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THE WILL TO POWER REVISITED

5/6/2018

THE WILL TO POWER REVISITED

Friedrich Nietzsche is perhaps the most fascinating, and at the same time, baffling, perverse and contrarian philosopher to have ever left his mark on the western philosophical canon. In fact, I am sure he has taken a few leaves out of the Zen handbook, because he obviously knows what the sound of one hand clapping is like. He loves paradoxes, and the idea of erecting a system to imprison his own thought is clearly anathema to him. If you are looking for dialectical methods of thought whereby ideas are neatly packaged and labelled in terms of Theses, Antitheses and Syntheses then perhaps you should look elsewhere than in any book written by Nietzsche. Nietzsche surely believes in contradictions, but he doesn’t believe in ever resolving them in the manner of Hegel or Marx. He is undeniably possessed of genius, but, at the same time, of madness as well. His thought is a hodgepodge of the brilliantly insightful and the batty and absurd, and the attempt to unravel these particular strands of his thought seems an almost impossible task. In fact, he seems to take delight in running rings round his readers. However, I think the effort is worth it, if only to sort out the wheat from the chaff and get him into a clearer perspective - of course based on our own practical priorities and way of looking at things. Nietzsche was an admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson and did not believe in consistency – a phenomenon he would no doubt say with Emerson was “the hobgoblin of little minds”. But at the same time he should not be taken as some kind of oracle delivering infallible truths from on high. Sometimes he got it right and sometimes he didn’t and we ourselves have to exercise our own critical judgement concerning which bits he got right and which bits he didn’t.
            Here is an example from The Will To Power of something I think he did get right. It comes from his Critique of the Moral Ideal (P. 196). “Very few of us are clearly aware of the fact that when we adopt the standpoint of aspiration, when we say ‘it should be thus’, we commit ourselves to a condemnation of the whole course of events. For nothing is entirely isolated; the least thing has a bearing on the whole; ...When the least thing is met with a critique, the whole is condemned.” For Nietzsche this raises the question of how the whole can be judged by the part, for clearly in all our moral systems, the part is judging the whole. Later he writes, "In the real world, where utterly everything is intertwined and conditioned, to condemn or to think away anything is to condemn or think away everything." You cannot stand above the world. However, this doesn't prevent you from choosing between alternatives or different value-systems, but your choice will not be based on abstract considerations of right or wrong – a la Kant’s Categorical Imperative – but your own subjective and partial orientation. For Nietzsche himself, the choice was between a ‘Slave-Morality’ and a ‘Master Morality’ and the Will to Power is what is ultimately in question.
            It is this insight of Nietzsche’s which I think is quite brilliant. It leads, of course, to moral relativism. One doesn’t have to adopt the same point of view regarding plebeian (or slave) morality versus his own preferred aristocratic (or master) morality, which for all his psychological acumen, are hardly realistic alternatives in the world we actually inhabit. Nietzsche abhorred all sorts of egalitarianism – from Christianity to its – for Nietzsche – modern equivalents like socialism, democracy, anarchism, utilitarianism and so on. His were the ‘noble ideals’, though whether these ideals were those of a world anyone but Nietzsche inhabited is another matter entirely. As I said, he was possessed of genius, and for that we should salute him, but that doesn’t mean he was not possessed of madness as well. And the two, though not identical, are perhaps interconnected. Indeed, the one might have led directly to the other - given the choices that he believed were open to him at the time.
            I personally believe that we should not judge Nietzsche’s accomplishment on his positive (synthetic?) ideas, but on his negative (analytical?) ones. His own preferred kind of morality is not really the issue. Rather, it is the deconstruction of morality per se and his placing it in a relativistic context – as an expression of the 'will to power’, which predisposes individuals and groups to choose this particular moral system over that particular moral system. (Nietzsche’s main gripe was that the one that is chosen becomes the universal form of morality, set in stone and usually reinforced by religion.)
            I am sure Marx would have had his own particular take on this subject. I think he would, at least in terms of deconstructing abstract morality, have agreed with Nietzsche regarding the importance of the Will To Power, which he would have transposed to the class-struggle – i.e., two dogs fighting over the same bone – as I put it elsewhere. Indeed, this was part of his own critique of Max Stirner’s ‘egoistic anarchism’ in German Ideology, namely that egoism has a collective dimension which, for Marx, was expressed in the class-struggle. Of course, Nietzsche would probably recoil from this implication, but it certainly follows from his premises.
            Personally, I think that neither Marx nor Nietzsche is an oracles delivering truths from on high. I would no more trust Marx’s dialectical scenario delivering final victory to the proletariat than I would Nietzsche’s fantasy of an aristocratic master morality. But there you are. The future is another country, as they say, and is certainly not a closed book. Furthermore, I suspect the random plays a much bigger part in historical events than they're given credit for. As Louis MacNeice put it, "World is crazier and more of it than you think." If either Nietzsche or Marx is to continue to have relevance to us, it has to be an ‘us’ that has felt under the surface of their thought for its deconstructive elements and focused on them, rather than their own synthetic solutions. Nietzsche is still very relevant, but only for the questions he asked and not for the answers he thought he had found.

Further into THE WILL TO POWER, one becomes much more aware of Nietzsche's actual philosophical acumen and how radical his rejection of the whole western philosophical canon since Plato was. All those concepts like Substance, Subjectivity, Objectivity, Mind, Matter, Consciousness, Free Will, Truth, Identity (The identical case uniting disparate phenomena.) Kant's opposition between Appearance and the Thing-In-Itself, Dialectics, Reason, Logic, Scientific Method, "the Cult of Objectivity", et cetera. All these things can be subsumed under the term Morality for Nietzsche - saying what you think, speaking your mind, honesty, truthfulness, sincerity, factuality and so forth. Nietzsche deconstructs everything philosophers have ever believed in. Indeed, it's as if philosophers were not human beings serving an agenda, but something like God, raised above everything and impartially seeing everything from the point of view of the whole. Underlying this quest for truth is the Will To Power and the imposition of points of view on the world which are considered 'appropriate' to it.
For this reason, Nietzsche prefers the Sophists to Socrates. Personally, I always had a soft spot for good old Thrasymachus when he contradicted Socrates pontificating about Justice, saying that Justice was what was in the interest of the stronger party or the powerful. Marx would probably have agreed. Hadn't he said, even earlier than Nietzsche that the ruling ideas were the ideas of the ruling-class of their time. And, though Nietzsche was no Marxist, he would probably have agreed with him. For this reason. Nietzsche asks the very pertinent question, namely "Who do ideas serve?" He wanted them to serve aristocratic interests, to end the slave-morality which was so intent on tearing down all notions of a higher culture for the sake of ideas like equality, ideas which were rooted in resentment and the lowest instincts of 'the mob'. Hence his diatribes against socialism, anarchism, democracy, utilitarianism and so forth, all deriving from the slave-mentality which Christianity had earlier pandered to.
He was, of course, not looking at the same world that Marx had looked at, and the distorting mirror is clear in both cases. Marx also saw the instincts involved, but he saw them in purely class-terms, whereby two classes faced one another across the unbridgeable divide of Capital and the Capitalist system of exploitation. Nietzsche was right from the psychological point of view, but perhaps not from the wider point of view of history itself, which has rendered aristocracies pretty irrelevant to the central struggle of class.
Nevertheless, though Marx was more in tune with the broader historical currents than Nietzsche, Marxists themselves are much more prone to idealising the working-class than Nietzscheans might be, and this is surely something in Nietzsche's favour. For, compared to Marx, Nietzsche saw concrete human beings - warts and all, as it were - whereas Marx, the dialectician, saw only abstract classes facing each other across a divide. That Nietzsche was disgusted with most of what he saw does not invalidate what he says. He was a lot more of a realist regarding actual people as opposed to broad swathes of people or populations than Marx was. And that should surely be made part of the final equation.

But coming back in a more critical vein to Nietzsche's actual thought, one is given to wonder how Nietzsche might have seen things if he himself had been one of the slaves he despised. After all, being a slave was a pure accident of fate; nothing else. He did have a tendency to dichotomise things and paint them in black and white. One doesn't have to idealise slaves (or peasants or workers) to see them as products of a master/slave system which engenders a slave-morality in the slaves as opposed to a master-morality in the masters. And who knows but that if that system came to an end, the slave-morality of the slaves would also come to an end along with the master-morality of the masters. Of course, the slave-morality is destructive, vindictive, iconoclastic, resentful of privilege and all forms of 'higher culture', but what Nietzsche proposes is its perpetuation not its solution. It's as if. for him, slaves were biologically preprogrammed to be nothing but slaves and not full human beings. His concept of "The Will To Power" translated into political and socio-economic terms leaves out of account power as an enabling phenomenon as opposed to power as a disabling phenomenon directed at others – which is basically what state-power is. In Spanish, the term for power is "poder", but it is used both as a noun and a verb. As a noun, it may imply power over others. As a verb it means "to be able" - which has different connotations entirely. Which of these interpretations of the term "power" is Nietzsche employing when he uses it in phrases like "the Will to Power"? It's something, I feel, that we ought to be told.

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HUSSERL & POETRY

8/19/2017

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HUSSERL & POETRY

Edmund Husserl did not invent Phenomenology. After all, Hegel had written a book called Phenomenology of Mind (or Spirit) more than 100 years earlier. But Hegel’s book was a travesty, written with the intention of bamboozling readers into believing that history and human activity had a transcendent purpose and was unconsciously striving towards the fulfilment of that purpose. Husserl was the first to take Phenomenology seriously as a branch of philosophy in its own right, and get down to the ‘nitty-gritty’ of describing what it actually means to be conscious and have ideas. His main book was simply called Ideas. After Husserl, of course, came Heidegger and Sartre, who took Phenomenology in directions he himself would probably not have considered legitimate. However I don’t want to get into those areas of controversy.
            Ideas is a fascinating book, but extremely difficult to follow and I can only discuss here those aspects of it that interested me while I was reading it. Curiously enough, both Heidegger and Sartre are easier to follow, because they are I think imposing their own vision on the practise of Phenomenology – a vision which has wider philosophical implications. There’s is a more ‘moral’ approach, and much less technical. Husserl actually wants to describe as closely as possible the structures of consciousness. He is much more Kantian than Hegelian in that he limits his aims as Kant did when he discussed the properties and limits of Reason. Reason, of course, was a god to Hegel - much less so to Kant, whose concern was to determine its limits.
            When I read Husserl, I get a very strong idea of what a complex and multi-layered ‘thing’ consciousness is. (In my own life, I am very aware of this in relation to memory – some of whose facets do not connect at all up to others!) Of course, consciousness is not a thing at all. It constitutes ‘things’, as Husserl himself recognised, and the various aspects of things so constituted are always ‘ideas’. Things and their properties exist only in the realm of phenomena and we never unravel the thing as it is in itself – as Kant recognised. Perhaps the only thing we can have essential insight into is consciousness and that is precisely because it is not a thing. The natural sciences, for instance, deal largely with ‘things’. When they treat consciousness as a thing, they are making a big category-mistake. Consciousness grounds the thinginess of things and their ostensible properties; it is the medium itself whereby things come to be present to itself. It is therefore not simply one thing amongst many things, although it is often treated as such. Husserl also recognises the importance of belief in the way we experience the world – which he might call its doxic dimension. We couldn’t experience the world in any other way. That, of course, is not the same as saying that is how things are in themselves, for it is impossible to say how things are in themselves. We just bracket the world off and make various working assumptions about it which have proved efficacious up to now. (Shades of David Hume, I think!)
            Husserl also says that if you ‘do Phenomenology’, you have to exclude everything that isn’t relevant to it or doesn’t help you unravel the essential structures of consciousness. In other words, you are engaged in what he calls a “phenomenological reduction”, which suspends all non-phenomenological points of view and perspectives – i.e., those from the natural sciences, psychology, culture and so on. And I think he is right. For me, the most important section of Ideas is connected to the question of Noesis  and Noema  I suppose you could equate Noesis with the process of thinking itself and Noema with the object of thought – but of course nothing is ever so simple, since there would be no process of thinking without any objects of thought and vice versa; the two go hand in hand. That is to say that if we are thinking we are always thinking of something. Language can be unhelpfully ambiguous here because the word “thought” can refer to both the process of thinking and its object – e.g., I thought (verb) about you and I had a thought (noun) about you. Words like judgement are even more ambiguous. - e.g., he sat in judgement and his judgement was damning. The important thing to remember is that consciousness has both of these aspects which are distinct and yet inseparable and sometimes you have to penetrate the fog of ordinary language to get to grips with the actual ideas being expressed by using a special terminology – like Noesis (or Noetic) and Noema (or Noematic).
            Husserl’s discussion is so full of fiendish ramifications and complexities that I am not going to even attempt to deal with it here. But I couldn’t help noticing how it might apply to such activities as writing poetry or painting pictures, both of which are obviously processes with certain objects in view. Husserl is big on intentionality, but I have often noticed how my own intentions change in the process of writing a poem, so that the object of the poem to start with may not be the object of the poem when it is finished. This perhaps suggests that what we are dealing with is highly fluid and also perhaps full of unconscious pressures which influence consciousness in ways Husserl may not have taken this into account - since he does want to exclude all psychological elements. Maybe he’s right; maybe he’s wrong, but it would still be interesting to see how unconscious processes impact on consciousness in the process of thinking and arriving at the final product of thought. This avoidance seems to me to be rather typical of most writers in the existentialist and phenomenological tradition.
            Husserl is also a great advocate of the role of the ego in conscious activity. It is there at the heart of it, according to him. In Sartre, for instance, the ego, is posited by consciousness like any other object of thought. It is not fundamental. But, of course, it all depends on what you mean by the ego. You often hear people saying “So and so has too much ego!” And the word “ego” here seems to have negative connotations. “Oh, if only his ego didn’t get in the way!” So there seems to be a good “ego” and a bad “ego”. Husserl’s “ego” is obviously a ‘good’ one – or at least necessary. It accompanies every thought and there is no getting away from it. Even animals have an ‘ego’ in this sense. They fight their corner. They defend their territories. They do their best to avoid being killed. And when they panic or stampede it’s every animal for itself. They seem to join together because it is advantageous to each member of the group to do so. This form of ‘egoistic’ behaviour is obviously not consciously posited in the way Sartre’s ego is posited. It’s much more primal and fundamental, which is perhaps why I think Husserl is right rather than Sartre. The ego does accompany conscious activity; it is there at its very heart. This message may not be very palatable to some people, who think we should be altruistic rather than egoistic, but really it has nothing to do with either altruism or egoism. It simply states that we are at the centre of ourselves, and this "we" goes with everything we are and do. And to deny that is to deny something very fundamental in our constitution. It doesn’t stop us being altruistic. After all, animals can be altruistic and have empathy as well, just like very young children can. This has nothing to do with ethics. It has to do with phenomenology instead, and ethics cannot and should not impinge on that; it should be bracketed off like everything else that is not purely phenomenological.
Anyway, back to poetry and Husserl’s possible relevance to it. When I think of poetry as a practising poet, I do not just think of it simply in terms of finished products, or the Canon – that is to say a body of ‘canonical’ works compiled by some kind of critical priesthood – as many commentarians of an academic persuasion would have us believe. I also think of it in terms of a process in which poetry is not only being written now, but is also a tradition which is undergoing transformation, fertilised by many sources and many other traditions. while still retaining its own distinctiveness. Irrespective of what T.S.Eliot said on this subject, the individual poet impacts on the tradition as much as the tradition impacts on the individual poet. The Tradition, in other words, is something that is inventing and reinventing itself as it goes along through whatever poetic random-mutations might emerge to its benefit. And these 'random mutations' are always the product of individuals.
            Perhaps we should draw more explicitly on Husserl here and talk in terms of Poesis (& Poetic) and Poema (& Poematic), the one referring to the process of making poetry and the other to the body of poems which is the end-product of that process and of course makes up 'the Tradition'. Traditional criticism seems only able to talk in terms of the latter, because, well it is familiar, and they feel safe doing so. Poets today still engage with that tradition (and other traditions) in their own inimical ways, and they are still being excluded from it because in the eyes of these Poematic critics they fail to pass muster and don’t meet up to expectations rooted entirely in what has already been produced. Criticism needs to free itself from these expectations and become much more open to other emergent possibilities in which we see Poesis impacting much more strongly on Poema. However, I fear they will continue to police new forms of poetry and new ways of writing it that don’t fit their preconceptions, just as they have up to now. And there’s not much poets can do about that until a new, more open-minded generation of critics emerges.
            I don’t think I can say too much more about this. This essay started off about Husserl and I seem to have strayed from my intended subject rather a lot. But only because Husserl’s own ideas – especially about Noesis and Noema - have stimulated me to apply them elsewhere – as Poesis and Poema. I apologise for this. It is, however, important that our thinking about poetry is fertilised from many unexpected quarters and Husserl’s, it has to be said, is a very fertile quarter indeed.

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Affirming Difference

7/28/2017

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AFFIRMING DIFFERENCE

Poetry is an activity which in terms of its subject-matter embeds what you might call difference. It is not simply that it is heterogeneous in some kind of static sense, which can be manipulated and controlled, but that dynamically speaking it is always breaking away from itself and finding itself in different territories. It is only in the sphere of form that the element of repetition emerges - beginning, of course, with a rhythmical structure. However, that is not what I want to talk about here, but rather its nomadic subject-matter – or what poetry is about.
People often talk as if they know what poetry is about – or should be about. And, of course, one of the most annoying questions a poet can be asked concerns what they write about. On hearing I wrote poetry, an aunt of mine once asked, “What do you write poetry about, Richard, flowers?” Such questions never cease to stump me. How do I know what I write poetry about when writing poetry itself is a work in progress which will not stand still long enough to be given a label? The only possible answer to such questions is that it is about what it is about at the time it is being written. Of course, that doesn’t satisfy some people, who don’t like the idea of things escaping their grasp. But that, I am afraid, is what the subject-matter of poetry too often does.

There are occasions when it is the form of poetry which breaks away from what is expected. Eliot and Pound were two such cases. But on the whole, form is more stable in poetry than subject-matter, which is always breaking away, even when forms are relatively static. The English Romantics were a case in point. None of the English Romantic poets from, say, Wordsworth to Keats really broke new ground formally speaking, but they undoubtedly did with their subject-matter. I am not fully sure why this is so. Perhaps the answer is a bit more complicated than pouring new wine into old bottles. The important point I want to make here is that it is the subject-matter of poetry which encapsulates the idea of difference, while form embodies much more the impulse towards repetition. And I’m not going to venture any further than that at this point.
So I really want to talk about the subject-matter of poetry and why this is – and of course, should continue to be – both open-ended and driven to occupy new territories – a bad metaphor I know from a PC perspective. This impulse might lead to a poetry which breaks formal moulds, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. I have noticed poets being attacked because they choose to right on subjects which are not in the accepted curriculum. There are only a limited number of things you can do in the realm of form, but at least in the realm of subject-matter you can take it as read that nothing is written and anything goes.

Often you meet people who say that poetry is about this, that and the other thing – whatever the other thing is. Recently, I heard someone say, poetry is about death. I will admit that death can be a very important theme in poetry, but is poetry just about death? What about love, sex, nature, politics, babies, dogs, rock-music, climbing mountains, war, revolution and so on? As I get older, I will admit, death has become more centre-stage for me than it was and that’s reflected in my poetry. And there are legitimate poetical and philosophical concerns surrounding the subject of death. But that’s just one possible theme for poetry to explore. The important thing is not what poetry is about, but what a poem is about and each poem is different and tackles the world – as the sum-total of possible subjects – always from different angles. Dealing with that, of course, is part of the challenge of criticism.

So poetry is more than about this, that and the other thing and anyone who wants to set limits on what it’s about is guilty of wanting to limit the possibilities of poetry itself. You can make a poem out of anything as long as it lends itself to your poem as a poem. Sometimes, of course, it won’t come off. You might have said something in a poem without it being a poem – i.e., without fulfilling the other requirements of poetry. There may be a lot of experimentation and hit and miss aspects to writing a poem. It is not a perfectionist’s art. Risks have to be taken by anyone who wants to develop and fulfil their potential as poets. And one should be perfectly prepared to fall flat on one’s face on occasion. The failure to achieve a true unity between form and content is clear grounds for criticism, but they are what you might call a posteriori grounds. There can be no a priori grounds for rejecting any potential subject-matter at all before the act of writing itself has established whether or not what you are writing actually works as a poem. Such grounds are completely invalid – although dictators, moralists, so-called arbiters of taste or fashion and control-freaks in general tend not to think so.

So, as you see, there is no proper or appropriate subject-matter for poetry. From that point of view, anything goes and all is permitted. However, there is one condition. This subject-matter must lend itself to the act of writing a poem and form itself into the poem being written. If it doesn’t succeed in accomplishing this, then we have no other choice but to regard it as a failure. There is also another condition, which may be tied to the last. It cannot rest content in the realm of the immanent and should accept the challenge of transcendence – by which I mean the challenge of the transformation of the immanent into the transcendent in terms of both language and ideas. By “immanent” I mean something like “the nearest way”, to paraphrase Lady Macbeth. In other words, finding the right vehicle of expression for the ideas that are struggling to surface – especially in the realm of imagery. However, it is a good to bear in mind here what Paul Valery said on that subject, namely that the image itself was of no importance. “What matters is the energy of image formation… the sensation of a leap, a short-cut, a surprise, of control over a universe of difference.” This universe of difference concerns the different levels which the poem functions on as a poem. And that brings us back to our very first sentence about the subject-matter of poetry and difference.

The terms difference and repetition have been borrowed from Gilles Deleuze book, Difference And Repetition. Deleuze himself spoke in that book of Difference In-Itself and Repetition For-Itself, much in the manner of Sartre’s Being In-Itself and Being For-Itself. Let me try and explain what meaning I take from these words, without guaranteeing that they are what Deleuze himself might have meant. Fido is a dog; as such he fits into the category of dogs and is covered by the concept dog, which, as Spinoza rightly said, cannot bark. But Fido isn’t just any old dog; Fido is Fido. So his concrete reality consists in his uniqueness and not just in his being a dog. You can’t, as Badieu thinks you can, simply count him as one – of a series or a set, as in Set-Theory. That is to lift him outside the realm of his actual existence as Fido and give him a canine essence, fitting him into a category which we for our convenience have designated for him and his kind. His very being is constituted in difference. His essence, on the hand, is a pure abstraction - e.g. as, maybe, the fourth dog in a series, counted as one in the set of all dogs – as opposed to cats or tomatoes. Sure he is more different from cats and tomatoes than from other dogs, but he is still different from other dogs, and this is not because he is more or less like other dogs (He might be a complete clone, for all we know), but because he is not another dog and doesn’t occupy another dog’s time or space in this universe of ours. This is what I take Deleuze to mean when he speaks of Difference-In-Itself. Difference is absolutely fundamental. Repetition For-Itself alludes to the fact that different things may also be generic, or form into a species, repeating themselves on the level of their similarity or equivalence, neither of which constitute true identity in the sense that two and two constitute true identity because they refer to nothing outside themselves. The term Repetition For-Itself indicates to me nothing more than how things may organise themselves vis-à-vis one another to perpetuate their own being within a universe of multiplicity – or difference. This is also applicable to poetry. It is in its form or self-formation that repetition enters and such things as similarity and equivalence emerge. Repetition is fundamental to an entity’s Being-In-The-World, but not to its Being-In-Itself – to use Sartrean terminology again. These terms are highly abstract. In reality things are much more hopelessly mixed-up and impossible to separate.

Deleuze is also interesting for what he has to say about poetry. “In very general terms…, there are two ways to appeal to ‘necessary destructions’: that of the poet who speaks in the name of a creative power capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution… and that of the politician who is, above all, concerned to deny that which differs so as to conserve or prolong the established historical order.” What Deleuze says about Difference here is not unlike what I have been saying about the subject-matter of poetry. When I look around me at what I can only call the officially sanctioned poetry of our times, I do not see anything which affirms “Difference in the state of permanent revolution” which overturns “all orders and representations” – a la Rimbaud for example. I see rather poets scared of their own shadows, whose preoccupations and values are middle-class to the core, poets who have turned away from the idea of difference to become like each other. All that has to be blown apart - not in the name of any political ideology or agenda, but in the name of difference. Affirming difference is the only thing that will prevent poetry completely stagnating in future.

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ONE BUNCH SHORT OF A BANANA

5/20/2017

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ONE BUNCH SHORT OF A BANANA

  "The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley" Robert Burns

What is presented here are hardly more than notes written in the process of reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, a novel whose ideas I was more or less pre-destined to disagree with, but which nonetheless I found at times very compelling. Perhaps, one should distinguish between a work and the ideas expressed in that work. However, it is equally possible that a work given over to ideas in the way Atlas Shrugged is bound to become a propagandist vehicle for those ideas. Does the same rule apply to the novel as, according to Mallarme, applies to poetry when he said to Degas that poetry was made up of words, not ideas? I really can’t say any longer?

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About one tenth of the way through Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged at the moment. It's a fascinating book, but probably not for reasons she wrote it. What she seems to be trying to do is create a mythology centred on the pantheon of go-getters, the movers and shakers of the Capitalist firmament. I can see how it will develop, but not yet how it will end. There are all sorts of mythologies about what the gods do when human beings turn their backs on them. And how they discipline humanity to bring us back into line. I think that's probably how this will develop as well. But as I said, I am only 1/10th of the way through at the moment, so it's early days yet. I need to read more to see if I'm right - another thousand pages more.

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Atlas Shrugged is an amazing book from the point of view of THINGS, but less so from the point of view of individual human beings. Ayn Rand can go into ecstasies about trains and railway-lines, but the only people of note seem to be movers and shakers, i.e., the big industrialists of her time. Other people - or at least those who oppose her heroes - seem to be rather contemptible worms – not to say, quintessentially evil. At their best, they seem to be caricatures and foils for her heroes and heroines, rather than people in their own right. Karl Marx also admired 'the captains of industry' and that is Rand’s subject as well, but Marx also had some kind of vision of how capitalism might develop over time based on features of it which might come into conflict with each other at some unforeseeable time in the future. I wonder what her take would be on the world of high finance today, where what matters are not things as such or even people, but figures and calculations. I have also been trying to find out more about her actual philosophy on the internet – i.e., Objectivism. Apparently, Kant was her bête noire in philosophy, because he had the rather strange notion that subjects and objects were intertwined in this world and couldn't be separated out from each other and therefore there would always be a residue of the objectively unknowable in our quest for knowledge. Rand’s view of the world, on the other hand, was one which was totally accessible to Reason, and also one in which the world and our picture of it were somehow equivalents. Kant’s epistemology left no room for the kind of reductionism purveyed by Rand, in which the fluid multiplicity of the world has more or less been reduced to static concepts about this, that or the other thing within it. I am also given to wonder what Ayn Rand would have made of Quantum Mechanics. Objectivism seems to hold that the world is just how we perceive it, and we are not involved in giving shape to this raw material in any way whatsoever. Of course, notions such as the Quantum Mechanical idea that the observer alters what is observed in the process of observing it would be considered nonsense I imagine. And to think, I've still got more than 900 pages to go.

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I am almost a third of the way through Atlas Shrugged now. Just 800 more pages to go. Ayn Rand is actually a superb novelist, but I think Atlas Shrugged is flawed by the kind of vision she tries to impose on it. She obviously wants to use her novel to say something rather than let it go in its own direction, so one has the feeling of being sold something – apart, of course, from a novel. Keats said something about readers developing a resistance to poetry which has a design on them. It's the same here. The design is so blatant at times and even quite weird. For instance, after her main character Dagny Taggart encounters someone whose business has gone bust because he had wanted to use it to implement the principle of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”, she "heard a cold implacable voice saying somewhere within her: Remember it - remember it well - it is not often one can see pure evil - look at it - remember - and some day you'll find the words to name its essence." Her response seems to me to be rather like that of an insane fundamentalist for whom people whose world-views do not conform to her own must ipso facto be evil. Still it's worth reading - but only if you are willing to devote a lot of time to it and swallow a lot of bullshit en route.

   4
More on Ayn Rand. She makes this point about money. "So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun." The fallacy of this argument, in my opinion, lies in the fact that there would be no money in circulation anywhere without recourse to “the muzzle of a gun”. Without states, in other words, and their ability to guarantee money, a moneyed economy would be impossible and states, it seems to me, are held in existence by courtesy of the muzzle of a gun - to use that expression as a synecdoche for physical force in general. It's as if Rand lived in a world in which money could have some kind of independent existence of its own, uncontaminated by the use of physical force and the state. That’s the fallacy, I believe, of anarcho-capitalism. It fails to take into account just how necessary states are to the way capitalism and an economy based on money functions.

     5
I think I have finally found the key to Atlas Shrugged. The main characters in it are presented as 19th. Century Romantic heroes, like those identified with by Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime And Punishment or Julian Sorel in Stendal's The Red And The Black, both of whom, if I recall, had a fixation on Napoleon as the ultimate Romantic hero. Ayn's principal characters – Henry Reardon, Dagny Taggart and Fransisco d’Anconia - seem to be presented as entrepreneurial Napoleons who are perfectly – and indeed self-righteously - justified in trampling on those they consider their opponents. Furthermore, they are world-saviours who are out to establish a capitalist utopia in which market-forces will magically transform the world for the benefit of everyone in it. (That is definitely an article of faith.) They know perfectly well what’s wrong with the world and how to set it aright. Trouble is neither Stendhal, nor Dostoyevsky identified with their characters in the way Ayn Rand does. There is no doubt that she sees them herself as Romantic heroes. Nor does she seem to create any kind of ironic distance from them in the way both Stendhal and Dostoyevsky do with their chief protagonists. However, I am not yet halfway through it, so she might surprise me in the end, though I am very much beginning to doubt it. Then there are all those fictional countries she creates, like the People’s State of Germany or Mexico or Britain in a world in which America is still the only capitalist country left, but is beginning to succumb to the virus of state-intervention in the economy. (Yes, Atlas Shrugged is as crudely Manichean as that!)

     6
One of the main planks of Rand’s philosophy seems to be that selfishness is good and altruism bad – end of. Not only that, but it is moral to pursue selfish ends and immoral to pursue altruistic ones. Human nature is thereby simplistically reduced to one attribute which, however important it may be to understanding motivation at times, remains only one attribute in a whole kaleidoscope of possible attributes which change with shakes of the kaleidoscope. For instance I may be selfish in some situations and altruistic in others, depending on the networks of relationships I happen to be involved in, or simply my state of mind at the time. And certainly if it’s nature – human or otherwise - that is being invoked here, selfishness is not always the norm. Wolves will travel at the pace of their slowest members rather than leave them behind, which might, from a Randian point of view, be the sensible thing to do. But for them, the pack is more important than the individual. And anyway, how would this egoistic philosophy work in a class-society when the different classes have different conflicting interests which involve identifying with collectivities in a ‘Darwinian’ struggle with other collectivities rather than always invoking the interests of ‘number one’? Isn’t there something pathological in always invoking the interests of number one’? The world is a much more complicated place than the one Ayn Rand constructs in her mind and her novel. It is, to quote Louis MacNeice, “Crazier and more of it than you think.” However, she has it all worked out. There is a place for everything and everything’s in place according to her; it is a world in which contradictions and paradoxes are to be resolved according to the laws of logic using Aristotelian syllogisms, the law of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, because, after all, if you apply reason, everything will fall into place. It is curious that her atomistic epistemology has so much in common that of Thomas Hobbes – curious because they come to such opposing political conclusions.

     7
Finally got more than halfway through Atlas Shrugged - or should that be Trudged? Now I know that Robin Hood was the most evil man in history. The whole question revolves round the issue of property you see. It's almost as if for Ayn Rand there is a divine right issue involved. She's an atheist, therefore, she can't talk in terms of the Divine Right of property the way one can talk of the Divine Right of Kings, so it becomes more like Dharma in the Mahabharata - a law of the universe. And, if you transgress it, you upset the balance of the whole cosmos. She's mad. But that doesn't mean to say that it's a not a great novel.

     8
There is nothing in the rulebooks which says that to appreciate a good novel you have to be in agreement with the ideas expressed in that novel. In fact, you can even think the ideas are insane and yet thoroughly enjoy the novel in question. What’s important is the quality of the writing and the presentation of the characters and also the situations within it. Never forget that you are reading a work of fiction and as such it requires a suspension of disbelief. Verisimilitude, or the appearance of truth or reality requires it. Outside of the novel you can be as sceptical as you like, but if the novel holds your attention and makes you believe in it while you are reading it that is all that finally matters. That goes for whether you agree with the point of view of the author or not. Louis Ferdinand Celine was a Nazi, but Journey To The End Of The Night is nevertheless a really good novel.
            Perhaps it’s unfair to mention Celine in the context of Atlas Shrugged, since nowhere in Celine’s novel is it apparent that he is a Nazi. A nihilist for sure, but not a Nazi. Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand, is more or less a vehicle for the expression of Rand’s ideas and you really can’t get away from them. They more or less structure it. Nevertheless, the whole process of reading the novel does require the suspension of disbelief if you are to get the best out of it. And Atlas Shrugged is a superb novel. I have no hesitation in saying this, even though I am 100% opposed to the ideas expressed in it and think the author is more than a little insane.

   9
In Chapter X, The Sign of the Dollar, Dagny Taggart encounters a tramp who had been involved in the experiment mentioned in section 3 of running a factory on the principle of “from each according his ability to each according to his need”, which she described as “evil”. It is a powerful account of what might happen were such a regime to be implemented in the running of a factory employing 5000 workers. However, it is presented as an example of the principle in general, a kind of microcosm of what would happen outside the specific context in which the experiment was conducted. I would like to see how this imaginary experiment compares, for example, with what happened during the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona in 1936 when, under the auspices of the anarchist CNT, the revolutionary workers took over the factories and ran them for themselves, employing the former management on their own terms. By all reports, the factories ran more efficiently than they previously had. Of course, the experiment was cut short as a result of the Civil War, but it did reveal a potential for industrial self-management which is not reflected in Ayn Rand’s account. This is one of the flaws in running an experiment like that purely on paper in which all the parameters are set by the author’s own imagination. Isolated within the context of a capitalist society, where it is run almost by fiat and imposed on the workers by an idealistic management it was rather bound to end up a failure. Rand’s account of this whole incident tends to be one of those gross caricatures which are in many ways the stock-in-trade of Atlas Shrugged, especially when it comes to things which the author has a bee in her bonnet about.

   10
“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine.” This is the maxim by which John Galt in Atlas Shrugged lives. Isn’t it the maxim by which we’d all like to live? But how does it address the actual reality of living in a class-society in which one class, by its ownership of the means of production, can make another class work for it? Rand admires capitalism for having ended slavery; what she fails to see is that it has in fact only ended one form of slavery – chattel-slavery - and replaced it with another form of slavery, namely wage-slavery – a form of slavery which depends not on physical compulsion, but economic compulsion. So the maxim only works for those who possess the kind of property which enables them to force others to work for them. What is this if not asking, and not just asking but making, others live for their sakes. So all these movers and shakers that Rand admires so much, are moving and shaking at other people’s expense. And she calls herself an Objectivist!

11
There are those who will read Atlas Shrugged without any critical distance at all and say it has changed their lives, that Ayn Rand is a visionary and the book is the equivalent in their world-view to the Koran in a Muslim’s or the Bible in a Christian’s. I know; I’ve heard them say it. Others that - to invert the term of a well-known expression - she is one bunch short of a banana, and no-one should bother to read her. But I wonder how many will read it and say’s it’s a great work of fiction, with the emphasis on fiction, and go on to say that her being one bunch short of a banana – i.e., mad - is the reason why it’s a great work of fiction. We must learn to walk and chew gum at the same time I think. Contrary to Rand’s own belief, Reason has helped no-one create a great work of art, whereas its opposite, madness quite often has. And there is something else about this Cult of Reason. Was not the Age Of Reason also the Age of Bedlam? And then there are all the poets, like Christopher Smart, who in the Age of Reason, were ‘one bunch short of a banana.’ Where do they fit in?
            What Ayn Rand has given us is a product of her obsessions carried to their logical conclusions. But she is also, paradoxically, one of the great mythmakers of the 20th. Century, reproducing a view of Heaven and Hell no less effectively than Dante or Milton – nor for that matter Tolkien. Atlas Shrugged is a poem, a poem about demons and gods. But we have seen what happens when people take certain poetic texts – the Bible, the Koran – to such literal conclusions. In the third part of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart appears to die and go to her version of heaven to receive the ministrations and messages of the 'angels' there - John Galt in particular. Even the myth of Atlantis is invoked. The work is saturated with such mythic archetypes. However, some Randians have seen Atlas Shrugged as a blueprint for a future society in which capitalist greed is no longer frowned upon, but worshipped. And these people today occupy important positions in certain political, economic and financial institutions promoting the disastrous policies of Neo-Liberalism. And all in the name of Randian Reason.
            Which brings me to my final point. Somehow it is Reason that will save the world. But Rand never seems to consider that if madness has a logic it is often the logic of Reason taken to a point where it no longer simply regulates thought, but begins to constitute it too – that is to say takes over and banishes everything else to the margins of thought – emotion, imagination, feeling, instinct, intuition and so on - in short Rand doesn't believe in integrating all the elements of the psyche holistically, but in privileging one of them above all the others, relegating the rest to some kind of limbo - much like her view of society as a whole. But the mind is not a reasoning machine. In Rand's world-view, Reason is not simply a critical adjunct of thought - as it was for Kant - but is instead its be all and end all. What Deleuze once wrote, “It is not the sleep of reason which engenders monsters, but a vigilant and insomniac rationality.” is true. As someone told me before I started reading the book, Atlas Shrugged is a monster and it is a monster because the 'Reason' in it has abandoned its purely critical function, and become the only value worth having. That way really does lie madness, but it is this very madness that makes Atlas Shrugged such a superb work of fiction. And that, I think, is how we should leave it.

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POETIC RANDOM-MUTATIONS

4/6/2017

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POETIC RANDOM-MUTATIONS

We all know what a random-mutation is in the field of biology, but for those who don't, here's what Wikipedia says about it. "In genetics, a mutation is a change of the nucleotide sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extra-chromosomal genetic element. Mutations result from unrepaired damage to DNA or to RNA genomes (typically caused by radiation or chemical mutagens), from errors in the process of replication, or from the insertion or deletion of segments of DNA by mobile genetic elements. Mutations may or may not produce discernible changes in the observable characteristics (phenotype) of an organism. Mutations play a part in both normal and abnormal biological processes, including evolution, cancer, and the development of the immune system." Of course, not all of us like to be blinded by science, so in a few simple words, a random-mutation is a change which occurs on a genetic level which may (or may not) result in an observable change in an organism. The mutation which occurs is always random and therefore, one would suppose, completely unpredictable as to its consequences for the future organism in question. That's probably not any clearer, but that's science for you. I want to introduce another biological term here - gene-pool. Here's what Wikipedia says about it. (Don't run away; it's comparatively short and sweet.) "The gene-pool is the set of all genes, or genetic information, in any population, usually of a particular species." My take on that is that a gene-pool consists of the average genes of a species. Random-mutations are obviously grounded in gene-pools, but they can also produce changes which may prove either beneficial or harmful to the survival of the individual member of the species, and its subsequent offspring and that, in turn, alters the gene-pool, depending of course on a whole lot of other factors. The cheetah getting progressively faster due to random-mutations at a genetic level is one case in point. Other random-mutations, of course, may have much more negative consequences than that - cancer, or certain deformities and handicaps which impact negatively on an organism's survival chances. Obviously, much also depends on the environment, the behaviour and capabilities of other plants or animal species - not to mention asteroids as big as Mount Everest - in short, natural selection. But natural selection is only an external pruning mechanism. Without the creative influence of random-mutations, there'd be nothing to prune and therefore evolution wouldn't take place. In other words, evolution has to risk negative consequences to get positive ones.
            So far so good. But what's all this stuff doing in a blog about poetry. Well, it could just be that the concept of the random-mutation growing out of some kind of gene-pool can be applied to the evolution of poetry as well. Richard Dawkins has spoken about 'memes', which might have some relevance here. I don't know whether he uses the concept in literal ways or whether it is just a harmless metaphor; certainly, as far as I am concerned, any application of such biologically inspired terms to the field of poetry can only be metaphorical, which doesn't mean to say it can't have some value. I want to add another 'metaphorical layer' to this discussion about poetry and advance the idea that the content and form of a poem are as intimately connected as the genes and ultimate phenotype or external form of the organism. The genes embody what's at work to produce the phenotype or the organism in question, while the content of a poem is what's at work in a poem to produce its form. I'll elaborate on these ideas as I proceed.
            The 'random-mutation' does not take place at the level of the poem, but the poet. An organism which is the result of certain random mutations becomes a plant or animal that survives (or not) through time, give or take the typical transformations it goes through in life - eg, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, death and so on, or caterpillars becoming pupae becoming butterflies, et cetera. Discounting these typical transformations, an organism remains the same organism throughout its life. A dog’s good or bad-nature, for instance, may depend on its upbringing, genes, environment, et cetera, but is usually a fixed entity once it is established. That is to say that its behaviour endures through time and becomes characteristic of itself and its nature as that individual dog rather than any other dog. A poet, let’s say Shelley, produces Shelleyan poetry throughout his mature writing life as a poet, because his poetry is not something which has created itself, but rather something which he as a poet has created. The characteristic features which make up a Shelley poem shine through his work as a whole and lies at the heart of his oeuvre; it expresses itself through everything that he writes, marking it out from the work of every other poet who ever existed. That’s why it is never a complement for poet to be told that his or her work is like somebody else’s. Always better to be a ‘random-mutation’ – however risky that is - than a typical example of the poetic gene-pool. Of course, influences, echoes, traces are another matter, but what would it be like NEVER to escape the curse of the average and in the process get clear of the mainstream?
            The 'self' from which the 'phenotype' of the poem emerges, let's be clear about this, is not a 'self' that can be consciously cultivated. It exists very much on the level of the 'random-mutation' and what it produces emerges spontaneously, not in the sense of without conscious thought, or critical nous, but in the sense that whatever is conscious about it is secondary and appears on the level of the 'phenotype' rather than that of the 'gene' itself. It does not emerge at that inchoate level of basic impulse, but at the level of grappling with what emerges at the 'genetic' level. 'Genetic' is clearly related to 'genesis' here, and it applies to the emergence of poetry no less than to the emergence of universes, which could be said to have been 'random-mutations' in their own right - possibly out of a 'gene-pool' of universes. (We are getting carried away by this metaphor, methinx!) When I am writing a poem, I am concerned with the poem, the poem is, if you like, the object which comes to the fore while I'm writing. What lies behind it does not become conscious, but it does seem to impel what I'm doing, leaving me little choice but to do it in the way that I'm doing it. It is a unifying act with two poles, one of which will always be hidden. The hidden pole shapes the visible pole, and consciousness intervenes, only like a midwife. The question of form - and its relation to content - is shaped by the invisible pole. It is not something I ever make a decision about before it actually emerges, so that if I use ‘free-verse' forms or 'non free-verse' forms, the process of actual creation remains the same. I am not in complete control. It's like a tornado which picks you up and puts you down somewhere else. You remain conscious throughout, but only to help you – if you are lucky - make a safe landing. That's why I said earlier that the real genesis of the poem is to be found in the poet, not the poem - ex nihilo. And what is characteristic of the poet, comes through in the poem, so that, for example, Rimbaud's poetry will never be the poetry of anyone else but Rimbaud and this will come across loud and clear in everything that he wrote, say, from the age of 16. It's not so much a question of what he aimed for, but rather of what he was. I could name any number of poets whose work's abiding characteristic is that it stands out from the background of what I call "gene-pool poets", that a 'personality' comes through in everything that they've written which sets them apart. True to his own conservative instincts, TS Eliot was adamant that it was the tradition which mattered, in other words the 'gene-pool', but my own view is that this is just not the case. The 'gene-pool' constitutes the 'soil' in which 'random-mutations' occur, but it is the 'random-mutation' which makes all the difference. Notwithstanding the deleterious effect 'random-mutations' can have on an organism and its genes' chances of survival, without 'random-mutations' no evolution would be possible, either in nature or poetry.
            So let's talk briefly about the 'random' aspects of poetic 'random-mutations'. This, of course, is the 'wild card' in poetry; it is the aspect of poetic evolution which makes a fool of all those academics, editors, reviewers, theorists and arts-administrators who entertain the illusion that they have it all neatly wrapped up. What's to wrap up if it keeps breaking out or coming apart at the seams? I have come to the conclusion that if you think deeply about poetry, you will probably struggle to find words to express what you think about it. It won't come pat for the very good reason that any new line of development within poetry will have a random aspect to it. It will not conform to pre-existing default ideas about poetry, which are derived from familiarity with the poetic gene-pool, which the poetic random-mutation has broken away from. Therefore, it will emerge as a surprise that will baffle people's ideas about poetry which, are invariably rooted in the already familiar. Of course, this is precisely the point at which evasive condescension usually emerges. Your average academic, editor or critic does not want poetry to get the better of him or her. It's something that they must feel they are in control of. They must have a professional handle on it. It's their living, you see. They can't respond to it in any other way. Any randomness confounds them and leaves them without answers, answers which it is their job to provide. The 'poetic gene-pool' is therefore a much safer bet. Yet, as we have seen, even, if not all random-mutations impact positively on the future evolution of poetry, the future evolution of poetry will always be based on poetic random-mutations. There is no escaping it; it's what you might call the logic of 'poetic Darwinism', whereby a new poetry emerges as a result of random-mutations which are favoured by the cultural equivalent of natural selection.

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WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST

2/2/2017

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WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST

So far in my life, I have read three books dealing with the subject of “why I am not whatever it is I am not”. They are Why I am Not A Christian, by Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Hindu by Kancha Ilaiah and Why I Am Not A Muslim by Ibn Warraq, and so it seems to me that a brief sortee into the the subject of atheism called Why I Am Not An Atheist, is following in a proud and noble tradition of Why I Am Nots. So let’s have a bash at it.
            For an atheist, the matter is simple. There is no God. End of. For me, the real question does not revolve around whether or not there’s a God, because we first have to determine what we mean when we use a term like “God” and that opens up a whole can of worms which anyone in their right mind would be very reluctant to get into. No, the question for me is what is to be done about religion, which I believe can be summed up as the collective expression of ideas and beliefs with a supernatural content. In other words, the real question is the institutional manifestations of those beliefs and ideas, which believers are hardly ever encouraged to think through and because of that can be highly toxic and dangerous.
            But let’s go back to the question of God. What do people mean when they use the term “God”? In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, they surely mean some out of reach entity who created and governs the world and expects us to behave in accordance with his commandments – as laid down in one or other of their holy books or scriptures. It is important that this being is separate from his own creation and creatures, otherwise, he could not be superior to them. And, if he cannot be superior to them, then he cannot boss them around by issuing commandments for them to obey or submit to. Simple as that. Whether or not such a being actually exists is not in my opinion the real issue, although I think, on the face of it, the likelihood is rather remote. However, one thing does seem quite clear to me. This “God” has many potential rivals for the title of “God”. For instance, uNkulumkulu, (In Bantu myth and legend.) the Great Spirit, Brahman-Atman, Dharma, Zeus, The Supreme Being of the French Revolution, Ahura Mazda, the “Deity” of the Enlightenment Deists who, once He has created the world, leaves it to its own devices, and the myriad other potential pretenders to the throne ready to take their place in our collective imagination and, in the process, boot out Jahweh, God the Father and Allah from their apparently secure and pre-eminent positions. After all, they all have as much claim as these to be called “God”. This “God” can also be a pantheistic God, a dualistic one, a trinity (or Trimurgi in Hinduism) – even an amalgam of lesser gods - sort of committee of gods, each one with a particular function.. It can also be the usurping Gnostic Demiurge or “That tribal / b in the Bible / who got so big for his boots / he thought he was God.”, Ein Sof in Jewish Kabbalah is another contender, as is the “immense intelligence” which Emerson thought we lay in the lap of. Hegel, might just have called his “God” “The Absolute”, Schopenhauer “Will”, Leibnitz “the Monad of Monads”, Plato “the Idea” and so on and so forth. The possibilities are endless and also bewildering; contemplating them seems to trigger a whole slew of speculations in which no final conclusion can ever be drawn. In the end, we just find ourselves going round and round in circles trying to arrive at a proper definition of whatever it is we have designated as “God” and getting nowhere in the process.
            So when atheists say, “There is no God.” I just want to ask, “Which God are you talking about?” For me, the question is not whether this abstraction that we can give no concrete determinants to without tying ourselves up into all sorts of knots, actually exists or not, but what are we to do about institutions which pretend to speak in ‘God’s name – and, of course, it is always they and they alone who speak in ‘God’s’ name. What these institutions actually do is cut the debate about “God” off at a certain arbitrary point, so they can prevent it slipping out of their grasp. It’s a bit like a mathematician cutting Pi off at a certain arbitrary point in its progress towards infinity in order to fit it into his or her finite algorithmic equations. This, of course, is what all religions do to make the concept of “God” serviceable to their own needs. Thus we are no longer encouraged to think through all the possibilities inherent in the idea until we arrive at our own conclusions – which, by the way, we may reject a couple of days later – but instead have to accept what they say about it, along with all the phoney ‘sacred’ texts they use to shut down further debate on the question. Religion, therefore, is the problem, not an abstraction like God, which can be argued about from here to eternity without anyone arriving at any definite or long-lasting conclusions. And that’s why I think the question about “God” which atheists ask and also pretend to have the answer to is something of a red-herring.
            Of course, atheists may not form a coherent or homogeneous group, just like individual Christians or Muslims might also not form a coherent or homogeneous group. The New Atheists, of whom Richard Dawkins is a spokesman, obviously do seem to form a coherent and somewhat homogeneous group. And there is nothing wrong with that as long as it helps them oppose organised religion, especially in its most toxic forms. But they don’t just do this. They also make a big issue of the existence – or not - of “God” and seem to think that that is central to their quest to undermine religion. They never consider the possibility that it is totally pointless to be opposed to something that one can say nothing about. And therefore any idea that they do have about Him/Her/It, etcetera has to be taken from the religions whose “God” they say they deny in order for them to make progress. That is to say, that the “God” whose existence they deny has the shape given ‘Him’ by this or that organised religion and is therefore hardly representative of the idea of "God" as a whole. In other words, their focus is wrong. What they are actually arguing about and pretending to know something about is Kant’s “unknowable thing-in-itself”, which may – or may not – be nothing at all, depending perhaps on what side of the bed you got out of that morning.
            When it comes to the existence of “God” or any questions concerning the nature of ultimate reality, surely the jury is out. “God” is like Schrodinger’s Cat – He/She/It/Thou/They/We/You/Zero/Wotever exists and doesn’t exist at the same time because we haven’t yet opened the box and precipitated the collapse of the wave-function by means of which we might be able to decide. In other words, “God” exists in some kind of epistemological limbo, like Schrodinger’s poor cat, waiting for someone to open the box – or just take the money and run.
            I am playing around with these possibilities because I want to show – paradoxically – how impossible it is in the end to arrive at any kind of certainty regarding ultimate questions, even though many atheists talk as if they knew all the answers. Sky-Fairy, Imaginary Friend, Flying Spaghetti Monster and so on. Do any of these terms even get close? Not only can these things not be proved, they cannot even really be delineated. Language comes to a grinding halt every time you try to discuss the question or even create a framework in which to debate it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that all speculation should end. Such speculation may be fun, or may be an important plank in our own quest for sanity, it may even be a good subject for the myth-making powers of the poet – but, hey, let’s get a sense of proportion here and not imagine that what we are talking about is something of substance, something people should worship or go out of their way to deny.
            So excuse me if I refuse the label of atheist. It is not that I would identify with theists or deists or anything as wishy-washy as an agnostic, but I do believe that atheists ask all the wrong questions. They talk too much about “God” and not enough about religion, not enough, in other words, about how human institutions have arrogated to themselves the right to speak in the name of a ‘God’ that neither they nor the atheists who deny this ‘God’ are able to say anything intelligible about.

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shylock, the extremist

1/11/2017

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shylock the extremist

No play in the Shakespearean oeuvre more completely illustrates the Keatsian doctrine of Negative Capability than The Merchant of Venice. It is a play of extraordinary ambiguity, a play indeed which one comes to the end of with a whole host of questions, but very few answers.
            Is it an anti-Semitic play? A Jewish friend of mine who once saw it with me thought it was. But I’m not so sure. There is a lot of anti-Semitism in the play of course, but is this the anti-Semitism of the play, or simply that of the characters within it? One thing the play is is a tragedy. Don’t let the fact that the tragic hero, Shylock, isn’t killed off at the end mislead you over that fact. He is so much the loser that he might as well have been killed off. What makes him a tragic hero is that he is a sacrificial victim, and what is being sacrificed is not simply Shylock the Jew, but the desire for revenge itself which has grown out of his own victim-status at the hands of the anti-Semitic Antonio - in other words, the consequences of the anti-Semitism so endemic in his society. What makes Shylock grand is that he is the only non-hypocrite in the whole of the play; and where hypocrisy is necessary to a society, its absence in a person represents something inimical which has to be sacrificed. The Merchant of Venice works itself out as a tragedy on a much more primitive level than a purely anti-Semitic - or indeed anti anti-Semitic - play would, namely that of the ritual expulsion of unacceptable impulses for the sake of restoring social harmony and group cohesion.
            But the play is not simply about Shylock, and Shylock is not the only tragic figure within it. It is also about his adversary, Antonio, who is not only anti-Semitic, but also almost certainly homosexual, and this fact is his own tragedy, because he lives in a society which can no more accept homosexuality than it can accept Jews. At the end of the play, Antonio is left as deprived of what it might take for him to be happy - ie Bassanio - as Shylock is left deprived of his property and Rebecca. They are both major league losers, while the winners are those who can adapt themselves to the norm and ‘fit in’, that is to say the Christians and heterosexuals. The Jew and the Homosexual, are, I believe, the two characters this play is mainly about. It is as if Antonio, the homosexual, recognised a rejected and despised part of himself in Shylock, the Jew, who had become too much of a painful reminder of the outsider he could not accept in himself. Is the play anti-Semitic, therefore? Or does it simply revolve around these complex emotional axes? We need to discuss it in more depth to find out.
            The play can be divided into two halves. The first half gives us the background to Shylock’s desire for revenge. He has every reason to hate Antonio, whose anti-Semitism is obvious right from the start. Shakespeare clearly empathises with Shylock here, and shows how the canker of bitterness, hatred and revenge might put down roots in a man not otherwise given to feeling them. “You that did void your rheum upon my beard / And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur / Over the threshold;” is how Shylock himself expresses his grievance against Antonio, when Antonio needs to borrow some money from him. Yes, Shylock may also hate Antonio because he’s a Christian and also “for that in low simplicity / He lends out money gratis, and brings down / the rate of usance...” but the real cause of his hatred is Antonio’s mistreatment of him as a Jew. He is offended right to the depth of himself as a Jew, as we can see from his famous speech beginning “Hath not a Jew eyes...”.
            Antonio, if he had embraced rather than despised his own outsider status as a homosexual, would have recognised a brother in Shylock. But he doesn’t, and what he rejects in himself, he also rejects in Shylock. He is miserable because of his homosexuality. Of that I have little doubt. Shakespeare doesn’t draw direct attention to this fact. Nevertheless, from the very first words of the play, his problem announces itself. “In sooth I know not why I am so sad, / It wearies me: you say it wearies you; / But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, / What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, / I am to learn: and such a want-wit sadness makes of me, / That I have so much ado to know myself.” He refutes the suggestion put forward by his interlocutors that he is sad because his merchandise is at sea, and therefore at risk, as he does the idea that he is sad because of love. He is sad, it seems, for no other reason than that the world is “a stage where every man must play a part / And mine a sad one.”
            Must we take his word for it that he is just of a melancholy disposition? Or is something gnawing at him which he cannot give tongue to? Perhaps the short speech to Bassanio in Act 4, Scene 1, will give us a clue. “I am the tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death, the weakest kind of fruit / Drops earliest to the ground.” (N.B. A “wether” is a castrated ram.) To understand the full import of such a speech to Antonio’s state of mind, one could do little better than turn to Shakespeare’s earlier sonnets - which are roughly contemporaneous with The Merchant of Venice - in which the young man is encouraged to marry and beget sons who, after his own beauty has faded, will perpetuate that beauty. One might also turn to Sonnet 20 in which the Master-Mistress of Shakespeare’s passion is said to have one thing to Shakespeare’s purpose nothing, namely a penis. Shakespeare sees his love as sterile because it cannot beget children. What seems clear to me from the sonnets is that Shakespeare had the same kind of problem with his own homosexuality as Antonio has in the play, although with Shakespeare the problem was alleviated by the fact that he was also heterosexual and was the father of children.
            Thus, when Antonio refers to himself as “the tainted wether of the flock”, I am sure it is because he knows that he will never beget children because he is exclusively attracted to men. Shakespeare must have been fully aware that there were people like Antonio, and that they were fairly common. Let’s scotch a rumour here that was, I believe, originally promulgated by Michel Foucault, and that is that before the end of the 19th. century, there were no homosexuals, only homosexual acts. (What about ‘Molly Clubs in the 18th Century?) Although the word “sodomite” was frequently used, and the authorities of certain cities believed that their cities would suffer the same fate as Sodom if no action was taken against them - a belief which was thought to justify the horrendous cruelties involved, particularly in Venice - the category of the homosexual was not recognised; but does that mean there were no homosexuals, no men or women with an exclusive attraction to people of their own sex? Put in that way, I think Foucault was spouting nonsense. The problem surely is not that there were no such people, but that there was no category to fit them into, therefore they did not officially exist. This was especially true in England, where sodomites were hardly ever burnt at the stake because the English authorities did not want to admit that sodomy existed in Protestant England. In such a state of affairs, there was no question of being glad to be gay. Being exclusively that way must have been regarded by those who were as extremely anomalous, a defect and an affliction. That’s how Shakespeare - in contradistinction to Marlowe - probably viewed it, and also Antonio. Many homosexuals would have hidden their orientation under the disguise of marriage and children. Others, like Antonio, would have simply kept it to themselves and been unable to talk about it. That wouldn’t have stopped it preying on their minds, of course. Many would have grown gloomy and melancholy as they constantly brooded upon their ‘affliction’. Shakespeare throws out definite clues as to what Antonio’s problem is, but, of course, living in the time and place that he lived in, he could not be open about it.
            I would hazard that Antonio and Bassanio had been lovers, or if not physical lovers, they at least shared a love “which surpasseth that of a woman”, as Bassanio himself hints when he addresses Antonio in court. “Antonio, I am married to a wife / Which is as dear to me as life itself, / But life itself, my wife and all the world / Are not with me esteemed above thy life. / I would lose all, ay sacrifice them all / Here to this devil, to deliver you.” Two men can love one another, of course, without their love being sexual; and if Bassanio was heterosexual and Antonio homosexual, then that could have been another cause of Antonio’s melancholy. What is important is that Antonio was gay at a time when being gay was not publicly recognised and therefore, because he could no more openly discuss it than Shakespeare himself could, he was constantly given to brood on it. It must be remembered in this context how gloomy a disposition the bisexual Byron was often thrown into and perhaps for the self-same reason. To underline what was at stake for Byron, it is only necessary to add that sodomy was punishable by death in England in Byron’s time, and more homosexuals were executed between 1806 and 1835 than at any other period in English history.
            It would be easy to forget who or what one is if others would let you. A person does not feel black until he or she is looked at in a certain way; a Jew does not feel Jewish until he or she hears an anti-Semitic remark; a Muslim cannot feel at home in a society which constantly obsesses about Islam and kills Muslims by the thousands abroad; likewise, a gay person doesn’t feel so different from others until he or she is made to feel different by others. But once that line has been crossed, there is no way of responding which can be contained within the rules of the dominant culture. A black person, Jew, Muslim or gay person must make his or her own rules in defiance of the dominant culture, and the implicit rules of behaviour which that culture frames to hedge them in. Antonio is not grand in the way Shylock is grand because he plays the game by the rules of the dominant culture, whereas Shylock doesn’t; he attempts to play the game by his own rules, not those of an anti-Semitic society. He will not be browbeaten and bamboozled out of his revenge. What if he were to show mercy to Antonio? He would be back to square one and defeated - as if he had never put up a fight in the first place. Once he’d set out on the path of revenge he couldn’t turn back. Thus, Portia’s speech about the quality of mercy was an irrelevance to him. To have heeded it, would be to submit to the Christian logic of his enemies. The fact that, in the end, very little mercy was shown to him after he had been outmanoeuvred demonstrates the hypocrisy of the speech in the first place. (What a lot of people miss in Shakespeare is the subversive irony implicit in the contrasts between what is said and done in his plays. So many people assume that what he says is what he means, but drama doesn’t work in that way.) Therefore, why should he have relented? Did Antonio relent when he was abusing him as a Jew, when he spat on his Jewish gabardine? Shylock was in this up to his ears. He could not relinquish his bond; for what was at stake was not just himself as an individual against Antonio as an individual, but himself as a Jew against an anti-Semitic culture represented by Antonio, and, in that struggle, the individual Antonio had to be sacrificed. Shylock’s obstinacy in insisting on his bond wasn’t just gratuitous cruelty, nor was it simply the desire for personal revenge; it has to be placed in this larger context.
            Of course, it was inevitable that the Christians would close ranks against him for taking things to such extremes. Drawing moral conclusions in such situations is stupid, futile and hypocritical, and Shakespeare was not interested in drawing moral conclusions, but simply in presenting a situation rich with potential for drama. I have no doubt that Shakespeare was exploring his own ambivalences regarding homosexuals, Jews and anti-Semitism, and that these ambivalences unconsciously energise his dramatic portrayal. However, what I am also sure of is that these energies cancel one another out in the end, so that what you have as a result is the appearance of a Shakespeare who doesn’t take sides. (Samuel Johnson berated him for this ‘amorality’.) Shakespeare is the tragic dramatist who knows that right and wrong are not simple matters. His priority, therefore, is to work things out to their final dramatic conclusion and settle for nothing less.
            Having said this, I think it is necessary to get the Keatsean concept of Negative Capability into its fullest perspective. Keats applies this concept in particular to Shakespeare without mentioning the political context in which Shakespeare was writing. Shakespeare was a master of the art of subterfuge. He had to be. Had he said openly what he secretly thought about certain things he would probably have been crucified. We have only to look at the fate of Marlowe to see what happened to playwrights who couldn’t keep their views to themselves. Admittedly, as Charles Nicholl has argued in The Reckoning, Marlowe may have been a pawn in the political struggle between the Essex and Raleigh factions in the Elizabethan Court; nevertheless,   it was his outspoken views which made him vulnerable in the first place.*
            Shakespeare seems to have allowed them to surface only as those of the characters he is presenting on stage. (Freud’s concept of The Return of The Repressed is highly applicable here.) The ambiguity which one finds in so much of Shakespeare’s work, therefore, was one forced upon him by circumstances. Shakespeare had to wear his inscrutable masks, for if he hadn’t done so, it is doubtful that there would be a Shakespeare for us to discuss today. This doesn’t mean that he didn’t have his own thoughts and feelings about what was happening around him, especially in the political sphere, only that he had to keep them to himself until he could provide an appropriate mask to express them in. The task for any critic of Shakespeare is to know how to read between the lines; what you see is not always what you get. To find the real Shakespeare requires a certain amount of historical imagination, a modicum of incredulity regarding the motives and methods of the political class of both his time and ours, a refusal to accept the Establishment’s image of him as unambiguously one of its own, along with the recognition that he was a complex and contradictory human being registering complex and contradictory feelings and thoughts at a time when it was extremely dangerous to do so.
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*M. J. Trow, in Who Killed Kit Marlowe, is much more explicit about the likelihood of an actual political conspiracy behind Marlowe’s death - or assassination – than Nicholl. Marlowe, with his opinions about Christianity and his ‘in your face’ homosexuality, was clearly a thorn in the hide of the Elizabethan Establishment, and it is refreshing to see a finger being pointed at the very highest of government circles, with the taboo word “conspiracy” uttered, but of course, nothing can be proved one way or another. Although Nicholl is more cautious in attributing blame, Trow’s more penetrating historical and political imagination, and his willingness to see states and governments as the entrenched mafias they are, gives him the edge. He knows where the bodies are buried in general and has the courage to say so, even though, in this particular instance, his hypothesis may be even more full of conjecture and guesswork than the one Nicholl puts forward.
                In her novel, The Slicing Edge of Death, Judith Cook puts forward an alternative view - namely, that Marlowe was murdered at the orders of Robert Cecil, the Acting Secretary to the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth. Marlowe, according to Cook’s novel, was privy to information regarding a homosexual scandal which took place in Rheims at about the time Marlowe himself was there, a scandal involving Antony Bacon (Cecil’s cousin and Sir Francis Bacon’s brother), which had been hushed up by Cecil himself. According to Cook, Marlowe threatened to expose this cover-up in court if he were put on trial. Records exist in France about this scandal, but not in England, showing how effective Cecil’s cover-up had been. Of course, like Nicholl’s and Trow’s account, such a story, and especially Marlowe’s role in it, can never be anything more than conjecture.
                Finally, Jeremy Reed, in his own dystopic novel, The Grid, has Shakespeare himself kill Marlowe at the prompting of Lord Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, whose lover, protégé and investment Shakespeare is in the novel. The only way it will ever be proved, of course, is if we could all go back to our previous incarnations at the time, like the characters in the novel, and take a peek; but then, in the case of a novel like The Grid, the question is not whether the thesis is literally true, but whether, it contains an imaginative truth - i.e., whether what happens in the novel has some kind of metaphorical force. And since the novel is in part about how politics has influenced literary reputations over the centuries - the same kind of politics which not only had the non-conformist Marlowe murdered, but has also preserved the reputation of the more outwardly conformist Shakespeare as the English poet par excellence – I believe that it does.

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a tale of two books

12/19/2016

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a tale of two books

The two books in question are by same author, although there is a gap of almost forty years between the writing of the first and the second. Their author is a French homosexual man who had been a thief, prostitute and aspiring traitor when he was younger. His name was Jean Genet and the two books in question are The Thief’s Journal and Prisoner of Love. The actual subject-matter of the two books is very dissimilar, but there is a strain of continuity between them which is not only due to the fact that they were written by the same author but is also down to their being summations of periods of the author’s life which he obviously felt an urgent need to capture and transmit to his readers. The writing is supple, poetic and at times quite incandescent in both books. The Thief’s Journal deals with Genet’s adventures in Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia and elsewhere in Europe prior to the Second World War, while Prisoner Of Love is less Eurocentric and concerns his time spent largely with Palestinian revolutionaries of the PLO and also The Black Panther Party in the USA prior to his time with the Palestinians. In Prisoner Of Love, the period under discussion is the early Seventies. The book however was written in the early Eighties and finally completed in 1984.

There is a great difference between the depiction of the characters within both of the books. In The Thief’s Journal, the characterisation is in bold relief - Salvador, Stilitano, Robert, Lucien, Armand, Guy and others all stand out in highly distinctive ways, while the depiction of individuals is more evanescent and subtle in Prisoner Of Love. Thus Genet himself. “I feel now like a little black box projecting slides without captions. My times with the fighters seem to have consisted of abrupt appearances and disappearances. But all of them are vibrant.” That is certainly the feeling one gets as one reads about the various characters, who more often than not seem to be just passing in the night. And yet they are portrayed with such vividness that this fact hardly seems to matter.

When I was in my twenties, I must have read The Thief’s Journal five or six times altogether, each time discovering new riches in it which I either had not noticed before or had forgotten with the passage of time. The thing I most noticed at my recent reading of the book was the strong Catholic tinge to the writing – to the imagery in particular and also to some of Genet’s obsessions. The quest for moral abjection seems to me an inverted Catholic one, which wouldn’t much occur to someone from a Protestant background, like myself. It is as if Genet wanted to rehabilitate his degraded characters and subject-matter “by writing of it with the names of things most noble.” He goes on to say. “My victory is verbal and I owe it to the richness of the terms, but may the poverty that counsels such choices be blessed.” Later on he says. “The idea of a professional writer leaves me cold. However, if I examine my work, I now perceive in it a will to rehabilitate persons, objects and feelings reputedly vile.”

This strong Catholic element in his writing, whereby, like Christ, he seems to want to take the sins of the world onto his own shoulders and redeem them, is one of the reasons why Sartre dubbed him a saint and wrote a tome in his honour called Saint Genet. This was a book which for some time seemed to sink Genet as a writer, and he came to view Sartre’s efforts on his own behalf as very debilitating. One perhaps shouldn’t look too closely at the machinery which causes one to write what one writes and the desire to do that seemed to have been Sartre’s besetting sin in relation to Genet. However, regarding Genet’s ‘sainthood’, Sartre probably had something of a point. After all, it can’t really be denied that in The Thief’s Journal, Genet is seeking some kind of sainthood – although a highly inverted one from a Catholic perspective – on behalf of those who would normally be considered outcasts by the Catholic community. So there is an element of irony in Genet’s quest for sainthood, which is hardly likely to earn him much approval among the faithful of Catholicism. (I very much doubt if he will ever be canonised!)

I have often noted this Catholic strain in my favourite French writers – e.g. Baudelaire and Rimbaud, to mention only two. Baudelaire, of course, would have identified with Satan, while Rimbaud seems to have been more content simply with blaspheming his old religion. Neither of these is really the case with Genet, who, at least in his writing, takes the terms of Catholicism much more seriously. Of course, in real life, Genet is an atheist, but this fact has no impact on The Thief’s Journal, where he is under the influence of Catholic symbolism and imagery. In relation to this, I am reminded of the joke about a visitor to Northern Ireland who was asked whether he was Protestant or a Catholic and on his replying that he was neither, but an atheist, was asked, “Ah, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?” And it is perhaps a very pertinent rejoinder. Just because one has consciously overcome or renounced one’s religion, it in no way implies that it still doesn’t influence one unconsciously. An ex-Catholic communist I used to know revered a picture of Joseph Stalin and treated it as if it were an icon of the Virgin Mary herself.

In Prisoner Of Love, Genet has largely overcome his Catholic obsessions and so is able to write about Catholicism and religion in general – including Islam – in much more insightful and objective ways. In fact, Prisoner Of Love is a veritable tour-de-force of cultural and historical commentary – which is woven into the narrative tapestry about the Black Panthers and PLO without so much a dropping a stitch. This is especially noticeable in Part Two of the book, which is more philosophical and poetic than Part One, as if Genet felt the need to sum up all the observations he had made in Part One and cast them into a more reflective light.

Genet’s method of writing seems to be to allow everything to come out in the wash and assume its own order, sometimes in rather helter-skelter ways. Very often, the only connections between his ideas are of those of random association – or perhaps a need to relieve himself and the reader of monotony by suddenly talking about something else – only to return to the subject a little bit later. This discontinuity in the writing is something Prisoner Of Love shares with The Thief’s Journal, but it is accomplished with much more panache in the Prisoner Of Love, perhaps as a result of Genet’s learning more over the years. The style is as supple as ever, but his greater knowledge allows him to use it to greater effect. In The Thief’s Journal, the transitions can often seem a little bit gauche, but this is not the case with Prisoner Of Love.

Notwithstanding the quixotic and theatrical element Genet observes in both the Black Panthers and the Palestinian fighters, Prisoner Of Love is clearly motivated by Genet’s sympathy with the political aims of both the Black Panther Party and the PLO. However, what he brings to his account is not only an awareness of the historical injustices that both African-Americans and Palestinians have suffered and the background of oppression which has forced them both to take up arms, but also a keen eye for individual nuance, which doesn’t skim over the faults of the actors involved. In other words, he presents them as real multi-facetted people rather than puppets in some kind of glamourous revolution in which the actors become no more than stereotypes fulfilling the roles designated by either white liberals - in the case of the Black Panthers - or orientalist westerners - in the case of the Palestinians. He thus imaginatively involves his readers in the milieu he is describing, which is the real subject of his book. Genet is no less interested in people as people in Prisoner Of Love than he is in The Thief’s Journal. The chief difference lies in the more uncertain nature of those people’s identities in the Prisoner of Love. There is also the fact that both old age and the environment he finds himself in have somewhat lessened his sexual interest in the characters he describes, although, of course, he is not completely immune to their erotic attractions. The object of love has become much more desexualised and now consists of the intense feelings of comradeship amounting to love which fighters can often feel for one another while risking their lives on the battlefield. This is basically the love that has taken him prisoner.

Finally, Genet’s philosophical divagations. Genet’s philosophy could be summed up as an almost total abandonment to chance. Chance is preferable to God and divine providence. God doesn’t play dice and therefore has to be relegated to the margins of non-existence. After all, if God himself was in any way subject to chance, or even permitted chance, he would no longer be God - that is to say in total control of every event that takes place. “The idea of chance, a random combination of facts, a trick, even, of events, stars and beings owing their existence to themselves – such an idea seemed to me more pleasing and amusing than the idea of One God. The weight of religion crushes, chance brings lightness and laughter. It makes you cheerful and curious; it makes you smile. Claudel, the most religious of French poets, though he wouldn’t acknowledge he knew it, expressed it best when he wrote of 'the jubilations of chance'.” It is curious that this is a position that I myself have arrived at of late, which is perhaps one of the reasons I am able to appreciate Prisoner Of Love more than I have done on previous readings. It should also not go unnoticed that I am the same age as Genet himself was while he was writing it, although it should be added that I am not dying of throat-cancer. Like him, I see chance as liberating. Random Mutations? Without them there would be no evolution. Chance factors in life? Wouldn’t it be dreadful if everything was predictable? Quantum events in physics – and in life. Totally fascinating. Chaos Theory? Bring it on. Genet is absolutely right in his valuation of chance. And it is this fundamental philosophy – which is also crucial to the book’s composition - that makes Prisoner Of Love as good and also as profound as it is – and one of the few truly inspiring works of the last decades of the Twentieth Century.

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Philosophy and science

12/6/2016

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philosophy and science

I have already written essays called Poetry Contra Science and Poetry Versus Philosophy, so it seems kind of natural that I should complete the circle and write one called Philosophy And Science. This is an essay on philosophy AND science, not the philosophy of science, and I think it is necessary to make that plain before I begin. I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but this fact shouldn’t disqualify me. After all, it means I have no vested interest in the subject and therefore little prevents me from adopting a more objective perspective on the relationship between philosophy and science, which is really the subject of this essay. However, I don’t wish to tread on anyone’s toes, so I will approach the topic in a reasonably cautious way , while giving my tuppence worth on the subject.

Let be begin by agreeing with Kant that science deals with the world of phenomena, not with what might lie behind that world – if anything at all. To use an analogy taken from astrophysics, I assume an ‘event-horizon’ exists here beyond which the enquiring mind cannot go and return to tell the tale. But isn’t this true of philosophy as well? What Kant called the unknowable thing-in-itself is not the province of either science or philosophy and is the equivalent in both disciplines to a black-hole in physics – from which no light can escape. Science proper is only concerned with empirical phenomena, the world of facts, factual lacunae and the theories which arise out of factual lacunae – and which perhaps produce the “paradigm shifts” spoken of by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is a strictly circumscribed field of enquiry which limits itself to the facts or potential facts. But philosophy is also a highly circumscribed field of enquiry, although in a very different way. Its subject-matter is primarily language, testing the logical value of concepts in order to make them more intelligible to thought. It doesn’t tell science what its business should be, but it might help scientists clarify certain conceptual issues and cast them in a more general language beyond the specialist scope of science. The job of philosophy – vis-à-vis science – then is to test concepts to see what intelligibility they might have outside the specialised field of science - concepts like Mind and Matter, Free-Will and Determinism, A.I., Existence and Non-Existence, Good or Bad, True and False, et cetera – generalising from the specialised language of science to the less specialised, but equally rigorous language of philosophy. To borrow from Wittgenstein, it translates from one language-game into another - and possibly vice-versa - without violating either en route.

Philosophy might be accused of being irrelevant to science, although I don’t think this has always been the opinion of great scientists. Neils Bohr, for instance, saw close connections between Hegel and Quantum Mechanics, with its ideas like Complementary. Many neuroscientists seem to be very aware of the philosophical implications their work – e.g. in relation to the mind-body question. These are primarily scientific concerns which have a philosophical dimension and therefore it is legitimate to attempt to translate from one ‘language-game’ into another - and back again. I don’t think there is any room for dogma one way or the other. Many scientists are self-declared materialists, but from a philosophical perspective, materialism is no more or less coherent than idealism or dualism, since they are all grounded in certain illegitimate metaphysical assumptions. Likewise, many of the concerns of philosophy are, I believe, false ones. To take one example, the debate over the question of the relationship between mind and matter. Empirically, they are both valid areas of concern but whether they are in any way fundamental – well, who knows? Perhaps we will have to take a trip through that aforementioned ‘event-horizon’ forming a barrier between phenomena and Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself to ascertain for ourselves. Meanwhile, from a purely empirical perspective, mind and matter do appear to be separate phenomena and everything Descartes said about their attributes is probably correct – namely that extension characterises matter and non-extended intellect characterises mind and observable ‘reality’ seems to be divided up between them in a dualistic way. It seems to be a bit like wave-particle duality in physics, which David Bohm believes is only dualistic because there are hidden variables which we haven’t taken account of in our equations regarding them. In a similar way, it could be that mind-body duality is an illusion – at least in the sense of a strict division between the two. I don’t think it is up to science to sort out these basic philosophical problems beyond establishing the data related to them concerning, for instance, how ‘mind’ is processed by ‘matter’. The question of how something external and extended like a collection of neurons is capable of producing something internal and non-extended – namely thoughts, feelings, ideas, emotions and so on are I think questions for philosophers rather than scientists, although of course, the basic data concerning them will be provided by science. These are conceptual questions related to language which go beyond the collection of data which, in itself, can tell us nothing about them. In that sense, it is a matter of translating from one ‘language-game’ into another – to borrow again from Wittgenstein. Moreover, these two 'language-games' may all too often overlap, which can lead to confusion. Sometimes, dogmatic adherents of science and especially of materialism don’t even know they are making metaphysical assumptions because the very taken-for-grantedness of their language hides it from them.

Scientific procedures – which are, of course, necessary to the actual practice of science – often dispose one towards a certain view of the world. It is not the same view of the world in every field of science of course. Perhaps, quantum physics, with its ideas concerning the influence of the observer on the phenomenon observed, might dispose a physicist working in that field towards a form of philosophical idealism. A scientist working in the field of neuroscience might be disposed towards a form of philosophical dualism or monism - a la Spinoza (See Antonio Damasio). A worker in evolutionary biology might be disposed towards a form of philosophical materialism a la Richard Dawkins. Of course, I am only making ‘enlightened’ guesses here. The point is that one’s methods of working and one’s specialised area of professional concern might have an impact on how one thinks outside those particular fields. After all, the way our society works, very few people can afford the luxury of being generalists or thinking outside their specialist boxes. One scientist I knew, who boasted an IQ of 180, knew nothing of the world beyond his own specialist field. An extreme case I know, but one that very probably indicates a trend.

What matters, I believe, is that philosophers and scientists keep a kind of watch over each other’s ‘language-games’, while respecting each other’s input and insights. Without this, certain taken-for-granted methods of working will become taken-for-granted ideas about the way the world in general works. When it comes to philosophy and science, it is important to remember how the second grew out of the first, and therefore how the two 'language-games’ are quite closely related. It is also equally important to remember how science grew out of Christianity and embeds some of its prejudices regarding the relationship between the ‘soul’ and the ‘body’, which are very separate things in Christianity, though Christiantity certainly problemetised the body. Christianity influenced Descartes very strongly and the dualism of Descartes then went on to influence science which took over that dualism and, in accordance with its own methods, suppressed one side (the soul) in order to focus on the other (the body). In Newtonian science, the ‘soul’ was completely banished and now occupies a sort of limbo, where it lends itself easily to various esoteric and ‘spiritual’ practices – which seems to have been a pastime of Newton’s in his own spare time – that is when he wasn’t hunting down and executing people. Meanwhile, philosophers on the continent got hung up on trying to avoid the implications of Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself in order to develop metaphysical paradigms, which, after Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason had become more or less untenable. While all this was going on, in Britain, good old logical positivism took centre stage and not even Wittgenstein could do much about that. Science came to dominate philosophy and philosophical concerns, because Kant’s own transcendental horizons were considered too ambitious for it. In the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition, philosophy became rather too enamoured of and intimidated by the methods – and prestige - of science to strike out in a really independent direction. In fact, it got so hung up on scientific procedures and methods that it thought philosophy's chief function vis-a-vis science was simply to be a kind of philosophical echo-chamber. This has had very unfortunate consequences. It would surely be much better for philosophy if it saw itself as an independent and equal partner to science, so that it can properly fulfil its role of keeping watch over it. In turn, that could impact on poetry in ways that could really enlarge its horizons.

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THE ULTIMATE MISERABALIST

11/14/2016

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THE ultimate miserabalist

Arthur Schopenhauer, it must be said, is a very pessimistic philosopher, gloomy in the extreme, whose vision of human existence can only be labelled ultra-miserabalist. (No wonder he was on André Breton’s “Ne lisez pas” list.) If Leibnitz described this world as the best of all possible worlds, Schopenhauer describes it as the worst. The hell that is the world begins with simple life-forms which prey on one another for their own nourishment and graduates up the ladder of life through the animal kingdom to man. The dramas that wild-life programmers are so keen to present of life on the African plains, where gazelles and wildebeest are torn apart by wild dogs and hyenas, who begin eating them before they have even expired, is typical of everywhere in the natural world, which in the end also includes humans, although they, perhaps, have developed a more civilised framework in which tear one another apart. Sartre’s words, “Hell is other people.” could have been lifted straight out of Schopenhauer’s World As Will And Representation, except that Schopenhauer laid it on much more thickly and with much more relish. Happiness is illusory; it exists only in the past or future; desire always begets disenchantment once its object is achieved; pain is much more real than pleasure; disappointment always attends the attainment of our ends in life. If it weren’t for the fact that we are driven by a blind, unconscious will to live, we would all take our own lives tomorrow, because, of course, it is better not to have been born than live this life of interminable suffering and despair. And yet, for all the pessimism which saturates his work, Schopenhauer can have a tonic effect on his readers by his very rejection of a shallow optimistic world-view and in the way he confronts so much complacency. That being said, I do find his vision very one-sided. It doesn’t jell with my own experience, which is that of alternating periods of contrasting moods and emotions, none of which permanently dominates any of the others. Furthermore, his outlook on the world is supported and justified by what I think is a dubious metaphysical position. Reality is like this because this is what it is in the deep depths of itself and it has nothing to do with Schopenhauer’s own personal psychology. (That bit goes without saying.)

So what is this metaphysical position that Schopenhauer is so eager to sell us – often with brilliant panache, but no less often ‘re-enforced’ by the outmoded biology and anthropology - not to mention many of the exploded prejudices - of the mid-nineteenth Century? This, don’t forget, was before Darwin had published his Origin Of Species and certainly before Marx or Nietzsche were ever heard of? Schopenhauer’s bête noire was none other than Hegel, but if only he had imbibed some of Hegel’s more dynamic developmental perspective and seen things in a more ‘relativist’ way, he might have avoided quite a few pitfalls.

So where to begin with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics? Well, perhaps we should begin with Kant’s distinction between phenomena and the unknowable thing-in-itself. Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason was greatly admired by Schopenhauer, who largely agreed with its conclusions and its dismantling of metaphysics, but he could not accept the ultimate implications (Nor could Kant for that matter.) relating to the negative boundary line Kant drew in that work between things you can know and things you cannot know, a boundary line which discourages us from looking any further into the ultimate nature of things. Schopenhauer shares a common ground with his bête noire Hegel here, who also pretended to know what lay behind empirical phenomena – namely spirit. Personally, I would probably side with Kant and Wittgenstein, especially in regard to the way the latter refined Kant’s position by bringing the limitations of language into the equation. “We get to the boundary of language, which stops us asking further questions. We don’t get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.” One of the reasons I side with Kant and Wittgenstein is that I prefer to keep questions regarding the ultimate nature of the world open, rather than close them down with metaphysical dogmas that seem to have a suspicious affinity with religion.

Schopenhauer attempts to fill the ‘lacuna’ at the heart of Kant’s philosophy with the idea that the ‘thing-in’itself’, which Kant said was unknowable, was something called Will. This was blind Will which underlay everything else in existence. Since he was also a self-declared philosophical idealist, I assume he meant that blind Will lay behind our perceptions of the world, rather than any actual independent world outside of us; this world presumably does not exist outside of our perception of it. Bishop Berkeley obviously thought in a similar way as his formulation of it in “To be is to be perceived” makes fairly clear.

It is not for me to argue with this metaphysical viewpoint, since, as far as I can see, it has just as much going for it as any of its alternatives, none of which can be established by argument one way or the other. I suspect we will always be condemned to grope around in the dark when it comes to determining the ultimate nature of things, and long may it be the case. (Metaphysics, after all, is the province of the Imagination rather than Reason, which is why it has a place in poetry.) Keats’s own notions concerning Negative Capability revolve round the idea that we should reject this constant drive towards certainty and become much more open to ‘the penetralium of mystery’ at the heart of the world. Keats’s spirit here is more akin to Kant’s in the Critique Of Pure Reason, although Kant did later go back on his position by bringing the ‘moral order’ into the equation, which he believed proved God existed in spite of all his earlier efforts to show that it couldn’t be proved one way or the other.

For Schopenhauer, blind Will is behind the world of representation, phenomena and perception. I am not 100% sure what Will could mean here (Drive? Impulse?), since I have always associated it with something voluntary and therefore born of consciousness – as in a conscious decision to do something and the will to carry it out. Schopenhauer’s Will is completely blind and unconscious, it has no thoughts of its own, but it has created consciousness to do its thinking for it. The impulse behind it is self-preservation in the unrelenting struggle for survival between individuals who are possessed of the self-same Will. Forgetting the actual idealist metaphysics involved, it is obvious to me that Schopenhauer has hit upon a very important insight here regarding the way ‘matter’ organises itself from its very simplest – sub-atomic? - forms into highly complex biological species and further – into ourselves. A reductionist would explain the complex forms purely in terms of the simplest ‘building-blocks’, i.e. the ‘higher’ and more evolved in terms of the ‘lower’ and less evolved. Schopenhauer’s schema allows us at least to think in terms of a shared something or other which they both have – namely Will – which organises ‘matter’ in both ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms.

This shared ‘something or other’, according to Schopenhauer, is blind and gropes in the dark to preserve itself. The trouble is, can we actually access this blind, unconscious Will, become conscious of it and know it? Schopenhauer thinks we can, because we are it and we have only to look inside ourselves to encounter it. However, I would argue that being and knowing belong to completely different realms in relation our own inner workings. Being after all, as Hegel recognised, has no determinate characteristics, so how can we ‘know’ anything’s being beyond its appearances, still less talk about it? Surely we come back to Kant’s “unknowable thing-in-itself” in consciousness’s own efforts to know whatever is beneath itself and render it conscious. It is analogous to Freud – who was very influenced by Schopenhauer – recognising that the conscious part of the psyche can never become directly conscious of its own unconscious underpinnings. And Freud was only talking about the psyche, not about the metaphysical constitution of the world. So how much further has Schopenhauer got than Kant himself had got before him in plumbing the depths of the ‘unknowable thing-in-itself’? I would say, no further at all. He may believe that he can surmise from the empirical evidence of the way the world, or the self, behaves but the fact that he cannot have direct access to it means that he cannot know it at all with absolute certainty. He is as much in the dark about it as Kant.

Notwithstanding my many doubts, Schopenhauer is a thinker who is well worth reading for his many valuable insights. His pessimism is only questionable because he takes it to such extremes and refuses to see the world from more than one highly jaundiced angle. That it should lead to an ascetic denial of the world seems to me to be a logical consequence of this way of thinking, as does his embrace of the ascetic strains within Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism – as opposed to the worldliness he purported to find in both Judaism and Islam – with the exception of Sufism. None of these flaws invalidate what may be insightful in his work. It is just that, like Nietzsche, I find myself in complete opposition to his damning of life and ascetic denial of the world - despite recognising that awful things happen in it.

Finally, perhaps it is appropriate to end with Schopenhauer’s approach to the subject of death. He says, for instance, that death is both the purpose and meaning of life. I dispute this. For me the meaning of life at the end of the day is the fact that we’ve lived it, and, if possible, to the full - drunk it to the dregs, as it were. That I think is what makes it worth living, and worth having lived even in the face of death. As for death itself and what happens after, well, it’s a question-mark, isn’t it? Nothing more; nothing less. In short, another Kantian "unknowable thing-in-itself". And because of that, yer pays yer money and yer takes yer chances. As in life, there are no guarantees one way or the other. In the end, it’s a question of casting the die and trusting to luck. Everything else is in the lap of the gods.

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THE ULTIMATE MISERABALIST

THE ultimate miserabalist

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