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.