danced a pas de deux with me at the age of eighty-three; to my mother, who went off in search of God … I owe these lines to Miro, who infected me with love as if it were poison, I owe these lines to my father, whom I never really got to know; I owe these lines to a chocolate-maker and a White-Red Lieutenant; to a prison cell; to an operating table in the middle of a classroom; to a book I would not have written if…” As Niza recounts her family’s stories she must come to terms with the fact that all of her relatives had their own distinct notions of their own history. “There were countless versions of the truth, and as soon as you put them in your mouth they distorted themselves, crumbled like stale bread, leaving only an insipid taste on the tongue.”