The servile soul

The 19th Century German poet Heinrich Heine describes the servility of his fellow Germans:

Servants that are without a master are not on that account free men: servility is in their soul. The German is like a slave who obeys his lord without chains or the lash, at mere command, aye, even at a sign. Slavery is in the man himself, in his soul. Spiritual is worse than material slavery. The Germans must be freed from within; from without there is no help for them.

What about Americans? What’s our highest aspiration? Our ideal of freedom? In my case, it was always to start my own business. In other words, to make myself servile to the marketplace directly, rather than at one remove through my employer. The idea of being master of myself, of creating what my genius and mine alone can create, with no regard for when or how the market will find a use for it—this is alien to Americans. Subservience to the marketplace has been so deeply encoded into our souls, it shows itself even in our daydreams of freedom.

The new humanities

Humanities departments, even as they wave the banner of a critical theory conceived by ardent critics of the division of labor, simultaneously deposit themselves into a convenient little niche created for them by the universities that fodder capitalist enterprises. Unlike earlier humanists who either squandered their families’ capital or martyred themselves for the cause of truth, today’s practical humanists understand that a sustainable bourgeois existence is more fundamental in the hierarchy of needs than the search for truth. While their theories laud freedom and autonomy and look askance at all heteronomous authority, in practice humanities PhD mills see their mission not so differently from departments churning out JDs and MBAs. The point is to make sure students can find a nice comfortable bourgeois job when they’re done.

When students derive pleasure or pride from the quest for truth itself, rather than its socially useful results, we can conclude such students are fueled by antisocial narcissism rather than a healthy desire to be team players in the existing social order. A passion for truth might admittedly serve as a powerful fuel to propel students in their studies. But if it propels them in a direction that isn’t useful in the present social order, what’s the point? No, on those rare occasions when this antisocial passion for truth arises, it must be summarily extinguished. A more conventional fuel, the desire for bourgeois respectability, must be put in its place. This fuel may not provide quite the same impetus, but at least it gets the students going in the right direction.

In the new humanities, where truth is defined a social construction (unlike the elitist truth of past humanities, which abhors aspiring after broad dissemination), it is in fact difficult to see how a passion for truth could be distinguished from a monomaniacal narcissism. In an era of democratic epistemology, the proper aspiration for the seeker of truth is to work to forge consensus, rather than solitarily seek a truth that appeals to him alone.

In this new, improved, tamed and domesticated humanities, the central question is, how to attract good students? If the purpose of humanities graduate programs is merely to prepare students for a productive role in the division of labor, why settle for such a small one? Why would a bright student opt to host ornamental sideshows in undergraduate education, and forego the more significant and lucrative roles her intelligence qualifies her for?

Wielding the power of the state

The libertarians are concerned that Keynesian economics "encourages politicians to wield the power of the state in ways that do enormous harm.” What the libertarians forget is that they too insist on “wielding the power of the state” to enforce the property rights of a tiny minority that owns virtually all the capital assets in society. This does enormous harm to all members of society other than this small minority.

Drapetomania

In 1851 psychiatrist Samuel Cartwright gave a name to the mental illness that caused slaves to attempt to escape from slavery: “drapetomania.” As a consequence of the progress of psychiatry we now have dozens of names for the mental illnesses that cause corporate slaves to attempt to escape their slavery: depression, bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, to name just a few.

David Hume vs. Wallace Stevens

“The ultimate ends of human action,” says David Hume, “can never be accounted for by reason.” For Hume, the ultimate ends of human action are to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. He has reduced man from a rational animal to an animal. Should we be surprised that he sees no reason in the aims of a being whom he has stripped in advance of his reason? A rational being strives to know and understand. He accepts pain. He does not fear it. He accepts death. He does not fear it. Hume’s life, like that of the typical bourgeois, is no more than a cowardly quest for comfort and convenience. All heroic sentiments, including the passion to learn and understand, have given way to the petty concern for material comfort.

For a genuine philosopher, the ultimate ends of human action are knowledge, wisdom, enlightenment, happiness and virtue. These are precisely the same ends that any rational being desires, the ends that reason itself desires, or, that God, the ens intelligens, the ultimate conception of reason, desires.

When the sincere philosopher asks himself why he hates pain, the question to him is a serious one, and he may decide there is no reason. When a limb is amputated, the patient often feels pain in the phantom limb for the rest of his life. He can learn to ignore the pain. It is, in fact, only biology that demands we hate pain. The mind is perfectly capable, as every ascetic and flagellant can attest, of overcoming its biological programming,. Hume pays no heed to ascetics and flagellants, perhaps because he perceives them as irrational. But aren’t they in fact more rational than he, having overcome the biological prejudice against pain and risen to a higher level of intellectual autonomy?

Hume admits that there is no rational reason for hating pain and loving pleasure, and yet he is unwilling to try to overcome these irrational biological prejudices. Here we see that in Hume’s world common sense prevails over reason, or, better put, common sense defines what it means to be reasonable. The idea that excellence is rare, and can therefore never accord with anything common, whether common beliefs or common tastes, is not one that Hume is willing to entertain.

The eternal philosopher, says Wallace Stevens, is the one who remains always on the road from self to God—or more precisely, since the number of ways from self to God is limitless, on one of the many roads. The poem that would be “unimpeachably divine,” Stevens says, is the poem that would allow us to leave behind the faults of animal life. The best philosophy is part of this unimpeachably divine poem. “The idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea.” Proto-pragmatist philosophers like Bacon, Locke and Hume want to traverse the road in the other direction, so that philosophy will return to its human limitations and rely on the humble evidence of “the teeth, the throat and the bowels” (Stevens’ expression), and not on the divine will to truth at any price.

Tell a man his desire for wealth and pleasure may be corrupting his reason so he can’t see clearly. He blinks. What’s reason for, if not for the pursuit of wealth and pleasure? In his mental life, reason occupies a very humble place. The teeth, the throat and the bowels occupy the places of honor in this kingdom, while reason drudges thanklessly under their whip and sleeps in the servant’s quarters.

Even those who are exceptionally clever in finding the means to wealth are seldom perplexed by the fact that the end goal to which all their intelligence is directed is precisely the same goal the least intelligent aim at.

Class warfare

I saw this on a bumper sticker the other day:

REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH OVER $5 MILLION
MAKE CAPITALISM WORK FOR EVERYONE

This raises an interesting question, which in my experience is seldom discussed. Suppose economists are right that property rights are essential to prosperity. We might still ask, are unlimited property rights essential to prosperity? Most good things are not good in excess. Could property rights be one of those things?

The specter of communism, which our rulers use to frighten us into submission, is a red herring. Confiscate the obscene wealth of plutocrats. Redistribute it. Then let capitalism loose again so it can work for everyone. Our rulers would prefer we don't talk about options like this. The debate is framed as a choice between an unjust system and an impractical one. And we drop to our knees and thank our leaders for leading us on the practical path.

Throughout history, rulers have claimed they rule us for our own good. Even when they imprison us, they claim this is for our own good. The inquisitors in the Middle Ages claimed they tortured heretics for their own good. When our rulers tell us the rules are for our own good, we should be demanding evidence for this claim, not accepting it on authority.

For the more than two thirds of Americans born with no property, how is the ruthless enforcement of unlimited property rights good?

How to outlaw a counterculture

In the 1660s, one out of every 100 Parisians was confined to an asylum. The leadership of Paris, according to Foucault, had “acquired an ethical power of segregation, which permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social uselessness.” Today in the United States, as incarceration rates also rapidly approach the one percent mark, we might be inclined to look for parallels.

America’s dominant culture of unmitigated economic rapaciousness has always been accompanied by oppositional cultures, one of which we might call the leisure counterculture. This counterculture calls the dominant commerce-centered outlook into question, and is therefore a menace to economic productivity. The question is, how to get rid of it? Rulers have often encountered difficulty when they arbitrarily incarcerate citizens based on their ideology. But this turns out not to be so great an obstacle as it might seem. The solution is to criminalize the rituals of leisure, thereby making a large proportion of the leisure counterculture into criminals.

Walter Benjamin

Today I encountered Walter Benjamin’s recommendation to write for writers, rather for reading “consumers.” Like the protestant notion of the priesthood of all believers, Benjamin seems to be seeking a reformation in the Geisteswissenschaften, where all intelligent people are transformed into thinkers, perhaps all into writers. The category of the consumer, like the category of the layman, is to be eliminated.

Books in the wrong hands are dangerous

The priestly caste of the fourteenth century was profoundly worried that if the Scriptures fell into the hands of the man on the street, they would be grossly misinterpreted. What “grossly misinterpreted” turned out to mean, of course, was “interpreted in a manner inconsistent with the agenda of the Church.” Today, we are faced with a similar problem. The priestly caste of psychiatrists is very worried that if the textbooks of psychopharmacology fall into the hands of the man on the street, they will be grossly misinterpreted. What “grossly misinterpreted” means, of course, is “interpreted in a manner inconsistent with the agenda of the capitalist ruling class.”

otium cum dignitate

At the same time the workplace strips autonomy and dignity from our work, making us merely elements in the productive apparatus, Hollywood and Madison Avenue strip autonomy and dignity from our leisure, making us mere passive spectators of entertainment that makes no demands whatsoever on the intellect. We have neither labor cum dignitate nor otium cum dignitate.

Nietzsche's "middle way"

There is a temptation to see the body as merely an unwelcome distraction from the life of the mind. Nietzsche felt this temptation vividly. Heroic resistance to this temptation is what led him to develop a new form of asceticism, in which commodity fetishes have no place, and yet the body is no longer despised.

Analytic philosophy

What we need is a philosophy that rigorously upholds the rules of logic—as analytic philosophy does—and yet resists the temptation to make an individual thinker no more than an administrator of mankind’s collective project of knowledge accumulation—as analytic philosophy also does. We need both the dispassionate dedication to reason of the mathematician and the ardent dedication to truth of the religious mind. Bertrand Russell, for example, recommends, in addition to knowledge about the universe, “a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.” It is those who strive both for truth and for a depth of feeling about truth, Russell says, who are philosophers. Russell cites the case of Heraclitus, for whom “the facts of science, as they appeared to him, fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.”

Divine role models and human role models

In my more cynical moods, I imagine that religions seek to portray their founders as more than human because they want to lower expectations on their parishioners. If the founder of a religion was more than human, then I, being merely human, needn’t feel remorse when I don’t live up to his example.

This sort of watering down is a prerequisite for any religion to be accepted as a state sanctioned religion. If all Christians were held to the standard of emulating their founder, for example, no representative of a state which punishes criminals could call himself a Christian. No trader who seeks personal advantage could call himself a Christian.

Genius should expect to be treated as a fool or a knave

A self-appointed genius that expects all to be in its awe lacks one defining characteristic of genius—a realistic assessment of its appeal. The most foolish thing in any intelligence is an expectation that it will be universally recognized.

Hélas

Oscar Wilde’s 1881 poem “Hélas” begins:

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?—
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.

Wilde is expressing his reservations about the virtues of the romantic era in comparison to the classical era. Ancient wisdom (Stoicism in particular) offers a regime of “austere control” which aims to make the psyche invulnerable and self-sufficient. Romanticism, on the other hand, makes the psyche vulnerable to “drift with every passion,” making it a “stringed lute on which all winds can play.” The scroll of Wilde’s mind has been written twice—first with the classics, then with romanticism. In the mood the poem expresses, the second writing seems merely “boyish” in comparison to the more mature ancient wisdom. The puerile scribbles of romanticism have merely covered up and marred the profound wisdom of the ancients, wisdom which might otherwise have laid bare the “secret of the whole” of human existence.

The poem continues:

Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is that time dead? ...

Wilde was only 27 when he wrote the poem, so it seems hardly plausible that he is lamenting the demise of his intellect. He seems rather to be wishing he had been born in an earlier time, in which the authority of the classics was still untrammeled by Enlightenment skepticism and Romantic cynicism.

Pragmatism

There are those who would like to redefine truth as what is practical. But in order to ascertain if something is practical, we will need to establish certain facts. Establishing the truth of these facts is either going to lead us to an infinite regress, or, at some point, force us to confront the old fashioned demand to bear witness to the truth.

The lowest common denominator

A business owned by one man or woman will sometimes seek to be profitable, sometimes to be charitable, in accordance with the judgment of that one. A business owned by many men or women must seek to please them all. They are unlikely to have the same objectives in their charity, and can agree only on the one objective of profitability. This, the lowest common denominator, will therefore prevail.

Skepticism

Skepticism is a virtue if it comes at the right time, when we are trying to decide upon the truth or falsity of a claim. If it comes too early, when we have yet to understand what is being claimed—if we use it merely as an excuse to evade the effort to understand points of view different from our own—then it is certainly a vice.

My ruined mind

My intellect, permanently and irrevocably damaged by my education, is destined to be ruled by concerns of utility rather than sublimity. Perhaps what I need to develop is a literature of pessimism like that of Cioran, a self-absorbed, egotistical lamentation of the ruination of my intellect at the hands of philistine educators.

Crisis of faith

In 1832 Emerson faced a crisis. He no longer believed in the immortality of the soul, the inerrancy of the Bible, and yet his profession as a preacher called upon him to affirm these things every day. I find myself facing a similar crisis. I no longer believe technology is the salvation of mankind, and yet my profession as an engineer calls upon me to affirm this faith every day.

Epiphanies

“Have you had a great joy?” asks Nietzsche, “Well, then bid it farewell. It will never come a second time.” For those who take great pleasure in epiphanies, a category which includes both Herr Nietzsche and myself, joy comes as a result of understanding something new and sublime. The same epiphany, unfortunately, can’t be repeated twice.

Regarding file sharing

In 1790 there were about six hundred for-pay lending libraries in England. As public libraries began to offer for free what these offered for a price, for-pay libraries gradually ceased to exist. In the twenty-first century, digital technology makes it possible to reproduce books, recordings and films at essentially no cost. The for-pay bookstore, record store and cinema are now also threatened with extinction. File sharers occupy the same threatening position in the twenty-first century that public libraries did in the nineteenth. Access to culture for the poor has always been opposed by commercial interests that hope to profit by making culture accessible to the rich. We who sincerely care about culture, however, have always applauded free access to culture.

Opponents of file sharing argue that it lessens the rewards for those who create culture. But the sincere artist produces art for the sake of art, not for the sake of rewards. The only art that file sharing threatens is commodity art. Anything we can do to remove the taint of profit is a boon to genuine culture.

Nietzsche's pharmacy

In my continued research into Nietzsche’s pharmaceutical habits, I find the following quotations.

A letter from Nietzsche’s sister states, “It was only with the aid of narcotics that he could combat nights of sleeplessness and depression; not only morphine and opium, but chloral and a drug unknown to me were these aids where always had a most strange effect on my brother.” Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (2010), p. 363.

It was the time in which Zarathustra was born, the time when its ‘medium’ took opium, not as a soporiphic—for that he had the powerful chloral—but as a means of lifting himself out of the doldrums. ... In one of his notebooks Nietzsche records a characteristic of the Superman which brings an unexpected new dimension to the vision that he had on the isles of the blest: ‘From out of a superabundance of life the Superman combines those visions of the opium-eater, of madness, and of the Dionysian dance.’
Joachim Köhler, Zarathustra’s Secret (2002), p. 226

Nietzsche’s ways of dealing with those illnesses that appeared as physical afflictions (paroxysms, disturbances of vision, headaches, etc.) were at first in accordance with contemporary custom: he consulted physicians, specialists, and authorities, expecting them to prescribe only on the basis of rational knowledge. Nietzsche, however, was subjected to numerous ineffective treatments since many physicians apply therapeutic measures even when there is no rational basis for them, assuming that there is invariably—and not merely in particular, outstanding instances —a sensible, i.e., causally effective treatment. Going beyond the counsels of physicians, Nietzsche applied his own therapy on the basis of observations made on himself and of the hints which he came across in his reading. Not unlike physicians of positivistic persuasion and faith in scientific authority, he occasionally confused rational, empirically proven methods with positivistic notions of possibility. He probably succeeded to a certain extent in the methodical choice—using precise meteorological data—of the climate that was at least most suitable for him. For the rest, his life was fraught with necessarily uncertain experimental attempts: “All sorts of mixtures with which he treated himself stood on Nietzsche’s stove in Basel,” Overbeck reports concerning the period from 1875 on. Later he employed all sorts of medicaments, salts, and, above all, rationally effective soporifics (considerable quantities of chloral hydrate), although the effectiveness of soporifics when used routinely is extremely questionable, and finally a tincture containing hashish which he probably had obtained from a Dutchman.
Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche (1997), p. 109

Repeatedly he [Nietzsche] turns with disdain against the inanity of those who, conscious of their own health, turn away from anything strange to them: “The poor creatures of course do not realize how cadaverous in color and how ghost-like their health looks.” He stigmatizes the methods of the educated Philistine who invents, “for his habits, his viewpoints, his rejections and patronage, the universally effective term health” and gets rid of “any inconvenient disturber of the peace by suspecting him of being sick or eccentric.” In opposition to this, Nietzsche asserts: “Actually it is an annoying fact that ‘the spirit’ is in the habit of descending with particular sympathy upon the ‘unhealthy and unprofitable’ ones.” These formulations cannot conceal the fact that all Nietzsche’s philosophizing favors health, disparages illness, and seeks to overcome all that is ill. Again it is the difference in the concept of health that makes this contradiction possible.
This concept, as Nietzsche realizes, is not ambiguous by accident. “Health as such does not exist. It is your goal that determines what health ought to mean even for your body. . . . The concept of normal health .must be given up. . . . Of course, health might appear, in one case, like the opposite of health in another.” “Health and sickness are not essentially different. • . . We must not make distinct principles or entitles of them. . . . Actually there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence.”
Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche (1997), pp. 111-112

In Sils-Maria Nietzsche told me about his bouts of raging headaches and the various medications he had tried against them. In Rapallo and in other places of the Riviera di Levante, where he had spent his times of worst health, he had written for himself all kinds of prescriptions signed Dr. Nietzsche, which had been prepared and filled without question or hesitation. Unfortunately I took no notes and the only one I remember is chloral hydrate. But since Nietzsche, as he expressly told me, had been surprised never to be asked whether he was a medical doctor authorized to prescribe this kind of medication, I conclude that some dubious medicines must have been among them. At any rate, he claimed to know his own sickness better than any doctor and to understand better which medications were to be used. Nietzsche never spoke of having used hashish, nor can I remember ever hearing the word hashish from his lips, but no doubt in his intensive reading of contemporary French authors— among them Baudelaire—he was already familiar with hashish in the summer of 1884 as a new drug that had recently appeared in Europe.
Testimony of Resa con Schirnhofer, April 3, 1994, as printed in Sander L. Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries (1991), p. 163

Economist and philosopher

The economist looks at the way we spend our days, and helps us figure out how to do whatever we’re doing more efficiently. The philosopher looks at the way we spend our days, and tells us we are spending them foolishly.

How many intellects martyred themselves for my iPhone?

The marvels of engineering would be irreproachable if they didn't demand the sacrifice of so many a genius on their altar. When genius dedicates itself to becoming useful, it forsakes the possibility of becoming sublime.

Charity and justice

The state of mind which capitalism cultivates in its workers is one in which justice (as conceived by the capitalists rulers, of course) plays a large role, and charity and sympathy play insignificant roles. Most of the tangible things I encounter in everyday life do not belong to me. They belong to my employer. Any act of charity or generosity I might engage in—even giving a moment of my time—would be an act of injustice to toward my employer.

Human genius

Human genius, large or small,
Is certain without food and care
Never to expand at all,
Or, if filled with wind alone,
To grandly fly into the air,
Grandiose and overblown.

Thoughts

“One whose falsehoods no longer deceive,” says Ambrose Bierce, “has forfeited the right to speak truth.” What might he mean? Perhaps that the one who is not competent enough to deceive is unlikely to be competent enough to discover truth.

The Western Intellectual Tradition is my God. An atheism that denies reverence even to this God would be just an excuse to avoid studying.

When I hear leftists lamenting the authority of the Dead White Males, or the authority of science, my first suspicion is that they were looking for a convenient excuse to bring their studies to a conclusion, and their professors obliged them by providing one.

“Wisdom is before him that hath understanding,” says Solomon, “but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.” Delivering the morning newspaper, turning all eyes to the ends of the earth at the start of every day, is the way our society cultivates foolishness.

When I was younger and looking in every direction for approval, chasing money seemed extremely logical. What is money, after all, but the approval of others in its most tangible and quantifiable form?

Education is always described as a “program”—“master’s program,”—“PhD program.” The objective of every such program is to prepare a man or woman for his or her role in the division of labor. The script of the student’s life, at least in outline, is written beforehand. If we were foolish enough to cultivate genius instead of harnessing it, education would proceed not according to a “program,” but according to the needs of genius, which only genius itself can determine.

Perhaps the worst thing about the “program” is that is has an endpoint. This instills in vulnerable students the pernicious idea that study is a preparation for something else rather than an end in itself.

The professor’s job calls for him to devote his attention to the Western Intellectual Tradition. It also calls for him to devote his attention to students whose aim in life is a comfortable salary. Even if, in theory, his dedication to the Western Intellectual Tradition is sincere, in practice he serves Mammon once removed.

Ye cannot both serve The Western Intellectual and perform a role in the division of labor. It is not accidental that Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer retreated from the world to write.

If you are quite certain that your genius will never produce anything profound, go right ahead and dedicate it to reputation and money. No matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine how anyone could be certain of this.

More often than not, reverence for our elders and reverence for truth ally themselves on one side, with reverence for money and reputation on the other. But those of our elders whose lives have been wholly dedicated to money and reputation, and who seek to justify their choices by foisting them upon the next generation—they do not deserve our reverence.

Commerce is no more than a highly developed and refined excuse to avoid studying. Admittedly it also provides food and shelter, but these do not begin to compensate for the attention it takes away.

There is one sort of piety which helps us cultivate reverence for what is high and contempt for what is low. There is another sort of piety which helps us cultivate reverence for ourselves and contempt for those who are different. The second sort is what gives piety its bad reputation.

“There is nothing either good or bad,” says Hamlet, “But thinking makes it so.” Concentrate, therefore, on the thinking and not on the things.

The "new age"

Those who apply the moniker “new-age” to themselves describe themselves quite aptly. The new age is indeed an age of ignorance—of both science and history—and they are its vanguards. The enticement of new-age literature, of course, is that it requires very little intellectual discipline in those who create and consume it. In an age that is ever looking for new ways to shirk intellectual discipline, it is a godsend. Democracy has always coexisted uneasily alongside the aristocracy of intellect. The prerogative of this aristocracy—the right of those who dedicate their lives to a deep and precise understanding of the world to rule over young minds—has always been tenuous, and grows ever more so. If young minds are more comfortable with ignorance and superstition than with intellectual discipline, why shouldn’t they choose rulers who pander to their preference?

The biologist uses the theories of genetics and evolution every day in his work. He palpably feels their explanatory power. The engineer uses Maxwell’s equations to create machines. Every working machine is a vindication of their truth. The new-age gurus who have achieved celebrity in Hollywood are not admired for their ability to cultivate intellectual discipline in their audience. They are admired for their ability to entertain. The foremost talent this demands, of course, is that one not demand any strenuous effort of anyone. The proponents of intellectual laxity are no longer content to merely expound their false doctrines. They now also demand equal rights for their errors in the kingdom of knowledge. Those who performed poorly in mathematics invariably seek later in life not to remedy this defect in their education, but rather to console themselves for it. They thus grow ever more insistent in their demands of equal rights for ignorance.

As I grow older I come more and more to believe that intellectual discipline is incompatible with neighbor-love. If I love truth, how can I not despise those who carelessly bear witness to falsehood? The premise of neighbor love is that even enemies on the battlefield are brothers in the Kingdom of God. But for those, like me, who have changed their allegiance from the Kingdom of God to the kingdom of knowledge, those who bear witness to falsehood are enemies in the most exalted of all kingdoms, no matter if they should happen to be my brothers in the kingdom of flesh and blood.

To what shall I equate my secret longing to be free?

What exactly are we doing that is more important than seeking a profound understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit? “Caring for our children,” a mother might reply. But what aspect of this care could possibly be more important than imparting a sense of intellectual curiosity and a passion for profundity to our children? How will we do this if we are not even seeking profundity ourselves? Are we so sure it is wise to chase after honors and rewards in order to provide our children luxuries, which merely destine them to a life of superficiality? Wouldn’t it be better to sit and beg in the street as we set an example of dedication to the life of the mind?

A beautiful mind, disfigured by the whip.
A once proud mind, with bent back and stooped shoulders.
The product of our education.

To what shall I equate my secret longing to be free?
Mathematics remains mute, leaving me to suffer.
In the language of mathematics, the question can't even be asked.

A philistine generation of philosophers, influenced more by Frege than Shakespeare, would like us to stop asking such questions. “If it can’t be expressed in the language of mathematics,” they say, “then it's meaningless.”

Biology gives me a plausible explanation for the origin of man. Archaeology tells me what my ancestors did and thought about. But what shall I do? What shall I think about? Science has no answer.

Do I want to be a perfectly functioning part in the machine of commerce? Do I want to be part of something beautiful?
Or should I strive to become something beautiful myself?

Bear witness to the truth

A friend sent me an E-mail in which some very unscientific claims were made, to which I duly responded with a lecture about the importance of controls in experiments and of calculating p-values to assess the statistical significance of results.

My battle with ignorance often puts me at odds with those I love. Even to acknowledge their ignorance seems to me an act of disrespect. And yet to deny it would be to deny the obvious, and might lead to other errors of knowledge down the road. My commitment to truth must take precedence over filial piety. Or rather, my piety is reserved for the quest for truth.

If the scientist better understood the passion which motivates him, he would talk far more about bearing witness to the truth. If the religious man better understood the passion which motivates him, he would talk far less about it.

A vile orgy of self-sacrificing

“The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing,” says Ayn Rand, who imagines capitalism is the cure. In fact, capitalism, at least as presently practiced, is the most vile orgy of self-sacrificing that has ever existed—all the more vile since it is done in the name of a misguided egoism that imagines material things and material things alone are what the self needs to flourish. The investment banker works twelve hours a day at a job he despises so that he can spend his evening in a fine restaurant, where the waiter works twelve hours a day at a job he despises. We nail ourselves to the cross of commerce, and then use its rewards to erect monuments to our martyrdom.

At work we strive to fulfill what we imagine are the needs of others, which, we imagine, are expressed in the marketplace. In our leisure hours we strive to fulfill what we imagine are our own needs, which, we imagine, can be fulfilled by things that are offered in the marketplace. Needs that are simple to discover and require elaborate means to satisfy can indeed be very efficiently addressed by the marketplace. But needs that are difficult to discover and require simple means to satisfy cannot. When I reflect sincerely, I find that the second sort of needs far outnumber the first.

So long as I rely on the marketplace to satisfy my needs, and to guide me in helping others satisfy theirs, I will omit from consideration every need that cannot be adequately expressed by the marketplace. Very often the best service we can render to our fellow human beings is to advise them to change course. Offering them the means to continue on their present course, the one thing the market can do exquisitely, often doesn’t help them at all.

If I try offering love, I might find, at least occasionally, that I get love in return. But this market is very inefficient. I will often be swindled, and have no means to restore justice.

When all the fox’s wiles fail to fetch the grapes, he insists they must be sour. A critic of commerce who doesn’t have more than his share of booty always leaves himself open to the accusation that he is merely airing sour grapes. But most of us have in fact been able to sample a few grapes now and then, even if we haven’t fetched the entire vine. I find the grapes are indeed sweet, in moderation, but in excess they only produce indigestion. The fox’s self-deception, I would say, isn’t really so unwise. If the grapes prove too difficult to fetch, why shouldn’t he look for a way to put them out of his mind and happily go on his way looking for other fruit? The illusion foisted upon us by commerce, that its fruits are the only ones worth striving for, this, more than anything, we must fortify ourselves against.

Quantum Vodoo

Powerful faith tends to produce hallucinations that confirm it. Such hallucinations testify to exceptional states of mind. But they are misinterpreted by philistine interpreters of religion as evidence of the existence of supernatural entities.

“Extraordinary claims,” says Carl Sagan, “require extraordinary evidence.” If the personal accounts of disciples happen to coincide with one another, this can be explained far more plausibly by their shared faith, or by supposing some conference took place between them, than by supposing, in the face of all the evidence we have accumulated to the contrary, that the laws of nature vary with time and place.

It still irks me when quantum mechanics is invoked to smuggle superstition into the realm of fact. Quantum mechanics precisely predicts the probabilities of events, leaving no room for divine or other mysterious forms of intervention. When the outcome of experiments shows that the predicted probabilities are very precise, it becomes implausible to suppose that they are being mysteriously manipulated. Einstein once quipped, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Well, He does. But the quantum mechanical dice are not loaded dice. As our experiments show quite definitively, they are fair dice. Both mathematics and experiment show that quantum mechanics reduces precisely to Newtonian mechanics for things on the scale of human beings and the objects we see and manipulate with our unaided eyes and hands—even, in fact, for things on the scale of cells. The universe didn’t suddenly become less predictable when quantum mechanics was introduced. Thermodynamic effects, also probabilistic in nature, dwarf quantum mechanical effects in their magnitude, and these have been known and understood since the Nineteenth Century.

The religion of bourgeois prudence

The first step to moral perfection is your liberation from the religion in which you were raised. Not a single person has come to perfection except by following this way.
Thoreau, as cited in Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, P. Sekirin, trans. (1997), August 8

The religion in which I was raised was the religion of bourgeois prudence—the rituals of orderly production and consumption, the reverence for capital. This is the prevailing religion, the state sanctioned religion. Only by overcoming it can I free my mind, and perceive without religious illusions.

The German word "geistig"

“Dancing, business, theatre, cards, dares, horses, women, drink, travel, all these are powerless in the face of the boredom that arises when a lack of intellectual needs makes intellectual pleasures impossible.”—Schopenhauer

The “geistige Bedürfnisse” of which Schopenhauer speaks could also be translated as “spiritual needs.” To our ears, this would give the passage an entirely different meaning. “Intellectual” and “spiritual” might be considered synonymous, both referring to the mind. But unfortunately the word “spiritual” has been usurped by those for whom care of the intellect is a lazy and undisciplined affair. It is as if the word “athletic” had been usurped by those who watch television all day. We may consider ourselves fortunate that, at least for now, the word “intellectual” retains an association with discipline. In our paradisiacal democracy, where we are ruled by those who, in addition to representing the majority, also represent the intellectual level of the majority, this is unlikely to last for long.

Thoughts

“‘The room filled with laughter,’” Noah read aloud. He looked up from the book in his lap. “Isn’t that odd?” he asked, “It’s like laughing at your own joke.”

“It’s a laugh track,” proposed Hannah.

Noah and Hannah were part of that social set in which the quest to demonstrate familiarity with the latest intellectual fashions has become habitual, instinctive, second-nature. Hannah was therefore eager to demonstrate she too was intimately familiar with Müllhauser, the German author whose book, Intellectual Detritus, had just appeared in English.

“In his seminal essay on the political philosopher Leo Strauss,” Hannah clamored pretentiously, “Müllhauser claims that Strauss should be interpreted not only as advocating esoteric reading, but also as demanding esoteric writing.”

As the room filled with the smoke from Hannah’s bong, Noah continued reading aloud, “‘The purpose of my art is to disrupt the narrative of the reader’s life and force him to create a metanarrative. I introduce self-referentiality into my art in order to persuade my readers to introduce self-referentiality into the psyche—in other words, to introspect, to reflect upon themselves.’”

Brecht

Bertolt Brecht laments that for him is it impossible to eat and drink when so many suffer from hunger and thirst. For me it is impossible to enjoy the freedom that comes from my discovery of the myriad ways I am manipulated, while so many others continue to forge fetters for themselves.

"What is truth?" asked jesting Pilate, but would not stay for an answer

There is world of difference between “What is truth?” in the sense Pilate asks it—where it expresses cowardly acceptance of temporal power and impatience with those who question it—and “What is truth?” in the sense Nietzsche and Marx ask it—where it expresses the brave desire to assiduously question the truths with which ecclesiastical and economic interests have indoctrinated us. The postⁿ-modernists of today’s academy, it seems to me, ask the question in a sense far closer to that of Pilate than that of Nietzsche. Rather than undertaking the difficult task of questioning the merits of the banal culture fed to them by so-called artists whose motives are in fact no higher than self-enrichment, they insist pop-culture is the equal of high culture created with motives of cultivating wisdom and virtue. Rather than undertaking the difficult task of questioning the motives of an academic enterprise whose primary purpose is to fodder capitalist enterprises with intellectually lobotomized students eager to serve power, the postⁿ-modernists want to make sure they can get a job in that enterprise. Although they love to cite the occasional posthumous aphorism that seems to support their cause, they certainly have no intention of modelling their life conduct on that of Nietzsche, who bravely endured poverty and ridicule in order to dedicate his life to discovering and bearing witness to difficult truths about the human condition. When the postⁿ-modernists ask “What is truth?” what they mean is that any inconvenient conception of truth that might make rigorous demands of them—courage, asceticism, or even assiduity—is impolite to discuss.

Confucian Aphorisms

Anamika asked, “Master, shall we buy and sell?”

The Master said, “The cult of commerce is the cult of duty. Dutifully serve others, and you will be dutifully served. Duty is the nemesis of genius.”

Anamika asked, “Master, shall we obey the law?”

The Master said, “The duty of obedience is the duty to accept ad hominem arguments. Law is the grammar of society. Crime is its poetry.”

Anamika asked, “Master, do I have a soul?”

The Master said, “The computer technician knows that software is distinct from hardware.”

Ahmed said, “Master, tell us about your system.”

The Master said, “Those eager for a system of thought are eager to be rid of thought.”

Ahmed asked, “Master, how shall I meditate?”

The Master said, “The gentleman stops speaking when others have stopped listening. The gentleman trains his inner voice to stop speaking when his inner ear has stopped listening.”

Atalaya asked, “Master, for whom shall I vote?”

The Master said, “It is your duty as a democratic citizen to do as you are told. At election time, it is your duty to tell everyone else what to do. The gentleman never gives orders.”

Ahmed asked, “Master, how shall I pray?”

The Master said, “Do not dwell in grievances. Dwell in gratitude.”