Category: Meaning and Life and the Humanities

Philosophy and How One Acts

A friend with whom I have been reading various philosophical attempts to come to terms with what consciousness is and does writes to me about “illusionism,” the claim that we do not have selves. We are simply mistaken in thinking the self exists. The basic argument is the classic empiricist case against “substance.” There are various phenomena (let’s call them “mental states” in this case), but no stuff, no thing, no self, to which those mental states adhere, or in which they are collected. Thomas Metzger is one philosopher who holds this position and in an interview tells us that his position has no experiential consequences. It is not clear to me whether Metzger thinks (in a Nietzschean way) that the self is an unavoidable illusion or if Metzger thinks that ll the phenomena we attribute to the self would just continue to be experienced in exactly the same way even if we dispensed with the notion (illusion) of the self. In either case, accepting or denying Metzger’s position changes nothing. Belief or non-belief in the self is not a “difference that makes a difference” to recall William James’s formula in the first chapter of his book, Pragmatism.

The issue, then, seems to be what motivates a certain kind of intellectual restlessness, a desire to describe the world (the terms of existence) in ways that “get it right”–especially if the motive does not seem to be any effect on actual behavior. It’s “pure” theory, abstracted from any consequences in how one goes about the actualities of daily life.

There does exist, for some people, a certain kind of restless questioning. I have had a small number of close friends in my life, and what they share is that kind of restlessness. A desire to come up with coherent accounts of why things are the way they are, especially of why people act the ways they do. People are endlessly surprising and fascinating. Accounting for them leads to speculations that are constantly being revised and restated because each account seems, in one way or another, to fail to “get things right.” There is always the need for another round of words, of efforts to grasp the “why” and “how” of things. Most people, in my experience, don’t feel this need to push at things. I was always trying to get my students to push their thinking on to the next twist—and rarely succeeded in getting them to do so. And for myself this restless, endless inquiry generates a constant stream of words, since each inadequate account means a new effort to try to get it more accurately this time.

Clearly, since I tried to get my students to do this, I think of such relentless questioning as an intellectual virtue. But what is it good for? I take that to be the core issue of your long email to me. And I don’t have an answer. Where id is, ego shall be. But it seems very clear that being able to articulate one’s habitual ways of (for example) relating to one’s lover, to know what triggers anger or sadness or neediness, does little (if anything) to change the established patterns. Understanding (even if there were any way to show that the understanding was actually accurate) doesn’t yield much in the way of behavioral results.

This gets to your comment that if people really believed Darwin was right, as many people do, then they wouldn’t eat animals. William James came to believe that we have our convictions first—and then invent the intellectual accounts/theories that we say justify the convictions. In other words, we mistake the causal sequence. We take the cause (our convictions) as the effect (our theory), when it is really the other way around. Nietzsche was prone to say the very same thing.

One way to say this: we have Darwin, but will use him to justify exactly opposite behaviors. You say if we believed Darwin we wouldn’t eat animals. I assume that the logic is that Darwin reveals animals as our kin, so eating them is a kind of cannibalism. We don’t eat dogs because they feel “too close” to us; that feeling should be extended to all animals, not just fellow humans and domestic pets. (The French eat horse meat although Americans won’t). But many people use Darwin to rationalize just the opposite. We humans have evolved as protein seeking omnivores and we developed domesticating animals we eat just as we developed agriculture to grow plants we eat. Even if we argue that domestication and agriculture were disasters, proponents of so-called “paleo diets” include meat eating in their attempt to get back to something thought basic to our evolved requirements. So even is Darwin is absolutely right about how life—and specifically human life—emerged, people will use the content of his theory to justify completely contradictory behaviors.

This analysis, of course, raises two questions. 1) What is the cause of our convictions if it is not some set of articulable beliefs about how the world is? James only answer is “temperament,” an in-built sensibility, a predilection to see the world in a certain way. (Another book I have just finished reading, Kevin Mitchell’s Free Agents [Princeton UP, 2023], says about 50% of our personality is genetically determined and that less than 10% is derived from family environment. Mitchell has an earlier book, titled Innate [Princeton UP, 2018], where he goes into detail about how such a claim is supported.) Nietzsche, in some places, posits an in-built will to power. All the articulations and intellectualisms are just after the fact rationalizations. In any case, “temperament” is obviously no answer at all. We do what we do because we are who we are—and how we got to be who we are is a black box. Try your damndest, it’s just about impossible to make sure your child ends up heterosexual or with some other set of desires.

2)So why are James and Nietzsche still pursuing an articulated account of “how it really works”? Is there no consequence at all at “getting it right”? Shouldn’t their theories also be understood as just another set of “after the fact” rationalization? In other words, reason is always late to the party—which suggests that consciousness is not essential to behavior, just an after-effect.

That last statement, of course, is the conclusion put forward by the famous Libet tests. The ones that say we move our hand milli-seconds before we consciously order our hand to move. Both Dennett [in Freedom Evolves (Penguin, 2003) and Mitchell (in Free Agents) have to claim the Libet experiment is faulty in order to save any causal power for consciousness. For the two of them, who want to show that humans actually possess free will, consciousness must be given a role in the unfolding of action. There has to be a moment of deliberation, of choosing between options—and that choosing is guided by reason (by an evaluation of the options and a decision made between those options) and beliefs (some picture of how the world really is.) I know, from experience, that I have trouble sleeping if I drink coffee after 2pm. I reason that I should not drink coffee after 2pm if I want to sleep. So I refrain from doing so. A belief about a fact that is connected to a reasoned account of a causal sequence and a desire to have one thing happen rather than another: presto! I choose to do one thing rather than another based on that belief and those reasons. To make that evaluation certainly seems to require consciousness—a consciousness that observes patterns, that remembers singular experiences that can be assembled into those patterns, that can have positive forward-looking desires to have some outcomes rather than others (hence evaluation of various possible bodily and worldly states of affairs), and that can reason about what courses of action are most likely to bring those states of affairs into being. (In short, the classical account of “rationality” and of “reason-based action.”)

If this kind of feedback loop actually exists, if I can learn that some actions produce desirable results more dependably than others, then the question becomes (it seems to me): at what level of abstraction does “knowledge” no longer connect to action? Here’s what I am struggling to see. Learned behavior, directed by experiences that provide concrete feedback, seems fairly easy to describe in terms of very concrete instances. But what happens when we get to belief in God—or Darwin? With belief in God, we seem to see that humans can persist in beliefs without getting any positive feedback at all. I believe in a loving god even as my child dies of cancer and all my prayers for divine intervention yield no result. (The classic overdramatized example.) Faced with this fact, many theologians will just say: it’s not reasonable, so your models of reasoned behavior are simply irrelevant at this point. A form of dualism. There’s another belief-to-action loop at play. Another black box.

On Darwin it seems to me a question of intervention. Natural selection exists entirely apart from human action/intention/desire etc. It does its thing whether there are humans in the world or not. That humans can “discover” the fact of natural selection’s existence and give detailed accounts of how it works is neither here nor there to natural selection itself. This is science (in one idealized version of what science is): an accurate description of how nature works. The next step seems to be: is there any way for humans to intervene in natural processes to either 1) change them (as when we try to combat cancer) or 2) harness the energies or processes of nature to serve specific human ends. (This is separate from how human actions inadvertently, unintentionally, alter natural processes–as is the case in global warming. I am currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future–and will discuss it in a future post.)

In both cases (i.e intentionally changing a natural process of harnessing the energies of a natural process toward a specifically human-introduced end), what’s driving the human behavior are desires for certain outcomes (health in the case of the cancer patient), or any number of possible desires in the cases of intervention. I don’t think the scientific explanation has any direct relation to those desires. In other words, nothing about the Darwinian account of how the world is dictates how one should desire to stand in relation to that world. Darwin’s theory of evolution, I am saying, has no obvious, necessary, or univocal ethical consequences. It does not tell us how to live—even if certain Darwinian fundamentalists will bloviate about “survival of the fittest” and gender roles in hunter-gatherer societies.

I keep trying to avoid it, but I am a dualist when it comes to ethics. The non-human universe has no values, no meanings, no clues about how humans should live. Hurricanes are facts, just like evolution is a fact. As facts, they inform us about the world we inhabit—and mark out certain limits that it is very, very useful for us to know. But the use we put them to is entirely human generated, just as the uses the mosquito puts his world to are entirely mosquito driven. To ignore the facts, the limits, can be disastrous, but pushing against them, trying to alter them, is also a possibility. And the scientific knowledge can be very useful in indicating which kinds of intervention will prove effective. But it has nothing to say about what kinds of intervention are desirable.

I am deeply uncomfortable in reaching this position. Like most of the philosophers I read, I do not want to be a dualist. I want to be a naturalist—where “naturalism” means that everything that exists is a product of natural forces. Hence all the efforts out there to offer an evolutionary account of “consciousness” (thus avoiding any kind of Cartesian dualism) and the complementary efforts to provide an evolutionary account of morality (for example, Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project [Harvard UP, 2011.) I am down with the idea that morality is an evolutionary product—i.e. that it develops out of the history and “ecology” of humans as social animals. But there still seems to me a discontinuity between the morality that humans have developed and the lack of morality of cancer cells, gravity, hurricanes, photosynthesis, and the laws of thermodynamics. Similarly, there seems to me a gap between the non-consciousness of rocks and the consciousness of living beings. So I can’t get down with panpsychism even if I am open to evolutionary accounts of the emergence of consciousness from more primitive forms to full-blown self-consciousness.

Of course, some Darwinians don’t see a problem. Evolution does provide all living creatures with a purpose—to survive—and a meaning—to pass on one’s genes. Success in life (satisfaction) derives from those two master motives—and morality could be derived from serving those two motives. Human sociality is a product of those motives (driven in particular by the long immaturity, non-self-sustaining condition, of human children)—and morality is just the set of rules that makes sociality tenable. So the theory of evolution gives us morality along with an account of how things are. The fact/value gap overcome. How to square this picture of evolution with its randomness, its not having any end state in view, is unclear. The problem of attributing purposes to natural selection, to personifying it, has bedeviled evolutionary theory from the start.

For Dennett, if I am reading him correctly, the cross-over point is “culture,”—and, more specifically, language. Language provides a storage device, a way of accumulating knowledge of how things work and of successful ways of coping in this world. Culture is a natural product, but once in place it offers a vantage point for reflection upon and intervention in natural processes. Humans are the unnatural animal, the ones who can perversely deviate from the two master motives of evolution (survival and procreation) even as they strive to submit nature to their whims. It’s an old theme: humans appear more free from natural drivers, but even as freedom is a source of their pride and glory, it often is the cause of their downfall. (Hubris anyone?) Humans are not content with the natural order as they find it. They constantly try to change it—with sometimes marvelous, with other times disastrous, results.

But that only returns us to the mystery of where this restless desire to revise the very terms of existence comes from. To go back to James and Nietzsche: it doesn’t seem like our theories, our abstract reasonings and philosophies, are what generate the behavior. Instead, the restlessness comes first—and the philosophizing comes after as a way of explaining the actions. See, the philosophers say, the world is this particular way, so it makes sense for me to behave in this specific way. But, says James, the inclination to behave that way came first—and then the philosophy was tailored to match.

So, to end this overlong wandering, back where I began. Bertrand Russell (in his A History of Western Philosophy) said that Darwin’s theory is the perfect expression of rapacious capitalism—and thus it is no surprise that it was devised during the heyday of laissez-faire. That analysis troubles me because it offers a plausible suspicion of Darwin’s theory along the William James line. The theory just says the “world is this way” in a manner that justifies the British empire and British capitalism in 1860. But I really do believe Darwin is right, that he has not just transposed a capitalist world view into nature. I am, however, having trouble squaring this circle. That is, how much our philosophizing, our theories, just offer abstract versions of our pre-existing predilections—and how much those theories offer us genuine insights about the world we inhabit, insights that will then effect our behavior on the ground. A very long-winded way of saying I can’t come up with a good answer to the questions your email posed.

Disparate Economies

In the course of my reading group’s discussion of Pride and Prejudice the other night, I commented that there are always two economies: one of wealth, the other of status. The rankings that competition for preeminence on those scales produces do not (in many cases) coincide. This is particularly obvious in Austen’s world, where fortunes made from “trade” do not secure the kind of social status that gentry like the Bennetts enjoy, despite their fairly modest wealth.

But money and status are not entirely disconnected. Bingley (who eventually marries the eldest Bennett daughter, Jane) is the beneficiary of his father’s success in trade—and is in the process of “laundering” the substantial wealth that he has inherited. He will marry a daughter from the gentry (basically, people whose money derives from land and who have the financial wherewithal to not have to work) and is looking around to purchase an “estate.” His family will move from the world of trade to the status of “landed” in one generation. The novel makes it clear that Darcy’s family made a similar move a generation or two back. Lady Catherine (Darcy’s obnoxious aunt) is not “old” aristocracy; her title only goes back two generations.

[An important sidenote: the supposed firewall between money gained through “trade” and the “old money” of the landed aristocracy was more fiction than fact. Those safe five percent returning investments on which the gentry lived only partially derived from their English estates, with their rent paying tenants and agricultural products. Their money was also invested–as Austen registers in Mansfield Park–in the plantations worked by slaves to produce sugar, cotton, and tobacco in the Americas. Similarly, of course, the great textile factories of the Industrial Revolution depended on cotton produced by slaves. On top of all that, until just about exactly the time of Austen’s death, there were the incomes and profits generated directly by the slave trade.]

The relative openness of British society, especially in exactly Austen’s lifetime (1775-1817), to such status enhancement is often cited as one reason the British never suffered the kind of revolution that unfolded in France. The new wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution could buy status as well as all the other goodies money can buy. The aristocracy was not closed (as it was in France). The novel’s example is the Lucas family. The father is knighted for giving a pretty speech when the king comes to town. And the novel pokes (fairly gentle) fun at the newly minted Sir William’s pretensions to status—especially since his household is dirt poor.

The Lucas sub-plot indicates (as does Lady Catherine’s efforts to prevent the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy) that snobbery is rife. Social climbing (the use of money and marriage to launder one’s declassé origins) is always vulnerable to those who will sneer at the pretensions of the newcomers. The charge of vulgarity always lurks. Which is why “manners” are so crucial in the novel—and in its assessment of the character of its characters. Elizabeth may be technically right when she insists to Lady Catherine that she is Darcy’s social equal in every respect. But the behavior of her mother and of her sisters, of which Elizabeth is deeply ashamed, puts the lie to that courageous assertion. One has to act one’s status—or the game is lost. That’s why the real sting in Elizabeth’s refusal of Darcy’s first proposal comes when she tells him his manner has been ungentlemanly. Just as Elizabeth cannot gainsay what Darcy has to say about her family in that proposal, he cannot deny, upon reflection, that she is right to say he has not acted like a gentleman.

All of this is to say that for Austen, status has substance. She is not blind to the absurdities of status—both of the naked efforts to attain it and the pufferies practiced by those who think they have it (pufferies, as in Lady Catherine’s and Sir William’s cases, that stem from insecurity about actually possessing the status they nominally possess. After all, why would Lady Catherine suffer the obsequies of Mr. Collins unless she needed to be constantly assured of her eminence?)

Still, Austen also respects status even as she mocks how people strive for it—and inhabit it once attained. She believes in the codes of the gentleman, in the codes of what the French call politesse, because they enable social intercourse along lines that she desires. She is well aware that civility often masks indifference and even outright hostility (as in the case of Bingley’s sisters and their behavior toward Jane and Elizabeth Bennett), but she greatly prefers that hypocrisy (the tribute vice pays to virtue) to the outright vulgarity of Mrs. Bennett. A world in which hostility and hatred must be veiled is a better world than one of direct (to the mattresses) competition.

Everything is doubled in Austen. She sees the utility (to use a vulgar word she would never use) of the “ways” of her world even as she satirizes the deficiencies of those “ways” and is keenly aware of how people use them to serve selfish, even nefarious, ends. Thus the novel warns us against taking “manners” at face value. They can be a mask, as they are in the case of Wickham. The substance of status can be a lie as well. Judgment of others is the primary—and incredibly difficult—task for everyone in Austen’s novels, but for no one more than her heroines. To make a mistake in whom one marries is, particularly for women (but also for men as Mr. Bennett’s case shows), an utter disaster. But it is incredibly difficult to know who another truly is. Status and manners are only partial clues and can be deceiving. Austen is very severe on characters she deems “stupid.” Stupidity, in her novels, it seems to me, is evidenced most directly in either lacking any interest in judging/interpreting the character of others (Mr. Collins is too self-involved in putting forward his own pretensions to ever see another person) or in blindly accepting at face value worldly markers of character (Mrs. Bennett, for whom a man’s fortune is all you need to know.) To take either money or social status as an accurate marker of character, of someone’s true worth, is a grievous mistake.

How does this translate to today’s world? Not very directly, but it’s not irrelevant either. The competition for money is more direct today—and there is not much social stigma attached to the source of one’s wealth or to engagement in direct, undisguised, efforts to accumulate money. It would be tempting to say that money and status are more directly aligned in today’s America than it was in Austen’s England. That is, because gaining money is not stigmatized, to become wealthy is also to achieve status. To some extent that is true. But it is still complicated. There is not a one-to-one correspondence. We still utilize a concept of “vulgarity”—the obverse of which might be captured in terms like “esteem” or “respect.” And we have our own laundering system, primarily in our prestige obsessed system of higher education. The newly rich want to send their children to the Ivies or other prestigious private universities (with maybe three or four public flagships also acceptable) as markers of having “made it.”

The obvious case for the still incomplete alignment of money and status is Donald Trump. Long before he got involved in politics, Trump was a by-word for vulgarity. And there is a decent case to be made that he only got involved in politics out of resentment at being laughed at by Barack Obama. Certainly, resentment against Obama (a “class act” if there ever was one) is a major motivator for Trump. Another, somewhat different case, would be Brittney Spears. If the notion of “nouveau riche” or parvenu haunts Trump, the specter of “white trash” hovers over Spears. And it seems pretty obvious that philanthropy to prestigious cultural institutions—the Ivy league universities, the operas in NYC and San Francisco, art museums and the like—are a contemporary way to launder money, to use it to attain status, entrance into the right social circles.

I am always befuddled when I read all those “social” novels—by Thackeray, Proust, Edith Wharton among others—where social climbing is the dominant motive driving the characters’ actions. In the worlds I inhabit, such ambitions seem utterly absent. In contemporary America, where is “society” of that sort even to be found? If you wanted to “climb,” where would you go and what would you do? Who (like Proust’s Verdurins and Guermantes) are today’s social arbiters? Outside of NYC and San Francisco, are there really social hierarchies, exclusive events/salons/balls that outsiders fervently dream of getting access to—and people who do anything and everything to gain that access? It just doesn’t seem the way life in present day USA is organized. I have no doubt that some philanthropy is driven by the desire to be associated with other donors whom one wants to hang with, but I have also known and worked with other philanthropists to whom attaining some increase in social status is of no interest to them.

So I am left with the puzzle of how the economies of wealth and status work today. What are the terms of competition for these goods? I won’t talk about competition for wealth here today, although that’s an interesting topic to which I would like to return. Partly because I think some roads to wealth today rely on the kinds of media that have also greatly altered the forms status now takes and the ways to gain it. (What I have in mind is the competition for venture capital—and the ways in which style over substance can win the day as in the cases of WeWork, FX, and Thanatos.)

Anyway, here’s my suspicion. The economy of status has been altered drastically by the nature of publicity. Let’s assume that the desire for status is a desire to be seen, to be known, and to be esteemed. One wants to be recognized as a member in good standing of a certain social set. My skepticism about the kinds of social climbing found in the classic novels as existing today stems from the difficulty of identifying social sets in today’s world. Where is this “society” that you are trying to attain status in?

One answer to that question is the “set” established by your profession. An artist strives for respect and standing in the “art world”; a university professor wants standing in her “field”; and business people want esteem among their peers. There are, in other words, professional hierarchies—and these hierarchies are not primarily tracked by money. As a business person once told me, the money’s not primary, but it is a way of keeping score. So money is not unrelated to the rankings in the hierarchy, but non-monetary achievements are (ideally) the “real” determinant of status. The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen have a standing superior to Neil Diamond irrespective of the fortunes accumulated by each. We don’t reference how much money they each have when ranking them.

Here, however, is where I think the distortions of the media come into play. In the classic social novels, no one is pursuing fame or celebrity. Modern media mean that you can play for standing in society as a whole, not in some particular subset. Everyone knows who Donald Trump is (even long before he ran for president) just as everyone knows who Michael Jackson is. Competition for standing in that amorphous, but all-encompassing, world is competition for attention. It has become a cliché, but still true, that we now live in an attention economy. What is disturbing to old-liners like me is that attention seems substance-free. No such thing as bad publicity. Celebrity is being famous for being famous. The celebrity doesn’t have to bring any goods to market (think of Elizabeth Holmes); she just has to be good at attracting eyes—and in Holmes’ case (as in many others) the money will follow the eyes.

How long can you get away with this? Crypto is indicating you can get away with it for quite some time. On the other hand, there are still some (even if feeble) quality controls. Bruce Springsteen, for the most part, manages to sidestep the attention economy. He has never descended into tabloid hell the way Brittney Spears has—and the almost universal respect he has garnered remains tied to his achievements, not to his being a celebrity. Or think of Dolly Parton as contrasted to Tammy Wynette (despite some recent attempts to recalibrate our understanding of Tammy.) Dolly has slowly but surely moved from being a cartoonish character to a revered one. That’s partly because of her ability to make fun of her white trash look (“it takes a lot of money to look this cheap”), and her avoiding the tabloid fodder of Wynette’s drug problems and multiple divorces, along with a rise in cultural status of country music over the past forty years.

Taylor Swift is an interesting case along these lines. There’s a substantial body of work there (even if this old fogey can’t judge the quality of it), but her fame has now thrown her into the media frenzy where her actual music is mostly irrelevant. Will she be able to avoid descending into tabloid hell? Will she continue to produce her music? When you think of it, it is a miracle that the Beatles, once Beatlemania hit, actually continued to develop musically and produced work in 1967 that was superior to the work that gained them fame in 1964. It’s only worse now in terms of how the attention world will eat its young. Maybe Taylor Swift will manage not to get swallowed up on the basis of this fame coming to her (unlike the Beatles) relatively late. She was known before of course, but not “known” like this—and let’s hope the ballast of being 33, not 17 like Brittney Spears, sees her through.

In sum, “status” seems to have exploded in today’s world, having to a large extent collapsed into something better described as “fame” or “celebrity.” Yet, there are still circumscribed social sets in which people strive for status, in which there are fairly well defined markers for garnering respect. But there’s now another game in town, one where a person becomes famous not relative to a defined set, but for society in general. Donald Trump, we might justly say, failed to garner any respect in the closed sets of NYC society or the business world (his skills as a businessman are laughable, non-existent; he fooled no one in that world). But he was a winner in the other (larger?) game of becoming known, if not quite respected, in society at large. And you can cash in that kind of success, not just in dollars but in other perks as well.

You can’t have that larger game without the media through which one’s image is offered to millions. We have multiple media of that type now (not just the newspapers of the 19^th century) and the frenzied effort to garner attention feels like the defining characteristic of our era. That so much of that effort is also light on content (to put it charitably) is deeply disturbing to old fogeys like myself.

I am generally skeptical of claims that our times are radically different than times past—and hate positions that rely on claiming our times are much worse than times past. So I want to register a caveat at the end of this post—and a promissory note. The desire for fame as contrasted to status is not a new phenomenon, so I need to think about how fame was understood and pursued prior to the media tools currently deployed in seeking it. And as long as I am trying to track “economies,” there are at least two other competitive spheres that should be considered: struggles for power and the competition for sexual success (this last returning us to an Austen focused interest in the marriage market, but influenced now by the Darwinian concept of sexual selection.) But enough for today.

Albert Einstein on the Humanities

A passage from Einstein, lifted from the compilation of his writings titled Ideas and Opinions (New York: Bonanza Books, 1954). Offered without comment.

It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he–with his specialized knowledge–more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community.

These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not–or at least not in the main–through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the “humanities” as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy.

Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the grounds of immediate usefulness kills the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included.

It is also vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be developed in the young human being, a development that is greatly jeopardized by overburdening him with too much and with too varied subjects (point system). Overburdening necessarily leads to superficiality. Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty. (Originally published in the New York Times of October 5, 1952.)

Spinoza, Goethe, and Liza Dalby

One of my reading groups has just finished reading Goethe’s Faust (both part)—and our discussion reproduced the arguments that book has generated since it first appeared in the world.

To put the mater bluntly: how is it that Faust is saved at the end of the play? He is, for many readers, a “criminal and a madman” (to quote from David Luke’s introduction to the translation we read.) A criminal in his seduction and betrayal of Gretchen, an act that leads directly to four deaths (Gretchen’s mother, her brother, the infant she conceives with Faust, and Gretchen herself.) His repentance for those crimes is unconvincing to many readers.

And he is a madman in his utopian scheme to hold back the sea and create a “paradisal scene,” a “wide new land” where “new human habitations stand” (Part Two, Act V, lines 11087; 11007-8). What might seem a noble enterprise, a desire to provide the necessities and even comforts of life for others, is tainted from the start by Faust’s declared desire: “I want to rule and to possess; what need/Have I of fame? What matters but the deed?” (Part Two, Act IV, lines 10187-88). A desire for eminence, for the commission of “high deeds” (Part Two, Act IV, line 10181), not any investment in the benefits those deeds might produce, drives Faust forward. The point of striving, it would seem, lies simply in the striving, not in its results.

The madness is revealed partly through the hubristic aim of holding back the sea. Faust tells us that he hates the sea’s “barren will,” the way that it ceaselessly comes forward, only to withdraw, with “not a thing achieved,” “this useless elemental energy!/And so my spirit dares new wings to span:/This I would fight, and conquer if I can” (Part Two, Act IV, 10217; 10219-10222.) He appears completely unaware that his own “striving” is just as pointless, just as wrapped up in the ceaseless expression of energy, and never oriented toward an actual accomplishment.

The madness (which now seems characteristic of modern men) also entails this fight against natural processes, this urge to dominate them, to install a humanly imposed order that brings nature to heel. Only shortly before (at the beginning of Act IV), Faust has recognized that Nature is a power that is separate from and indifferent to human concerns. “When Nature’s reign began, pure and self-grounded/Then this terrestrial globe it shaped and rounded . . . .Thus Nature takes her pleasure, never troubling/With all your crazy swirl and boil and bubbling” (Part Two, Act IV, lines 10097-8; 10105-6). Perhaps it is this very transcendence that makes humans want to subdue nature; nature’s separateness threatens the human pretension to self-sufficiency and thus becomes insufferable. Nature must be subdued, even while its dominion (not least its imposition of a death that will, without fail, come to all) cannot finally be overcome. Striving to deny its power is mad.

Cancer is natural—and few would say that human efforts to thwart its unfolding is ignoble, crazy, and not worth the effort. So there is some chance that Goethe actually endorses Faust’s ambitions, that Goethe sees the efforts of modern man to harness nature’s energies and processes as laudable striving, even if the effort is bound to only limited successes. Here’s how we might ventriloquize a certain (Usually masculine) vision of “life” and the position of humans within it: “We humans are at war with the nature that brings cancer and death; romantic notions of living in harmony with nature are nonsensical delusions, blind to the destructive forces embedded in nature, in the war of all against all that is nature’s primary law. Striving is the only way forward; conflict the way new things, perhaps even better ones, are brought into the world. Heraclitus: “War is the father of all things.” We are doomed to striving, to kicking against the pricks, and it’s sentimental nonsense to call that striving “madness” and think we can find some modus vivendi with the nature that is out to kill us. Similarly, full human potential is only unleashed in competition, in striving against others.”

On that reading, Faust is saved precisely because his restless striving is the right way to live—irrespective of the results of that striving. A life is only fully lived when the self expresses its vital energies, is oriented to “the deed,” with the devil taking the hindmost. Faust’s relentless search for that which might satisfy him should be applauded—while we also admit the harsh fact that his striving will bring him into conflict not only with nature but also with other human beings. Life is a contact sport—and some people (nay, all people) are going to get hurt.

That “positive” reading of Faust and his striving is going to lead me to Spinoza. But two additional thoughts first. 1. The case for a negative reading of Faust, for the conclusion that he is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (the famous description of Byron), is cemented (it seems to me) by his covetousness once he has created his dominion grabbed from the sea. We are told that his land’s creation required “human sacrifice” (Part Two, Act V, line 11128). But, again, that might be read as simply the acceptance that there is no making of an omelet with breaking some eggs. (It is often claimed that sentiment was expressed by Stalin; but, in fact, I have only seen it stated explicitly by the British politician and imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, father of the appeaser Neville Chamberlain.) More damning is Faust’s inability to tolerate that others might have dominion over their own patches of land, no matter how small. He must uproot Baucis and Philemon. Even as he gazes over his “masterpiece of man’s creation,” Faust feels the “sharpest torment: what/A rich man feels he has not got!” “Their stubbornness, their opposition/Ruins my finest acquisition/And in fierce agony I must/Grow weary of being just” (Part Two, Act V, lines 11248; 11251-2; 11269-72).

The result of this “fierce agony” is a reprise of the ending of Part One. Once again, Faust is the agent of death; in clearing Baucis and Philemon off the land, they are killed. Faust, once again, expresses remorse at the deaths he has caused, but just as in the case of Gretchen, he has acted on despicable motives (seduction in the one case, covetousness in the other) and, thus, seems unworthy of the reader’s sympathy or approbation. And most certainly unworthy of the salvation that is extended to him in the scenes immediately following the deaths of Baucis and Philemon.

The second point revolves around the question of forgiveness. To put it bluntly: must forgiveness be “earned?” The “negative” reading of Faust, it seems to me, hinges on this question. Some price—be it true repentance or some form of punishment—must be exacted before forgiveness is extended. To put it that way can seem niggardly. Why not imagine someone of such magnanimity that forgiveness is offered without demanding a quid pro quo? Presumably, that’s what is imagined in some Christian versions of “grace.” The worthiness of the sinner is neither here nor there. And I do think that Goethe, in the final analysis, does not believe in hell. He believes that all are saved. We are all humans, and are all worthy of love—and to be loved.

A hard doctrine, this universal forgiveness. (So hard, in fact, that most versions of Christianity take the exact opposite course—emphasizing how many are damned, how the reprobate fully deserve eternal torment, how there are very many that even a merciful god must consign to the fires of hell.) Are we really going to let people—concretely, Faust—get away with murder? No final responsibility? No accounting? Just forgiveness and love extended to all?

The “positive” reading of Faust might just have to land in that hard place. Maybe not, maybe you can make some kind of case that Faust goes through some process, some set of changes, that makes him worthy of salvation by the end. But it seems to me that case is very difficult, if not impossible, to make. After all, both parts of the play end with him causing deaths that he regrets but also evades all the consequences of.

More plausible is the idea that Goethe is displaying the inevitably conflictual core of life on earth. All must navigate those conflicts; none are innocent, but (equally) none are guilty. Humans are just dealing with the deck they have been dealt, striving to find a path through the violence. They can’t be blamed for that.

Enter Spinoza. Specifically, what gets called (by commentators on Spinoza’s philosophy), the “conatus doctrine.” In Book III of the Ethics (Proposition 6), Spinoza writes: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its own being.” Note the key word “strive.”

In some ways, conatus can seem a principle of self-preservation, or even a statement about inertia, about the way that things, conservatively, attempt to maintain the present state of things. In Goethe, however, the notion of a thing’s “own being” takes on a temporal dimension. A thing moves toward, develops through the course of a lifetime, its character, its characteristic mode of being. This variant of conatus is captured in the term entelechy, defined as “the realization of potential,: or, more elaborately, as “the vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system or organization.”

In short, Goethe places one’s “own being,” one’s identity (in the most profound sense of that term), out in front of us, something to strive for, something to be achieved. (Miles Davis: “it takes a whole lifetime to sound like oneself.”) Goethe thus stands at the beginning of the German obsession with Bildung, a word it is hard to translate since it encompasses education, culture, and growth/formation of character. (Recall the biological sense of the word “culture” to capture the sense of the environment in which an individual grows.)

Faust, understood this way, is striving toward achieving himself. When he reaches that destination, he will tell the moment to “stop.” He will have arrived. But his challenge to the devil is to declare that that moment will never come; he will never arrive. There will always be more about himself to be discovered/uncovered. He contains multitudes and wants, with the devil’s assistance, to experience all those potential selves that he harbors. He cannot exhaust himself, he believes.

That’s one way to describe Faust’s insatiable hunger. We might call that the “inward” path; diving deeper into himself, he will find all that he can possibly be. And there is good reason to think that part of Goethe (at least) believes that multiplicity will never cohere, will never coalesce into some distinctive or unified identity. It’s all fragments all the way down—a point of view the disparate Part Two drives home with a vengeance. Life is a picaresque, an odyssey of disconnected incidents, not the well unified plot described in Aristotle’s Poetics. To taste it all is Faust’s ambition, and to say there will never be a moment that serves as a culmination, as an arrival point, is to say that all the moments have their pleasures and their pains, their sufficiencies and their lacks. There is always reason to move on.

But—and here my discussion will take another turn—there is also the “outward” path. Goethe’s Faust, it seems to me, also asserts that human life, the life lived on earth, is shadowed throughout by another, spiritual, realm. Faust’s restlessness, after all, is not just his desire to plumb his unexplored depths, but also his hunger for connection to the spiritual powers he senses all about him. His frustration with his studies and with his life more generally comes from his inability to break through this mundane, material existence to the spiritual realm beyond it. His striving is for the more than human, for Nature with a capital N, or for God.

We come back to Spinoza here. The “own being” that conatus strives to preserve is not self-created. That being has been implanted in us. It is the divine spark within—the indwelling being that will align us with Nature/God. Spinoza is a pantheist; that is, every component of creation partakes of the godhead. Peace (and freedom in Spinoza’s idiosyncratic definition of freedom) comes when the alignment of part with whole is seamless. (Dante: “In His will, our peace.) We achieve our own being in Spinoza when, and only when, there is no difference, no gap, between the “all” and my individual being.

I don’t think that’s where Goethe is. Faust strives to make contact with the “all,” but I don’t think the goal is to be subsumed into that all. Goethe is too invested in the quest, in the journey, in the striving prior to any arrival. (This, obviously, returns us, on a different level, to the disinterest in results and consequences that Faust evidences.) The energy that conatus points toward, the “vital principle,” is Goethe’s focus—which helps explain why Goethe can be so important to Nietzsche. Life expressing itself through deed is what Goethe seems (at least some of the time) to be celebrating—without any concern for ordinary standards of good and evil. Life as a blind force, but one that should not be reined in by notions of morality, or good taste, or “civilization.” To put it that way takes Goethe too far in Nietzsche’s direction no doubt, but the hint is there. The “spiritual,” in this reading, would then be the vital energies of the universe at large, energies that dwarf human attempts to understand, corral, or moralize them. The whirlwind from the book of Job.

Goethe believes (I am arguing) that this world is shadowed by a spiritual one—and that human “hunger” is generated by the desire to contact that other world. The form taken by the effort to appease that hunger in Faust seems aggressively, even toxically, masculine—with the stress on conflict and the indifference to collateral damage. By the time we get to Nietzsche, striving looks not only toxic, but pathological, all too obviously compensatory for felt (and feared) weaknesses.

All of which reminds us that Goethe’s play is shadowed by something else besides a spiritual realm: namely, the feminine. From Gretchen through “the Mothers” and Helen of Troy to the penitent women of the last scenes, there is the mysterious, never fully developed, presence of women who offer our hyper-masculine hero the glimpse of an alternative path. In one way, the feminine is the possibility of unqualified love. If forgiveness need not be earned, but is simply granted by magnanimous grace, then it is woman who are expected to extend that forgiveness, expected to love without any question of desert. (James Joyce in Ulysses on maternal love as the only sure thing in the world, and the only thing one does not have to earn or deserve in any way whatsoever.) Salvation is through the feminine, through the forgiveness and love that the feminine gives freely, not through the rather pathetic, vain-glorious, striving of the male. The loving Christian god is a woman.

The feminine in Faust offers at least two things. One: the possibility that development might not be through conflict, but instead through the unleashing of potential through the enabling affirmation of love. Is it really competition that yields our best selves? Why not insist that cooperation and encouragement are better catalysts of human achievement? Why is striving to work together, to delight in the talents of others, considered weak and sentimental, scorned as “feminine?”

The second possibility is finding fulfillment in having children, which also entails a reconciliation to the fact of one’s own death. The world will be handed on to one’s progeny. Women in Faust are associated with the mystery of birth. The mysterious “Mothers” of Part Two, Act One are the ineffable origin of all things, terrifying but fecund. And Helen and Faust give birth to a son, Euphorion, in Part Two, Act Three. But becoming a parent proves a path not taken for Faust. Instead of yielding the world to his son, we have a reversal of the usual (natural?) course of things. The son dies before the father, so that Faust does not experience the kind of love that gives of oneself to one’s child, a love that eschews the Oedipal conflict on which Freud focused, choosing instead not to fight with the loved one. (Freud, like Joyce, idealized maternal love, declaring that the only pure love in the world was of the mother for her eldest son.)

This gendered division of labor (where women love, and men conflict/compete) is obnoxious for all kinds of reasons, not least of all for its reserving all possibility of heroic action to men. Women just get to sit around and wait for the man to come home—and then to salve his wounds, his frustrated pride, and provide unquestioning love. Women are just stepping stones toward something else: salvation. But within that gendered division lies the sense that maybe the heroic ideal, the emphasis on deeds above all else, is nuts, can only lead to endless restlessness and striving. Heroic striving is not the path to salvation. How else to read the ending of Faust, the need for feminine intervention on Faust’s behalf? Perhaps endless restlessness and striving are not worthy of celebration, but should be jettisoned for a more sane, a more satisfying, affirmation of what is there in front of us. What if, in fact, humans don’t need to be saved, don’t need to be transported to some “elsewhere,” whether that be some other-worldly spiritual realm or just some imagined utopia where the sea has been held back? The surrender we are looking for is not to the overwhelming energy/power of some god or to some utopian vision of what our human ingenuity can produce, but to the possibility of satisfaction with what human life can afford: a circumscribed place shared with loved others. That, after all, is exactly what Baucis and Philemon represent: the non-heroic and its joys.

In other words, maybe what we need is to change the scale of our desires and our actions, to stop imagining global transformations, or titanic conflicts with forces of good and evil, or momentous encounters with powers beyond the human. A more modest focus has been coded as “feminine” with Western cultures; women represent love and the domestic; men represent striving out in the “wider world.” I don’t know enough about Eastern cultures to claim they assign men and women to different roles than we do in the West. What I do know is that Western writers from Thoreau on have turned to the East when they have wanted to deflate the masculine discourse of heroic action and have tried to emphasize, instead, a quieter attention to the here and now, to achieve a peacefulness that contrasts to a restlessness that they deem more dysfunctional than admirable.

Which brings me to Liza Dalby. I have just finished reading her almanac cum memoir, East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons (University of California Press, 2007). Dalby (originally from Indiana) has spent almost half her lifetime immersed in Japanese culture. She is also an avid gardener. Her book travels through a single year, following an ancient Chinese almanac that has been widely adopted (with some alterations) by the Japanese. The point of the almanac is to be attuned to the changes in meteorological conditions as the year unfolds. Such changes are, of course, crucial to the farmer and the gardener, indicating what plants will thrive at different times. The almanac divides the year into 72 five-day parcels, and offers a natural occurrence that signals where each parcel fits into a full year’s cycle through the seasons.

Crucially, the gardener (and farmer) is not someone who lets nature take its course. Instead, there is a partnership. The gardener must respect the natural processes that are inevitable. You can complain about the weather, but there isn’t much you can do about it. Instead, you need to be sensitive to the unfolding weather—and shape your gardening practices toward achieving what the weather makes possible. (The same goes, of course, for other natural factors such as soil, parasites, and weeds.) Dalby is no romantic; like any gardener, she knows that nature can be destructive as well as creative, and that the squirrels will eat her persimmons, and the hawks will eat the squirrels. It is not so much a question of living in some idealized “harmony” with an abstract nature as it a constant attention to a multitude of natural processes with which to contend, taking what those processes afford (make possible) and taking precautions (not all of which will succeed) against what those processes will destroy. Carving out a garden amidst the diverse energies and contentions that constitute an eco-system. No monotheism here (no God, no Nature), but a full panoply of actors, human and non-human–and the need to navigate among them.

What I like about Dalby (and here she is very distinct from Thoreau) is how resolutely secular she is. (I have no idea if this secularity is characteristic of the Japanese or not, even as she derives much of her stance toward life from Japanese sources.) She does not see herself as getting in touch with some distinctive (or personified) powers in her attention to natural processes. This is just the world in which she has landed, one in which the seasons change in ways that are simultaneously predictable and not. August will be warmer than February, but more exact predictions are chancy. The almanac provides some clues about what to look out for, but the real work is in being attentive to what is in front of you. Harder work, much harder work, than we usually realize. With our heads in the clouds, dreaming of spiritual elsewheres or enchanted by visions of what tomorrow will bring, attending to, living in, the present eludes us.

That there is nothing else except what is right there before us is, perhaps, the hardest lesson to learn. Of course, Dalby’s urge to keep her diary, to write a book, violates complete immersion in the present. She needs to preserve something of the passing moment, and she needs to feel there is an audience to her witnessing for the present. Still, the injunction to “pay attention” is important to her—and is offered as the best (the only?) path toward rendering life satisfying, interesting, perhaps even worth living. We won’t find meaning some place else if we do not find it in the present.

“A full century has passed since Hearn’s lament that Japan would end up as a dull copy of the West, yet it seems to me that the Japanese attention to seasonality has, if anything, become stronger. Sharpening our senses, aware of the seasons, we can be more present in the world. Once absorbed, this way of looking at things reveals interest everywhere–even in a junkyard, making wind chimes in California” (Dalby, p. 155).