Mesoscope's bookshelf: read en-US Sun, 04 May 2025 22:58:44 -0700 60 Mesoscope's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Politische Theologie, Bd.1, Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität]]> 2977052 Book by Schmitt, Carl 70 Carl Schmitt 3428088050 Mesoscope 0 Concept of the Political, I came around to this work, the wellspring of Schmitt's important concept of the Ausnahmezustand, the state of emergency, which was implicitly or explicitly taken up by wide-ranging figures including Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and Jacob Taubes.

In comparison to Concept of the Political, which I found to be completely without value, Schmitt's analysis in Political Theology is extremely subtle and makes some provocative and illuminating points. Not least, the book is helpful for understanding the mindset of reactionary decisionists, such as the kind who populate the Roberts Supreme Court today. I thought of them several times reading this short treatise, and ended up convinced that the court's far-right majority sees itself as in a unique position to save what it no doubt regards as the core of American civilization from the existential threat posed by radical leftists.

Schmitt is often termed a political realist, and this can be seen in his efforts to locate the essence of the state in something actual, rather than in norms, rules, procedures, and laws. By a complex path of argument, he asserts that the actual authority of the state ultimately devolves to the sovereign capacity to make decisions precisely in circumstances that cannot be procedurally addressed - that is to say, states of exception, which is perhaps better translated as "states of emergency," though both registers are subsumed by this discussion.

Schmitt's political realism is tied, as it so often seems to be, to a dour historical pessimism of a Hobbes variety; one which views the state as the only thing that keeps human beings from eating one another alive. The final function of the state in Schmitt's view is defend us from internal or external threats, and the nature of those threats cannot be exhaustively formalized in any conceivable set of procedures. It will always require human judgment and human agency to decide when the state of emergency has begun, and when it has ended.

Section three ties this central argument to the his concept of political theology, and here Schmitt lost me a bit. He argues that our collective political, metaphysical, and theological constructions of reality are mutually entangled, and that generally imply one another, and he warns against crude attempts to reduce these terms to one of the members, such as Marx tried to do in his ideology critique. This is not a particularly novel idea, and I'm not entirely clear on how it relates to his larger argument, other than in the indirect sense that our political theories always entail implicit and/or covert moral, metaphysical, and theological judgments. This argument does sort of heat up the final section, when Schmitt reviews the arguments of the horrifying Catholic reactionary Donoso Cortés, who understood the battle between decisionism and atheist anarchism in explicitly eschatological terms.

It's tiresome to wade through the abstruse works of highly-objectionable thinkers, but sometimes it's necessary. For someone trying to get a handle on Carl Schmitt, I would much sooner recommend this book than The Concept of the Political, for what it's worth.

Update 2025: This work launched back into relevance to a degree I could not have anticipated even six months ago. Schmitt warned urgently against fake emergencies (𾱲ԲܲԲ󳾱ܲäԻ) as a pretext to wield unconstrained power, and today I read in the New York Times:

Trump Says He Will Put 100% Tariff on Movies Made Outside U.S.

Declaring foreign film production a national security threat, the president said he had asked his top trade official to start the process of imposing a tax on Hollywood.]]> 4.00 1922 Politische Theologie, Bd.1, Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität
author: Carl Schmitt
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: german, policy, politics, law, philosophy
review:
I won't rate this book, as it falls outside my ordinary spectrum of valuation to comparatively rank a complex and sometimes-vexing work written by history's most prominent Nazi jurist. Sometimes one must descend into the mire in order to understand the larger conversation, and Schmitt is too significant to ignore. Thus, after despising his Concept of the Political, I came around to this work, the wellspring of Schmitt's important concept of the Ausnahmezustand, the state of emergency, which was implicitly or explicitly taken up by wide-ranging figures including Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and Jacob Taubes.

In comparison to Concept of the Political, which I found to be completely without value, Schmitt's analysis in Political Theology is extremely subtle and makes some provocative and illuminating points. Not least, the book is helpful for understanding the mindset of reactionary decisionists, such as the kind who populate the Roberts Supreme Court today. I thought of them several times reading this short treatise, and ended up convinced that the court's far-right majority sees itself as in a unique position to save what it no doubt regards as the core of American civilization from the existential threat posed by radical leftists.

Schmitt is often termed a political realist, and this can be seen in his efforts to locate the essence of the state in something actual, rather than in norms, rules, procedures, and laws. By a complex path of argument, he asserts that the actual authority of the state ultimately devolves to the sovereign capacity to make decisions precisely in circumstances that cannot be procedurally addressed - that is to say, states of exception, which is perhaps better translated as "states of emergency," though both registers are subsumed by this discussion.

Schmitt's political realism is tied, as it so often seems to be, to a dour historical pessimism of a Hobbes variety; one which views the state as the only thing that keeps human beings from eating one another alive. The final function of the state in Schmitt's view is defend us from internal or external threats, and the nature of those threats cannot be exhaustively formalized in any conceivable set of procedures. It will always require human judgment and human agency to decide when the state of emergency has begun, and when it has ended.

Section three ties this central argument to the his concept of political theology, and here Schmitt lost me a bit. He argues that our collective political, metaphysical, and theological constructions of reality are mutually entangled, and that generally imply one another, and he warns against crude attempts to reduce these terms to one of the members, such as Marx tried to do in his ideology critique. This is not a particularly novel idea, and I'm not entirely clear on how it relates to his larger argument, other than in the indirect sense that our political theories always entail implicit and/or covert moral, metaphysical, and theological judgments. This argument does sort of heat up the final section, when Schmitt reviews the arguments of the horrifying Catholic reactionary Donoso Cortés, who understood the battle between decisionism and atheist anarchism in explicitly eschatological terms.

It's tiresome to wade through the abstruse works of highly-objectionable thinkers, but sometimes it's necessary. For someone trying to get a handle on Carl Schmitt, I would much sooner recommend this book than The Concept of the Political, for what it's worth.

Update 2025: This work launched back into relevance to a degree I could not have anticipated even six months ago. Schmitt warned urgently against fake emergencies (𾱲ԲܲԲ󳾱ܲäԻ) as a pretext to wield unconstrained power, and today I read in the New York Times:

Trump Says He Will Put 100% Tariff on Movies Made Outside U.S.

Declaring foreign film production a national security threat, the president said he had asked his top trade official to start the process of imposing a tax on Hollywood.
]]> <![CDATA[The Sublime Continuum and Its Explanatory Commentary: With the Sublime Continuum Supercommentary - Revised Edition (Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences)]]> 123276558 Explore an in-depth explanation of buddha nature and self-emptiness.

The originalSublime Continuum Explanatory Commentarywas written by Noble Asanga to explain the verses received from the bodhisattva Maitreyain the late fourth century CE in northern India. Here it is introduced and presented in an original translation from Sanskrit and Tibetan, with the translation of an extensive TibetanSupercommentaryby Gyaltsap Darma Rinchen (1364�1432), whose work closely followed the view of his teacher, Tsong Khapa (1357�1419).

Contemporary scholars have widely misunderstood the Buddhist Centrist (Madhyamaka) teaching of emptiness, or selflessness, as either a form of nihilism or a radical skepticism. Yet Buddhist philosophers from Nagarjuna on have shown that the negation ofintrinsicreality, when accurately understood, affirms the supreme value ofrelativerealities. Gyaltsap Darma Rinchen, in hisSupercommentary, elucidates a highly positive theory of the buddha nature,showing how the wisdom of emptiness empowers the compassionate life of the enlightened, as it is touched by its oneness with the truth body of all buddhas. With his clear study of Gyaltsap’s insight and his original English translation, Bo Jiangcompletes his historic project of studying and presenting these works from Sanskrit and Tibetan in both Chinese and, now, English translations, in linked publications.]]> 777 Bo Jiang Mesoscope 2 buddhism
But I do have two problems with this volume. The first is that Bo Jiang's translation style seems to be modeled after the approach of his teacher, Robert Thurman, which I find extremely off-putting, and sometimes actively misleading. Here a sample line from Asanga's commentary:

"Karmic evolution will be inevitably connected with birth. Hence, immature beings who have instinctually latent sign-habits engage with objects and originate inappropriate mentation which originates addictions. Their origination addictions originates karmic evolutionary actions which in turn originates birth."

I object strongly to what strikes me as a tendency to render soteriological terminology in what sounds to my ears like pseudo-scientific jibber-jabber, in what I can only assume is an attempt to make it seem more "relevant." That is, if the reader can understand that what we're talking about here isn't some crusty old medieval metaphysics but evolution (?) and addiction (??), then we'll understand, yes, this is a dharma that can speak to me today, living in the US.

That's not how this style actually functions, of course - it just makes it sound more like esoteric pseudo-scientific rambling from the mid-70s by someone with a dog-eared copy of Julian Jaynes on his desk.

The style issue is so destructive to the effect of this work I want to probe a little deeper, and pose the question of whether or not the translator really understands what evolution and addiction mean. Evolution is not just a sciencey-sounding word for change - it means modification and adaptation through selective descent. What does that have to do with karma?

And addiction is a big word for a contested model for understanding why humans do certain kinds of things despite knowing better. It is not just a scientific way of saying that we're really attached to something.

And what is this business with "originate"? For whom is that a clearer and better choice than "gives rise to"? Many individual choices are bad, and when many bad choices jumble up in a single statement, the mind recoils.

Another example within easy reach is using "Universal Vehicle" to translate "Mahayana." As is well-known, "maha" means great, and insisting on using "Universal Vehicle" in this book means the reader must parse why Asanga and Gyeltsap explicitly explain "Mahayana" to mean "great vehicle" in their commentaries, when they analyze the title of Maitreyanatha's work.

The second problem with this book is that both commentaries are long and rather opaque. Unlike many of Maitreyanatha's work, the Uttaratantra is actually pretty straightforward, so you wonder what Asanga's commentary is supposed to add, and why he feels it's necessary to parenthetically interject the twenty-two abandonments of a bodhisattva on the Path of Accumulation or what have you, and why does that kind of thing so often. And, well, Gyeltsap's commentary takes Asanga's commentary, and amplifies it, at more than twice the length.

What I would recommend unless you're a pretty hard core specialist is that you take one of the much more reasonable translations available, like Rosmarie Fuchs's highly-readable "Buddha Nature," with a commentary by Jamgon Kongtrul. I'm more of a Gelukpa guy myself, but in this case, they missed the mark.]]> 3.50 The Sublime Continuum and Its Explanatory Commentary: With the Sublime Continuum Supercommentary - Revised Edition (Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences)
author: Bo Jiang
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: buddhism
review:
I hate to appear ungrateful for this volume, which was doubtlessly a massive effort to produce, and it's extremely important. It's a translation of Maitreyanatha's Utttaratantra, with a further translation of Asanga's full-length commentary, followed by yet another translation of Gyeltsap Darma Rinchen's full-length commentary on Asanga's commentary. Gyeltsep, being of course, one of the princple disciples of Je Tsong Khapa, and an extremely important and influential Gelukpa exegete.

But I do have two problems with this volume. The first is that Bo Jiang's translation style seems to be modeled after the approach of his teacher, Robert Thurman, which I find extremely off-putting, and sometimes actively misleading. Here a sample line from Asanga's commentary:

"Karmic evolution will be inevitably connected with birth. Hence, immature beings who have instinctually latent sign-habits engage with objects and originate inappropriate mentation which originates addictions. Their origination addictions originates karmic evolutionary actions which in turn originates birth."

I object strongly to what strikes me as a tendency to render soteriological terminology in what sounds to my ears like pseudo-scientific jibber-jabber, in what I can only assume is an attempt to make it seem more "relevant." That is, if the reader can understand that what we're talking about here isn't some crusty old medieval metaphysics but evolution (?) and addiction (??), then we'll understand, yes, this is a dharma that can speak to me today, living in the US.

That's not how this style actually functions, of course - it just makes it sound more like esoteric pseudo-scientific rambling from the mid-70s by someone with a dog-eared copy of Julian Jaynes on his desk.

The style issue is so destructive to the effect of this work I want to probe a little deeper, and pose the question of whether or not the translator really understands what evolution and addiction mean. Evolution is not just a sciencey-sounding word for change - it means modification and adaptation through selective descent. What does that have to do with karma?

And addiction is a big word for a contested model for understanding why humans do certain kinds of things despite knowing better. It is not just a scientific way of saying that we're really attached to something.

And what is this business with "originate"? For whom is that a clearer and better choice than "gives rise to"? Many individual choices are bad, and when many bad choices jumble up in a single statement, the mind recoils.

Another example within easy reach is using "Universal Vehicle" to translate "Mahayana." As is well-known, "maha" means great, and insisting on using "Universal Vehicle" in this book means the reader must parse why Asanga and Gyeltsap explicitly explain "Mahayana" to mean "great vehicle" in their commentaries, when they analyze the title of Maitreyanatha's work.

The second problem with this book is that both commentaries are long and rather opaque. Unlike many of Maitreyanatha's work, the Uttaratantra is actually pretty straightforward, so you wonder what Asanga's commentary is supposed to add, and why he feels it's necessary to parenthetically interject the twenty-two abandonments of a bodhisattva on the Path of Accumulation or what have you, and why does that kind of thing so often. And, well, Gyeltsap's commentary takes Asanga's commentary, and amplifies it, at more than twice the length.

What I would recommend unless you're a pretty hard core specialist is that you take one of the much more reasonable translations available, like Rosmarie Fuchs's highly-readable "Buddha Nature," with a commentary by Jamgon Kongtrul. I'm more of a Gelukpa guy myself, but in this case, they missed the mark.
]]> <![CDATA[Der andere Name. Heptalogie I–II]]> 48507070 Asle, ein Maler, lebt seit dem Tod seiner Frau allein in einem kleinen Ort bei Bjørgvin, einer Stadt, die an der Südwestküste Norwegens liegt. Er will nicht mehr malen, was er sieht, sondern will bis zu einem Punkt vordringen, der hinter dem Gegenständlichen liegt. In seinem gerade vollendeten Ölgemälde etwa, auf dem sich zwei breite Pinselstriche kreuzen, bringt er ein besonderes Licht zum Vorschein, ein beinahe göttliches Leuchten.
Seine einzigen Freunde sind sein alter Nachbar Åsleik, ein Fischer und Kleinbauer, der Junggeselle ist, sowie Beyer, sein in der Stadt lebender Galerist. Dort lebt auch ein anderer Asle, der ebenfalls Maler, aber dem Alkohol verfallen und sehr einsam ist � zwei Versionen eines Menschen, zwei Versionen eines Lebens. Dass sie einander in der Weihnachtszeit begegnen, ist das Herzstück des Romans.
Vor dem Hintergrund der norwegischen Landschaft, dem Meer, den Fjorden, erzählt Jon Fosse in diesen ersten beiden Teilen seines siebenteiligen Opus magnum auf eindringliche, geradezu betörende Weise von den existentiellen Fragen des Lebens, von Liebe und Einsamkeit, Leben und Tod, von Licht und Schatten, Glaube und Hoffnungslosigkeit - und vom Wesen der Kunst. Alles ist immer da, nichts ist vergangen, also fließen Vergangenheit und Gegenwart in eins. »Langsame Prosa« nennt er dieses melodiöse Buch, dabei ist sein wunderbar kreisendes, tastendes Schreiben auch bisher schon nicht hastig gewesen. Jetzt erreicht es eine neue Qualität.]]> 475 Jon Fosse 3498021419 Mesoscope 5 german, literature Heptalogie (rendered as Septology in the English translation) finds the artist Asle contemplating a simple painting he has just begun with two intersecting lines of color, focusing on the complex admixture formed by the region where they converge. This plunges him into a reverie on the interplay of light and darkness and reflection upon how, as an artist, he seeks more than anything else to capture the invisible light that shines inside the darkness and to render it perceptible.

Astute readers will hear echoes of the mystical via negativa of Saint John of the Cross, which T. S. Eliot also echoed in Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.

I don't detect a Buddhist influence in this work, but I certainly thought many times of Sekito Kisen's Sandokai: There is light inside the darkness, but don't see it as light.

This reflection immediately announces the theme of mystical reflection on the mystery of creation, in every possible sense, which is the constant object of meditation in this work. As a Christian, Asle takes himself to be part of the mystery of incarnation, which is figured by the cross as the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical planes, of time and eternity, which meet in consciousness, which Eliot called "the dream-crossed twilight between birth and dying."

Fosse himself is, of course, not a painter, but a writer. But his protagonist's focus on the light of darkness is directly analogous to the writer's own focus on discovering language to express the silence. This is the central topic of the Nobel Prize acceptance speech Fosse gave after receiving the award for this work.

The intersecting lines and the field they create where they converge is a central organizing image of the work, and it also finds expression in the doubling of various characters. There are, for example, two characters named Asle in this work. Although they are generally and matter-of-factly treated as two separate people, they sometimes slip and slide into one another in ways that suggest they are actually the same person.

There is much that one could say about the dual identity of the protagonist - one could note, for example, that Fichte described the schism that occurs in subjectivity by virtue of the fact that we are for ourselves both subject and object. We are aware of ourselves and our own awareness as an object of our knowledge, but it is we ourselves who are aware of this. Fosse alluded to this split in consciousness in his Nobel speech with a reference to Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic imagination.

But it should be emphasized that Fosse is too much an artist to allow the strange dual-yet-singular character of his protagonist collapse into any one meaning. Symbolism of that reductive sort is, after all, trivial and unsatisfying; as Goethe put it, the writer simply buries in their intended meaning in the sand, and the reader digs it up again.

The events of Heptologie unfold over the span of a week, the darkest days of the year leading into the solstice, and in Norway, those days are very dark indeed. It quickly becomes clear that the intended reference here is to the seven days of creation, with day one being the separation of darkness and light. On day two, we read in Genesis, God separated the upper and lower waters from the sky, and this theme will be picked up as a controlling image for the second volume.

All of this is reflective of the central preoccupations of high modernism, and it could be easily argued that this essentially a Christian mythopoetic novel, which uses the mysteries of creation and incarnation as controlling metaphors in much the same way that Joyce used Homer's Odyssey in Ulysses. That impression is certainly reinforced by the deep similarities between Fosse's literary mysticism and the Christianity of T. S. Eliot.

As with Joyce's masterpiece, Fosse's novel uses something like interior monolog, and are written* in an unbroken stream of the protagonist's thoughts, with no sentence breaks. Where Fosse differs from the high modernists is in style is that he's something of a minimalist - instead of using his writing to constantly invent novel ways of writing, he has created one very distinctive approach that allows for very specific kinds of effects, and sticks with it.

This style reminded me strongly of Mark Rothko's paintings. On one level, you see a new Rothko and you think, once again, it's a couple of squares. Except that each individual painting is its own entire universe. The formal contours of the work are exceedingly constrained, but within those constraints, a vast range of effects remains possible. It is as though Fosse, like Rothko, invented his own idiomatic expressive language, carefully fitted to the modes of expression that he found absorbing. [Update: I was pleased to see an in Der Spiegel after writing this review in which Fosse compared his writing to Rothko's paintings, citing the "inner luminosity" they both seek to capture.]

Fosse's book, with its unapologetic Christianity and its deep absorption on existential and spiritual problems, is exceedingly untimely, but for the readers, like myself, who themselves feel extremely distant from the contemporary sociopolitical focus of literature, he may appear like something of a miracle, as if the times were still capable of producing a Rilke or a Hölderlin.

* I noticed the agreement error while revising this review, but decided to leave it, because it's actually completely appropriate to the work.]]> 3.91 2019 Der andere Name. Heptalogie I–II
author: Jon Fosse
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: german, literature
review:
The first volume of Fosse's Heptalogie (rendered as Septology in the English translation) finds the artist Asle contemplating a simple painting he has just begun with two intersecting lines of color, focusing on the complex admixture formed by the region where they converge. This plunges him into a reverie on the interplay of light and darkness and reflection upon how, as an artist, he seeks more than anything else to capture the invisible light that shines inside the darkness and to render it perceptible.

Astute readers will hear echoes of the mystical via negativa of Saint John of the Cross, which T. S. Eliot also echoed in Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.

I don't detect a Buddhist influence in this work, but I certainly thought many times of Sekito Kisen's Sandokai: There is light inside the darkness, but don't see it as light.

This reflection immediately announces the theme of mystical reflection on the mystery of creation, in every possible sense, which is the constant object of meditation in this work. As a Christian, Asle takes himself to be part of the mystery of incarnation, which is figured by the cross as the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical planes, of time and eternity, which meet in consciousness, which Eliot called "the dream-crossed twilight between birth and dying."

Fosse himself is, of course, not a painter, but a writer. But his protagonist's focus on the light of darkness is directly analogous to the writer's own focus on discovering language to express the silence. This is the central topic of the Nobel Prize acceptance speech Fosse gave after receiving the award for this work.

The intersecting lines and the field they create where they converge is a central organizing image of the work, and it also finds expression in the doubling of various characters. There are, for example, two characters named Asle in this work. Although they are generally and matter-of-factly treated as two separate people, they sometimes slip and slide into one another in ways that suggest they are actually the same person.

There is much that one could say about the dual identity of the protagonist - one could note, for example, that Fichte described the schism that occurs in subjectivity by virtue of the fact that we are for ourselves both subject and object. We are aware of ourselves and our own awareness as an object of our knowledge, but it is we ourselves who are aware of this. Fosse alluded to this split in consciousness in his Nobel speech with a reference to Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic imagination.

But it should be emphasized that Fosse is too much an artist to allow the strange dual-yet-singular character of his protagonist collapse into any one meaning. Symbolism of that reductive sort is, after all, trivial and unsatisfying; as Goethe put it, the writer simply buries in their intended meaning in the sand, and the reader digs it up again.

The events of Heptologie unfold over the span of a week, the darkest days of the year leading into the solstice, and in Norway, those days are very dark indeed. It quickly becomes clear that the intended reference here is to the seven days of creation, with day one being the separation of darkness and light. On day two, we read in Genesis, God separated the upper and lower waters from the sky, and this theme will be picked up as a controlling image for the second volume.

All of this is reflective of the central preoccupations of high modernism, and it could be easily argued that this essentially a Christian mythopoetic novel, which uses the mysteries of creation and incarnation as controlling metaphors in much the same way that Joyce used Homer's Odyssey in Ulysses. That impression is certainly reinforced by the deep similarities between Fosse's literary mysticism and the Christianity of T. S. Eliot.

As with Joyce's masterpiece, Fosse's novel uses something like interior monolog, and are written* in an unbroken stream of the protagonist's thoughts, with no sentence breaks. Where Fosse differs from the high modernists is in style is that he's something of a minimalist - instead of using his writing to constantly invent novel ways of writing, he has created one very distinctive approach that allows for very specific kinds of effects, and sticks with it.

This style reminded me strongly of Mark Rothko's paintings. On one level, you see a new Rothko and you think, once again, it's a couple of squares. Except that each individual painting is its own entire universe. The formal contours of the work are exceedingly constrained, but within those constraints, a vast range of effects remains possible. It is as though Fosse, like Rothko, invented his own idiomatic expressive language, carefully fitted to the modes of expression that he found absorbing. [Update: I was pleased to see an in Der Spiegel after writing this review in which Fosse compared his writing to Rothko's paintings, citing the "inner luminosity" they both seek to capture.]

Fosse's book, with its unapologetic Christianity and its deep absorption on existential and spiritual problems, is exceedingly untimely, but for the readers, like myself, who themselves feel extremely distant from the contemporary sociopolitical focus of literature, he may appear like something of a miracle, as if the times were still capable of producing a Rilke or a Hölderlin.

* I noticed the agreement error while revising this review, but decided to leave it, because it's actually completely appropriate to the work.
]]> <![CDATA[Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, Vol. 1]]> 36854868 380 Alexander Pushkin 0691181012 Mesoscope 5 literature, poetry, favorites Eugene Onegin, Pushkin was simply a name to me; now I love him like a brother. Books like this are why I read at all.

The towering genius of this work can be felt in its titanic legacy on the golden age of Russian literature, with many of its core themes, devices, and character types becoming fundamental to generations of great writers to follow, from Gogol to Chekhov. But it can just as easily be felt on every page immediately, in its stupendous diversity of means, used to illuminate, to entertain, and to comfort weary hearts.

On one level, Onegin appears almost formless, a race run at full gallop from station to station, filled with jokes, asides addressed to the reader, and satire, and populated by bungled people whose hearts are tied up in anarchic knots and whose lives are chaotic and pathless. Yet at the same time, the formal artistry of this work is immaculate in the extreme. Composed almost entirely in an eighteen-line iambic pentameter stanza scheme, a bit similar to a sonnet but of Pushkin's own invention, every single verse consists of the same number of syllables. Its spectacular, crystalline symmetries gradually come into focus as the reader picks up on the structural similarities between its eight chapters, learns of the ways that the first and final chapters are reflections of one another, and certain devices become visible, such as the orchestration of the whole work, which unfolds on a multi-year time span, as a progression of the seasons.

There are three principle male characters and three principle female characters who pursue them - this kind of structural element is so evident when its pointed out, but so subtly deployed that I wouldn't even have noticed had Nabokov not pointed it out in his commentary.

It's hard to convey how astonishing it is, to find in a single work the fury and complexity of the human animal analyzed with the perceptiveness approaching Shakespeare and then deployed with the formal care approaching Dante. These antipodes are synthesized in an extraordinary creative act.

I will not linger on Nabokov's translation, which was close to perfect for me, because what I want is to get as close to the original meaning as possible. I will say as an aside that I am glad Nabokov did not attempt to set his version in verse. Almost every verse translation of a long poem is very bad, and it should not even be attempted unless you are Alexander Pope or Ezra Pound. It is difficult enough to write good verse in the first place. The challenge of writing poetry that succeeds as poetry as well as richly and accurately conveying the meaning of the original is simply not a realistic goal, and the resulting verse is inevitably laughably mediocre.

This is not an easy read, but it's very great. It far exceeded my expectations, and belongs to the first rank of the world's literature. ]]> 4.46 1833 Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, Vol. 1
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1833
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/04
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: literature, poetry, favorites
review:
Sometimes, but not always, when you turn to one of the classics, you find that they're classics for a reason. Before reading Eugene Onegin, Pushkin was simply a name to me; now I love him like a brother. Books like this are why I read at all.

The towering genius of this work can be felt in its titanic legacy on the golden age of Russian literature, with many of its core themes, devices, and character types becoming fundamental to generations of great writers to follow, from Gogol to Chekhov. But it can just as easily be felt on every page immediately, in its stupendous diversity of means, used to illuminate, to entertain, and to comfort weary hearts.

On one level, Onegin appears almost formless, a race run at full gallop from station to station, filled with jokes, asides addressed to the reader, and satire, and populated by bungled people whose hearts are tied up in anarchic knots and whose lives are chaotic and pathless. Yet at the same time, the formal artistry of this work is immaculate in the extreme. Composed almost entirely in an eighteen-line iambic pentameter stanza scheme, a bit similar to a sonnet but of Pushkin's own invention, every single verse consists of the same number of syllables. Its spectacular, crystalline symmetries gradually come into focus as the reader picks up on the structural similarities between its eight chapters, learns of the ways that the first and final chapters are reflections of one another, and certain devices become visible, such as the orchestration of the whole work, which unfolds on a multi-year time span, as a progression of the seasons.

There are three principle male characters and three principle female characters who pursue them - this kind of structural element is so evident when its pointed out, but so subtly deployed that I wouldn't even have noticed had Nabokov not pointed it out in his commentary.

It's hard to convey how astonishing it is, to find in a single work the fury and complexity of the human animal analyzed with the perceptiveness approaching Shakespeare and then deployed with the formal care approaching Dante. These antipodes are synthesized in an extraordinary creative act.

I will not linger on Nabokov's translation, which was close to perfect for me, because what I want is to get as close to the original meaning as possible. I will say as an aside that I am glad Nabokov did not attempt to set his version in verse. Almost every verse translation of a long poem is very bad, and it should not even be attempted unless you are Alexander Pope or Ezra Pound. It is difficult enough to write good verse in the first place. The challenge of writing poetry that succeeds as poetry as well as richly and accurately conveying the meaning of the original is simply not a realistic goal, and the resulting verse is inevitably laughably mediocre.

This is not an easy read, but it's very great. It far exceeded my expectations, and belongs to the first rank of the world's literature.
]]> Hard Times 22364136 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780141439679.

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root everything else'

Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and 'bully of humility' Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimised weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognise the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.

This edition of Hard Times is based on the text of the first volume publication of 1854. Kate Flint's introduction sheds light on the frequently overlooked character interplay in Dickens' great critique of Victorian industrial society.]]> 321 Charles Dickens Mesoscope 3 audiobook, literature
Or at least, we have a superlative craftsman, able to order and deliver scenes with clarity and sometimes haunting eloquence. But in my register, his art only partly compensates for his lack of depth.

Scarcely any mention of the Industrial Revolution in England can be made without evoking this didactic novel, which testifies to the social problems associated with this transition. And this is unfortunate, for Dickens goes after the transformation occurring all around him with all the zeal and subtlety of a pamphleteer. I found myself wondering if the William Hogarth was a conscious inspiration, finding echoes of the master engraver's posture of judgement in his "A Rake's Progress" or "Industry and Idleness."

We have something of a moral fable set out in this book. The action is organized in clean lines around three acts. Act one, in which we meet the family Gradgrind, and learn of the obtuse obsession of Master Gradgrind for the world of fact, and for purging human endeavor of all traces of wonder or fancy. Act two, in which his distorted worldview plays out predictably in the lives of his children and their contacts, building toward extreme tension and conflict as the contradictions between the head and the heart escalate. Act three, in which many cathartic speeches are made, various come-uppances are served, and we move toward a clean resolution.

The characters and action move forward like game pieces on a board. We clearly recognize, because it is telegraphed again and again, that the characters are to be understood as types, who exemplify philosophies current in Dickens's day.

But do they? Can there truly ever have been any proponent of any extremist philosophy so patently and transparently misguided as the "Facts, facts, facts!" of Mr. Gradgrind? I doubt it very much.

At the book's worst, which is regrettably often, these characters are ciphers for points of view that have no foundation in human psychology or intellectual history. The villains are so unworthy and duplicitous, the good characters so saintly in their patient suffering, that we can't make contact with any actual subjectivity.

The thing I find most oppressive about Dickens - and it does at times leave me intensely claustrophobic - is the suffocating sense that his characters have no options, and know it. All-too-often they perceive that their lot is their lot, and human dignity consists largely in their capacity to bear it in good stead. If they are born to labor, then labor they must, and they will, and do not seek outside of their station, whatever hardship or suffering it entails.

Clearly this is no acceptable normative posture, unless one is a rather retrograde fatalist. But is it descriptive? Is this how lives really were lived in Victorian England? Was Dickens merely chronicling the lack of opportunity of his day?

I don't really believe it, because Dickens himself was such manifest counter-testimony to that dire vision of history. In classic Dickensian fashion, he lacked a formal education because of his father's incarceration in debtor's prison, which obliged him to work in factories rather than study. Did he bear his grisly lot with the good patience of a saint? No, he refused to accede to the implications of his class and status, and quite overcame his limitations, becoming one of the most famous writers of his day.

So why are all his characters haunted by the grim certitude that if they are born to deprivation, then deprivation they must accept? I can't imagine.

In sum, I find Dickens an author of great craft but minimal insight. He panders to his readers with melodrama consisting primarily of shallow moralizing that is tedious and quite inaccurate. ]]> 3.42 1854 Hard Times
author: Charles Dickens
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1854
rating: 3
read at: 2016/04/08
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: audiobook, literature
review:
I remember having a pretty poor experience with Great Expectations in high school, and now that I've gone through another Dickens novel as an adult, I congratulate my high school self for not listening to my teacher's insistence that we're dealing with a great author here. Good job, younger Barnaby.

Or at least, we have a superlative craftsman, able to order and deliver scenes with clarity and sometimes haunting eloquence. But in my register, his art only partly compensates for his lack of depth.

Scarcely any mention of the Industrial Revolution in England can be made without evoking this didactic novel, which testifies to the social problems associated with this transition. And this is unfortunate, for Dickens goes after the transformation occurring all around him with all the zeal and subtlety of a pamphleteer. I found myself wondering if the William Hogarth was a conscious inspiration, finding echoes of the master engraver's posture of judgement in his "A Rake's Progress" or "Industry and Idleness."

We have something of a moral fable set out in this book. The action is organized in clean lines around three acts. Act one, in which we meet the family Gradgrind, and learn of the obtuse obsession of Master Gradgrind for the world of fact, and for purging human endeavor of all traces of wonder or fancy. Act two, in which his distorted worldview plays out predictably in the lives of his children and their contacts, building toward extreme tension and conflict as the contradictions between the head and the heart escalate. Act three, in which many cathartic speeches are made, various come-uppances are served, and we move toward a clean resolution.

The characters and action move forward like game pieces on a board. We clearly recognize, because it is telegraphed again and again, that the characters are to be understood as types, who exemplify philosophies current in Dickens's day.

But do they? Can there truly ever have been any proponent of any extremist philosophy so patently and transparently misguided as the "Facts, facts, facts!" of Mr. Gradgrind? I doubt it very much.

At the book's worst, which is regrettably often, these characters are ciphers for points of view that have no foundation in human psychology or intellectual history. The villains are so unworthy and duplicitous, the good characters so saintly in their patient suffering, that we can't make contact with any actual subjectivity.

The thing I find most oppressive about Dickens - and it does at times leave me intensely claustrophobic - is the suffocating sense that his characters have no options, and know it. All-too-often they perceive that their lot is their lot, and human dignity consists largely in their capacity to bear it in good stead. If they are born to labor, then labor they must, and they will, and do not seek outside of their station, whatever hardship or suffering it entails.

Clearly this is no acceptable normative posture, unless one is a rather retrograde fatalist. But is it descriptive? Is this how lives really were lived in Victorian England? Was Dickens merely chronicling the lack of opportunity of his day?

I don't really believe it, because Dickens himself was such manifest counter-testimony to that dire vision of history. In classic Dickensian fashion, he lacked a formal education because of his father's incarceration in debtor's prison, which obliged him to work in factories rather than study. Did he bear his grisly lot with the good patience of a saint? No, he refused to accede to the implications of his class and status, and quite overcame his limitations, becoming one of the most famous writers of his day.

So why are all his characters haunted by the grim certitude that if they are born to deprivation, then deprivation they must accept? I can't imagine.

In sum, I find Dickens an author of great craft but minimal insight. He panders to his readers with melodrama consisting primarily of shallow moralizing that is tedious and quite inaccurate.
]]> <![CDATA[The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day]]> 74145 174 E.A. Wallis Budge 0811807673 Mesoscope 5 egypt, religion-mythology
The translation is quite readable and there are several useful essays and commentaries written by competent egyptologists.

Because of the compositional unity of hieroglyphic writing and accompanying illustrations, it is highly desirable to read a translation like this which lavishes attention on the presentation of the images.

The text itself is a well-preserved specimen of a genre of funerary texts referred to in aggregate as "The Book of Going Forth by Day". It is a collection of spells and instructions buried with wealthy Egyptians to assist them in penetrating to the Hall of Two Truths where they could submit themselves to be judged for a proper dispensation in the afterlife. Most of the text is an assortment of miscellaneous incantations and lists of formulae to be recited at the appropriate time to the various guardians.

There is a great deal of material here of considerable interest to the student of mythology. Because the Egyptians provided very little in the way of religious narrative, most of what we know about their beliefs is extrapolated from texts like this work, and similar collections of funerary writings such as the Pyramid Texts an Coffin Texts.

This particular scroll was prepared for a wealthy scribe named Ani. It is a good specimen but does not contain every chapter found in the genre. A very useful supplement is included in this volume which presents the chapters not contained herein which are found in the Theban recension of this work.

This is a superb volume by every metric and it is an absolute cornerstone of the study of Egyptian religion. ]]> 4.14 -1500 The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day
author: E.A. Wallis Budge
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.14
book published: -1500
rating: 5
read at: 2009/08/30
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: egypt, religion-mythology
review:
This is a beautiful book - a large-format facsimile reproduction of the Papyrus of Ani in large color images with translation of the hieroglyphs beneath. The pictures comprising the bulk of the book are not of the Papyrus itself, held in the British National Museum; rather it is a reproduction of a carefully-made imitation of the original.

The translation is quite readable and there are several useful essays and commentaries written by competent egyptologists.

Because of the compositional unity of hieroglyphic writing and accompanying illustrations, it is highly desirable to read a translation like this which lavishes attention on the presentation of the images.

The text itself is a well-preserved specimen of a genre of funerary texts referred to in aggregate as "The Book of Going Forth by Day". It is a collection of spells and instructions buried with wealthy Egyptians to assist them in penetrating to the Hall of Two Truths where they could submit themselves to be judged for a proper dispensation in the afterlife. Most of the text is an assortment of miscellaneous incantations and lists of formulae to be recited at the appropriate time to the various guardians.

There is a great deal of material here of considerable interest to the student of mythology. Because the Egyptians provided very little in the way of religious narrative, most of what we know about their beliefs is extrapolated from texts like this work, and similar collections of funerary writings such as the Pyramid Texts an Coffin Texts.

This particular scroll was prepared for a wealthy scribe named Ani. It is a good specimen but does not contain every chapter found in the genre. A very useful supplement is included in this volume which presents the chapters not contained herein which are found in the Theban recension of this work.

This is a superb volume by every metric and it is an absolute cornerstone of the study of Egyptian religion.
]]> The Magic Mountain 88077
The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.]]> 706 Thomas Mann Mesoscope 5
**

Review of first reading (John E. Woods translation)

Thomas Mann's novel presents a Bildungsroman of sorts, chronicling the moral, intellectual, and spiritual maturation of young Hans Castorp at the Berghof sanitarium in Switzerland, where he undergoes prolonged treatment for tuberculosis. In that time he encounters a microcosm of European bourgeois society in the years leading up to World War I, sands off the rough edges of his being, and gradually becomes an engaging, discerning, and admirable person of moderate intellectual ability but enormous character. On the surface his life contains little action, but as he moves through his journey toward individuation, his process of inner discovery frequently reflects various mythological themes which Mann, largely under the spell of Wagner, believed to be basic structuring patterns of human psychology.

I was prompted to read this book by its frequent comparison with Ulysses, with which it indeed shares numerous philosophical and thematic affinities, though the two books could not be more dissimilar in style or tone. In my opinion, Joyce's masterpiece is superior in nearly every way, and by contrast, Mann's work feels quite stuffy and old-fashioned. In contrast to Joyce's unflinching intimacy, Mann holds his characters and events at arm's length with overwrought formality, which I found quite alien. Writing under this polite-society constraint, in which many key events are implied with a wink but kept off stage, as it were, one gets the sense that Mann would blush to address his own protagonist by the informal "Du."

As a consequence, although we learn with a great flourish of disclosure, for example, that our hero has begun regularly seeing a psychiatrist, the reader may be surprised as I was to find that this is mentioned precisely twice, once early on, and again, briefly, at the end of the novel. It is quite incomprehensible to me that a novel that dwells so entirely on the inner life of its primary character could introduce and then completely drop that avenue of insight, but one truly gets the sense that Mann felt it would be indecent to pry.

The author's sense of proprietary, and the keenly artificial and self-conscious manner of his third-person omniscient narration, left me with a deep and pervasive feeling of contrivance. This book contained few revelations for me, and on the whole I was somewhat disappointed, ever hungering for works of the first order, and not finding one here. Still, I know a masterpiece of craft when I see one, whether or not it is amenable to my aesthetic interests, and the book undeniably contains moments of blazing intensity.]]> 4.12 1924 The Magic Mountain
author: Thomas Mann
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1924
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: literature, currently-reading, german
review:
Hab den Roman schon mal auf Englisch gelesen, jetzt lese ich ihn auf Deutsch. Es ist mir sofort vorgekommen, dass ich ihn vorher nicht besonders gut verstanden habe. Es war ein Fehler, Der Zauberberg zuerst zu lesen, bevor ich Die Buddenbrooks z. B. gelesen hatte.

**

Review of first reading (John E. Woods translation)

Thomas Mann's novel presents a Bildungsroman of sorts, chronicling the moral, intellectual, and spiritual maturation of young Hans Castorp at the Berghof sanitarium in Switzerland, where he undergoes prolonged treatment for tuberculosis. In that time he encounters a microcosm of European bourgeois society in the years leading up to World War I, sands off the rough edges of his being, and gradually becomes an engaging, discerning, and admirable person of moderate intellectual ability but enormous character. On the surface his life contains little action, but as he moves through his journey toward individuation, his process of inner discovery frequently reflects various mythological themes which Mann, largely under the spell of Wagner, believed to be basic structuring patterns of human psychology.

I was prompted to read this book by its frequent comparison with Ulysses, with which it indeed shares numerous philosophical and thematic affinities, though the two books could not be more dissimilar in style or tone. In my opinion, Joyce's masterpiece is superior in nearly every way, and by contrast, Mann's work feels quite stuffy and old-fashioned. In contrast to Joyce's unflinching intimacy, Mann holds his characters and events at arm's length with overwrought formality, which I found quite alien. Writing under this polite-society constraint, in which many key events are implied with a wink but kept off stage, as it were, one gets the sense that Mann would blush to address his own protagonist by the informal "Du."

As a consequence, although we learn with a great flourish of disclosure, for example, that our hero has begun regularly seeing a psychiatrist, the reader may be surprised as I was to find that this is mentioned precisely twice, once early on, and again, briefly, at the end of the novel. It is quite incomprehensible to me that a novel that dwells so entirely on the inner life of its primary character could introduce and then completely drop that avenue of insight, but one truly gets the sense that Mann felt it would be indecent to pry.

The author's sense of proprietary, and the keenly artificial and self-conscious manner of his third-person omniscient narration, left me with a deep and pervasive feeling of contrivance. This book contained few revelations for me, and on the whole I was somewhat disappointed, ever hungering for works of the first order, and not finding one here. Still, I know a masterpiece of craft when I see one, whether or not it is amenable to my aesthetic interests, and the book undeniably contains moments of blazing intensity.
]]> Leben des Galilei 241526
Die Uraufführung der ersten Fassung des Stückes erfolgte 1943 am Schauspielhaus Zürich, die der zweiten Fassung 1947 in Beverly Hills (Coronet Theatre).

»Das Leben des Galilei wird vermutlich neben der Heiligen Johanna der Schlachthöfe und dem Kaukasischen Kreidekreis und einigen Stücken Lyrik Brechts größten Anspruch auf Unsterblichkeit begründen.« W. E. Süskind]]> 161 Bertold Brecht 3518100017 Mesoscope 4 drama, german The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast.)

I felt the drama of this crisis peaked about a third of the way through the play, around the time when Galileo unsuccessfully begged the Lord Chamberlin of Cosmo de Medici to simply look through the telescope he had set up for a demonstration. It then started to feel a bit repetitive, as the same fundamental conflict played out in different ways several times.

The play also includes an anachronistic projection of Marxist theory into the events, with Galileo explicitly arguing that the real reason the church officials were opposed to scientific advancement per se was because they feared that the eyes of science would eventually turn dispassionately to the study of man, and the conditions of his material oppression by entrenched interests.

It was jarring to read those lines put into Galileo's mouth, not least because Brecht himself argues against anachronism in historical plays in his Little Organon, where he warns that to ignore the deep differences of belief that characterize different historical periods only encourages the tendency to view historically-produced conditions and values as transhistorical and eternal.

It also strikes the reader as dogmatic, and Brecht always seems to teeter on the brink of dogmatism. But this leads us straight to the deep interpretive dilemma of how this play is to be taken.

Some critics, including Marcel Reich-Ranicki and the Brecht biographer Stephen Parker, read this play as primarily aimed at the Stalinist purges going on in the Soviet Union around this time, and at the extreme pressure put on Brecht himself to toe the SED party line in the nascent DDR. This is a very attractive reading, and one which I favored in my own reading of the play. If this is in fact what Brecht was up to, then we have a work of subversive genius, which on the surface is an unassailable work that upholds communist values, but which, with only a little reading between the lines on the part of the reader, comprises a savage critique of the totalitarian excesses of Soviet communism. It even includes thinly-disguised suggestions concerning how to keep working for truth, even if one is under constant surveillance.

If this reading is not correct, if the play is to be read on its surface level, then I think it does suffer from fairly serious faults of anachronism and dogmatism.

How to decide? This is always a problem, reading the work of progressive artists working under politically-repressive conditions. Ultimately, I think the question is undecidable, at least on the basis of the existing historical evidence, but I do find it highly corroborative that when I read this play, not even knowing when it was written, my best guess was that this is how it was intended to be taken, and only later found corroborating arguments and evidence. I also can't bring myself to believe that someone with Brecht's genius and fire would be taken in by the dull slogans of the petty bureaucrats of an intensely-repressive state.]]> 3.41 1943 Leben des Galilei
author: Bertold Brecht
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/09
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: drama, german
review:
On the surface, this play is about the life of Galileo and the struggle of the idealistic and scientific pursuit of truth against reactionary forces that seek to suppress new discoveries in the service of maintaining the status quo. The battleground for his dispute is Galileo's refutation of the Copernican heliocentric theory of the universe, and the omnipresent threat is the Inquisition, which, as is noted early in the play, had burnt Giordano Bruno at the stake in Rome a mere ten years earlier, in part for defending similar beliefs. (As an aside, it probably did not help Bruno's case that he wrote works with titles like The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast.)

I felt the drama of this crisis peaked about a third of the way through the play, around the time when Galileo unsuccessfully begged the Lord Chamberlin of Cosmo de Medici to simply look through the telescope he had set up for a demonstration. It then started to feel a bit repetitive, as the same fundamental conflict played out in different ways several times.

The play also includes an anachronistic projection of Marxist theory into the events, with Galileo explicitly arguing that the real reason the church officials were opposed to scientific advancement per se was because they feared that the eyes of science would eventually turn dispassionately to the study of man, and the conditions of his material oppression by entrenched interests.

It was jarring to read those lines put into Galileo's mouth, not least because Brecht himself argues against anachronism in historical plays in his Little Organon, where he warns that to ignore the deep differences of belief that characterize different historical periods only encourages the tendency to view historically-produced conditions and values as transhistorical and eternal.

It also strikes the reader as dogmatic, and Brecht always seems to teeter on the brink of dogmatism. But this leads us straight to the deep interpretive dilemma of how this play is to be taken.

Some critics, including Marcel Reich-Ranicki and the Brecht biographer Stephen Parker, read this play as primarily aimed at the Stalinist purges going on in the Soviet Union around this time, and at the extreme pressure put on Brecht himself to toe the SED party line in the nascent DDR. This is a very attractive reading, and one which I favored in my own reading of the play. If this is in fact what Brecht was up to, then we have a work of subversive genius, which on the surface is an unassailable work that upholds communist values, but which, with only a little reading between the lines on the part of the reader, comprises a savage critique of the totalitarian excesses of Soviet communism. It even includes thinly-disguised suggestions concerning how to keep working for truth, even if one is under constant surveillance.

If this reading is not correct, if the play is to be read on its surface level, then I think it does suffer from fairly serious faults of anachronism and dogmatism.

How to decide? This is always a problem, reading the work of progressive artists working under politically-repressive conditions. Ultimately, I think the question is undecidable, at least on the basis of the existing historical evidence, but I do find it highly corroborative that when I read this play, not even knowing when it was written, my best guess was that this is how it was intended to be taken, and only later found corroborating arguments and evidence. I also can't bring myself to believe that someone with Brecht's genius and fire would be taken in by the dull slogans of the petty bureaucrats of an intensely-repressive state.
]]> Transit 41014983 Transit klargeworden.

Seghers verarbeitet darin ihr eigenes Flüchtlingsschicksal: Schon 1933 vor den Nazis aus Deutschland nach Paris geflohen, mußte sie 1941 auch Europa verlassen. Eindringlicher als andere Romane über diese Zeit, etwa Lion Feuchtwangers Exil oder Klaus Manns Der Vulkan, schildert Seghers die Angst der Flüchtenden und deren verzweifelte Suche nach einem Land, das bereit ist, ihnen Asyl zu gewähren.

Im Zentrum des Romans steht ein aus dem KZ nach Frankreich Entflohener, der namenlos bleibt. Über Rouen und Paris gelangt er nach Marseille, das nach der Besetzung Frankreichs 1941 Sammelbecken für zahlreiche Emigranten wird. Gleichmütig beobachtet er zunächst die verzweifelten Versuche der Flüchtlinge, Visa, Transitscheine und Schiffstickets zu erhalten. Erst als er eine Frau kennenlernt beginnt er selbst die Odyssee von Behörde zu Behörde. Zermürbende Bittgänge zu zynischen Beamten, um rechtzeitig alle Papiere zu bekommen, bevor die "Montreal" ausläuft...

Der Titel Transit ist dabei doppeldeutig -- damit ist nicht nur das wichtige Formular gemeint, mit dem andere Länder Flüchtenden die Durchfahrt erlauben, sondern auch der Zustand der Heimatlosigkeit. Ein Thema das leider auch am Ende dieses Jahrtausends aktuell bleibt -- ein lehrreiches Buch, für uns, die wir bequem und sicher in Mitteleuropa leben.--Gudrun Christoph

"Transit gehört zu den Büchern, die in mein Leben eingreifen, an denen mein Leben weiterschreibt, so daß ich sie alle paar Jahre zur Hand nehmen muß, um zu sehen, was inzwischen mit mir und mit ihnen passiert ist."--Christa Wolf

]]> 309 Anna Seghers 3746635012 Mesoscope 4 german, literature Transit, fled to France after the Nazi rise to power, eventually making his way to Marseilles, bound for the New World. And, like our protagonist, Benjamin found himself confronted with an extraordinary and Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth. Although he had a ticket to sail from Lisbon, an entry visa to the United States, and a transit visa to cross Spain, he could not obtain the exit visa necessary to leave France. After setting out on foot to try to enter Spain illegally, he found the border closed, and ended his life by suicide rather than be handed to the Nazis for extermination.

It is an open question why the bureaucrats in France would make it so extremely difficult for refugees to leave, when they were apparently unwanted, but there you have it. This is the kind of question that haunts the background of this book, which is mostly set in the harbor of one of the most active points of departure for the most desperate of Europe. Many readers will probably find the setting reminiscent of the film Casablanca, which was based on a play called Everybody Comes to Rick's, inspired by its authors' experience in southern France.

Anna Seghers herself made it out of Marseilles to Mexico, where she wrote this book. She describes the situation of flight with the keen eye of a psychologist and a powerful gift for establishing milieu. For me, the most fascinating and effective part of the novel was her closely-observed characterization of the situation, and her reports of the many people who, say, finally showed up at the harbor to depart with a briefcase full of paperwork, only to find they could not board because they didn't have the necessary permission from the harbormaster. Or those who couldn't get a visa to the United States because they could not find two US citizens willing to write a character reference.

Where the book arguably takes a bit of a misstep is in its somewhat Existentialist maneuvers with the central character, which reminded me of the stories that Sartre and Camus would one day write, telling stories about characters who are allegories, and are not necessarily psychologically convincing. Without giving anything away, I can say that the protagonist of Transit finds himself in an extraordinary situation which serves as a kind of metaphor for the experience of being in "transit," in a kind of limbo where one both is and is not one's self, where one both does and does not have plans and goals, and in which one, ultimately, both is and is not alive.

Seghers mostly pulls this off, but the quotidian, concrete details of ordinary people trying frantically to escape were so much more powerful to me, I could not help but think her story and her gifts as a writer would have been better served by a more conventional story.

The book was originally published in ten equal-sized installments in serialized form, and I think this format became a bit of a straight jacket, as it is sometimes repetitive and sometimes drags.

This book is nearly a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, and I look forward to reading more by Seghers, such as her highly-acclaimed Das Siebte Kreuz.

Note: it took me around 80 pages to realize the protagonist is a man, which I found a bit confusing. If you write a heavily-autobiographical book about your experiences but change the gender of the protagonist, probably better to establish that clearly early on.]]> 3.19 1944 Transit
author: Anna Seghers
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.19
book published: 1944
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/26
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: german, literature
review:
It would be impossible for me to think of this book without thinking of Walter Benjamin, who, like the unnamed protagonist of Transit, fled to France after the Nazi rise to power, eventually making his way to Marseilles, bound for the New World. And, like our protagonist, Benjamin found himself confronted with an extraordinary and Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth. Although he had a ticket to sail from Lisbon, an entry visa to the United States, and a transit visa to cross Spain, he could not obtain the exit visa necessary to leave France. After setting out on foot to try to enter Spain illegally, he found the border closed, and ended his life by suicide rather than be handed to the Nazis for extermination.

It is an open question why the bureaucrats in France would make it so extremely difficult for refugees to leave, when they were apparently unwanted, but there you have it. This is the kind of question that haunts the background of this book, which is mostly set in the harbor of one of the most active points of departure for the most desperate of Europe. Many readers will probably find the setting reminiscent of the film Casablanca, which was based on a play called Everybody Comes to Rick's, inspired by its authors' experience in southern France.

Anna Seghers herself made it out of Marseilles to Mexico, where she wrote this book. She describes the situation of flight with the keen eye of a psychologist and a powerful gift for establishing milieu. For me, the most fascinating and effective part of the novel was her closely-observed characterization of the situation, and her reports of the many people who, say, finally showed up at the harbor to depart with a briefcase full of paperwork, only to find they could not board because they didn't have the necessary permission from the harbormaster. Or those who couldn't get a visa to the United States because they could not find two US citizens willing to write a character reference.

Where the book arguably takes a bit of a misstep is in its somewhat Existentialist maneuvers with the central character, which reminded me of the stories that Sartre and Camus would one day write, telling stories about characters who are allegories, and are not necessarily psychologically convincing. Without giving anything away, I can say that the protagonist of Transit finds himself in an extraordinary situation which serves as a kind of metaphor for the experience of being in "transit," in a kind of limbo where one both is and is not one's self, where one both does and does not have plans and goals, and in which one, ultimately, both is and is not alive.

Seghers mostly pulls this off, but the quotidian, concrete details of ordinary people trying frantically to escape were so much more powerful to me, I could not help but think her story and her gifts as a writer would have been better served by a more conventional story.

The book was originally published in ten equal-sized installments in serialized form, and I think this format became a bit of a straight jacket, as it is sometimes repetitive and sometimes drags.

This book is nearly a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, and I look forward to reading more by Seghers, such as her highly-acclaimed Das Siebte Kreuz.

Note: it took me around 80 pages to realize the protagonist is a man, which I found a bit confusing. If you write a heavily-autobiographical book about your experiences but change the gender of the protagonist, probably better to establish that clearly early on.
]]> Nach der Natur 3129650 After Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author’s position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time. Author W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His previously translated books� The Rings of Saturn , The Emigrants , Vertigo , and Austerlitz —have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December 2001.]]> 99 W.G. Sebald 3596120551 Mesoscope 4 german, poetry
Most of this poem reads like missing chapters from his novel Rings of Saturn, only with arbitrary line breaks. I think this points to a formal problem that, at least in these two works-the only works by Sebald that I've read thus far-he was not able to solve. His writing is neither prose nor verse and works equally well as either, but equally poorly as well. As a poem, I feel it lacks the conviction of a unifying conception, and he reads to me like a kind of collector or curator of impressions, and it must be said that his impressions are frequently of the same basic type, expressing a deep world-weariness and dukkha in the Buddhist sense of suffering the pain of existence, which he ties more or less explicitly to the historical trauma of growing up in aftermath of Nazi Germany.

He writes with a kind of astringent distrust of beauty, but in the rare moments he allows himself to write lyrically, to which he is clearly extremely well suited, it is not only felt as a momentary exultation, but as a relief - a relief from his oppressive insistence on discovering abject sorrow and decline in every impression. I have little appetite for the literature of the clinically depressed.

He is intelligent in a way that reminds me of certain post-Heideggerian philosophers, but he rarely surprises me with something truly new. And I think he gives too much of the intellect to his design, and not enough to the intuition. There is something brittle and fragile at the heart of this work.

The crowning image of the poem is his vision of the concupiscence, as depicted by Matthias Grünewald in a painting of the temptation of Saint Anthony. That is to say, he is horrified by the monstrous heart of nature, where life eats life, and the whole network is tangled in an endless sea of using and devouring. Or, as he puts it later:

Es sind nämlich
nicht ins Gleichmaß zu richten
die Entwicklungsbahnen großer
Systeme, zu diffus ist der Akt
der Gewalt, das eine immer
der Anfang des andern
und umgekehrt. Taurus
draconem genuit et draco
taurum, und es ist nirgends
ein Einhalt.

If you can't experience the givenness of that whole mess as itself miraculous and inexplicable, then nothing can save you. Every time I read Sebald, I am astonished that he didn't end his life by suicide.]]> 3.64 1988 Nach der Natur
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: german, poetry
review:
I was prepared to give this long prose-poem a more critical review until one of the last cantos, part five of the third section, forced me to reevaluate. That piece is one of the most beautiful German poems I've read from the last fifty years.

Most of this poem reads like missing chapters from his novel Rings of Saturn, only with arbitrary line breaks. I think this points to a formal problem that, at least in these two works-the only works by Sebald that I've read thus far-he was not able to solve. His writing is neither prose nor verse and works equally well as either, but equally poorly as well. As a poem, I feel it lacks the conviction of a unifying conception, and he reads to me like a kind of collector or curator of impressions, and it must be said that his impressions are frequently of the same basic type, expressing a deep world-weariness and dukkha in the Buddhist sense of suffering the pain of existence, which he ties more or less explicitly to the historical trauma of growing up in aftermath of Nazi Germany.

He writes with a kind of astringent distrust of beauty, but in the rare moments he allows himself to write lyrically, to which he is clearly extremely well suited, it is not only felt as a momentary exultation, but as a relief - a relief from his oppressive insistence on discovering abject sorrow and decline in every impression. I have little appetite for the literature of the clinically depressed.

He is intelligent in a way that reminds me of certain post-Heideggerian philosophers, but he rarely surprises me with something truly new. And I think he gives too much of the intellect to his design, and not enough to the intuition. There is something brittle and fragile at the heart of this work.

The crowning image of the poem is his vision of the concupiscence, as depicted by Matthias Grünewald in a painting of the temptation of Saint Anthony. That is to say, he is horrified by the monstrous heart of nature, where life eats life, and the whole network is tangled in an endless sea of using and devouring. Or, as he puts it later:

Es sind nämlich
nicht ins Gleichmaß zu richten
die Entwicklungsbahnen großer
Systeme, zu diffus ist der Akt
der Gewalt, das eine immer
der Anfang des andern
und umgekehrt. Taurus
draconem genuit et draco
taurum, und es ist nirgends
ein Einhalt.

If you can't experience the givenness of that whole mess as itself miraculous and inexplicable, then nothing can save you. Every time I read Sebald, I am astonished that he didn't end his life by suicide.
]]> <![CDATA[Lectures du Coran (French Edition)]]> 29775653 579 Mohammed Arkoun 222638992X Mesoscope 0 to-read 3.00 1997 Lectures du Coran (French Edition)
author: Mohammed Arkoun
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Spells, Images, and Mandalas: Tracing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals (Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhism)]]> 23035850 353 Koichi Shinohara 0231537395 Mesoscope 0 to-read 0.0 2014 Spells, Images, and Mandalas: Tracing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals (Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhism)
author: Koichi Shinohara
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Fathers and Sons 6094772 Fathers and Sons explores the ageless conflict between generations through a period in Russian history when a new generation of revolutionary intellectuals threatened the state. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian by Peter Carson, with an introduction by Rosamund Bartlett and an afterword by Tatyana Tolstaya.

Returning home after years away at university, Arkady is proud to introduce his clever friend Bazarov to his father and uncle. But their guest soon stirs up unrest on the quiet country estate - his outspoken nihilist views and his scathing criticisms of the older men expose the growing distance between Arkady and his father. And when Bazarov visits his own doting but old-fashioned parents, his disdainful rejection of traditional Russian life causes even further distress. In Fathers and Sons, Turgeneve created a beautifully-drawn and highly influential portrayal of the clash between generations, at a time just before the end of serfdom, when the refined yet vanishing landowning class was being overturned by a brash new breed that strove to change the world.

Peter Carson's elegant, naturalistic new translation brings Turgenev's masterpiece to life for a new generation of readers. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett discusses the novel's subtle characterisation and the immense social changes that took place in the 1850s Russia of Fathers and Sons. This edition also includes a chronology, suggested further reading and notes.

If you enjoyed Fathers and Sons, you might like Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, also available in Penguin Classics.

'One of the first Russian novels to be translated for a wider European audience. It is a difficult art: in this superb new version, Peter Carson has succeeded splendidly' Michael Binyon, The Times

'If you want to get as close as an English reader can to enjoying Turgenev, Carson is probably the best'
Donald Rayfield, The Times Literary Supplement]]> 200 Ivan Turgenev 014144133X Mesoscope 5 literature
I found the parent-child stuff quite moving, and while I surely once would have identified much more with the children, I now, appropriate to the march of time, in many respects land on the side of the parents, who at times see their children much more clearly than their children see themselves. I was reminded of the striking observation in Alexander Payne's film The Holdovers that every new generation of young people believes that they are the first people in the history of the species to discover the mysteries of love. When one spends any time with teenagers, one immediately sees how common it is in that age range to lack any consciousness of the fact that their parents have already been through that stage of life.

There is a melancholy sort of mono no awareRadetzky March, which, more than anything, is the story of realizing that the world you knew is gone forever.

For the children of this novel, and especially for the self-pronounced nihilist Bazarov, there is little in the ancien régime of the fathers that is worth preserving. Because he is young, he does not understand how transparent, how arrogant, and how cruel his attitudes are.

This is what I would call a brilliant work rather than a work of genius. In both kinds of novels, one finds that events emerge by necessity, but only in the latter is the nature of that necessity impossible to fully articulate. It is felt and experienced, and emerges from the depths of insight rather than from careful craftsmanship. At times, Fathers and Sons feels like an illustration of a social argument, and as such, it lacks the wildness and surprise of actual life. ]]> 3.98 1862 Fathers and Sons
author: Ivan Turgenev
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1862
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: literature
review:
This work is well known as the novel which introduced the word "nihilism" into currency, and it is that, but much more besides. First and foremost, it is a rich and closely-observed study of how fathers and sons define themselves in mutual opposition, and the kinds of psychological predicaments that leads to. This is interwoven with a more general mediation on the way societies address social problems across generations, and it is no coincidence that Turgenev's novel is set on the cusp of the 1861 abolition of serfdom.

I found the parent-child stuff quite moving, and while I surely once would have identified much more with the children, I now, appropriate to the march of time, in many respects land on the side of the parents, who at times see their children much more clearly than their children see themselves. I was reminded of the striking observation in Alexander Payne's film The Holdovers that every new generation of young people believes that they are the first people in the history of the species to discover the mysteries of love. When one spends any time with teenagers, one immediately sees how common it is in that age range to lack any consciousness of the fact that their parents have already been through that stage of life.

There is a melancholy sort of mono no awareRadetzky March, which, more than anything, is the story of realizing that the world you knew is gone forever.

For the children of this novel, and especially for the self-pronounced nihilist Bazarov, there is little in the ancien régime of the fathers that is worth preserving. Because he is young, he does not understand how transparent, how arrogant, and how cruel his attitudes are.

This is what I would call a brilliant work rather than a work of genius. In both kinds of novels, one finds that events emerge by necessity, but only in the latter is the nature of that necessity impossible to fully articulate. It is felt and experienced, and emerges from the depths of insight rather than from careful craftsmanship. At times, Fathers and Sons feels like an illustration of a social argument, and as such, it lacks the wildness and surprise of actual life.
]]> <![CDATA[The Origins of Totalitarianism]]> 11854948 Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism and an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history



The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.]]> 578 Hannah Arendt Mesoscope 3 history, politics
What one would expect Arendt to do in a book like this is to explain what she means by "totalitarian," then to demonstrate that it is a novel, valid conceptual category that rightly applies to both the Nazi and Stalinist forms of governance, and then to investigate the historical conditions that gave rise to this new form of government. Instead, she only clearly explains what she means by totalitarianism at the very end and takes it for granted for the vast majority of the book that it's a valid category. Having left the phenomena whose historical origins she is investigating in the book undefined, what she ends up demonstrating with her historical argument is, in essence, that what happened is what happened; that is, that what she calls "totalitarian government" is the end result of the processes that she describes. By opting not to clarify and validate the concept as such, the historical investigation of its origins therefore takes on a tautological character: what happened is what happened, and its results, she calls "totalitarian."

This is only somewhat mitigated by the concluding theoretical analysis of totalitarianism, which I found unpersuasive. I very much doubt there are many historians or theorists who find it a useful concept, or who agree that the term, as she understands it, is the best way of interpreting the goals and character of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. I further doubt that many experts seriously believe that those two regimes had something fundamental in their character that set them completely apart from the authoritarian or fascist governments of Spain, Italy, and Japan of the same period, which receive barely a mention.

So what is this "totalitarianism?" It is essentially a novel form of government that arises from the breakdown of the social fabric and the natural grouping of self-interested political actors into classes or parties. Totalitarian governments seek total control of the human being in a variety of respects. By their very nature, totalitarian regimes necessarily seek to eventually bring the whole world under a single government. They also seek to exercise total control over their subjects, destroying any individual claim to spontaneity or choice that might exist within them. Totalitarian states recognize no limitation to their potential power or reach, and they use concentration camps as laboratories to find ways to destroy the autonomous human being.

In providing a historical account of the movement's origins, Arendt implicitly makes two arguments: first, totalitarian governments arise from and must be understood in terms of their specific historical conditions; and second, that they can be meaningfully explicated in terms of their character and goals through rational accounts.

The first point is important because it insists on the completely historical character of regimes of mass terror. This anticipates the arguments she would make more directly in Eichmann in Jerusalem, that the Holocaust must be understood as a historical phenomenon, and cannot be held as something with an essential uniqueness of metaphysical evil or monstrosity that places it beyond the reach of analysis and makes it inexplicable. This is a point that she qualifies in some important respects, such as in arguing that psychology cannot reach the experience of the concentration camps, but it essentially stands. The second point is important because it guides her argument in ways that shape her conclusion. That is to say, Arendt analyzes the history of these movements with an eye to what "their ultimate goals really were or must have been" in order for them to have done the kinds of things that they did. In my view, this leads her to essentially reconstruct an implicit ideology that no one actually asserted or defended, and this should give us pause. Ut is often not obvious that the motives she imputes were actually held by historical agents. I am skeptical, for example, that the leader of a totalitarian state wishes to destroy any possibility of human freedom. I would think Hitler would have been perfectly happy with SS men spontaneously discovering new ways to advance or celebrate the Master Race.

It is highly problematic to assume that the Nazis had a monolithic, clear intention that organized all of their actions and plans, and even more so to assume it comprised a novel set of tactics and goals that were largely shared with Stalinist Russia. It seems to me more likely that their state ideologies were, rather, a hodgepodge of well-known bad ideas that were unified in a novel configuration and super-charged by advanced industrialization and by a generation of misery and chaos following World War II.

Arendt has an extraordinarily bad habit (all to common among German and French scholars of her day) of either under-explaining or failing to explain at all what she means by many of the primary terms in the book. She speaks at great length about the importance of "the mob," for example, but only defines the term as "the residue or remainder of the class system." I was forced to go to secondary literature to get the foggiest idea of what she meant by this. Central to her early arguments about the rise of antisemitism is her insistence that antisemitism arose "precisely when the nation-state was beginning its sharp decline." What does she even mean by this? As far as I can see, the nation-state is still going strong several decades after the book was written.

The book is extraordinarily Eurocentric. In her chapters on imperialism, she describes African peoples en masse as "savages" and holds them accountable to a German yardstick of civilization, holding that their lives are essentially squandered because they do not "contribute to something lasting outside of themselves," i.e., the kind of "civilization" that she is committed to defending. Her overwhelming interest is fixed on Germany and France, and she often writes as though other countries don't even exist. Arendt, having found safe harbor as a refugee in the United States, and then having written this very book within its shores, incredibly has a long discussion about human rights and refugees in which the United States doesn't even come up. She writes of the Declaration of the Rights of Man as though the Declaration of Independence had never been written, and of the French Revolution as though it were the first time European royal authority were challenged in modern Europe by constitutional democratic republicans. This reflects a kind of stuffy conservatism and smugness that is at times rather repellant.

Many will be interested in this book because of the light it may shed on modern forms of illiberal populism. In some limited sense, this book does illuminate this area, especially in her penetrating discussion of the way that totalitarian regimes destroy the possibility of truth in order to create an arbitrary reality that they prefer.

However, a reader who is (solely) concerned with finding parallels to Orban, Erdogan, Putin, or Trump is likely to come away disappointed. In particular, the first half of the book, dealing with antisemitism and imperialism, both presuppose a substantial knowledge of the history of Europe in the nineteenth century, and will really only be of interest to readers who are interested in that as a topic per se.

We also need to take seriously the degree to which she roots her analysis in a very detailed treatment of the historical specifics. She understood totalitarianism in very specific terms, and opposed overgeneralization of her concepts to related forms of government that she considered entirely distinct, such as tyranny or fascism. Whatever Trump is, I think it's clear that he is not a totalitarian, in the terms that Arendt puts forth.

To recap, there is a great deal of interesting material in this book that make it worth reading, but also significant deficiencies in the form and content of its central arguments. It has to be read actively and critically.

]]> 4.33 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism
author: Hannah Arendt
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1951
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: history, politics
review:
This is a book that does small things extremely well and big things badly. The texture of the book is an ongoing interpretive analysis of any number of cultural and historical factors contributing to her overall argument concerning the emergence of a novel form of government in early twentieth century Europe, and many of her incidental arguments are arresting, beautifully phrased, and highly worthwhile. However, her central argument has significant problems of both method and content.

What one would expect Arendt to do in a book like this is to explain what she means by "totalitarian," then to demonstrate that it is a novel, valid conceptual category that rightly applies to both the Nazi and Stalinist forms of governance, and then to investigate the historical conditions that gave rise to this new form of government. Instead, she only clearly explains what she means by totalitarianism at the very end and takes it for granted for the vast majority of the book that it's a valid category. Having left the phenomena whose historical origins she is investigating in the book undefined, what she ends up demonstrating with her historical argument is, in essence, that what happened is what happened; that is, that what she calls "totalitarian government" is the end result of the processes that she describes. By opting not to clarify and validate the concept as such, the historical investigation of its origins therefore takes on a tautological character: what happened is what happened, and its results, she calls "totalitarian."

This is only somewhat mitigated by the concluding theoretical analysis of totalitarianism, which I found unpersuasive. I very much doubt there are many historians or theorists who find it a useful concept, or who agree that the term, as she understands it, is the best way of interpreting the goals and character of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. I further doubt that many experts seriously believe that those two regimes had something fundamental in their character that set them completely apart from the authoritarian or fascist governments of Spain, Italy, and Japan of the same period, which receive barely a mention.

So what is this "totalitarianism?" It is essentially a novel form of government that arises from the breakdown of the social fabric and the natural grouping of self-interested political actors into classes or parties. Totalitarian governments seek total control of the human being in a variety of respects. By their very nature, totalitarian regimes necessarily seek to eventually bring the whole world under a single government. They also seek to exercise total control over their subjects, destroying any individual claim to spontaneity or choice that might exist within them. Totalitarian states recognize no limitation to their potential power or reach, and they use concentration camps as laboratories to find ways to destroy the autonomous human being.

In providing a historical account of the movement's origins, Arendt implicitly makes two arguments: first, totalitarian governments arise from and must be understood in terms of their specific historical conditions; and second, that they can be meaningfully explicated in terms of their character and goals through rational accounts.

The first point is important because it insists on the completely historical character of regimes of mass terror. This anticipates the arguments she would make more directly in Eichmann in Jerusalem, that the Holocaust must be understood as a historical phenomenon, and cannot be held as something with an essential uniqueness of metaphysical evil or monstrosity that places it beyond the reach of analysis and makes it inexplicable. This is a point that she qualifies in some important respects, such as in arguing that psychology cannot reach the experience of the concentration camps, but it essentially stands. The second point is important because it guides her argument in ways that shape her conclusion. That is to say, Arendt analyzes the history of these movements with an eye to what "their ultimate goals really were or must have been" in order for them to have done the kinds of things that they did. In my view, this leads her to essentially reconstruct an implicit ideology that no one actually asserted or defended, and this should give us pause. Ut is often not obvious that the motives she imputes were actually held by historical agents. I am skeptical, for example, that the leader of a totalitarian state wishes to destroy any possibility of human freedom. I would think Hitler would have been perfectly happy with SS men spontaneously discovering new ways to advance or celebrate the Master Race.

It is highly problematic to assume that the Nazis had a monolithic, clear intention that organized all of their actions and plans, and even more so to assume it comprised a novel set of tactics and goals that were largely shared with Stalinist Russia. It seems to me more likely that their state ideologies were, rather, a hodgepodge of well-known bad ideas that were unified in a novel configuration and super-charged by advanced industrialization and by a generation of misery and chaos following World War II.

Arendt has an extraordinarily bad habit (all to common among German and French scholars of her day) of either under-explaining or failing to explain at all what she means by many of the primary terms in the book. She speaks at great length about the importance of "the mob," for example, but only defines the term as "the residue or remainder of the class system." I was forced to go to secondary literature to get the foggiest idea of what she meant by this. Central to her early arguments about the rise of antisemitism is her insistence that antisemitism arose "precisely when the nation-state was beginning its sharp decline." What does she even mean by this? As far as I can see, the nation-state is still going strong several decades after the book was written.

The book is extraordinarily Eurocentric. In her chapters on imperialism, she describes African peoples en masse as "savages" and holds them accountable to a German yardstick of civilization, holding that their lives are essentially squandered because they do not "contribute to something lasting outside of themselves," i.e., the kind of "civilization" that she is committed to defending. Her overwhelming interest is fixed on Germany and France, and she often writes as though other countries don't even exist. Arendt, having found safe harbor as a refugee in the United States, and then having written this very book within its shores, incredibly has a long discussion about human rights and refugees in which the United States doesn't even come up. She writes of the Declaration of the Rights of Man as though the Declaration of Independence had never been written, and of the French Revolution as though it were the first time European royal authority were challenged in modern Europe by constitutional democratic republicans. This reflects a kind of stuffy conservatism and smugness that is at times rather repellant.

Many will be interested in this book because of the light it may shed on modern forms of illiberal populism. In some limited sense, this book does illuminate this area, especially in her penetrating discussion of the way that totalitarian regimes destroy the possibility of truth in order to create an arbitrary reality that they prefer.

However, a reader who is (solely) concerned with finding parallels to Orban, Erdogan, Putin, or Trump is likely to come away disappointed. In particular, the first half of the book, dealing with antisemitism and imperialism, both presuppose a substantial knowledge of the history of Europe in the nineteenth century, and will really only be of interest to readers who are interested in that as a topic per se.

We also need to take seriously the degree to which she roots her analysis in a very detailed treatment of the historical specifics. She understood totalitarianism in very specific terms, and opposed overgeneralization of her concepts to related forms of government that she considered entirely distinct, such as tyranny or fascism. Whatever Trump is, I think it's clear that he is not a totalitarian, in the terms that Arendt puts forth.

To recap, there is a great deal of interesting material in this book that make it worth reading, but also significant deficiencies in the form and content of its central arguments. It has to be read actively and critically.


]]> The Gambler 12857 The Gambler, Dostoevsky reaches the heights of drama with this stunning psychological portrait.]]> 188 Fyodor Dostoevsky Mesoscope 5 literature Consolation of Philosophy

If Dostoevsky had written this novella and nothing else but a handful of short stories, he would still be rightly remembered as one of the greatest fiction writers of the nineteenth century in Russia. It gets at something very simple, yet very profound, in the human heart, and if it does not make it intelligible, it at least renders it to view.

Why do gamblers gamble? One could come away from this work, which was famously based on the author's own experiences, with the conviction that it's clearly an addiction, as though that explains it, instead of just providing a word for the fact that some people find it quite impossible to stop.

Our eponymous gambler makes it quite clear early on that he's well aware that it makes no sense to gamble, that is completely irrational to do so, and he looks on those helpful souls who try to explain the implausibility of hoping for success to him with nearly as much pity as those who try to turn him away from the tables with moral instruction. Indeed, this is at the very core of why he does it - not because he doesn't know it's a bad idea, but because it's a bad idea, and if there is one thing that he truly dreads, it's the life of people who do nothing but make "good decisions," epitomized in his thoughts by a scornful depiction he gives of good, pious Prussian families who do nothing but work, save, and read edifying books.

I'm reminded of a surpisingly-illuminating bit of dialog that came out the TV series "Justified," when the loose cannon federal marshal tells his well-meaning but stodgy boss "There's more to life than good ideas." "Yeah," his boss replies, "there's bad ideas, too."

What I think of most in Dostoevsky's characterization of his constitutional aversion to simply "doing the right thing" is the 2016 criticism of the "Blue Church," a scathing criticism of liberal sentiment written by an anonymous conservative redditor who casted the moral urgency of the left as a kind of busybody scolding, like they never tired of reminding other people to eat their vegetables.

Without entertaining the political merits of such a position, I will say that it helps explain a lot, particularly why convictions that must be morally interpreted as nihilistic are often felt by those who hold them as ecstatic and emancipatory. There can be a kind of high romance, even if of necessarily tragic variety, of casting of the tyranny of thought and thinking, of reflection and sobriety.

Perhaps this is all very much on my mind simply because the 2024 US election will take place in three days, but I think it's there, nevertheless. In any case, this novella is close to perfect, and easily the best of the three short works by Dostoevsky I have read - I'd rank it well above Notes from Underground. As a psychological study, it is of the first tier. Dramatically, it is punctuated by moments of great surprise that are so obvious in retrospect that one almost feels that they've been had, even when they could never have been foreseen. It is an entertaining, riotously amusing, and deeply disturbing work, tragically romantic in its way, but hung about with the shadow of inevitable doom.

Update: It's worth noting that after writing this review, I read Pushkin's classic short story "The Queen of Spades," and learned that in several key respects, it clearly served as Dostoevsky's model for this novella. That Dostoevsky had the deepest love for Pushkin is well-known, and "Queen of Spades" was published during his first youthful period of devouring literature. ]]> 3.95 1866 The Gambler
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1866
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: literature
review:
"Inconstancy is my very essence, says the Wheel." - Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

If Dostoevsky had written this novella and nothing else but a handful of short stories, he would still be rightly remembered as one of the greatest fiction writers of the nineteenth century in Russia. It gets at something very simple, yet very profound, in the human heart, and if it does not make it intelligible, it at least renders it to view.

Why do gamblers gamble? One could come away from this work, which was famously based on the author's own experiences, with the conviction that it's clearly an addiction, as though that explains it, instead of just providing a word for the fact that some people find it quite impossible to stop.

Our eponymous gambler makes it quite clear early on that he's well aware that it makes no sense to gamble, that is completely irrational to do so, and he looks on those helpful souls who try to explain the implausibility of hoping for success to him with nearly as much pity as those who try to turn him away from the tables with moral instruction. Indeed, this is at the very core of why he does it - not because he doesn't know it's a bad idea, but because it's a bad idea, and if there is one thing that he truly dreads, it's the life of people who do nothing but make "good decisions," epitomized in his thoughts by a scornful depiction he gives of good, pious Prussian families who do nothing but work, save, and read edifying books.

I'm reminded of a surpisingly-illuminating bit of dialog that came out the TV series "Justified," when the loose cannon federal marshal tells his well-meaning but stodgy boss "There's more to life than good ideas." "Yeah," his boss replies, "there's bad ideas, too."

What I think of most in Dostoevsky's characterization of his constitutional aversion to simply "doing the right thing" is the 2016 criticism of the "Blue Church," a scathing criticism of liberal sentiment written by an anonymous conservative redditor who casted the moral urgency of the left as a kind of busybody scolding, like they never tired of reminding other people to eat their vegetables.

Without entertaining the political merits of such a position, I will say that it helps explain a lot, particularly why convictions that must be morally interpreted as nihilistic are often felt by those who hold them as ecstatic and emancipatory. There can be a kind of high romance, even if of necessarily tragic variety, of casting of the tyranny of thought and thinking, of reflection and sobriety.

Perhaps this is all very much on my mind simply because the 2024 US election will take place in three days, but I think it's there, nevertheless. In any case, this novella is close to perfect, and easily the best of the three short works by Dostoevsky I have read - I'd rank it well above Notes from Underground. As a psychological study, it is of the first tier. Dramatically, it is punctuated by moments of great surprise that are so obvious in retrospect that one almost feels that they've been had, even when they could never have been foreseen. It is an entertaining, riotously amusing, and deeply disturbing work, tragically romantic in its way, but hung about with the shadow of inevitable doom.

Update: It's worth noting that after writing this review, I read Pushkin's classic short story "The Queen of Spades," and learned that in several key respects, it clearly served as Dostoevsky's model for this novella. That Dostoevsky had the deepest love for Pushkin is well-known, and "Queen of Spades" was published during his first youthful period of devouring literature.
]]> <![CDATA[Wallenstein: ein dramatisches Gedicht]]> 1919706 510 Friedrich Schiller 342302660X Mesoscope 5
Friedrich Schiller is primarily remembered as a poet, dramatist, and philosopher, of course, but he taught history at the University of Jena that now bears his name, and he wrote a substantial history of the Thirty Years' War. In the story of Albrecht von Wallenstein, generalissimo of the Habsburg forces until he was relieved, then called back to service, then assassinated by the emperor, he Schiller found an attractive subject who seemed to embody the complexities and contradictions for which the war is famous. After raising and leading one of the largest armies of the war on behalf of the emperor, Wallenstein began to fear a war without end (he wasn't wrong - this was about 15 years in). Under his own authority, he made ceasefire agreements with the Saxons and the Swedes, and the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II began to fear that his high commander might forcibly impose peace on him. It was then he apparently ordered the general's death.

There are many enigmas in the historical record, and these are taken up as a central problem of the play, which keeps its protagonist at an arm's length to deepen the mystery about what he is thinking and what he actually intends. The enormous work is subdivided into a dedicatory poem, a poetical dramatic prolog of some 50 pages in length entitled Wallenstein's Camp, and then two full-length plays, The Piccolomini and Wallenstein's Death. The play begins at a great remove, approaching its titular figure from the outside and only very gradually.

In the introductory poem, the audience's attention is called to the imaginative character of art, in which both the actors and the audience must cooperate to fully "stage" the play's events:

Nicht er ist's, der auf dieser Bühne heut
Erscheinen wird. Doch in den kühnen Schaaren,
Die sein Befehl gewaltig lenkt, sein Geist
Beseelt, wird euch sein Schattenbild begegnen,
Bis ihn die scheue Muse selbst vor euch
Zu stellen wagt in lebender Gestalt,
Denn seine Macht ist's, die sein Herz verführt,
Sein Lager nur erkläret sein Verbrechen....

This might well remind the reader of the narrator of Shakespeare's Henry V:

O pardon, since a crookèd figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high uprearèd and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts....

This signals what will be one of the great themes of the play, which I interpret as a kind of idealist dramatics. The question of what, ultimately, is real, and what things mean, and how we know, and what the limits of our knowledge actually are, is a question that will be constantly evoked on every level of the play. The introductory poem highlights the imaginal co-construction that brings the dead words to life on the stage, and we move, then, into the events, starting at the outer periphery. Wallenstein's Camp with an itinerant father and a son who are seeking food, and the first spoken lines introduce in miniature the theme of discord between father and son that comprises the crisis of the play:

Bauernknabe: Vater, es wird nicht gut ablaufen,
Bleiben wir von dem Soldatenhaufen.
Sind Euch gar trotzige Kameraden;
Wenn sie uns nur nicht am Leibe schaden.

Despite the boy's warning, into the camp they go, and we get a lively panoramic view of many different residents, including soldiers and mercenaries of different backgrounds and motives. One can only imagine Brecht taking copious notes for his Mutter Courage.

The scene reminds me of the Easter walk sequence of Goethe's Faust I, which similarly paints the portrait of a milieu in a series of lively miniatures. This is one of the numerous ways that Goethe's mighty work, which was published in its complete form only a few years before Wallenstein, left its mark, and seemingly drove Schiller to reach for new heights in his own oeuvre.

By eavesdropping on the soldiers' discussions, the situation is set up for the audience, which learns that Wallenstein has called all his forces to him along with his family, and imperial envoys have been coming and going. The mood is tense, and no one knows what the general's plans are, or if he intends to break with the emperor. But one thing gradually becomes clear: among the rank-and-file, the final loyalty is Wallenstein, not the crown.

The Piccolomini brings us inside the castle walls, where we encounter Wallenstein, his principle captains, and his entourage and family. We remain at arm's length from Wallenstein and only very gradually begin to develop any sense of his personalitya. The mood is one of increasing urgency, and his supporters believe it is critical that Wallenstein make whatever move he is going to make, and soon. The Swedes are drawing near and the emperor is clearly growing ever-mmore suspicious of his motives.

Meanwhile, Wallenstein pushes to prolong making a final decision and devotes himself to reading the signs in the stars, aided by Seni, his astrologer.

The feeling of discomfort increases steadily, along with certain, urgent questions. Why is he delaying? What is he waiting for?

It was initially hard for me to believe that he ever could have been an effective leader, so long does he delay in the critical hour. We gradually learn that he injured his head falling out of a window (a kind of subconscious repetition of the defenestration that began the war?), and has never quite been the same.

Wallenstein himself frames his indecisiveness in extravagent terms, declaring that while lesser men can content themselves with the directives of the earth, he is chosen by history to operate on a higher plane, as it were, and therefore has to take his guidance from the heavens themselves.

There is a great deal of astrological symbology in this play, but I have to confess I do not have a distinct understanding of what it was supposed to convey, exactly. In general terms, it provides a kind of symbolic vocabulary for elaborating on the idealist theme of struggling to understand the meaning of historical moments and events, but to what end, I cannot say with confidence. I learn from the footnotes that the astrologer character was originally intended to be comic, but lost his stock qualities in later drafts. In an exchange of letters with Goethe, they speak of the appeal of astrology in a general way as a kind of extension of the intuition that environmental factors determine the significance of things, and it's not always obvious how far into the cosmos that significance extends, and whether or not we supply it. This, of course, seems to echo the image from the introductory poem of the play being a co-creation of theater and audience.

But I must say that Schiller's use of astrology seems more to raise the question than to shed any light on any possible answer. In a similar way, Wallenstein's remove from the audience as an enigmatic character highlights the historical problem of interpreting who he was and what he was about, but dramatically, the effect is that his personality never comes into focus. Such was the opinion of Ludwig Tieck, at least, who wrote an illuminating critique of the play, and Eckermann and Goethe likewise express that Schiller's intereest in certain philosophical problems at times usurps his attention from the poetic and dramatic effects of the play. It's perhaps understandable that one of the play's great admirers was Hegel, who said in his lectures on aesthetics that the play does an extraordinary job depicting the dialectic of determinacy and indeterminacy.

There is much more to be said about this play - very much more - and this itself is a bit of a problem. The play is huge in every respect, and Schiller did not fully succeed in keeping everything in focus. In my opinion, it is too long (it's easily the longest of his plays), and too crowded for any of its individual elements to land with sufficient force.

That being said, the play does offer a huge amount for its audience to chew on and to admire. It was relentlessly fascinating and sometimes deeply suspenseful, which is not an easy feat for a series of plays that, after all, end with Wallenstein's Death. In many respects, it's the best of the Schiller plays I've read, though dramatically, I would rank it well below Don Carlos and William Tell.]]> 3.75 1800 Wallenstein: ein dramatisches Gedicht
author: Friedrich Schiller
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1800
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: drama, german, literature, poetry
review:
The more one delves into the Thirty Years' War, the more one asks: what, if anything, was it about? It is often described as a religious war, but then Protestant Sweden's primary ally was Catholic France against the Catholic Habsburgs. The chaos seemed to take on a life of its own, with armies of mercenaries regularly trading sides and various powers striving year after year to reap some new advantage from all the destruction.

Friedrich Schiller is primarily remembered as a poet, dramatist, and philosopher, of course, but he taught history at the University of Jena that now bears his name, and he wrote a substantial history of the Thirty Years' War. In the story of Albrecht von Wallenstein, generalissimo of the Habsburg forces until he was relieved, then called back to service, then assassinated by the emperor, he Schiller found an attractive subject who seemed to embody the complexities and contradictions for which the war is famous. After raising and leading one of the largest armies of the war on behalf of the emperor, Wallenstein began to fear a war without end (he wasn't wrong - this was about 15 years in). Under his own authority, he made ceasefire agreements with the Saxons and the Swedes, and the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II began to fear that his high commander might forcibly impose peace on him. It was then he apparently ordered the general's death.

There are many enigmas in the historical record, and these are taken up as a central problem of the play, which keeps its protagonist at an arm's length to deepen the mystery about what he is thinking and what he actually intends. The enormous work is subdivided into a dedicatory poem, a poetical dramatic prolog of some 50 pages in length entitled Wallenstein's Camp, and then two full-length plays, The Piccolomini and Wallenstein's Death. The play begins at a great remove, approaching its titular figure from the outside and only very gradually.

In the introductory poem, the audience's attention is called to the imaginative character of art, in which both the actors and the audience must cooperate to fully "stage" the play's events:

Nicht er ist's, der auf dieser Bühne heut
Erscheinen wird. Doch in den kühnen Schaaren,
Die sein Befehl gewaltig lenkt, sein Geist
Beseelt, wird euch sein Schattenbild begegnen,
Bis ihn die scheue Muse selbst vor euch
Zu stellen wagt in lebender Gestalt,
Denn seine Macht ist's, die sein Herz verführt,
Sein Lager nur erkläret sein Verbrechen....

This might well remind the reader of the narrator of Shakespeare's Henry V:

O pardon, since a crookèd figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high uprearèd and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts....

This signals what will be one of the great themes of the play, which I interpret as a kind of idealist dramatics. The question of what, ultimately, is real, and what things mean, and how we know, and what the limits of our knowledge actually are, is a question that will be constantly evoked on every level of the play. The introductory poem highlights the imaginal co-construction that brings the dead words to life on the stage, and we move, then, into the events, starting at the outer periphery. Wallenstein's Camp with an itinerant father and a son who are seeking food, and the first spoken lines introduce in miniature the theme of discord between father and son that comprises the crisis of the play:

Bauernknabe: Vater, es wird nicht gut ablaufen,
Bleiben wir von dem Soldatenhaufen.
Sind Euch gar trotzige Kameraden;
Wenn sie uns nur nicht am Leibe schaden.

Despite the boy's warning, into the camp they go, and we get a lively panoramic view of many different residents, including soldiers and mercenaries of different backgrounds and motives. One can only imagine Brecht taking copious notes for his Mutter Courage.

The scene reminds me of the Easter walk sequence of Goethe's Faust I, which similarly paints the portrait of a milieu in a series of lively miniatures. This is one of the numerous ways that Goethe's mighty work, which was published in its complete form only a few years before Wallenstein, left its mark, and seemingly drove Schiller to reach for new heights in his own oeuvre.

By eavesdropping on the soldiers' discussions, the situation is set up for the audience, which learns that Wallenstein has called all his forces to him along with his family, and imperial envoys have been coming and going. The mood is tense, and no one knows what the general's plans are, or if he intends to break with the emperor. But one thing gradually becomes clear: among the rank-and-file, the final loyalty is Wallenstein, not the crown.

The Piccolomini brings us inside the castle walls, where we encounter Wallenstein, his principle captains, and his entourage and family. We remain at arm's length from Wallenstein and only very gradually begin to develop any sense of his personalitya. The mood is one of increasing urgency, and his supporters believe it is critical that Wallenstein make whatever move he is going to make, and soon. The Swedes are drawing near and the emperor is clearly growing ever-mmore suspicious of his motives.

Meanwhile, Wallenstein pushes to prolong making a final decision and devotes himself to reading the signs in the stars, aided by Seni, his astrologer.

The feeling of discomfort increases steadily, along with certain, urgent questions. Why is he delaying? What is he waiting for?

It was initially hard for me to believe that he ever could have been an effective leader, so long does he delay in the critical hour. We gradually learn that he injured his head falling out of a window (a kind of subconscious repetition of the defenestration that began the war?), and has never quite been the same.

Wallenstein himself frames his indecisiveness in extravagent terms, declaring that while lesser men can content themselves with the directives of the earth, he is chosen by history to operate on a higher plane, as it were, and therefore has to take his guidance from the heavens themselves.

There is a great deal of astrological symbology in this play, but I have to confess I do not have a distinct understanding of what it was supposed to convey, exactly. In general terms, it provides a kind of symbolic vocabulary for elaborating on the idealist theme of struggling to understand the meaning of historical moments and events, but to what end, I cannot say with confidence. I learn from the footnotes that the astrologer character was originally intended to be comic, but lost his stock qualities in later drafts. In an exchange of letters with Goethe, they speak of the appeal of astrology in a general way as a kind of extension of the intuition that environmental factors determine the significance of things, and it's not always obvious how far into the cosmos that significance extends, and whether or not we supply it. This, of course, seems to echo the image from the introductory poem of the play being a co-creation of theater and audience.

But I must say that Schiller's use of astrology seems more to raise the question than to shed any light on any possible answer. In a similar way, Wallenstein's remove from the audience as an enigmatic character highlights the historical problem of interpreting who he was and what he was about, but dramatically, the effect is that his personality never comes into focus. Such was the opinion of Ludwig Tieck, at least, who wrote an illuminating critique of the play, and Eckermann and Goethe likewise express that Schiller's intereest in certain philosophical problems at times usurps his attention from the poetic and dramatic effects of the play. It's perhaps understandable that one of the play's great admirers was Hegel, who said in his lectures on aesthetics that the play does an extraordinary job depicting the dialectic of determinacy and indeterminacy.

There is much more to be said about this play - very much more - and this itself is a bit of a problem. The play is huge in every respect, and Schiller did not fully succeed in keeping everything in focus. In my opinion, it is too long (it's easily the longest of his plays), and too crowded for any of its individual elements to land with sufficient force.

That being said, the play does offer a huge amount for its audience to chew on and to admire. It was relentlessly fascinating and sometimes deeply suspenseful, which is not an easy feat for a series of plays that, after all, end with Wallenstein's Death. In many respects, it's the best of the Schiller plays I've read, though dramatically, I would rank it well below Don Carlos and William Tell.
]]> <![CDATA[The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poems of Alexander Pushkin]]> 1181366 The Bronze Horseman is the second-most famous poem in Russian literature after his Eugene Onegin, and notoriously difficult to translate. This new translation, described by Robert Chandler as 'truly wonderful', is accompanied here by Pushkin's greatest shorter verses. They range from lyric poetry to narrative verse, based on traditional Russian stories of enchanted tsars and magical fish. Together, they show the dazzling range and achievement of Russia's greatest poet.]]> 261 Alexander Pushkin 0670192414 Mesoscope 0 4.15 The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poems of Alexander Pushkin
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: currently-reading, poetry, literature
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tiroler Fasnacht: Innerhalb Der Alpenlandischen Winter - Und Vorfruhlingsbrauche]]> 171109888 0 Anton Dorrer Mesoscope 0 to-read 0.0 Tiroler Fasnacht: Innerhalb Der Alpenlandischen Winter - Und Vorfruhlingsbrauche
author: Anton Dorrer
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen (German Edition)]]> 209855752 0 Otto Höfler 3959489285 Mesoscope 0 to-read 0.0 Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen (German Edition)
author: Otto Höfler
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath]]> 71156 Ecstasies compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across Europe and in England for thousands of years.]]> 368 Carlo Ginzburg 0226296938 Mesoscope 0 to-read 4.11 1989 Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath
author: Carlo Ginzburg
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century]]> 33917107
On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.

Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.�

Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.]]> 127 Timothy Snyder 0804190119 Mesoscope 4 politics
I think it's well worth a quick read, and worth keeping handy, so it can be used as an actual reminder for practical steps to take.

If I were writing this book, I would have included a 21st point: "Don't overstate continuities with the historical past." That is to say, while the examples Snyder uses are often helpful, I think there is a great danger in over-relying on models of twentieth-century fascist and totalitarian states. In some ways, there are crucial similarities, but in other ways, the situation is totally different. When the Nazis seized power, the country had just been through a devastating war followed by a devastating and humiliating peace, and at times German unemployment reached as high as 50%. The US today, by contrast, is stable economically, and has not fought a war on its soil since 1812. If one focuses too much on historical analogies, one is going to miss the role of globalization, right-wing media, tech billionaires, social media, and other important factors, though in fairness, many of these factors are things Snyder considers. My main point here is that it is a mistake to think too much of the past as a model for the future, and we have to be on strict guard against this. ]]> 4.25 2017 On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
author: Timothy Snyder
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: politics
review:
Timothy Snyder is a historian who specializes in World War II, and in this book, he writes a brisk, lightweight guide for 20 specific steps people can and should take to resist the encroachment of authoritarian government, specifically under Trump in the United States. The tips are presented as pithy injunctions, such as "Be wary of paramilitaries," and "Learn from peers in other countries," followed by 2-3 pages of commentary, often using quite interesting historical examples to illustrate the meaning and relevance of his points.

I think it's well worth a quick read, and worth keeping handy, so it can be used as an actual reminder for practical steps to take.

If I were writing this book, I would have included a 21st point: "Don't overstate continuities with the historical past." That is to say, while the examples Snyder uses are often helpful, I think there is a great danger in over-relying on models of twentieth-century fascist and totalitarian states. In some ways, there are crucial similarities, but in other ways, the situation is totally different. When the Nazis seized power, the country had just been through a devastating war followed by a devastating and humiliating peace, and at times German unemployment reached as high as 50%. The US today, by contrast, is stable economically, and has not fought a war on its soil since 1812. If one focuses too much on historical analogies, one is going to miss the role of globalization, right-wing media, tech billionaires, social media, and other important factors, though in fairness, many of these factors are things Snyder considers. My main point here is that it is a mistake to think too much of the past as a model for the future, and we have to be on strict guard against this.
]]> Tauben im Gras 1769233 228 Wolfgang Koeppen 3518371010 Mesoscope 2 german, literature Tauben im Gras famously echoes and sometimes parodies the structure of Joyce's Ulysses, but where that infinitely-greater work ends with a resounding "yes," this novel winds down into a dismal "no."

"Ein Dichter altert nicht," reflects Edwin the academic near the book's nadir - "a poet changes nothing." This clearly reflects the bitter experience of the author, who lived a tormented life and considered his literary career a failure. But why should they need to? It is not the fault of art, if it should be so misconstrued by an artist, who demands that it not only offer an end in itself, but also "change things."

"Progress is not a matter of far and near," wrote the Zen master Sekito Kisen, "but if you are confused, mountains and rivers will block your way."

Ultimately the book collapses under the weight of its own nihilism. Characters limply posit values only to be fail to live up to them, or to be failed by them. They explore numerous possibilities for life, which invariably prove to be mere avenues of self-deception and disappointment. Human connection only leads to deeper and more profound forms of isolation.

There is far more to be said about Koeppen's treatment of race in this book than I can set down here, but it is clumsy and extremely destructive to its effect. In this novel, set in 1950s Munich, and boasting more than 30 major characters, there are more Black American soldiers than former Nazis. What's that about? Why do the characters, and why does the omniscient narrator, constantly refer to Blacks solely in terms of their Blackness? "Der Neger, der Neger, der Neger," - "the negro," we read again and again - or worse. Koeppen fetishizes race with the monotonous, repetitive quality of the obsessive or the fanatic.

One one level, Koeppen is clearly writing about racism, and he clearly signals that he is concerned with the problematic ways that Germans construct their idea of Americans based on what they glean from Coke bottles, Life magazine articles, and Karl May novels. But does Koeppen himself not obviously construct his Black characters as broad amalgamations of stereotypes? Does he not render them as noble savages, or as savages, quick to violence, but also quick to laugh, quick to forget, moving through the world with the easy confidence and sensuous innocence of animals before the deluge? It's grotesque, and the author's insistence on shoving it into the reader's face becomes unspeakably tedious.

Washington. Odysseus. These aren't names, they're flags. And what the hell were his references to Uncle Tom's cabin about? They are as incoherent as they are disturbing.

I am reminded strongly of Klaus Mann's more self-aware treatment of the Black dancer Prinzessin Tebap, who becomes a cipher for Hendrik Höfgen's psychological dissonance in Mephisto. Unlike Mann, who plainly recognized that the forbidden character of his cabaret dancer's ethnic identity charged her with a taboo eroticism, Koeppen writes in the thrall of that very obsession, that play of attraction and repulsion that Mann so effectively depicted as being a core dynamic driving Nazi society. He's fallen under the spell of the very phenomenon he's trying to unmask, and for this reader, it comes across as embarrassingly provincial and dated. You cannot naively appropriate Black identity in this way without assuming that your readership will include no actual Black people.

There is some brilliant writing in this book - so brilliant, that were it not suffocated by the author's inability to commit to his own values and bogged down by his feckless handling of race, it would easily be one of the best post-War German novels I've read. It's a real disappointment.]]> 3.14 1951 Tauben im Gras
author: Wolfgang Koeppen
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.14
book published: 1951
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: german, literature
review:
I was quite divided in my appraisal of this book until the ending, which I hated. Koeppen's Tauben im Gras famously echoes and sometimes parodies the structure of Joyce's Ulysses, but where that infinitely-greater work ends with a resounding "yes," this novel winds down into a dismal "no."

"Ein Dichter altert nicht," reflects Edwin the academic near the book's nadir - "a poet changes nothing." This clearly reflects the bitter experience of the author, who lived a tormented life and considered his literary career a failure. But why should they need to? It is not the fault of art, if it should be so misconstrued by an artist, who demands that it not only offer an end in itself, but also "change things."

"Progress is not a matter of far and near," wrote the Zen master Sekito Kisen, "but if you are confused, mountains and rivers will block your way."

Ultimately the book collapses under the weight of its own nihilism. Characters limply posit values only to be fail to live up to them, or to be failed by them. They explore numerous possibilities for life, which invariably prove to be mere avenues of self-deception and disappointment. Human connection only leads to deeper and more profound forms of isolation.

There is far more to be said about Koeppen's treatment of race in this book than I can set down here, but it is clumsy and extremely destructive to its effect. In this novel, set in 1950s Munich, and boasting more than 30 major characters, there are more Black American soldiers than former Nazis. What's that about? Why do the characters, and why does the omniscient narrator, constantly refer to Blacks solely in terms of their Blackness? "Der Neger, der Neger, der Neger," - "the negro," we read again and again - or worse. Koeppen fetishizes race with the monotonous, repetitive quality of the obsessive or the fanatic.

One one level, Koeppen is clearly writing about racism, and he clearly signals that he is concerned with the problematic ways that Germans construct their idea of Americans based on what they glean from Coke bottles, Life magazine articles, and Karl May novels. But does Koeppen himself not obviously construct his Black characters as broad amalgamations of stereotypes? Does he not render them as noble savages, or as savages, quick to violence, but also quick to laugh, quick to forget, moving through the world with the easy confidence and sensuous innocence of animals before the deluge? It's grotesque, and the author's insistence on shoving it into the reader's face becomes unspeakably tedious.

Washington. Odysseus. These aren't names, they're flags. And what the hell were his references to Uncle Tom's cabin about? They are as incoherent as they are disturbing.

I am reminded strongly of Klaus Mann's more self-aware treatment of the Black dancer Prinzessin Tebap, who becomes a cipher for Hendrik Höfgen's psychological dissonance in Mephisto. Unlike Mann, who plainly recognized that the forbidden character of his cabaret dancer's ethnic identity charged her with a taboo eroticism, Koeppen writes in the thrall of that very obsession, that play of attraction and repulsion that Mann so effectively depicted as being a core dynamic driving Nazi society. He's fallen under the spell of the very phenomenon he's trying to unmask, and for this reader, it comes across as embarrassingly provincial and dated. You cannot naively appropriate Black identity in this way without assuming that your readership will include no actual Black people.

There is some brilliant writing in this book - so brilliant, that were it not suffocated by the author's inability to commit to his own values and bogged down by his feckless handling of race, it would easily be one of the best post-War German novels I've read. It's a real disappointment.
]]> Hamlet 18588
Professor Hibbard's illuminating and original introduction explains the process by which variant texts were fused in the eighteenth century to create the most commonly used text of today. Drawing on both critical and theatrical history, he shows how this gusion makes Hamlet seem a much more 'problematic' play than it was when it originally appeared in the First Folio of 1623.]]> 416 William Shakespeare 0192834169 Mesoscope 5 literature, drama, favorites Hamlet when I was seventeen, and in a lifetime of searching for the great works of the world, I can say I have never seen its equal. In my opinion, it towers above the other works of Shakespeare, and it is the best work of literature that I have ever read.

Hamlet the character is the genius of modern thought. By the force of his personality and his inexhaustible charisma, he invites the reader to something approaching complete identification. And once we enter into this play, into this titanic character, we are bounded in a nutshell, but may count ourselves the kings of infinite space, for the horizon of Hamlet's powers of discovery and invention are as inexhaustible as the limits of subjectivity itself.

"Who's there?" The play opens with a question of identity, put forth as a challenge by the watchers, who maintain the integrity of Elsinore's walls. It moves immediately into a controversy of appearances. There is an uncanny apparition walking the night - a phenomenon, if you will - what is its true nature? What is the cause of its appearance?

Enter Hamlet, bearing the name of his father, but in aptitude and temperament, more closely resembling Claudius, his "mighty opposite." Les extrêmes se touchent. Hamlet senior was inclined to solve problems by smiting them upon the ice, while Claudius is a schemer and a keen observer, and in the world of this play, Hamlet's only intellectual equal. Claudius sees through his madness almost immediately: "Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little, was not like madness. There's something in his soul o'er which his melancholy sits on brood...."

The first few acts are almost entirely concerned with lies, deception, and surveillance - everyone is spying on everyone else, trying to lay hold of the play's unanswerable, inaugural question - who's there? What is real?

Shakespeare, of course, is far more inclined to raise profound questions than to answer them.

The classic interpretive questions associated with Hamlet are: why does he delay? And is he truly mad? But I do not see much mystery in either of these questions, if one remains close to the text. He delays because he is Hamlet. If he were a being of lesser capacity, he would have raced to his revenge, like the hero of The Spanish Tragedy. Or like Laertes, who does not delay and ask questions, but acts like the proper protagonist of an Elizabethan revenge drama, and leaps into action to avenge his slain father. And how did that work out?

Shakespeare loves to duplicate action, replicating the high matter of his plays in low and comical parallel subplots. In Hamlet, Laertes is Hamlet's double, only inferior in every way.

As to Hamlet's madness - what does it consist of, exactly? Almost entirely of him telling the truth with exaggerated force, or thinly-disguised. Most readers can sense his madness is closer to the license of the Fool than the lunacy of Poor Tom. In his fits, he heaps contempt upon Polonius, and rages "Get thee to a nunnery" to Ophelia, after being wounded to his very heart by her rejection, and by the way that their love has been co-opted as a blunt tool by his enemies - to which Ophelia, ever the obedient sister, daughter, and subject, never once objects.

"Here's columbine, for forsaken love. Sweets, for the sweet."

In the final act, Hamlet offers an apology for assailing Laertes at Ophelia's funeral:

What I have done
That might your nature, honor, and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness. If ’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged;
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.

Hamlet is the epitome of the divided subjectivity characteristic of post-Cartesian consciousness.
And, as with Descartes, the principle problem of the play is, what is real? And how do we know?

The mediate structure of consciousness along with its principle mechanisms - memory, judgment, and imagination - are raised to the level of explicit awareness by the plot again and again, as disguise, conspiracy, surveillance, plays within the play, madness. And because we have been drawn inside, by the force of the uniquely-compelling character of its protagonist and the fascinating nature of its story, it is as if the mechanisms of our own thought become newly visible, like fish becoming aware of water. As characters in our own story, we become aware of the logos by which we are articulated, and the flesh is made word.]]> 4.12 1601 Hamlet
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1601
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: literature, drama, favorites
review:
The first great Shakespeare critic, Samuel Johnson, said that we only become gradually aware of artistic greatness, when we find, by long comparison, that a work reaches a level of quality and depth that other works cannot equal. I first read Hamlet when I was seventeen, and in a lifetime of searching for the great works of the world, I can say I have never seen its equal. In my opinion, it towers above the other works of Shakespeare, and it is the best work of literature that I have ever read.

Hamlet the character is the genius of modern thought. By the force of his personality and his inexhaustible charisma, he invites the reader to something approaching complete identification. And once we enter into this play, into this titanic character, we are bounded in a nutshell, but may count ourselves the kings of infinite space, for the horizon of Hamlet's powers of discovery and invention are as inexhaustible as the limits of subjectivity itself.

"Who's there?" The play opens with a question of identity, put forth as a challenge by the watchers, who maintain the integrity of Elsinore's walls. It moves immediately into a controversy of appearances. There is an uncanny apparition walking the night - a phenomenon, if you will - what is its true nature? What is the cause of its appearance?

Enter Hamlet, bearing the name of his father, but in aptitude and temperament, more closely resembling Claudius, his "mighty opposite." Les extrêmes se touchent. Hamlet senior was inclined to solve problems by smiting them upon the ice, while Claudius is a schemer and a keen observer, and in the world of this play, Hamlet's only intellectual equal. Claudius sees through his madness almost immediately: "Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little, was not like madness. There's something in his soul o'er which his melancholy sits on brood...."

The first few acts are almost entirely concerned with lies, deception, and surveillance - everyone is spying on everyone else, trying to lay hold of the play's unanswerable, inaugural question - who's there? What is real?

Shakespeare, of course, is far more inclined to raise profound questions than to answer them.

The classic interpretive questions associated with Hamlet are: why does he delay? And is he truly mad? But I do not see much mystery in either of these questions, if one remains close to the text. He delays because he is Hamlet. If he were a being of lesser capacity, he would have raced to his revenge, like the hero of The Spanish Tragedy. Or like Laertes, who does not delay and ask questions, but acts like the proper protagonist of an Elizabethan revenge drama, and leaps into action to avenge his slain father. And how did that work out?

Shakespeare loves to duplicate action, replicating the high matter of his plays in low and comical parallel subplots. In Hamlet, Laertes is Hamlet's double, only inferior in every way.

As to Hamlet's madness - what does it consist of, exactly? Almost entirely of him telling the truth with exaggerated force, or thinly-disguised. Most readers can sense his madness is closer to the license of the Fool than the lunacy of Poor Tom. In his fits, he heaps contempt upon Polonius, and rages "Get thee to a nunnery" to Ophelia, after being wounded to his very heart by her rejection, and by the way that their love has been co-opted as a blunt tool by his enemies - to which Ophelia, ever the obedient sister, daughter, and subject, never once objects.

"Here's columbine, for forsaken love. Sweets, for the sweet."

In the final act, Hamlet offers an apology for assailing Laertes at Ophelia's funeral:

What I have done
That might your nature, honor, and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness. If ’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged;
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.

Hamlet is the epitome of the divided subjectivity characteristic of post-Cartesian consciousness.
And, as with Descartes, the principle problem of the play is, what is real? And how do we know?

The mediate structure of consciousness along with its principle mechanisms - memory, judgment, and imagination - are raised to the level of explicit awareness by the plot again and again, as disguise, conspiracy, surveillance, plays within the play, madness. And because we have been drawn inside, by the force of the uniquely-compelling character of its protagonist and the fascinating nature of its story, it is as if the mechanisms of our own thought become newly visible, like fish becoming aware of water. As characters in our own story, we become aware of the logos by which we are articulated, and the flesh is made word.
]]> <![CDATA[Die Zerstörung unserer Zukunft: Ein Lesebuch]]> 20442031 336 Günther Anders 3257241666 Mesoscope 4 philosophy, politics, german
Take that in a little - the choice to destroy all of human civilization was in the hands of one man in the early 1960s, and he gave it 50/50, whether he himself or his opposite in the Soviet Union would initiate the apocalypse. Why is this not a matter of constant public concern?

There was a time when Anders was a major public intellectual in Germany, belonging to a circle of discussion that included Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, Karl Löwith, and other key figures. After 1945, Günther Anders made it the constant concern of his life, and tried in every way he could to communicate thoughtfully about the threat to the general public by any available means. Though his background was academic philosophy (he was a student of both Husserl and Heidegger, and the cousin of Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt's first spouse), he did not write in a technical manner, because his desire was to sound the alarm and to persuade.

This reader collects excerpts from some of his major writings, especially the first volume of his "Obsolescence of Humanity" (which has been translated into English). It also includes a long interview in which he relates the major events of his life, which is almost constantly fascinating.

I would describe his work as highly variable in quality. He has a number of core insights that are of urgent relevance today, not just applied to the nuclear threat, but to other global crises such as climate change which have a similar scope and genesis. Much of what he writes, I find off the mark, and often skim large bits to get to the good stuff.

His is a name worth knowing, and it is well worth your time to be familiar with his basic ideas. ]]> 3.50 2011 Die Zerstörung unserer Zukunft: Ein Lesebuch
author: Günther Anders
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: philosophy, politics, german
review:
The fact that Günther Anders has largely seemed to vanish from contemporary awareness is perhaps the greatest proof of his core thesis, that we are constitutionally incapable of facing the reality of the threat of total annihilation posed by our nuclear arsenals up to this very day. For discussions about the atomic age and nuclear disarmament may well now strike the reader as relics from the Cold War, as though the threat were not more urgent today than ever before, perhaps with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the president of the United States said that the chances for total destruction of human society by nuclear war were around 50/50.

Take that in a little - the choice to destroy all of human civilization was in the hands of one man in the early 1960s, and he gave it 50/50, whether he himself or his opposite in the Soviet Union would initiate the apocalypse. Why is this not a matter of constant public concern?

There was a time when Anders was a major public intellectual in Germany, belonging to a circle of discussion that included Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, Karl Löwith, and other key figures. After 1945, Günther Anders made it the constant concern of his life, and tried in every way he could to communicate thoughtfully about the threat to the general public by any available means. Though his background was academic philosophy (he was a student of both Husserl and Heidegger, and the cousin of Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt's first spouse), he did not write in a technical manner, because his desire was to sound the alarm and to persuade.

This reader collects excerpts from some of his major writings, especially the first volume of his "Obsolescence of Humanity" (which has been translated into English). It also includes a long interview in which he relates the major events of his life, which is almost constantly fascinating.

I would describe his work as highly variable in quality. He has a number of core insights that are of urgent relevance today, not just applied to the nuclear threat, but to other global crises such as climate change which have a similar scope and genesis. Much of what he writes, I find off the mark, and often skim large bits to get to the good stuff.

His is a name worth knowing, and it is well worth your time to be familiar with his basic ideas.
]]> <![CDATA[Twelfth Night: Or What You Will (The New Cambridge Shakespeare)]]> 42597 186 William Shakespeare 052153514X Mesoscope 4 drama, literature 3.97 1602 Twelfth Night: Or What You Will (The New Cambridge Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1602
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/12
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: drama, literature
review:
As fine and elegant a farce as can be imagined, as far as that goes. Beautiful images of music and the sea attend all of its fair and silly dreams of love's perplexities. It remains as relentlessly free from deeper purpose as any of Shakespeare's comedies. And, like many of the others, it contains very numerous lines of jest and wordplay that are completely opaque to the modern reader, which baffled editors argue over to this day.
]]> Surviving Autocracy 50695164 A bestselling, National Book Award-winning journalist's essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Donald Trump's speech and behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate. Within forty-eight hours of his victory, the essay "Autocracy: Rules for Survival" had gone viral, and Gessen's coverage of his norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy--and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence to Americans. This incisive book provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous trajectory of the past few years. Gessen not only highlights the corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and the cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years have changed us, from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages but also a beacon to recovery--or to enduring, and resisting, an ongoing assault.]]> 288 Masha Gessen 0593188934 Mesoscope 0 history, politics, abandoned
Quibble: Gessen occasionally makes demonstrative use of the generic masculine in describing autocrats, which I found a bit off-putting. Have they never heard of Alice Weidel, Marine Le Len, Giorgia Meloni, Sahra Wagenknecht, or Marjorie Taylor Greene?]]> 4.14 2020 Surviving Autocracy
author: Masha Gessen
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: history, politics, abandoned
review:
Not what I expected, which was an expanded version of Gessen's article "Autocracy: Rules for Survival", for obvious reasons. Instead, it's a fairly light-weight review of the various horrors of the first Trump presidency, all of which were already known to me.

Quibble: Gessen occasionally makes demonstrative use of the generic masculine in describing autocrats, which I found a bit off-putting. Have they never heard of Alice Weidel, Marine Le Len, Giorgia Meloni, Sahra Wagenknecht, or Marjorie Taylor Greene?
]]> <![CDATA[The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History]]> 229567 465 Ibn Khaldun 0691120544 Mesoscope 4
I think the scientific virtues of this book have been somewhat exaggerated, in part because of its enthusiastic reception by systematic historians such as Toynbee who were making their own effort to create or discover a general theory of history. But to my eyes, Ibn Khaldoun's method is more that of a speculative philosopher than a scientist. He infers general patterns on the basis of a small number of examples, and regards the patterns as prior to the actuality.

The scientific approach would be somewhat the other way around, where the empirical example would provoke a hypothesis that would then be tested on further examples. But Ibn Khaldoun moves very quickly to a state of epistemic closure, precisely of the kind I find endemic to the Islamic thought-world of his era, and beyond.

Rather than reading this book as a progressive predecessor to the scientific revolution, I position it as a conservative work that attempts to maintain something of the rational-empirical method of the High Middle Ages in the face of its waning under the burgeoning influence of al-Ghazali. I see this book not as the forecast of the sciences of sociology and economics, but as a late example of the rationalism that had been typical of much of the thought of al-Andalus and the 'Abbasid caliphate.

I think few of his actual statements of fact will be too persuasive for the modern reader, from his position that the sun is neither hot nor cold to his view that blacks are well known to be less intelligent to his view that royalty proceeds from holy authority, and urban settled life proceeds from both. But this is a work of some interest to the intellectual historian. ]]> 4.08 1377 The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History
author: Ibn Khaldun
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1377
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: history, philosophy, islam-sufism
review:
Ibn Khaldoun's Muqaddimah is frequently described as a work of proto-sociology and economics. There is a grain of truth to that, but the similarity lies more in the subject matter than the manner of inquiry.

I think the scientific virtues of this book have been somewhat exaggerated, in part because of its enthusiastic reception by systematic historians such as Toynbee who were making their own effort to create or discover a general theory of history. But to my eyes, Ibn Khaldoun's method is more that of a speculative philosopher than a scientist. He infers general patterns on the basis of a small number of examples, and regards the patterns as prior to the actuality.

The scientific approach would be somewhat the other way around, where the empirical example would provoke a hypothesis that would then be tested on further examples. But Ibn Khaldoun moves very quickly to a state of epistemic closure, precisely of the kind I find endemic to the Islamic thought-world of his era, and beyond.

Rather than reading this book as a progressive predecessor to the scientific revolution, I position it as a conservative work that attempts to maintain something of the rational-empirical method of the High Middle Ages in the face of its waning under the burgeoning influence of al-Ghazali. I see this book not as the forecast of the sciences of sociology and economics, but as a late example of the rationalism that had been typical of much of the thought of al-Andalus and the 'Abbasid caliphate.

I think few of his actual statements of fact will be too persuasive for the modern reader, from his position that the sun is neither hot nor cold to his view that blacks are well known to be less intelligent to his view that royalty proceeds from holy authority, and urban settled life proceeds from both. But this is a work of some interest to the intellectual historian.
]]> Im Osten der Träume 210422387 En 1989, juste avant la chute de l'Union soviétique, une famille even aurait décidé de repartir en forêt, recréer un mode de vie autonome fondé sur la chasse, la pêche et la cueillette. Était-ce une légende ? Comment un petit collectif violenté, spolié, asservi par les colons avant d'être oublié de la grande histoire s'est-il saisi de la crise systémique pour regagner son autonomie ? Comment a-t-il fait pour renouer les fils ténus du dialogue quotidien qui le liait aux animaux et éléments, sans le secours des chamanes éliminés par le processus colonial ? Quelles manières de vivre les Even d'Icha ont-ils réinventées, pour continuer d'exister dans un monde rapidement transformé sous les coups de boutoir de l'extractivisme et du changement climatique ?
Dans ce livre, où les rêves performatifs et les histoires mythiques répondent aux politiques d'assimilation comme au dérèglement des écosystèmes, l'autrice fait dialoguer histoire coloniale et cosmologies autochtones en restituant leurs puissances aux voix multiples qui confèrent au monde sa vitalité.]]> 326 Nastassja Martin 3751820175 Mesoscope 2 anthropology, memoirs
Much of the book is conducted as what you might call a micro-ethnography, a very close account of conversations held with a handful of interlocutors of the Even people of Siberia, and one in particular, Darja, who is the source of about 85% of what we learn of their worldview. Her stories are often exceedingly interesting and affecting, and this is where the book is at it's strongest.

Where it really suffers is when the author struggles to turn the fragmentary and elliptical observations into a general theory. She often seems to argue that we can take what she has gleaned from the beliefs of a couple of people as a framework for accurately reconstructing the cosmology and worldview of the Even people as a whole, which I think badly underestimates the role of individual difference. And, when Martin attempts to contrast the Even cosmology in an illuminating way with what she takes to be the standpoint of the European society she comes from, I found that her representation of the rationalist scientific worldview was essentially a caricature. This came most clearly into focus when she asserts that from the standpoint of the western worldview, one can only respond to climate change in one of two ways: with the belief that we are headed for total annihilation, or convinced that technology will save us.

This doesn't remotely resemble the standpoint of any actual climatologist, as even a brief survey of the relevant literature would make abundantly clear. There is no single statement in an IPCC summary report that is not multiply qualified in scope, probability, and confidence, and to dismiss the sophistication of people coming from this background is, I think, indicative of a kind of casual arrogance here that I find extremely alienating, and rather common in certain sectors of anthropology and sociology, as if, not having read Foucault or Bruno Latour, climatologists are not capable of making complex, dynamic, nuanced judgments of the kind that she or her Even interlocutors make.

There is a deep tension in the book that stems from her conflicting desires to create a general theory and to tell a highly-personal account, and in my opinion, she ends up doing neither in sufficient depth. The personal account mostly works, but it provides a weak foundation for the theory, and at times, it must be said, when Martin writes on the theoretical level, I was turned off. Having a strong background in philosophy, her theoretical musings often seemed amateurish to me, and I would advise her to read less Latour and more Kant or Hegel. Something a little less critical, and with a little more of its own substance.

I also felt a continual confusion in terms of what the book was fundamentally about. In the introduction, Martin tells a lengthy story that seemed to culminate in her deciding to write a comparative work contrasting indigenous perspectives on both sides of the Bering straight based on her field work, comparing the Gwich'in people of Alaska with the Even of Siberia. But she only develops this very slightly and soon drops it entirely, spending most of the book on a variety of unrelated topics. She seemed to not know herself what kind of book she was trying to write.

It seems pretty clear to me that the author is trying to blow the reader's mind, and I think there's a certain amount of hubris in that, at least in the way she went about it, and a certain mildly antagonistic quality toward the reader that I felt throughout. I didn't particularly come away feeling like she had that much respect for her reader, or much expectation that they had been on their own complex and rich journeys of discovery, or had their own complex answers to big questions.]]> 3.75 Im Osten der Träume
author: Nastassja Martin
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: anthropology, memoirs
review:
I really enjoyed aspects of this book, but I found its core argument to be a bit facile, and honestly, deeply wrong in many core respects.

Much of the book is conducted as what you might call a micro-ethnography, a very close account of conversations held with a handful of interlocutors of the Even people of Siberia, and one in particular, Darja, who is the source of about 85% of what we learn of their worldview. Her stories are often exceedingly interesting and affecting, and this is where the book is at it's strongest.

Where it really suffers is when the author struggles to turn the fragmentary and elliptical observations into a general theory. She often seems to argue that we can take what she has gleaned from the beliefs of a couple of people as a framework for accurately reconstructing the cosmology and worldview of the Even people as a whole, which I think badly underestimates the role of individual difference. And, when Martin attempts to contrast the Even cosmology in an illuminating way with what she takes to be the standpoint of the European society she comes from, I found that her representation of the rationalist scientific worldview was essentially a caricature. This came most clearly into focus when she asserts that from the standpoint of the western worldview, one can only respond to climate change in one of two ways: with the belief that we are headed for total annihilation, or convinced that technology will save us.

This doesn't remotely resemble the standpoint of any actual climatologist, as even a brief survey of the relevant literature would make abundantly clear. There is no single statement in an IPCC summary report that is not multiply qualified in scope, probability, and confidence, and to dismiss the sophistication of people coming from this background is, I think, indicative of a kind of casual arrogance here that I find extremely alienating, and rather common in certain sectors of anthropology and sociology, as if, not having read Foucault or Bruno Latour, climatologists are not capable of making complex, dynamic, nuanced judgments of the kind that she or her Even interlocutors make.

There is a deep tension in the book that stems from her conflicting desires to create a general theory and to tell a highly-personal account, and in my opinion, she ends up doing neither in sufficient depth. The personal account mostly works, but it provides a weak foundation for the theory, and at times, it must be said, when Martin writes on the theoretical level, I was turned off. Having a strong background in philosophy, her theoretical musings often seemed amateurish to me, and I would advise her to read less Latour and more Kant or Hegel. Something a little less critical, and with a little more of its own substance.

I also felt a continual confusion in terms of what the book was fundamentally about. In the introduction, Martin tells a lengthy story that seemed to culminate in her deciding to write a comparative work contrasting indigenous perspectives on both sides of the Bering straight based on her field work, comparing the Gwich'in people of Alaska with the Even of Siberia. But she only develops this very slightly and soon drops it entirely, spending most of the book on a variety of unrelated topics. She seemed to not know herself what kind of book she was trying to write.

It seems pretty clear to me that the author is trying to blow the reader's mind, and I think there's a certain amount of hubris in that, at least in the way she went about it, and a certain mildly antagonistic quality toward the reader that I felt throughout. I didn't particularly come away feeling like she had that much respect for her reader, or much expectation that they had been on their own complex and rich journeys of discovery, or had their own complex answers to big questions.
]]> <![CDATA[Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)]]> 62121715
How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.

To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.

Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.]]> 144 Wendy Brown 0674279387 Mesoscope 4 philosophy, politics In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, where she used it to diagnose the apparent wholesale abandonment of basic values such as truth and democracy in the United States.

But the concept of nihilism is a sword with two edges. Brown's neat explanation of how she uses the term in the introduction is plausible on its face:

"Nihilism is manifest today as ubiquitous moral chaos or disingenuousness but also as assertions of power and desire shorn of concern for accountability to truth, justice, consequences, or futurity, not only ethics. Nihilism is revealed in the careless, even festive, breaking of a social compact with others and with succeeding generations that is manifest in quotidian speech and conduct today, especially but not only on the right."

The problem comes when one more carefully subjects the term to scrutiny. Certainly, the word nihilism has meant a great many things to a great many people. In the concept's earliest days in Russia, it carried a positive connotation, for Turgenev and Trotsky, signaling a clearing fire that would burn away the old deadwood of State and Religion, and their baseless insistence on a self-evident legitimacy. We should take this as a warning that its range of meanings is huge, and, as with any term of comparable scope, it can obscure as easily as illuminate.

So we need to get into nihilism and recognize first and foremost that the term is necessarily normative. It refers only to the felt crisis at the loss of values that are important for us. As Nietzsche put it, nihilism is when "our highest values devalue themselves." "Our." "Highest." This leads us directly into a conflict regarding which values matter, which need to be preserved or resuscitated. One can easily imagine the conservative Christian agreeing that we have a nihilistic crisis in the United States, one in which the value of an unborn life is no longer recognized, and in which the sanctity of marriage, the very foundation of society, has been sold for a song in the marketplace of political correctness.

The crisis of nihilism, then, comes down to a point of view, and here things get even more complicated. Do MAGA Republicans spurn the very notion of truth, as Brown claims? Has the concept of shared reality truly broken down to the degree where factual claims are fungible and purely strategic? Or is it simply that the political left and the political right are riven by profound disagreements about what constitutes truth, and about which facts are true? My sense is very much that right-wing voters absolutely believe it "matters" whether or not climate change is a real phenomenon, or whether or not the 2020 election was truly stolen - they simply have a different set of answers.

One can (and should) disagree with these answers and analyze the various forms of misinformation and disinformation that give rise to destructive false beliefs, of course. But what matters here is whether or not we are truly in a kind of post-truth polity in which truth no longer matters to voters, or if politicians are simply doing what politicians have always done: lying. The former entails a nihilistic crisis, the latter does not.

This goes to the heart of the whole argument, because the question at stake is whether or not we are living in a post-truth society that has spun out of a social crisis rooted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century displacement of absolute truth by philosophy and science. But these people we are engaging, these putatively post-truth casualties of postmodernism, are precisely those who reject the authority of philosophy and science to displace the eternal truths promised by religion and tradition. If anyone is having a nihilistic crisis, it should be liberals. Conservative Christians can simply continue to believe that climate change is not possible because God promised Noah that he would never destroy the world again. And if one argues, like Heidegger, that such unshakable faith is itself a symptom of nihilism, and a response to it, then the application of the term has lost any criterion for falsifiability, and that should give us pause.

I don't think Brown has quite got a hold of all these problems in her diagnosis of the political crisis of the present. In this book, she focuses her attention primarily on two short essays by Max Weber, one analyzing the task of politics, and one analyzing the proper orientation of science and the academy. In both cases, there is a dichotomy that she wishes to problematize. In the first case, she argues that Weber's efforts to exorcize appeals to emotion and charismatic persuasion from politics have contributed to a left that is distrustful of charismatic leaders, and that this is both theoretically and strategically problematic. Similarly, in the second essay, Weber argues that science and teaching should focus exclusively on "the facts," and ascetically disregard any infiltration of politics, feeling, or preference for a particular outcome. To the modern reader, such an attempt immediately occurs as anachronistic and astonishingly naive, so it is not difficult for Brown to problematize this notion. What is more difficult is to establish that this problem is deeply tied up in the crisis of nihilism that Weber himself diagnosed, and that Brown sees as a crisis of our present age.

This is a useful and often-persuasive critical engagement with Nietzsche and with Weber, but the notion of nihilism has begun to occur to me as something so gigantic and so laden with immense baggage, that I'm starting to ask if it retains any analytical utility.]]> 3.88 Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)
author: Wendy Brown
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/15
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: philosophy, politics
review:
I was drawn to this book after being very impressed by Brown's deeply-affecting account of nihilism in her earlier work In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, where she used it to diagnose the apparent wholesale abandonment of basic values such as truth and democracy in the United States.

But the concept of nihilism is a sword with two edges. Brown's neat explanation of how she uses the term in the introduction is plausible on its face:

"Nihilism is manifest today as ubiquitous moral chaos or disingenuousness but also as assertions of power and desire shorn of concern for accountability to truth, justice, consequences, or futurity, not only ethics. Nihilism is revealed in the careless, even festive, breaking of a social compact with others and with succeeding generations that is manifest in quotidian speech and conduct today, especially but not only on the right."

The problem comes when one more carefully subjects the term to scrutiny. Certainly, the word nihilism has meant a great many things to a great many people. In the concept's earliest days in Russia, it carried a positive connotation, for Turgenev and Trotsky, signaling a clearing fire that would burn away the old deadwood of State and Religion, and their baseless insistence on a self-evident legitimacy. We should take this as a warning that its range of meanings is huge, and, as with any term of comparable scope, it can obscure as easily as illuminate.

So we need to get into nihilism and recognize first and foremost that the term is necessarily normative. It refers only to the felt crisis at the loss of values that are important for us. As Nietzsche put it, nihilism is when "our highest values devalue themselves." "Our." "Highest." This leads us directly into a conflict regarding which values matter, which need to be preserved or resuscitated. One can easily imagine the conservative Christian agreeing that we have a nihilistic crisis in the United States, one in which the value of an unborn life is no longer recognized, and in which the sanctity of marriage, the very foundation of society, has been sold for a song in the marketplace of political correctness.

The crisis of nihilism, then, comes down to a point of view, and here things get even more complicated. Do MAGA Republicans spurn the very notion of truth, as Brown claims? Has the concept of shared reality truly broken down to the degree where factual claims are fungible and purely strategic? Or is it simply that the political left and the political right are riven by profound disagreements about what constitutes truth, and about which facts are true? My sense is very much that right-wing voters absolutely believe it "matters" whether or not climate change is a real phenomenon, or whether or not the 2020 election was truly stolen - they simply have a different set of answers.

One can (and should) disagree with these answers and analyze the various forms of misinformation and disinformation that give rise to destructive false beliefs, of course. But what matters here is whether or not we are truly in a kind of post-truth polity in which truth no longer matters to voters, or if politicians are simply doing what politicians have always done: lying. The former entails a nihilistic crisis, the latter does not.

This goes to the heart of the whole argument, because the question at stake is whether or not we are living in a post-truth society that has spun out of a social crisis rooted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century displacement of absolute truth by philosophy and science. But these people we are engaging, these putatively post-truth casualties of postmodernism, are precisely those who reject the authority of philosophy and science to displace the eternal truths promised by religion and tradition. If anyone is having a nihilistic crisis, it should be liberals. Conservative Christians can simply continue to believe that climate change is not possible because God promised Noah that he would never destroy the world again. And if one argues, like Heidegger, that such unshakable faith is itself a symptom of nihilism, and a response to it, then the application of the term has lost any criterion for falsifiability, and that should give us pause.

I don't think Brown has quite got a hold of all these problems in her diagnosis of the political crisis of the present. In this book, she focuses her attention primarily on two short essays by Max Weber, one analyzing the task of politics, and one analyzing the proper orientation of science and the academy. In both cases, there is a dichotomy that she wishes to problematize. In the first case, she argues that Weber's efforts to exorcize appeals to emotion and charismatic persuasion from politics have contributed to a left that is distrustful of charismatic leaders, and that this is both theoretically and strategically problematic. Similarly, in the second essay, Weber argues that science and teaching should focus exclusively on "the facts," and ascetically disregard any infiltration of politics, feeling, or preference for a particular outcome. To the modern reader, such an attempt immediately occurs as anachronistic and astonishingly naive, so it is not difficult for Brown to problematize this notion. What is more difficult is to establish that this problem is deeply tied up in the crisis of nihilism that Weber himself diagnosed, and that Brown sees as a crisis of our present age.

This is a useful and often-persuasive critical engagement with Nietzsche and with Weber, but the notion of nihilism has begun to occur to me as something so gigantic and so laden with immense baggage, that I'm starting to ask if it retains any analytical utility.
]]> Ausnahmezustand. 1279183 128 Giorgio Agamben 3518123661 Mesoscope 3 philosophy, politics, german Political Theology. Schmitt's theory is not particularly easy to understand, and Agamben in an erudite and perceptive interpreter. He does an outstanding job of clarifying Schmitt's theory and in teasing out the core arguments that are at stake, such as Schmitt's pervasive concern with ontological realism.

Agamben subtly links Schmitt's quest for an actually-existing basis for law and the state to Heidegger's nostalgia for being through the judicious use of a quote from Plato's Sophist-one which also features prominently in the introduction to Being and Time-which refers to a "war between giants over being." In this case, the giants are Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, and one of the most interesting sections of Agamben's book is his detailed analysis of the implicit debate those two authors carried out in their works, particularly in Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and Trauerspiele dissertation.

In the final section, Agamben links the general problem of the state of emergency to the concept of auctoritas, or personal authority, in Roman law, and ends up with an argument that law is necessarily bound to a state of lawlessness, that they exist in constant dialectical tension that is instantiated by the state of emergency, where auctoritas refers to claims to power that have no basis in law.

In what is by far the worst part of the book, Agamben links this theory to the larger argument he makes in his Homo Sacer series, of which this book is a part: that the state of emergency makes possible the creation of extra-legal categories of action and status determination, categories that allow for arbitrary treatment and action. For Agamben, this category is exemplified by the "enemy combatants" status of the US War on Terror.

For some reason, Agamben sees that kind of breakdown in the margins of legal status as definitive of the course charted by Europe and the United States since the Second World War, and argues that the underlying dialectical tensions constitute the “working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war.�

Although I share deep concern about the indefinite and lawless detention of persons in Guantanamo Bay, I hardly see this as indicative of a core strategy by western governments to inaugurate indefinite states of emergency to facilitate the rise of a new fascist empire. It's deeply disappointing, after dozens of pages of brilliant and careful analysis, to see Agamben fall into a bizarre and paranoid thesis that strikes me as genuinely suggestive of mental illness. And the worst readings of this argument have only been substantiated in recent years, in which Agamben has baselessly testified before the Italian parliament that emergency measures to fight the spread of Covid 19 were unwarranted, and were in fact motivated by a sinister plot to coerce the masses into voluntarily surrendering their rights. His conspiracy-mongering included accusations that the severity of the illness was systematically exaggerated by a medical establishment that he describes as part and parcel of a global reactionary attempt by technocrats to rob people of their basic rights.

Four years later, the sinister global cabal he prophesied has failed to materialize, but Agamben has not retracted his dangerous, destructive claims. Instead, he has lent his authority to political extremists, with whom he clearly shares a tendency to paranoid fantasy.

In summary, the analysis and exegesis that comprises the vast majority of this book is extremely illuminating, but his ultimate argument is batshit crazy.]]> 4.11 2003 Ausnahmezustand.
author: Giorgio Agamben
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: philosophy, politics, german
review:
For most of its short length, Agamben's monograph on the "state of exception" or "state of emergency" consists of a brilliant, penetrating, and extremely useful analysis of Carl Schmitt's theory of the state of emergency included in the latter's Political Theology. Schmitt's theory is not particularly easy to understand, and Agamben in an erudite and perceptive interpreter. He does an outstanding job of clarifying Schmitt's theory and in teasing out the core arguments that are at stake, such as Schmitt's pervasive concern with ontological realism.

Agamben subtly links Schmitt's quest for an actually-existing basis for law and the state to Heidegger's nostalgia for being through the judicious use of a quote from Plato's Sophist-one which also features prominently in the introduction to Being and Time-which refers to a "war between giants over being." In this case, the giants are Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, and one of the most interesting sections of Agamben's book is his detailed analysis of the implicit debate those two authors carried out in their works, particularly in Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and Trauerspiele dissertation.

In the final section, Agamben links the general problem of the state of emergency to the concept of auctoritas, or personal authority, in Roman law, and ends up with an argument that law is necessarily bound to a state of lawlessness, that they exist in constant dialectical tension that is instantiated by the state of emergency, where auctoritas refers to claims to power that have no basis in law.

In what is by far the worst part of the book, Agamben links this theory to the larger argument he makes in his Homo Sacer series, of which this book is a part: that the state of emergency makes possible the creation of extra-legal categories of action and status determination, categories that allow for arbitrary treatment and action. For Agamben, this category is exemplified by the "enemy combatants" status of the US War on Terror.

For some reason, Agamben sees that kind of breakdown in the margins of legal status as definitive of the course charted by Europe and the United States since the Second World War, and argues that the underlying dialectical tensions constitute the “working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war.�

Although I share deep concern about the indefinite and lawless detention of persons in Guantanamo Bay, I hardly see this as indicative of a core strategy by western governments to inaugurate indefinite states of emergency to facilitate the rise of a new fascist empire. It's deeply disappointing, after dozens of pages of brilliant and careful analysis, to see Agamben fall into a bizarre and paranoid thesis that strikes me as genuinely suggestive of mental illness. And the worst readings of this argument have only been substantiated in recent years, in which Agamben has baselessly testified before the Italian parliament that emergency measures to fight the spread of Covid 19 were unwarranted, and were in fact motivated by a sinister plot to coerce the masses into voluntarily surrendering their rights. His conspiracy-mongering included accusations that the severity of the illness was systematically exaggerated by a medical establishment that he describes as part and parcel of a global reactionary attempt by technocrats to rob people of their basic rights.

Four years later, the sinister global cabal he prophesied has failed to materialize, but Agamben has not retracted his dangerous, destructive claims. Instead, he has lent his authority to political extremists, with whom he clearly shares a tendency to paranoid fantasy.

In summary, the analysis and exegesis that comprises the vast majority of this book is extremely illuminating, but his ultimate argument is batshit crazy.
]]> <![CDATA[William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford Paperbacks)]]> 117260 William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life received high acclaim from critics and scholars. The New York Review of Books called it "a masterpiece," and the Guardian labeled it "our best life of Shakespeare."

Making the resources of the world's greatest Shakespeare collections more accessible to all readers, this updated "Compact Life" contains a refined and amplified version of the original text and fifty of the original documents reproduced in smaller format. Schoenbaum has incorporated new material into his narrative, including an eyewitness account, in harrowing detail, of a murder believed to have occurred in New Place, the house that Shakespeare bought in Stratford in 1597. He also provides a new postscript which includes newly-compiled information from recent research on Shakespeare.]]> 384 Samuel Schoenbaum 0195051610 Mesoscope 5 biography, literature Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, which will likely remain the canonical reference of its kind in my lifetime. This edition is intended for the lay reader, and for this non-specialist, at least, it certainly appears complete enough.

It is hard for me to imagine a better starting place for any reader seeking to know more about the genius behind the poetry and drama. Schoenbaum has masterfully assembled what little we know, and leveraged the documentary evidence to build up a surprisingly robust portrait of his subject. I very much appreciated the care he took to stick close to the evidence, and, when traditional stories are reproduced, to trace their genealogy and objectively evaluate their likely accuracy.

Readers looking for a more imaginative treatment will need to look elsewhere, but I would encourage them to start with Schoenbaum first, so they can be well grounded in the concrete data before moving on to speculation and conjecture. ]]> 4.35 1977 William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford Paperbacks)
author: Samuel Schoenbaum
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: biography, literature
review:
This classic Shakespeare biography is a shortened version of the author's monumental Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, which will likely remain the canonical reference of its kind in my lifetime. This edition is intended for the lay reader, and for this non-specialist, at least, it certainly appears complete enough.

It is hard for me to imagine a better starting place for any reader seeking to know more about the genius behind the poetry and drama. Schoenbaum has masterfully assembled what little we know, and leveraged the documentary evidence to build up a surprisingly robust portrait of his subject. I very much appreciated the care he took to stick close to the evidence, and, when traditional stories are reproduced, to trace their genealogy and objectively evaluate their likely accuracy.

Readers looking for a more imaginative treatment will need to look elsewhere, but I would encourage them to start with Schoenbaum first, so they can be well grounded in the concrete data before moving on to speculation and conjecture.
]]> <![CDATA[The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath]]> 722667 Beyond the Wall of Sleep. Begun probably in the autumn of 1926, it was completed on January 22, 1927 and was unpublished in his lifetime. It is both the longest of the stories that make up his Dream Cycle and the longest Lovecraft work to feature protagonist Randolph Carter. Along with his 1927 novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, it can be considered one of the significant achievements of that period of Lovecraft's writing. The Dream-Quest combines elements of horror and fantasy into an epic tale that illustrates the scope and wonder of humankind's ability to dream.

The dream-quest of unknown Kadath --
Celephais --
The silver key --
Through the gates of the silver key --
The white ship --
The strange high house in the mist]]> 144 H.P. Lovecraft 0345337794 Mesoscope 5 fiction, favorites 3.96 1943 The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1943
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: fiction, favorites
review:

]]> The Prelude 8260447 738 William Wordsworth Mesoscope 4 poetry A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells....."

This Wordsworth promises, but does not deliver, for The Recluse, to which The Prelude was intended to serve as a "portico," or introduction, was never completed. There are those who find in The Prelude its own sufficiency, but to me, it is above all the account of his growth in wisdom, a portrait of the poet as a young man, until he arrived at this perennial insight, which was to serve as the vantage point for his great work. But he then fell silent, and fifty more years of life were not enough for him to work out what he had to say.

So we are left to imagine, and perhaps to find hints of it in this his greatest work, but in my reading, the traces are scant. Far more what we get is the youthful vision, only transcended at the end, of nature as a kind of pastoral setting where the soul can find repose from the weariness and sorrow of life. It is a song of youthful joy, which resonates profoundly for many, but not for me, because I do not see joy in youth or nature; rather, not joy alone, but joy bound to sorrow, and life bound to death.

Does Wordsworth see this? I think not - at least I do not feel it, in his atavastic and nostalgic characterizations of the Lake District, with its bucolic fields and gentle hills. It is a land of lambs without lions, of butterflies without wasps, without droughts, hunger, or the burning drive to reproduce.

This vision does not resonate with me, and I think, as I have thought so many times, of Goethe's remark to Eckermann, that the seed of all art must be truth. In Wordsworth, as in so many of the Romantics, I see not truth, but fancy.

I will add that his poetics leave me somewhat cold. His model is Milton, but I am of the party of Dante, and agree with Eliot that there is little more in the 14 books of Paradise Lost than was said in the few hundred words of Genesis that it recapitulates. Pound claimed poetry is "language charged with meaning," but Wordsworth will not settle for a dozen words when two hundred and ninety will do. This long, very long, and often repetitive work rarely takes flight, though it does at times.

Its stated purpose is to sanctify this very life as the field of holy mystery, but in truth I found his work preparatory to the goal.]]> 3.78 1850 The Prelude
author: William Wordsworth
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1850
rating: 4
read at: 2020/08/09
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: poetry
review:
"Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells....."

This Wordsworth promises, but does not deliver, for The Recluse, to which The Prelude was intended to serve as a "portico," or introduction, was never completed. There are those who find in The Prelude its own sufficiency, but to me, it is above all the account of his growth in wisdom, a portrait of the poet as a young man, until he arrived at this perennial insight, which was to serve as the vantage point for his great work. But he then fell silent, and fifty more years of life were not enough for him to work out what he had to say.

So we are left to imagine, and perhaps to find hints of it in this his greatest work, but in my reading, the traces are scant. Far more what we get is the youthful vision, only transcended at the end, of nature as a kind of pastoral setting where the soul can find repose from the weariness and sorrow of life. It is a song of youthful joy, which resonates profoundly for many, but not for me, because I do not see joy in youth or nature; rather, not joy alone, but joy bound to sorrow, and life bound to death.

Does Wordsworth see this? I think not - at least I do not feel it, in his atavastic and nostalgic characterizations of the Lake District, with its bucolic fields and gentle hills. It is a land of lambs without lions, of butterflies without wasps, without droughts, hunger, or the burning drive to reproduce.

This vision does not resonate with me, and I think, as I have thought so many times, of Goethe's remark to Eckermann, that the seed of all art must be truth. In Wordsworth, as in so many of the Romantics, I see not truth, but fancy.

I will add that his poetics leave me somewhat cold. His model is Milton, but I am of the party of Dante, and agree with Eliot that there is little more in the 14 books of Paradise Lost than was said in the few hundred words of Genesis that it recapitulates. Pound claimed poetry is "language charged with meaning," but Wordsworth will not settle for a dozen words when two hundred and ninety will do. This long, very long, and often repetitive work rarely takes flight, though it does at times.

Its stated purpose is to sanctify this very life as the field of holy mystery, but in truth I found his work preparatory to the goal.
]]> <![CDATA[For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet]]> 934410 184 Rebecca Rischin 0801472970 Mesoscope 3 music
Even at 120 pages, the book felt a bit stuffed to me, and could perhaps have benefitted from tighter editing - very similar statements sometimes appear, separated by a page or two. And at times, the author strikes me as a bit pretentious, as when she portentously explains that the book has eight chapters, in a mirror of the composer's mystically-inspired organizational scheme for his quartet. I mean, this dissertation is hardly a work on the same plane, and it strikes me as bad taste to imply some kind of comparison.

Despite certain issues of this kind, the core of the book is useful, and it does highly problematize the received story of this work's composition. It is true that the work was eked out in miserable conditions, but it is also true that the musicians involved were protected and showered with special privileges, while their campmates could be hung for stealing a few potatoes from the mess.

This makes it a bit harder to regard the work as the kind of testimony to the persistence of the human soul in a naive sense - what the reader will make of this added complexity will no doubt vary.]]> 4.04 2003 For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet
author: Rebecca Rischin
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/27
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: music
review:
This book's primary purpose is to serve as the definitive resource for the documentary history of the composition and first performance of Messiaen's great quartet, as the author leaves no doubt in her somewhat self-aggrandizing introductory comments. To that end, it serves its purpose, chronicling what is known about its notorious composition and world-premiere in Stalag 8a near Görlitz. Perhaps a third of this book is concerned with the work itself and its performance, and a great deal of it is devoted to biographical information concerning not just Messiaen, but the other three musicians who performed it for the first time. For the non-specialist, this might seem a surprising choice, and I confess my interest in the life and times of Henri Akoka, Etienne Pasquier, and Jean Le Boulaire is minimal.

Even at 120 pages, the book felt a bit stuffed to me, and could perhaps have benefitted from tighter editing - very similar statements sometimes appear, separated by a page or two. And at times, the author strikes me as a bit pretentious, as when she portentously explains that the book has eight chapters, in a mirror of the composer's mystically-inspired organizational scheme for his quartet. I mean, this dissertation is hardly a work on the same plane, and it strikes me as bad taste to imply some kind of comparison.

Despite certain issues of this kind, the core of the book is useful, and it does highly problematize the received story of this work's composition. It is true that the work was eked out in miserable conditions, but it is also true that the musicians involved were protected and showered with special privileges, while their campmates could be hung for stealing a few potatoes from the mess.

This makes it a bit harder to regard the work as the kind of testimony to the persistence of the human soul in a naive sense - what the reader will make of this added complexity will no doubt vary.
]]> <![CDATA[The Tempest (The Pelican Shakespeare)]]> 75045943
The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

]]> 84 William Shakespeare Mesoscope 4 drama, literature The Tempest is a towering poetical achievement, but the structure of its symbology contradicts the requirements of the story, and as a result, the play succeeds as poetry, but is dramatically ineffectual.

Prospero is the former duke of Milan, whose rule has been usurped by his brother, Antonio, who stranded him at sea with his young daughter, Miranda. By the power of his magic, Prospero became the master of the unnamed island where they made their home, primarily, by controlling the spirits of the air and of the earth, whom we particularly meet as the benevolent servant Ariel, and the misshapen witch's son and "mooncalf" Caliban. As the play begins, a ship carrying his brother and various other Italian lords is ensnared in a magical storm of Prospero's creation, and once he has them on the island, they are totally under his control. There, he moves them about like pieces on a board, with the goal of setting things to right.

Although his heart urges him to vengeance, Prospero only lightly torments his captive audience with tricks that are more perplexing than awful, such as an enchanted feast that vanishes when they sit down to enjoy it. Not exactly the fires of Purgatory.

Toward the end, Prospero declares that he will choose the high road of reconciliation over vengeance, that he will compel only penance from Antonio and his accomplices. But the attentive reader will notice that no penance is actually forthcoming; on the contrary, during the few hours they stay on the island, Antonio plans a new and worse crime against his friends.

Prospero puts an end to the scheming, but there is no real confrontation or catharsis, just as there is no conflict, because Prospero is nigh-omnipotent. The conflict ends, but without any concordant dramatic or psychological transformation, because he chooses to drop the matter instead of taking vengeance.

Now, of course, his daughter Miranda has met Antonio's son Ferdinand, and the two have fallen into an immortal love in about twenty minutes' time, and this new union becomes the key device of Shakespeare's conception. Upon learning of their love, Antonio moves to ask forgiveness from Miranda for the harms he has inflicted, when Prospero says "There, sir, stop: / Let us not burden our remembrances / With a heaviness that's gone." In this we can discover Shakespeare's deep purpose. The play illustrates the way that generational conflicts are, in fact, generally resolved. The old conflicts and grievances are not answered, but with the passage of generations, new circumstances arise in which the old conflicts lose their grip. Old grudges become irrelevant, unless they are actively affirmed and renewed by successive generations.

Prospero recognizes and honors this reality, and does not seek atonement or reconciliation, but simply negates the conflict, and bestows the custody of care to the generation that is to come.

One would have to be blind to read this play without recognizing that Prospero is, to some degree, Shakespeare himself, who, like Prospero, completed this work, and then "drowned his book," returning to Stratford-upon-Avon for retirement, where for him, like Prospero, "every third thought shall be my grave." Shakespeare, too, sets aside his godlike omnipotence as master of the stage, surrendering his powers and bequeathing care to those who would come after.

These, then, are the two principle poetical concerns of the work, and they reach to the very heights of English poetry. However, the conflict of the play is negated rather than reconciled or resolved, which largely breaks the dramatic engine. And it must be said that the experience of reading or watching this play has always left me deeply dissatisfied. When I think back on it, I think of its great symbolic moments, conveyed through a handful of lines, and forget most of the story, in which nothing much occurs.

When I compare Prospero and Antonio to, say, Joseph and his brothers, or, better, to Jacob and Esau, it is simply obvious that the plot has ceded too much to Shakespeare's vision of putting conflicts to bed. How can there be forgiveness without any real sense of atonement or repentance? Antonio and Prospero claim it at the end, but we don't feel it, because Shakespeare has not shown it. The story has not done the necessary work.

Similarly, Prospero makes something of a transformation from the lordly autocrat of the first act to the voice of mercy in the last act, and it is just as unexplained, and as inexplicable. It's hard to be fully on board with Prospero as a character, given the tyrannical tendencies he clearly demonstrates early on. Is this a form of self-awareness on the part of the author? It is tempting to speculate in the affirmative, but of course, we may never know.

It should be noted that the play lends itself readily to an esoteric or depth psychology interpretation, in which the island is the Self and Prospero is something of a highly-individuated ego, who exerts control over the higher and lower faculties of his spirit, personified as Ariel and Caliban, to effect a mystical marriage of reconciliation of that most ancient of archetypes of dyadic opposition - warring brothers. On that level, it could be read as something like The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.

It also must be said that most modern readers will detect and feel discomfort at the colonialist tropes embodied by this work. It is unavoidable, to see in Caliban only a slightly-exaggerated form of the terrible European stereotype subhuman and immortal savages in the world abroad; beings whose right and natural state was to be ruled by the more refined Europeans. It's every bit as obvious as the antisemitic tropes that went into the character of Shylock, and it needs to be confronted and analyzed.

So the play is not perfect, and nothing much happens, and key aspects of the plot are inexplicable and unconvincing. Nevertheless, I could not do without the play for its (mostly) enlightened high argument, and for Francisco's great statement, which I would raise as the epitaph and worthy testament to the legacy of the greatest poet in the English language:

"Though the seas threaten, they are merciful; I have curs'd them without cause."]]> 3.28 1611 The Tempest (The Pelican Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1611
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: drama, literature
review:
The Tempest is a towering poetical achievement, but the structure of its symbology contradicts the requirements of the story, and as a result, the play succeeds as poetry, but is dramatically ineffectual.

Prospero is the former duke of Milan, whose rule has been usurped by his brother, Antonio, who stranded him at sea with his young daughter, Miranda. By the power of his magic, Prospero became the master of the unnamed island where they made their home, primarily, by controlling the spirits of the air and of the earth, whom we particularly meet as the benevolent servant Ariel, and the misshapen witch's son and "mooncalf" Caliban. As the play begins, a ship carrying his brother and various other Italian lords is ensnared in a magical storm of Prospero's creation, and once he has them on the island, they are totally under his control. There, he moves them about like pieces on a board, with the goal of setting things to right.

Although his heart urges him to vengeance, Prospero only lightly torments his captive audience with tricks that are more perplexing than awful, such as an enchanted feast that vanishes when they sit down to enjoy it. Not exactly the fires of Purgatory.

Toward the end, Prospero declares that he will choose the high road of reconciliation over vengeance, that he will compel only penance from Antonio and his accomplices. But the attentive reader will notice that no penance is actually forthcoming; on the contrary, during the few hours they stay on the island, Antonio plans a new and worse crime against his friends.

Prospero puts an end to the scheming, but there is no real confrontation or catharsis, just as there is no conflict, because Prospero is nigh-omnipotent. The conflict ends, but without any concordant dramatic or psychological transformation, because he chooses to drop the matter instead of taking vengeance.

Now, of course, his daughter Miranda has met Antonio's son Ferdinand, and the two have fallen into an immortal love in about twenty minutes' time, and this new union becomes the key device of Shakespeare's conception. Upon learning of their love, Antonio moves to ask forgiveness from Miranda for the harms he has inflicted, when Prospero says "There, sir, stop: / Let us not burden our remembrances / With a heaviness that's gone." In this we can discover Shakespeare's deep purpose. The play illustrates the way that generational conflicts are, in fact, generally resolved. The old conflicts and grievances are not answered, but with the passage of generations, new circumstances arise in which the old conflicts lose their grip. Old grudges become irrelevant, unless they are actively affirmed and renewed by successive generations.

Prospero recognizes and honors this reality, and does not seek atonement or reconciliation, but simply negates the conflict, and bestows the custody of care to the generation that is to come.

One would have to be blind to read this play without recognizing that Prospero is, to some degree, Shakespeare himself, who, like Prospero, completed this work, and then "drowned his book," returning to Stratford-upon-Avon for retirement, where for him, like Prospero, "every third thought shall be my grave." Shakespeare, too, sets aside his godlike omnipotence as master of the stage, surrendering his powers and bequeathing care to those who would come after.

These, then, are the two principle poetical concerns of the work, and they reach to the very heights of English poetry. However, the conflict of the play is negated rather than reconciled or resolved, which largely breaks the dramatic engine. And it must be said that the experience of reading or watching this play has always left me deeply dissatisfied. When I think back on it, I think of its great symbolic moments, conveyed through a handful of lines, and forget most of the story, in which nothing much occurs.

When I compare Prospero and Antonio to, say, Joseph and his brothers, or, better, to Jacob and Esau, it is simply obvious that the plot has ceded too much to Shakespeare's vision of putting conflicts to bed. How can there be forgiveness without any real sense of atonement or repentance? Antonio and Prospero claim it at the end, but we don't feel it, because Shakespeare has not shown it. The story has not done the necessary work.

Similarly, Prospero makes something of a transformation from the lordly autocrat of the first act to the voice of mercy in the last act, and it is just as unexplained, and as inexplicable. It's hard to be fully on board with Prospero as a character, given the tyrannical tendencies he clearly demonstrates early on. Is this a form of self-awareness on the part of the author? It is tempting to speculate in the affirmative, but of course, we may never know.

It should be noted that the play lends itself readily to an esoteric or depth psychology interpretation, in which the island is the Self and Prospero is something of a highly-individuated ego, who exerts control over the higher and lower faculties of his spirit, personified as Ariel and Caliban, to effect a mystical marriage of reconciliation of that most ancient of archetypes of dyadic opposition - warring brothers. On that level, it could be read as something like The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.

It also must be said that most modern readers will detect and feel discomfort at the colonialist tropes embodied by this work. It is unavoidable, to see in Caliban only a slightly-exaggerated form of the terrible European stereotype subhuman and immortal savages in the world abroad; beings whose right and natural state was to be ruled by the more refined Europeans. It's every bit as obvious as the antisemitic tropes that went into the character of Shylock, and it needs to be confronted and analyzed.

So the play is not perfect, and nothing much happens, and key aspects of the plot are inexplicable and unconvincing. Nevertheless, I could not do without the play for its (mostly) enlightened high argument, and for Francisco's great statement, which I would raise as the epitaph and worthy testament to the legacy of the greatest poet in the English language:

"Though the seas threaten, they are merciful; I have curs'd them without cause."
]]> The Merchant of Venice 24128 249 William Shakespeare 0743477561 Mesoscope 4 literature, drama
In a masterful analysis of The Merchant of Venice in his highly-uneven study of Shakespeare, Harold Bloom asserts that Shylock is the first great personality Shakespeare invents, and the only one to appear before Falstaff enters the stage. This fact creates many deep problems, not only for audiences, but for the play, which has relegated Shylock to a stock role, diabolical to an absurdly comic degree, beyond measure or reason. But his personality speaks with such force out of that role that he constantly undermines his prescribed office. In a sense, one could say that the character is as discriminatory as Shakespeare could manage to be, for the antisemite sees only the category, not the human, while Shakespeare the dramatist can only render human beings.

The problem of Shylock presents itself so forcefully that the modern reader might not even notice that the core conception of the drama is about something much larger. As suggested by the play's name, it is really about currency and exchange, used as a universal medium and metaphor for understanding and interpreting all forms of human interaction.

The problem of Shylock, his fanatical insistence on collecting his pound of flesh, is only one of the ways this set of images functions. It finds its symbolic twin in the wager offered to suitors seeking the hand of the beautiful and wealthy heiress, Portia - they must open one of three casks, each of which contains a different fate for the suitor. It is a speculative endeavor par excellance, and an exacting one, for each suitor must vow before their attempt that they will never seek another hand.

There is a folk or fairy tale quality to this scenario that almost conceals the merciless quality of the transaction, which is as totalizing and inflexible in its demands as the bond demanded by Shylock. Yet many critics have somehow regarded Portia as an emblem of Christian mercy, compared to the Pharisee-like legalism of Shylock.

Read the play with this in mind, and you will find countless images and metaphors that understand friendship, love, loss, honor, duty, responsibility, and charity in basically economic terms, much as much of the early theological analyses of Christian redemption used explicitly economic language in describing how it was that Jesus could "repay the debt of sin owed by humanity." The logic of this play is transactional, and the inexorable force that governs events is that of balancing the books.

The problem of Shylock is one that we cannot get away from, nor should we try, but rather, we can draw insight from the degree to which Shakespeare's character failed to be confined by the part he was set to play.]]> 3.77 1596 The Merchant of Venice
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1596
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: literature, drama
review:
Ultimately, for modern audiences, this play is and must be about Shylock, not only because the character is bound up with brazenly-antisemitic tropes that command our attention, but because he forcefully emerges as the most interesting and complex character of the play in spite of this reduction.

In a masterful analysis of The Merchant of Venice in his highly-uneven study of Shakespeare, Harold Bloom asserts that Shylock is the first great personality Shakespeare invents, and the only one to appear before Falstaff enters the stage. This fact creates many deep problems, not only for audiences, but for the play, which has relegated Shylock to a stock role, diabolical to an absurdly comic degree, beyond measure or reason. But his personality speaks with such force out of that role that he constantly undermines his prescribed office. In a sense, one could say that the character is as discriminatory as Shakespeare could manage to be, for the antisemite sees only the category, not the human, while Shakespeare the dramatist can only render human beings.

The problem of Shylock presents itself so forcefully that the modern reader might not even notice that the core conception of the drama is about something much larger. As suggested by the play's name, it is really about currency and exchange, used as a universal medium and metaphor for understanding and interpreting all forms of human interaction.

The problem of Shylock, his fanatical insistence on collecting his pound of flesh, is only one of the ways this set of images functions. It finds its symbolic twin in the wager offered to suitors seeking the hand of the beautiful and wealthy heiress, Portia - they must open one of three casks, each of which contains a different fate for the suitor. It is a speculative endeavor par excellance, and an exacting one, for each suitor must vow before their attempt that they will never seek another hand.

There is a folk or fairy tale quality to this scenario that almost conceals the merciless quality of the transaction, which is as totalizing and inflexible in its demands as the bond demanded by Shylock. Yet many critics have somehow regarded Portia as an emblem of Christian mercy, compared to the Pharisee-like legalism of Shylock.

Read the play with this in mind, and you will find countless images and metaphors that understand friendship, love, loss, honor, duty, responsibility, and charity in basically economic terms, much as much of the early theological analyses of Christian redemption used explicitly economic language in describing how it was that Jesus could "repay the debt of sin owed by humanity." The logic of this play is transactional, and the inexorable force that governs events is that of balancing the books.

The problem of Shylock is one that we cannot get away from, nor should we try, but rather, we can draw insight from the degree to which Shakespeare's character failed to be confined by the part he was set to play.
]]> Love's Labor's Lost 35792342 The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 159 William Shakespeare 0525503935 Mesoscope 5 drama, literature Love's Labour's Lost, I'm in something of a state of ecstasy, so overpowering is this play in its absurdly abundant ideas and energies. Of Shakespeare's comedies, this is among the very best.

For most of its length, it appears to be a somewhat typical pastoral comedy moving toward its inevitable end, but again and again, the play turns itself inside out, and one has to start again. As the Pelican introduction admirably put it, the play is fundamentally concerned with the inability of language to fix or control meaning. In this play, as in reality, life always evades our efforts to fix it in terms of view or policy, and as Derrida would argue centuries later, this pertains to the play of language, by which he meant that meaning itself is only possible because of this evasion.

It is right to evoke Derrida, as this play is absolutely a fully-realized precursor to postmodernism; there is in fact not a single key concept or idea in postmodernism that is not reflected by it. Berowne, we are repeatedly reminded, ultimately sees his own reflection in the "pitch-black eyes" of Rosaline, his paramour, who completely evades his every attempt to form a stable relationship to her. This forms a kind of sadomasochistic dynamic that will remind many readers of the Dark Lady sonnets, and inevitably suggest certain questions regarding the possible biographical basis for the anguish felt by all of the male characters in this play, that their wit and verbal powers are insufficient to master and control the objects of their affection.

The main action is simple enough - four nobles of Navarre vow to abstain from food, drink, and women for a term of three years to pursue their studies, just in time for four beautiful young ladies to arrive from the court of France to arrive, as if on cue.

As if on cue - the fact that they so immediately fall in love with the first four women they see after taking this vow suggests to the reader that, having taken this vow, they might have responded the same way to any four women. And indeed, in the sprawling final scene of the play, when the women wear masks, they demonstrate conclusively that the men who profess their eternal love cannot even confidently tell which is which. One thinks of the postmodern concept of the endless circulation and fungibility of signifiers.

Upon their arrival, the oath-bound men will not let the ladies into the court, and set up tents on the field to receive them. Here, the action moves into the pastoral proper - nearly all of Shakespeare's comedies involve alternative societies set up outside the wall of the city, where the action occurs. By the time the men have changed their tune and invite the women to enter, they will not go in, having once been refused.

When they would enter, they cannot, but when they are invited, they will not. There are echoes here of Kafka's great parable "Before the Law" which are not coincidental.

The men seek to master their objects of desire in the battlefield of language, but language proves to elusive a tool, and the women are too canny to simply be subdued. Of course, on one level, "being subdued" means "conforming to the conventions of the genre," which, we might expect, despite the play's name, will move inexorably toward consummation. But the play itself has broken down by the end, with Berowne explicitly noting in his final words on stage that its subject cannot be contained within a play.

The sheer density of this play is overpowering - not just in ideas, but the dialog is famed as overflowing with complex wordplay. It must be acknowledged that a great deal of this will be lost on the modern reader, unless you happen, for example, to know off the top of your head that a pricket is a first-year buck deer, and a sorrel is a deer of two years. The reader of the footnotes may come away impressed by how many slang terms the Elizabethans used for the word "penis."

One might almost think this play should be classified with the problem plays, but if its resolution should appear muddy and dark, the bright and ebullient mood of the play is unceasing. I should only want to live in a world in which love is ungovernable.]]> 3.37 1598 Love's Labor's Lost
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.37
book published: 1598
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: drama, literature
review:
I am extremely surprised to report that, upon reaching the end of Love's Labour's Lost, I'm in something of a state of ecstasy, so overpowering is this play in its absurdly abundant ideas and energies. Of Shakespeare's comedies, this is among the very best.

For most of its length, it appears to be a somewhat typical pastoral comedy moving toward its inevitable end, but again and again, the play turns itself inside out, and one has to start again. As the Pelican introduction admirably put it, the play is fundamentally concerned with the inability of language to fix or control meaning. In this play, as in reality, life always evades our efforts to fix it in terms of view or policy, and as Derrida would argue centuries later, this pertains to the play of language, by which he meant that meaning itself is only possible because of this evasion.

It is right to evoke Derrida, as this play is absolutely a fully-realized precursor to postmodernism; there is in fact not a single key concept or idea in postmodernism that is not reflected by it. Berowne, we are repeatedly reminded, ultimately sees his own reflection in the "pitch-black eyes" of Rosaline, his paramour, who completely evades his every attempt to form a stable relationship to her. This forms a kind of sadomasochistic dynamic that will remind many readers of the Dark Lady sonnets, and inevitably suggest certain questions regarding the possible biographical basis for the anguish felt by all of the male characters in this play, that their wit and verbal powers are insufficient to master and control the objects of their affection.

The main action is simple enough - four nobles of Navarre vow to abstain from food, drink, and women for a term of three years to pursue their studies, just in time for four beautiful young ladies to arrive from the court of France to arrive, as if on cue.

As if on cue - the fact that they so immediately fall in love with the first four women they see after taking this vow suggests to the reader that, having taken this vow, they might have responded the same way to any four women. And indeed, in the sprawling final scene of the play, when the women wear masks, they demonstrate conclusively that the men who profess their eternal love cannot even confidently tell which is which. One thinks of the postmodern concept of the endless circulation and fungibility of signifiers.

Upon their arrival, the oath-bound men will not let the ladies into the court, and set up tents on the field to receive them. Here, the action moves into the pastoral proper - nearly all of Shakespeare's comedies involve alternative societies set up outside the wall of the city, where the action occurs. By the time the men have changed their tune and invite the women to enter, they will not go in, having once been refused.

When they would enter, they cannot, but when they are invited, they will not. There are echoes here of Kafka's great parable "Before the Law" which are not coincidental.

The men seek to master their objects of desire in the battlefield of language, but language proves to elusive a tool, and the women are too canny to simply be subdued. Of course, on one level, "being subdued" means "conforming to the conventions of the genre," which, we might expect, despite the play's name, will move inexorably toward consummation. But the play itself has broken down by the end, with Berowne explicitly noting in his final words on stage that its subject cannot be contained within a play.

The sheer density of this play is overpowering - not just in ideas, but the dialog is famed as overflowing with complex wordplay. It must be acknowledged that a great deal of this will be lost on the modern reader, unless you happen, for example, to know off the top of your head that a pricket is a first-year buck deer, and a sorrel is a deer of two years. The reader of the footnotes may come away impressed by how many slang terms the Elizabethans used for the word "penis."

One might almost think this play should be classified with the problem plays, but if its resolution should appear muddy and dark, the bright and ebullient mood of the play is unceasing. I should only want to live in a world in which love is ungovernable.
]]> <![CDATA[Henry V (The Pelican Shakespeare)]]> 32968555 The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel


The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
"]]> 121 William Shakespeare 0143130242 Mesoscope 5 drama, literature 3.70 1599 Henry V (The Pelican Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1599
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/20
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: drama, literature
review:
An extraordinary and satisfying conclusion to the four histories beginning with Richard II. The so-called "Henriad" constitutes in aggregate one of the best and most fascinating sets of plays that Shakespeare wrote. Just magnificent.
]]> <![CDATA[The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley, #3)]]> 19494 212 John Le Carré Mesoscope 4 fiction
I also have to say I found the plot a bit obvious. This is a real problem for the thriller and mystery author - when you have a small number of characters, there's only so many ways things can possibly go, so it's not always so easy to outsmart your audience.]]> 4.07 1963 The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley, #3)
author: John Le Carré
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: fiction
review:
Despite some superb writing, I'm somewhere between three and four stars here. My typical experience with le Carré is that in the first fifty pages, I'm thinking he's one of our great modern authors, and then by page 100 it's starting to feel a bit repetitive. Even at 200 pages, this book does indeed start to feel repetitive by the end - almost the entire second half consists of dialogs between a handful of characters punctuated by very brief scenes of action. One has the feeling that the author wrote out the story in a schematized fashion, and then tried to find a persuasive way to bring the events across dramatically. In this case, I think he fell short.

I also have to say I found the plot a bit obvious. This is a real problem for the thriller and mystery author - when you have a small number of characters, there's only so many ways things can possibly go, so it's not always so easy to outsmart your audience.
]]> <![CDATA[The Winter's Tale (The Pelican Shakespeare)]]> 35691742 The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

]]> 158 William Shakespeare 1524705616 Mesoscope 3 drama, literature Love's Labours Lost, The Merchant of Venice, the "problem plays," and finally the so-called "late romances," which seek to move between and among the registers of the drama he knew, now unfolding as tragedy and now unfolding as farce. I do not believe Shakespeare persuasively achieved his goal in any of his attempts, and the clashing registers have generally been felt and interpreted by audiences as a problem.

In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare tries to combine the deep tragedy of the first three acts with the tneder pastoral comedy of the latter two by uniting them under the aegis of natural mystery. The play is obviously intended as a kind of semi-naturalized retelling of the myth of the renewal of spring, in part telegraphed by a highly-charged reference to Persephone during a spring festival by Perdita, who embodies the very spirit of renewal. The very winter of tragic, uncontrolled jealousy of the first half of the play is made glorious spring by the redemptive powers of regeneration, bodied forth in the story by the next generation, who make good the mistakes of their fathers through simply acting in accord with the dictates of Nature.

The tragedy laid out in the first half of the play felt extremely familiar. King Leontes of Sicily suspects his angelic wife of infidelity with his brother in a manner that strongly resembles Othello, and his loyal advisors desperately try to restrain their ruler's self-destructive wrath in a manner that strongly resembles King Lear. The extremes of emotion transform the landscape of the play from a more or less naturalistic setting to something akin to a fairytale or myth, signaled by a divine storm and the notoriously incongruous stage instruction "Exit, pursued by a bear". The action of the play seems to freeze, and the world becomes as lifeless as winter, when Persephone serves out her term in the Plutonian depths.

Now we break into a long comic pastoral signifying renewal, and in my opinion the play never really recovers from its jarring shifts in tone and naturalism. In one interesting gesture, the beginning of Act IV parallels the events at the beginning of the play, suggesting the beginning of the new cycle. There is a tale of star-crossed lovers, which lurches toward the climax of the play, which is, inexplicably, described by walk-on characters rather than dramatized. The action famously concludes with a bit of magical realism that brings together its various symbols of the unity of nature and art and the power of rebirth through time.

I simply don't think it works on the dramatic level. The pieces are too disjunct and the events are too higgledy-piggledy to cohere into a story that scans. It also does not help that the play shares many of the same core themes as The Tempest, written at approximately the same time, and almost universally preferred.

I was also bothered by the degree to which this seems to be a play in which human beings are men and men are human beings, while women are ciphers of a transcendent mystery, and essentially serve as supports to the psycho-spiritual journey of male agents. This is often a problem in his work - I would argue, for example, that the blameless quality of Desdemona actually makes her less interesting and effective as a character, because she becomes less of a person than a type, and it becomes more difficult to sympathize with her. This is something we have to deal with in his legacy, but it is all over this play, with all three major female characters serving a merely-symbolic function.

If I were Shakespeare's editor, I would have struck the tedious comic character Autolycus completely from the play. I found his subplot a totally unnecessary distraction.

I would call this play an interesting misfire, one which contains certain moments that are so suggestive, one can only regret it doesn't really cohere. It would be really great if Shakespeare had managed to produce his own idiosyncratic version of a mystery play, as he clearly seemed to intend, but ultimately his interests are far too humanist for him to really master spiritual allegory.]]> 3.94 1623 The Winter's Tale (The Pelican Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1623
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: drama, literature
review:
Of the Shakespeare plays I have read, this is certainly one of the least successful, formally and symbolically, and it suffers from the several problems that have dogged the playwright throughout his career. Most especially, he has often chafed at the limitations of the genres of comedy and tragedy, and has sought again and again to subvert or transcend those limitations. So we have Love's Labours Lost, The Merchant of Venice, the "problem plays," and finally the so-called "late romances," which seek to move between and among the registers of the drama he knew, now unfolding as tragedy and now unfolding as farce. I do not believe Shakespeare persuasively achieved his goal in any of his attempts, and the clashing registers have generally been felt and interpreted by audiences as a problem.

In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare tries to combine the deep tragedy of the first three acts with the tneder pastoral comedy of the latter two by uniting them under the aegis of natural mystery. The play is obviously intended as a kind of semi-naturalized retelling of the myth of the renewal of spring, in part telegraphed by a highly-charged reference to Persephone during a spring festival by Perdita, who embodies the very spirit of renewal. The very winter of tragic, uncontrolled jealousy of the first half of the play is made glorious spring by the redemptive powers of regeneration, bodied forth in the story by the next generation, who make good the mistakes of their fathers through simply acting in accord with the dictates of Nature.

The tragedy laid out in the first half of the play felt extremely familiar. King Leontes of Sicily suspects his angelic wife of infidelity with his brother in a manner that strongly resembles Othello, and his loyal advisors desperately try to restrain their ruler's self-destructive wrath in a manner that strongly resembles King Lear. The extremes of emotion transform the landscape of the play from a more or less naturalistic setting to something akin to a fairytale or myth, signaled by a divine storm and the notoriously incongruous stage instruction "Exit, pursued by a bear". The action of the play seems to freeze, and the world becomes as lifeless as winter, when Persephone serves out her term in the Plutonian depths.

Now we break into a long comic pastoral signifying renewal, and in my opinion the play never really recovers from its jarring shifts in tone and naturalism. In one interesting gesture, the beginning of Act IV parallels the events at the beginning of the play, suggesting the beginning of the new cycle. There is a tale of star-crossed lovers, which lurches toward the climax of the play, which is, inexplicably, described by walk-on characters rather than dramatized. The action famously concludes with a bit of magical realism that brings together its various symbols of the unity of nature and art and the power of rebirth through time.

I simply don't think it works on the dramatic level. The pieces are too disjunct and the events are too higgledy-piggledy to cohere into a story that scans. It also does not help that the play shares many of the same core themes as The Tempest, written at approximately the same time, and almost universally preferred.

I was also bothered by the degree to which this seems to be a play in which human beings are men and men are human beings, while women are ciphers of a transcendent mystery, and essentially serve as supports to the psycho-spiritual journey of male agents. This is often a problem in his work - I would argue, for example, that the blameless quality of Desdemona actually makes her less interesting and effective as a character, because she becomes less of a person than a type, and it becomes more difficult to sympathize with her. This is something we have to deal with in his legacy, but it is all over this play, with all three major female characters serving a merely-symbolic function.

If I were Shakespeare's editor, I would have struck the tedious comic character Autolycus completely from the play. I found his subplot a totally unnecessary distraction.

I would call this play an interesting misfire, one which contains certain moments that are so suggestive, one can only regret it doesn't really cohere. It would be really great if Shakespeare had managed to produce his own idiosyncratic version of a mystery play, as he clearly seemed to intend, but ultimately his interests are far too humanist for him to really master spiritual allegory.
]]> <![CDATA[Henry IV, Part 2 (The Pelican Shakespeare)]]> 36394528 The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 169 William Shakespeare 1524705632 Mesoscope 5 drama, literature Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1. It is hard to believe that a continuation of Part 1 that carries on immediately after the events of that play and that was written a year or two later could be so completely different in its structure, tone, and effect. Where Part 1 moved lightly and briskly, with enormously satisfying characterization and action, this one stagnates in an arresting portrait of disjunction and decline, one which provokes the reader/viewer by continually frustrating their expectations for resolution in ways that are surprising, and sometimes deeply shocking. This is a much darker play.

The change in tenor is immediately announced in the first scene, when an important character receives news that his son has had a major triumph in battle, only to learn minutes later that earlier reports were completely wrong, and his son has in fact been killed and his army routed. This is the first of many abrupt disappointments and reversals.

This play is not as enjoyable, surely, as part one, or as its successor, Henry V, but it is every bit as good. It is simply that its rewards are of an entirely different nature, and it leaves a deep, bitter pang, much as actual history is wont to do. ]]> 3.40 1598 Henry IV, Part 2 (The Pelican Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1598
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: drama, literature
review:
An extraordinary continuation of the story began in Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1. It is hard to believe that a continuation of Part 1 that carries on immediately after the events of that play and that was written a year or two later could be so completely different in its structure, tone, and effect. Where Part 1 moved lightly and briskly, with enormously satisfying characterization and action, this one stagnates in an arresting portrait of disjunction and decline, one which provokes the reader/viewer by continually frustrating their expectations for resolution in ways that are surprising, and sometimes deeply shocking. This is a much darker play.

The change in tenor is immediately announced in the first scene, when an important character receives news that his son has had a major triumph in battle, only to learn minutes later that earlier reports were completely wrong, and his son has in fact been killed and his army routed. This is the first of many abrupt disappointments and reversals.

This play is not as enjoyable, surely, as part one, or as its successor, Henry V, but it is every bit as good. It is simply that its rewards are of an entirely different nature, and it leaves a deep, bitter pang, much as actual history is wont to do.
]]> A Midsummer Night's Dream 33155 320 William Shakespeare 1903436605 Mesoscope 5 literature, drama A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the operas of Wagner - a composer and poet whom no less an authority than Claude Lévi-Strauss identified as "the first structuralist" - the play encodes its deepest wisdom structurally, and it requires a little excavation.

The play's high argument is directly named in Act V, Scene 1:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

The ambiguous and fertile space of the spirit is the playground of this magnificent drama, where genius rubs shoulders with madness, love with bewilderment, the most humane hearts scheme alongside abstruse supernatural powers, and wisdom combines with delusion. The force that confounds our attempts to draw sharp lines between these interplayed opposites is Puck, who embodies the power of the active imagination, the life of the spirit that discloses and conceals in a single gesture, that paints the ciphers of salvation and destruction with a single brush.

Within the framework of this rather profound symbolic lattice, nothing much happens, which is perhaps Shakespeare's way of insisting, as he has insisted in several other comedies, that mere amusement and delight in the energies of life are quite enough. They are, in fact, the thing itself, if one stops to think about it; they are, in fact, the very heart of the matter.

In spite of this, there remains, for this reader at least, a mild discomfort with the degree to which the plot is essentially a farce, a comedy of errors that belligerently resists any attempt to see anything more to its misaligned lovers deluded by a magic draught than something like a sitcom. Were I to detect a deeper statement in all of this, rather than an arbitrary discord from which the lovers must eventually resolve for the play to end as it should, then I would call this one of the very best of Shakespeare's works. As it stands, it is nearly so, and a work of spectacular imagination, beauty, and craft. That is to say, it is quite enough.]]> 4.00 1595 A Midsummer Night's Dream
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1595
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: literature, drama
review:
This play invites a stucturalist reading, for A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the operas of Wagner - a composer and poet whom no less an authority than Claude Lévi-Strauss identified as "the first structuralist" - the play encodes its deepest wisdom structurally, and it requires a little excavation.

The play's high argument is directly named in Act V, Scene 1:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

The ambiguous and fertile space of the spirit is the playground of this magnificent drama, where genius rubs shoulders with madness, love with bewilderment, the most humane hearts scheme alongside abstruse supernatural powers, and wisdom combines with delusion. The force that confounds our attempts to draw sharp lines between these interplayed opposites is Puck, who embodies the power of the active imagination, the life of the spirit that discloses and conceals in a single gesture, that paints the ciphers of salvation and destruction with a single brush.

Within the framework of this rather profound symbolic lattice, nothing much happens, which is perhaps Shakespeare's way of insisting, as he has insisted in several other comedies, that mere amusement and delight in the energies of life are quite enough. They are, in fact, the thing itself, if one stops to think about it; they are, in fact, the very heart of the matter.

In spite of this, there remains, for this reader at least, a mild discomfort with the degree to which the plot is essentially a farce, a comedy of errors that belligerently resists any attempt to see anything more to its misaligned lovers deluded by a magic draught than something like a sitcom. Were I to detect a deeper statement in all of this, rather than an arbitrary discord from which the lovers must eventually resolve for the play to end as it should, then I would call this one of the very best of Shakespeare's works. As it stands, it is nearly so, and a work of spectacular imagination, beauty, and craft. That is to say, it is quite enough.
]]> <![CDATA[Henry IV, Part 1 (The Pelican Shakespeare)]]> 31624477 The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.
This edition of "Henry IV, Part 1" is edited with an introduction by Claire McEachern.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators."]]> 117 William Shakespeare 014313020X Mesoscope 5 drama, literature Richard III and Richard II.

And of course, Falstaff - what can even be said about this most delightful, most hilarious of characters? He has the fascinating quality of Lear's Fool or Troilus' Thersites, but unlike those, he is fully human, and as such, may be fully loved.]]> 3.69 1597 Henry IV, Part 1 (The Pelican Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1597
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: drama, literature
review:
Absolutely extraordinary, easily one of the best Shakespeare histories. The diversity of scene and mood is richly cinematic in the best possible sense. The characters are clearly defined and the action is clean and brisk, which is a welcome evolution from the heavy and verbose complexity of plot that dogs earlier plays like Richard III and Richard II.

And of course, Falstaff - what can even be said about this most delightful, most hilarious of characters? He has the fascinating quality of Lear's Fool or Troilus' Thersites, but unlike those, he is fully human, and as such, may be fully loved.
]]> <![CDATA[Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human]]> 20942 New York Review of Books. A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition-Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships: that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.]]> 745 Harold Bloom 157322751X Mesoscope 2 Love's Labours Lost, for example, helped me find my way into the play, while I found his analyses of Macbeth and Othello somewhat bizarre, crowded as they are with inscrutable, oracular utterances, repeated evocations of "proleptic consciousness," and references to some sort of idiosyncratic Jewish gnosticism that Bloom pregnantly evokes several times, but does not elucidate.

This contributed to my growing sense of unease with this book, and my ever-increasing conviction that there is something wrong wtih it, and something wrong with its author. This is not something that I say lightly. I am not a psychologist, I am not going to try to tie all the pieces into some story, but that they fit together somehow is obvious. His frequent claims to a kind of self-justifying authority for his views. His bizarre fixation on a caricature of postmodernism and feminism, which he returns to again and again like an obsession. His oddly-occult metaphysical realism, and its ties to a notoriously solipsistic and schizotypal religious system, i.e., gnosticism. His sometimes-offputing fascination with the darkness and nihilism of Iago and Macbeth. The numerous accusations in circulation that he took advantage of his female grad students.

It is said that the philosophy of the hermetics is a labyrinth without end, and I think that Bloom is a hermetic in this sense, weaving an infinitely-complex path around an empty center, toward which he constantly gestures as a source for his authority, but which he leaves dark. I genuinely think you have to approach this work with caution. In some very deep way, Bloom was not okay, and it comes across in his writing in ways that I think could be disturbing to sensitive readers.]]> 4.03 1998 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
author: Harold Bloom
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1998
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: abandoned, criticism, literature
review:
I've been reading quite a few Shakespeare plays and have been using this as an adjunct to my study, and it is tailor-made to the purpose, with free-standing interpretive essays on all of Shakespeare's dramatic works. I have generally found them somewhat mixed - his analysis of Love's Labours Lost, for example, helped me find my way into the play, while I found his analyses of Macbeth and Othello somewhat bizarre, crowded as they are with inscrutable, oracular utterances, repeated evocations of "proleptic consciousness," and references to some sort of idiosyncratic Jewish gnosticism that Bloom pregnantly evokes several times, but does not elucidate.

This contributed to my growing sense of unease with this book, and my ever-increasing conviction that there is something wrong wtih it, and something wrong with its author. This is not something that I say lightly. I am not a psychologist, I am not going to try to tie all the pieces into some story, but that they fit together somehow is obvious. His frequent claims to a kind of self-justifying authority for his views. His bizarre fixation on a caricature of postmodernism and feminism, which he returns to again and again like an obsession. His oddly-occult metaphysical realism, and its ties to a notoriously solipsistic and schizotypal religious system, i.e., gnosticism. His sometimes-offputing fascination with the darkness and nihilism of Iago and Macbeth. The numerous accusations in circulation that he took advantage of his female grad students.

It is said that the philosophy of the hermetics is a labyrinth without end, and I think that Bloom is a hermetic in this sense, weaving an infinitely-complex path around an empty center, toward which he constantly gestures as a source for his authority, but which he leaves dark. I genuinely think you have to approach this work with caution. In some very deep way, Bloom was not okay, and it comes across in his writing in ways that I think could be disturbing to sensitive readers.
]]> King Richard II 33131

The Arden Shakespeare has developed a reputation as the pre-eminent critical edition of Shakespeare for its exceptional scholarship, reflected in the thoroughness of each volume. An introduction comprehensively contextualizes the play, chronicling the history and culture that surrounded and influenced Shakespeare at the time of its writing and performance, and closely surveying critical approaches to the work. Detailed appendices address problems like dating and casting, and analyze the differing Quarto and Folio sources. A full commentary by one or more of the play's foremost contemporary scholars illuminates the text, glossing unfamiliar terms and drawing from an abundance of research and expertise to explain allusions and significant background information. Highly informative and accessible, Arden offers the fullest experience of Shakespeare available to a reader.


Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

General Editors' Preface

Preface

Introduction

Politics

Historical Context and the Issue of Topicality

The Connection with Essex

Ideology: Competing Conceptions of Monarchy

Characterization: Attitudes towards Richard and Bolingbroke

Politics in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Stagings

Language

Style

Imagery, Major Themes, Symbolism, Patterns of Allusion

Rhetoric

Afterlife

The Date

The Relation to Edward II and Woodstock

Richard II and the Second Tetralogy

Probable Venues of Early Performance

Sources

Holinshed

Hall

The Mirror for Magistrates

Daniel

Woodstock

Froissart; Creton; Traison

Edward II

Minor Sources

Text

THE TRAGEDY OF KING RICHARD THE SECOND

Longer Notes

Appendices

1 Textual Analysis

2 Doubling Chart

3 Genealogical Tables

Abbreviations and references

Abbreviations used in notes

Works by and partly by Shakespeare

Editions of Shakespeare collated or referred to

Other works

Modern stage and television productions cited

Index]]> 593 William Shakespeare 1903436338 Mesoscope 5 drama, literature
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

At every juncture, Henry Bolingbrook says one thing while intending another, while Richard slowly tries to hammer his way out of the solipsistic prison in which he's bound himself. Trapped in a literal prison, he muses on the powers of imagination in ways that must have resonated with his world-creating creator:

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented.

Shakespeare presupposes familiarity with the relevant events, so background reading is useful.]]> 3.83 1595 King Richard II
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1595
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: drama, literature
review:
An outstanding and fascinating history, though the extraordinary dialog overwhelms the action at times. Some of the speeches of the failed philosopher-king Richard II approach Hamlet in their reflective power:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

At every juncture, Henry Bolingbrook says one thing while intending another, while Richard slowly tries to hammer his way out of the solipsistic prison in which he's bound himself. Trapped in a literal prison, he muses on the powers of imagination in ways that must have resonated with his world-creating creator:

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented.

Shakespeare presupposes familiarity with the relevant events, so background reading is useful.
]]> Othello 28953400
This edition of Othello is edited with an introduction and notes by Russ McDonald and was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia. Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series.

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

SEE LESS]]> 145 William Shakespeare 0143128612 Mesoscope 4 literature, drama Remembrance attracted my sympathies.

In my view, the play has some problems with pacing and structure. We plunge into a tumult of action, and never really have the chance to get to know any of our protagonists or to relate with them before events take off at a full gallop - and who, indeed, is there in this play to relate to or identify with? The towering general and high speechmaker Othello? Desdemona, lily-white as the fresh-fallen snow, and with a pure heart of the kind only found in storybooks? I suppose one could identify with the duplicitous Iago, except it is almost universally recognized that he poses a problem for the spectator, in that the ferocity of his crimes seem totally disproportionate to his complaint.

Many of Shakespeare's characters serve as an occasion to draw out his protagonists, so that they put their thoughts into words. To some degree, Iago serves that function - so much so, that it is tempting to view him as the jealous part of Othello's mind. But that only works within Shakespeare's dramaturgy when it functions equally well on the dramatic and the symbolic planes, like the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, who work just as well as literal or symbolic agents. I do not think Iago is often experienced as functioning on that level.

The one character I find wholly satisfying is Iago's wife Emilia, who is much more of a real woman than Desdemona, and much more of a human being than anyone else on the stage. But her part, crucial as it is, is small.

By convention, Shakespeare wrote four "great tragedies" and this is one of them, but in practice, I more and more hear people mentioning Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, and leaving this one out, and I think that's right. Personally, I don't think it's any better than Antony and Cleopatra, or than Julius Caesar, for that matter.]]> 3.91 1603 Othello
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1603
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: literature, drama
review:
Years ago, when I read Othello for the first time, I remember being relatively unmoved by it, and reading it again, I had the same response. The great critic A. C. Bradley wrote that the grief of King Lear is more grand but less immediate and recognizable in everyday life than that of Othello, but for me, this is simply not so. I do not resonate with jealousy stories, and they are alien to me, emotionally, so while I understand the action of the play, it does not resonate with me, any more than the pathologically-jealous narrator of Proust's Remembrance attracted my sympathies.

In my view, the play has some problems with pacing and structure. We plunge into a tumult of action, and never really have the chance to get to know any of our protagonists or to relate with them before events take off at a full gallop - and who, indeed, is there in this play to relate to or identify with? The towering general and high speechmaker Othello? Desdemona, lily-white as the fresh-fallen snow, and with a pure heart of the kind only found in storybooks? I suppose one could identify with the duplicitous Iago, except it is almost universally recognized that he poses a problem for the spectator, in that the ferocity of his crimes seem totally disproportionate to his complaint.

Many of Shakespeare's characters serve as an occasion to draw out his protagonists, so that they put their thoughts into words. To some degree, Iago serves that function - so much so, that it is tempting to view him as the jealous part of Othello's mind. But that only works within Shakespeare's dramaturgy when it functions equally well on the dramatic and the symbolic planes, like the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, who work just as well as literal or symbolic agents. I do not think Iago is often experienced as functioning on that level.

The one character I find wholly satisfying is Iago's wife Emilia, who is much more of a real woman than Desdemona, and much more of a human being than anyone else on the stage. But her part, crucial as it is, is small.

By convention, Shakespeare wrote four "great tragedies" and this is one of them, but in practice, I more and more hear people mentioning Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, and leaving this one out, and I think that's right. Personally, I don't think it's any better than Antony and Cleopatra, or than Julius Caesar, for that matter.
]]> <![CDATA[Die Kapuzinergruft (Von Trotta Family, #2)]]> 1055537 192 Joseph Roth 3423131004 Mesoscope 3 german, literature Die Kapuzinergruft is something of a continuation of Roth's classic novel Radetzkymarsch, which covered the last few generations of Austria-Hungary prior to World War I. This book follows a cousin of the protagonist of the prior book from the years leading up to World War I to the Anschluss of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. Although the characters and action are only nominally related to Radetzkymarsch, this book is certainly a spiritual cousin of the earlier work, and similarly paints a representative portrait of a time of upheaval and transformation by depicting the life of someone who lived through it.

One of the disappointments for me in reading it is that at least one key figure is a lesbian, and her orientation is leveraged to make her a symbol of the social disorder and confusion of the time. It is a mean-spirited caricature.

Despite its flaws, and especially because it's a short, easy read, I would recommend it to most readers of Radetzkymarsch, because it does sort of bring you up to date on how Roth saw events up until nearly the end of his live. It is artfully written and has some beautiful, evocative prose, and it's easier to dive into than its counterpart, as the protagonist of this volume has much more of an active inner life. The characters of Radetzkymarsch generally seemed to sleepwalk through their lives in a sense of disorientation and disconnection from their own wishes and impulses, which was interesting, but also a bit monotonous at times.

All in all, Die Kapuzinergruft says about as much as you could say about a tumultuous couple of decades in a 150-page book.

minor spoiler below

Given the period in question, I was surprised by how little the book had to say about the rise and the spread of Nazi ideology. If the book has a point to make about that, it would appear to be something on the order of "It all happened so fast, while we were not paying any attention at all." That is in itself a pretty interesting artistic statement to make, but it was a bit disappointing.]]> 3.88 1938 Die Kapuzinergruft (Von Trotta Family, #2)
author: Joseph Roth
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1938
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/02
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves: german, literature
review:
Die Kapuzinergruft is something of a continuation of Roth's classic novel Radetzkymarsch, which covered the last few generations of Austria-Hungary prior to World War I. This book follows a cousin of the protagonist of the prior book from the years leading up to World War I to the Anschluss of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. Although the characters and action are only nominally related to Radetzkymarsch, this book is certainly a spiritual cousin of the earlier work, and similarly paints a representative portrait of a time of upheaval and transformation by depicting the life of someone who lived through it.

One of the disappointments for me in reading it is that at least one key figure is a lesbian, and her orientation is leveraged to make her a symbol of the social disorder and confusion of the time. It is a mean-spirited caricature.

Despite its flaws, and especially because it's a short, easy read, I would recommend it to most readers of Radetzkymarsch, because it does sort of bring you up to date on how Roth saw events up until nearly the end of his live. It is artfully written and has some beautiful, evocative prose, and it's easier to dive into than its counterpart, as the protagonist of this volume has much more of an active inner life. The characters of Radetzkymarsch generally seemed to sleepwalk through their lives in a sense of disorientation and disconnection from their own wishes and impulses, which was interesting, but also a bit monotonous at times.

All in all, Die Kapuzinergruft says about as much as you could say about a tumultuous couple of decades in a 150-page book.

minor spoiler below

Given the period in question, I was surprised by how little the book had to say about the rise and the spread of Nazi ideology. If the book has a point to make about that, it would appear to be something on the order of "It all happened so fast, while we were not paying any attention at all." That is in itself a pretty interesting artistic statement to make, but it was a bit disappointing.
]]> <![CDATA[Macbeth (The New Cambridge Shakespeare)]]> 20485570 79 William Shakespeare 1139812203 Mesoscope 5 literature, favorites Love's Labour's Lost also wrote Macbeth, or that the same man wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, and Henry V. These works do not simply differ in tone and attitude, they seem to unfold in different universes.

Dr. Johnson observed that Shakespeare's absolute mastery of the different genres is one of the surest signs of his genius, as he could not name a single Greek or Latin author who wrote both tragedy and comedy. This is all part of the giganticness of Shakespeare's legacy that makes it almost impossible to take its measure, and why the secondary literature piles superlative upon superlative in describing his mighty art.

Macbeth is, to be sure, a far more focused play than Hamlet or King Lear, and perhaps because of that fact, it boasts a formal perfection that the larger-scale works cannot match, along with a relentless, unified movement toward its dire end - that is, if one omits Act III, Scene 5, when the weird sisters meet with Hecate, which is obviously spurious, and which contradicts the entire conception of the rest of the play.

In this work, Shakespeare fits word to thought more perfectly than ever before had been done in the English language, with the thought as penetrating as it was illuminating. Consider these words of Lady Macbeth:

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o� th� milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it.

This is a perfect statement.

The "She should have died hereafter" soliloquy has never been surpassed. ]]> 4.19 1623 Macbeth (The New Cambridge Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1623
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: literature, favorites
review:
Reading several plays by Shakespeare back-to-back is an astonishing experience - it is hard to believe that the man who wrote Love's Labour's Lost also wrote Macbeth, or that the same man wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, and Henry V. These works do not simply differ in tone and attitude, they seem to unfold in different universes.

Dr. Johnson observed that Shakespeare's absolute mastery of the different genres is one of the surest signs of his genius, as he could not name a single Greek or Latin author who wrote both tragedy and comedy. This is all part of the giganticness of Shakespeare's legacy that makes it almost impossible to take its measure, and why the secondary literature piles superlative upon superlative in describing his mighty art.

Macbeth is, to be sure, a far more focused play than Hamlet or King Lear, and perhaps because of that fact, it boasts a formal perfection that the larger-scale works cannot match, along with a relentless, unified movement toward its dire end - that is, if one omits Act III, Scene 5, when the weird sisters meet with Hecate, which is obviously spurious, and which contradicts the entire conception of the rest of the play.

In this work, Shakespeare fits word to thought more perfectly than ever before had been done in the English language, with the thought as penetrating as it was illuminating. Consider these words of Lady Macbeth:

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o� th� milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it.

This is a perfect statement.

The "She should have died hereafter" soliloquy has never been surpassed.
]]> <![CDATA[King Lear (The Pelican Shakespeare)]]> 12945
The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 270 William Shakespeare 0140714901 Mesoscope 5 literature, drama, favorites Hamlet - and one of the greatest works of art in any language.

For many readers, the deepest sorrow and unease elicited from this tragedy comes from its lacerating depiction of the unsatisfactory nature of familial love. Parents disappointed by their children and children disappointed by their parents, and siblings moved to the extremes of violence in competition over resources are the prime driver of the plot. Cordelia is spurned by Lear for refusing to flatter his vanity, while Edgar is driven from his father's care by the machinations of his deceitful brother, and these two stories unfold in parallel. Each father undergoes the most profound psychological turmoil, and both of their disordered states find a correlate within the play; Gloucester in the person of Tom o' Bedlam, and Lear in the form of the Fool, two parts that serve complementary functions in providing an interlocutor for the suffering fathers' depths of despair.

In one of the uncanny maneuvers of the play, the Fool appears to the careful reader as a counterpart to Cordelia; he appears on stage immediately after she departs in Act I, and then vanishes in Act III shortly before her return. And then in the final scene of the play, at a critical moment, Lear refers to his daughter as his "poor fool," confirming and sealing their hidden unity.

Similarly, Tom o' Bedlam is in truth Gloucester's falsely-accused son Edgar, who appears to his father in that form only when Gloucester falls into deep despair, and then he serves as a kind of initiatory guide through his crisis.

Both correlates for a father's madness reflect the antagonistic form the powers of life assume when life itself is betrayed. In a manner similar to the Greek goddess Nemesis or the Furies, life appears in its punishing roll in response to a crime that turns against its rhythms.

The profundity of this play is very great, and there are no words adequate to critically engage the appearance of Lear after the furious storm on the heath re-appearing dressed in the weeds of the field. It is an artistically perfect and spiritually complete statement within itself. ]]> 4.04 1605 King Lear (The Pelican Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1605
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: literature, drama, favorites
review:
This play is one of the greatest works of literature in the English language - the only thing I know that equals it is Hamlet - and one of the greatest works of art in any language.

For many readers, the deepest sorrow and unease elicited from this tragedy comes from its lacerating depiction of the unsatisfactory nature of familial love. Parents disappointed by their children and children disappointed by their parents, and siblings moved to the extremes of violence in competition over resources are the prime driver of the plot. Cordelia is spurned by Lear for refusing to flatter his vanity, while Edgar is driven from his father's care by the machinations of his deceitful brother, and these two stories unfold in parallel. Each father undergoes the most profound psychological turmoil, and both of their disordered states find a correlate within the play; Gloucester in the person of Tom o' Bedlam, and Lear in the form of the Fool, two parts that serve complementary functions in providing an interlocutor for the suffering fathers' depths of despair.

In one of the uncanny maneuvers of the play, the Fool appears to the careful reader as a counterpart to Cordelia; he appears on stage immediately after she departs in Act I, and then vanishes in Act III shortly before her return. And then in the final scene of the play, at a critical moment, Lear refers to his daughter as his "poor fool," confirming and sealing their hidden unity.

Similarly, Tom o' Bedlam is in truth Gloucester's falsely-accused son Edgar, who appears to his father in that form only when Gloucester falls into deep despair, and then he serves as a kind of initiatory guide through his crisis.

Both correlates for a father's madness reflect the antagonistic form the powers of life assume when life itself is betrayed. In a manner similar to the Greek goddess Nemesis or the Furies, life appears in its punishing roll in response to a crime that turns against its rhythms.

The profundity of this play is very great, and there are no words adequate to critically engage the appearance of Lear after the furious storm on the heath re-appearing dressed in the weeds of the field. It is an artistically perfect and spiritually complete statement within itself.
]]> <![CDATA[Troilus and Cressida (The Pelican Shakespeare)]]> 36394521 The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 190 William Shakespeare 1524705624 Mesoscope 5 drama, literature
The "quarrel" Shakespeare sees at the heart of the Trojan War is an all-too-human dispute over a cuckolding, compounded into titanic proportion by a fantastic admixture of vanity, recklessness, hypocrisy, and naiveté. The core dynamic of Paris' abduction of Helen is recapitulated in microcosm in the passion of Troilus for the Cressida, mediated by her truly revolting uncle Pandarus, who acts as prurient ringmaster for the seduction. When the foundations of such a romance prove unstable, the play lurches in the direction of tragedy, only to degenerate into a black-hearted farce.

I found this a very difficult play to read in comparison with, say, The Tempest or King Lear. The language is unusually demanding, but especially the overpowering mood of squalor and depravity makes it a bit hard to bear. It's also not easy for me to see the Iliad, one of my favorite works in the whole of world literature, made the target of such a merciless and venomous depiction. It would be hard to imagine a more deprecating characterization of Achilles, for example.

Like Don Quixote, which was written just a few years later, this play unwinds the mythology of the chivalric virtues and unmasks the dark heart of violence that lies beneath it. However, unlike Cervantes' masterpiece, it shows little love for humanity and for the basic human virtues of love and friendship.

Thersites is worth a second mention as the most interesting character in the play, who is almost sympathetic in his scorn of the fools around him, save that his rancor is all-consuming and leaves nothing else. But his function in the play is quite interesting - he interjects a critical self-consciousness into the world and articulates an ongoing interpretation of the characters and events that surpasses what even the most savvy reader would be capable of. In this sense, he strikes me as an early prototype for the Fool of King Lear, and his role in the play highlights Shakespeare's great interest in a pre-postmodern fascination with experimental explorations of the reflexive character of consciousness and its relationship to the mechanics of narrative.

In summary, this play is a work of titanic genius, though it is not altogether easy to like.]]> 3.73 1601 Troilus and Cressida (The Pelican Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1601
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves: drama, literature
review:
There is much for the intellect to admire in this problem play, but little for the heart to take hold of. It unfolds as something like a satire of the events described in Homer's Iliad, which Shakespeare would have known from the Chapman translation and from Ovid's synopsis in Metamorphoses, but it's clearly not a satire, because it's not funny. Such humor as the reader experiences generally takes the form of an eruption of bitter laughter after an intense buildup of tension and discomfort. One finds this particularly in the speeches of Thersites, who unleashes what is probably the most imaginative and ingenious stream of invective and insults in the English language. Truly.

The "quarrel" Shakespeare sees at the heart of the Trojan War is an all-too-human dispute over a cuckolding, compounded into titanic proportion by a fantastic admixture of vanity, recklessness, hypocrisy, and naiveté. The core dynamic of Paris' abduction of Helen is recapitulated in microcosm in the passion of Troilus for the Cressida, mediated by her truly revolting uncle Pandarus, who acts as prurient ringmaster for the seduction. When the foundations of such a romance prove unstable, the play lurches in the direction of tragedy, only to degenerate into a black-hearted farce.

I found this a very difficult play to read in comparison with, say, The Tempest or King Lear. The language is unusually demanding, but especially the overpowering mood of squalor and depravity makes it a bit hard to bear. It's also not easy for me to see the Iliad, one of my favorite works in the whole of world literature, made the target of such a merciless and venomous depiction. It would be hard to imagine a more deprecating characterization of Achilles, for example.

Like Don Quixote, which was written just a few years later, this play unwinds the mythology of the chivalric virtues and unmasks the dark heart of violence that lies beneath it. However, unlike Cervantes' masterpiece, it shows little love for humanity and for the basic human virtues of love and friendship.

Thersites is worth a second mention as the most interesting character in the play, who is almost sympathetic in his scorn of the fools around him, save that his rancor is all-consuming and leaves nothing else. But his function in the play is quite interesting - he interjects a critical self-consciousness into the world and articulates an ongoing interpretation of the characters and events that surpasses what even the most savvy reader would be capable of. In this sense, he strikes me as an early prototype for the Fool of King Lear, and his role in the play highlights Shakespeare's great interest in a pre-postmodern fascination with experimental explorations of the reflexive character of consciousness and its relationship to the mechanics of narrative.

In summary, this play is a work of titanic genius, though it is not altogether easy to like.
]]> <![CDATA[Doctor Faustus (Routledge English Texts)]]> 3231307 184 Christopher Marlowe 0415039606 Mesoscope 3 drama, literature
The story of Doctor Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for power and knowledge, is derived from extremely popular chapbooks that circulated in the earliest days of the printing press. Like most popular entertainments that assume a hight moral tone, the story celebrates his wicked deeds with prurient glee, until it is time to archly condemn them.

Marlowe's play is in the unenviable position of inviting comparison with both Shakespeare, his rival and contemporary, and Goethe, who made far better use of the same source material. (Goethe claimed not to have read Marlowe's work until long after Part I of his own treatment was published). This play suffers terribly under both comparisons. It has nothing whatsoever of the depth, the genius, or the artistry of those authors.

Marlowe seems to have no particular insight into the story of a soul in peril, other than insofar as it provides an occasion for an amusing set of scenes of a nigh-omnipotent scholar-magician humiliating the pope and badgering petty rivals. Even his world-famous speech about Helen of Troy begins with an immortal couplet, only to plummet into mediocre blank verse:

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.

Entirely forgettable.

As mentioned, the only scene that elicits real feeling is his terror before the end:

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.
O lente lente currite noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.

Anyone who has awaited a long-dreaded hour will recognize how terrible time's implacable advance can be. But despite the real feeling he musters here, on the whole, Marlowe evidences no psychological or philosophical insight into the play's core predicament. Take Marlowe's Faustus entertaining repentance:

My heart is harden’d, I cannot repent.�
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven,
But fearful echoes thunders in mine ears,
‘Faustus, thou art damn’d!�

And compare this with the chapel scene of Claudius in Hamlet:

O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon ’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin
And both neglect....

Here you can see the difference between the works of a competent craftsman and an immortal genius.]]> 3.68 1588 Doctor Faustus (Routledge English Texts)
author: Christopher Marlowe
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1588
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: drama, literature
review:
I read this play in my college days and had completely forgotten it, except for two things: the famous lines "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships / and burned the topless towers of Ilium?", and the genuine terror the play evokes at its climax. Rereading it now, I would say that these are the only two things worth remembering. Otherwise, it makes a mere spectacle of the source legend.

The story of Doctor Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for power and knowledge, is derived from extremely popular chapbooks that circulated in the earliest days of the printing press. Like most popular entertainments that assume a hight moral tone, the story celebrates his wicked deeds with prurient glee, until it is time to archly condemn them.

Marlowe's play is in the unenviable position of inviting comparison with both Shakespeare, his rival and contemporary, and Goethe, who made far better use of the same source material. (Goethe claimed not to have read Marlowe's work until long after Part I of his own treatment was published). This play suffers terribly under both comparisons. It has nothing whatsoever of the depth, the genius, or the artistry of those authors.

Marlowe seems to have no particular insight into the story of a soul in peril, other than insofar as it provides an occasion for an amusing set of scenes of a nigh-omnipotent scholar-magician humiliating the pope and badgering petty rivals. Even his world-famous speech about Helen of Troy begins with an immortal couplet, only to plummet into mediocre blank verse:

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.

Entirely forgettable.

As mentioned, the only scene that elicits real feeling is his terror before the end:

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.
O lente lente currite noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.

Anyone who has awaited a long-dreaded hour will recognize how terrible time's implacable advance can be. But despite the real feeling he musters here, on the whole, Marlowe evidences no psychological or philosophical insight into the play's core predicament. Take Marlowe's Faustus entertaining repentance:

My heart is harden’d, I cannot repent.�
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven,
But fearful echoes thunders in mine ears,
‘Faustus, thou art damn’d!�

And compare this with the chapel scene of Claudius in Hamlet:

O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon ’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin
And both neglect....

Here you can see the difference between the works of a competent craftsman and an immortal genius.
]]> Das siebte Kreuz 48669354 Anna Seghers schrieb ihren berühmten Roman in Paris, einer Zwischenstation auf ihrer lebensgefährlichen Flucht vor den Nazis ins Exil, mit der Souveränität einer Schriftstellerin von Weltrang und einer Klarsicht, die die Lektüre bis heute zur tief berührenden existenziellen Erfahrung macht. Der Text ist durchdrungen von Seghers� eigenen Erfahrungen und dem inneren Bild ihrer rheinhessischen Heimat.]]> 431 Anna Seghers 3746634695 Mesoscope 4 german, literature Das Siebte Kreuz, by all accounts her greatest work, is not a particularly easy book to evaluate, because its strengths and weaknesses are both of considerable magnitude.

The book deals with seven prisoners who escape from a concentration camp, focusing especially on Georg Heisler, who is a journeyman communist of deep passion but mercurial temperament. One of the extremely interesting choices of the book is to paint him in a not particularly heroic, or even necessarily sympathetic, light. He is tenaciously idealistic, but also uses people, and when he is done with them, he simply moves on and never looks back, and this includes his wife and child.

Almost all of the characters in the book are similarly complex, and one of the core insights of the book is that in times of urgency, these kinds of things don't really matter so much, particularly in comparison to the question of whether or not, when the circumstances arise, you are prepared to take a risk on the side of humanity.

I say "almost all," because Walau, Heisler's mentor in the camp, serves as a kind of "epitome of the wisdom of the communist party." Reich-Ranicki cannily points out that this lapse in Seghers' strong tendency to paint from life, as it were, reflects one of the books cardinal flaws: the author's reluctance to criticize the party. One can easily relate this to questions of Seghers' own character, as seen in her decades-long refusal to criticize the crimes and abuses of the communists in the USSR and Europe, but this largely falls outside the scope of a consideration of this book.

In terms of the book's action, the question primarily revolves around whether or not Georg will make it to safety. The book is at its very best when it follows him closely, and provides a harrowing study of the psychology of flight. There is nothing adventuresome or heroic about his experience, but an experience of constant, almost-overwhelming terror. This is something that Seghers would have known all-too-well, based on her own experience with being interrogated by the Gestapo, fleeing Germany, and then fleeing France, the latter part of which was brought to life in her worthwhile novel Transit. The psychological acuity of her characterization of the experience of persecution and flight at times reaches Dostoevsky-like intensity, even if she is hardly the artist that Dostoevsky was.

There are three peculiarities about this book that must be mentioned. First, the cast of characters is enormous - there are dozens of important characters that you need to remember, and it is not always particularly easy to recall if it was the wife of Franz or Fritz or Hermann or Paul or Fiedler that was supposed to send the signal if everything is all right. Characters that have only been mentioned in passing resurface hundreds of pages later, and the author is clearly confident that you will immediately remember who they are. Some characters receive significant attention even though they have no discernible connection to the plot whatsoever. I'm thinking here especially of Ernst, a shepherd who inexplicably gets tens of pages-we even spend some time learning about his mother-even though all that could literally be cut from the book entirely, and it would not require a single additional change.

This gets to the second peculiarity of the book. Seghers clearly intends to tell the story not just of a heroic escapee or group of escapees, but of all the people who took part in these events. I note in rereading my review of Transit that I mentioned Seghers is deeply interested in representing milieu, and that is even more true in this book. It is about everyone involved and some of their neighbors who are not involved. It often struck me as a bit jarring, when suddenly the story switched gears to focus on a minor character. and told their story in what generally felt like a digression, an unnecessary digression. And I lost count of how many times I said, who is this person again? And why are we reading about their trip to the market? It was very, very many times.

I can only assume that this represents an intentional and ideologically-motivated choice by the author to counter the heroic individual narrative, and to tell a story in which communities of people are affected by repression, and to look at how all of them do, or do not, fight back. This is interesting in theory, but as a practice, it places heavy demands on the reader, and often felt distracting and arbitrary. I could not believe my eyes when, fifteen pages from the end, we are introduced to yet another character, and get a little story about her life. Seghers' appetite for introducing new characters vastly surpassed my interest in learning about them, and this practice frequently disrupted the momentum of the novel.

The third feature I would call out is that it often works by indirection. Major plot developments are communicated in passing in highly-elliptical statements or references. Many things are left unsaid, and have to be inferred. I know a reader who completely missed the fact that Heisler was a communist, and looking back on it, I realized that I only knew he was because it was mentioned that he met another character at some event, which I happened to look up and found that it comemorated the deaths of Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

I understand the reasons for all of these artistic choices, and none of them are invalid per se. But as a reader, I was constantly frustrated reading this book, trying to track who everyone was and what was going on. Part of this is a matter of taste. I definitely prefer a book that focuses on its modest group of characters and moves right along without a lot of digression. That said, this book has many more characters than Buddenbrooks, which is nearly twice its length.]]> 3.88 1942 Das siebte Kreuz
author: Anna Seghers
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1942
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: german, literature
review:
Anna Seghers' Das Siebte Kreuz, by all accounts her greatest work, is not a particularly easy book to evaluate, because its strengths and weaknesses are both of considerable magnitude.

The book deals with seven prisoners who escape from a concentration camp, focusing especially on Georg Heisler, who is a journeyman communist of deep passion but mercurial temperament. One of the extremely interesting choices of the book is to paint him in a not particularly heroic, or even necessarily sympathetic, light. He is tenaciously idealistic, but also uses people, and when he is done with them, he simply moves on and never looks back, and this includes his wife and child.

Almost all of the characters in the book are similarly complex, and one of the core insights of the book is that in times of urgency, these kinds of things don't really matter so much, particularly in comparison to the question of whether or not, when the circumstances arise, you are prepared to take a risk on the side of humanity.

I say "almost all," because Walau, Heisler's mentor in the camp, serves as a kind of "epitome of the wisdom of the communist party." Reich-Ranicki cannily points out that this lapse in Seghers' strong tendency to paint from life, as it were, reflects one of the books cardinal flaws: the author's reluctance to criticize the party. One can easily relate this to questions of Seghers' own character, as seen in her decades-long refusal to criticize the crimes and abuses of the communists in the USSR and Europe, but this largely falls outside the scope of a consideration of this book.

In terms of the book's action, the question primarily revolves around whether or not Georg will make it to safety. The book is at its very best when it follows him closely, and provides a harrowing study of the psychology of flight. There is nothing adventuresome or heroic about his experience, but an experience of constant, almost-overwhelming terror. This is something that Seghers would have known all-too-well, based on her own experience with being interrogated by the Gestapo, fleeing Germany, and then fleeing France, the latter part of which was brought to life in her worthwhile novel Transit. The psychological acuity of her characterization of the experience of persecution and flight at times reaches Dostoevsky-like intensity, even if she is hardly the artist that Dostoevsky was.

There are three peculiarities about this book that must be mentioned. First, the cast of characters is enormous - there are dozens of important characters that you need to remember, and it is not always particularly easy to recall if it was the wife of Franz or Fritz or Hermann or Paul or Fiedler that was supposed to send the signal if everything is all right. Characters that have only been mentioned in passing resurface hundreds of pages later, and the author is clearly confident that you will immediately remember who they are. Some characters receive significant attention even though they have no discernible connection to the plot whatsoever. I'm thinking here especially of Ernst, a shepherd who inexplicably gets tens of pages-we even spend some time learning about his mother-even though all that could literally be cut from the book entirely, and it would not require a single additional change.

This gets to the second peculiarity of the book. Seghers clearly intends to tell the story not just of a heroic escapee or group of escapees, but of all the people who took part in these events. I note in rereading my review of Transit that I mentioned Seghers is deeply interested in representing milieu, and that is even more true in this book. It is about everyone involved and some of their neighbors who are not involved. It often struck me as a bit jarring, when suddenly the story switched gears to focus on a minor character. and told their story in what generally felt like a digression, an unnecessary digression. And I lost count of how many times I said, who is this person again? And why are we reading about their trip to the market? It was very, very many times.

I can only assume that this represents an intentional and ideologically-motivated choice by the author to counter the heroic individual narrative, and to tell a story in which communities of people are affected by repression, and to look at how all of them do, or do not, fight back. This is interesting in theory, but as a practice, it places heavy demands on the reader, and often felt distracting and arbitrary. I could not believe my eyes when, fifteen pages from the end, we are introduced to yet another character, and get a little story about her life. Seghers' appetite for introducing new characters vastly surpassed my interest in learning about them, and this practice frequently disrupted the momentum of the novel.

The third feature I would call out is that it often works by indirection. Major plot developments are communicated in passing in highly-elliptical statements or references. Many things are left unsaid, and have to be inferred. I know a reader who completely missed the fact that Heisler was a communist, and looking back on it, I realized that I only knew he was because it was mentioned that he met another character at some event, which I happened to look up and found that it comemorated the deaths of Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

I understand the reasons for all of these artistic choices, and none of them are invalid per se. But as a reader, I was constantly frustrated reading this book, trying to track who everyone was and what was going on. Part of this is a matter of taste. I definitely prefer a book that focuses on its modest group of characters and moves right along without a lot of digression. That said, this book has many more characters than Buddenbrooks, which is nearly twice its length.
]]> Schloß Gripsholm 1796695 141 Kurt Tucholsky 3938484713 Mesoscope 5 german, literature Schloß Gripsholm is so saturated with irony, its reader could be forgiven for mistaking it for a diversion, a light novel about two young lovers from Berlin who take a summer holiday in Sweden. But the mood is so light because the world was so heavy. As if to underscore this point, the book begins with an apparently arbitrary exchange of letters between its author and the publisher arguing about how the proceeds of the book are to be distributed. It produces a Verfremdung effect such as we might expect from Brecht, and underscores the degree to which the pleasures of repose depicted in the pages that follow are a flight from all of that-a flight that mostly succeeds.

Then in the last lines (note: this is no spoiler to reveal), bookending the action, we find a reference to Martje Flor, a folk hero of the low Germans, who remained defiantly cheerful in the face of the worst that history has to offer. We end the book as we begin, with a reminder that none of its pleasures come without a cost.

In his novel Die Kapuzinergruft, which written around the same time as Schloß Gripsholm, Joseph Roth has his hero, a well-to-do bohemian youth of Vienna, describe the ironic stance adopted by his friends:

"Aus unsern schweren Herzen kamen die leichten Witze, aus unserem Gefühl, daß wir Todgeweihte seien, eine törichte Lust an jeder Bestätigung des Lebens: an Bällen, am Heurigen, an Mädchen, am Essen, an Spazierfahrten, Tollheiten aller Art, sinnlosen Eskapaden, an selbstmörderischer Ironie, an ungezähmter Kritik, am Prater, am Riesenrad, am Kasperltheater, an Maskeraden, am Ballett, an leichtsinnigen Liebesspielen in den verschwiegenen Logen der Hofoper, an Manövern, die man versäumte, und sogar noch an jenen Krankheiten, die uns manchmal die Liebe bescherte."

This is a bit more üٰ than the irony that saturates Tucholsky's novel, but it's well within the same register - particularly the observation that the light humor came out of heavy hearts that felt doomed to die. It is a kind of gallows humor.

All of this forms the lightest of backgrounds to Schloß Gripsholm. Blink and you might miss it, but you will feel it in the aching melancholy that beautifully colors the languid days of sunbathing, carousing, and drinking. It is a melancholy that could almost be mistaken for nostalgia, were it not for the beginning and the end, and a certain adventure the protagonists undertake to try to help a child in distress.

This book is nine-tenths mood and only one-tenth story, with the latter serving largely as an occasion to convey the former, and a chance for the characters to sardonically deliver one brilliant quip after another about society and the world. Tucholsky is mostly known as a writer of Feuilletons, and this shows; he only just manages to generate enough story to hold the short book together.

I had quite the wrong idea about Tucholsky before reading this - somehow I thought he was supposed to be kind of a heavy social commentator. Instead, I find an ironist reminiscent of Heinrich Heine, with whom he has often been compared, and who is a favorite of mine. I almost wrote "also a favorite of mine," but not quite.

I found this book a delightful read, even if the frequent Plattdeutsch caused me more than one headache.]]> 3.83 1931 Schloß Gripsholm
author: Kurt Tucholsky
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1931
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: german, literature
review:
Irony functions by holding opposites within itself. Schloß Gripsholm is so saturated with irony, its reader could be forgiven for mistaking it for a diversion, a light novel about two young lovers from Berlin who take a summer holiday in Sweden. But the mood is so light because the world was so heavy. As if to underscore this point, the book begins with an apparently arbitrary exchange of letters between its author and the publisher arguing about how the proceeds of the book are to be distributed. It produces a Verfremdung effect such as we might expect from Brecht, and underscores the degree to which the pleasures of repose depicted in the pages that follow are a flight from all of that-a flight that mostly succeeds.

Then in the last lines (note: this is no spoiler to reveal), bookending the action, we find a reference to Martje Flor, a folk hero of the low Germans, who remained defiantly cheerful in the face of the worst that history has to offer. We end the book as we begin, with a reminder that none of its pleasures come without a cost.

In his novel Die Kapuzinergruft, which written around the same time as Schloß Gripsholm, Joseph Roth has his hero, a well-to-do bohemian youth of Vienna, describe the ironic stance adopted by his friends:

"Aus unsern schweren Herzen kamen die leichten Witze, aus unserem Gefühl, daß wir Todgeweihte seien, eine törichte Lust an jeder Bestätigung des Lebens: an Bällen, am Heurigen, an Mädchen, am Essen, an Spazierfahrten, Tollheiten aller Art, sinnlosen Eskapaden, an selbstmörderischer Ironie, an ungezähmter Kritik, am Prater, am Riesenrad, am Kasperltheater, an Maskeraden, am Ballett, an leichtsinnigen Liebesspielen in den verschwiegenen Logen der Hofoper, an Manövern, die man versäumte, und sogar noch an jenen Krankheiten, die uns manchmal die Liebe bescherte."

This is a bit more üٰ than the irony that saturates Tucholsky's novel, but it's well within the same register - particularly the observation that the light humor came out of heavy hearts that felt doomed to die. It is a kind of gallows humor.

All of this forms the lightest of backgrounds to Schloß Gripsholm. Blink and you might miss it, but you will feel it in the aching melancholy that beautifully colors the languid days of sunbathing, carousing, and drinking. It is a melancholy that could almost be mistaken for nostalgia, were it not for the beginning and the end, and a certain adventure the protagonists undertake to try to help a child in distress.

This book is nine-tenths mood and only one-tenth story, with the latter serving largely as an occasion to convey the former, and a chance for the characters to sardonically deliver one brilliant quip after another about society and the world. Tucholsky is mostly known as a writer of Feuilletons, and this shows; he only just manages to generate enough story to hold the short book together.

I had quite the wrong idea about Tucholsky before reading this - somehow I thought he was supposed to be kind of a heavy social commentator. Instead, I find an ironist reminiscent of Heinrich Heine, with whom he has often been compared, and who is a favorite of mine. I almost wrote "also a favorite of mine," but not quite.

I found this book a delightful read, even if the frequent Plattdeutsch caused me more than one headache.
]]> Die Blechtrommel 762756 782 Günter Grass 3423118210 Mesoscope 0 3.80 1959 Die Blechtrommel
author: Günter Grass
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/16
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: german, literature, on-hold, to-read
review:
I read enough to recognize this is a masterpiece, but the German's just too difficult for me at this point. I'll try again in a couple of years.
]]> <![CDATA[Der Fall Wagner: Zweite Auflage]]> 44484695
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.]]> 76 Friedrich Nietzsche 0341598488 Mesoscope 5 german, music, philosophy
This extraordinary essay is for people who know and value Wagner, Nietzsche, and nineteenth-century German culture, in that order. That Nietzsche knew and valued Wagner is an understatement, but here he works out the process by which he came to develop his own identity and worldview despite Wagner. In the process, he offers a model, especially to his German contemporaries, how to avoid being swallowed by profound thinkers who bring forth entire worlds out of themselves. And this warning is badly needed - countless enthusiasts have been swallowed whole by Kant, or Hegel, or Wagner, or Heidegger ... or Nietzsche ... and never found a thing of their own to say, in their own way.

For those who know the times, the book contains countless penetrating insights, not the least of which pertains to Goethe, whom Nietzsche regards in some sense as a counter-foil to Wagner.]]> 3.38 1888 Der Fall Wagner: Zweite Auflage
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1888
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: german, music, philosophy
review:
"Tatsächlich hat er sein ganzes Leben einen Satz wiederholt: daß seine Musik nicht nur Musik bedeute! Sondern mehr! Sondern unendlich viel mehr!... »Nicht nur Musik« � so redet kein Musiker."

This extraordinary essay is for people who know and value Wagner, Nietzsche, and nineteenth-century German culture, in that order. That Nietzsche knew and valued Wagner is an understatement, but here he works out the process by which he came to develop his own identity and worldview despite Wagner. In the process, he offers a model, especially to his German contemporaries, how to avoid being swallowed by profound thinkers who bring forth entire worlds out of themselves. And this warning is badly needed - countless enthusiasts have been swallowed whole by Kant, or Hegel, or Wagner, or Heidegger ... or Nietzsche ... and never found a thing of their own to say, in their own way.

For those who know the times, the book contains countless penetrating insights, not the least of which pertains to Goethe, whom Nietzsche regards in some sense as a counter-foil to Wagner.
]]> Abendländische Eschatologie 53864889
Occidental Eschatology, originally Jacob Taubes's doctoral thesis and the one book he published in his lifetime, seeks to renegotiate the historical synthesis and spiritual legacy of the West through the study of apocalypticism. Covering the origins of apocalypticism from Hebrew prophecy through antiquity and early Christianity to its medieval revival in Joachim of Fiore, Taubes reveals its later secularized forms in Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard. His aim is to show the lasting influence of revolutionary, messianic teleology on Western philosophy, history, and politics.

Combining painstaking scholarship with an unmatched scope of reference, Taubes takes a comprehensive approach to the twin focuses of political theology and philosophy of history. He argues that acceptance of the idea that time will one day come to an end has profound implications for political thought. If natural time is experienced as an eternal cycle of events, "history" is the realm of time in which human actions can make decisions to alter the progression of events. This philosophy asks that individuals take responsibility for their own actions and resist authority that claims to act on their behalf. Whereas universal history is written by the victors, the messianic or apocalyptic event enters history and gives a voice to the oppressed.

]]> 0 Jacob Taubes 388221256X Mesoscope 5
Like the author, the book is difficult to classify. I would probably settle for calling it something like an existential analysis of eschatology from the perspective of the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history, focusing on the temporal structure of historical consciousness as it relates to the anticipation of an end of time.

Taubes is famous for his untranslatable slogan (from a later interview) "Zeit heißt Frist," which you might render as "Time is limiting" or "delimiting." The core insight here is that the Occidental conception of time, and especially of historical time, is necessarily based on an eschatological structure, in which history stretches between a beginning and an end, and our actions have meaning or value only as conceived of within those terms. What we do, matters, because time is finite; time is limited. And, the structure of time as a limited span terminating in a final judgment is the underlying structure for our consciousness of time as a sphere in which we are indebted (verschuldet) to one another.

In Taubes's view, this structure holds true for European consciousness whether or not individuals are religious or believe in a literal or figurative end of time; either way, it is the implicit basis for core beliefs, such as the belief that we do not have infinite time to get things right.

The opening chapter of this book is a kind of free-from essay on the structure of eschatological consciousness that shows the influence of Carl Schmitt's Political Theology and Karl Löwith's Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Like those two authors, who deeply impressed the young author, Taubes is interested in understanding the structure of history and the larger meaning of its various moments.

The remainder of the book comprises a historical analysis of eschatology as it develops in European culture. He traces its evolution through watershed authors and works, including the prophetic and apocalyptic books of the Bible and the letters of Paul, the extracanonical gnostic apocalyptic literature of the late classical period, the works of Joachim of Fiore, and then on to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Even at its most conventional, the book is unusual for an academic work - you might think of the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment as an adjacent points of reference, though the through line of Taubes's thought is easier to track.

Taubes was born into a family of rabbis, which moved from Austria to Zürich during World War II, where Taubes was himself ordained as a rabbi in 1943. This book was published as his dissertation in 1947 for his doctorate in philosophy. He traveled throughout western Europe and the United States and settled in Berlin, where he would remain, teaching at the Freie Univerität until his death in 1987. His outsized impact as a public intellectual threatens to dwarf his intellectual achievements - he knew and worked with several major figures, including Carl Schmitt, Gershom Scholem, and Jürgen habermas, with whom he long served as the editor of Suhrkamp's Theorie imprint.

Jacob Taubes was clearly a genius, which is not a word I use lightly or often. But it should be noted that books written by geniuses are variable in quality. On the whole, I would say that this one is extraordinary, extraordinarily profound, and at times breathtaking in the clarity of thought and expression by which he can draw ideas together and extract the essential sense of complex arguments or entire historical movements in a few short paragraphs. He was deeply learned and demonstrates a fluent mastery over a vast range of material.

Taubes possessed a unique and extraordinary intellect, and while this book has influences, it has no predecessor or successor.]]> 5.00 1947 Abendländische Eschatologie
author: Jacob Taubes
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1947
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/25
date added: 2024/08/02
shelves: german, religion-mythology, philosophy, christianity, judaism
review:
This is a unique work by a singular genius - literally unique, in the sense that Jacob Taubes wrote no second book in the next forty years of his very active intellectual life. It is also unique in the sense that it clearly embodies the core of his thought, and, judging from articles and interviews that came decades later, that core would remain consistent for the rest of his life. I think it is likely that he wrote no second book because he put everything into this one.

Like the author, the book is difficult to classify. I would probably settle for calling it something like an existential analysis of eschatology from the perspective of the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history, focusing on the temporal structure of historical consciousness as it relates to the anticipation of an end of time.

Taubes is famous for his untranslatable slogan (from a later interview) "Zeit heißt Frist," which you might render as "Time is limiting" or "delimiting." The core insight here is that the Occidental conception of time, and especially of historical time, is necessarily based on an eschatological structure, in which history stretches between a beginning and an end, and our actions have meaning or value only as conceived of within those terms. What we do, matters, because time is finite; time is limited. And, the structure of time as a limited span terminating in a final judgment is the underlying structure for our consciousness of time as a sphere in which we are indebted (verschuldet) to one another.

In Taubes's view, this structure holds true for European consciousness whether or not individuals are religious or believe in a literal or figurative end of time; either way, it is the implicit basis for core beliefs, such as the belief that we do not have infinite time to get things right.

The opening chapter of this book is a kind of free-from essay on the structure of eschatological consciousness that shows the influence of Carl Schmitt's Political Theology and Karl Löwith's Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Like those two authors, who deeply impressed the young author, Taubes is interested in understanding the structure of history and the larger meaning of its various moments.

The remainder of the book comprises a historical analysis of eschatology as it develops in European culture. He traces its evolution through watershed authors and works, including the prophetic and apocalyptic books of the Bible and the letters of Paul, the extracanonical gnostic apocalyptic literature of the late classical period, the works of Joachim of Fiore, and then on to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Even at its most conventional, the book is unusual for an academic work - you might think of the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment as an adjacent points of reference, though the through line of Taubes's thought is easier to track.

Taubes was born into a family of rabbis, which moved from Austria to Zürich during World War II, where Taubes was himself ordained as a rabbi in 1943. This book was published as his dissertation in 1947 for his doctorate in philosophy. He traveled throughout western Europe and the United States and settled in Berlin, where he would remain, teaching at the Freie Univerität until his death in 1987. His outsized impact as a public intellectual threatens to dwarf his intellectual achievements - he knew and worked with several major figures, including Carl Schmitt, Gershom Scholem, and Jürgen habermas, with whom he long served as the editor of Suhrkamp's Theorie imprint.

Jacob Taubes was clearly a genius, which is not a word I use lightly or often. But it should be noted that books written by geniuses are variable in quality. On the whole, I would say that this one is extraordinary, extraordinarily profound, and at times breathtaking in the clarity of thought and expression by which he can draw ideas together and extract the essential sense of complex arguments or entire historical movements in a few short paragraphs. He was deeply learned and demonstrates a fluent mastery over a vast range of material.

Taubes possessed a unique and extraordinary intellect, and while this book has influences, it has no predecessor or successor.
]]> The Bernese Oberland 99368559 171 Arnold Henry Moore Lunn 0049140531 Mesoscope 2 switzerland
Having no interest in skiing whatsoever, I found about a quarter of the book useful, but the material in those few pages is invaluable. I'm delighted to have at last gotten some small sense of the history of the region, and look into the recent history of some of its major landmarks, including Grindelwald, Mürren, Kandersteg, Interlaken, and others.

I'm giving this book a net negative review because Lunn shows himself to be rather a stuffy bore, somewhat self-aggrandizing and prone to extravagance in his writing. He also pointlessly interjects his reactionary political commentary at several points - he was apparently an admirer of Franco, and an arch-conservative. One can pick this up readily enough from his numerous references to any kind of centralized government bureaucracy as a "Cult of Moloch," and his extraordinarily off-color joke that some English gentlemen of his acquaintance consider "Africa to begin at Normandy," meaning, of course, the world becomes savage just across the channel. Like many other men who spend their lives in leisure, he has an outsized hostility toward the welfare state, and a gnawing fear that it robs people of the good, clean love of an honest day's work. It's noxious stuff, and a complete distraction.]]> 2.00 1973 The Bernese Oberland
author: Arnold Henry Moore Lunn
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 2.00
book published: 1973
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: switzerland
review:
I picked up this book at a second-hand shop in London. Like so many, I absolutely love the Berner Oberland, and I have found to my surprise that I can find very little written about it in either German or English, except for trail guides. And so I was happy to find it, and this book is not without its charms. It was published in 1958 by one Sir Arnold Lunn, apparently a gentleman of means, as he dedicated his life to mountain climbing, hiking, and, especially, skiing. He apparently conceived of this book as a guide, but it's really a mishmash of memoir, anecdote, regional history, and record of various famous ski runs and peak ascents.

Having no interest in skiing whatsoever, I found about a quarter of the book useful, but the material in those few pages is invaluable. I'm delighted to have at last gotten some small sense of the history of the region, and look into the recent history of some of its major landmarks, including Grindelwald, Mürren, Kandersteg, Interlaken, and others.

I'm giving this book a net negative review because Lunn shows himself to be rather a stuffy bore, somewhat self-aggrandizing and prone to extravagance in his writing. He also pointlessly interjects his reactionary political commentary at several points - he was apparently an admirer of Franco, and an arch-conservative. One can pick this up readily enough from his numerous references to any kind of centralized government bureaucracy as a "Cult of Moloch," and his extraordinarily off-color joke that some English gentlemen of his acquaintance consider "Africa to begin at Normandy," meaning, of course, the world becomes savage just across the channel. Like many other men who spend their lives in leisure, he has an outsized hostility toward the welfare state, and a gnawing fear that it robs people of the good, clean love of an honest day's work. It's noxious stuff, and a complete distraction.
]]> <![CDATA[Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere (German Edition)]]> 58597974
Klaus Mann, the second child of Thomas Mann, was born in Munich in 1906. He began writing short stories and articles in 1924, and within a year was a theatrical critic for a Berlin newspaper. In 1925 both a volume of short stories and his first novel, THE PIOUS DANCE, were published. His sister, Erika, to whom he was very close, was in the cast of his first play, ANJA AND ESTHER. Mann left Germany in 1933 and lived in Amsterdam until 1936, during which time he became a Czechoslovakian citizen, having been deprived of his German citizenship by the Nazis. He moved to America in 1936, living in Princeton, New Jersey, and New York City. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943. He died at the age of forty-two in Cannes, France. Robin Smyth was a European correspondent for the London Observer.]]> 378 Klaus Mann 3751969837 Mesoscope 5 german, literature
Klaus Mann tells the harrowing story of the transformation of German society between the mid-twenties and early thirties as experienced by an actor of moderate talent who goes by the name of Hendrik Höfgen. This character, I later learned, was based on the actor Gustaf Gründgens, and though Mann denied it, all of the major characters appear to have real-life counterparts, including Erika and Thomas Mann, Gottfried Benn, and Joseph Göbels.

Written in exile in the Netherlands in 1936, the author poured all of his scorn and anguish onto the page at the barbaric absurdity and absurd barbarism of the Nazi party, and the degree to which the vast majority of Germans adapted themselves piecemeal to accommodate the new political realities, selling their souls one compromise at a time.

The style of the book is quite straightforward, but that fits the topic. I also must say that I was surprised by how refreshing I found it, to see a German-speaking author confront Nazism head on, without any philosophical speculation, thick layers of symbolism, or experimental engagements with ineffability or memory or composite identity. And I cannot help but think that it is in part because this book is so plain-spoken, such a matter-of-fact description of what went on, that the book was banned for a few decades in Western Germany, after Gründgens's adopted son sued the publisher for slander. German society allows little room for embarrassment.

I think this novel does an extraordinary job of demonstrating the moral, psychological, political, and economic calculus that goes into a society inching its way toward genocidal autocracy. All-too-many of the dynamics carefully portrayed by this book are familiar today in my own home country of the United States, and that made for uneasy reading. I was particularly struck by the strong role that resentment played in the psychology of Nazi enthusiasts. Fortunately, there are obvious and substantial differences as well - in particular, the key role of normalizing political violence is quite distinct.

To profess the disbelief that things such as Nazism could "still happen" in the twentieth century, wrote Walter Benjamin, is not philosophical. It is merely a confession that one's conception of history is inadequate. This is just as true in the twenty-first century.]]> 5.00 1936 Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere (German Edition)
author: Klaus Mann
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1936
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: german, literature
review:
I don't usually hear this book mentioned in the company of great German novels of the twentieth century, but I have to say I found it very great, and within the compass of its conception, nearly perfect. I was surprised.

Klaus Mann tells the harrowing story of the transformation of German society between the mid-twenties and early thirties as experienced by an actor of moderate talent who goes by the name of Hendrik Höfgen. This character, I later learned, was based on the actor Gustaf Gründgens, and though Mann denied it, all of the major characters appear to have real-life counterparts, including Erika and Thomas Mann, Gottfried Benn, and Joseph Göbels.

Written in exile in the Netherlands in 1936, the author poured all of his scorn and anguish onto the page at the barbaric absurdity and absurd barbarism of the Nazi party, and the degree to which the vast majority of Germans adapted themselves piecemeal to accommodate the new political realities, selling their souls one compromise at a time.

The style of the book is quite straightforward, but that fits the topic. I also must say that I was surprised by how refreshing I found it, to see a German-speaking author confront Nazism head on, without any philosophical speculation, thick layers of symbolism, or experimental engagements with ineffability or memory or composite identity. And I cannot help but think that it is in part because this book is so plain-spoken, such a matter-of-fact description of what went on, that the book was banned for a few decades in Western Germany, after Gründgens's adopted son sued the publisher for slander. German society allows little room for embarrassment.

I think this novel does an extraordinary job of demonstrating the moral, psychological, political, and economic calculus that goes into a society inching its way toward genocidal autocracy. All-too-many of the dynamics carefully portrayed by this book are familiar today in my own home country of the United States, and that made for uneasy reading. I was particularly struck by the strong role that resentment played in the psychology of Nazi enthusiasts. Fortunately, there are obvious and substantial differences as well - in particular, the key role of normalizing political violence is quite distinct.

To profess the disbelief that things such as Nazism could "still happen" in the twentieth century, wrote Walter Benjamin, is not philosophical. It is merely a confession that one's conception of history is inadequate. This is just as true in the twenty-first century.
]]> <![CDATA[Gilgamesh: A New English Version]]> 138371 In the ancient city of Uruk, the tyrannical King Gilgamesh tramples citizens "like a wild bull". The gods send an untamed man named Enkidu to control the ruthless king, but after fighting, Enkidu and Gilgamesh become great friends and embark on a series of adventures. They kill fearsome creatures before Enkidu succumbs to disease, leaving Gilgamesh despondent and alone. Eventually, Gilgamesh moves forward, and his quest becomes a soul-searching journey of self-discovery.

Mitchell's treatment of this extraordinary work is the finest yet, surpassing previous versions in its preservation of the wisdom and beauty of the original.

©2004 Stephen Mitchell (P)2004 Recorded Books LLC]]> 290 Anonymous Mesoscope 5 Note: This review covers Stephen Mitchell's Gilgamesh: A New English Version and David Ferry's Gilgamesh; A New Rendering in English Verse. ŷ does not appear to support reviewing multiple translations of the same work.

Stephen Mitchell's version - five stars

Not a translation, Mitchell used multiple editions of the ancient Akkadian epic as the basis for this unrhymed verse interpretation. On the surface the Gilgamesh epic belongs to the unsophisticated monster-slaying hero tale, but a closer reading reveals psychological richness and insight of considerable depth and power. It's also interesting to the student of comparative religions in its many correspondences with the stories of Joseph and Noah.

Comparing this edition with literal translations, I see that Mitchell has expertly rendered a highly-readable edition that I will gladly return to. Belongs on the shelf near Seamus Heaney's Beowulf.

David Ferry's version - three stars

Like Mitchell's version, Ferry's rendition is not a translation, but a poetic re-rendering, and like Mitchell's version, it is heavily based on the scholarly translation by E. A. Speiser found in Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts. If you have a serious interest in this material and don't already own Pritchard's book, you should definitely get it first.

In contrast to Mitchell's version, which primarily aims to smooth out the story's pockmarked surface, Ferry takes much more aggressive liberties with the text in the service of rendering a more poetic version. I will confess that other than certain passages, I did not particularly hear or feel much poetic force in his version, however. It appears to be basically written in an indifferent pentameter, but lines vary so regularly and so strongly from one another in scansion, one hardly notices it's in verse.

In general, I strongly prefer sticking close to the source, so it vexed me when, for example, in telling the story of how Gilgamesh travels through the gate of the sun to the netherworld, Ferry simply omits the fact that the hero has to race through it, or he will be caught by the sun and burned.

There are times when the poetical force of a new rendition warrants extensive changes, such as in Christopher Logue's stupendous re-imagining of the Iliad in War Music, but I don't think Ferry's work rises to that level. The majority of it read to me as little better than a flat translation of the original, and that doesn't justify the many liberties he took with the story.]]> 3.87 -1200 Gilgamesh: A New English Version
author: Anonymous
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.87
book published: -1200
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/17
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves: mesopotamia, religion-mythology
review:
Note: This review covers Stephen Mitchell's Gilgamesh: A New English Version and David Ferry's Gilgamesh; A New Rendering in English Verse. ŷ does not appear to support reviewing multiple translations of the same work.

Stephen Mitchell's version - five stars

Not a translation, Mitchell used multiple editions of the ancient Akkadian epic as the basis for this unrhymed verse interpretation. On the surface the Gilgamesh epic belongs to the unsophisticated monster-slaying hero tale, but a closer reading reveals psychological richness and insight of considerable depth and power. It's also interesting to the student of comparative religions in its many correspondences with the stories of Joseph and Noah.

Comparing this edition with literal translations, I see that Mitchell has expertly rendered a highly-readable edition that I will gladly return to. Belongs on the shelf near Seamus Heaney's Beowulf.

David Ferry's version - three stars

Like Mitchell's version, Ferry's rendition is not a translation, but a poetic re-rendering, and like Mitchell's version, it is heavily based on the scholarly translation by E. A. Speiser found in Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts. If you have a serious interest in this material and don't already own Pritchard's book, you should definitely get it first.

In contrast to Mitchell's version, which primarily aims to smooth out the story's pockmarked surface, Ferry takes much more aggressive liberties with the text in the service of rendering a more poetic version. I will confess that other than certain passages, I did not particularly hear or feel much poetic force in his version, however. It appears to be basically written in an indifferent pentameter, but lines vary so regularly and so strongly from one another in scansion, one hardly notices it's in verse.

In general, I strongly prefer sticking close to the source, so it vexed me when, for example, in telling the story of how Gilgamesh travels through the gate of the sun to the netherworld, Ferry simply omits the fact that the hero has to race through it, or he will be caught by the sun and burned.

There are times when the poetical force of a new rendition warrants extensive changes, such as in Christopher Logue's stupendous re-imagining of the Iliad in War Music, but I don't think Ferry's work rises to that level. The majority of it read to me as little better than a flat translation of the original, and that doesn't justify the many liberties he took with the story.
]]> <![CDATA[The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Volume 2) (The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path, the Lamrim Chenmo)]]> 1061686 The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lam rim chen mo) is one of the brightest jewels in the world's treasury of sacred literature. The author Tsong-kha-pa (1357�1419) completed this masterpiece in 1402 and it soon became one of the most renowned works of spiritual practice and philosophy in the world of Tibetan Buddhism. Tsong-kha-pa took great pains to base his incisive insights on the classical Indian Buddhist literature, illustrating his points with classical citations as well as with sayings of the masters of the earlier Kadampa tradition. In this way, the text demonstrates clearly how Tibetan Buddhism carefully preserved and developed the Indian Buddhist traditions. Volume One covers all practices that are prerequisite for developing the spirit of enlightenment (bodhicitta). Volume Two explains how to train in the six perfections in order to develop the heart of compassion indispensable for any student who wants to put the Dharma into practice. Volume Three contains a presentation of the two most important topics to be found in the Great Treatise: meditative serenity (shamatha) and supramundane insight into the nature of reality (vipasyana).]]> 300 Tsongkhapa 1559391685 Mesoscope 5 buddhism, tibet, favorites The Great Treatise as a Whole

Although Robert Thurman is disposed to ebullience, I wholeheartedly agree with his assessment that Tsong Khapa's Great Treatise is "one of the greatest religious or secular works in the library of our human heritage." It is a masterpiece of clarity, beauty, and utility, presenting the great scholar-yogi's overview of the stages of practice based on sutra and the Indian and Tibetan commentaries, from its initial stages to the its most profound contemplations on the final nature of reality.

Deriving from the Indian tradition of Prajnaparamita commentarial literature, the Great Treatise offers a comprehensive overview of Buddhist thought, organized into a graded series of contemplations and practices and presented in a progression ranging from the fundamental practices that can be understood and carried out by anyone, and proceeding in an ascending hierarchy to more demanding practices for beings of "higher capacity."

The practices are generally presented in the sequence in which any yogi would undertake them, beginning with refuge, moving on through contemplations of the inevitability of death, and on to the development of compassion and so on, though the principle organizational principle is how each practice is regarded with respect to the necessary capacity to undertake it, as well as the degree of resolution it affords into the nature of reality. For example, the practices of concentrating the mind in meditation are the second to last topic in the series, but it is one of the first practices any yogi would need to undertake, and serves as a foundation for most of the rest. Without meditative stability, a yogi cannot focus sufficiently to undertake the various contemplations laid out in this treatise.

Generally speaking, the Great Treatise, like the rest of the Prajnaparamita literature, is treated by Gelukpa monks more like a encyclopedic compendium of practices and positions than an actual series of practices to be programmatically followed - at least according to Georges Dreyfus's observations. Nonetheless, the Great Treatise certainly can be taken as a core guide to practice, and I daresay that approach is particularly useful for lay people.

It is also particularly relevant for people who wish to undertake practice based on sutra and Indo-Tibetan commentaries, rather than taking the tantic path. Following the example of the Bengali Kadampa reformer Jowo Atisha, Tsong Khapa scrupulously distinguishes between the practices based on sutra and the practices based on tantra, emphasizing that they should be kept separate. Despite ultimately being concordant, the way they talk about the same concepts is sufficiently different that blending them is a cause of deep confusion, in his view.

I have read a great deal of Tsong Khapa's writing, and this work in particular stands out to me for its beguiling clarity and profundity. I can get into hashing out the differences in the object of negation as posited by the Svatantrika-Sautrantika-Madhyamikas versus the Prasangika-Madhyikas as much as the next guy, but this work is of obvious and great immediate existential relevance to anyone. It is superbly translated by a team of terrific scholars, most of whom have produced other writings I have greatly enjoyed. It is a masterpiece, and a cornerstone of the Tibetan tradition.


Volume Two

This volume presents teachings for beings of "greater capacity," i.e., those capable of entering the Great Vehicle practices of universal liberation. The principle aim of these practices is to arouse the mind of enlightenment, which is a powerful determination that one will attain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, and remain engaged in cyclic existence for as long as one may be of service. It is perhaps best summarized in a classic verse of Shantideva from his "Engaging in the Bodhisattva Deeds":

As long as space endures,
As long as sentient beings remain,
May I remain
In order to help them.

The basis for developing this powerful motivation is the development of love and compassion, where love is understood as the desire for all beings to be happy, and compassion is understood as the desire for all beings to be free of suffering. According to the tradition explicated by this work, when those two feelings are extended without partiality to all sentient beings by one who is already grounded in the preliminary trainings of renunciation, comprehending the faults of cyclic existence, and so forth, then one has awakened the mind of enlightenment.

The actual path leading to awakening can then be undertaken in a series of practices that are epitomized by the Mahayana "Six Perfections," which are generosity, ethical discipline, patience or endurance, joyful perseverance or enthusiasm, meditative concentration, and wisdom - specifically the wisdom recognizing the final nature of all phenomena.

In this volume, Tsong Khapa presents an encyclopedic series of contemplations and meditative techniques that help practitioners arouse the mind of enlightenment, compassion, and love, and then cultivate the first four of the six perfections. It also includes an overview of concentration and wisdom, which are treated at far greater depth in the third and final volume. There is also a brief chapter on how to effectively gather disciples.

What I personally find most helpful in this volume are the chapters on the mind of enlightenment, love, and compassion - they are excellent. I didn't get as much from his analysis of the first of the four perfections, which draw very heavily from Shantideva's masterpiece, but present them in a rather more schematic and didactic format that doesn't particularly add much for me.]]> 4.67 2002 The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Volume 2) (The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path, the Lamrim Chenmo)
author: Tsongkhapa
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2017/04/15
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves: buddhism, tibet, favorites
review:
The Great Treatise as a Whole

Although Robert Thurman is disposed to ebullience, I wholeheartedly agree with his assessment that Tsong Khapa's Great Treatise is "one of the greatest religious or secular works in the library of our human heritage." It is a masterpiece of clarity, beauty, and utility, presenting the great scholar-yogi's overview of the stages of practice based on sutra and the Indian and Tibetan commentaries, from its initial stages to the its most profound contemplations on the final nature of reality.

Deriving from the Indian tradition of Prajnaparamita commentarial literature, the Great Treatise offers a comprehensive overview of Buddhist thought, organized into a graded series of contemplations and practices and presented in a progression ranging from the fundamental practices that can be understood and carried out by anyone, and proceeding in an ascending hierarchy to more demanding practices for beings of "higher capacity."

The practices are generally presented in the sequence in which any yogi would undertake them, beginning with refuge, moving on through contemplations of the inevitability of death, and on to the development of compassion and so on, though the principle organizational principle is how each practice is regarded with respect to the necessary capacity to undertake it, as well as the degree of resolution it affords into the nature of reality. For example, the practices of concentrating the mind in meditation are the second to last topic in the series, but it is one of the first practices any yogi would need to undertake, and serves as a foundation for most of the rest. Without meditative stability, a yogi cannot focus sufficiently to undertake the various contemplations laid out in this treatise.

Generally speaking, the Great Treatise, like the rest of the Prajnaparamita literature, is treated by Gelukpa monks more like a encyclopedic compendium of practices and positions than an actual series of practices to be programmatically followed - at least according to Georges Dreyfus's observations. Nonetheless, the Great Treatise certainly can be taken as a core guide to practice, and I daresay that approach is particularly useful for lay people.

It is also particularly relevant for people who wish to undertake practice based on sutra and Indo-Tibetan commentaries, rather than taking the tantic path. Following the example of the Bengali Kadampa reformer Jowo Atisha, Tsong Khapa scrupulously distinguishes between the practices based on sutra and the practices based on tantra, emphasizing that they should be kept separate. Despite ultimately being concordant, the way they talk about the same concepts is sufficiently different that blending them is a cause of deep confusion, in his view.

I have read a great deal of Tsong Khapa's writing, and this work in particular stands out to me for its beguiling clarity and profundity. I can get into hashing out the differences in the object of negation as posited by the Svatantrika-Sautrantika-Madhyamikas versus the Prasangika-Madhyikas as much as the next guy, but this work is of obvious and great immediate existential relevance to anyone. It is superbly translated by a team of terrific scholars, most of whom have produced other writings I have greatly enjoyed. It is a masterpiece, and a cornerstone of the Tibetan tradition.


Volume Two

This volume presents teachings for beings of "greater capacity," i.e., those capable of entering the Great Vehicle practices of universal liberation. The principle aim of these practices is to arouse the mind of enlightenment, which is a powerful determination that one will attain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, and remain engaged in cyclic existence for as long as one may be of service. It is perhaps best summarized in a classic verse of Shantideva from his "Engaging in the Bodhisattva Deeds":

As long as space endures,
As long as sentient beings remain,
May I remain
In order to help them.

The basis for developing this powerful motivation is the development of love and compassion, where love is understood as the desire for all beings to be happy, and compassion is understood as the desire for all beings to be free of suffering. According to the tradition explicated by this work, when those two feelings are extended without partiality to all sentient beings by one who is already grounded in the preliminary trainings of renunciation, comprehending the faults of cyclic existence, and so forth, then one has awakened the mind of enlightenment.

The actual path leading to awakening can then be undertaken in a series of practices that are epitomized by the Mahayana "Six Perfections," which are generosity, ethical discipline, patience or endurance, joyful perseverance or enthusiasm, meditative concentration, and wisdom - specifically the wisdom recognizing the final nature of all phenomena.

In this volume, Tsong Khapa presents an encyclopedic series of contemplations and meditative techniques that help practitioners arouse the mind of enlightenment, compassion, and love, and then cultivate the first four of the six perfections. It also includes an overview of concentration and wisdom, which are treated at far greater depth in the third and final volume. There is also a brief chapter on how to effectively gather disciples.

What I personally find most helpful in this volume are the chapters on the mind of enlightenment, love, and compassion - they are excellent. I didn't get as much from his analysis of the first of the four perfections, which draw very heavily from Shantideva's masterpiece, but present them in a rather more schematic and didactic format that doesn't particularly add much for me.
]]> <![CDATA[Die Maßnahme: Zwei Fassungen, Anmerkungen]]> 241116 107 bertholt-brecht 3518120581 Mesoscope 5 drama, german Little Organon and Dialectical Theater.

This play consists of the report of four communist agitators from Moscow who were sent to China to foment revolution. During their time there, they enlisted a local agent to help spread propaganda and organize worker demonstrations, and at some point, the four agitators end up liquidating their agent, for reasons they explain over the course of the narrative.

When reporting to their comrades, the four agitators speak as one, and periodically reenact key events, and each time they do so, they shift roles, so that their agent is played by a different agitator each time. Periodically, a classical chorus comments on the action. According to Brecht's intentions, the audience is to collectively play the chorus, and they were expected to attend rehearsals for weeks.

All of the conventions of performance are therefore reconfigured in a series of extremely interesting ways, which have a direct relevance to the content of the play, which functions as a kind of social laboratory for considering the many deep questions raised by the events it describes. But in spite of all this adventurous formal experimentation, the play remains a deeply human and affective story at its core, and this is the miracle that Brecht somehow pulls off in his great works that nearly defies the imagination.

It's a short work, and well worth reading, especially if you have any interest at all in Brecht's theory. It's extremely illuminating with respect to his methods and ideas.]]> 3.38 1930 Die Maßnahme: Zwei Fassungen, Anmerkungen
author: bertholt-brecht
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1930
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/04
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves: drama, german
review:
Brecht wrote this fascinating play in the early 30s at the highpoint of his experimentalist phase, during the Weimar years when challenging works of art still commanded wide attention. It is a prime exemplar of his theory of drama, and exemplifies the ideas presented in works like Little Organon and Dialectical Theater.

This play consists of the report of four communist agitators from Moscow who were sent to China to foment revolution. During their time there, they enlisted a local agent to help spread propaganda and organize worker demonstrations, and at some point, the four agitators end up liquidating their agent, for reasons they explain over the course of the narrative.

When reporting to their comrades, the four agitators speak as one, and periodically reenact key events, and each time they do so, they shift roles, so that their agent is played by a different agitator each time. Periodically, a classical chorus comments on the action. According to Brecht's intentions, the audience is to collectively play the chorus, and they were expected to attend rehearsals for weeks.

All of the conventions of performance are therefore reconfigured in a series of extremely interesting ways, which have a direct relevance to the content of the play, which functions as a kind of social laboratory for considering the many deep questions raised by the events it describes. But in spite of all this adventurous formal experimentation, the play remains a deeply human and affective story at its core, and this is the miracle that Brecht somehow pulls off in his great works that nearly defies the imagination.

It's a short work, and well worth reading, especially if you have any interest at all in Brecht's theory. It's extremely illuminating with respect to his methods and ideas.
]]> <![CDATA[Kleines Organon für das Theater]]> 25515493 � 57 Bertolt Brecht Mesoscope 3 philosophy, drama Poetics, which argues that that theater essentially functions by the audience's identification with the characters, such that we participate in their emotional lives. As an alternative, Brecht argues on behalf of the role of alienation (Verfremdung), by which the audience is made consciously aware of the artifice of the proceedings, so that they may have a rational-critical relationship to the events depicted. In that way, theatrical productions in all senses take on the character of a laboratory experiment. Instead of being carried along by the force of the narrative, audience members are prompted to analyze and criticize it. Instead of putting on performances in the stodgy old ways, actors, set designers, choreographers, composers, et cetera are to consciously undertake practices so that they can see many different sides of each character, many possibilities for their meaning and representation, and so forth.

In this sense, Brecht argues that theater should be scientific, as befits the 'children of the current scientific age.' Ah, I remember a time even in my own life when intellectuals could reasonably take it for granted that we are in fact living in a 'scientific age,' not in a time where every single measurement can and often is politicized.

But I digress. When Brecht says 'scientific,' he is often referring to the analysis of history offered by dialectical materialism. To my ears, referring to such an approach as 'scientific' is risible - is there any cleric of any church more dogmatic than a mid-twentieth century Marxist? And indeed, Brecht takes the conclusions of Marx's writings on political economy and ideology as if they deserve the same status as Newton's laws of motion.

Generally speaking, high German culture of the last 150 years has been divided into two tendencies. The inward-facing existential-phenomenological tradition exemplified by figures such as Rilke and Heidegger is ultimately concerned with problems of meaning and value. The outward-facing social-critical tradition exemplified by the Frankfurt School is ultimately concerned with moral and social justice. Brecht, in his critique of the inwardness of Aristotle, seeks to appropriate theater entirely into the latter sphere. Theater is to be entertaining, yes - he insists on this - but also pedagogic and pro-social, ultimately serving the cause of emancipation.

In many respects, this argument would almost seem to justify theater as a form of propaganda to be administered by the party apparatus for the education of the masses, and he does come dangerously close to this way of thinking. Such theater, of course, is the exact opposite of art. Brecht saves his vision from this sorry fate by insisting on the dynamic, progressive, open-ended character of dialectics. It is not that 'we' possess the truth and our job is to disseminate it. Rather, it is the task of theater to create a vital, entertaining context for the company and the audience alike to to cooperatively ask many questions in the spirit of an open-ended exploration, to challenge ourselves and each other to view the facts from many sides.

This is, I think, one of the most laudable aspects of Brecht's theory. At times, his description of how theater is to be produced starts to approach something like the para-theatrical experiments of Grotowski, who used the devices and techniques of theater for exploration. The difference, of course, is that Brecht's exploration is ultimately to be social-critical.

In my view, there is something ineradicably tedious about the vision of a social pedagogic theater, even one that is open-ended. The solemn insistence that the function of entertainment is to educate in pre-determined terms is stultifying, and there is something borderline coercive about appropriating art forms and depriving them of any claim to dwell in interiority or private experience, as if that would be socially irresponsible. Instead, we should use theater as a chance to study injustice. Such a view is extremely reductive.

In my opinion, it is also ultimately formed on a spurious philosophical assumption. As far as I follow Brecht, he views theatrical performance as a kind of microcosm of social life, and he regards identification with the action of the play as an analog of what Georg Lukacs called reification, in which we assume that reality as it seems is somehow necessary, and not the result of historically-mediated processes. Brecht argues that audience members who identify with theater in the Aristotelian mode are in a kind of trance, one which is parallel to the trance that the masses are in when they take the political and economic status quo for granted.

This parallel is assumed rather than demonstrated, and I think it's quite false. I take, for example, a film like Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory," and I pose the simple question: if I watch and enjoy that film in a conventional way, identifying with the characters and asking no critical questions about the historical age in which it is set, does that necessarily reinforce my accession to reification, to the social illusions that govern the inequitable distribution of power and wealth?

I think the answer is clearly "Of course not." The fact that I have a period of immersion neither means that I'm more susceptible to political propaganda, much less that "Paths of Glory" cannot be critical of the political status quo. The opposite is, in fact, obviously true.

You cannot simply say 'because of reification, immersion=bad, critical awareness=good'. Critical reason can be deployed to ignominious ends, and immersion can be used enroll people in the service of the highest human values.

There is a deeper problem with Brecht's theory, which is that I don't think he ultimately understands how his own drama functions - at least not the way it functions for me. The paradigmatic example he gives for his theater of estrangement is his own Mutter Courage, which I have both read and seen, and in fact, have seen a recording of a performance that Brecht himself directed with the Berliner Ensemble.

According to Brecht's theory, I am supposed to be startled by the fact that Mutter Courage is simultaneously a 'victim' of the Thirty Years' War and someone who makes her living by it; this is the kind of 'contradiction' that is supposed to generate critical self-consciousness, and provoke me to meditate on the contradictions inherent in that historical moment.

But I do not perceive that as a 'contradiction' in anything but the most trivial sense. Of course a person can be opposed to a war and also benefit from it. One can wish it would end, but also make do with the realities of the historical situation in which one finds oneself.

This is only a 'contradiction' if one adopts an extremely reductive view of life. If Brecht does indeed harbor such a reductive view - that one, for example, should be either 'for' the French Revolution, say, or 'against' it, and that anything else is a 'contradiction'- then he is lucky he has stumbled upon a theoretical device that obliges him to violate the simplicity of characterization that such a worldview warrants.

What appeals to me about Brecht is his capacity to write complex characters and moving drama, not that he alerts me to the inability of 17th-century states in Europe to overcome the very conditions that produced the destructive war. To me, the latter is trivial, and the former is profound.

What appeals to me about Brecht's theory is his insistence on its dynamism and that we take every opportunity to examine our perceptions and beliefs from many different angles. What I dislike about it is that his doctrinaire reliance on Marxist theory is reductive, and in many ways represents the very opposite impulse.

Few ideas have been more harmful to German philosophy in the last two hundred years than the idea that it should be 'scientific.' As a matter of practice, those who believe this the most are generally the least scientific in their actual thinking, for science is the opposite of dogma, and holds no traffic with certainty. Science is an open-ended and ongoing process of exploration, not the formulaic application of certain hypothetical laws. Where Brecht's theory is in accord with actual science, I find if of use. But where Brecht, like Hegel and Marx, views science dogmatically, I think he has lost his way.]]> 3.85 1949 Kleines Organon für das Theater
author: Bertolt Brecht
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1949
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/02
date added: 2024/07/02
shelves: philosophy, drama
review:
In this dense essay, Brecht lays out his vision for a Marxist theater of dialectical materialism. As is obliquely telegraphed by the title, it is intended as a critique of the Aristotelian theory of dramaturgy in Poetics, which argues that that theater essentially functions by the audience's identification with the characters, such that we participate in their emotional lives. As an alternative, Brecht argues on behalf of the role of alienation (Verfremdung), by which the audience is made consciously aware of the artifice of the proceedings, so that they may have a rational-critical relationship to the events depicted. In that way, theatrical productions in all senses take on the character of a laboratory experiment. Instead of being carried along by the force of the narrative, audience members are prompted to analyze and criticize it. Instead of putting on performances in the stodgy old ways, actors, set designers, choreographers, composers, et cetera are to consciously undertake practices so that they can see many different sides of each character, many possibilities for their meaning and representation, and so forth.

In this sense, Brecht argues that theater should be scientific, as befits the 'children of the current scientific age.' Ah, I remember a time even in my own life when intellectuals could reasonably take it for granted that we are in fact living in a 'scientific age,' not in a time where every single measurement can and often is politicized.

But I digress. When Brecht says 'scientific,' he is often referring to the analysis of history offered by dialectical materialism. To my ears, referring to such an approach as 'scientific' is risible - is there any cleric of any church more dogmatic than a mid-twentieth century Marxist? And indeed, Brecht takes the conclusions of Marx's writings on political economy and ideology as if they deserve the same status as Newton's laws of motion.

Generally speaking, high German culture of the last 150 years has been divided into two tendencies. The inward-facing existential-phenomenological tradition exemplified by figures such as Rilke and Heidegger is ultimately concerned with problems of meaning and value. The outward-facing social-critical tradition exemplified by the Frankfurt School is ultimately concerned with moral and social justice. Brecht, in his critique of the inwardness of Aristotle, seeks to appropriate theater entirely into the latter sphere. Theater is to be entertaining, yes - he insists on this - but also pedagogic and pro-social, ultimately serving the cause of emancipation.

In many respects, this argument would almost seem to justify theater as a form of propaganda to be administered by the party apparatus for the education of the masses, and he does come dangerously close to this way of thinking. Such theater, of course, is the exact opposite of art. Brecht saves his vision from this sorry fate by insisting on the dynamic, progressive, open-ended character of dialectics. It is not that 'we' possess the truth and our job is to disseminate it. Rather, it is the task of theater to create a vital, entertaining context for the company and the audience alike to to cooperatively ask many questions in the spirit of an open-ended exploration, to challenge ourselves and each other to view the facts from many sides.

This is, I think, one of the most laudable aspects of Brecht's theory. At times, his description of how theater is to be produced starts to approach something like the para-theatrical experiments of Grotowski, who used the devices and techniques of theater for exploration. The difference, of course, is that Brecht's exploration is ultimately to be social-critical.

In my view, there is something ineradicably tedious about the vision of a social pedagogic theater, even one that is open-ended. The solemn insistence that the function of entertainment is to educate in pre-determined terms is stultifying, and there is something borderline coercive about appropriating art forms and depriving them of any claim to dwell in interiority or private experience, as if that would be socially irresponsible. Instead, we should use theater as a chance to study injustice. Such a view is extremely reductive.

In my opinion, it is also ultimately formed on a spurious philosophical assumption. As far as I follow Brecht, he views theatrical performance as a kind of microcosm of social life, and he regards identification with the action of the play as an analog of what Georg Lukacs called reification, in which we assume that reality as it seems is somehow necessary, and not the result of historically-mediated processes. Brecht argues that audience members who identify with theater in the Aristotelian mode are in a kind of trance, one which is parallel to the trance that the masses are in when they take the political and economic status quo for granted.

This parallel is assumed rather than demonstrated, and I think it's quite false. I take, for example, a film like Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory," and I pose the simple question: if I watch and enjoy that film in a conventional way, identifying with the characters and asking no critical questions about the historical age in which it is set, does that necessarily reinforce my accession to reification, to the social illusions that govern the inequitable distribution of power and wealth?

I think the answer is clearly "Of course not." The fact that I have a period of immersion neither means that I'm more susceptible to political propaganda, much less that "Paths of Glory" cannot be critical of the political status quo. The opposite is, in fact, obviously true.

You cannot simply say 'because of reification, immersion=bad, critical awareness=good'. Critical reason can be deployed to ignominious ends, and immersion can be used enroll people in the service of the highest human values.

There is a deeper problem with Brecht's theory, which is that I don't think he ultimately understands how his own drama functions - at least not the way it functions for me. The paradigmatic example he gives for his theater of estrangement is his own Mutter Courage, which I have both read and seen, and in fact, have seen a recording of a performance that Brecht himself directed with the Berliner Ensemble.

According to Brecht's theory, I am supposed to be startled by the fact that Mutter Courage is simultaneously a 'victim' of the Thirty Years' War and someone who makes her living by it; this is the kind of 'contradiction' that is supposed to generate critical self-consciousness, and provoke me to meditate on the contradictions inherent in that historical moment.

But I do not perceive that as a 'contradiction' in anything but the most trivial sense. Of course a person can be opposed to a war and also benefit from it. One can wish it would end, but also make do with the realities of the historical situation in which one finds oneself.

This is only a 'contradiction' if one adopts an extremely reductive view of life. If Brecht does indeed harbor such a reductive view - that one, for example, should be either 'for' the French Revolution, say, or 'against' it, and that anything else is a 'contradiction'- then he is lucky he has stumbled upon a theoretical device that obliges him to violate the simplicity of characterization that such a worldview warrants.

What appeals to me about Brecht is his capacity to write complex characters and moving drama, not that he alerts me to the inability of 17th-century states in Europe to overcome the very conditions that produced the destructive war. To me, the latter is trivial, and the former is profound.

What appeals to me about Brecht's theory is his insistence on its dynamism and that we take every opportunity to examine our perceptions and beliefs from many different angles. What I dislike about it is that his doctrinaire reliance on Marxist theory is reductive, and in many ways represents the very opposite impulse.

Few ideas have been more harmful to German philosophy in the last two hundred years than the idea that it should be 'scientific.' As a matter of practice, those who believe this the most are generally the least scientific in their actual thinking, for science is the opposite of dogma, and holds no traffic with certainty. Science is an open-ended and ongoing process of exploration, not the formulaic application of certain hypothetical laws. Where Brecht's theory is in accord with actual science, I find if of use. But where Brecht, like Hegel and Marx, views science dogmatically, I think he has lost his way.
]]> <![CDATA[Radetzkymarsch (Von Trotta Family, #1)]]> 76305 Radetzkymarsch gilt als das Hauptwerks des großen Epikers Joseph Roth.]]> 403 Joseph Roth 3423124776 Mesoscope 5 literature, german Radetzkymarsch was published, Joseph Roth wrote:

'Dear emperor! I have served you, I have buried you, I have, perhaps in arrogance, once attempted to depict you -- and I have survived you. But in death you are still stronger than I am. Forgive me my arrogance! I love all Austrian emperors: each that has followed you, and all that will follow you. But to you, my Emperor Franz Joseph, I pay my homage in person, because you are my childhood and my youth. Hail, emperor of my childhood! I have buried you: for me you shall never die!"

In the symbolic matrix of the human heart, an emperor, king, prophet or poet may come to stand for an entire age or nation of the Earth; not in the trivial sense of the historian using a king's name as a shorthand for a certain span of time, but in a way that is deeply felt, in which the life of a people seems to breathe in the very life of their exemplars. An emperor is not just a ruler, but the bearer of the archetype of his people, in which they may find themselves or lose themselves.

On one level, this is very much what Roth's most acclaimed novel is about, the last, great age of the Habsburg monarchy in Austria-Hungary, which was, for the novelist, the last great age of his own life. Written in years of dejection and alcoholism, with the pitch-black prospect of Nazi rule looming on the horizon, Roth harkens back to a vanished age, and communicates its forms of life in all of its complexity. And if the author deeply loved the now-departed emperor and the age of the book, as he emphatically insisted, this did not prevent him from probing the character of both with the penetrating and sometimes-merciless eye of a great artist. For this is no nostalgic or atavistic work yearning for the imagined springtime of life or a bygone age, but a hard novel of people who are frequently desperately unhappy, unable to find opportunities to express their thoughts and feelings even to themselves, surrounded by servile automatons, and devoid of any kind of meaningful inner life.

Radetzkymarsch tells the story of three generations of the men of the von Trotta family. (The various mothers scarcely receive a mention, as do any women, other than as love interests for the male characters.) The story kicks off at the Battle of Solferino, which, Wikipedia tells me, is the last major battle in which the rulers of the respective countries actually fought on the field. Here we already see what is felt by many of the characters as a kind of decline; generations of peace and the modernization of war subtly and gradually displace the traditional martial virtues that have prevailed among soldiers for many centuries.

In any event, the first of our Trottas saves the life of the emperor in what would seem to be an impulse arising more from his complete identification with his sense of duty as a soldier and a subject than any particular heroism he might possess. It is perhapts the same sense of duty with which his grandson, decades later, will agree to guarantee the gambling debts of a superior officer with a simple "Jawohl!"

In gratitude for his act, the "hero of Solferino" is ennobled, and his family rises to the level of petty nobility, serving as mid-tier bureaucrats in the state bureaucracy and as junior officers in the military. So their lives become bound up entirely with the forms and fortunes of the Habsburg state, and the real project of chronicling an age can begin.

For most of the novel's length, it consists primarily of a peripatetic look at the social milieu. The lives of its protagonists starts to function like a frame tale, as the novel is punctuated with numerous, long digressions analyzing episodes in the lives of this minor character or that before looping back to the main progression. I will admit that this is not my favorite part of the novel; I prefer a story that keeps focused on its principal characters, and do not love numerous digressions.

I will also say that to my taste, the allegorical character of some of its events are over-explained by its author, who at times seems to virtually shout at his reader "You see, the old man is actually the empire!" I generally prefer symbolic work to be handed with a lighter touch.

These are matters of taste, and I freely grant that what Roth does choose to do, he generally does with mastery. Ultimately, though, what redeems this book is its overpowering ending, which brings the whole thing into focus with a new intensity and depth of feeling, and which is a work of rare virtuosity. One genuine feels the profound depths of sadness felt by those witnessing the end of the world that they knew and loved.

Though I will admit, I am not certain what it was about this age that Roth loved so much, because so much of what happens in the book is so terrible, and so many of the lives he describes are so empty and unhappy. I can't help but compare it to Stefan Zweig's Die Welt von Gestern, which describes life in Vienna and Salzburg during the same time, and who portrays a culture overflowing with arts and ideas. There is not a trace of that here; the von Trottas for the most part live like ghosts shuffling through the forms of life they have been handed by their society, and every ten years or so they remember they have feelings, too.]]> 4.20 1932 Radetzkymarsch (Von Trotta Family, #1)
author: Joseph Roth
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: literature, german
review:
In a short essay called "In der Kapuzinergruft," probably written in 1935, a few years after Radetzkymarsch was published, Joseph Roth wrote:

'Dear emperor! I have served you, I have buried you, I have, perhaps in arrogance, once attempted to depict you -- and I have survived you. But in death you are still stronger than I am. Forgive me my arrogance! I love all Austrian emperors: each that has followed you, and all that will follow you. But to you, my Emperor Franz Joseph, I pay my homage in person, because you are my childhood and my youth. Hail, emperor of my childhood! I have buried you: for me you shall never die!"

In the symbolic matrix of the human heart, an emperor, king, prophet or poet may come to stand for an entire age or nation of the Earth; not in the trivial sense of the historian using a king's name as a shorthand for a certain span of time, but in a way that is deeply felt, in which the life of a people seems to breathe in the very life of their exemplars. An emperor is not just a ruler, but the bearer of the archetype of his people, in which they may find themselves or lose themselves.

On one level, this is very much what Roth's most acclaimed novel is about, the last, great age of the Habsburg monarchy in Austria-Hungary, which was, for the novelist, the last great age of his own life. Written in years of dejection and alcoholism, with the pitch-black prospect of Nazi rule looming on the horizon, Roth harkens back to a vanished age, and communicates its forms of life in all of its complexity. And if the author deeply loved the now-departed emperor and the age of the book, as he emphatically insisted, this did not prevent him from probing the character of both with the penetrating and sometimes-merciless eye of a great artist. For this is no nostalgic or atavistic work yearning for the imagined springtime of life or a bygone age, but a hard novel of people who are frequently desperately unhappy, unable to find opportunities to express their thoughts and feelings even to themselves, surrounded by servile automatons, and devoid of any kind of meaningful inner life.

Radetzkymarsch tells the story of three generations of the men of the von Trotta family. (The various mothers scarcely receive a mention, as do any women, other than as love interests for the male characters.) The story kicks off at the Battle of Solferino, which, Wikipedia tells me, is the last major battle in which the rulers of the respective countries actually fought on the field. Here we already see what is felt by many of the characters as a kind of decline; generations of peace and the modernization of war subtly and gradually displace the traditional martial virtues that have prevailed among soldiers for many centuries.

In any event, the first of our Trottas saves the life of the emperor in what would seem to be an impulse arising more from his complete identification with his sense of duty as a soldier and a subject than any particular heroism he might possess. It is perhapts the same sense of duty with which his grandson, decades later, will agree to guarantee the gambling debts of a superior officer with a simple "Jawohl!"

In gratitude for his act, the "hero of Solferino" is ennobled, and his family rises to the level of petty nobility, serving as mid-tier bureaucrats in the state bureaucracy and as junior officers in the military. So their lives become bound up entirely with the forms and fortunes of the Habsburg state, and the real project of chronicling an age can begin.

For most of the novel's length, it consists primarily of a peripatetic look at the social milieu. The lives of its protagonists starts to function like a frame tale, as the novel is punctuated with numerous, long digressions analyzing episodes in the lives of this minor character or that before looping back to the main progression. I will admit that this is not my favorite part of the novel; I prefer a story that keeps focused on its principal characters, and do not love numerous digressions.

I will also say that to my taste, the allegorical character of some of its events are over-explained by its author, who at times seems to virtually shout at his reader "You see, the old man is actually the empire!" I generally prefer symbolic work to be handed with a lighter touch.

These are matters of taste, and I freely grant that what Roth does choose to do, he generally does with mastery. Ultimately, though, what redeems this book is its overpowering ending, which brings the whole thing into focus with a new intensity and depth of feeling, and which is a work of rare virtuosity. One genuine feels the profound depths of sadness felt by those witnessing the end of the world that they knew and loved.

Though I will admit, I am not certain what it was about this age that Roth loved so much, because so much of what happens in the book is so terrible, and so many of the lives he describes are so empty and unhappy. I can't help but compare it to Stefan Zweig's Die Welt von Gestern, which describes life in Vienna and Salzburg during the same time, and who portrays a culture overflowing with arts and ideas. There is not a trace of that here; the von Trottas for the most part live like ghosts shuffling through the forms of life they have been handed by their society, and every ten years or so they remember they have feelings, too.
]]> <![CDATA[Creative Mythology (The Masks of God, #4)]]> 450350 1976, 730 pages, 5 by 8" 750 Joseph Campbell 0140043071 Mesoscope 5 religion-mythology
I think this is why, every time I talk about Campbell, I always feel the need to start with a kind of apology or justification, as his thoughts are very much out of season. I see him as the final major figure in a line, primarily German, that began with Herder and peaked in the 19th century - in broad terms, beginning with Idealism, flourishing in Romanticism, and culminating in early depth psychology and literary modernism. It is a movement whose chief impulse can be read as Romantic in M. H. Abraham’s sense, which is to say, “naturalizing the supernatural,� or reinterpreting the essential content of religious and mythological art and literature in natural or scientific terms, without reference to the transcendent or divine.

In this, the fourth volume of Campbell’s magnum opus The Masks of God, it is the movement out of the literal interpretation of mythological belief that he identifies as one of the two paradigmatic characteristics of our present-day circumstance. In his reading, as the progress of the material sciences made it increasingly untenable to hold to a literal interpretation of traditional rites and beliefs, the “mythogenic zone,� or traditional field in which mythological forms were encountered moved from the exterior to the interior world, and have been increasingly interpreted in psychological terms, figurative expressions of the inner truths of the psyche. The Forest Adventurous no longer figures in our best and most serious literature as the field of transformation - the locus of the mythological has moved to the interior world of dream and the unconscious.

This shift has especially been the movement of European thought since the early modern period, as various precepts of Biblical cosmology were shown to be factually false in a progressive series of discoveries by Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and so on. The modern has only a few available options - to deny the evidence of their senses and of reason and hold fast to a bronze age account of the world that contradicts in nearly every fundamental the scientific and technological world that surrounds them every day, to discard the whole of our mythological and religious inheritance as not literally true and therefore without value, or to reinterpret that inheritance in the light of our best understanding of how images function, based on a deep and comparative study of literature, art, and psychology.

Obviously Campbell takes up the last option, and rightfully so. One might be tempted to ignore the whole enterprise as a catalog of superstitions, but I think one would do so at their peril, in part because of the profound value these traditions have in providing orientation, support, and value in our experience of life, but also because humankind cannot be understood simply as animal rationale, and whether or not we like the irrational, it is an important part of what we are. Campbell himself expressed it best in volume one of Masks of God:

“Clearly mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible forms of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man's place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk.�

I think this is born out plainly enough in our daily headlines, as world leaders and crowds alike reenact myths of the former glory of their once-upon-a-time golden ages, with disastrous consequences. Fascism, for example, depends on the systematic failure to differentiate between history and myth.

We cannot, then, simply leave this whole matter alone, or else we cede one of the deepest forces shaping human history in its entirety to those who uncritically operate within its sphere, out of their own irrationality or out of cynicism, and then we see masses galvanized by the old signs of the unconscious. For a case study of a society in the thrall of an unconscious dependence on a set of archaic archetypes, see Germany, circa 1938.

On the rather more positive side, people continue to respond deeply to myths, for the simple reason that myths are about the things that matter to people. Many of the greatest and noblest works of human creativity are saturated with mythological themes, and it can only be for our benefit to understand how they function and why they elicit such a compelling response - why people are still, for example, fascinated by Greek tragedy, why people speak of Goethe’s Faust in hushed tones of reverence to this day, or why we can still feel in the deep heart’s core a recognition of something deeply and profoundly true in one of the Upanishads or in one of Paul’s letters.

The ultimate reference of myth, Campbell tells us, is timeless, because myth speaks to the common part of our human heritage that is constant, at least from the perspective of historical time. But its forms are manifold, and each new age finds its own particular modes of expression for the old mythological themes and images, each reflecting the unique priorities and values of the society which gives them shape.

This brings us to the second paradigmatic feature of our current situation viz. mythology and religion, which is the importance of the individual. In Campbell’s telling, the unique stress of European culture on the value of the individual as such first arose during the High Middle Ages, and is most clearly seen in continental Arthurian romance, and especially in the Parzifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach, dated to around 1215. Campbell devotes enormous attention to explicating this work in this book - some might say too long. Well over a hundred pages are dedicated to simply retelling the story of Parzifal, possibly because this volume predates the standard Sutto translation by some years.

In any case, Campbell gives a very compelling reading of von Eschenbach’s poem, arguing that it lays out a framework for understanding the ultimate source of value as a light that shines out from within, not from some “otherworldly beyond,� as Hegel put it, decreed by Blake’s “Nobodaddy.� He sees this as inaugurating the uniquely modern European stress put on the individual, which, he emphasizes, is not found in any other time or place.

In broad strokes I found Campbell’s argument persuasive, if sometimes open to challenge. I dimly recall reading his explanation at one point for why Ancient Greece and Rome do not qualify for esteeming the unique contents of the personality as a source and repository of value in itself, but I don’t remember the details. It also would seem that certain traditions of Japan place at least some value on individuality.

Campbell makes it clear that in his view, this framework holds the highest potential for individuals, and he takes certain artists as models exemplifying what such a life looks like, particularly James Joyce and Thomas Mann. I share his enthusiasm for Joyce and am rather cooler on Mann, whose Magic Mountain was interesting to me, but which I hardly experienced as a breakthrough work, or even a novel of the first tier.

Campbell has his favorites, and sometimes, I think, gives them attention out of proportion to their significance. In claiming that von Eschenbach is the greatest writer of his period, for example, and that he far outstrips Dante, he will find few supporters. And how is it possible, that in characterizing the artistic and spiritual horizon in which we find ourselves today, he could spend a hundred pages on Gottfried von Straßburg, but hardly a single paragraph on Shakespeare? The silence there is deafening, and I frankly don’t know what to make of it.

There is also a paradoxical tension in Campbell’s work that he apparently didn’t recognize, but I think needs to be stated. Campbell polemicizes throughout the work against orthodoxies and normative religious and cultural systems for their coercion and constant distortion, and he argues instead of an individualism in which people find their own ways. But then he leaves no doubt that he himself has very strong ideas about which of these ways are right and which of them are wrong. “Any way chosen by the individual’s own heart, so long as it’s my way,� he seems to say.

Campbell paints with a broad brush and there’s a lot in him that one can criticize. I find his obvious hatred of social-critical readings of mythological literature alienating, and perhaps his most objectionable trait as a scholar. And that does leave him vulnerable to accusations of a distasteful sort of essentialism in how he characterizes “peoples,� and, no less, women. I have heard him say ruefully in a recorded talk that these days (i.e., the 60s), young women are telling him they don’t want to “fulfill the traditional role of women in serving as the object and support of the hero quest, and instantiating life itself in their being rather than their activity� - now they want to be the hero. “Oh boy,� he said, “I think it’s good that I’m retiring now.� That was probably true.

One can make of this what one will, though I will say in the main line, my experience is that, at least in terms of what he argues for, if not in terms of his biography, Campbell was deeply humanist and always tried to meet people in their own terms with decency and respect, even if the frame he developed for doing so nearly a century ago differs from what I would prefer, or is susceptible to critique.

At the end of the day, Campbell has been of great importance to me as a guide, in part because our interests are uncannily similar, and in part because I am of a similar type. We are generalists, and it is often not recognized, especially by specialists, that being a good generalist is its own kind of expertise, which has its own limitations, sure, but its own value as well. For at essence, Campbell explores the highest reaches of human creative endeavor with an eye to understanding what these things mean, while many specialists wouldn’t even understand what that question means.

But people live in worlds of meanings prior to living in a world of facts, which is why Hero with a Thousand Faces has sold millions of copies - can you think of another work on comparative religions or folklore that can say the same? So I’ll end where I began, observing that Campbell is a figure out of time, but also that not all change is good, and the intellectual tradition he writes out of is one of the high watersheds of our collective endeavor to understand ourselves and our world, limitations and all.]]> 3.96 1968 Creative Mythology (The Masks of God, #4)
author: Joseph Campbell
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at: 2022/06/17
date added: 2024/06/19
shelves: religion-mythology
review:
Joseph Campbell, like Bach, was a man out of his time, coming at the end of a long, beautiful movement of human culture, and in many ways epitomizing and summarizing it. Just as Bach raised the art of counterpoint to a transcendent sphere even as the rest of the music world was abandoning it as an organizational device, so Campbell wrote penetrating and sweeping comparative works that provide a useful framework for understanding the major movements of mythology and a religion as a whole, even as the framework he was using was passing into obscurity.

I think this is why, every time I talk about Campbell, I always feel the need to start with a kind of apology or justification, as his thoughts are very much out of season. I see him as the final major figure in a line, primarily German, that began with Herder and peaked in the 19th century - in broad terms, beginning with Idealism, flourishing in Romanticism, and culminating in early depth psychology and literary modernism. It is a movement whose chief impulse can be read as Romantic in M. H. Abraham’s sense, which is to say, “naturalizing the supernatural,� or reinterpreting the essential content of religious and mythological art and literature in natural or scientific terms, without reference to the transcendent or divine.

In this, the fourth volume of Campbell’s magnum opus The Masks of God, it is the movement out of the literal interpretation of mythological belief that he identifies as one of the two paradigmatic characteristics of our present-day circumstance. In his reading, as the progress of the material sciences made it increasingly untenable to hold to a literal interpretation of traditional rites and beliefs, the “mythogenic zone,� or traditional field in which mythological forms were encountered moved from the exterior to the interior world, and have been increasingly interpreted in psychological terms, figurative expressions of the inner truths of the psyche. The Forest Adventurous no longer figures in our best and most serious literature as the field of transformation - the locus of the mythological has moved to the interior world of dream and the unconscious.

This shift has especially been the movement of European thought since the early modern period, as various precepts of Biblical cosmology were shown to be factually false in a progressive series of discoveries by Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and so on. The modern has only a few available options - to deny the evidence of their senses and of reason and hold fast to a bronze age account of the world that contradicts in nearly every fundamental the scientific and technological world that surrounds them every day, to discard the whole of our mythological and religious inheritance as not literally true and therefore without value, or to reinterpret that inheritance in the light of our best understanding of how images function, based on a deep and comparative study of literature, art, and psychology.

Obviously Campbell takes up the last option, and rightfully so. One might be tempted to ignore the whole enterprise as a catalog of superstitions, but I think one would do so at their peril, in part because of the profound value these traditions have in providing orientation, support, and value in our experience of life, but also because humankind cannot be understood simply as animal rationale, and whether or not we like the irrational, it is an important part of what we are. Campbell himself expressed it best in volume one of Masks of God:

“Clearly mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible forms of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man's place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk.�

I think this is born out plainly enough in our daily headlines, as world leaders and crowds alike reenact myths of the former glory of their once-upon-a-time golden ages, with disastrous consequences. Fascism, for example, depends on the systematic failure to differentiate between history and myth.

We cannot, then, simply leave this whole matter alone, or else we cede one of the deepest forces shaping human history in its entirety to those who uncritically operate within its sphere, out of their own irrationality or out of cynicism, and then we see masses galvanized by the old signs of the unconscious. For a case study of a society in the thrall of an unconscious dependence on a set of archaic archetypes, see Germany, circa 1938.

On the rather more positive side, people continue to respond deeply to myths, for the simple reason that myths are about the things that matter to people. Many of the greatest and noblest works of human creativity are saturated with mythological themes, and it can only be for our benefit to understand how they function and why they elicit such a compelling response - why people are still, for example, fascinated by Greek tragedy, why people speak of Goethe’s Faust in hushed tones of reverence to this day, or why we can still feel in the deep heart’s core a recognition of something deeply and profoundly true in one of the Upanishads or in one of Paul’s letters.

The ultimate reference of myth, Campbell tells us, is timeless, because myth speaks to the common part of our human heritage that is constant, at least from the perspective of historical time. But its forms are manifold, and each new age finds its own particular modes of expression for the old mythological themes and images, each reflecting the unique priorities and values of the society which gives them shape.

This brings us to the second paradigmatic feature of our current situation viz. mythology and religion, which is the importance of the individual. In Campbell’s telling, the unique stress of European culture on the value of the individual as such first arose during the High Middle Ages, and is most clearly seen in continental Arthurian romance, and especially in the Parzifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach, dated to around 1215. Campbell devotes enormous attention to explicating this work in this book - some might say too long. Well over a hundred pages are dedicated to simply retelling the story of Parzifal, possibly because this volume predates the standard Sutto translation by some years.

In any case, Campbell gives a very compelling reading of von Eschenbach’s poem, arguing that it lays out a framework for understanding the ultimate source of value as a light that shines out from within, not from some “otherworldly beyond,� as Hegel put it, decreed by Blake’s “Nobodaddy.� He sees this as inaugurating the uniquely modern European stress put on the individual, which, he emphasizes, is not found in any other time or place.

In broad strokes I found Campbell’s argument persuasive, if sometimes open to challenge. I dimly recall reading his explanation at one point for why Ancient Greece and Rome do not qualify for esteeming the unique contents of the personality as a source and repository of value in itself, but I don’t remember the details. It also would seem that certain traditions of Japan place at least some value on individuality.

Campbell makes it clear that in his view, this framework holds the highest potential for individuals, and he takes certain artists as models exemplifying what such a life looks like, particularly James Joyce and Thomas Mann. I share his enthusiasm for Joyce and am rather cooler on Mann, whose Magic Mountain was interesting to me, but which I hardly experienced as a breakthrough work, or even a novel of the first tier.

Campbell has his favorites, and sometimes, I think, gives them attention out of proportion to their significance. In claiming that von Eschenbach is the greatest writer of his period, for example, and that he far outstrips Dante, he will find few supporters. And how is it possible, that in characterizing the artistic and spiritual horizon in which we find ourselves today, he could spend a hundred pages on Gottfried von Straßburg, but hardly a single paragraph on Shakespeare? The silence there is deafening, and I frankly don’t know what to make of it.

There is also a paradoxical tension in Campbell’s work that he apparently didn’t recognize, but I think needs to be stated. Campbell polemicizes throughout the work against orthodoxies and normative religious and cultural systems for their coercion and constant distortion, and he argues instead of an individualism in which people find their own ways. But then he leaves no doubt that he himself has very strong ideas about which of these ways are right and which of them are wrong. “Any way chosen by the individual’s own heart, so long as it’s my way,� he seems to say.

Campbell paints with a broad brush and there’s a lot in him that one can criticize. I find his obvious hatred of social-critical readings of mythological literature alienating, and perhaps his most objectionable trait as a scholar. And that does leave him vulnerable to accusations of a distasteful sort of essentialism in how he characterizes “peoples,� and, no less, women. I have heard him say ruefully in a recorded talk that these days (i.e., the 60s), young women are telling him they don’t want to “fulfill the traditional role of women in serving as the object and support of the hero quest, and instantiating life itself in their being rather than their activity� - now they want to be the hero. “Oh boy,� he said, “I think it’s good that I’m retiring now.� That was probably true.

One can make of this what one will, though I will say in the main line, my experience is that, at least in terms of what he argues for, if not in terms of his biography, Campbell was deeply humanist and always tried to meet people in their own terms with decency and respect, even if the frame he developed for doing so nearly a century ago differs from what I would prefer, or is susceptible to critique.

At the end of the day, Campbell has been of great importance to me as a guide, in part because our interests are uncannily similar, and in part because I am of a similar type. We are generalists, and it is often not recognized, especially by specialists, that being a good generalist is its own kind of expertise, which has its own limitations, sure, but its own value as well. For at essence, Campbell explores the highest reaches of human creative endeavor with an eye to understanding what these things mean, while many specialists wouldn’t even understand what that question means.

But people live in worlds of meanings prior to living in a world of facts, which is why Hero with a Thousand Faces has sold millions of copies - can you think of another work on comparative religions or folklore that can say the same? So I’ll end where I began, observing that Campbell is a figure out of time, but also that not all change is good, and the intellectual tradition he writes out of is one of the high watersheds of our collective endeavor to understand ourselves and our world, limitations and all.
]]> Das dichterische Werk. 1267011 336 Georg Trakl 3423124962 Mesoscope 3 german, poetry 4.59 1970 Das dichterische Werk.
author: Georg Trakl
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.59
book published: 1970
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/10
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: german, poetry
review:
Trakl was a significant German poet of the early twentieth century who left a small body of work before he died at the untimely age of 27. Within his extant verse he does present a unique vision of some power, but he seems, unfortunately, to have lacked the time to develop his craft, and the dozens of poems he left us are marked by a striking repetitiveness in style and subject.
]]> <![CDATA[Switzerland: A Village History]]> 1758434 228 David Birmingham 080401065X Mesoscope 5 europe, history, switzerland
For my itinerary this book proved to be an excellent fit, covering the city-state of Bern in some detail and giving copious scrutiny to life in an Alpline cheese-making community. It was striking to visit national museums in Zürich and Bern and, in contrast with Birmingham's village-level focus, to get a sense of the markedly different ways in which the history of the region was understood by its urban centers versus how it occurred on the countryside.

Birmingham covers a period of some 800 years in his two hundred pages, basing evocative descriptions of the life and times of Château-d'Oex based closely on primary sources. This book is an excellent and illuminating read, and I was very pleased to spend some time with it.]]> 3.70 2000 Switzerland: A Village History
author: David Birmingham
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2015/07/18
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves: europe, history, switzerland
review:
I read this book in preparation for a trip to Bern, Zürich, and the Berner Oberland - I wanted to get a sense of the country's history, and Birmingham's approach of focusing on the small dairy village of Château-d'Oex in the district of Gruyère sounded more interesting than a conventional national history. I'm glad I took this approach - sometimes studying local history provides a richer sense of a national culture than you can get from a higher level, and given the striking social, political, economic, linguistic, and cultural diversity that characterizes Switzerland, it's probably particularly true in this case.

For my itinerary this book proved to be an excellent fit, covering the city-state of Bern in some detail and giving copious scrutiny to life in an Alpline cheese-making community. It was striking to visit national museums in Zürich and Bern and, in contrast with Birmingham's village-level focus, to get a sense of the markedly different ways in which the history of the region was understood by its urban centers versus how it occurred on the countryside.

Birmingham covers a period of some 800 years in his two hundred pages, basing evocative descriptions of the life and times of Château-d'Oex based closely on primary sources. This book is an excellent and illuminating read, and I was very pleased to spend some time with it.
]]> <![CDATA[Learning Greek with Plato: A Beginner's Course in Classical Greek (Bristol Phoenix Press Classical Handbooks)]]> 1197916 530 Frank Beetham 1904675565 Mesoscope 0 to-read 4.10 2007 Learning Greek with Plato: A Beginner's Course in Classical Greek (Bristol Phoenix Press Classical Handbooks)
author: Frank Beetham
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Habsburgs: To Rule the World]]> 53054822 The definitive history of the dynasty that dominated Europe for centuries

In The Habsburgs, Martyn Rady tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world they built -- and then lost -- over nearly a millennium. From modest origins, the Habsburgs gained control of the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. Then, in just a few decades, their possessions rapidly expanded to take in a large part of Europe, stretching from Hungary to Spain, and parts of the New World and the Far East. The Habsburgs continued to dominate Central Europe through the First World War.

Historians often depict the Habsburgs as leaders of a ramshackle empire. But Rady reveals their enduring power, driven by the belief that they were destined to rule the world as defenders of the Roman Catholic Church, guarantors of peace, and patrons of learning. The Habsburgs is the definitive history of a remarkable dynasty that forever changed Europe and the world.]]> 416 Martyn Rady 1541644506 Mesoscope 0 to-read 3.81 2020 The Habsburgs: To Rule the World
author: Martyn Rady
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political]]> 50805892 “Judith Butler is the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today."� Cornel West

“Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time.� � J. M. Bernstein

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilized in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence.

Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how “racial phantasms� inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.]]> 240 Judith Butler Mesoscope 0 3.84 2020 The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political
author: Judith Butler
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/28
date added: 2024/05/30
shelves: politics, philosophy, abandoned
review:
Abandoning after about 100 pages. Butler is an intelligent and cogent thinker, but I have several issues with this book that limit its usefulness for me. Simply put, I think her partisan commitments distort her ability to think objectively or abstractly about the attendant issues, and it reads much more like a political polemic than a work of philosophy. It's too reductive, too dualistic, too simplistic in its frame, and assumes too much commonality of worldview from the reader. I get the impression she's trying to write for a wider audience than her usual circle - if that's so, I think it's a failure.
]]> A Hegel Dictionary 117245 368 Michael J. Inwood 0631175334 Mesoscope 5 philosophy
If you're thinking about getting this book as an aid to reading Hegel, do yourself a favor and get it. I picked it up while reading Science of Logic, and I wish I had had it when I was reading Phenomenology of Spirit - it is incredibly useful, bordering on essential.

This work includes detailed explanations of several dozen of Hegel's key terms. For each, Inwood reviews the etymology of the German source term, its colloquial definition, its usage history in philosophy, and a detailed review and analysis of how Hegel uses the term, with citations to the relevant works.

For me, the review of the philosophical meaning of the terms is nearly as useful as the explanation of Hegel's specific usage. Hegel presupposes a vast knowledge of philosophy, and when looking up a term like "the Understanding," for example, it's enormously helpful to get a mini-review of how the term was used by Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant, before diving into Hegel's take.

Nearly every term I've looked up during my reading has been included, either with a full entry or as part of another entry. Pretty much every term you would expect to find is here: absolute, reflection, concept, idea, spirit, measure, sublation, infinity, immediate, and so forth. Some entries resemble mini-surveys of some of Hegel's main ideas, such as "Art, Beauty, and Aesthetics" or "Religion, Theology and Philosophy of Religion."

One minor criticism: I do not think it is appropriate to characterize Hegel's philosophy as a priori, as Inwood sometimes does. The very notion of the a priori is only coherent within a Kantian subject/object framework that Hegel clearly rejects and frequently criticizes. I do not believe Hegel himself ever applied that term to his own thought.

For anyone working their way through Hegel's work, I enthusiastically recommend this work.]]> 3.72 1992 A Hegel Dictionary
author: Michael J. Inwood
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/25
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: philosophy
review:
"La nécessité de constituer un Hegel-Lexicon est patente." - A. Koyré

If you're thinking about getting this book as an aid to reading Hegel, do yourself a favor and get it. I picked it up while reading Science of Logic, and I wish I had had it when I was reading Phenomenology of Spirit - it is incredibly useful, bordering on essential.

This work includes detailed explanations of several dozen of Hegel's key terms. For each, Inwood reviews the etymology of the German source term, its colloquial definition, its usage history in philosophy, and a detailed review and analysis of how Hegel uses the term, with citations to the relevant works.

For me, the review of the philosophical meaning of the terms is nearly as useful as the explanation of Hegel's specific usage. Hegel presupposes a vast knowledge of philosophy, and when looking up a term like "the Understanding," for example, it's enormously helpful to get a mini-review of how the term was used by Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant, before diving into Hegel's take.

Nearly every term I've looked up during my reading has been included, either with a full entry or as part of another entry. Pretty much every term you would expect to find is here: absolute, reflection, concept, idea, spirit, measure, sublation, infinity, immediate, and so forth. Some entries resemble mini-surveys of some of Hegel's main ideas, such as "Art, Beauty, and Aesthetics" or "Religion, Theology and Philosophy of Religion."

One minor criticism: I do not think it is appropriate to characterize Hegel's philosophy as a priori, as Inwood sometimes does. The very notion of the a priori is only coherent within a Kantian subject/object framework that Hegel clearly rejects and frequently criticizes. I do not believe Hegel himself ever applied that term to his own thought.

For anyone working their way through Hegel's work, I enthusiastically recommend this work.
]]> <![CDATA[Der grüne Heinrich, Zweite Fassung]]> 43474911
Die Geschichte des jungen Heinrich, seiner Zerrissenheit zwischen der zarten Anna und der stolzen und sinnlichen Judith, seiner künstlerischen Ambitionen und seines Lebens als erfolgloser Maler in der Fremde ist einer der großartigsten und persönlichsten Bildungsromane in deutscher Sprache.]]> 944 Gottfried Keller 3257226411 Mesoscope 5 literature, german, favorites Der Grüne Heinrich (or Green Henry) is widely considered one of the greatest German-language novels of all time, It is a largely-autobiographical Bildungsroman telling the story of an aspiring artist who grows up in alpine Switzerland with his mother. After being thrown out of his private school, he takes up an artistic vocation and receives an uneven education in painting, learning in fits and starts from the various tutors he finds for himself. He eventually sets out for Munich and tries to make a go of it as an artist, but with a studiously impractical character, he finds little success. These broad outlines will be immediately recognizable to the reader of any short description of Keller’s life.

Der Grüne Heinrich is almost synonymous with the nineteenth-century genre of realism, which served as a kind of naturalist counterpart to the Romantic movement, with its fabulous tales of mystery and enchantment. More precisely, this work is customarily classified as a work of “poetic realism�, and the contradictory tendencies encapsulated by this term neatly express the core aesthetic conundrum of the book. Keller sought to harness the material of his life and render it into an artful, controlled literary work with a developed aesthetic and moral structure. The literary critic Sandra Kluwe refers to this problem in Keller's work as "the dialectic of mimesis and poeisis."

Since so much of the book is about his artistic vocation, I took the time to study all of the paintings the youthful Keller painted that I could find, and I particularly found that his 1842 painting Gewitterstimmung (easily viewable online) provides an illustration of a clash between Keller’s desire to faithfully reproduce the stuff of life and his wish to shape it into motifs according to certain aesthetic structural principles. The colors, textures, and effects of lighting in the painting show a striking verisimilitude, but the figures are organized in a contrived manner, producing an odd and not-completely-satisfactory effect.

I think this is perfectly analogous to how Grüner Heinrich is written. Keller beautifully evokes the experience of life in so much of this book, and I especially appreciated the luminous way that the sublime beauty of his mountain home animated his youth with a kind of spiritual energy. The first half of the book conveys a wonderful and vivid sense of how it was for a sensitive and philosophical spirit to grow up in nineteenth-century Switzerland, and this is one of the best and most beautiful parts of the book.

But, as with his painting, his formal control of composition seems crude by comparison, and the book suffers from his clumsy attempts to tell a kind of instructive moral story from the material of his life. Whenever the book slips into its symbolic register, it is suddenly as though one is reading a different, worse novel. I would especially call out a long episode after his eventual departure from Munich toward the end of the novel as utterly fantastical. It is storybook stuff of the “and the man in the inn turned out to be his long lost brother!� variety, served up to try to make a message out of life, because, Keller apparently believed, that’s what artful novels do.

But life does not impart such messages to us, for as the saying has it, “If the Tao could be spoken, everyone would have told his brother.� The felicitous representation of life’s myriad complexity can only clash with any attempt at organization into clear motifs, and the book suffers from it.

The worst of this, it must be said, is his feckless handling of female characters, who function more as symbols than as characters. The novel evidences an appalling lack of insight into female psychology, and I can say it did not surprise me at all to learn that Keller himself never managed to find a successful relationship. In dramatic terms, the book is at its worse when Keller tries to interpret his failure to connect with women as reflective of some deeper purpose. This is mere wish fulfillment, and it’s embarrassing to read.

Nietzsche, excited by Keller’s writings, sent him a copy of his Fröhliche Wissenschaft, but Keller found it off-putting and did not respond. And this is, I think, a real shame - if he had pored over it, he might have learned, as Nietzsche learned, to love his mistakes, and to understand that, as much as his successes, they are what defined him. Instead, Keller is obviously mortified by certain personal and professional failures in his life, and his efforts to control or distance his relationship to them reads like he’s throwing a tarp of words over the (to him) unsightly parts of his autobiography. He does not seem to register that all of these problems helped eventually guide him to his literary path, where he would find enormous success and acclaim.

Despite the formal flaws, this novel is, on the whole, compelling and quite worth reading. At times it is positively alive with a rapturous beauty, in passages like this one:

�...wir gingen auf den Weg, welcher zuerst über den Kirchhof führte, der auf einer kleinen Höhe gelegen ist. Dort duftete es gewaltig von tausend Blumen, eine flimmernde, summende Welt von Licht, Käfern und Schmetterlingen, Bienen und namenlosen Glanztierchen webte über den Gräbern hin und her. Es war ein feines Konzert bei beleuchtetem Hause, wogte auf und nieder, erlöschte bis auf das gehaltene Singen eines einzelnen Insektes, belebte sich wieder und schwellte mutwillig und volltönig an; dann zog es sich in die Dunkelheiten zurück, welche die Jasmin- und Holunderbüsche über den Grabzeichen bildeten, bis eine brummende Hummel den Reigen wieder ans Licht führte; die Blumenkelche nickten im Rhythmus vom fortwährenden Absitzen und Auffliegen der Musikanten.�

I’ll try to get across in English for my English-speaking readers:

"We took the path that went first by the cemetery that was laid by a little outcropping. The area was powerfully perfumed by a thousand flowers, a flickering, humming world of light, beetles, and little butterflies, bees and nameless little creatures of light, hovering this way and that over the graves. It was a fine concert in an illuminated hall which vaulted up and down, then dissipated until the singing of one solitary insect remained, then came swelling back to life, boldly and robustly; then it withdrew back into shadows painted by the jasmine and hollander bushes over the gravestones until the humming buzz brought the circling dance into the light once more; the calyxes nodded to the rhythm of the constant soaring and swooping of the musicians."

The German is obviously more wonderful than my meager translation - for example, "little creatures of light" is "Glanztierchen", which is more like "a shining apparition of a little creature," as "Glanz" is both “light� and “fleeting appearance�.

I love this book, flaws and all, and for many very long passages it roars with great beauty like a mountain river. The aesthetic problems he was wrestling with troubled a lot of serious German-speaking novelists in the nineteenth century, and it may perhaps be said that no one found an altogether satisfactory solution bringing harmony to mimesis and poeisis until Thomas Mann.]]> 3.67 1854 Der grüne Heinrich, Zweite Fassung
author: Gottfried Keller
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1854
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/22
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves: literature, german, favorites
review:
The name Gottfried Keller is little known in the English-speaking world, but Der Grüne Heinrich (or Green Henry) is widely considered one of the greatest German-language novels of all time, It is a largely-autobiographical Bildungsroman telling the story of an aspiring artist who grows up in alpine Switzerland with his mother. After being thrown out of his private school, he takes up an artistic vocation and receives an uneven education in painting, learning in fits and starts from the various tutors he finds for himself. He eventually sets out for Munich and tries to make a go of it as an artist, but with a studiously impractical character, he finds little success. These broad outlines will be immediately recognizable to the reader of any short description of Keller’s life.

Der Grüne Heinrich is almost synonymous with the nineteenth-century genre of realism, which served as a kind of naturalist counterpart to the Romantic movement, with its fabulous tales of mystery and enchantment. More precisely, this work is customarily classified as a work of “poetic realism�, and the contradictory tendencies encapsulated by this term neatly express the core aesthetic conundrum of the book. Keller sought to harness the material of his life and render it into an artful, controlled literary work with a developed aesthetic and moral structure. The literary critic Sandra Kluwe refers to this problem in Keller's work as "the dialectic of mimesis and poeisis."

Since so much of the book is about his artistic vocation, I took the time to study all of the paintings the youthful Keller painted that I could find, and I particularly found that his 1842 painting Gewitterstimmung (easily viewable online) provides an illustration of a clash between Keller’s desire to faithfully reproduce the stuff of life and his wish to shape it into motifs according to certain aesthetic structural principles. The colors, textures, and effects of lighting in the painting show a striking verisimilitude, but the figures are organized in a contrived manner, producing an odd and not-completely-satisfactory effect.

I think this is perfectly analogous to how Grüner Heinrich is written. Keller beautifully evokes the experience of life in so much of this book, and I especially appreciated the luminous way that the sublime beauty of his mountain home animated his youth with a kind of spiritual energy. The first half of the book conveys a wonderful and vivid sense of how it was for a sensitive and philosophical spirit to grow up in nineteenth-century Switzerland, and this is one of the best and most beautiful parts of the book.

But, as with his painting, his formal control of composition seems crude by comparison, and the book suffers from his clumsy attempts to tell a kind of instructive moral story from the material of his life. Whenever the book slips into its symbolic register, it is suddenly as though one is reading a different, worse novel. I would especially call out a long episode after his eventual departure from Munich toward the end of the novel as utterly fantastical. It is storybook stuff of the “and the man in the inn turned out to be his long lost brother!� variety, served up to try to make a message out of life, because, Keller apparently believed, that’s what artful novels do.

But life does not impart such messages to us, for as the saying has it, “If the Tao could be spoken, everyone would have told his brother.� The felicitous representation of life’s myriad complexity can only clash with any attempt at organization into clear motifs, and the book suffers from it.

The worst of this, it must be said, is his feckless handling of female characters, who function more as symbols than as characters. The novel evidences an appalling lack of insight into female psychology, and I can say it did not surprise me at all to learn that Keller himself never managed to find a successful relationship. In dramatic terms, the book is at its worse when Keller tries to interpret his failure to connect with women as reflective of some deeper purpose. This is mere wish fulfillment, and it’s embarrassing to read.

Nietzsche, excited by Keller’s writings, sent him a copy of his Fröhliche Wissenschaft, but Keller found it off-putting and did not respond. And this is, I think, a real shame - if he had pored over it, he might have learned, as Nietzsche learned, to love his mistakes, and to understand that, as much as his successes, they are what defined him. Instead, Keller is obviously mortified by certain personal and professional failures in his life, and his efforts to control or distance his relationship to them reads like he’s throwing a tarp of words over the (to him) unsightly parts of his autobiography. He does not seem to register that all of these problems helped eventually guide him to his literary path, where he would find enormous success and acclaim.

Despite the formal flaws, this novel is, on the whole, compelling and quite worth reading. At times it is positively alive with a rapturous beauty, in passages like this one:

�...wir gingen auf den Weg, welcher zuerst über den Kirchhof führte, der auf einer kleinen Höhe gelegen ist. Dort duftete es gewaltig von tausend Blumen, eine flimmernde, summende Welt von Licht, Käfern und Schmetterlingen, Bienen und namenlosen Glanztierchen webte über den Gräbern hin und her. Es war ein feines Konzert bei beleuchtetem Hause, wogte auf und nieder, erlöschte bis auf das gehaltene Singen eines einzelnen Insektes, belebte sich wieder und schwellte mutwillig und volltönig an; dann zog es sich in die Dunkelheiten zurück, welche die Jasmin- und Holunderbüsche über den Grabzeichen bildeten, bis eine brummende Hummel den Reigen wieder ans Licht führte; die Blumenkelche nickten im Rhythmus vom fortwährenden Absitzen und Auffliegen der Musikanten.�

I’ll try to get across in English for my English-speaking readers:

"We took the path that went first by the cemetery that was laid by a little outcropping. The area was powerfully perfumed by a thousand flowers, a flickering, humming world of light, beetles, and little butterflies, bees and nameless little creatures of light, hovering this way and that over the graves. It was a fine concert in an illuminated hall which vaulted up and down, then dissipated until the singing of one solitary insect remained, then came swelling back to life, boldly and robustly; then it withdrew back into shadows painted by the jasmine and hollander bushes over the gravestones until the humming buzz brought the circling dance into the light once more; the calyxes nodded to the rhythm of the constant soaring and swooping of the musicians."

The German is obviously more wonderful than my meager translation - for example, "little creatures of light" is "Glanztierchen", which is more like "a shining apparition of a little creature," as "Glanz" is both “light� and “fleeting appearance�.

I love this book, flaws and all, and for many very long passages it roars with great beauty like a mountain river. The aesthetic problems he was wrestling with troubled a lot of serious German-speaking novelists in the nineteenth century, and it may perhaps be said that no one found an altogether satisfactory solution bringing harmony to mimesis and poeisis until Thomas Mann.
]]> <![CDATA[Don Karlos: Infant von Spanien]]> 1097271 221 Friedrich Schiller 3150000386 Mesoscope 5 drama, german Don Karlos is easily the best, and is very nearly a great work of art. If I stop short of unreserved praise, it is because I cannot read certain key contrivances of the plot as anything other than artifice. To a degree, this is not Schiller's fault-he was simply writing for another age.

Nor should the reader look to the play for anything like historical accuracy, which is likewise no fault of the play.

I would suppose that the model for this play is Shakespeare, and especially the early acts owe a lot to Hamlet. If one is to steal, one might as well steal from the best.

Schiller wrote this work in a vibrant pentameter that continues to ring in your head even after you've put the book down.

Don Karlos is the heir-apparent of Hapsburg Spain, son of Philip II and grandson of Charles V. He is not altogether heroic, and shows a dangerous lability of mind and a great, sweeping enthusiasm that does not particularly serve him or his friends and allies. He is quick to emotional and sometimes self-destructive speeches of deep feeling, and rather than shaping the play's action, Don Karlos has a way of starting various fires that those around him must race about to either contain or to fan.

This does not sit well with his tyrannical father, Philip, who, surprisingly, emerges as one of the most complex and interesting characters of the play. Despite his paranoia and cruelty, Schiller discovers a sympathy for the character that is one of the crown jewels of the play. The more you know about Schiller's biography, and what the character of Philip II certainly meant to him, the more astonishing this becomes. Thomas Mann memorably canonizes this development in his Tonio Kröger when the young hero tries to get across to his indifferent friend Hans Hansen why the king moved him more than the play's actual heroes.

Another great character is the Marquis von Posa, childhood friend of Don Carlos, and a great reader of the human heart. He emerges as one of the play's most cagey and sophisticated characters before being ill-used in acts three and four in an unconvincing plot line in which everything comes to hang on his true allegiances -something that is arbitrarily concealed from the audience for the sole purpose of generating suspense. This is something I just hate to see in any work of fiction. It's the kind of thing one expects, say, from melodramatic operas.

The artifices of the plot don't always fit well with the often-staggering psychological complexity of the characters, but on the whole, the play is a great dramatic and poetic achievement, and boasts several scenes and several characters of enormous power.]]> 3.52 1787 Don Karlos: Infant von Spanien
author: Friedrich Schiller
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1787
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/14
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves: drama, german
review:
Of the works of Schiller I've read thus far, Don Karlos is easily the best, and is very nearly a great work of art. If I stop short of unreserved praise, it is because I cannot read certain key contrivances of the plot as anything other than artifice. To a degree, this is not Schiller's fault-he was simply writing for another age.

Nor should the reader look to the play for anything like historical accuracy, which is likewise no fault of the play.

I would suppose that the model for this play is Shakespeare, and especially the early acts owe a lot to Hamlet. If one is to steal, one might as well steal from the best.

Schiller wrote this work in a vibrant pentameter that continues to ring in your head even after you've put the book down.

Don Karlos is the heir-apparent of Hapsburg Spain, son of Philip II and grandson of Charles V. He is not altogether heroic, and shows a dangerous lability of mind and a great, sweeping enthusiasm that does not particularly serve him or his friends and allies. He is quick to emotional and sometimes self-destructive speeches of deep feeling, and rather than shaping the play's action, Don Karlos has a way of starting various fires that those around him must race about to either contain or to fan.

This does not sit well with his tyrannical father, Philip, who, surprisingly, emerges as one of the most complex and interesting characters of the play. Despite his paranoia and cruelty, Schiller discovers a sympathy for the character that is one of the crown jewels of the play. The more you know about Schiller's biography, and what the character of Philip II certainly meant to him, the more astonishing this becomes. Thomas Mann memorably canonizes this development in his Tonio Kröger when the young hero tries to get across to his indifferent friend Hans Hansen why the king moved him more than the play's actual heroes.

Another great character is the Marquis von Posa, childhood friend of Don Carlos, and a great reader of the human heart. He emerges as one of the play's most cagey and sophisticated characters before being ill-used in acts three and four in an unconvincing plot line in which everything comes to hang on his true allegiances -something that is arbitrarily concealed from the audience for the sole purpose of generating suspense. This is something I just hate to see in any work of fiction. It's the kind of thing one expects, say, from melodramatic operas.

The artifices of the plot don't always fit well with the often-staggering psychological complexity of the characters, but on the whole, the play is a great dramatic and poetic achievement, and boasts several scenes and several characters of enormous power.
]]> <![CDATA[Capital in the Twenty First Century]]> 18736925 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.

Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.]]> 685 Thomas Piketty 067443000X Mesoscope 5 history, economics, policy
Equally uneasy with the ideologically-constrained Marxist economists of Europe and the theory-crazed mathematical economists of the US, Piketty undertakes to do a different kind of economics, explicitly more akin to the genre of political economy that dropped out of sight decades ago. He urges economists to be wary of abstractions, and instead to make judicious use of all available empirical data, and to carefully consider the role of history and politics in shaping economic outcomes.

As a result, his book is surprisingly persuasive, based, as it is, on an enormous database of economic data that he has compiled for decades with his colleagues. His data are publicly available, and his arguments are copiously backed up in end notes.

His theory-light style also makes his book surprisingly pleasant to read. I expected it to be a dry, arcane tome, filled with differential equations and statistics. While it is not entirely without math, in essence it tells a story - the story of the evolution of distributions of wealth, and what we can learn from it. Nor should we laypeople recoil from a little math - otherwise, we entirely cede the field of economics to mathematicians, and it's too important for that.

This book sheds light on the forces driving the increased concentration of more and more resources into fewer and fewer hands, especially at the very top of the wealth hierarchy. Piketty argues that the fundamental mechanism driving inequality is described by the simple equation r > g, meaning that the average annual return on capital is greater than growth. So, for example, wealth derived from investments consistently outpaces wage increases.

Year over year, these disparities accumulate at a compounded rate, and wealth accumulated in the past takes on a greater and greater role in the economy. In the absence of counter-balancing forces such as high inflation or progressive taxation, this leads ultimately to an ever-smaller number of inherited megafortunes.

This is not theoretical speculation, mind you - he has persuasive data to back up his history and the principles he deduces from it.

There is much of great interest in this book, such as his history of inflation, which essentially did not exist prior to the late 19th century in Europe and the United States. Or his alarming analysis of growth, arguing that in the absence of massive demographic expansion, or outside of brief periods of heavy industrialization, historical growth can be expected to cap off at about 1% annually.

The big surprise for me was his policy discussion of a way forward, in which he argues for a progressive global tax on capital. At a glance this idea sounded preposterously Utopian to me, but Piketty is well aware of the challenges. Nevertheless, he makes an extremely persuasive argument that, short of this solution, we have little reason to hope for a just and democratic counter-tendency to a trend toward wealth concentration that, in the long run, will impress even the most staunch free-market ideologue as untenable.

This book is rather long, and I hope that he will some day publish a short version that presents its basic ideas in a form that can be more readily absorbed by a general audience. I think this book has a vital role to play in public discourse, but many will be turned off by its heft.

If you are one of the many people interested in Piketty but daunted by this book's size, I urge you to read parts of it and skim or skip the rest. Specifically, I believe any general reader could profit greatly from reading only chapters 1-4, 8-9, and 16.

If you're looking for Piketty light, you may safely ignore his short "Economics of Inequality", published in English in 2015. It is not a condensed expression of his arguments, it is a short book first published in 1997, and barely updated. ]]> 4.04 2013 Capital in the Twenty First Century
author: Thomas Piketty
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2016/09/07
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves: history, economics, policy
review:
Piketty's fascinating book is a crucial contribution to social and political debates on economic inequality, presenting an engrossing and persuasive history of capital and income distributions globally, and offering the basis for one plausible way forward.

Equally uneasy with the ideologically-constrained Marxist economists of Europe and the theory-crazed mathematical economists of the US, Piketty undertakes to do a different kind of economics, explicitly more akin to the genre of political economy that dropped out of sight decades ago. He urges economists to be wary of abstractions, and instead to make judicious use of all available empirical data, and to carefully consider the role of history and politics in shaping economic outcomes.

As a result, his book is surprisingly persuasive, based, as it is, on an enormous database of economic data that he has compiled for decades with his colleagues. His data are publicly available, and his arguments are copiously backed up in end notes.

His theory-light style also makes his book surprisingly pleasant to read. I expected it to be a dry, arcane tome, filled with differential equations and statistics. While it is not entirely without math, in essence it tells a story - the story of the evolution of distributions of wealth, and what we can learn from it. Nor should we laypeople recoil from a little math - otherwise, we entirely cede the field of economics to mathematicians, and it's too important for that.

This book sheds light on the forces driving the increased concentration of more and more resources into fewer and fewer hands, especially at the very top of the wealth hierarchy. Piketty argues that the fundamental mechanism driving inequality is described by the simple equation r > g, meaning that the average annual return on capital is greater than growth. So, for example, wealth derived from investments consistently outpaces wage increases.

Year over year, these disparities accumulate at a compounded rate, and wealth accumulated in the past takes on a greater and greater role in the economy. In the absence of counter-balancing forces such as high inflation or progressive taxation, this leads ultimately to an ever-smaller number of inherited megafortunes.

This is not theoretical speculation, mind you - he has persuasive data to back up his history and the principles he deduces from it.

There is much of great interest in this book, such as his history of inflation, which essentially did not exist prior to the late 19th century in Europe and the United States. Or his alarming analysis of growth, arguing that in the absence of massive demographic expansion, or outside of brief periods of heavy industrialization, historical growth can be expected to cap off at about 1% annually.

The big surprise for me was his policy discussion of a way forward, in which he argues for a progressive global tax on capital. At a glance this idea sounded preposterously Utopian to me, but Piketty is well aware of the challenges. Nevertheless, he makes an extremely persuasive argument that, short of this solution, we have little reason to hope for a just and democratic counter-tendency to a trend toward wealth concentration that, in the long run, will impress even the most staunch free-market ideologue as untenable.

This book is rather long, and I hope that he will some day publish a short version that presents its basic ideas in a form that can be more readily absorbed by a general audience. I think this book has a vital role to play in public discourse, but many will be turned off by its heft.

If you are one of the many people interested in Piketty but daunted by this book's size, I urge you to read parts of it and skim or skip the rest. Specifically, I believe any general reader could profit greatly from reading only chapters 1-4, 8-9, and 16.

If you're looking for Piketty light, you may safely ignore his short "Economics of Inequality", published in English in 2015. It is not a condensed expression of his arguments, it is a short book first published in 1997, and barely updated.
]]> <![CDATA[The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness]]> 6792458
As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them.

In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.]]> 290 Michelle Alexander Mesoscope 2
To this degree, I am in strong sympathy with the author, and I'm glad this book's success has drawn mainstream attention to these urgent issues. But I cannot pretend I think this book is particularly sound or well argued. It is written like the argument of a lawyer, and I for one am not persuaded by her thesis beyond a reasonable doubt.

Alexander uncritically reduces enormously complex historical processes to simple slogans in the service of forwarding her argument that mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow; that is, it amounts to a socially-sanctioned system of laws and customs intended to keep the foot of society on the neck of black Americans.

Unfortunately, no key concept in this thesis is adequately examined. We barely even have a clear concept of what she means by "race." She presents a brief and entirely unpersuasive history that argues race is a social construction that was developed in the New World as a way of estranging poor blacks from poor whites and keeping them from making common cause.

This was perhaps the first time when I paused and asked myself, is she serious? There is nothing more to the concept of race than an arbitrary and artificial mechanism of control?

I think not. We have decades of research in social psychology examining the way people form and identify with groups, and it's not just something cooked up by wealthy plantation owners - it has very deep roots in our cognitive biology. And we have a history of distinguishing between peoples and their ethnic characters that goes back at least to Greek conceptions of Perisans as the other that developed during the Persian War.

I understand Alexander's disinclination to dwell on these details when she has a compelling argument to make, but again and again in this book I found her doing the same thing - making facile reductions in terms that support her argument.

Generally, I wasn't persuaded by her thesis that mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow, and I think that argument distracts from better and more interesting interpretations of the same data. Of course there are racist policy makers, but personally I think social policies that are not, by and large, explicitly racist in intent can nevertheless be extremely racist in their effect. To me this makes much better sense of a lot of the data, such as the fact that many extremely draconian drug laws were called for and enjoy strong support by black Americans.

I am uncomfortable with Alexander's use of historical evidence. Again and again in the first half of the book, she made historical claims that caused me to raise my eyebrows, and when I've researched further to get corroboration for her version of events, I've come away feeling that I strongly disagree with her interpretations. I would encourage any reader of this book to likewise poke around if they read any historical claim that really surprises them.

Finally, I'm not a lawyer like Ms. Alexander, but I did find her single-minded focus on the courts increasingly bizarre. She analyzed court rulings that permitted discriminatory practices throughout the book, ignoring the fact that there also exists a legislative branch of government - one which is tasked under the separation of powers with writing the laws. She caustically rejects numerous Supreme Court rulings - some unanimous - which held, in essence, "this practice is not illegal or unconstitutional," and repeatedly interpreted these findings as tantamount to unilaterally creating or affirming laws.

But ... judicial review is not about making laws or affirming that they're just - it's an evaluation of how the law has been interpreted by lower courts, or their constitutionality. And I can't believe I have to call this out in a book written by a former ACLU lawyer. ]]> 4.52 2010 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
author: Michelle Alexander
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2016/08/24
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves: history, politics, black, policy
review:
I wish I could recommend this book, which speaks with urgency and passion about an issue of compelling importance - the mass incarceration of black Americans under the aegis of the largely-discredited War on Drugs. I agree that this must be one of the central points of focus for anyone concerned with civil rights and equality in the United States today. As Alexander cites in the book, the government's own best information clearly indicates that all ethnic groups use illegal drugs at comparable levels, but blacks are far more likely to be incarcerated, and our philosophy of imprisonment only grows more and more draconian over time. The destruction wrought by this completely illegitimate legal program must be openly confronted.

To this degree, I am in strong sympathy with the author, and I'm glad this book's success has drawn mainstream attention to these urgent issues. But I cannot pretend I think this book is particularly sound or well argued. It is written like the argument of a lawyer, and I for one am not persuaded by her thesis beyond a reasonable doubt.

Alexander uncritically reduces enormously complex historical processes to simple slogans in the service of forwarding her argument that mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow; that is, it amounts to a socially-sanctioned system of laws and customs intended to keep the foot of society on the neck of black Americans.

Unfortunately, no key concept in this thesis is adequately examined. We barely even have a clear concept of what she means by "race." She presents a brief and entirely unpersuasive history that argues race is a social construction that was developed in the New World as a way of estranging poor blacks from poor whites and keeping them from making common cause.

This was perhaps the first time when I paused and asked myself, is she serious? There is nothing more to the concept of race than an arbitrary and artificial mechanism of control?

I think not. We have decades of research in social psychology examining the way people form and identify with groups, and it's not just something cooked up by wealthy plantation owners - it has very deep roots in our cognitive biology. And we have a history of distinguishing between peoples and their ethnic characters that goes back at least to Greek conceptions of Perisans as the other that developed during the Persian War.

I understand Alexander's disinclination to dwell on these details when she has a compelling argument to make, but again and again in this book I found her doing the same thing - making facile reductions in terms that support her argument.

Generally, I wasn't persuaded by her thesis that mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow, and I think that argument distracts from better and more interesting interpretations of the same data. Of course there are racist policy makers, but personally I think social policies that are not, by and large, explicitly racist in intent can nevertheless be extremely racist in their effect. To me this makes much better sense of a lot of the data, such as the fact that many extremely draconian drug laws were called for and enjoy strong support by black Americans.

I am uncomfortable with Alexander's use of historical evidence. Again and again in the first half of the book, she made historical claims that caused me to raise my eyebrows, and when I've researched further to get corroboration for her version of events, I've come away feeling that I strongly disagree with her interpretations. I would encourage any reader of this book to likewise poke around if they read any historical claim that really surprises them.

Finally, I'm not a lawyer like Ms. Alexander, but I did find her single-minded focus on the courts increasingly bizarre. She analyzed court rulings that permitted discriminatory practices throughout the book, ignoring the fact that there also exists a legislative branch of government - one which is tasked under the separation of powers with writing the laws. She caustically rejects numerous Supreme Court rulings - some unanimous - which held, in essence, "this practice is not illegal or unconstitutional," and repeatedly interpreted these findings as tantamount to unilaterally creating or affirming laws.

But ... judicial review is not about making laws or affirming that they're just - it's an evaluation of how the law has been interpreted by lower courts, or their constitutionality. And I can't believe I have to call this out in a book written by a former ACLU lawyer.
]]> Europe Entrapped 22209906 104 Claus Offe 0745687512 Mesoscope 4
Written in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the book focuses much of its attention on the inadequacies of the response to the sovereign debt crisis, including a lot of venom directed at the Merkel government and the champions of austerity for their self-destructive moralizing and lack of solidarity. For example, Offe highlights the so-called "denominator effect," by which austerity measures imposed on Greece directly caused its GDP to contract, thereby in themselves RAISING the debt-to-GDP ratio, and making even further social spending reductions necessary. This is the perverse logic of austerity on full display.

I am sympathetic toward Offe's political sensibility and agree with his argument that the EU needs a robust political and social basis as well as an economic basis if it is to survive.

The last few chapters started to turn me off to Offe as the tone of his editorializing heated up - by the end, he became a bit shrill for my taste. That said, this book was extremely useful and well worth reading.]]> 3.72 2014 Europe Entrapped
author: Claus Offe
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2020/12/14
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves: europe, history, sociology, politics, policy
review:
Offe's essay on structural issues that imperil the Eurozone and, by extension, the EU, has an outsized impact completely disproportionate to its short length. I found his sociological and historical analysis of the structural and social problems threatening the project of integration to be enormously useful in providing a robust and appropriate conceptual framework for thinking about and understanding the problems he analyzes, which largely have to do with the widely-reported "democratic deficit" that mars the legitimacy of the Union.

Written in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the book focuses much of its attention on the inadequacies of the response to the sovereign debt crisis, including a lot of venom directed at the Merkel government and the champions of austerity for their self-destructive moralizing and lack of solidarity. For example, Offe highlights the so-called "denominator effect," by which austerity measures imposed on Greece directly caused its GDP to contract, thereby in themselves RAISING the debt-to-GDP ratio, and making even further social spending reductions necessary. This is the perverse logic of austerity on full display.

I am sympathetic toward Offe's political sensibility and agree with his argument that the EU needs a robust political and social basis as well as an economic basis if it is to survive.

The last few chapters started to turn me off to Offe as the tone of his editorializing heated up - by the end, he became a bit shrill for my taste. That said, this book was extremely useful and well worth reading.
]]> Absalom, Absalom! 716652 384 William Faulkner 0099475111 Mesoscope 4 literature The Sound and the Fury. Nevertheless, part of me wants to enthusiastically recommend it, because the things it gets right, it gets very right. As Faulkner scholar Michael Gorra , “No one can read it quickly or even entirely with pleasure, but anyone who can hear its flowered dissonance will know that such books are why we read at all.�

I began reading this as my first Faulkner novel after hearing that it can be read before The Sound and the Fury. That is quite false - so much so that when I realized its degree of connection to the earlier book, I put it down midway through, read the other one, and then returned to it. Anyone who says it can be read on its own does not appreciate fully how it functions. (My SatF review is here.)

Absalom, Absalom! extends and deepens the tragedy of The Sound and the Fury by tying it to broader problems of historical memory and social identity, and I believe the two have to be taken as an inseparable whole. Faulkner is ultimately a genealogist of the American soul, and in the many-layered story of the Compson family he dramatizes the roots of a crisis of the spirit that still rages like an out of control fire through the land.

This book is famously difficult. Some writers have defended it as not that hard, but I found it extraordinarily hard to read - much more so than The Sound and the Fury. Not because it jumps around in time, or anything like that, but because it’s written in a highly-stylized way. It is said to contain one of the longest sentences in English literature, but honestly I didn’t notice it, whenever it was, because most of the sentences are extremely long - they commonly run two-thirds of a page, and paragraphs often run for six or more pages.

The sentences and paragraphs are not merely long, but are written in an odd, circumlocutory fashion that lopes, loops, circles around, suggests, obscures, or omits. The cumulative effect is very wearisome, and I had the impression of trying to ride a bucking horse from Boston to Mississippi. It required a continual, active exertion to keep my attention on the page, and even so, I would frequently go back and find I had missed key action because it was buried or obscured.

My criterion for evaluating such stylistic machinations is simple - I believe they must contribute to the beauty or to the ideas of the book to a degree that is commensurate with the toll they exact on the reader. In my opinion this novel badly fails that test.

I believe Faulkner's primary reasons for writing in this manner were twofold. First, the story is largely refracted through the mind of Quentin Compson, its principle narrator, who, we know from The Sound and the Fury, is prone to compulsive abstraction. That made for an absorbing chapter of that short book, but it is a terrible way to write a long novel.

The second is that the book is centrally concerned with the way in which historical memory and present identity are related, and how they are products of the imagination. This is indeed a core aspect of the book, but in my opinion, Faulkner’s stylistic experimentation actually obscures this more than he illuminates it, because the manner of speech and thought is so obviously false, so clearly artifice. Unlike, say, Ulysses, which directly conveys a vivid impression of how people think and experience the world, no human being speaks or thinks in the way Faulkner has them speak and think in this book.

This book is also far too long in my opinion, and very repetitive. A handful of key events are excavated and explored from different perspectives, and by the time we’re done, we have more than exhausted their finite intrinsic interest. There was a very long section near the end that circled round to events that had already been thoroughly mined and went through them yet again, and at greater length and at still greater a remove, and I found it almost unbearable.

Despite my appreciation for his larger project and my deep efforts to sympathize with it, Faulkner ultimately did manage to alienate me as a reader. So many of the book’s difficulties are simply arbitrary. Imagine a chapter of narration in which it is unclear for several pages who the narrator is, simply because the author simply declines to tell you. Infuriating, and I am deeply relieved to be done with it.

Despite the fact that I believe Faulkner's stylistic approach was profoundly misguided and destructive to the character of the novel, I have to emphasize that in terms of the matter of the book, this work is of the first rank. The aggregate effect of reading his corpus has brought an entire world to life in a way that literature rarely does, and it is of the utmost contemporary relevance. There are readers who seem to be less turned off by his approach, so especially if you have read and admired The Sound and the Fury, I would recommend giving this one a try, despite its difficulties.]]> 4.01 1936 Absalom, Absalom!
author: William Faulkner
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1936
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/18
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves: literature
review:
This book is unusually difficult for me to evaluate. I found the way it was written somewhat hateful, and its problems with race are substantially more fraught than The Sound and the Fury. Nevertheless, part of me wants to enthusiastically recommend it, because the things it gets right, it gets very right. As Faulkner scholar Michael Gorra , “No one can read it quickly or even entirely with pleasure, but anyone who can hear its flowered dissonance will know that such books are why we read at all.�

I began reading this as my first Faulkner novel after hearing that it can be read before The Sound and the Fury. That is quite false - so much so that when I realized its degree of connection to the earlier book, I put it down midway through, read the other one, and then returned to it. Anyone who says it can be read on its own does not appreciate fully how it functions. (My SatF review is here.)

Absalom, Absalom! extends and deepens the tragedy of The Sound and the Fury by tying it to broader problems of historical memory and social identity, and I believe the two have to be taken as an inseparable whole. Faulkner is ultimately a genealogist of the American soul, and in the many-layered story of the Compson family he dramatizes the roots of a crisis of the spirit that still rages like an out of control fire through the land.

This book is famously difficult. Some writers have defended it as not that hard, but I found it extraordinarily hard to read - much more so than The Sound and the Fury. Not because it jumps around in time, or anything like that, but because it’s written in a highly-stylized way. It is said to contain one of the longest sentences in English literature, but honestly I didn’t notice it, whenever it was, because most of the sentences are extremely long - they commonly run two-thirds of a page, and paragraphs often run for six or more pages.

The sentences and paragraphs are not merely long, but are written in an odd, circumlocutory fashion that lopes, loops, circles around, suggests, obscures, or omits. The cumulative effect is very wearisome, and I had the impression of trying to ride a bucking horse from Boston to Mississippi. It required a continual, active exertion to keep my attention on the page, and even so, I would frequently go back and find I had missed key action because it was buried or obscured.

My criterion for evaluating such stylistic machinations is simple - I believe they must contribute to the beauty or to the ideas of the book to a degree that is commensurate with the toll they exact on the reader. In my opinion this novel badly fails that test.

I believe Faulkner's primary reasons for writing in this manner were twofold. First, the story is largely refracted through the mind of Quentin Compson, its principle narrator, who, we know from The Sound and the Fury, is prone to compulsive abstraction. That made for an absorbing chapter of that short book, but it is a terrible way to write a long novel.

The second is that the book is centrally concerned with the way in which historical memory and present identity are related, and how they are products of the imagination. This is indeed a core aspect of the book, but in my opinion, Faulkner’s stylistic experimentation actually obscures this more than he illuminates it, because the manner of speech and thought is so obviously false, so clearly artifice. Unlike, say, Ulysses, which directly conveys a vivid impression of how people think and experience the world, no human being speaks or thinks in the way Faulkner has them speak and think in this book.

This book is also far too long in my opinion, and very repetitive. A handful of key events are excavated and explored from different perspectives, and by the time we’re done, we have more than exhausted their finite intrinsic interest. There was a very long section near the end that circled round to events that had already been thoroughly mined and went through them yet again, and at greater length and at still greater a remove, and I found it almost unbearable.

Despite my appreciation for his larger project and my deep efforts to sympathize with it, Faulkner ultimately did manage to alienate me as a reader. So many of the book’s difficulties are simply arbitrary. Imagine a chapter of narration in which it is unclear for several pages who the narrator is, simply because the author simply declines to tell you. Infuriating, and I am deeply relieved to be done with it.

Despite the fact that I believe Faulkner's stylistic approach was profoundly misguided and destructive to the character of the novel, I have to emphasize that in terms of the matter of the book, this work is of the first rank. The aggregate effect of reading his corpus has brought an entire world to life in a way that literature rarely does, and it is of the utmost contemporary relevance. There are readers who seem to be less turned off by his approach, so especially if you have read and admired The Sound and the Fury, I would recommend giving this one a try, despite its difficulties.
]]> Die Ringe des Saturn 448435 349 W.G. Sebald 3596136555 Mesoscope 4 german, literature Rings of Saturn is a melancholy story of aimless wandering and meditation. Its peripatetic protagonist, a literary stand-in for the book's author, treks through the desolate Suffolk countryside, reflecting on a plethora of curious historical, artistic, and philosophical topics. These reflections are often triggered by the landscape, but sometimes arise out of the murky gloom of unconscious association. Gradually, the connections start to give rise to an underlying web of moods and ideas imaged by recurring motifs and anchored in a strong current of historical tragedy.

If, as many critics opine, the unspoken goad for the author's melancholy is to a large degree the legacy of the Holocaust, then this great shadow makes itself known only mediately and through through circumlocution. There is a tendency in contemporary German culture to talk around the Holocaust in a variety of ways, and I am not convinced that this is a good thing. In Sebald's case, indirection most probably also derives from the German modernist tradition of not-saying and not-seeing, key devices in the literature of anxiety.

The book weaves and winds its way through considerations of topics as varied as the life of Joseph Conrad, herring fishing, the Suffolk hurricane of 1989, Thomas Browne, the work of Jorge Luis Borges, silk cultivation, World War II, and the Irish Troubles. The book invariably waxes in interest and effectiveness as the subject matter draws closer to Sebald's personal experience, and some of the purely historical subjects, such as the long meditation on China's last empress held only anecdotal interest.

In general, I feel that Sebald was only somewhat successful in making a persuasive case for his form in this work, though I know he has many passionate defenders. At times it was dazzling in its intensity, but some of it felt arbitrary.

The novelist J. M. Coetzee observed, and I agree, that English-speaking audiences probably overestimate the originality of Sebald's approach. Literature and philosophy have been in much closer dialog in the German-speaking world than the English for centuries, and a great number of major authors straddle the divide. Collections of literary-philosophical miniatures go back at least to Benjamin's Denkbilder, and I was strongly reminded several times in Rings of Saturn of Ernst Jünger's Abenteuerliches Herz and Hans Blumenberg's Die Sorge geht über den Fluß. I would particularly recommend the latter as a mesmerizing work which made stronger and more confident use of motifs to bind a collection together than Rings. At times Sebald simply wanders on, and by the end, I was disappointed not to find a stronger through-line.]]> 4.08 1995 Die Ringe des Saturn
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/07
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: german, literature
review:
W. G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn is a melancholy story of aimless wandering and meditation. Its peripatetic protagonist, a literary stand-in for the book's author, treks through the desolate Suffolk countryside, reflecting on a plethora of curious historical, artistic, and philosophical topics. These reflections are often triggered by the landscape, but sometimes arise out of the murky gloom of unconscious association. Gradually, the connections start to give rise to an underlying web of moods and ideas imaged by recurring motifs and anchored in a strong current of historical tragedy.

If, as many critics opine, the unspoken goad for the author's melancholy is to a large degree the legacy of the Holocaust, then this great shadow makes itself known only mediately and through through circumlocution. There is a tendency in contemporary German culture to talk around the Holocaust in a variety of ways, and I am not convinced that this is a good thing. In Sebald's case, indirection most probably also derives from the German modernist tradition of not-saying and not-seeing, key devices in the literature of anxiety.

The book weaves and winds its way through considerations of topics as varied as the life of Joseph Conrad, herring fishing, the Suffolk hurricane of 1989, Thomas Browne, the work of Jorge Luis Borges, silk cultivation, World War II, and the Irish Troubles. The book invariably waxes in interest and effectiveness as the subject matter draws closer to Sebald's personal experience, and some of the purely historical subjects, such as the long meditation on China's last empress held only anecdotal interest.

In general, I feel that Sebald was only somewhat successful in making a persuasive case for his form in this work, though I know he has many passionate defenders. At times it was dazzling in its intensity, but some of it felt arbitrary.

The novelist J. M. Coetzee observed, and I agree, that English-speaking audiences probably overestimate the originality of Sebald's approach. Literature and philosophy have been in much closer dialog in the German-speaking world than the English for centuries, and a great number of major authors straddle the divide. Collections of literary-philosophical miniatures go back at least to Benjamin's Denkbilder, and I was strongly reminded several times in Rings of Saturn of Ernst Jünger's Abenteuerliches Herz and Hans Blumenberg's Die Sorge geht über den Fluß. I would particularly recommend the latter as a mesmerizing work which made stronger and more confident use of motifs to bind a collection together than Rings. At times Sebald simply wanders on, and by the end, I was disappointed not to find a stronger through-line.
]]> Die Wahlverwandtschaften 381968
Die Geschichte einer tragischen Verwicklung, zwischen einem glücklichen Ehepaar, einem guten Freund und einer Nichte »ist das undurchdringlichste und vielleicht vieldeutigste Buch, das Goethe geschrieben hat«. Erich Trunz]]> 359 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 3423124032 Mesoscope 5 literature, german, favorites

After my second read, I would say it is both less and more enigmatic than the first time; less, insofar as my much greater familiarity with Goethe's oeuvre and my acquaintance with the novel made its action much easier to follow. More, insofar as the central mysteries the book poses to the reader become even deeper upon closer examination. At heart, I think this book is an exploration of the invisible forces that shape human destiny, and a kind of treatise in novel-form on the intrinsic significance of things. Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis.]]> 3.75 1809 Die Wahlverwandtschaften
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1809
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/29
date added: 2024/04/29
shelves: literature, german, favorites
review:
I wrote this post in 2019 after reading this book for the first time:


After my second read, I would say it is both less and more enigmatic than the first time; less, insofar as my much greater familiarity with Goethe's oeuvre and my acquaintance with the novel made its action much easier to follow. More, insofar as the central mysteries the book poses to the reader become even deeper upon closer examination. At heart, I think this book is an exploration of the invisible forces that shape human destiny, and a kind of treatise in novel-form on the intrinsic significance of things. Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis.
]]> <![CDATA[Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf]]> 702172 In Form eines Friedensvertrages wendet Kant seine Moralphilosophie (vgl. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Kategorischer Imperativ) auf die Frage der Politik nach dem Frieden zwischen den Staaten an. Auch hier gilt es, von der Vernunft geleitete Entscheidungen zu treffen und nach Gerechtigkeit zu trachten. Dabei stellt er klar, dass der Frieden kein natürlicher Zustand für den Menschen sei und deshalb gestiftet werden müsse. Die Gewährung des Friedens sei Sache der Politik, welche sich der Idee eines allgemeingültigen Rechtssystems unterzuordnen habe; denn so heißt es im Anhang: Das Recht der Menschen muß heilig gehalten werden, der herrschenden Gewalt mag es auch noch so große Aufopferung kosten. Dem Despotismus erteilt Kant eine Absage.]]> 87 Immanuel Kant 3150015014 Mesoscope 4 philosophy 3.68 1795 Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf
author: Immanuel Kant
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1795
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/22
date added: 2024/04/22
shelves: philosophy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development]]> 3856 304 Mike Cohn 0321205685 Mesoscope 4 product-management
The book has a couple downsides. First, my copy cost 41 Euros, which is at least twice as much as it should have. It's a print-on-demand book from 2004 with around 250 pages - the cost is extortionate. Second, it's somewhat dated. It assumes the reader will be coming out of a waterfall development mindset and does a lot of explanation of Agile and arguments on its behalf. It also seems to have been written before product management orgs reached their current status as a major component of most software companies, so the function is rarely mentioned and not much considered. And some of the terminology is a bit dated - what we would call jobs-to-be-done these days is called Goal Stories, for example. Third, stylistically, the writing is at times a bit odd. I have several examples, but the one I'll mention is that what most people would call "red flags," Cohn calls "smells," which I found a bit weird.

Modern readers might blanche at the price, need to skim the stuff on why scrums are good, and translate references to customer teams into product manager equivalents, but at the end of the day, you get what you came for - a solid, comprehensive overview of the topic.]]> 3.88 2004 User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development
author: Mike Cohn
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/18
date added: 2024/04/18
shelves: product-management
review:
This seems to be one of the classic texts on user stories. It is generally quite well-written and organized with copious examples and a several-chapter case study at the end. It gives a clear understanding of user stories, what they're for, what they're not, how to write them, how to prioritize them, and how to organize them into iteration planning and final testing.

The book has a couple downsides. First, my copy cost 41 Euros, which is at least twice as much as it should have. It's a print-on-demand book from 2004 with around 250 pages - the cost is extortionate. Second, it's somewhat dated. It assumes the reader will be coming out of a waterfall development mindset and does a lot of explanation of Agile and arguments on its behalf. It also seems to have been written before product management orgs reached their current status as a major component of most software companies, so the function is rarely mentioned and not much considered. And some of the terminology is a bit dated - what we would call jobs-to-be-done these days is called Goal Stories, for example. Third, stylistically, the writing is at times a bit odd. I have several examples, but the one I'll mention is that what most people would call "red flags," Cohn calls "smells," which I found a bit weird.

Modern readers might blanche at the price, need to skim the stuff on why scrums are good, and translate references to customer teams into product manager equivalents, but at the end of the day, you get what you came for - a solid, comprehensive overview of the topic.
]]> Science of Logic 808164 844 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1573922803 Mesoscope 5 philosophy, favorites
Quick preview:

One has to marvel at the breathtaking ambition and stupendous folly of the Science of Logic; that Hegel, armed only with his idiosyncratic method of immanent deduction and dialectic, would dare attempt to trace the logical structure of experience from its lowest foundations in empty, indeterminate abstraction all the way to its uttermost peak; through the vast manifolds of nature and objectivity and at last unto the Godhead itself, all in one great, self-consistent, and architectonically-complete demonstration. Science of Logic is a Tower of Babel built by one man.

The absurdity of the endeavor and the complete inadequacy of his intellectual toolkit makes itself felt on every page as his system struggles to hold itself together under its own enormous weight. It does so largely by relying on a core set of titanic, nebulous categories. In a single paragraph, I counted Hegel using the word Grund in at least four different ways (cause, reason, ground, and basis), as though the fact that one German word includes this diversity of meanings can do the work for us of binding together all of its manifold registers into a single concept.

Here, I think Hegel fully earned Schopenhauer’s scorn, who remarked in his own infinitely clearer, infinitely more reasonable, infinitely less profound treatment of Grund that Hegel can’t even keep straight the difference between reason and cause....]]> 4.16 1812 Science of Logic
author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1812
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/16
date added: 2024/04/16
shelves: philosophy, favorites
review:
I tried to post my review here, but it's too long for ŷ. If you're interested, you can read it here: .

Quick preview:

One has to marvel at the breathtaking ambition and stupendous folly of the Science of Logic; that Hegel, armed only with his idiosyncratic method of immanent deduction and dialectic, would dare attempt to trace the logical structure of experience from its lowest foundations in empty, indeterminate abstraction all the way to its uttermost peak; through the vast manifolds of nature and objectivity and at last unto the Godhead itself, all in one great, self-consistent, and architectonically-complete demonstration. Science of Logic is a Tower of Babel built by one man.

The absurdity of the endeavor and the complete inadequacy of his intellectual toolkit makes itself felt on every page as his system struggles to hold itself together under its own enormous weight. It does so largely by relying on a core set of titanic, nebulous categories. In a single paragraph, I counted Hegel using the word Grund in at least four different ways (cause, reason, ground, and basis), as though the fact that one German word includes this diversity of meanings can do the work for us of binding together all of its manifold registers into a single concept.

Here, I think Hegel fully earned Schopenhauer’s scorn, who remarked in his own infinitely clearer, infinitely more reasonable, infinitely less profound treatment of Grund that Hegel can’t even keep straight the difference between reason and cause....
]]> <![CDATA[Der Antichrist: Versuch einer Kritik des Christentums]]> 441283 128 Friedrich Nietzsche 3458326472 Mesoscope 4 Beyond Good and Evil and especially The Gay Science. The Antichrist (arguably better rendered as The Anti-Christian) is pretty far down on my list of favorite Nietzsche books, but as always, it includes some unforgettable passages.

Anyone who thinks Nietzsche is unproblematically "anti-religious" should probably review it, and perhaps focus on sections 33-36, in which he provides a surprisingly sensitive and insightful reading of the career of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.

Speaking of which, it is one of the book's many substantial critical and historical problems that Nietzsche did not distinguish between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John; much of what he said about Paul applies equally well to John. But as Walter Kaufmann has noted, this book is so replete with historical errors, it would be pedantic to enumerate them. This does not mean the book is devoid of important insights.

Antichrist also represents a great deal of what I think of as the "bad Nietzsche," the polemicist who is more of a no-sayer than a yes-sayer, who sounds, at times, bitter and shrill, and whose contrariness poises him to positions I find intensely problematic, such as his wildly-ahistorical defense of the Indian caste system as explained in the Law Code of Manu, which he clearly only partly understood.

In his limited defense, this book was conceived as the first of four volumes in a Revaluation of all Values series, and I believe the negativity of the book was to a large degree intended as a way-clearing for what was to come, a process of breaking bonds and creating a clearing for new growth.]]> 3.58 1895 Der Antichrist: Versuch einer Kritik des Christentums
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1895
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/10
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves: christianity, german, philosophy
review:
The Nietzsche who is most of interest to me is the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil and especially The Gay Science. The Antichrist (arguably better rendered as The Anti-Christian) is pretty far down on my list of favorite Nietzsche books, but as always, it includes some unforgettable passages.

Anyone who thinks Nietzsche is unproblematically "anti-religious" should probably review it, and perhaps focus on sections 33-36, in which he provides a surprisingly sensitive and insightful reading of the career of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.

Speaking of which, it is one of the book's many substantial critical and historical problems that Nietzsche did not distinguish between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John; much of what he said about Paul applies equally well to John. But as Walter Kaufmann has noted, this book is so replete with historical errors, it would be pedantic to enumerate them. This does not mean the book is devoid of important insights.

Antichrist also represents a great deal of what I think of as the "bad Nietzsche," the polemicist who is more of a no-sayer than a yes-sayer, who sounds, at times, bitter and shrill, and whose contrariness poises him to positions I find intensely problematic, such as his wildly-ahistorical defense of the Indian caste system as explained in the Law Code of Manu, which he clearly only partly understood.

In his limited defense, this book was conceived as the first of four volumes in a Revaluation of all Values series, and I believe the negativity of the book was to a large degree intended as a way-clearing for what was to come, a process of breaking bonds and creating a clearing for new growth.
]]> <![CDATA[Pivot to Product Manager: The Ultimate 3-Step Playbook to Kickstart Your Product Management Career]]> 58480152
Are you already in charge of your own team but are feeling overwhelmed by all the responsibilities?

Have you managed to get an interview for a Product Manager position and need help on how to go about it?

The Product Manager plays a central and crucial role in any company. In a world fueled by the consumption of products, they get to decide what products to create, how to sell them and who to sell them to.

According to a recent study, a fully optimized Product Manager can actually increase the company’s profits by approximately 34%.

That’s how important this position is!

So, if you aspire to become one, you’ve got to be ready for it... and having the steps to achieve that career is the best tool you could have.

This is your time to rise above the rest.

In Pivot to Product Manager, you will

3 detailed steps that will give you the skills to lead teams, gain respect, and turn heads as the new Product ManagerWell-researched and great insights into the different paths that can take you to the Product Manager roleHow to nail the interview and prepare for any question that may come your wayLessons on the fundamentals of being a successful, profitable, and outstanding Product ManagerThe personality and behavioural traits that will help you manage, inspire, and lead a team to victory2 bonus chapters that will get you into the mindset of a Product Manager and learn the practices involved in creating and marketing productsAnd much more.

No one is born or destined to be a manager. You develop the skills needed through hard work and continuous self-improvement.

You make your own destiny when it comes to your career. By following the steps in this guide, you will emerge a well-rounded Product Manager that is ready to take the world by storm.

(Includes Product Manager interview questions and answers)]]> 190 Irving Malcolm Mesoscope 3 product-management
The introductory sections provide basic, high-level information about the knowledge, skills, and competencies required to work as a product manager and some general information about what the job consists of. This serves as a useful checklist of key topics for further research, but Malcolm doesn't cover any concept in real depth. He does at least provide scores of links and book recommendations, and I spent a few useful days going through every cited online resource.

The large majority of the book consists of preparation for the interview. I think this was a mistake, and the book is not very clear in its title or presentation that that is the focus. It includes dozens of practice questions and some sample answers, if that's what you're looking for.

I haven't yet read Gayle McDowell's Cracking the PM Interview, but the PMs I know seem to regard that as the gold standard, FWIW.

Short even for its 150 pages, fluffly and large-font, but useful for organizing further research.]]> 3.71 Pivot to Product Manager: The Ultimate 3-Step Playbook to Kickstart Your Product Management Career
author: Irving Malcolm
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: product-management
review:
The title suggests that it provides a practical guide for making a mid-career change, but it doesn't, really.

The introductory sections provide basic, high-level information about the knowledge, skills, and competencies required to work as a product manager and some general information about what the job consists of. This serves as a useful checklist of key topics for further research, but Malcolm doesn't cover any concept in real depth. He does at least provide scores of links and book recommendations, and I spent a few useful days going through every cited online resource.

The large majority of the book consists of preparation for the interview. I think this was a mistake, and the book is not very clear in its title or presentation that that is the focus. It includes dozens of practice questions and some sample answers, if that's what you're looking for.

I haven't yet read Gayle McDowell's Cracking the PM Interview, but the PMs I know seem to regard that as the gold standard, FWIW.

Short even for its 150 pages, fluffly and large-font, but useful for organizing further research.
]]> <![CDATA[Das Traumbuch � Postkarten aus dem Schlaf]]> 61159819
Und es ist wie so oft: Der Träumer kann fliegen, im Handumdrehn kommt er von einem Ort zum nächsten, er macht sich lächerlich und muss erkennen, dass er, während er sich lächerlich macht, gerade auf einer Bühne steht, vor Zuschauern Und so berichtet der Schriftsteller von Witz und Schrecken, Peinlichkeit und Rettung in seinen Träumen, und die Malerin folgt ihm kongenial.

Natürlich taucht Unbekanntes auf, der Selbstkostenpreis Gottes zum Beispiel. Oder gefiederte Hunde. Oder Wörter wie branghementique, die es nicht gibt, oder Kinder, die mit Krawatten auf die Welt kommen. Aber auch Bekanntes und Bekannte haben ihren Auftritt, die Stadt Wasserburg vor allem, dann auch Thomas Mann und Rudolf Augstein und Pete Sampras. Oder Maria Stuart, Edgar Selge und Jürgen Habermas. Und die bekannte unbekannte Schönheit, naheliegender weise. Immer wieder.


«Mir ist der von der Psychoanalyse empfohlene Umgang mit Träumen völlig fremd, ich weiß durch jahrelange Beobachtung, dass ich nichts damit zu tun habe. Schon das Bedürfnis, Träume zu deuten, kommt mir absurd vor. Meine Träume müssen nicht gedeutet oder gar nach den billigsten Schlüsseln übersetzt werden, sie sind mir lieb und wert, so wie sie vorkommen.»

«Arnold Stadler, er kommt zu mir her. Legt sich auf mich und sagt: Du miesepetriges Weib!»]]> 141 Martin Walser 3498003194 Mesoscope 0 to-read 3.20 Das Traumbuch – Postkarten aus dem Schlaf
author: Martin Walser
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Vom Ende der Geschichte: Die parallele Geschichte von Tragödie und Philosophie (German Edition)]]> 56921024 218 Ágnes Heller 3902968591 Mesoscope 0 to-read 4.00 Vom Ende der Geschichte: Die parallele Geschichte von Tragödie und Philosophie (German Edition)
author: Ágnes Heller
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Macht nichts. Eine kleine Trilogie des Todes]]> 1041892 90 Elfriede Jelinek 3499231611 Mesoscope 0 to-read 2.53 1999 Macht nichts. Eine kleine Trilogie des Todes
author: Elfriede Jelinek
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 2.53
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers]]> 1919474 Unusual book 100 Peter Weiss 351810053X Mesoscope 0 to-read 3.67 1960 Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers
author: Peter Weiss
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Die andere Seite 16038679 249 Alfred Kubin 3499255561 Mesoscope 0 to-read 3.57 1909 Die andere Seite
author: Alfred Kubin
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1909
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Der Untergeher 1441452 242 Thomas Bernhard 3518379976 Mesoscope 0 to-read 4.03 1983 Der Untergeher
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Rummelplatz 5998026 Was der verbotene DEFA-Streifen "Spur der Steine" für den Film darstellte, ist "Rummelplatz" für die Literatur. In keinem anderen Roman sind die Gründerjahre in Ost und West so ungeschönt und dabei literarisch gelungen dargestellt. Nun wird er erstmals vollständig publiziert.]]> 768 Werner Bräunig 3746624606 Mesoscope 0 to-read 4.01 2007 Rummelplatz
author: Werner Bräunig
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Kassandra 1209631 Da stünde, unter andern Sätzen: Laßt euch nicht von den Eignen täuschen."]]> 160 Christa Wolf 3630614558 Mesoscope 5 literature, german Die Hamletmaschine, Wolf does to the Iliad in this work.

Kassandra tells the story of Troy in its last years, as seen through the eyes of its titular protagonist. One of the cardinal virtues of the book is the degree to which Wolf shows a complete command of the poetic possibilities of the situation. Kassandra sees deeply into things, and the constant discovery of nuance and implication is one of the book's great pleasures.

The circumstances are, of course, very dark. Her revisionist account of the epic battle profoundly problematizes the concept of heroism, and reads a kind of anachronistic Cold War cynicism into it, largely through her use of the character Eumelos, an insignificant figure in the Greek account, but in Wolf's telling he becomes the head of a Stasi-like network of guards who are one of the great corrupting influences on her society.

As a revisionist account of Troy, I was reminded several times of Euripides' masterpiece The Trojan Women, which I discuss in . I can only assume it was a major influence.

Another obvious influence was Nietzsche, whose account of the pre-Christian moral universe of the Greeks in his Toward a Genealogy of Morals also left a conspicuous mark. The Greeks in Wolf's account are unburdened by a sense of good and evil though, as one character reflects in the book, it might be nice for the Trojans if they were.

If there is a misstep in the book, it is that Wolf shows evidence of a perhaps-naive nostalgia for the pre-Indo-European Neolithic goddess culture, which she identifies with a substratum of Trojan culture that is preserved by the women. This is the one place where her critical impulse seems to fail her, and to me she seemed a bit taken in by a romanticized conception of a matriarchal society.

At its best, this work functions as a general allegory of conflict and how it affects people, and of how we preserve the best of ourselves in the autonomous, private realm of our inner being. In a significant moment in the beginning, Kassandra reflects "Warum wollte ich die Sehergabe unbedingt? Mit meiner Stimme sprechen: das Äußerste. Mehr, andres hab ich nicht gewollt." Or, "Why did I want the gift of prophecy at all? At the last: to speak with my voice. I've never wanted anything different or more." It is in seeing and understand that Kassandra is most completely herself.

The relationship between Wolf's fictional world and post-war Germany is not completely clear to me. Obviously there are parallels between Troy and the DDR, but does that imply that the Greeks are in some sense the NATO forces? Are the US and Western Europe, like the Greeks, spiritually and morally comatose in a self-satisfied dream? I don't believe this was her meaning, I don't think it's intended to line up quite so consistently, but it's hard to say.

Update 2024: Re-reading this old review, I can hardly believe that I failed to mention that this book represents an early and important example of what is now a sub-genre of revisionist literature - the retelling of a classical or canonical tale from the perspective of a politically-marginalized figure. It's certainly not the earliest - Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea came nearly twenty years earlier, for example - but it's not to see Madeline Miller's popular novel Circe without thinking of Wolf's possible influence. ]]> 4.09 1983 Kassandra
author: Christa Wolf
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1983
rating: 5
read at: 2021/02/08
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: literature, german
review:
Wolf's short book is one of my favorite post-War German novels, if one could call it a novel. An "Erzählung," she called it - a tale or a story, and that just about says it, though it is also a political and philosophical essay, an allegory, and a prose-poem. One point of reference in English is the narrative poetry of Robison Jeffers, which has a similar kind of raw power. In German, I think immediately of Heiner Müller, of course, and am inclined to say that what that author did to Hamlet in Die Hamletmaschine, Wolf does to the Iliad in this work.

Kassandra tells the story of Troy in its last years, as seen through the eyes of its titular protagonist. One of the cardinal virtues of the book is the degree to which Wolf shows a complete command of the poetic possibilities of the situation. Kassandra sees deeply into things, and the constant discovery of nuance and implication is one of the book's great pleasures.

The circumstances are, of course, very dark. Her revisionist account of the epic battle profoundly problematizes the concept of heroism, and reads a kind of anachronistic Cold War cynicism into it, largely through her use of the character Eumelos, an insignificant figure in the Greek account, but in Wolf's telling he becomes the head of a Stasi-like network of guards who are one of the great corrupting influences on her society.

As a revisionist account of Troy, I was reminded several times of Euripides' masterpiece The Trojan Women, which I discuss in . I can only assume it was a major influence.

Another obvious influence was Nietzsche, whose account of the pre-Christian moral universe of the Greeks in his Toward a Genealogy of Morals also left a conspicuous mark. The Greeks in Wolf's account are unburdened by a sense of good and evil though, as one character reflects in the book, it might be nice for the Trojans if they were.

If there is a misstep in the book, it is that Wolf shows evidence of a perhaps-naive nostalgia for the pre-Indo-European Neolithic goddess culture, which she identifies with a substratum of Trojan culture that is preserved by the women. This is the one place where her critical impulse seems to fail her, and to me she seemed a bit taken in by a romanticized conception of a matriarchal society.

At its best, this work functions as a general allegory of conflict and how it affects people, and of how we preserve the best of ourselves in the autonomous, private realm of our inner being. In a significant moment in the beginning, Kassandra reflects "Warum wollte ich die Sehergabe unbedingt? Mit meiner Stimme sprechen: das Äußerste. Mehr, andres hab ich nicht gewollt." Or, "Why did I want the gift of prophecy at all? At the last: to speak with my voice. I've never wanted anything different or more." It is in seeing and understand that Kassandra is most completely herself.

The relationship between Wolf's fictional world and post-war Germany is not completely clear to me. Obviously there are parallels between Troy and the DDR, but does that imply that the Greeks are in some sense the NATO forces? Are the US and Western Europe, like the Greeks, spiritually and morally comatose in a self-satisfied dream? I don't believe this was her meaning, I don't think it's intended to line up quite so consistently, but it's hard to say.

Update 2024: Re-reading this old review, I can hardly believe that I failed to mention that this book represents an early and important example of what is now a sub-genre of revisionist literature - the retelling of a classical or canonical tale from the perspective of a politically-marginalized figure. It's certainly not the earliest - Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea came nearly twenty years earlier, for example - but it's not to see Madeline Miller's popular novel Circe without thinking of Wolf's possible influence.
]]> <![CDATA[Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie; Drei Studien zu Hegel (Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.5)]]> 13487014 386 Theodor W. Adorno Mesoscope 0 to-read 5.00 1956 Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie; Drei Studien zu Hegel (Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.5)
author: Theodor W. Adorno
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Die Bibel (Luther-Übersetzung)]]> 2328991 1307 Martin Luther 3438011018 Mesoscope 5
No author has had a greater effect on the German language than Martin Luther, and it's astonishing how modern much of this text feels - not so remote as the King James from modern English, perhaps in part because Luther emphasized the meaning more than attempting to faithfully reconstruct the the original literal sense of the text.

The Bible as a monument of literature is impossible to review. It's vast in scope and diversity, and obviously constitutes not only one of the wonders of the ancient world, but one of the greatest and most influential literary works in human history. ]]> 5.00 Die Bibel (Luther-Übersetzung)
author: Martin Luther
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/26
date added: 2024/03/26
shelves: german, christianity, religion-mythology
review:
For a German study group, I read Genesis, Exodus, Ruth, 2 Judges, 1 and 2 Kings, the Song of Songs, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Isaiah, Daniel, the four Gospels, Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Revelation, some in part, most in their entirety.

No author has had a greater effect on the German language than Martin Luther, and it's astonishing how modern much of this text feels - not so remote as the King James from modern English, perhaps in part because Luther emphasized the meaning more than attempting to faithfully reconstruct the the original literal sense of the text.

The Bible as a monument of literature is impossible to review. It's vast in scope and diversity, and obviously constitutes not only one of the wonders of the ancient world, but one of the greatest and most influential literary works in human history.
]]> <![CDATA[Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben]]> 2911436 47 Georg Simmel 3518068571 Mesoscope 4 german, philosophy, sociology Philosophie des Geldes in his titanic essay on reification in Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, and the influence of this work on his thinking is immediately obvious.

Simmel argues that in order to function, large cities must rationalize their social interactions to make them predictable and orderly. In one telling example, he points to the pocket watches that everyone carries, in order to coordinate themselves in terms of a superordinate, regulating conception of time.

The standardization that results from this rationalization, he argues, tends to drain experience of its individual color, and here one detects distant echoes of Hegel and Marx.

Simmel also calls out the pace of modern life as placing novel demands on our attention, and describes the characteristic mode of life in the city as blasiert, or blasé. In his view, the high frequency of inputs, along with constant changes and demands for our attention, cause people to rebound into a kind of studied indifference, and he sees this as especially impactful on our social interactions. People in modern cities, he reports, barely have the mental capacity to acknowledge their neighbors with a smile or even a glance, and when they do form groups, they tend to maintain strict boundaries, so they have space and security to allow their peculiar personalities to unfold with one another.

Having lived in Berlin for the last six years, I will tell you with 100% certainty that what he is describing here is not typical of modernity as a whole, but is completely typical of this city. Simmel was born in Berlin, went to school at Humboldt University in the heart of the city, and as far as I know, lived here until shortly before his death. The frosty standoffishness he describes and the tendency to socialize in little groups is completely typical of Berlin, but not at all typical of Paris, London, San Francisco, or New York, or probably even Munich or Cologne.

On this basis, I think Simmel somewhat overgeneralizes from his own experience and mis-diagnoses the social malaise he experiences as stemming from various features of modern life, when some of them would seem to me to be clearly rooted in peculiarities of local culture. ]]> 3.78 1903 Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben
author: Georg Simmel
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1903
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/14
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: german, philosophy, sociology
review:
This essay is a classic reference point for the early-twentieth-century critique of rationalization and modernity, and it exists in close dialog with work of Max Weber and Georg Lukács on the same topic. Lukács cited Simmel's Philosophie des Geldes in his titanic essay on reification in Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, and the influence of this work on his thinking is immediately obvious.

Simmel argues that in order to function, large cities must rationalize their social interactions to make them predictable and orderly. In one telling example, he points to the pocket watches that everyone carries, in order to coordinate themselves in terms of a superordinate, regulating conception of time.

The standardization that results from this rationalization, he argues, tends to drain experience of its individual color, and here one detects distant echoes of Hegel and Marx.

Simmel also calls out the pace of modern life as placing novel demands on our attention, and describes the characteristic mode of life in the city as blasiert, or blasé. In his view, the high frequency of inputs, along with constant changes and demands for our attention, cause people to rebound into a kind of studied indifference, and he sees this as especially impactful on our social interactions. People in modern cities, he reports, barely have the mental capacity to acknowledge their neighbors with a smile or even a glance, and when they do form groups, they tend to maintain strict boundaries, so they have space and security to allow their peculiar personalities to unfold with one another.

Having lived in Berlin for the last six years, I will tell you with 100% certainty that what he is describing here is not typical of modernity as a whole, but is completely typical of this city. Simmel was born in Berlin, went to school at Humboldt University in the heart of the city, and as far as I know, lived here until shortly before his death. The frosty standoffishness he describes and the tendency to socialize in little groups is completely typical of Berlin, but not at all typical of Paris, London, San Francisco, or New York, or probably even Munich or Cologne.

On this basis, I think Simmel somewhat overgeneralizes from his own experience and mis-diagnoses the social malaise he experiences as stemming from various features of modern life, when some of them would seem to me to be clearly rooted in peculiarities of local culture.
]]> Traumnovelle 1333396 Die scheinbar glückliche Ehe von Fridolin und Albertine wird auf die Probe gestellt, als Fridolin in den Straßen Wiens nach erotischen Abenteuern sucht, während seine Frau sich ihrerseits der Phantasie hingibt, ihren Mann zu betrügen. Doch liegt im Ausleben geheimer Begierden die ersehnte Erfüllung? Schnitzlers »Traumnovelle« handelt von menschlichen Sehnsüchten und Trieben vor dem Hintergrund erster wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse auf dem Gebiet der Psychoanalyse. 1999 wurde sie von Stanley Kubrick unter dem Titel »Eyes Wide Shut« verfilmt.]]> 123 Arthur Schnitzler 315018455X Mesoscope 3 german, literature öß, but as an artist, Schnitzler is nowhere near the level of those geniuses. Without knowing much about him, I would guess that where Hoffmann and Kafka came by their uncanny visions honestly, as it were, Schnitzler was spoon-fed ideas of the unconscious through his reading of Freud. The difference is palpable.

One piece of evidence for this theory is that the protagonist of Traumnovelle at one point asks himself if he could be undergoing some kind of psychological breakdown, and thinks about what we could call in English a "fugue state." Once you achieve that kind of meta-theoretical awareness of your sources in literature, the original, animating impulse is always lost. It must come from life.

The story centers around a successful doctor and his young wife who go to a ball during carnival season, where the doctor is titillated by a little harmless flirting outside their marriage. He and his wife confide some of their erotic memories and fantasies to one another, which excites them and makes them feel a bit threatened and guilty. The rest of the novella takes up this ambivalent feeling of danger/excitement associated with the siren song of the libido, which threatens to beckon them both outside the safe garden walls of their bourgeois existence. Their marriage and their lives may or may not get lost in the maze of enigmatic and primal energies with which they flirt.

To me, the whole thing was redolent of bourgeois sexual guilt of a fairly pedestrian character. It strove for surrealism, but is imagery was too simplistic to really land. It felt disconnected from any real human energy that I could respond to or identify with.

It's a enduring mystery to me why Stanley Kubrick made his last film about this slightly stuffy story. He was probably going for David Lynch, but, like Schnitzler, his basic artistic style is too controlled to create something truly uncanny.]]> 3.67 1926 Traumnovelle
author: Arthur Schnitzler
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1926
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves: german, literature
review:
This trifle is thematically in the same ballpark as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Kafka, or the Robert Musil of öß, but as an artist, Schnitzler is nowhere near the level of those geniuses. Without knowing much about him, I would guess that where Hoffmann and Kafka came by their uncanny visions honestly, as it were, Schnitzler was spoon-fed ideas of the unconscious through his reading of Freud. The difference is palpable.

One piece of evidence for this theory is that the protagonist of Traumnovelle at one point asks himself if he could be undergoing some kind of psychological breakdown, and thinks about what we could call in English a "fugue state." Once you achieve that kind of meta-theoretical awareness of your sources in literature, the original, animating impulse is always lost. It must come from life.

The story centers around a successful doctor and his young wife who go to a ball during carnival season, where the doctor is titillated by a little harmless flirting outside their marriage. He and his wife confide some of their erotic memories and fantasies to one another, which excites them and makes them feel a bit threatened and guilty. The rest of the novella takes up this ambivalent feeling of danger/excitement associated with the siren song of the libido, which threatens to beckon them both outside the safe garden walls of their bourgeois existence. Their marriage and their lives may or may not get lost in the maze of enigmatic and primal energies with which they flirt.

To me, the whole thing was redolent of bourgeois sexual guilt of a fairly pedestrian character. It strove for surrealism, but is imagery was too simplistic to really land. It felt disconnected from any real human energy that I could respond to or identify with.

It's a enduring mystery to me why Stanley Kubrick made his last film about this slightly stuffy story. He was probably going for David Lynch, but, like Schnitzler, his basic artistic style is too controlled to create something truly uncanny.
]]> <![CDATA[Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Great Books in Philosophy)]]> 157118
Sextus Empiricus stands as an example of the "skeptic" school of thought whose members believed that knowledge was either unattainable or, if a genuine possibility, the conditions necessary to achieve it were next to impossible to satisfy. In other words, in the absence of complete knowledge, one must make do with the information provided by an imperfect world and conveyed to the mind through sense impressions that can often deceive us. Throughout his life Sextus Empiricus entered into intellectual combat with those who confidently claimed to possess indubitable knowledge. For skeptics, the best one can hope to achieve is a reasonable suspension of judgment—remaining ever mindful that claims to knowledge require careful scrutiny, thoughtful analysis, and critical review if we are to prevent ourselves and others from plunging headlong into mistaken notions.]]> 288 Sextus Empiricus 0879755970 Mesoscope 5 philosophy
If this sounds similar to the Yogasutra of Patanjali or the Buddhist philosophers of India, this is not a coincidence. According to Diogenes Laertius, Pyrrho traveled to India in order to study with the Gymnosophists, the Greek word he used to describe various yogic schools. The philosophical and rhetorical agreements between the Madhyamaka school of Nagarjuna and Pyrrhic skepticism are countless, ranging from the stated goals of the tradition to using extremely similar examples, such as both traditions using the case of phenomena appearing yellow to a person suffering from jaundice as a stock example for why the senses are unreliable.

The views of the skeptical schools of Pyrrho and Timon were summarized by a certain Aristocles in this manner:

"[W]e should not trust [sense perceptions, as they are unreliable], but should be without opinions and without inclinations and without wavering, saying about each single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not. Timon says that the result for those who are so disposed will be first speechlessness [perhaps resembling the "noble silence" that fell upon the Buddha after his final illumination], but then freedom from worry; and Aenesidemus says pleasure."

We are first struck by the similarity to the Madhyamaka ideal of "freedom from views," and then by the rejection of four possible modalities of being: is, is not, both, and neither. This fourfold negation is referred to by Buddhist scholars as the tetralemma, and is universally acknowledged to be the definitive position associated with the Buddhist Madhymaka school. I have never myself seen it formulated in a non-Indian tradition from the ancient world.

Here is a short excerpt from Outlines of Skepticism:

"If a thing moves, it moves either in the place where it is or in that where it is not. but it does not move in the place where it is, for if it is in it, it remains in it; nor yet does it move in the place where it is not; for where a thing is not, there it can neither effect nor suffer anything. Therefore nothing moves."

Compare to this argument from Nagarjuna's Mulamadhymakakarika:

Now, where one has gone one does not go.
Where one has not yet gone one does not go.
Apart from where one has gone and where one has not gone,
That over which one goes cannot be conceived.

This work is therefore of extraordinary interest to the comparativist, and I think one would have to be obtuse to fail to recognize the obvious connection here between Indian and Greek philosophy. What form it took, we cannot say. According to our tentative dating, Pyrrho was centuries earlier than Nagarjuna, but then Nagarjuna is often held to have compiled existing ideas in his Fundamental Wisdom.

The arguments of Sextus Empiricus also exerted a deep influence on modern philosophy, notably on Kant and Hegel, both of whom are known to have been enthusiastic readers of Pyrrhic skepticism. Kant taught Sextus Empricus for thirty years as part of his course on logic, and the basic structure of his use of antimonies of pure reason reflects its obvious influence. Hegel's criticism of dogmatic philosophy, as has been pointed out by his biographer Klaus Vieweg, owes a great deal to his enthusiastic use of Sextus Empiricus's so-called "five modes," which are presented as a general set of arguments for refuting any position.

The five modes are often reduced to a subset of three, which are referred to as the Trilemma of Agrippa. In this form, the argument runs as follows:

If I assert a proposition P, for which I provide some number of reasons or arguments, then there are either a finite number of reasons, or an infinite number of reasons; in the latter case, the argument may be eliminated by reductio ad infinitum.

If there are a finite number of reasons for the argument (P because of Q, Q because of R, and so forth), either the successive justifications eventually lead back to the original argument, or they do not; in the former case, it is a circular reasoning. And in the remaining case, in which a finite number of arguments terminates on a proposition not identical to the initial proposition, that final proposition must itself be unestablished, and thus dogmatic.

All arguments therefore ultimately resolve through chains of reasoning either back to themselves, or to an article of faith, or they do not resolve at all.

Vieweg persuasively links this argument to Hegel's critique of Schelling in the Differenzschrift as containing covert dogmatic premises, which are themselves undemonstrated.

Again, I have to emphasize that Outlines is not a beautiful book. It is not readable like a Platonic dialog, but it may be mined for extremely valuable material.]]> 3.88 200 Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Great Books in Philosophy)
author: Sextus Empiricus
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.88
book published: 200
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/01
date added: 2024/03/01
shelves: philosophy
review:
In this extremely unlovely book, Sextus Empiricus (c. 200 CE) summarizes the main points of skeptical philosophy following the tradition of the semi-legendary philosopher Pyrrho (c. 300 BCE). Pyrrhic skepticism directs us to question dogmatic or uncertain statements, as one would tend to think of skepticism in the time of Descartes. But it was also an explicitly therapeutic discipline aimed at generating a sense of detachment or equipoise in which the mind would stand in a state of suspension or non-commitment to beliefs. This was said to relieve the practitioner from unnecessary suffering. This work by Sextus Empiricus provides a terse and extremely dry collection of typical arguments the school would employ in bringing about that state of uncertainty.

If this sounds similar to the Yogasutra of Patanjali or the Buddhist philosophers of India, this is not a coincidence. According to Diogenes Laertius, Pyrrho traveled to India in order to study with the Gymnosophists, the Greek word he used to describe various yogic schools. The philosophical and rhetorical agreements between the Madhyamaka school of Nagarjuna and Pyrrhic skepticism are countless, ranging from the stated goals of the tradition to using extremely similar examples, such as both traditions using the case of phenomena appearing yellow to a person suffering from jaundice as a stock example for why the senses are unreliable.

The views of the skeptical schools of Pyrrho and Timon were summarized by a certain Aristocles in this manner:

"[W]e should not trust [sense perceptions, as they are unreliable], but should be without opinions and without inclinations and without wavering, saying about each single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not. Timon says that the result for those who are so disposed will be first speechlessness [perhaps resembling the "noble silence" that fell upon the Buddha after his final illumination], but then freedom from worry; and Aenesidemus says pleasure."

We are first struck by the similarity to the Madhyamaka ideal of "freedom from views," and then by the rejection of four possible modalities of being: is, is not, both, and neither. This fourfold negation is referred to by Buddhist scholars as the tetralemma, and is universally acknowledged to be the definitive position associated with the Buddhist Madhymaka school. I have never myself seen it formulated in a non-Indian tradition from the ancient world.

Here is a short excerpt from Outlines of Skepticism:

"If a thing moves, it moves either in the place where it is or in that where it is not. but it does not move in the place where it is, for if it is in it, it remains in it; nor yet does it move in the place where it is not; for where a thing is not, there it can neither effect nor suffer anything. Therefore nothing moves."

Compare to this argument from Nagarjuna's Mulamadhymakakarika:

Now, where one has gone one does not go.
Where one has not yet gone one does not go.
Apart from where one has gone and where one has not gone,
That over which one goes cannot be conceived.

This work is therefore of extraordinary interest to the comparativist, and I think one would have to be obtuse to fail to recognize the obvious connection here between Indian and Greek philosophy. What form it took, we cannot say. According to our tentative dating, Pyrrho was centuries earlier than Nagarjuna, but then Nagarjuna is often held to have compiled existing ideas in his Fundamental Wisdom.

The arguments of Sextus Empiricus also exerted a deep influence on modern philosophy, notably on Kant and Hegel, both of whom are known to have been enthusiastic readers of Pyrrhic skepticism. Kant taught Sextus Empricus for thirty years as part of his course on logic, and the basic structure of his use of antimonies of pure reason reflects its obvious influence. Hegel's criticism of dogmatic philosophy, as has been pointed out by his biographer Klaus Vieweg, owes a great deal to his enthusiastic use of Sextus Empiricus's so-called "five modes," which are presented as a general set of arguments for refuting any position.

The five modes are often reduced to a subset of three, which are referred to as the Trilemma of Agrippa. In this form, the argument runs as follows:

If I assert a proposition P, for which I provide some number of reasons or arguments, then there are either a finite number of reasons, or an infinite number of reasons; in the latter case, the argument may be eliminated by reductio ad infinitum.

If there are a finite number of reasons for the argument (P because of Q, Q because of R, and so forth), either the successive justifications eventually lead back to the original argument, or they do not; in the former case, it is a circular reasoning. And in the remaining case, in which a finite number of arguments terminates on a proposition not identical to the initial proposition, that final proposition must itself be unestablished, and thus dogmatic.

All arguments therefore ultimately resolve through chains of reasoning either back to themselves, or to an article of faith, or they do not resolve at all.

Vieweg persuasively links this argument to Hegel's critique of Schelling in the Differenzschrift as containing covert dogmatic premises, which are themselves undemonstrated.

Again, I have to emphasize that Outlines is not a beautiful book. It is not readable like a Platonic dialog, but it may be mined for extremely valuable material.
]]> Frühe Schriften (Werke, #1) 18682713 640 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 3518282018 Mesoscope 4 german, philosophy Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal, commonly translated as The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. This book includes other useful documents that are helpful for the study of Hegel, and especially as preparatory study for his Phenomenology, such as early sketches of his conceptions of idealism and system philosophy. Students of Hegel's political philosophy will find his Die Verfassung Deutschlands significant. Note that this volume does not include his Differenzschrift, which is found in Werke volume 2.

The Spirit of Christianity is an analysis of the evolution of consciousness over the span of the Old and New Testaments, as Hegel reconstructs it from his reading of the Bible, periodically supplemented by observations brought in from classical sources such as Josephus. He seems to oscillate a bit with respect to whether or not he believes these sources accurately characterize actual history, and at one point suggests that whether they do or not, they are significant for chronicling the received history upon which contemporary societies base their self-understanding.

It goes without saying that few today would seek to discover a "spirit of Judaism" or "of Christianity" on any basis, much less on a source as problematic as the Bible. In some ways, that's a loss, as analyses of cultures and broad forms of life can be philosophically rich. But they are also obviously problematic in ways that no modern reader can ignore. Like me, they will most likely have to situate themselves within the spirit of Hegel's age to engage with this text on its own terms.

Many of Hegel's interpretations of Judaism and Christianity, and of the "progression" leading from the former to the latter, are chestnuts of Latin Christendom's self-understanding - especially the account of the Jews as a people of laws and covenants, and the Christians as moving beyond such a reductive mode to attempt a universal conception of our relationship to one another and to the divine. Some of Hegel's analyses are reductive, and some of them are uncomfortably close to antisemitic cliches, though I would myself not characterize either the work or Hegel as antisemitic. I would understand if some did, but I think it is important to recognize, for example, that he sees the legalistic spiritual vocabulary of the Old Testament as a form of the more general tendency to organize moral principles in terms of laws that derive their ultimate authority from a source outside of nature, and that is the object of his critique. To a large degree, the real target of his critique is Kant's moral philosophy and its structure of authority and obligation.

What was most novel and interesting in the book is Hegel's attempt to recover and reconstruct an account of the autonomous internal dynamics by which various historical periods constituted entire varieties of central social, theological, ontological, and epistemic categories. This set of internal relations he seeks to excavate has been called "the logic of experience." But he does not explicitly thematize his own method, unfortunately, and as usual, it is up to the reader what exactly he seems to be doing, and to evaluate it. It is not entirely clear to me that experience necessarily implies the kind of worked-out internal architectonic structure and consistency that Hegel's account would seem to presuppose.

Much of the character of his argument can be seen in this striking quotation:

"The relationship between the boundless and the finite is, freely, a holy secret, because this relationship is itself life. The reflection which divides life can differentiate it into a boundless and a bounded, and only the delimitation, the finite considered for itself, yields the concept of man as the contrary term to the divine. Outside of reflection, it does not in truth occur."

[Der Zusammenhang des Unendlichen und des Endlichen ist freilich ein heiliges Geheimnis, weil dieser Zusammenhang das Leben selbst ist; die Reflexion, die das Leben trennt, kann es in Unendliches und Endliches unterscheiden, und nur die Beschränkung, das Endliche für sich betrachtet gibt den Begriff des Menschen als dem Göttlichen entgegengesetzt; außerhalb der Reflexion, in der Wahrheit findet sie nicht statt.]

The idea here is that the evolution of rational reflection has led to forms of objectification and estrangement, such that the impersonal powers of reason that we rely on to command nature take on a life of their own and become a numinous moral and spiritual authority. In Hegel's reading, Jesus sought to free the spiritual community from the oppressive and inhuman character of this ultimate authority by returning human relations to the natural condition of interacting directly out of love.

In his study of Hegel, Walter Kaufmann sees this essay as essentially reading Goethe (Iphigenia) and Schiller (Letters) into the career of Jesus, and I think there is some truth to it. But Kaufmann fails completely to acknowledge the novelty of Hegel's excavation of the logic of experience, which astonishes me - I can hardly see how that would be possible, but there it is.

Some of Hegel's specific arguments were extremely interesting. Two highlights for me were his account of why monotheism is so fundamental to Jewish moral and theological law. Having recently read through a bit of the Deuteronomistic histories in a reading group, this occurs as a fairly urgent question - why Israel was forsaken by God in Kings on account of the tolerance of certain Jewish kings for polytheism, without much consideration for any other aspect of their reigns. And the most interesting part of the book for me was his analysis of the law, and the way that a rigid conception of the law makes the ultimate source of the law's authority occur to consciousness as an overpowering force that is hostile to life. Readers of Kafka and Dostoevsky will find this section enormously interesting.

There are other long sections that I found to be of little value, which were repetitive, or obscure, or unconvincing, or all three. He has a tendency to get lost in the calculus of his own abstractions such that he loses contact with the actual phenomenon he's trying to explicate.

In contrast with Hegel's similar analyses in the Phenomenology, his argument here is rather more straightforward and limited in scope. That makes this text a useful adjunct to the Phenomenology, as you can begin to grok his general approach.]]> 4.17 1986 Frühe Schriften (Werke, #1)
author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/22
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves: german, philosophy
review:
What I have read here, and what I am reviewing, is Hegel's long essay Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal, commonly translated as The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. This book includes other useful documents that are helpful for the study of Hegel, and especially as preparatory study for his Phenomenology, such as early sketches of his conceptions of idealism and system philosophy. Students of Hegel's political philosophy will find his Die Verfassung Deutschlands significant. Note that this volume does not include his Differenzschrift, which is found in Werke volume 2.

The Spirit of Christianity is an analysis of the evolution of consciousness over the span of the Old and New Testaments, as Hegel reconstructs it from his reading of the Bible, periodically supplemented by observations brought in from classical sources such as Josephus. He seems to oscillate a bit with respect to whether or not he believes these sources accurately characterize actual history, and at one point suggests that whether they do or not, they are significant for chronicling the received history upon which contemporary societies base their self-understanding.

It goes without saying that few today would seek to discover a "spirit of Judaism" or "of Christianity" on any basis, much less on a source as problematic as the Bible. In some ways, that's a loss, as analyses of cultures and broad forms of life can be philosophically rich. But they are also obviously problematic in ways that no modern reader can ignore. Like me, they will most likely have to situate themselves within the spirit of Hegel's age to engage with this text on its own terms.

Many of Hegel's interpretations of Judaism and Christianity, and of the "progression" leading from the former to the latter, are chestnuts of Latin Christendom's self-understanding - especially the account of the Jews as a people of laws and covenants, and the Christians as moving beyond such a reductive mode to attempt a universal conception of our relationship to one another and to the divine. Some of Hegel's analyses are reductive, and some of them are uncomfortably close to antisemitic cliches, though I would myself not characterize either the work or Hegel as antisemitic. I would understand if some did, but I think it is important to recognize, for example, that he sees the legalistic spiritual vocabulary of the Old Testament as a form of the more general tendency to organize moral principles in terms of laws that derive their ultimate authority from a source outside of nature, and that is the object of his critique. To a large degree, the real target of his critique is Kant's moral philosophy and its structure of authority and obligation.

What was most novel and interesting in the book is Hegel's attempt to recover and reconstruct an account of the autonomous internal dynamics by which various historical periods constituted entire varieties of central social, theological, ontological, and epistemic categories. This set of internal relations he seeks to excavate has been called "the logic of experience." But he does not explicitly thematize his own method, unfortunately, and as usual, it is up to the reader what exactly he seems to be doing, and to evaluate it. It is not entirely clear to me that experience necessarily implies the kind of worked-out internal architectonic structure and consistency that Hegel's account would seem to presuppose.

Much of the character of his argument can be seen in this striking quotation:

"The relationship between the boundless and the finite is, freely, a holy secret, because this relationship is itself life. The reflection which divides life can differentiate it into a boundless and a bounded, and only the delimitation, the finite considered for itself, yields the concept of man as the contrary term to the divine. Outside of reflection, it does not in truth occur."

[Der Zusammenhang des Unendlichen und des Endlichen ist freilich ein heiliges Geheimnis, weil dieser Zusammenhang das Leben selbst ist; die Reflexion, die das Leben trennt, kann es in Unendliches und Endliches unterscheiden, und nur die Beschränkung, das Endliche für sich betrachtet gibt den Begriff des Menschen als dem Göttlichen entgegengesetzt; außerhalb der Reflexion, in der Wahrheit findet sie nicht statt.]

The idea here is that the evolution of rational reflection has led to forms of objectification and estrangement, such that the impersonal powers of reason that we rely on to command nature take on a life of their own and become a numinous moral and spiritual authority. In Hegel's reading, Jesus sought to free the spiritual community from the oppressive and inhuman character of this ultimate authority by returning human relations to the natural condition of interacting directly out of love.

In his study of Hegel, Walter Kaufmann sees this essay as essentially reading Goethe (Iphigenia) and Schiller (Letters) into the career of Jesus, and I think there is some truth to it. But Kaufmann fails completely to acknowledge the novelty of Hegel's excavation of the logic of experience, which astonishes me - I can hardly see how that would be possible, but there it is.

Some of Hegel's specific arguments were extremely interesting. Two highlights for me were his account of why monotheism is so fundamental to Jewish moral and theological law. Having recently read through a bit of the Deuteronomistic histories in a reading group, this occurs as a fairly urgent question - why Israel was forsaken by God in Kings on account of the tolerance of certain Jewish kings for polytheism, without much consideration for any other aspect of their reigns. And the most interesting part of the book for me was his analysis of the law, and the way that a rigid conception of the law makes the ultimate source of the law's authority occur to consciousness as an overpowering force that is hostile to life. Readers of Kafka and Dostoevsky will find this section enormously interesting.

There are other long sections that I found to be of little value, which were repetitive, or obscure, or unconvincing, or all three. He has a tendency to get lost in the calculus of his own abstractions such that he loses contact with the actual phenomenon he's trying to explicate.

In contrast with Hegel's similar analyses in the Phenomenology, his argument here is rather more straightforward and limited in scope. That makes this text a useful adjunct to the Phenomenology, as you can begin to grok his general approach.
]]> <![CDATA[Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen. Mit den Augustenburger Briefen]]> 258980 288 Friedrich Schiller 3150180627 Mesoscope 3 german, philosophy Phenomenology was profoundly influenced by its ideas, method, and terminology.

It is also an awkward and inelegant work, one which shows Schiller to have a poor command of philosophical argumentation. Brilliant insights and calls to action are crowded side-by-side with long, wearying passages that attempt to systematize his thoughts in a way their provisional character cannot support. His ideas are brilliant but underdeveloped, and I think even the most sympathetic modern reader will hesitate to agree that beauty can perform the heavy lifting Schiller requires of it. This is an important aspect of the work that is seldom acknowledged by its critics, and I will return to it later.

In his outstanding study Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams interprets this essay as belonging to a genre of works presenting a general history of the evolution of humanity's moral, cultural, and intellectual capacities, which also includes Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind and Kant's Conjectural Origin of the History of Man.

Abrams argues that the primary task of the age in which Schiller wrote was to recover the core insights of the religious and spiritual legacy of European thought and to naturalize it - to recast its mystical and supernatural elements in psychological and philosophical terms. He sees Schiller's core argument as essentially recapitulating the Christian concept of the felix culpa or fortunate fall in secular form. This refers to the idea that humanity's fall in the Garden should be viewed as a blessing, since it prepared the way for our redemption by Christ, which brought us nearer to God. Similarly, Schiller will argue that our fall from innocence will be ultimately redeemed through a higher synthesis of faculties that he interprets as aesthetic in character.

Schiller sees man's original state of nature in explicitly prelapsarian terms. Like Rousseau, he believes that before culture divides humanity's consciousness into differentiated powers that may be developed in different degrees, we existed in a naive and simple state of unity, living unreflectively as a part of nature and compelled to act according to our instincts and natural impulses. Once we developed our intellectual capacities, we were "expelled from the Garden" as it were, alienated from that pre-reflective simplicity. This alienation caused a kind of psychic wound rooted ultimately in the differentiation of our conscious life into different, disjunct domains, such as nature versus culture. In his analysis of this essay, Carl Jung compares this state of fragmentation to the wound of the grail king Amfortas, which cannot be healed by anything less than divine grace.

Schiller divides human experience into two complementary domains: the timeless domain of form and idea, and the temporal world of the finite, transitory objects of sensual experience. I would call this a form of the more general distinction between synchronic and diachronic modes of experience. Or, in Abram's frame, we might characterize this as a secularization of the ancient divide between the material and the spiritual, between body and soul.

In Schiller's view, the human being is likewise divided into a timeless dimension that he calls our personality, which he regards as ensuring the persistence of our character over time, and a temporal dimension that he calls our condition [Zustand], which includes all changing aspects of the self that belong to the temporal world. He awkwardly attempts to link this underdeveloped division to various ideas developed by Kant and Fichte, such as by arguing that our capacity to generate moral laws comes from the strictly timeless dimension of the personality, in obvious deference to Kant's deontology.

Schiller argues that the two aspects of our experience have a corresponding "drive": the "material drive" [Sachtrieb], by which we sensuously engage with the material world, and the "form drive" [Formtrieb] by which we seek to impose a static, lawful regularity on the dynamic flux of our experience. He sees this as a fundamental disjunction in the human psyche occasioned by the rise of abstract reflection, which creates an unbridgeable gulf between these two modes, thereby alienating the rational person from their sensual side.

In a manner that obviously attracted the attention of young Hegel, Schiller argued that there must be a third faculty by which these two disjunct tendencies can be synthesized. He even uses the term "aufheben," or sublimation, to describe the process by which these dichotomous terms can be simultaneously negated and preserved as the system moves up to a higher logical level. This concept became a core part of Hegel's dialectical terminology.

Later in the work, he attempts to reconstruct the general structure of humanity's historical evolution through various modalities of experience. In this context, he introduces another term that will become central in Hegel’s Phenomenology: the idea of moments [Momente] of cultural evolution. This term emphasizes the ambiguity between chronological and logical priority. For example, when he says that the rational mode is a moment that necessarily precede the aesthetic mode, it is intentionally ambiguous if he means that there is a literal historical sequence that must be followed, or if rationality as such is necessarily prior to the aesthetic mode in a logical sense, and is somehow subsumed by it. This is an interesting and suggestive flattening of ideas, but it does not exactly serve the cause of clarity.

The synthesizing drive that Schiller believes unites the other two is the play drive [Spieltrieb], and in what becomes one of the most famous aspects of this essay, Schiller sets about to rehabilitate our notion of play. He understands the idea in its most expansive sense, as a immediately-gratifying condition of life resulting from excess and overflow, in which individuals are free to create, not mechanically compelled by instinct or by formal law, as we would in the state of nature or in a mode of mere rational reflection, but in a higher mode that encompasses both states of being.

Each of these drives has a corresponding object: the object of the Sachtrieb is life, the object of the Formtrieb is the abstract concept or law, and the object of the Spieltrieb is beauty.

Beauty, in conjunction with the human capacity to play, becomes a synthesizing (i.e., redemptive) power that reunites the shards of our being in a way that elevates our nature. It becomes a force by which we are positively motivated by the attractive power of beauty and move toward it according to our will, not compelled by our appetites or the force of a moral command. In this sense, Schiller binds the idea of beauty to the idea of freedom, and concludes the work by arguing that truly free modes of human interaction are made possible by beauty and play:

"The aesthetic formative impulse establishes insensibly a third joyous empire of play and of appearance, between the formidable realm of powers and the sacred realm of law � an empire wherein man is released from the binds of circumstance, and is freed, both physically and morally, from all that can be called constraint."

On one level, this essay is a social argument for the values of beauty and play, seeking to establish their importance in the grand scheme of human endeavor. In one of its most frequently-cited lines, Schiller tells us that man is always most nearly himself when he plays.

Beauty should generally be understood as a powerful response to a beautiful work of fine art or person. For Schiller, a deep experience of beauty is a profound and transformative experience that would seem to be modeled on the beatific vision. it is a moment when time and space seems to fall away, when ultimate value is directly communicated to the receptive psyche. Drawing from James Joyce, Joseph Campbell called this kind of experience as one of "aesthetic arrest."

In this sense, it's easy to tie Schiller's core argument to Abrams's reading of the work as essentially a secularization of various millennialist and soteriological arguments that are ready-to-hand. Both the individual divided consciousness and the temporal world are redeemed by the aesthetic insight, and art becomes the new vehicle of salvation. This argument was profoundly influential on the Romantics and indeed, on all of nineteenth-century German thought. Schiller was not the first or only person to characterize art as the new sacrament, as the new and primary sphere of ultimate value for humanity, but he was certainly one of the most important and influential.

And, for Hegel and a generation of early Romantics, Schiller's association of all this with a political concept of freedom inspired by Rousseau and by the early promise of the French Revolution would be no less influential. Schiller's personal concern for freedom stems from his experience growing up in the hereditary duchy of Württemberg, where the duke wielded absolute power. He spent long, miserable years in an oppressive military academy and then served as an army doctor and, after the dramatic success of his first play Die Räuber, he was imprisoned by the duke and forbidden to write further plays. He eventually illegally fled the duchy and resettled in Jena, near Weimar.

So it must be remembered that for Schiller, “freedom� was not a romantic notion or a mere political slogan, and one can easily understand why he associated it with both an overflowing abundance of life and with artistic creativity.

When you lay out the argument like this, it is easy to see why it was so influential and important. However, as I alluded to above, this work is terribly written. Goethe himself complained to Eckermann that "The more [the Germans] give themselves up to certain philosophical schools, the worse they write ... in this sense, Schiller's style is at its most magnificent and effective whenever he doesn't philosophize...."

["Je näher [die Deutschen] sich gewissen philosophischen Schulen hingegeben, desto schlechter schreiben sie.... So ist Schillers Styl am prächtigsten und wirksamsten, sobald er nicht philosophiert...."]

As a philosopher, Schiller was strictly an amateur, and he probably would have been well advised to present his ideas as a philosophical essay in the manner of Herder rather than attempting to ape the systematicity of Kant and Fichte. We can accept the general idea of dividing human experience into a temporal and atemporal dimension, for example, without believing that there is really something "eternal" that shapes human personality, or worse, that such a notion is necessary to account for the persistence of the human personality over time. This argument is based on Fichte's Ich-philosophy but receives no explanation or support, and in Schiller's hands it reads like something a sophomore philosophy major would claim. Does the table also possess an eternal personality, since it remains a table?

As a simplified construction, there is nothing wrong with speaking in this way, but again and again, Schiller treats these constructs like they can be rigorously elaborated, and it does nothing more than emphasize their inadequacy. The essay is crowded with many such arguments, passages that I came to call "garbage talk" in my marginal notes, such as the following example from the twenty-fifth letter:

"In our satisfaction at cognitions we distinguish without trouble the passage from activity to passivity, and actually observe that the first is over, when the latter appears. On the contrary, in our delight at beauty no such succession between activity and passivity can be distinguished, and reflection is here so thoroughly blended with feeling, that we think the form is directly perceivable. Beauty then is indeed object for us, since reflection is the condition by which we perceive it; but at the same time it is a condition of our subject, because feeling is the condition by which we have a conception of it."

This is simply a word salad of vague and underdetermined concepts.

Most secondary summaries of this text suggest it possesses a strength of argument that it altogether lacks. I believe some commentators don't wish to call out its inadequacies because they fear it is their own lack of familiarity with philosophy that makes it so difficult. But the problem is Schiller, not them, and anyone who compares five pages of this essay with five pages from Schopenhauer will immediately see what I mean.

So let it be said, this text is badly written. It is overly florid and verbose, and the argument is segmented and scattered in ways that make it laborious to track. M. H. Abrams charitably called it "surprisingly intricate." It is also an extremely important work in the history of ideas, and an absolutely key reference for understanding early Romantic and Hegelian philosophy.

Note: I completely rewrote this review in 2024 after a close re-reading.]]> 3.79 1794 Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen. Mit den Augustenburger Briefen
author: Friedrich Schiller
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1794
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/02/15
shelves: german, philosophy
review:
This essay in 27 letters represents the author's primary philosophical statement, and an entire generation of post-Kantian idealists and early Romantics were heavily influenced by its arguments establishing the cultural, psychological, and, if I may say, soteriological function of art. It is also essential reading for students of Hegel, whose Phenomenology was profoundly influenced by its ideas, method, and terminology.

It is also an awkward and inelegant work, one which shows Schiller to have a poor command of philosophical argumentation. Brilliant insights and calls to action are crowded side-by-side with long, wearying passages that attempt to systematize his thoughts in a way their provisional character cannot support. His ideas are brilliant but underdeveloped, and I think even the most sympathetic modern reader will hesitate to agree that beauty can perform the heavy lifting Schiller requires of it. This is an important aspect of the work that is seldom acknowledged by its critics, and I will return to it later.

In his outstanding study Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams interprets this essay as belonging to a genre of works presenting a general history of the evolution of humanity's moral, cultural, and intellectual capacities, which also includes Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind and Kant's Conjectural Origin of the History of Man.

Abrams argues that the primary task of the age in which Schiller wrote was to recover the core insights of the religious and spiritual legacy of European thought and to naturalize it - to recast its mystical and supernatural elements in psychological and philosophical terms. He sees Schiller's core argument as essentially recapitulating the Christian concept of the felix culpa or fortunate fall in secular form. This refers to the idea that humanity's fall in the Garden should be viewed as a blessing, since it prepared the way for our redemption by Christ, which brought us nearer to God. Similarly, Schiller will argue that our fall from innocence will be ultimately redeemed through a higher synthesis of faculties that he interprets as aesthetic in character.

Schiller sees man's original state of nature in explicitly prelapsarian terms. Like Rousseau, he believes that before culture divides humanity's consciousness into differentiated powers that may be developed in different degrees, we existed in a naive and simple state of unity, living unreflectively as a part of nature and compelled to act according to our instincts and natural impulses. Once we developed our intellectual capacities, we were "expelled from the Garden" as it were, alienated from that pre-reflective simplicity. This alienation caused a kind of psychic wound rooted ultimately in the differentiation of our conscious life into different, disjunct domains, such as nature versus culture. In his analysis of this essay, Carl Jung compares this state of fragmentation to the wound of the grail king Amfortas, which cannot be healed by anything less than divine grace.

Schiller divides human experience into two complementary domains: the timeless domain of form and idea, and the temporal world of the finite, transitory objects of sensual experience. I would call this a form of the more general distinction between synchronic and diachronic modes of experience. Or, in Abram's frame, we might characterize this as a secularization of the ancient divide between the material and the spiritual, between body and soul.

In Schiller's view, the human being is likewise divided into a timeless dimension that he calls our personality, which he regards as ensuring the persistence of our character over time, and a temporal dimension that he calls our condition [Zustand], which includes all changing aspects of the self that belong to the temporal world. He awkwardly attempts to link this underdeveloped division to various ideas developed by Kant and Fichte, such as by arguing that our capacity to generate moral laws comes from the strictly timeless dimension of the personality, in obvious deference to Kant's deontology.

Schiller argues that the two aspects of our experience have a corresponding "drive": the "material drive" [Sachtrieb], by which we sensuously engage with the material world, and the "form drive" [Formtrieb] by which we seek to impose a static, lawful regularity on the dynamic flux of our experience. He sees this as a fundamental disjunction in the human psyche occasioned by the rise of abstract reflection, which creates an unbridgeable gulf between these two modes, thereby alienating the rational person from their sensual side.

In a manner that obviously attracted the attention of young Hegel, Schiller argued that there must be a third faculty by which these two disjunct tendencies can be synthesized. He even uses the term "aufheben," or sublimation, to describe the process by which these dichotomous terms can be simultaneously negated and preserved as the system moves up to a higher logical level. This concept became a core part of Hegel's dialectical terminology.

Later in the work, he attempts to reconstruct the general structure of humanity's historical evolution through various modalities of experience. In this context, he introduces another term that will become central in Hegel’s Phenomenology: the idea of moments [Momente] of cultural evolution. This term emphasizes the ambiguity between chronological and logical priority. For example, when he says that the rational mode is a moment that necessarily precede the aesthetic mode, it is intentionally ambiguous if he means that there is a literal historical sequence that must be followed, or if rationality as such is necessarily prior to the aesthetic mode in a logical sense, and is somehow subsumed by it. This is an interesting and suggestive flattening of ideas, but it does not exactly serve the cause of clarity.

The synthesizing drive that Schiller believes unites the other two is the play drive [Spieltrieb], and in what becomes one of the most famous aspects of this essay, Schiller sets about to rehabilitate our notion of play. He understands the idea in its most expansive sense, as a immediately-gratifying condition of life resulting from excess and overflow, in which individuals are free to create, not mechanically compelled by instinct or by formal law, as we would in the state of nature or in a mode of mere rational reflection, but in a higher mode that encompasses both states of being.

Each of these drives has a corresponding object: the object of the Sachtrieb is life, the object of the Formtrieb is the abstract concept or law, and the object of the Spieltrieb is beauty.

Beauty, in conjunction with the human capacity to play, becomes a synthesizing (i.e., redemptive) power that reunites the shards of our being in a way that elevates our nature. It becomes a force by which we are positively motivated by the attractive power of beauty and move toward it according to our will, not compelled by our appetites or the force of a moral command. In this sense, Schiller binds the idea of beauty to the idea of freedom, and concludes the work by arguing that truly free modes of human interaction are made possible by beauty and play:

"The aesthetic formative impulse establishes insensibly a third joyous empire of play and of appearance, between the formidable realm of powers and the sacred realm of law � an empire wherein man is released from the binds of circumstance, and is freed, both physically and morally, from all that can be called constraint."

On one level, this essay is a social argument for the values of beauty and play, seeking to establish their importance in the grand scheme of human endeavor. In one of its most frequently-cited lines, Schiller tells us that man is always most nearly himself when he plays.

Beauty should generally be understood as a powerful response to a beautiful work of fine art or person. For Schiller, a deep experience of beauty is a profound and transformative experience that would seem to be modeled on the beatific vision. it is a moment when time and space seems to fall away, when ultimate value is directly communicated to the receptive psyche. Drawing from James Joyce, Joseph Campbell called this kind of experience as one of "aesthetic arrest."

In this sense, it's easy to tie Schiller's core argument to Abrams's reading of the work as essentially a secularization of various millennialist and soteriological arguments that are ready-to-hand. Both the individual divided consciousness and the temporal world are redeemed by the aesthetic insight, and art becomes the new vehicle of salvation. This argument was profoundly influential on the Romantics and indeed, on all of nineteenth-century German thought. Schiller was not the first or only person to characterize art as the new sacrament, as the new and primary sphere of ultimate value for humanity, but he was certainly one of the most important and influential.

And, for Hegel and a generation of early Romantics, Schiller's association of all this with a political concept of freedom inspired by Rousseau and by the early promise of the French Revolution would be no less influential. Schiller's personal concern for freedom stems from his experience growing up in the hereditary duchy of Württemberg, where the duke wielded absolute power. He spent long, miserable years in an oppressive military academy and then served as an army doctor and, after the dramatic success of his first play Die Räuber, he was imprisoned by the duke and forbidden to write further plays. He eventually illegally fled the duchy and resettled in Jena, near Weimar.

So it must be remembered that for Schiller, “freedom� was not a romantic notion or a mere political slogan, and one can easily understand why he associated it with both an overflowing abundance of life and with artistic creativity.

When you lay out the argument like this, it is easy to see why it was so influential and important. However, as I alluded to above, this work is terribly written. Goethe himself complained to Eckermann that "The more [the Germans] give themselves up to certain philosophical schools, the worse they write ... in this sense, Schiller's style is at its most magnificent and effective whenever he doesn't philosophize...."

["Je näher [die Deutschen] sich gewissen philosophischen Schulen hingegeben, desto schlechter schreiben sie.... So ist Schillers Styl am prächtigsten und wirksamsten, sobald er nicht philosophiert...."]

As a philosopher, Schiller was strictly an amateur, and he probably would have been well advised to present his ideas as a philosophical essay in the manner of Herder rather than attempting to ape the systematicity of Kant and Fichte. We can accept the general idea of dividing human experience into a temporal and atemporal dimension, for example, without believing that there is really something "eternal" that shapes human personality, or worse, that such a notion is necessary to account for the persistence of the human personality over time. This argument is based on Fichte's Ich-philosophy but receives no explanation or support, and in Schiller's hands it reads like something a sophomore philosophy major would claim. Does the table also possess an eternal personality, since it remains a table?

As a simplified construction, there is nothing wrong with speaking in this way, but again and again, Schiller treats these constructs like they can be rigorously elaborated, and it does nothing more than emphasize their inadequacy. The essay is crowded with many such arguments, passages that I came to call "garbage talk" in my marginal notes, such as the following example from the twenty-fifth letter:

"In our satisfaction at cognitions we distinguish without trouble the passage from activity to passivity, and actually observe that the first is over, when the latter appears. On the contrary, in our delight at beauty no such succession between activity and passivity can be distinguished, and reflection is here so thoroughly blended with feeling, that we think the form is directly perceivable. Beauty then is indeed object for us, since reflection is the condition by which we perceive it; but at the same time it is a condition of our subject, because feeling is the condition by which we have a conception of it."

This is simply a word salad of vague and underdetermined concepts.

Most secondary summaries of this text suggest it possesses a strength of argument that it altogether lacks. I believe some commentators don't wish to call out its inadequacies because they fear it is their own lack of familiarity with philosophy that makes it so difficult. But the problem is Schiller, not them, and anyone who compares five pages of this essay with five pages from Schopenhauer will immediately see what I mean.

So let it be said, this text is badly written. It is overly florid and verbose, and the argument is segmented and scattered in ways that make it laborious to track. M. H. Abrams charitably called it "surprisingly intricate." It is also an extremely important work in the history of ideas, and an absolutely key reference for understanding early Romantic and Hegelian philosophy.

Note: I completely rewrote this review in 2024 after a close re-reading.
]]> Ein Leuchten 199680207 Das neueste Werk des Nobelpreisträgers Jon Fosse � über den schmalen Grat zwischen Leben und Tod und eine Begegnung mit dem Licht in tiefer Dunkelheit.

Ein Mann setzt sich ins Auto und beginnt zu fahren, ohne zu wissen, wohin er will. Er biegt mal rechts, mal links ab und bleibt schließlich am Ende eines Waldweges stecken. Es dämmert und beginnt zu schneien, doch anstatt umzukehren und Hilfe zu holen, wagt sich der Mann törichterweise in den dunklen Wald hinein. Tiefer und tiefer dringt er vor in die Dunkelheit, bis er sich unweigerlich verirrt. Er ist müde und friert, als ihm tief in der Finsternis des Waldes ein leuchtendes Wesen begegnet.

Eindringlich und Ein Leuchten ist das neueste Werk von Jon Fosse, dem «Beckett des einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts» (Le Monde).]]> 73 Jon Fosse 3644019134 Mesoscope 3 literature, german Heptologie comes in around 100 Euros, only available in three lovely hard-bound volumes, while the English paperback in the US costs $21.

I've read one other Fosse novel and have started another, and this one is certainly the least of the three, for what that's worth. I found the description of a man lost in the woods at night who thinks he sees a light to be fascinating, but what I imagined was something with a deeper sense of mystery and ambiguity, while this work really just lays it all out for you, and in a manner that even with my slim knowledge of the author, already feels familiar.

I would refer the interested first-time reader to his short novel Morgen und Abend, and especially for the German reader, I would wait for the paperback, visit your local library, or wait for this work to be anthologized.]]> 3.50 2023 Ein Leuchten
author: Jon Fosse
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/02/15
shelves: literature, german
review:
I was intrigued enough by the premise of this short novella or long short-story to shell out 22 Euros for the 80-page book - this is one of the unfortunate facts that the reader of Fosse in German has to live with, along with the fact that the German translation of Heptologie comes in around 100 Euros, only available in three lovely hard-bound volumes, while the English paperback in the US costs $21.

I've read one other Fosse novel and have started another, and this one is certainly the least of the three, for what that's worth. I found the description of a man lost in the woods at night who thinks he sees a light to be fascinating, but what I imagined was something with a deeper sense of mystery and ambiguity, while this work really just lays it all out for you, and in a manner that even with my slim knowledge of the author, already feels familiar.

I would refer the interested first-time reader to his short novel Morgen und Abend, and especially for the German reader, I would wait for the paperback, visit your local library, or wait for this work to be anthologized.
]]> The Social Contract 12651
These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has not ceased to stir vigorous debate since its first publication in 1762. Rejecting the view that anyone has a natural right to wield authority over others, Rousseau argues instead for a pact, or ‘social contract�, that should exist between all the citizens of a state and that should be the source of sovereign power. From this fundamental premise, he goes on to consider issues of liberty and law, freedom and justice, arriving at a view of society that has seemed to some a blueprint for totalitarianism, to others a declaration of democratic principles.]]> 168 Jean-Jacques Rousseau 0143037498 Mesoscope 3 philosophy
The solution he comes up with is a form of republic that, as much as possible, is to be directly managed by the people who comprise it. Each one of them freely enters into the social contract, agreeing to help discern and then be bound by the general will of the entire group in exchange for receiving the various benefits the society confers.

This notion of "general will" is one of many extremely problematic constructs that Rousseau relies upon. It seems like a kind of abstraction or generalization, but he takes it quite seriously and discusses it as though it is relatively unproblematic in its status.

For Rousseau, it is the duty of those who enter into the social contract to obey the general will, which, politically construed, constitutes something that he calls "the Sovereign," which seems to be a kind of personification of the collective will; that is, it is an abstraction of an abstraction. It is the purpose of the various organs and officers of the state to take their marching orders from the Sovereign, which is actualized in various citizen committees we are all to attend in order to deliberate on matters of common significance.

Rousseau harbors some rather peculiar ideas, such as his insistence that Sovereignty cannot be alienated:

"I hold then that Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and that the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be represented except by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will."

As a consequence, any governance by representatives is necessarily oppressive:

"Sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility.... The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them."

Rousseau himself acknowledged that only relatively small societies could function according to his model. He probably took Geneva, the city of his birth, as one of his models, though that did not prevent the city from banning this work upon its publication for its unflattering characterization of Christianity:

"But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes."

This work is sometimes interesting and sometimes inspiring, but often a bit bizarre and of questionable relevance to the modern world. Many of his articles of faith are highly dubious, such as his obviously atavistic account of the prelapsarian state of nature. When Rousseau sent Voltaire a copy of his Social Contract, the latter mocked this aspect of his writing in a rather scornful letter of reply:

"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it."

There are some inspired notions worth preserving, such as his underlying intuition that legitimate governance ultimately derives from popular consent, instead of being delivered from on high. But there are equally unattractive notions, such as his insistence that the public will must be one and whole, and that it is intrinsically problematic for different people to have different interests. This leads as far as his support for censorship and deprivation of rights under certain circumstances to ensure "correct moral judgment" as determined by the Sovereign, which is, for Rousseau, an unimpeachable authority, though it might appear to us to be rather difficult to properly deduce its intentions.

On the whole, I found it to be a fairly crude work that is primarily of interest as a matter of intellectual history, due to his broad influence.]]> 3.80 1762 The Social Contract
author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
name: Mesoscope
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1762
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/12
date added: 2024/02/12
shelves: philosophy
review:
In Rousseau's account, human beings in their state of nature are pure, free, and generally good, and it is only by association with one another in society, which they enter into for various utilitarian reasons such as mutual defense, that they become corrupt and divided. In this work, he seeks to discover the best form of governance that preserves the benefits of organized mutual association, such as the establishment and guarantee of certain basic rights, while preserving the greatest possible degree of freedom for individuals.

The solution he comes up with is a form of republic that, as much as possible, is to be directly managed by the people who comprise it. Each one of them freely enters into the social contract, agreeing to help discern and then be bound by the general will of the entire group in exchange for receiving the various benefits the society confers.

This notion of "general will" is one of many extremely problematic constructs that Rousseau relies upon. It seems like a kind of abstraction or generalization, but he takes it quite seriously and discusses it as though it is relatively unproblematic in its status.

For Rousseau, it is the duty of those who enter into the social contract to obey the general will, which, politically construed, constitutes something that he calls "the Sovereign," which seems to be a kind of personification of the collective will; that is, it is an abstraction of an abstraction. It is the purpose of the various organs and officers of the state to take their marching orders from the Sovereign, which is actualized in various citizen committees we are all to attend in order to deliberate on matters of common significance.

Rousseau harbors some rather peculiar ideas, such as his insistence that Sovereignty cannot be alienated:

"I hold then that Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and that the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be represented except by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will."

As a consequence, any governance by representatives is necessarily oppressive:

"Sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility.... The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them."

Rousseau himself acknowledged that only relatively small societies could function according to his model. He probably took Geneva, the city of his birth, as one of his models, though that did not prevent the city from banning this work upon its publication for its unflattering characterization of Christianity:

"But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes."

This work is sometimes interesting and sometimes inspiring, but often a bit bizarre and of questionable relevance to the modern world. Many of his articles of faith are highly dubious, such as his obviously atavistic account of the prelapsarian state of nature. When Rousseau sent Voltaire a copy of his Social Contract, the latter mocked this aspect of his writing in a rather scornful letter of reply:

"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it."

There are some inspired notions worth preserving, such as his underlying intuition that legitimate governance ultimately derives from popular consent, instead of being delivered from on high. But there are equally unattractive notions, such as his insistence that the public will must be one and whole, and that it is intrinsically problematic for different people to have different interests. This leads as far as his support for censorship and deprivation of rights under certain circumstances to ensure "correct moral judgment" as determined by the Sovereign, which is, for Rousseau, an unimpeachable authority, though it might appear to us to be rather difficult to properly deduce its intentions.

On the whole, I found it to be a fairly crude work that is primarily of interest as a matter of intellectual history, due to his broad influence.
]]>