“Parfit” by David Edmonds

This is a biography of Derek Parfit, written by Edmonds, who studied philosophy under Parfit’s wife, Janet Radcliffe Richards. Renowned as an intellectual giant from his days at Eton and Oxford, there seemed to be little academically that Parfit could not do with ease. His pivot to devote his life to philosophy as a fellow at All Souls College seemed natural, even though he had never studied philosophy formally before applying. Parfit explained, “I remember wondering whether it was more likely that the continental philosophers would change, by discussing their important subjects in a clearer and better argued way, or that the analytical philosophers would change, by applying their clarity and logic to important subjects. I decided that the second seemed more likely, and I think I was right.” Parfit never finished beyond his undergraduate degree in history. But he saw this as a plus, “Because I never took a degree in philosophy, I have only read those books and articles that I wanted to read. That has helped me to love the subject.”

Parfit’s eccentric personality actually meshed well with his philosophy. His most famous book, only one of two he published, was Reasons and Persons. “Parfit once summed up the entire history of ethics in four neat steps: 1. Forbidden by God. 2. Forbidden by God, therefore wrong. 3. Wrong, therefore forbidden by God. 4. Wrong.” Parfit thought that humanity was relatively new in working out the implications for step 4, a secular morality that was objective. “Reasons and Persons would apply reason and logic to ethics without the distorting influence of God.” Parfit was very hard on himself and his intellect. As he aged, he maniacally focussed more and more on meta-ethics, because he felt that was all that really mattered in life. He truly believed that “everything he had written to date, every philosophical argument he had ever made, every conclusion he had ever reached, was pointless, worthless, and illusory, unless moral reasoning could be moored to solid ground. The solid ground had to be moral objectivity…. If morality was not objective, there was no reason to act in one way rather than another. He went further. If morality was not objective, life was meaningless. His own life was meaningless, and every human and animal life was meaningless.” Parfit explained, “I got increasingly disturbed and alarmed by the number of good philosophers who just assumed that there couldn’t be any normative truths.”

In the final decades of his life, Parfit was consumed by the fact that other very smart philosophers could not see his points and still disagreed with him. He revealed, “I am deeply worried by disagreements with people who seem as likely as I am to be getting things right.” Edmonds explains, “Parfit came to believe that dissent about ethics—especially dissent between leading philosophers—was evidence for its relativism. And he thought that relativism essentially collapsed into nihilism…. For Parfit, the thought that moral values might be merely something we project onto the world caused almost existential anguish. If moral values were relative, then we must conclude, he believed, that almost everything in his life was pointless…. Parfit needed his morality to be anchored in bedrock. There had to be an objective reason to relieve from suffering someone who is needlessly in pain…. It is not mere opinion. It is to do with our relationship to the world.”

Parfit also had a unique perspective on death. Upon a friend’s wife’s death, Parfit tried to console him, “When I think of someone dead whom I loved, it helps me to remember that this person isn’t less real because she isn’t real now, just as people far away aren’t less real because they aren’t real here.” Much of his philosophy was focussed on the nature of persons, the individual, and the continuity of personality. Parfit reassured himself, “I find it very comforting to think that all [death] means is that there will be no future person who is related to me in a certain way.” Finally, Parfit explained, “My life is my work. I believe I have found good reasons for believing that values aren’t just subjective and that some things really do matter. If my arguments don’t succeed, my life has been wasted.”

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

Alter does not mince words. “Ezekiel is surely the strangest of all the prophets.” Next, he gives a little background. “He was a Jerusalem priest, in all likelihood part of the group of an exiled elite that was deported to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in 597 B.C.E., a decade before the destruction of Jerusalem and the more general exile. His entire activity as a prophet took place in Babylonia.” Ezekiel’s prophecies reflect his vocation in the priesthood. “Ezekiel often exhibits distinctively priestly concerns—with purity and impurity, with the Temple and architectural configurations, and with the regimen of sacrifices. But what most distinguishes Ezekiel is that so much of his prophesying is conducted in a condition that looks like God-intoxicated derangement…. His power as a prophet stems from the hallucinatory vividness and utter originality of his visions.”

In Ezekiel 1:4, Ezekiel seems to see an image of God. Alter explains the uniqueness of Ezekiel’s specific prophecy, “a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud, and fire flashing, and radiance all round it…. God reveals himself in fire and lightning and cloud…. It combines the pyrotechnic paraphernalia of divine revelation with imagery evidently borrowed from sundry Mesopotamian sources—the wheeled throne, the four faces of the creatures like the four faces of the Babylonian god Marduk, the iconic animals…. It is visibly poetic prose…. The words do not scan as poetry, yet some of the diction is poetic…. Ezekiel has devised a prophetic prose-poetry that has scant precedents.” Alter then details, in Ezekiel 1:28, exactly how unique this vision is, “the look of fire with radiance all round. Like the look of the rainbow that is in the clouds on a day of rain, this was the look of the radiance all round, the look of the likeness of the glory of the Lord…. Never before in biblical literature has God’s “glory,” kavod, been given such visual realization.”

Alter gives a little historical background and a linguistic lesson in Ezekiel 3:15, “Tel Abib. Though this looks like a Hebrew name, “mound of the sprouting season,” and modern-day Tel Aviv drew the name from here, it is actually Akkadian and means “mound of the flood.”” Ezekiel often repeated himself. In Ezekiel 7:4, Alter relates one such echo, “you shall know that I am the Lord. This is a virtual refrain in Ezekiel. The idea behind it is that until now the people, pursuing its refractory ways, behaved as though YHWH did not exist, but as they bear the terrible punishment for their acts, they will be forced to recognize His existence and power.” Alter describes some more linguistics of note in Ezekiel 9:4, “trace a mark on the foreheads. The word for “mark,” taw, is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In paleo-Hebrew script, the form of this letter was an X. The saving mark on the forehead recalls the mark that saves Cain from retribution.”

In Ezekiel 20:12, Alter details the history of the time period, “And My sabbaths, too, I gave to them to be a sign between Me and them. In the late monarchic period and on into the era of exile, there was an increasing emphasis on the centrality of the sabbath, as attested in passages in Jeremiah and Trito-Isaiah as well as in Ezekiel. The portability of the sabbath as a community-affirming observance may have made it especially appealing in a time when the Temple was no longer accessible.”

Alter is quick to point out a poetic flourish. In Ezekiel 26:16, he states, “They shall don shuddering. In a shrewd metaphorical move, the Tyrian princes, having shed all their finery, clothe themselves not in garments but in shudders.” In Ezekiel 27:11, Alter points out another bit of poetry—or, rather, lack there of, “Men of Arvad. One should note that Ezekiel readily slips from poetry—virtually required by the qinah, the lament form—into prose, with no real change in content. This is not a prophet who is entirely comfortable in verse.”

In Ezekiel 33:16, Alter describes a finer point of theology, “All his offenses that he committed shall not be recalled for him. In Ezekiel’s vision of divine justice, a person lives in a condition of constant existential choice: the wicked man can reverse the dire consequences of all his previous trespasses by deciding to do what is right, and the righteous man can cancel all the good effects of his acts of justice by sliding into acts of wickedness.” Alter also notes when previous books of the bible are referenced. In Ezekiel 36:10, it is Genesis, “I will multiply humankind upon you. The mountains have been shorn of human population by the devastating conquest. Now they will again abound with people. The verb “multiply” and the term for “humankind,” ‘adam, obliquely recall the Creation story: the national restoration is to be a second Genesis.”

Finally, Ezekiel spends the last few chapters of the book going through the minutia of a second Temple is mystifying detail. In Ezekiel 41:2, Alter helps break it down, “And the width of the entrance was ten cubits, and the supports of the entrance five cubits on each side. Most modern translations seek to impart coherence to this whole account of the layout of the Temple by choosing terms familiar in our own architecture—“vestibules,” ledges,” “porticoes,” and the like—and rearranging the tangled syntax. But, in fact, even if we knew the precise meaning of these architectural terms, which we do not, Ezekiel’s report of spatial entities and their dimensions is quit bewildering. The clarity, then, of the modern translation is illusory, and the present translation is meant to replicate the bewilderment conveyed in the Hebrew.”

“Writings on Philosophy and Language” by Johann Georg Hamann (translated by Kenneth Haynes)

Hamann is an esoteric writer. He peppers in obscure references to biblical passages and philosophical tracts on every page, sometimes even multiple times in one rambling sentence. He had to obfuscate cleverly to say what he wanted to say, to be able to bash the contemporary rationalizing trends of Frederick II, and to not get in trouble. Frederick II was, after all, the man who paid his keep. And Hamann would insist—not well. Therefore, he used allegory and subterfuge to hide his true meanings. Hamann toiled in relative obscurity compared to his friend, Johann Herder, and his most frequent sparring partner, Immanuel Kant. Nonetheless, he was known by some, in his time, as the Magus of the North.

Hamann’s writings are hidden with jewels for those inclined to suffer over the lines and dig them out. He wrote much on the origins of culture and, especially, language. “There must be similarities among all human languages based on the uniformity of our nature…. The natural mode of thinking has an influence on language…. The lineaments of a people’s language will therefore correspond with the orientation of its mode of thinking, which is revealed through the nature, form, laws, and customs of its speech as well as through its external culture and through a spectacle of public actions…. From this orientation of the mode of thinking arises the comparative wealth in some areas of the language and the poverty that runs parallel to it in other areas.”

Hamann was a pietist and a traditionalist. He despised the modern trends towards the primacy of reason cleft from culture. “The man to whom history (by virtue of its name) yields science, and philosophy knowledge, and poetry taste not only becomes eloquent himself but almost always the equal of the ancient orators…. Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance…. The senses and passions speak and understand nothing but images. All the wealth of human knowledge and happiness consists in images…. Is all your human reason anything other than tradition and inheritance, and is anything much involved in tracing the pedigree of your trite, bald, and twice dead opinions to the roots of the family tree?”

Tradition, for Hamann, was the wellspring of all morality. Free will was also a necessary condition of humanity. “Without the freedom to be evil there is no merit, and without the freedom to be good no responsibility for one’s own guilt, and indeed no knowledge of good and evil. Freedom is the maximum and minimum of all our natural powers as well as both the fundamental drive and the final goal of their entire orientation, evolution, and return…. Everyone is his own legislator but also the first-born and the neighbor of his subjects…. Without fire and hearth, one is no citizen; without land and people, no prince; and the priestly nation of a mere bookbag-religion is, according to the expression of Scripture, a reproach to God and to divine reason.”

Despite being a Christian preacher and bashing Moses Mendelssohn mercilessly, Hamann had immense respect for Jewish tradition and, especially, the Old Testament. “A philosopher and citizen of the world ought to value the most ancient document because it concerns the entire human race and also because Moses illuminates the human race’s true relationships to his people without selfish prejudices…. However favorable the most recent etymology of the word Adel [“nobility”] from an Arabic root may be to the European centaur-knighthood, the Jew nevertheless is still the authentic first nobleman of the entire human race, and the prejudice of their family and ancestral pride is grounded more deeply than all the titles in the ludicrous chancery style of heraldry.”

Finally, Hamann blends reason and faith into a true complete knowledge. “The spirit of observation and the spirit of prophecy are the wings of human genius. All that is present belongs to the domain of the former; all that is absent, the past and the future, belongs to the domain of the latter. Philosophical genius expresses its power through striving, by means of abstraction, to make what is present absent; it disrobes actual objects into naked concepts and merely conceivable attributes, into pure appearances and phenomena. Poetic genius expresses its power through transfiguring, by means of fiction, visions of the absent past and future into present representations. Criticism and politics resist the usurpations of both powers and ensure that they are balanced, through these positive forces and means of observation and prophecy…. Since the sum of the present is infinitely small as against the manifold aggregate of the absent, and since the spirit of prophecy is infinitely superior to the simple spirit of observation, it therefore follows that our faculty of knowledge depends on the many-headed modifications of the inmost, darkest, and deepest instincts of approbation and desire, to which it must be subject.”

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

In Alter’s introduction he points out a few traits that are unique about the Book of Jeremiah. First, Alter gets into a bit of history. “Of all the prophets, Jeremiah is the one who conveys to us the most vivid sense of the man behind the words…. Jeremiah, a priest from the town of Anathoth near Jerusalem who was active from the 620s B.C.E. until the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586, tells us a good deal about himself because of his continual anguish over his prophetic calling…. A century before the beginning of Jeremiah’s mission, the northern kingdom of Israel had been overwhelmed by Assyrian invaders. A large part of the population was deported to sundry locations elsewhere in the Assyrian empire…. The other major event that stamped a strong mark on Jeremiah’s prophecies was the sweeping religious reforms instigated by King Josiah beginning around 622 B.C.E…. The exclusive centralization of the cult was thus associated with Deuteronomy’s persistent preoccupation with backsliding into paganism and with the notion that the worship of strange gods would lead directly to national disaster and exile as punishment for the people’s failure to honor the covenant with its God…. All this is translated into Jeremiah’s central message…. So often Jeremiah’s prophecies are bitter denunciations of the people’s wayward behavior accompanied by dire predictions that this will lead to scorched earth for the kingdom of Judah and exile for its inhabitants…. This sort of message, delivered at a time when Babylonian forces (597 B.C.E. and again in 587-586) were besieging Jerusalem, could not have made Jeremiah a very popular figure.” Alter describes the language in the Book of Jeremiah specifically, “As a poet he does not exhibit a great deal of either the verbal virtuosity of Isaiah son of Amoz or the metaphoric brilliance of Second Isaiah…. Many of the poems use stereotypical phrases, and a considerable portion of the prophecies is delivered in prose.”

In Jeremiah 1:15, Alter relates what he sees as the deficient poetical style of this prophet, “each set his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem…. What emerges is a rather surrealistic picture of kings on their thrones sitting in siege against Jerusalem. It should be noted that many scholars, including the editors of the Biblia Hebraica, read all or most of the section beginning with verse 14 as poetry. To this translator, however, all these verses do not seem to be sufficiently tight metrically to qualify as verse; however, as is often the case with high-rhetorical prose, they exhibit loose approximations of the parallel structures of poetry.”

The Book of Jeremiah, like the Book of Deuteronomy, is focused on blasphemous and idolatrous acts more than worldly wrongs. Alter states of Jeremiah 2:34, “the lifeblood of the innocent poor. Remarkably, this is the very first reference in the book to a sin of perpetrating injustice rather than a cultic trespass.” The notion of exile first comes up in Jeremiah 5:19. Alter relates, “thus shall you serve strangers in a land that is not yours. Here the prophecy of exile—an immanent threat throughout Jeremiah’s career—is made explicit. Serving strangers is measure-for-measure retribution for serving alien gods.”

The issue of the worship of pagan gods is a theme that is returned to again and again. In Jeremiah 10:6, Alter points out, “Because none is like you, O LORD. In antithesis to the absurdity of idol worship, the prophet launches on a kind hymn to God’s greatness. The phrase “none like you, O LORD” echoes the “Who is like You among the gods, O LORD” of the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:11), but, significantly, “among the gods” is deleted because Jeremiah, at this relatively late moment, no longer imagines that there may be other, punier gods alongside YHWH.”

Alter kindly details random points of interest in his footnotes. In Jeremiah 10:11, “Thus shall you say to them. This entire verse is in Aramaic, being the only complete sentence in Aramaic in the Hebrew Bible apart from the Aramaic sections of Nehemiah and Daniel. There have been suggestions from Late Antiquity onward that Jeremiah is addressing the group of Judahites exiled to Babylonia in 597 B.C.E., who would have been constrained to speak Aramaic to their pagan captors.” Alter also describes translation decisions and his reasonings in his detailed notes. In Jeremiah 17:9, he reveals, “More crooked the heart than all things. While the adjective ‘aqov certainly suggests “deceitful,” as many translations reflect, the root meaning of “crooked” is worth preserving. This is an etymology of Jacob’s name, as the angry Esau reminds us in Genesis 27:36.” Alter also notes when the scripture holds greater historical significance. In Jeremiah 18:6, he relates, “like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand. This entire sentence was imported for an impressive liturgical poem in the Yom Kippur service. The symbolic use of the potter harks back to the version of creation of humankind in Genesis 2, where God fashioned—the potter’s verb yatsar is used—the human creature from the soil.”

In Jeremiah 25:17, Alter describes an unusual occurrence in prophecy, “And I took the cup from the hand of the LORD. This is a bold and quite uncommon move: the metaphoric cup of wrath seems to become an actual cup that the prophet takes from God’s hand. Such quasiphysical proximity between God and prophet is altogether unusual. But since the cup is, after all, symbolic, the prophet’s taking it from the hand of the LORD finally must be understood as a purely figurative act, and that understanding is confirmed by his making the nations drink from it, an act that could not be literally performed.”

Finally, Alter notes a poetic exception from common biblical form in Jeremiah 50:25, “for the LORD of Armies has a task / in the land of the Chaldeans. This is a striking instance in which instead of the usual semantic parallelism in the second half of the line of poetry, a surprise is sprung. The word “task” in itself might seem innocuous, but when it is followed by “in the land of the Chaldeans,” and after the mention of weapons of wrath, the task turns out to be a grim mission of destruction throughout Babylonia.”

“The Skeptic Way- Outlines of Pyrrhonism” by Sextus Empiricus (translated by Benson Mates)

Sextus Empiricus was a Greek physician who lived in the second century A.D. He was a follower of Pyrrhonean Skepticism and wrote this treatise as a summary of Pyrrhonean thought. As for its influence, Mates claims, “The rediscovery and publication of these works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led directly to the skepticism of Montaigne, Gassendi, Descartes, Bayle, and other major figures.”

Empiricus begins on the fundamentals of truth. “Some people have claimed to have found the truth, others have asserted that it cannot be apprehended, and others are still searching…. The Skeptics continue to search…. As regards none of the things that we are about to say do we firmly maintain that matters are absolutely as stated, but in each instance we are simply reporting, like a chronicler, what now appears to be the case.” With that major caveat, which applies to his entire treatise, he goes on. “The Skeptic Way is called Zetetic [“questioning”] from its activity in questioning and inquiring, Ephectic [“suspensive”] from the pathos that arises concerning the subject of inquiry, Aporetic [“inclined to aporiai [the characteristic of being stumped]”] either as some say, from its being puzzled and questioning about everything or from its being at a loss as to whether to assent or dissent, and Pyrrohnean because it appears to us that Pyrrho applied himself to Skepticism more vigorously and conspicuously than his predecessors…. The Skeptic Way is a disposition to oppose phenomena and noumena to one another in any way whatever.”

The Skeptics had an ambivalent view on the concepts of the Good and the Bad. “The person who believes that something is by nature good or bad is constantly upset; when he does not possess the things that seem to be good, he thinks he is being tormented by things that are by nature bad, and he chases after the things he supposes to be good; then, when he gets these, he falls into still more torments because of irrational and immoderate exultation, and, fearing any change, he does absolutely everything in order not to lose the things that seem to him good. But the person who takes no position as to what is by nature good or bad neither avoids nor pursues intensely. As a result he achieves ataraxia [peace of mind]…. The [first] Skeptics were hoping to achieve ataraxia by resolving the anomaly of phenomena and noumena, and, being unable to do this, they suspended judgment. But then, by chance as it were, when they were suspending judgment the ataraxia followed, as a shadow follows the body. We do not suppose, of course, that the Skeptic is wholly untroubled, but we do say that he is troubled only by things that are unavoidable.” Later, Empiricus continues, “Thus the Skeptic, seeing so much anomaly in the matters at hand, suspends judgment as to whether by nature something is good or bad or, generally, ought or ought not be done…. He follows, without any belief, the ordinary course of life; for this reason he has no pathos one way or the other as regards matters of belief, while his pathe [feelings] in regard to things forced upon him are moderate. As a human being he has sensory pathe, but since he does not add to these the belief that what he experiences is by nature bad, his pathe are moderate…. He who supposes that something is by nature good or bad or, in general, ought or ought not be done, is upset in all sorts of ways…. From what has been said it is evident that there can be no such thing as an art of living.”

As regards to everyday wants, the Skeptics discovered the concept of marginal utility. “Things that are rare seem precious, but things that are familiar and easy to get do not. Indeed, if we thought of water as rare, how much more precious it would appear than all the things that do seem precious! And if we imagine gold simply scattered on the ground like stones, to whom do we think it would then be precious and worth hoarding away?”

The Skeptics spend a lot of time dealing with subjective appearances as opposed to the things in and of themselves, which they realize are impossible to comprehend independently. “For, as the Dogmatists say, the intellect does not of itself get in contact with external objects and receive phantasiai [sensory impressions] from them, but it does so by means of the senses; and the senses do not apprehend the external objects but only their own pathe, if anything. And so the phantasia will be of a sensory pathos, which is not the same thing as the external object…. And since this pathos differs from the external object, the phantasia will not be of the external object but of something different…. Nor again can one say that the soul apprehends the external objects by means of the sensory pathe because the pathe of the senses are similar to the external objects. For from whence will the intellect know whether the pathe of the senses are similar to the objects of sense…. The intellect, looking at the pathe of the senses but not having observed the external objects, will not know whether the pathe of the senses resemble the external objects.”

Empiricus does not put any weight in the mental gymnastics displayed by the Sophists and by apparent paradoxes. There is a simplicity to the Skeptic refutation. “If, therefore, when an argument is propounded in which the conclusion is false we know at once that because of having the false conclusion it is not true and sound, we shall not give our assent to it even though we may not know where the fallacy lies…. If the argument leads us to something unacceptable, it is not we who should give precipitate assent to the paradoxical result because of the plausibility of the argument, but it is the Dogmatists who should desist from an argument that forces them to assent to paradoxes, if indeed they have chosen, as they profess, to seek the truth and not indulge in silly talk like children…. If an argument is leading us to something generally considered paradoxical we shall not assent to the paradox because of the argument, but we shall avoid the argument because of the paradox.”

Finally, Empiricus concludes by returning to the art of living, the supposedly wise, and the restraints of reason on the pathe. “If one cannot come to possess the so-called “art of living” either by learning and teaching or by nature, that art so much vaunted by the philosophers cannot be discovered…. And just as one would not say that a eunuch has self-control with respect to sexual pleasures, nor that a person with a bad stomach has self-control with respect to the enjoyment of food (since for such things they have no craving that they can combat by means of self-control), in the same way one ought not say that the wise man has self-control if he has no natural pathos to restrain by his self-control…. For if he has an impulse toward something, he is certainly perturbed, and if he controls it with reason, he still has the bad in himself…. Thus, insofar as it is up to his prudence, the wise man does not acquire self-control, or if he does, he is the most unfortunate of all, so that the art of living has brought him no benefit but the greatest perturbation.”

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

Alter makes the case that this book should be divided into three sections. “Isaiah son of Amoz, a Jerusalemite, began his career as a prophet in the 730s B.C.E…. Chapters 1-39 in the book that comes down to us incorporate the prophecies of Isaiah but also include much disparate material that is clearly later, some of it reflecting the imminent or actual fall of the Babylonian empire to the Persians in 539 B.C.E. Nothing from chapter 40 to the end of the book is the work of Isaiah son of Amoz. The strong scholarly consensus is that chapters 40-55 were composed by a prophet of the Babylonian exile, whose name is beyond recovery, prophesying a triumphant return of the exiles to Zion through the agency of the Persian emperor Cyrus…. The so-called Second Isaiah is followed by a Third Isaiah in what is now the last eleven chapters of the book. The situation presupposed in these chapters is the predicament of the community in the Persian province of Yehud, or Judah, after the rebuilding of the Temple, so the historical setting would have to be the fifth century B.C.E., although probably before the decisive mission of Ezra and Nehemiah in the middle of that century…. The claim that Third Isaiah is a disciple of Second Isaiah may be questioned because they are far too removed from each other in time—perhaps by as much as three generations.”

The bulk of the Book of Isaiah is written in verse. “It is above all the vehicle of poetry in all these prophets that demands close attention…. There are two reasons for the use of poetry, one theological and the other pragmatic. In most of these texts, the prophet represents himself as the mouthpiece of God’s words… and it is perfectly fitting that God should address Israel not in prose, which is closer to the language of everyday human intercourse, but in the elevated and impressive diction of poetry. The more pragmatic reason for the use of verse is that, as in all poetic systems, poetry is memorable in the technical sense…. All three of the principal poets in the Isaian corpus exhibit a good deal of technical virtuosity, and, of course, this will often not be visible in translation. Isaiah son of Amoz is particularly adept in thematically pointed wordplay…. Plays on words resist even approximation in English. More pervasively, in all of the Isaian poets, the expressive power of the line of biblical poetry, in which the second verset concretizes, intensifies, or focuses what is expressed in the first, is exploited with great resourcefulness.”

In Isaiah 1:3, Alter notes the book’s first use of the complementary versets, “the donkey its master’s stall. This line is a neat illustration of the pattern of focusing or concretization in the movement from the first verset to the second in biblical poetry. The first verset puts forth the general relation of beast to owner; the second verset (with metrical room for an additional word in the parallelism because the verb “knows” does double duty for both halves of the line and need not be repeated) then focuses on the place of nurture connecting beast and master.”

Alter stresses, in Isaiah 6:8, that God speaks through the prophet’s mouth, allowing him the authority to also speak in verse, “Here I am, send me. The obvious implication is that, the prophet’s lips having been cleansed, he is now ready to take up his mission. There is a linguistic note as well as a spiritual one in all of this: poetry, purportedly representing divine speech, is the prophet’s vehicle; now, with his lips purified, he is in a condition to utter this elevated and powerful form of speech.”

Throughout his footnotes, Alter also focuses on the aesthetics of the language. He calls out especially beautiful and powerful images in particular lines of verse. In Isaiah 9:1, he notes, “The people walking in darkness/ have seen a great light. This is one of the most arresting instances of antithetical parallelism in biblical poetry. The line is starkly simple yet haunting.”

In his commentary to Isaiah 24:1, Alter begins by making a historical conjecture and then continues to justify one of his translation choices, “The Lord is about to sap the earth and strip it…. These words mark the beginning of a new large unit that runs to the end of chapter 27. In the judgment of most scholars it is at the very least a century and a half later than Isaiah son of Amoz, but this prophet is also a strong poet…. In keeping with this prophet’s cosmic outlook, ‘erets here means “earth” rather than “land.” This is a poet who exhibits a vigorous inventiveness in emphatic sound-play. Thus, “sap” and “strip” in this translation are only a pale approximation of boqeq and bolqah in the Hebrew.”

Often, Alter explains the origins and history of particular words. In Isaiah 29:1, he gives a bit more background, “Ariel. Although the second verset makes it clear that this is an epithet for Jerusalem, wildly disparate proposals have been made for the etymology of the name. Perhaps the least strained is that it means “lion of God,” which is to say, not an ordinary lion but some sort of heraldic lion; and a good candidate for that would be the cherubs carved over the Ark of the Covenant, which are more or less winged lions. By synecdoche, then, this carved beast in the Temple might have become an epithet for the city in which the Temple stood.”

In Isaiah 37:24, Alter again combines his historical and poetic knowledge to give insight, “I will go up to the heights of the mountains/ the far reaches of Lebanon. Although Sennacherib’s campaign did include Phoenicia, here he is besieging Jerusalem. The mountains of Lebanon, however, are the proverbial loftiest heights in biblical poetry, and yarketey levanon, “the far reaches of Lebanon,” contains an echo of yarketey tsafon, “the far reaches of Tsafon,” the dwelling place of the gods. Sennacherib’s declaration at this point sounds rather like that of the overweening king of Babylonia brought down to Sheol in chapter 14, which may allude to the text here. The cutting down of lofty cedars also figures in chapter 14.”

Alter relates the suddenness with which Second Isaiah begins his prophecy in Isaiah 40:1, “Comfort, O comfort My people. The prophecies of Second Isaiah begin abruptly, with no introductory formula as “The word of the Lord came to me, saying.” If such introductory matter once existed, it would have been editorially deleted in order to encourage the perception that these prophecies are a direct continuation of what had preceded. Scholars have long puzzled over who is being addressed in the first verse…. Perhaps it is simplest to assume that those addressed are people in general, or even nations, enjoined to comfort Israel. In any event, the key word “comfort” at the very beginning of Second Isaiah sounds the great theme of Second Isaiah’s prophecies.”

One of Alter’s repeated themes in his commentaries is the gradual stress away from paganism and towards a devout monotheistic worldview in the biblical text. In Isaiah 40:12, he points out, “Who with his hand’s hollow has measured the waters. With this prophecy, soaring poetry becomes the vehicle to convey God’s magisterial role over all creation. It is perhaps at this point, most likely in the later sixth century B.C.E., that the universalist potential of biblical monotheism is fully realized.”

Much of the Book of Isaiah deals with the impact of the Babylonian exile and the quest to return. In Isaiah 42:14, Alter expands on the conundrums that must have been on the minds of many, “I have been silent a very long time,/ kept my peace, held Myself in check. These words answer a theological quandary that would have plagued the exiles: where is the God of Israel, why does He allow us to be reduced to this lowly state? What God says is that He has chosen to be silent and hold back, but that moment is now past. like a woman in labor now I shriek. This simile marks the startling transition from God’s silence and self-occultation to the moment when a new era is born, with birth pangs like a human birth.”

In Isaiah 43:19, Alter points out another cyclical theme in the Bible, “I will make a way in the desert. The great highway in the desert that God will lay down for the return from exile is a symmetrical antithesis to the “way in the sea” (v. 16) He made for Israel in its first liberation from servitude. History is thus seen in a pattern of cyclical recurrences, with differences.”

Again, in Isaiah 48:1, Alter combines his knowledge of history and poetic structure to make a comment as to the prophetic word choices, “house of Jacob/ who are called by the name of Israel. Although it is a regular procedure in poetic parallelism to use “Jacob” (the primary term) in the first verset and “Israel” (the name to which “Jacob” was changed) in the second verset, the wording here looks as if it may be a gloss on the two names. Formerly “Israel” designated the northern kingdom, but since that kingdom was destroyed, the name has been attached to the Judahites as well, who now constitute the entire people. This adoption of the national name is further explained by the third verset, “who came out from Judah’s womb.””

In Isaiah 56:1, Alter makes the case that the section of Third Isaiah has begun, “Keep justice and do righteousness. This moral exhortation, coupled with the urging to observe the sabbath in the next verse, strikes a new note in the Isaiah collection, one that some commentators have characterized as “sermonic.” It is the strong consensus of biblical scholarship, with only a few dissenters, that Isaiah 56-66 is a later composition than Isaiah 40-55, and almost certainly the work of more than one prophet…. The probable period for these prophecies is the early decades of the fifth century B.C.E., before the arrival from Babylonia of Ezra and Nehemiah.”

Alter explains the significance of a repetition in Isaiah 60:7, which a casual reader might easily miss, “the house of My splendor I will make splendid. This is not a redundancy. The Temple by rights is the house of God’s splendor, but only when it is completely rebuilt and grandly refurbished will it achieve its status as the house of God’s splendor.”

In Isaiah 63:1, Alter describes the monotheistic God, once again still personified with semi-pagan attributes, “Who is this coming from Edom,/ in ensanguined garments from Bosra? The first six verses of this chapter are the most vivid—and grisly—representation in biblical poetry of YHWH as a warrior-god. The image of God trampling the vineyard would be picked up in the Book of Revelation.”

Finally, Alter reminds us of the envelope form so often used in the Bible, this time in Isaiah 66:13, “As a man whose mother comforts him,/ so I Myself will comfort you,/ and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem. The triple insistence on this verb, following “her comforting breast” is an excellent allusion to the comforting, “Comfort. O comfort My people,” at the beginning of chapter 40, bringing all of 40-66 to closure in an envelope structure.”

“Critias” by Plato (translated by Diskin Clay)

This dialogue is mainly a single speech by Critias. The speech is on the ancient mythical war between Athens and Atlantis. He first references the wealth and power of Athens’ ancient past, “For it is in the train of Leisure that Mythology and Inquiry into the Past arrive in cities, once they have observed that in the case of some peoples the necessities of life have been secured, but not before.” He claims that, back then, Athens was governed more like Plato’s proposed Republic, “Now, at that time, the other classes of citizens who dwelt in our city were engaged in manufacture and producing food from the earth, but the warrior class that had originally been separated from them by god-like men lived apart. They had all that was appropriate to their training and education. None of them had any private possession, but they thought of all their possessions as the common property of all, and they asked to receive nothing from the other citizens beyond what they needed to live.”

The dialogue ends abruptly, mid-sentence, and without conclusion. Towards its end, Critias describes the manner and morals of Atlantis in its own heyday, “For many generations and as long as enough of their divine nature survived, they were obedient unto their laws and they were well disposed to the divinity they were kin to. They possessed conceptions that were true and entirely lofty. And in their attitude to disasters and chance events that constantly befall men and in their relations with one another they exhibited a combination of mildness and prudence, because, except for virtue, they held all else in disdain and thought of their present good fortune of no consequence. They bore their vast wealth of gold and other possessions without difficulty, treating them as if they were a burden. They did not become intoxicated with luxury of the life their wealth made possible; they did not lose their self-control and slip into decline, but in their sober judgment they could see distinctly that even their very wealth increased with their amity and its companion, virtue. But they saw that both wealth and concord decline as possessions become pursued and honored. And virtue perishes with them as well…. But when the divine portion in them began to grow faint as it was often blended with great quantities of mortality and as their human nature gradually gained ascendancy, at that moment, in their inability to bear their great good fortune, they became disordered…. Inwardly they were filled with an unjust lust for possessions and power.”

“The Agony of Eros” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

This short book, by Han, is a meditation on the conflict he sees between modernity and eros. Han begins, “The crisis of love does not derive from too many others so much as from the erosion of the Other. This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self…. Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego…. Eros—erotic desire—conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the atopia, indeed the utopia, of the wholly Other.”

Modernity has become what Han describes as a “burnout culture.” He decries the sterilization, the lack of differentiation, the consumption, and the fetishization of materialism. “Today, more and more, dignity, decency, and propriety—matters of maintaining distance—are disappearing. That is, the ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost…. Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings…. Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.” Han suggests that modernity lives in a constant present. It is unable to reach back into the past or push forward to a future, because it is stuck in banality. “Today, the future is shedding the negativity of the Other and positivizing itself an optimized present that excludes all disaster…. Memory is not an organ of simple restitution, by means of which one makes the past present again. In memory, what has been is constantly changing. It is a progressive, living, narrative process.”

Han discusses how eros necessitates the change of the ego upon first contact with the Other, “According to Ficino, love is the “most serious disease of all”; a “change,” it “takes away from a man that which is his own and changes him into the nature of another.” Such injury and transformation constitute its negativity. Today, through the increasing positivization and domestication of love, it is disappearing entirely. One stays the same and seeks only the confirmation of oneself in the Other.” Han stays on the theme of the transformation of the Self through eros, but with a Hegelian twist, “Love is an absolute end unto itself. It is absolute because it presupposes death, the surrender of the self. The “true essence of love consists in giving up consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another.”” Han continues, “As an absolute end, love passes through death…. The reconciled return to oneself out of the Other means anything but violent appropriation of the Other…. Rather it is the gift of the Other—preceded by the surrender, the giving up, of one’s own self.” Han returns to Ficino, “When Ficino writes that the lover loses himself in another self—and yet, in this same waning oblivion, “recovers” and even “possesses” himself—this possession is the gift of the Other. The priority of the Other distinguishes the power of Eros from the violence of Ares. When power is a relation of domination, I assert myself against and oppose the Other by subjugating him or her to myself. In contrast, the power (Macht) or eros implies powerlessness and unconsciousness (Ohn-Macht); instead of affirming myself, I lose myself in (or for) the Other, who then rights me again: “The ruler possesses others through himself, but the lover takes possession of himself through another, and the farther each of the lovers is from himself, the nearer he is to the other, and though he is dead in himself, he comes to life again in the other.”” Han ends, “Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death…. Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time.”

Han finishes by returning to the theme of the duality of eros, with a riff on Badiou, “Love is a “Two scene,” a theater meant for a duo, to paraphrase Badiou. Interrupting the isolated perspective of the One, it makes the world arise anew from the vantage point of the Other, or Difference. Love, as an experience and an encounter is marked by the negativity of upheaval: “It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ [habiter] my situation.” The “event” is a moment of “truth”; it introduces a new and entirely different way of being into the habit of habiter, the situation at hand. It gives rise to something that circumstances cannot account for. It interrupts the Same in favor of the Other…. This transcendental fidelity may be understood as a universal quality of eros…. Love as an event—as a “Two scene”—is dehabitualizing and denarcissifying. It generates a “rupture,” a “hole” in the order of the Habitual and the Same…. Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving.”

“Menexenus” by Plato (translated by Paul Ryan)

This dialogue was known in antiquity as the “Funeral Oration” and is mainly comprised of a speech that Socrates claims was handed down to him by Aspasia, Pericles’ renown mistress. Socrates tells Menexenus that he takes no responsibility for its contents, themes, and veracity. Still, Menexenus has his doubts about who is the speech’s real author. The oration concerns Athens’ war dead and the themes of courage, virtue, glory, and heroism. Socrates begins, “Indeed, dying in war looks like a splendid fate in many ways…. They became brave by being sons of brave fathers. Let us, therefore, extoll first their noble birth, second their rearing and education. After that, let us put on view the deeds they performed, showing that they were noble and worthy of their birth and upbringing.”

Socrates proceeds to recount not only Athens’ recent war heroes, but first goes back, past the Peloponnesian War even, to the ancient wars with Persia. He begins with Athens’ most illustrious ancestors. “Those men were fathers not only of our bodies but of our freedom, ours and that of everyone on this continent.” He then continues to boast about Athens, “The opinion gained currency that our city could never be defeated in war, not even by all mankind. And that belief was true. We were overcome by our own quarrels, not by other men; by them we remain undefeated to this day, but we conquered ourselves and suffered defeat at our won hands.” After all, the more recent loss to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and the Civil War of the Thirty Tyrants have to be explained away.

Finally, Socrates returns to the valor of the war dead and what the present generation of Athenians owe to their ancestors, “We must remember the fallen, and every man, just as in war, must encourage their descendants not to desert the ranks of their ancestors and not to yield to cowardice and fall back…. Free to live on ignobly, we prefer to die nobly rather than subject you and your descendants to reproach and bring disgrace on our fathers and all our ancestors. We consider the life of one who has brought disgrace on his own family no life…. Do whatever you do to the accompaniment of valor, knowing that without it all possessions and all ways of life are shameful and base. For neither does wealth confer distinction on one who possesses it with cowardice (the riches of a man like that belong to another, not himself) nor do bodily beauty and strength, when they reside in a worthless and cowardly man, seem to suit him…. All knowledge cut off from rectitude and the rest of virtue has the look of low cunning, not wisdom…. For a man with self-respect nothing is more disgraceful than to make himself honored not through himself, but through his ancestors’ glory…. For that man’s life is best arranged for whom all, or nearly all, the things that promote happiness depend on himself.”

“The Gnostic Religion” by Hans Jonas

Jonas was a Jewish philosopher and, perhaps, the second most famous student of Heidegger’s. This book was originally his German dissertation, which he later fleshed out, and then, again, briefly updated as more of the Nag-Hammadi discovery was translated. However, most of Jonas’ history of the Gnostic movement does not rely on the more recent discoveries. Nonetheless, this book is a thorough examination of Gnostic belief and its opposition to contemporary standard Christianity, neo-Platonism, paganism, and Jewish thought. Jonas begins, “The name “Gnosticism,” which has come to serve as a collective heading for a manifoldness of sectarian doctrines appearing within and around Christianity during its critical first centuries, is derived from gnosis, the Greek word for “knowledge.” The emphasis on knowledge as the means for attainment of salvation, or even as the form of salvation itself, and the claim to the possession of this knowledge in one’s own articulate doctrine, are common features of the numerous sects…. The Church Fathers considered Gnosticism as essentially a Christian heresy.”

For Gnosticism, knowledge does not quite have its secular meaning. Knowledge “refers to objects which we nowadays should call those of faith rather than of reason…. Gnosis meant pre-eminently knowledge of God, and from what we have said about the radical transcendence of the deity it follows that “knowledge of God” is knowledge of something naturally unknowable and therefore itself not a natural condition…. It is closely bound up with revelatory experience, so that reception of the truth either through sacred and secret lore or through inner illumination replaces rational argument and theory…. “Knowledge” is not just theoretical information about certain things but is itself, as a modification of the human condition, charged with performing a function in bringing about salvation. Thus gnostic “knowledge” has an eminently practical aspect. The ultimate “object” of knowledge is God.”

Jonas relates how man fits into gnostic metaphysics, “Reduced to ultimate principles, his origin is twofold: mundane and extra-mundane….Through his body and his soul man is a part of the world and subjected to the heimarmene. Enclosed in the soul is the spirit, or “pneuma” (called also the “spark”), a portion of the divine substance from beyond which has fallen into the world…. The radical nature of the dualism determines that of the doctrine of salvation. As alien as the transcendent God is to “this world” is the pneumatic self in the midst of it. The goal of gnostic striving is the release of the “inner man” from the bonds of the world and his return to his native realm of light… The transcendent God is unknown in the world and cannot be discovered from it; therefore revelation is needed…. The Greek meaning of psyche, with all its dignity, did not suffice to express the new conception of a principle transcending all natural and cosmic associations that adhered to the Greek concept. The term pneuma serves in Greek Gnosticism generally as the equivalent of the expression for the spiritual “self,” for which Greek, unlike some oriental languages, lacked an indigenous word…. The discovery of this transcendent inner principle in man and the supreme concern about its destiny is the very center of the gnostic religion.”

The Gnostics had two main schools, Iranian and Syrian. These two schools principally differed in their conception of dualism. “The Gnostics were the first speculative “theologians” in the new age of religion superseding classical antiquity…. [Gnosticism] comprised as main tenets the ideas of an antidivine universe, of man’s alienness within it, and of the acosmic nature of the godhead…. Two types of system, called here for short (and without undue commitment to a theory of actual genetics) the Iranian and the Syrian, were evolved to explain essentially the same facts of a dislocated metaphysical situation—both “dualistic”…. The Iranian type, in a gnostic adaptation of Zoroastrian doctrine starting from a dualism of two opposed principles, has mainly to explain how the original Darkness came to engulf elements of the Light: i.e., it describes the world-drama as a war of changing fortunes…. The Syrian speculation undertakes the more ambitious task of deriving dualism itself, and the ensuing predicament of the divine in the system of creation, from the one and undivided source of being…. This inner divine “devolution” ends in the decadence of complete self-alienation that is this world…. Both dramas start with a disturbance in the heights; in both, the existence of the world marks a discomfiture of the divine and a necessary, in itself undesirable, means of its eventual restoration; in both, the salvation of man is that of the deity itself.”

Later, Jonas goes back to refining a conception of gnostic knowledge, “We have found “gnosis” to mean one of these things: knowledge of the secrets of existence as related in the gnostic myth, and these comprise the divine history from which the world originated, man’s condition in it, and the nature of salvation; then, more intellectually, the elaboration of these tenets into coherent speculative systems; then, more practically, knowledge of the “way” of the soul’s future ascent and of the right life preparing for this event; and, most technically or magically, knowledge of the sacraments, effective formulas, and other instrumental means by which the passage and liberation can be assured…. The mystical gnosis theou—direct beholding of the divine reality—is itself an earnest of the consummation to come. It is transcendence become immanent…. The ecstatic experience exhibits the double-edged character of the true eschaton of eschatological transcendental religion, which it draws—illegitimately, as we think—into the range of temporal life and the possibilities open to it…. It is this transposition of eschatology into the inwardness which yields the surpassing concept of gnosis.”

Jonas touches again on the nature of man in the cosmos, “This elevation—whether going that far or not—of ‘Man’ to a transmundane deity, prior and superior the creator of the universe, or, the assigning of that name to such a deity, is one of the most significant traits of gnostic theology…. That terrestrial man can identify his innermost being (“spirit,” “light,” etc.) with this supracosmic power, can therefore despise his cosmic oppressors and count on his ultimate triumph over them—and it becomes visible that the doctrine of the god Man, and in the creation story specifically: the humiliation of the demiurge in his name, mark the distinctly revolutionary aspect of gnosticism on the cosmic plane.”

Finally, Jonas circles back to gnostic dualism, “It is on this primary human foundation of a passionately felt experience of self and world, that the formulated dualistic doctrines rest. The dualism is between man and the world, and concurrently between the world and God…. Primarily would then be the feeling of an absolute rift between man and that in which he finds himself lodged—the world…. The divine is alien to the world and has neither part nor concern in the physical universe…. The true god, strictly transmundane, is not revealed or even indicated by the world, and is therefore the Unknown, the totally Other, unknowable in terms of any worldly analogies…. In its cosmological aspect it states that the world as the creation not of God but of some inferior principle whose law it executes; and, in its anthropological aspect, that man’s inner self, the pneuma (“spirit” in contrast to “soul”=psyche) is not part of the world, of nature’s creation and domain, but is, within that world, as totally transcendent and as unknown by all worldly categories as its transmundane counterpart, the unknown God without…. But whoever has created the world, man does not owe him allegiance, nor respect for his work…. The world, then, is the product, and even the embodiment, of the negative of knowledge. What it reveals is unenlightened and therefore malignant force, proceeding from the spirit of self-assertive power, from the will to rule and coerce. The mindlessness of this will is the spirit of the world, which bears no relation to understanding and love. The laws of the universe are the laws of this rule, and not of divine wisdom.” Jonas ends by quoting a famous Valentinian school saying, “What makes us free is the knowledge of who we were, what we have become; where we were, wherein we have been thrown; whereto we speed, where-from we are redeemed; what is birth and what rebirth.”