“Private Notebooks: 1914-1916” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein (translated by Marjorie Perloff)

These notebooks were written by Wittgenstein while he was serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, fighting on the Russian front in WWI. He wrote the private parts on the left-hand pages of his notebooks, in a code, which he had used as a child with his siblings, essentially transposing As into Zs, Bs into Ys, etc… Thus it was not meant to be impenetrable, but simply to stymy nosy eyes in the tight quarters of a boat patrolling the Vistula River. As Perloff relates, “The left-hand, or “secret,” pages have never been published in English, and there is not even an authoritative text in German.” 

Wittgenstein mainly recounts the mundanities of his day to day army life, which primarily consists of manning the ship’s spotlight, reading and rereading Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, peeling potatoes, complaining about the baseness of his fellow soldiers, working on the logical puzzles that would eventually form the basis of the Tractatus, masturbating, and sleeping. But, in between, he coins witty aphorisms and thinks much about God, ethics, the purpose of life, death, and spirituality. On the crudeness of his fellow soldiers, he notes, “So it turns out not to be true that a great common cause inevitably ennobles people.” During his whole tour of duty, Wittgenstein felt himself very much alone, whether in the company of officers or his fellow enlisted infantrymen, “No choice but to carry out one’s work in all humility and for God’s sake not to lose oneself!!!! For the easiest way to lose oneself is to want to give oneself to other people…. Only one thing is necessary: to maintain one’s distance from everything that happens; to collect oneself! God help me!”

Wittgenstein ponders deeply on all things spiritual, “Over and over again I say to myself the words of Tolstoy, “Man is helpless in the flesh but free in the Spirit.”” He also contemplates his duty, “I am afraid, not of being killed but not of fulfilling my duty properly before that moment…. If this is the end for me, may I die a good death, worthy of my best self. May I never lose my self.” He is often questioning and reprimanding himself, “It is infinitely hard not to resist evil. It is difficult to serve the spirit on an empty stomach and without sleep.” Given the setting, he is appropriately fixated with issues of life and death, “One must live for the good and the beautiful until life ends of its own accord.” He also considers the inner life, “The grace I’ve been given to think & work now is indescribable. I must acquire indifference to the hardships of the external life.” He is moved often, fluctuating from extreme depression to resigned contentment, “I am all spirit & therefore I am free.” At other times, the depression gets the better of him, “Pull yourself together! And don’t work just to pass the time but devoutly so as to live!” He works on his logic in spurts, castigating himself for days of inactivity followed by bursts of output, “I am thinking a great deal about my life and that is also a reason why I cannot work. Or is it the other way around?” He often talks directly to God, “God give me sanity and strength!!!” Sometimes the darkness is almost too much, “Contemplating suicide…. Am morally blank…. My soul is worn out, so to speak…. The entire external life in all its infamy is bursting in upon me…. God is love.”

Wittgenstein returns again and again to his deep loneliness, “Be satisfied with yourself. For others will not give you support or only for a short time! (Then you will become a burden to them.)” But he continually strives to make himself a better person by his sheer will. “It is difficult to live the good life! But the good life is beautiful.” He falls back time and again to his faith, “Man needs only God…. Perhaps the proximity to death will bring me the light of life! May God enlighten me! I am a worm but through God I can become a man…. Only death gives life its meaning.”

In Notebook 2 and, particularly, in Notebook 3, Perloff starts to intersperse the right-hand side of Wittgenstein’s notebooks, his work on the Tractatus, as his ideas from both sides begin to merge. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Wittgenstein was gradually sensing that his book would contain an ethics and worldview beyond just pure logic, “The Ancients were actually clearer, in that they acknowledged a clear-cut limit, while with the new [modern] system, it is supposed to look as if everything can be explained.” God begins to seep into his formal philosophical work, “What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like an eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. That therefore good and evil are somehow connected with the world. The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God. And to that meaning we can connect the image of God as a Father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life. I cannot bend the happenings in the world to my will; I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world—and so in a certain sense master it—by renouncing any influence on events.” He later continues, “The world is independent of my will. Even if everything that we wish for were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a gift of fate.” A few months later, Wittgenstein is still circling the same theme, “To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in a God means to see that life has a meaning…. In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: the world—which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I…. Only he who lives, not in time but in the present, is happy…. Then one can say that he lives eternally who lives in the present.”

Finally, Wittgenstein contemplates the possible unification of the ethical and happy lives, “It is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment or reward…. How can a man be happy anyway since he cannot ward off the misery of this world? Precisely through the life of understanding. A good conscience is the happiness that the life of understanding preserves. The life of understanding is the life that is happy despite the misery of the world. The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the conveniences of the world. To it, the conveniences of the world are only so many gifts of fate.” Wittgenstein contemplates the nature of suicide again, but this time at some remove, “If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin.”

“In the Margins” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is a collection of lectures written by Ferrante and given by an actress in her stead. Together, they focus on the process of writing, as well as the value of reading widely and deeply. Ferrante asserts, “The way we see ourselves dragging outside, by means of the written word, an imaginary “inside,” which is by its nature fleeting deserves more attention…. Everything begins with pencil and paper. Then a surprising split takes place: the I of the writer separates from its own thought and, in the separation, sees that thought…. When I write, not even I know who I am.”

Ferrante stresses that the task of writing begins with the readings that are already inside you. “My work, in fact, is founded on patience. I start from writing that is planted firmly in tradition, and wait for something to erupt and throw the papers into disarray…. The only thing we can’t do without, in literature and any other place, is form.” She begins her second lecture by musing on the phrase, taken from Diderot, to “tell the thing as it is.” She admits, “I didn’t know how to get an exact reproduction of reality, I wasn’t able to tell the thing as it was…. It’s arduous to speak truthfully, but you do your best.” Her breakthrough was realizing, “I will therefore try to tell it as I can, and, who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and tell it as it is.” In her third lecture, she points to the fact that when her fiction finally separated from realism, it became no less truthful. “With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through fiction.”

For Ferrante, the acts of writing and reading are inseparable. “We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own…. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune…. Thus when I talk about my “I” who writes, I should immediately add that I’m talking about my “I” who has read…. Thus writing is a cage and we enter it right away, with our first line. It’s a problem that has been confronted with suffering, I would say with anguish, precisely by those who have worked with the most dedication and engagement…. No language and no writing are made by themselves. That is to say: the scribe has to study and become so skillful that it’s almost as if the word, in becoming writing, were running autonomously from inside to outside, from the heart to the page.”

“The Books of Jacob” by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft)

This is a sprawling tome, which many view as Tokarczuk’s masterpiece. It is a historical novel based on the life of the mystical Jewish prophet Jacob Frank, who was, in turn, a follower of Sabbatai Zevi. Their devotees, the true believers, were heterodox Jews, who divined a mystical interpretation of the Talmud, steeped in Kabbalah. “All this is to teach the children that the Torah’s structure is the same. The shell is the simplest meaning of the Torah, its description of what happened. Then we start to get down into its depths…. P, pshat, that’s the literal meaning, R, remez, that’s the figurative meaning, D, drash, that’s what the learned say, and S, sod, that’s the mystical meaning…. “There were once four great sages, whose names were Ben Asai, Ben Soma, Elisha ben Abuyah, and Rabbi Akiba. One after the other they say they went to paradise,” begins the old man. “Ben Asai, well, he saw it, and he died…. Well, it means that he got into the River Pishon, a name that can be translated as: lips that learn the strict sense…. Ben Soma, well, he saw it, and he lost his mind…. That means he got into the River Gishon, a name that tells us that the person is only seeing the allegorical meaning…. Elisha ben Abuyah,” he goes on, “looked and became a heretic. That means that he got into the River Hiddekel, and he got lost in the great many possible meanings…. Only Rabbi Akiba went into paradise and came back out unscathed, which means that having plunged into the River Phrath, he got the deepest meaning, the mystical one…. And those are the four paths to reading and understanding.””

As soon as the young Jacob enters the plot, the other Sabbateans almost immediately regard him as the Messiah. “Jacob scolded them, “Don’t be such a fool. If a person wants to storm a fortress, he won’t get in by talking. Words come and go. A person’s got to have an army. We, too, must act, and not just speak. Did our forefathers not chatter, not pore over written words long enough? What did all that talking do for them? What came of it? It’s better to see with your eyes than write down a bunch of words.”” Jacob’s righthand man, Nahman, though, cannot help but be a scribe, in the dark of night recording their people’s history for posterity, “Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word disappear comes from the root word elem, and the site of that disappearance is known as olam: world. Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something, and then that something was gone. That is the world. The world then, in its entirety, is lack.” Another true believer, Reb Mordke, continues, “Every place has two characters—every place is double. What is sublime is also fallen. What is clement is at the same time base. In the deepest darkness lies the spark of the most powerful light, and vice versa: where omnipresent clarity reigns, a pit of darkness lurks inside the seed of light. The Messiah is our doppelgänger, a more perfect version of ourselves—he is what we would be, had it not been for the fall.”

Some Frankist followers seem to have converted to the heterodox faith more for possible secular rewards. “Shorr thinks that it is bad to be a Jew, that Jews have it hard in life, but that being a peasant is harder. There really is no fate worse than theirs. In that respect, Jews and peasants are equals, in the sense that they share the lowest rung in the hierarchy of creation. Only vermin might be ranked beneath them. Even cows and horses, and especially dogs, get better care.” The Frankist Jews are considered heretics within their own faith and so must hide their true religion. Mayer teaches his young daughter, “When the last little spark of divine light returns to its source, the Messiah will appear to us. All laws will be invalidated. The division between kosher and non-kosher will disappear, like the division between holy and cursed. Night will cease to be distinguishable from day, and the differences between men and women will disappear. The letters in the Torah will rearrange themselves so that a new Torah will come to be, and everything will be opposite…. Between the heart and the tongue lies an abyss…. Remember that. Thoughts must be concealed…. Think so that they think you are not thinking. Behave in such a way that you mislead others…. We don’t do that because we ourselves are like women. We survive by hiding. We play fools, pretend to be people we are not. We come home, and then we take off our masks. But we bear the burden of silence: masa duma.”

In Poland, both the traditional Jews and the Frankists live under the thumb of the king, the landowning nobility, and the Catholic Church. Bishop Dembowski has a hard time figuring them out. “If only he could understand these Jews the same way he can more or less comprehend the intentions of a peasant! Yet here you have their tassels, their hats, their bizarre speech… their suspicious religion. Why suspicious? Because it’s too close. Their books are the same, Moses, Abraham, Isaac on the stone under his father’s knife, Noah and his ark—all of it’s the same, and yet, with them it appears in some strange new context. Even Noah doesn’t look the same, exactly—he’s disfigured, somehow, and his ark is not the same, but rather Jewish, more ornamental, Eastern, bursting at the seams. Even Isaac, who was always a blond little stripling with rosy skin, has now transformed into a wild child, sturdier, not quite so defenseless…. Their faith is dark and concrete, almost uncomfortably literal. Their Moses is an old pauper with bony feet; ours a dignified elder with a flowing beard…. The worst is when a foreign thing is disguised as something that belongs. As though they were mocking us. As though they were making a joke out of the Holy Scriptures…. After all, the Jews have been around for longer, and yet they persist in their error. It is certainly not unreasonable to suspect that they must be up to something.” 

The traditional Jews despise the Frankists even more than the Christians. “Pinkas is profoundly convinced that the old tradition of their forefathers was the right approach, to pass over all matters connected with Sabbatai Tzvi in silence; nothing good, nothing bad, no cursing, no blessing. A thing that is not talked about ceases to exist…. So great is the power of the word that wherever it is lacking, the world just disappears…. Why talk? If you want to rid the world of someone, it does not take fire and sword, nor any type of violence. You just have to pass over that person in silence and never call him by name. In this way, he will gradually recede into oblivion. If another person insists on inquiring into the matter, you must threaten him with herem.” The Frankists, however, have faith even in their darkest hour. “The Messiah must stoop as low as possible, down into those dispassionate mechanisms of the world where the sparks of holiness, scattered into the gloom, have been imprisoned. Where darkness and humiliation are greatest. The Messiah will gather the sparks of holiness, which means that he will leave behind him an even greater darkness. God has sent him down from on high to be abased, into the abyss of the world, where powerful serpents will mercilessly mock him…. The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person—it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists.”

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

Alter proposes that the Book of Exodus is preeminently about Moses. “The general rule in Exodus, and again in Numbers when the story continues, is that what is of interest about the character of Moses is what bears on his qualities as a leader—his impassioned sense of justice, his easily ignited temper, his selfless compassion, his feelings of personal inadequacy…. Moses, as forger of the nation and prince of prophets is, after all, not an absolutely uniques figure but a man like other men.” God has also transformed. “God in Exodus has become essentially unseeable, overpowering, and awesomely refulgent.” Alter discusses the structural form of Exodus, “The narrative is organized around three thematically defined spaces: Egypt, the place of bondage; the wilderness, a liminal space where freedom will be realized and new obligations incurred, where a tense struggle between leader and people will play out as part of the initiatory experience of nationhood; and the promised destination of the Exodus from Egypt, the land that remains beyond the horizon of this book. Egypt is associated with water…. The wilderness is, antithetically, a zone of parched dryness…. Finally, beyond well-watered Egypt and the burning desert where uncanny fires flare, the new Israelite nation is repeatedly told of a third space, a land flowing not with water but, hyperbolically, with milk and honey.”

In Exodus 2:3, Alter comments, “she took a wicker ark…. The basket in which the infant is placed is called a tevah, “ark,” the same word for Noah’s ark…. As the ark in Genesis bears on the water the saving remnant of humankind, the child borne on the waters here will save his imperiled people.” In Exodus 2:10, Alter calls attention to the etymology of the name, Moses. “This is an authentic Egyptian name meaning “the one who is born,” and hence “son.” The folk etymology relates it to the Hebrew verb mashah, “to draw out from water.” Perhaps the active form of the verb used for the name mosheh, “he draws out,” is meant to align the naming with Moses’s future destiny of rescuing his people from the water of the Sea of Reeds.” Further along, in Exodus 2:13, Alter calls attention to a biblical device, “Why should you strike your fellow? The first dialogue assigned to a character in biblical narrative typically defines the character. Moses’s first speech is a reproof to a fellow Hebrew and an attempt to impose a standard of justice (rasha’, “the one in the wrong,” is a legal term).”

Alter will admit when there is deabte about the proper translation of the Hebrew. In Exodus 3:14, he relates, “‘Ehyeh-‘Asher-‘Ehyeh. God’s response perhaps gives Moses more than he bargained for—not just an identifying name (the implication of offering one such name might be that there are other divinities) but an ontological divine mystery of the most daunting character…. “I-Will-Be-Who-I-Will-Be” is the most plausible construction of the Hebrew, though the middle word, ‘asher, could easily mean “what” rather than “who,” and the common rendering of “I-Am-That-I-Am” cannot be excluded.” In Exodus 6:3, Alter expounds, “as El Shaddai, but in My name the Lord I was not known to them. The designation El Shaddai, which is in fact used a total of five times in the Patriarchal Tales, is an archaic, evidently Canaanite combination of divine names. El was the high god of the Canaanite pantheon, though the Hebrew term is also a common noun meaning “god.” No satisfactory explanation for the meaning or origin of the name Shaddai has been made, but some scholars link it with a term for “mountain,” and others associate it with fertility…. Were the patriarchs in fact ignorant of the name YHWH?” In Exodus 6:7, Alter relates, “you shall know that I am the Lord your God Who takes you out from under the burdens of Egypt. This idea is emphasized again and again, in the Torah as well as in later books of the Bible. It is the cornerstone of Israelite faith—that God has proven His divinity and His special attachment to Israel by the dramatic act of liberating the people from Egyptian slavery.”

Alter points out where the biblical text deviates from the geography, natural phenomena, or history of the referenced time period. In Exodus 10:13, he states, “an east wind. The Hebrew idioms were coined in the geography of Canaan, not of Egypt. In Canaan, locusts and parching winds come from the deserts to the east. In Egypt, such winds and blights would typically come from the Sudan, to the south.” In Exodus 10:19, Alter continues, “west wind. The literal meaning is “sea wind,” but because of the geographical situation of ancient Israel, “sea” (that is, the Mediterranean) is often used to designate the west. Again, the wind reference reflects the geography of Canaan.” In Exodus 13:17, Alter explains, “by way of the land of the Philistines…. The Philistines in this period are an anachronistic reference, they arrived from the Aegean region (and thus are known as the Sea People) in this coastal strip during the twelfth century B.C.E., perhaps as much as a hundred years after the conjectured date of the Exodus in the later thirteenth century.” Finally, in Exodus 13:18, “the Sea of Reeds. This is not the Red Sea, as older translations have it, but most likely a marshland in the northeastern part of Egypt. (Marshes might provide a realistic kernel for the tale of a waterway that is at one moment passable and in the next flooded.) But it must be conceded that elsewhere yam suf refers to the Red Sea, and some scholars have recently argued that the story means to heighten the miraculous character of the event through the parting of a real sea. Even if the setting is a marsh, the event is reported in strongly supernatural terms.”

Alter discusses the importance of Exodus 21:1, “And these are the laws. After the ten divine imperatives, couched in absolute terms and addressed to each Israelite in the second-person singular, we have a series of miscellaneous laws formulated casuistically…. This collection of laws, which make up chapter 21 through chapter 23, is conventionally called the Book of the Covenant…. It is probably one of the oldest collections of law in the Bible; it exhibits numerous parallels with (as well as divergences from) the Code of Hammurabi, with sundry other Sumerian and Akkadian codes, and with Hittite law.”

In Exodus 26:33, Alter comments on how God’s detailed instructions, throughout Exodus, relate to and call forth both the history and the future of the Israeli people, “the Ark of the Covenant, and the curtain shall divide for you between the Holy and the Holy of Holies. If the tent structure of the Tabernacle looks backward to an early nomadic period, its dimensions—exactly half those of Solomon’s temple—and its divisions mirror the structure of the Jerusalem temple…. The 100-cubit length (about 60 feet) of the Tabernacle is divided symmetrically between a western half, or outer court, where there is an altar for burnt offerings, and an eastern half, which constitutes the Holy Place (maqom qadosh), in which the lamp stand, the table, and the altar of incense are located, and a small inner zone, screened by a curtain, the Holy of Holies, in which the Ark of the Covenant is kept. The verbal construct “X of X” has the idiomatic sense in biblical Hebrew of “the supreme X” (compare “the song of songs, which is Solomon’s”).”

In Exodus 32:1, Alter comments, “make us gods that will go before us. Here, and repeatedly in the Golden Calf episode, ‘elohim, which regularly refers to God (in the singular) is used in the plural: despite all the spectacular demonstrations of the Lord’s supreme power, the people have not liberated themselves from polytheistic notions.” Alter later expands, “The Golden Calf is thus a kind of anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark.” Alter contrasts this blasphemous episode with Moses’ concurrent meeting with God, atop Mount Sinai. “Show me, pray Your Glory. We are not likely to recover precisely what the key term kavod—glory, honor, divine presence, and very literally, “weightiness”—conveyed to the ancient Hebrew imagination. In any case, Moses, who first fearfully encountered God in the fire in the bush, is now ready and eager to be granted a full-scale epiphany, a frontal revelation of the look and character of this divinity that has been speaking to him from within the pillar of cloud.” On Exodus 32:3, Alter continues, “I shall make all My goodness pass in front of you. In response to the request that God show Moses His glory, He offers instead to show him His “goodness” (tuv), a manifestation of His moral attributes as divinity. But God’s goodness is not amenable to human prediction, calculation, or manipulation: it is God’s untrammeled choice to bestow grace and compassion on whom He sees fit, as He has done with Moses.” Alter goes on, in connection with Exodus 32:23, “you will see My back, but My face will not be seen. Volumes of theology have been spun out of these enigmatic words. Imagining the deity in frankly physical terms was entirely natural for the ancient monotheists…. Through it the Hebrew writer suggests an idea that makes good sense from later theological perspectives: that God’s intrinsic nature is inaccessible, and perhaps also intolerable, to the finite mind of man, but that something of His attributes—His “goodness,” the directional pitch of His ethical intentions, the afterglow of the effulgence of His presence—can be glimpsed by humankind.”

Finally, Alter discusses the material aspects that recognize the covenantal pact between God and the Israelites in Exodus 40:20, “set the Covenant in the Ark. The Covenant, ‘edut, is a synonym for berit, the other common biblical term for pact, treaty, or covenant, and it clearly refers to the two stone tablets on which the words of the Covenant were written by the finger of God. The Tabernacle, then, has a double function: it is the place where sacrifices are offered, as in all ancient Near Eastern cults, and it is the place where the material document of an eternal contract between God and Israel is preserved.” In Exodus 40:38, Alter closes by stating, “in all their journeyings. Pointedly, “their journeyings,” mas’eyhem, is the last word of the Book of Exodus, just as this same verbal stem inaugurated the Wilderness narrative in 13:20, “And they journeyed from Succoth.” We have been left with a sense of harmonious consummation in the competition of the Tabernacle, likened by allusion to the completion of the tasks of creation; but the condition in which the Israelites find themselves remains unstable, uncertain, a destiny of wandering through arduous wasteland towards a promised land that is not yet visible on the horizon.”

“The Ethics of Authenticity” by Charles Taylor

Taylor, in this monograph, defends modern culture’s affinity for authenticity from its traditionalist detractors, while pointing out its deficiencies to those who proclaim the supremacy of subjectivism and instrumental reason, untethered to morality and community. Taylor does not seek a middle ground of compromise, but forges his own path towards a more enduring and objective authenticity.

Taylor cautions modernity’s defenders against “the individualism of self-fulfillment [which] involves a centring on the self and a concomitant shutting out, or even unawareness, of the greater issues or concerns that transcend the self, be they religious, political, historical.” Taylor continues, “The culture of self-fulfillment has led many people to lose sight of concerns that transcend them. And it seems obvious that it has taken trivialized and self-indulgent forms…. That the espousal of authenticity takes the form of a kind of soft relativism means that the vigorous defence of any moral ideal is somehow off limits…. In adopting the ideal [of self-fulfillment], people in the culture of authenticity, as I want to call it, give support to a kind of liberalism, which has been espoused by many others as well. This is the liberalism of neutrality…. The good life is what each individual seeks, in his or her own way…. The affirmation of the power of choice as itself a good to be maximized is a deviant product of the ideal.”

Taylor begins by looking back historically, “In Rousseau’s work [self-determining freedom] takes political form, in the notion of a social contract state founded on a general will, which precisely because it is the form of our common freedom can brook no opposition in the name of freedom…. Although Kant reinterpreted this notion of freedom in purely moral terms, as autonomy, it returns to the political sphere with a vengeance with Hegel and Marx…. Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own “measure”…. There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me…. Being true to myself means being true to my own originality.”

Taylor stresses that an enduring authenticity does not separate the idea of the personal Good from that of others’ in a sort of subjective nihilism. “Our understanding of the good things in life can be transformed by our enjoying them in common with people we love…. Some goods become accessible to us only through such common enjoyment…. The making and sustaining of our identity, in the absence of a heroic effort to break out of ordinary existence, remains dialogical throughout our lives…. More particularly, I want to show that modes that opt for self-fulfillment without regard (a) to the demands of our ties with others or (b) to demands of any kind emanating from something more or other than human desires or aspirations are self-defeating, that they destroy the conditions for realizing authenticity itself.”

Modernity has lost the component of authenticity that regards the other’s viewpoint. At its worst, modern culture no longer seeks to mesh together a common understanding of the good life. “The contemporary culture of authenticity slides towards soft relativism. This gives further force to a general presumption of subjectivism about value…. It is clear that a rhetoric of “difference,” of “diversity” (even “multiculturalism”), is central to the contemporary culture of authenticity…. [However,] difference so asserted becomes  insignificant…. Self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues are more significant than others…. Which issues are significant, I do not determine…. So the ideal of self-choice supposes that there are other issues of significance beyond self-choice…. To shut out demands emanating beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization…. I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter…. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.”

Modern man is not born into a predetermined station in life. Man is no longer born into a social hierarchy. He creates his own identity. However, for that identity to make sense, others must recognize him as such. Man has never lived in a bubble. He depends on how others’ view him to assert himself as himself. “The development of an ideal of inwardly generated identity gives a new and crucial importance of recognition…. The thing about inwardly derived, personal, original identity is that is doesn’t enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and it can fail.” At worst, modern authenticity devolves into narcissism. “The self-centred forms are deviant…. They tend to centre fulfillment on the individual, making his or her affiliations purely instrumental; they push, in other words, to a social atomism. And they tend to see fulfillment as just of the self, neglecting or delegitimating the demands that come from beyond our own desires or aspirations, be they from history, tradition, society, nature, or God; they foster, in other words, a radical anthropocentrism.” Taylor proposes an alternative, “We ought to be trying to persuade people that self-fulfillment, so far from excluding unconditional relationships and moral demands beyond the self, actually requires these in some form…. Authenticity points us towards a more self-responsible form of life. It allows us to live (potentially) a fuller and more differentiated life, because more fully appropriated as our own.”

To live a fuller life, modernity has to get away from life as subjective relativism, in which all morals and life’s goals are up for grabs. “Things centre more and more on the subject, and in a host of ways. Things that were once settled by some external reality—traditional law, say, or nature—are now referred to our choice. Issues where we were meant to accept the dictates of authority we now have to think out for ourselves. Modern freedom and autonomy centres us on ourselves…. The sacrifices that runaway instrumental reason imposes on us are obvious enough, in the hardening of an atomistic outlook, in our imperviousness to nature.” Taylor suggests taming instrumental reason. “Technology in the service of an ethic of benevolence towards real flesh and blood people; technological, calculative thinking as a rare and admirable achievement of a being who lives in the medium of a quite different kind of thinking.” For Taylor, this also requires a new kind of political culture—a return to the polis. It requires common aims and objective morals that are anathema to special interests, rent-seeking, and identity-politics. “The danger is not actual despotic control but fragmentation—that is, a people increasingly less capable of forming a common purpose and carrying it out…. This fragmentation comes about partly through a weakening of the bonds of sympathy, partly in a self-feeding way, through the failure of democratic initiative itself…. The idea that the majority of the people might frame and carry through a common project comes to seem utopian and naive. And so people give up…. A fragmented  society is one whose members find it harder and harder to identify with their political society as a community. This lack of identification may reflect an atomistic outlook, in which people come to see society purely instrumentally. But it also helps to entrench atomism, because the absence of effective common action throws people back on themselves…. A fading political identity makes it harder to mobilize effectively, and a sense of helplessness breeds alienation.”

“Works of Love” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

Kierkegaard, from the very start, sets out what this book will be all about, “They are Christian deliberations, therefore not about love but about works of love.” He begins by explaining why the love of God is different from worldly love, “But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be to your own harm, indeed, harmful to his cause; for God’s wisdom is beyond all comparison to yours, and God’s governance has no obligation of responsibility in relation to your sagacity. All you have to do is obey in love.”

Kierkegaard relates how being bound by love eternally is actually the truest form of freedom that a human has, “But the love that has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty and loves because it shall love—that love is independent and has the law for its existence in the relation of love itself to the eternal…. Alas, we often think that freedom exists and it is law that binds freedom. Yet it is just the opposite; without law, freedom does not exist at all, and it is law that gives freedom…. If when another person says, “I cannot love you any longer,” one proudly answers, “Then I can also stop loving you”—is this independence? Alas, it is dependence, because whether he will continue to love or not depends upon whether the other will love. But the person who answers, “In that case I shall still continue to love you”—that person’s love is made eternally free in blessed independence. He does not say it proudly—dependent upon his pride—no, he says it humbly, humbling himself under eternity’s shall, and for that very reason he is independent.”

In fact, love only becomes true love when it becomes an eternal duty. “The love that has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty is not exempted from misfortune, but it is saved from despair, in fortune and misfortune equally saved from despair…. See, passion inflames, worldly sagacity cools, but neither this heat nor this cold nor the combination of this heat and this cold is the pure air of the eternal…. But this “You shall love” removes all the unhealthiness and preserves the healthiness for eternity. So it is everywhere, this shall of eternity is the saving, the purifying, the ennobling element.” True love always requires an element of self-denial. “Wherever the essentially Christian is, there is also self-denial, which is Christianity’s essential form…. Self-denial is the very transformation by which a person becomes sober in the sense of eternity.” Universal love is also in constant danger of being replaced by particular loves, “But erotic love and friendship are the very peak of self-esteem, the I intoxicated in the other I. The more securely one I and another I join to become one I, the more this united I selfishly cuts itself from everyone else. At the peak of erotic love and friendship, the two actually do become one self, one I.”

True Christian love can only be recognized in the form of the love of one’s neighbor. One must love all of humanity equally and only in this way love God. But that also means loving your enemy just as you would love yourself, “The neighbor is the utterly unrecognizable dissimilarity between persons or is the eternal equality before God—the enemy, too, has this equality…. Shut your eyes and remember the commandment that you shall love; then you love—your enemy—no, then you love the neighbor, because you do not see that he is your enemy. In other words, when you shut your eyes, you do not see dissimilarities of earthly life…. The kinship is secured by each individual’s equal kinship with and relationship to God in Christ; because the Christian doctrine addresses itself equally to each individual…. Just as little as the Christian lives or can live without his body, so little can he live without the dissimilarity of earthly life that belongs to every human being in particular by birth, by position, by circumstances, by education etc.—none of us is pure humanity…. This must continue as long as temporality continues and must continue to tempt every human being who comes into the world, inasmuch as by being Christian he does not become exempt from dissimilarity, but by overcoming the temptation of dissimilarity he becomes a Christian. In so-called Christendom, therefore, the difference of earthly life still continually tempts—alas, perhaps it even more than tempts, so that one person is haughty and another defiantly envies. Both ways are in fact rebellion, are rebellion against the essentially Christian…. Christianity and worldliness will never come to a mutual understanding.”

Care for one’s station in the world is the enemy of Christian ethics. The temporal and eternity can never be reconciled. “Christianly the world’s opposition stands in an essential relationship to the inwardness of Christianity…. Christianity cannot keep anything other than what it has promised from the beginning: the world’s ingratitude, opposition, and derision, and continually to a higher degree the more earnest a Christian one becomes…. Therefore if anyone can demonstrate that the world or Christendom has now become essentially good, as if it were eternity, then I will also demonstrate that Christian self-denial has been made impossible and Christianity abolished, just as it will be abolished in eternity, where it will cease to be militant.”

Love is the only act that fulfills Christian law, “The relation of love to the Law is here like the relation of faith to understanding. The understanding counts and counts, calculates and calculates, but it never arrives at the certainty that faith possesses.” Love of your neighbor is the only debt in the temporal world worth owing,  “If possible, owe no one anything, no courtesy, no service, no sympathy in joy or in sorrow, no leniency in judging, no help in life, no advice in danger, no sacrifice, not even the hardest—no, in all this owe no one anything. But along with all this still remain in the debt that you certainly have not wished and before God have certainly not been able to pay off, the debt to love one another!”

The nature of true love is its immeasurability. It is immeasurable both for the lover and for the one loved. “In everything done for you by the one who loves, in the least little triviality as well as in the greatest sacrifice, there is always love along with it; and thereby the smallest service, which in the case of the hired servant you would scarcely find worth taking into account, becomes immeasurable…. The object of love confesses in love that with the least little thing the lover does infinitely more than all the others do with the greatest sacrifices; and the lover confesses to himself that in making every possible sacrifice he is doing infinitely less than he perceives the debt to be.”

In order to love one’s neighbor properly, there is the necessity of granting belief freely and giving to all the benefit of the doubt. “The person who loves believes all things. With the blessed joy of amazement, he will someday see that he was right; and if he made a mistake by believing too much of the good—to believe the good is in itself a blessing.” It is similar with hope. “That is why the person who hopes can never be deceived, because to hope is to expect the possibility of the good, but the possibility of the good is the eternal…. The loving one hopes all things. No indolence of habit, no pettiness of mind, no hairsplitting of sagacity, no quantities of experience, no slackness of years, no bitterness of evil passions corrupt for him his hope or counterfeit the possibility for him; every morning, yes, every moment, he renews his hope and refreshes possibility, while love abides and he in it…. Love hopes to the limit, yes, to the “last day,” for not until then is hope over.”

Kierkegaard circles back to the temptations of the worldly, “Acting sagaciously is, actually, a halfway approach, whereby one undeniably gets further ahead in the world, wins the world’s goods and advantages and the world’s honor, because, in the eternal sense, the world and world’s advantages are half-measures. But neither the eternal nor Holy Scripture has taught anyone to aspire to get ahead or furthest ahead in the world; on the contrary, it warns against getting too far ahead in the world in order, if possible, to keep oneself unstained by the defilement of the world…. If the hope is not fulfilled it perhaps will become apparent in one’s bitterness and despair how firmly one was attached to that for which it was a shame to hope.” The lust for money holds particular scorn for Kierkegaard, “From the eternal point of view money is less than nothing…. Think of eternity in whatever way you want to; only admit that many of the temporal things you have seen in temporality you wished to find again in eternity, that you wished to see trees and the flowers and the stars again, to hear the singing of birds and the murmuring of the brook again—but could it ever occur to you that there would be money in eternity? No, then the kingdom of heaven itself would again become a land of misery…. Of all the things you have seen, there is nothing of which you can be so sure that it will never enter heaven as—money.”

In fact, the rich and the poor can practice mercy alike. “Eternity understands only mercifulness; therefore if you want to learn to understand mercifulness, you must learn it from eternity. But if you are to have an understanding of the eternal, there must be stillness around you while you concentrate your attention completely on inwardness…. Mercifulness does not arouse amazement. What indeed is there to be amazed at if even the poorest wretch, and he best of all, can practice mercifulness? Mercifulness, if you in truth perceive it, does not arouse amazement; it stirs you, just because it is inwardness, it makes the deepest inward impression upon you.”

Kierkegaard concludes, “In the Christian sense, a person ultimately and essentially has only God to deal with in everything, although he still must remain in the world and in the earthly circumstances assigned to him…. The adult also readily imagines that his dealings with the world are actuality, but God brings him to understand that all this is only being used for his upbringing…. Thus God is the educator; his love is the greatest leniency and the greatest rigorousness…. But everything in you that is of flesh and blood and is timorousness and attachment to things of this earth must despair, so that you cannot acquire external certainty, a certainty once and for all, and in the easiest manner. See, this is the struggle of faith in which you can have occasion to be tried and tested every day.”

In the end, what happens on earth is irrelevant compared to eternity and God’s eternal love. Forgiveness of others is the necessary path to the forgiveness of yourself. “Christianity’s view is: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness you give is the forgiveness you receive, not the reverse…. God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you.” Kierkegaard returns once again to the unknowability of God’s love, “How rigorous this Christian like for like is! The Jewish, the worldly, the bustling like for like is: as others do unto you, by all means take care that you also do likewise unto them. But the Christian like for like is: God will do unto you exactly as you do unto others. In the Christian sense, you have nothing at all to do with what others do unto you—it does not concern you; it is a curiosity, an impertinence, a lack of good sense on your part to meddle in things that are absolutely no more your concern than if you were not present. You have to do only with what you do onto others, or how you take what others do unto you. The direction is inward; essentially you have to do only with yourself before God…. The Christian like for like belongs to this world of inwardness…. In the Christian sense, to love people is to love God, and to love God is to love people.”

“Saving Beauty” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This short monograph is a reflection, by Han, on the changing conceptions of beauty. As usual, Han brings to bear historical philosophical interpretations of the beautiful and contrasts them with the ideals of modernity. And again, as usual, he finds today’s digital social milieu lacking. Han asserts, “Today, the experience of beauty is impossible. Where the wish to please, the Like, edges its way to the foreground, experience, which is impossible without negativity, withers…. Smooth visual communication takes place in the form of contagion, without any aesthetic distance…. Communication reaches its maximum speed where like reacts to like…. Today, nothing endures. This impermanence also affects the ego and de-stabilizes it, makes it insecure.” Today, beauty is all about the Self. It only reflects back towards itself, the subject. He continues, “The temporality of digital beauty… is the immediate present without a future, even without history. It simply is present…. In this digital inwardness there can be no sense of wonder. The only thing human beings still like are themselves.”

Han contrasts modernity’s take on the beautiful with that of the sublime. “The aesthetics of beauty is a genuine phenomenon of modern times. Only, in the aesthetics of modern times, the beautiful and the sublime become separated…. The beautiful is juxtaposed to the sublime, which—due to its negativity—does not cause immediate pleasure.” Han begins his dive into the historical. “Plato… does not distinguish between beauty and the sublime. The beautiful is unsurpassable precisely because it is sublime…. The sight of beauty does not cause pleasure, but shocks…. The onlooker becomes ecstatic, is seized by awe and terror (ekplettontai). A ‘madness’ takes hold of him. Plato’s metaphysics of beauty is in sharp contrast to the modern aesthetics of pleasure which confirms the subject in its autonomy and complacency, instead of shocking it.” Han concludes, “Beauty and the sublime have the same origin. Instead of opposing the sublime to the beautiful, one should return to beauty a sublimity that cannot be subjected to inwardness, a de-subjectivizing sublimity, and thus undo the separation of beauty and the sublime.”

Han believes that true beauty must remain hidden behind its veil. It is never exposed and displayed, but remains in mystery. He quotes Walter Benjamin at length, “The task of art criticism is not to lift the veil but rather, through the most precise knowledge of it as a veil, to raise itself for the first time to the true view of the beautiful…. Never yet has a true work of art been grasped other than where it ineluctably represented itself as a secret.” Han riffs on Barthes’ distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. “The erotic photograph is a picture ‘that has been disturbed, fissured’. The pornographic photograph, by contrast, has neither fractures or fissures. It is smooth. Today all pictures are more or less pornographic. They are transparent.” Again, Barthes, “What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.” Rilke suggests beauty “is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure.” Adorno adds, “The image of beauty as that of a single and differentiated something originates with the emancipation from the fear of the overpowering wholeness and undifferentiatedness of nature.” Han weighs in, “Negativity is the invigorating force of life. It also forms the essence of beauty. Inherent to beauty is a weakness, a fragility, and a brokenness [Gebrochenheit]. To this negativity, beauty owes its power to seduce…. Beauty is illness.” Adorno claims, “Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay.”

In the modern world, beauty has even come to be opposed to that which is sexy. “Consumption and sexiness condition each other. The self that is based on sexual desire is a product of consumer capitalism…. The ideal of beauty evades consumption…. Sexiness is opposed to moral beauty or beauty of character. Morality, virtue and character have a specific temporality. They are based on duration, solidity and permanence…. Consumption and duration exclude each other…. The ideal consumer is a person without character.”

This wouldn’t be a Han book without a deep dive into Hegel. Han posits, “Central to Hegel’s aesthetics is the ‘concept’. It idealizes beauty and confers on it the brilliance of truth. Beauty results from the concept manifesting itself in the sensual, or ‘the Idea as the immediate unity of the Concept with its reality’…. No ‘aggregate’ is beautiful. Concepts take care that wholes do not disintegrate, or dissipate, into ‘heaps’…. The beautiful object is something over against the subject, something with which the subject develops a free relationship…. Only in the aesthetic relation with the object is the subject finally set free…. The beautiful object is an object over against the subject, in which any kind of dependance and compulsion has disappeared.” Hegel claims, “Thus the contemplation of beauty is of a liberal kind; it leaves objects alone as being inherently free and infinite; there is no wish to possess them or take advantage of them as useful for fulfilling finite needs and intentions.” Han continues, “Hegel’s aesthetic of beauty is an aesthetic of truth and freedom, which withdraws beauty from any form of consumption. Neither ‘truth’ nor the ‘concept’ can be consumed. Beauty is an end in itself…. Consumption and beauty are mutually exclusive…. [Beauty] does not tempt you to enjoy or to possess it. Rather, it invites you to linger in contemplation…. Beauty as well as truth is something exclusive. Thus they do not occur often [haufig].”

Han loves to linger. He critiques the modern world as one in which lingering has become verboten. We, moderns, are always in a rush: to do, to work, even to play. “Beauty itself actually invites us to linger; it is the will which stands in the way of contemplative lingering. But at the sight of beauty, willing retreats…. Beauty frees me from myself. The ego immerses itself in beauty. It rids itself of itself in the face of beauty.” Schopenhauer states, “Aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves.” Proust praises “the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams.” Han concludes, “The experience of beauty as recollection evades consumption.”

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

Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible is now generally considered the gold standard of scholarship, both in terms of his textual translation, as well as the commentary and annotations that he provides. It is the capstone of Alter’s illustrious career working closely with these texts. Instead of reviewing or summarizing such a well known work, I will simply point out a few points of interest to me as I went along. In his own introduction, Alter reveals how contemporary scholarship has aided his work. “This [modern] period, moreover, is one in which our understanding of ancient Hebrew has become considerably more nuanced and precise than it once was, thanks to comparative Semitic philology aided by archaeology.” On his style of translation, Alter notes, “A translation that respects the literary precision of the biblical story must strive to reproduce its nice discrimination of terms, and cannot be free to translate a word here one way and there another, for the sake of variety or for the sake of context…. It becomes feasible to reproduce most of the Hebrew reconfigurations of syntax, preserving the thematic or psychological emphases they are meant to convey.” A specific note on Alter’s translation of biblical verse, as opposed to prose, “It has long been recognized by scholarship that biblical poetry reflects a stratum of Hebrew older than biblical prose…. No previous English translation has made a serious effort to represent the elevated and archaic nature of the poetic language in contradistinction to the prose, though that is clearly part of the intended literary effect of biblical narrative…. Biblical Hebrew, in sum, has a distinctive music, a lovely precision of lexical choice, a meaningful concreteness, and a suppleness of expressive syntax.”

On the Book of Genesis, particularly, Alter comments, “The Primeval History, in contrast to what follows in Genesis, cultivates a kind of narrative that is fablelike or legendary, and sometimes, residually mythic…. The style tends much more than that of the Patriarchal Tales to formal symmetries, refrainlike repetitions, parallelisms, and other rhetorical devices of a prose that often aspires to the dignity of poetry, or that invites us to hear the echo of epic poetry in its cadences.” He contrasts the Patriarchal Tales where, “The unfolding history of the family that is to become the people of Israel is seen… as the crucial focus of a larger, universal history…. National existence, moreover, is empathetically imagined as a strenuous effort to renew the act of creation.”

In Genesis 1:26, “Let us make a human in our image.” Alter observes, “a human. The term ‘adam, afterward consistently with a definite article, which is used both here and in the second account of the origins of humankind, is a generic term for human beings, not a proper noun. It also does not automatically suggest maleness, especially without the prefix ben, “son of,” and so the traditional rendering “man” is misleading.”

Alter comments on Genesis 2:4, “God now called YHWH ‘Elohim instead of ‘Elohim as in the first version, does not summon things into being from a lofty distance through the mere agency of divine speech, but works as a craftsman, fashioning (yatsar instead of bara’, “create”), blowing life-breath into nostrils, building a woman from a rib. Whatever the disparate historical origins of the two accounts, the redaction gives us first a harmonious cosmic overview of creation and then a plunge into the technological nitty-gritty and moral ambiguities of human origins.”

In Genesis 3:1, Alter remarks on the style and playfulness of the text, “cunning. In the kind of pun in which the ancient Hebrew writers delighted, ‘arum, “cunning,” plays against ‘arumim, “naked,” of the previous verse.” In Genesis 3:12, Alter cannot help but noting, “gave by me, she gave me. The repeated verb nicely catches the way the first man passes the buck, not only blaming the woman for giving him the fruit but virtually blaming God for giving him the woman. She in turn of course blames the serpent. God’s curse, framed in verse, follows the reverse order, from serpent to woman to man.”

Often Alter’s annotations deal with history, as much as with textual precision. In Genesis 3:24, he relates, “The cherubim, a common feature of ancient Near Eastern mythology, are not to be confused with the round-cheeked darlings of Renaissance iconography. The root of the term means either “hybrid” or, by an inversion of consonants, “mount,” “steed,” and they are the winged beasts, probably of fearsome aspect, on which the sky god of the old Canaanite myths and the poetry of Psalms goes riding through the air. The fiery sword, not mentioned elsewhere but referred to with the definite article as though it were a familiar image, is a suitable weapon to set alongside the formidable cherubim.” In Genesis 10, Alter notes, “The Table of Nations is a serious attempt, unprecedented in the ancient Near East, to sketch a panorama of all known human cultures—from Greece and Crete in the west through Asia Minor and Iran and down through Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula to northwestern Africa.”

In Genesis 14:13, Alter describes the use of the term Hebrew, “Abram the Hebrew. Only here is he given this designation. Although scholars have argued whether “Hebrew” is an ethnic or social term or even the name for a warrior class, it is clear that it is invoked only in contexts when Abraham and his descendants stand in relation to members of other national groups.” Alter also points out a discrepancy in Genesis 24:10, “camels. The camels here and elsewhere in Genesis are a problem. Archaeological and extra biblical literary evidence indicates that camels were not adopted as beasts of burden until several centuries after the Patriarchal period, and so their introduction in the story would have to be anachronistic. What is puzzling is that the narrative reflects careful attention to other details of historical authenticity: horses, which also were domesticated centuries later, are scrupulously excluded from the Patriarchal Tales, and when Abraham buys a gravesite, he deals in weights of silver, not in coins, as in the later Israelite period. The details of betrothal negotiation, with the brother acting as principal agent for the family, the bestowal of a dowry on the bride and betrothal gifts on the family, are equally accurate for the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. Perhaps the camels are an inadvertent anachronism because they had become so deeply associated in the minds of later writers and audiences with desert travel.”

Alter disputes the correctness of the common translation “ladder” in Genesis 28:12, “a ramp. The Hebrew term occurs only here. Although its etymology is doubtful, the traditional rendering of “ladder” is unlikely. As has often been observed, the references to both “its top reaching the heavens” and “the gate of the heavens” use phrases associated with the Mesopotamian ziggurat, and so the structure envisioned is probably a vast ramp with terraced landings. There is a certain appropriateness in the Mesopotamian motif, given the destination of Jacob’s journey. Jacob in general is represented as a border crosser, a man of liminal experiences: here, then in his return trip when he is confronted by Laban, and in the nocturnal encounter at the ford of the Jabbok.”

Alter often notes key and first moments in the biblical text. In Genesis 32:29, ““Not Jacob shall your name hence be said, but Israel”…. Whereas Abraham is invariably called “Abraham” once the name is changed from “Abram,” the narrative continues to refer to this patriarch in most instances as “Jacob.” Thus, “Israel” does not really replace his name but becomes a synonym for it—a practice reflected in the parallelism of biblical poetry, where “Jacob” is always used in the first half of the line and “Israel,” the poetic variation, in the second half.” In Genesis 32:33, Alter continues, “Therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sinew. This concluding etiological notice is more than a mechanical reflex. For the first time, after the naming-story, the Hebrews are referred to as “the children of Israel,” and this dietary prohibition observed by the audience of the story “to this day” marks a direct identification with, or reverence for, the eponymous ancestor who wrestled through the night with a man who was no man.”

Alter also points out the etymology of words and their historic import. Throughout this work, he is also quick to give previous scholars their due. In Genesis 41:1, Alter remarks, “by the Nile. Given the Nile’s importance as the source of Egypt’s fertility, it is appropriate that this dream of plenty and famine should take place on its banks, a point made as long ago as the thirteenth century in Narbonne by the Hebrew exegete David Kimhi. As this story set in the pharaonic court unfolds, its Egyptian color is brought out by a generous sprinkling of Egyptian loanwords in the Hebrew narrative, “Nile” (ye’or), “soothsayers” (hartumim), “rushes” (‘ahu) “ring” (taba’at), “fine linen” (shesh).”

In Genesis 46:4, Alter points out the unique nature of the monotheistic project in the Bible, “I Myself will go down with you. The first-person pronoun is emphatic because God uses the pronoun ‘anokhi, which is not strictly necessary, followed as it is by the imperfect tense of the verb conjugated in the first-person singular. The reassurance God offers—which is already the kernel of a theological concept that will play an important role in national consciousness both in the Babylonian exile and after the defeat by the Romans in 70 C.E.—is necessary because in the polytheistic view the theater of activity of a deity was typically imagined to be limited to the territorial borders of the deity’s worshippers. By contrast, this God solemnly promises to go down with His people to Egypt and to bring them back up.” Finally, in Genesis 50:26, Alter comments on the book’s final line, “and he was put in a coffin in Egypt. The book that began with an image of God’s breath moving across the vast expanses of the primordial deep to bring the world and all life into being ends with this image of a body in a box, a mummy in a coffin. (The Hebrews in Canaan appear not to have used coffins, and the term occurs only here.) Out of the contraction of this moment of mortuary enclosure, a new expansion, and new births, will follow.”

“Hegel” by Charles Taylor

I think it would be fair to say this book is almost as much about the philosophy of Taylor as it is about the philosophy of Hegel. Or at the very least, Hegel through a Taylorian lens. Because of this, it is fascinating. Taylor begins, “Hegel’s spirit, or Geist, although he is often called ‘God’, and although claimed to be clarifying Christian theology, is not the God of traditional theism; he is not a God who could exist quite independently of men…. He is a spirit who lives as spirit only through men. They are the vehicles, and the indispensable vehicles, of his spiritual existence, as consciousness, rationality, will. But at the same time Geist is not reducible to man, he is not identical with the human spirit, since he is also the spiritual reality underlying the universe as a whole.”  Hegel stated, “The geological organism is only vitality in itself, the truly living organism is its other.” Taylor expands, “For the mature Hegel, man comes to himself in the end when he sees himself as the vehicle of a larger spirit.”

Hegel’s Geist can be thought of as the embodiment of reason. “Our conception of spirit and its self-realization must have a place for reason if man is to be the vehicle of cosmic spirit and yet retain his autonomy…. Rational understanding is not possible without a clear consciousness of the distinction between subject and object, self and other, the rational and the affective. And just because of this, Hegel will insist that the ultimate synthesis incorporate division as well as unity…. Thus Hegel in his mature system developed an original stand vis-a-vis the generation to which he belonged in time and aspiration. He did not slough off their aspirations—to combine the fullest moral autonomy of the subject with the highest expressive unity within man, between men and with nature. He shared the hope that this unprecedented and epoch-making synthesis could be made only if one could win through to a vision of a spiritual reality underlying nature, a cosmic subject, to whom man could relate himself and in which he could ultimately find himself.” Hegel proclaimed, “In self-consciousness as the concept of Geist, consciousness comes to a turning point, at which it steps out of the multi-colored show of sensible immanence and the empty night of suprasensible transcendence into the spiritual daylight of presence.” Furthermore, Hegel believed it fell upon philosophy the task of “the cancellation of division.” He went on, “The Absolute itself is thus the identity of identity and non-identity; opposition and unity are both in it.” Taylor explains, “In Hegel’s final position, philosophy occupies the highest place, just because it is the only fully adequate expression of the highest unity, the medium in which spirit comes totally to itself, and hence the development of philosophical thought is essential to the perfection of this highest synthesis.”

Hegel considered himself a Christian. He tried to square the circle between reason and faith. Taylor exposits, “Faith triumphantly returns; indeed, [Hegel] would not agree to call it ‘faith’; it is the cornerstone of his philosophical system, the Hegelian notion of Vernunft (Reason)…. The fact that he pondered so long on man’s religious and social development made him use the categories of post-Kantian idealism with a much richer field of reference and to incomparably greater effect…. With Hegel philosophy is used to illuminate the whole field of human history—political, religious, philosophical, artistic.” Hegel had this to say about the effect of disenchantment brought on by the Protestant Enlightenment, “Christianity has depopulated Valhalla, hewn down the sacred groves, and rooted out the phantasy of the people as shameful superstition, as a diabolical poison.” He would also claim, “The Enlightenment, this vanity of the understanding, is philosophy’s most forceful opponent.”

Taylor describes Hegel’s dialectics of thought and being, as well as between subject and object, “Our thinking as finite subjects, turns out to be that of the cosmos itself, or the cosmic subject, God, whose vehicles we are. In the higher vision of speculative philosophy, the world loses its otherness to thought, and subjectivity goes beyond finitude, and hence the two meet. We overcome the dualism between subject and world, between knowing man and nature, in seeing the world as the necessary expression of thought, or rational necessity, while we see ourselves as the necessary vehicles of this thought, as the point where it becomes conscious…. This means that we come to see ourselves not just as finite subjects, with our own thoughts as it were, but as vehicles of a thought which is more than just ours, that is in a sense the thought of the universe as a whole, or in Hegel’s terms, God…. Hegel solves the problem of uniting finite to infinite spirit without loss of freedom through his notion of reason…. The rational agent loses none of his freedom in coming to accept his vocation as vehicle of cosmic necessity…. The infinite subject is such that in order to be he must have an external embodiment; and who says external embodiment says embodiment in space and time, an embodiment which is somewhere and sometime, in a particular living being, with all that this involves. The infinite subject can only be through a finite one.” Hegel pontificated, “The Oriental world knew only that one man was free—the king represented the absolute principle…. The Greek world won through to an intuition of freedom, but saw only that some were free…. Only with Christianity do we win through to the intuition that man as such is free.”

In the middle of this tome, Taylor goes into minute detail breaking down the chapters of “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (PhG) line by line. It is a critique in which he seeks to articulate how Hegel returns again and again to the basics of his dialectic, as he moves forward through human history, “The PhG intends to start with our ordinary consciousness of things (das naturliches BewuBtsein), and to take us from there to the true perspective of Geist. The work is called a ‘phenomenology’ because it deals with the way things appear for consciousness, or with forms of consciousness. But ‘appearance’ here is not to be contrasted with ‘reality’; what is most real, the absolute, is essentially self-appearance…. Our ordinary consciousness takes us to be individual, finite subjects set over against the world. The perspective of Geist, on the other hand, shows us as vehicles of a spirit which is also expressed in the world, so that this world is no longer distinct from us…. It is to show how ordinary consciousness carefully examined breaks down in contradiction and itself points beyond itself to a more adequate form…. This means that we must follow the dialectical movement in consciousness…. If the argument follows a dialectical movement, then this must be in the things themselves, not just in the way we reason about them…. And yet these partial realities, just because they exist externally, each alongside the others, make a standing claim to independence which belies their status as posited vehicles of the whole…. The whole furniture of the world is there in order to embody Geist and to manifest what he essentially is, self-knowing spirit, self-thinking thought, pure rational necessity.”

In the PhG, Hegel continued on with the concept of self-consciousness. Taylor argues, “With self-consciousness, the dialectic will be between the idea of ourselves, what we claim to be, and what we actually are. These are the two moments Hegel calls self-certainty and truth…. The dialectic of self-consciousness is thus a dialectic of human longing and aspiration, and their vicissitudes…. What is aimed at is integral expression, a consummation where the external reality which embodies us and on which we depend is fully expressive of us and contains nothing alien. This goal, which we can call a state of total integrity, is identified in Hegel with his conception of infinity, a condition in which the subject is not limited by anything outside…. The real thing can only be attained when men come to see themselves as emanation of universal Geist. For it is only then that they will not see the surrounding universe as a limit, an other.” Vocation is the means by which the self-consciousness is reconciled with external reality. Taylor states, “Work thus plays a crucial role in man’s struggle for integrity…. This is why the principal path to integrity lies through recognition by another…. Man can come to see himself in the natural environment by making it over in conformity with his own project…. In transforming things we change ourselves. By creating a standing reflection of ourselves as universal beings we become such beings.” Taylor reasserts Hegel’s dialectic of the finite reconciled with the infinite, “We are condemned to particular existence as finite spirits. All we can do is to work through our particular existence in order to realize a form of life capable of carrying universal consciousness. We have to work through sin to atonement; sin itself is unavoidable.” Hegel stressed, “Only inaction is innocent, like the way of being a stone, but not even that of a child.”

Taylor next returns to Hegel’s conception of the movement of the world through history—the dialectic of particular and infinite existence through the process of death and becoming. “Hence infinity, the self-subsistent whole which we are forced to assume once we grasp the mortality of the finite, can only be the whole system of changing determinate beings. There is no foundation for finite things outside the system of the finite. Hence there is no source outside the system on which we can draw to explain the coming to be of new finite things. Their coming to be is just the passing away of their predecessors…. Not only the passing away but the coming to be of finite things happens of necessity…. Thus the infinite as the whole system of changing finite things is the unfolding of conceptual necessity, for these things change and deploy themselves in a perpetual attempt to resolve contradiction. Contradiction is the motor of things. And it touches everything, so that everything is swept along in a perpetual becoming…. It is a totality, a whole whose parts are intrinsically related to each other, that is, where each can only be understood by its relations to the others…. It makes all the difference between seeing the whole as a contingent grouping of finite things, and seeing it as a totality which deserves to be called ‘infinite’ in Hegel’s sense of the term, and in which the finite is seen as having its truth in the Idea…. But Infinity is still a poor and abstract version of the Idea. For we only know that it has a necessary structure deployed in space and time.” Taylor later expands, “The infinite only achieves its identity by reconciling contradiction, by finding itself in its other…. The Idea is thus a process of positing its other and then recovering its unity with itself in its other (EL, 215, WL, II, 412)…. Thus the unity of Idea and reality cannot be simply an sich [in itself], as it is in Life, it must also be fur sich [for itself].” Hegel opined, “The Idea, by virtue of the freedom which the Concept attains in it, has also the most stubborn opposition within itself; its repose consists in the security and certainty with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes this opposition, and comes together with itself in it [in ihm mit sich selbst zusammengeht].”

Taylor next interrogates Hegel’s conception of freedom. “The freedom of a civilized man is not to be found in defiance of the laws which necessitate his being other than he immediately is, but rather in his finding his own identity in this change, in this transformation of himself. He then understands and lives the rational necessity which corresponds to his own nature, which came first in the guise of external necessity, but which as rational, and his own, is freedom. Freedom is in living in rational, i.e., one’s own, necessity.” Hegel contrasted this with an absolute freedom, “Universal freedom can produce no positive work or deed; only negative action remains to it; it is only the fury of destruction.”

Unlike Kant, Hegel felt that mankind could grasp ontological reality. The real was not destined to be forever masked behind a veil of appearances. Taylor states, “The search for self-subsistent necessity only reaches its end in a vision of reality as a necessary totality…. Reality constituted a totality governed by necessity and which manifested this necessity…. The whole must display contingency on its surface, as it were, since this is inseparable from exteriority…. Reality as absolute or unconditioned necessity is structured by concepts…. Subjective thought reaches the same culmination as reality, that the concept in the mind is fundamentally one with the ontological concept…. The motor of this development is the ‘absolute contradiction’ (EL, 194) which consists in the fact that the real is at once a totality, whose parts are thus inwardly related, and yet also made up of parts which are integral and independent (selbstandig and vollstandig)…. We start off with things purely external and independent. Each thing is external and indifferent to the others. But this means that it is a mere aggregate in itself, for there is no reason to draw boundaries of a thing or object at any given level…. In teleology we have the fullest embodiment of internal necessity…. For this is the notion of a sense or purpose which is inherent in the object itself. The purpose is its essence, its most profound characterization…. Their form is also a necessity…. To conform to it is freedom for them.” Hegel related, “But men have a fate because they act out of their universal nature, and yet inevitably sin against this nature, fate being the retribution of the genus on the particular acting man.”

Taylor returns once again to the dialectic of embodied particulars, living in contingency, against the universal Idea, “We only achieve the return of Being to itself with the Idea, that is, with the understanding that reality is the locus of a double movement, only one of which starts from Being. The other, which is the more fundamental one, starts from the inner necessity, from the Idea, itself…. The multiplicity of determinate beings is bound together by necessity. The real return to unity comes when we see this necessity as absolute. But if necessity is absolute, then everything that exists, all being, exists for a purpose. So that the starting point is really this purpose itself, the inner formula of necessity, or the Idea…. So Hegel establishes his ontology. What is primary is subject or reason or conceptual necessity…. Hence both that the world exists and what it is like are necessary, given that reason, subject, necessity must be…. For in starting with Being, the simplest, emptiest, most inescapable postulate, that there is (some kind or other) of reality, he claims to have shown that the dependence of everything on reason or the Idea follows inescapably. Hence the circle is closed…. The teleology is internal.”

Taylor finishes by delving into Hegel’s views on history, politics, culture, art, religion, and philosophy. It is in the nature of man to relate to other men through the external world. Man is, by necessity, embodied, finite, and particular. Taylor begins by relating Hegel to Herder’s theory of language, “When we think of a human being, we do not simply mean a living organism, but a being who can think, feel, decide, be moved, respond, enter into relations with others; and all this implies a language, a related set of ways of experiencing the world, of interpreting his feelings, understanding his relation to others, to the past, the future, the absolute, and so on. It is the particular way he situates himself within this cultural world that we call his identity…. What we are as human beings, we are only in a cultural community…. The life of a language and culture is one whose locus is larger than that of the individual.” This culture has its unity in the State. Hegel claimed, “The state is not there for the sake of the citizens; one could say, it is the goal and they are its instruments. But this relation of ends and means is quite inappropriate here. For the state is not something abstract, standing over against the citizens; but rather they are moments as in organic life, where no member is end and none means…. The essence of the state is ethical life [die sittliche Lebendigkeit].” Hegel further explained how the individual and the State related to each other, “The principle of modern states has prodigious strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to progress to its culmination in the extreme of self-subsistent personal particularity, and yet at the same time brings it back to the substantive unity and so maintains this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.” Taylor claims, “Thus what is strange and contestable in Hegel’s theory of the state is not the idea of a larger life in which men are immersed, or the notion that the public life of a society expresses certain ideas, which are thus in a sense the ideas of the society as a whole and not just of the individuals, so that we can speak of a people as having a certain ‘spirit’. For throughout most of human history men have lived most intensely in relation to the meanings expressed in the public life of their societies…. But where Hegel does make a substantial claim which is not easy to grant is in his basic ontological view, that man is the vehicle of cosmic spirit, and the corollary, that the state expresses the underlying formula of necessity by which this spirit posits the world… the thesis that men—and hence in their own way these Volkgeister [spirits of the peoples]—are vehicles of a cosmic spirit which is returning to self-consciousness through man…. Thus his ideal is not a condition in which individuals are means to an end, but rather a community in which like a living organism, the distinction between means and ends is overcome, everything is both means and ends…. The rational state will restore Sittlichkeit [ethics], the embodiment of the highest norms in an ongoing public life.”

Taylor expands on Hegel’s conception of morality. In this, Hegel somewhat follows Kant’s deontological reasoning. Taylor states of Hegel, “Man is a moral agent because as a bearer of will he ought to conform his will to universal reason…. But as the subject of morality man still figures as an individual. The demand of morality is that I come to recognize that I am under the obligation of willing universal reason, simply in virtue of being a man…. The demands of morality in other words are inner as well as outer…. I have to do the right because it is the right; and it follows from this that I have to understand the right myself…. Morality touches our intentions and not just our acts.” As a self-professed Christian, for Hegel, religion comes into ethics. Taylor asks, “How does a Hegelian philosopher pray? Certainly the prayer of petition has no meaning for him. Nor can he really thank God. What he does is to contemplate his identity with cosmic spirit…. Thus the Hegelian ontology itself in which everything can be grasped by reason because everything is founded on rational necessity is ultimately incompatible with Christian faith. Hegel’s philosophy is an extraordinary transposition which ‘saves the phenomena’ (that is, the dogmas) of Christianity, while abandoning its essence.” Taylor concludes, “Hegel himself was the first ‘death of God’ theologian. For we have seen that Christ’s death plays a crucial and necessary role as the indispensable basis for the coming of the Spirit and hence the Spiritualization of God’s presence, which is the same as the building of this presence into the life of the community. Men must first of all see God concentrated in a single man. But this point of concentration has to disappear, if the fuller truth is to emerge that men carry God as a community, that God is in each and beyond each. God is like a flame which passes from mortal candle to mortal candle, each destined to light and go out, but the flame to be eternal.”