Tove Jansson

 https://tovejansson.com/

James on Kraus

“A liberated woman,” said Karl Kraus, “is a fish that has fought its way ashore.” Even at the time, there were women, some of them among his cheer-squad of beautiful mistresses, who thought he was talking through his hat. Agree with him or not, however, you wouldn’t mind being able to say something that sharp. Kraus was famous for being able to do so whenever he wanted, but eventually, as with his hero Oscar Wilde, his fame as a wit was there instead of the full, complex, tormented and deeply contemplative man. As a writer and practitioner of the higher journalism, he is still up there with all the other great names of literary Vienna – Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth – but up there for what, precisely?

The risk run by the aphorist is that people will grow restless between aphorisms, because they aren’t getting enough of what it says on the label. Even while he was alive, most people didn’t want any more of Kraus’s world view than would fit into a fortune cookie. Though he had no computer on his desk, Kraus was essentially a blogger before the fact: his basic technique was to write a couple of hundred words about something silly in the newspaper. He sometimes wrote at length, but his admirers preferred him to keep it short. The kind of thing they liked best from him might have been designed to pop up on a Blackberry today. “An aphorism can never be the whole truth,” he once wrote: “It is either a half-truth or a truth and half.” Yes, but that’s an aphorism. So is it true?
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Outside the German-speaking lands, Kraus is now known mainly for having been the Viennese café pundit who brilliantly fulfilled a self-created role as the scourge of loose language. Serious readers, even if their serious reading does not often include him, know that Kraus, from before the turn of the twentieth century until a couple of years before the Anschluss in 1938, was the linguistic health inspector who searched through what was said for what was meant, and was particularly scathing about the jingoistic propaganda that helped drive a generation of young men irretrievably into the mincing machine of the Great War.

Kept out of the trenches by his distorted spine, he was the pacifist on the warpath, the libertarian grammarian. Whether in the pages of his magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) or by means of his celebrated readings on stage, he constantly pointed out the connection between official bombast and the suffering of the people, between journalistic mendacity and political duplicity, between fine writing and foul behaviour. Some of those serious readers also know, or think they know, that Kraus finally fell silent because, on his own admission, Hitler had left him speechless.

Not true. The facts say that Kraus, immediately after confessing that the Nazis left him with nothing to say, went on to say quite a lot. There are thousands of facts like that in Edward Timms’s biography Karl Kraus, a two-tome desk-breaker which can be taken as the instigation of the piece I am writing now, because such a big, factually precise yet historically approximate biography brings to a focus some of the problems that Kraus’s brilliant career exemplified. Such a biography can also be a problem in itself, if its interpretations come to define its subject. Something like that, I believe, has happened in this instance, and it might be worth attempting a short historical account of Kraus’s career without wasting space by decorating the narrative with the usual sprinkle of aphorisms. There are a dozen different anthologies of those, quite apart from the compendia of his writings that Kraus put together himself. What we need, however, is a picture of the mind behind the fragments. Was that fragmentary too?

Francis Williams

 

Henri Bergson

When I started reading Bergson’s works, I immediately took to his philosophy and writing style, although there are places where his argument is not easy to follow and some of the subtler nuances of his thought get lost in translation. Despite this, it was like reaching an oasis of wisdom after fruitless wanderings in arid deserts claiming the noble name of ‘philosophy’, which are in some cases branches of grammar, linguistics or casuistry – modern secular versions of counting angels on pin-heads.

Henri Bergson was born in Paris in 1859 and died there in 1941. His mother was Anglo-Irish and his father Polish and an accomplished musician. Bergson uses musical analogies and writes with gallic panache and imagination, drawing freely from the metaphysician and artist in himself. One can see why his style, imagery and free usage of terms such as ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ did not appeal to the logical positivists.

In 1891 he married Louise Neuburger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, who was greatly influenced by Bergson’s theories on time and memory. Quite early in his professional teaching career, Bergson had one of those life-changing eureka moments. Until then he had been “Wholly imbued with mechanistic theories”, as he himself put it some years later in a letter to his friend, the American philosopher, William James. Bergson’s main critique of the mechanistic view centred on the perception of time: “It was the analysis of the notion of time, as that enters into mechanics and physics, which overturned all my ideas. I saw, to my great astonishment, that scientific time does not endure. This led me to change my point of view completely” (Encyc. Brit. article on Bergson)

His doctoral thesis was on Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889). Here Bergson distinguished between time as we actually experience it, lived time – which he called ‘real duration’ (durée réelle) – and the mechanistic time of science. This, he argued, is based on a misperception: it consists of superimposing spatial concepts onto time, which then becomes a distorted version of the real thing. So time is perceived via a succession of separate, discrete, spatial constructs – just like seeing a film. We think we’re seeing a continuous flow of movement, but in reality what we’re seeing is a succession of fixed frames or stills. To claim that one can measure real duration by counting separate spatial constructs is an illusion: “We give a mechanical explanation of a fact and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself”, he wrote.

His next major work, Matter and Memory (1896), was an essay on the relation between mind and body. In his preface, Bergson affirms the reality of mind and the reality of matter and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of memory, which he saw as the intersection or convergence of mind and matter. He regarded the brain as an organ of choice, with a practical role. Its main function is to filter mental images, allowing through to consciousness those impressions, thoughts or ideas that are of practical biological value. (Time and Free Will, p.181)

He spent five years researching all the psychological, medical and other literature then available on memory. He focussed in particular on the condition known as aphasia – loss of the ability to use language. The aphasiac understands what people are saying, knows what he or she wants to say, suffers no paralysis of the speech organs, and yet is unable to speak. This, Bergson argued, shows that it is not memory as such that is lost, but the bodily mechanism that is needed to express it. From this observation he concluded that memory, and so mind, makes use of the physical brain to carry out its own purposes.

Clearly there is vastly more in a given occasion of consciousness than in the corresponding brain state. This is surely a perfectly natural, normal, everyday part of human experience – a common-sense, empirical fact of life. We don’t really experience life as a succession of separate conscious states, progressing along an imaginary line. Instead, we feel time as a continuous flow, with no clearly demarcated beginnings and ends. We should not therefore confuse an abstract, arbitrary notion of practical convenience with the underlying truth that is continuously confirmed by our own experience.

Bergson uses one of his musical analogies to make the point: “As the symphony overflows the movements which scan it, so the mental/spiritual life overflows the cerebral/intellectual life. The brain keeps consciousness, feeling and thought tensely strained on life, and consequently makes them capable of efficacious action. The brain is the organ of attention to life.” (l’Energie Spirituelle 1910, p.47)

In his best known work, Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson made it clear that he accepted evolution as a scientifically established fact. He was born the year The Origin of Species was published and Creative Evolution adds a vital missing dimension to Darwinian theory. He believed that the failure to take into account the real time underlying the whole process results in the failure to appreciate the uniqueness of life. Bergson proposed that the evolutionary process should be seen as the expression of an enduring life force (élan vital), that is continually developing. Evolution has at its very heart this life force or vital impulse.

In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1912), Bergson expands on the central role of intuition. The true purpose of knowledge is to know things deeply, to touch the inner essence of things via a form of empathy: “A true empiricism”, he wrote, “is that which proposes to get as near to the original itself as possible, to search deeply into its life, and so, by a kind of intellectual auscultation, to feel the throbbings of its soul.”

Auscultation is listening to the internal organs through a stethoscope. Just as the physician does this to find out what is happening within the patient’s body, so the metaphysician practises a mental equivalent of auscultation to apprehend the inner essence of things.

Bergson also served on French diplomatic missions and from 1921-26 acted as president of the committee on international cooperation of the League of Nations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927 and in 1932 published his last major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. On the one hand, there’s the closed society based on conformity to rules and moral codes, interpreted in a strict, legalistic, literal way. On the other hand, there’s the open society, which expresses creativity, imagination and spirituality via the arts, music, poetry, philosophy and mystical experience. The source of the former is the intellect and the source of the latter is intuition.

In The Two Sources Bergson seemed to subscribe to a more traditional Christian theological notion of God. He acknowledged that his reflections had in fact brought him closer to the Roman Catholic position, which he saw as the fulfillment of his Judaic faith. But he never actually became a Catholic: “I would have become a convert”, he wrote, “had I not foreseen for years a formidable wave of anti-semitism about to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to be persecuted”. Only weeks before his death in 1941 and despite being seriously ill, Bergson insisted on registering as a Jew, even though he had been offered exemption by the Vichy government.
Why Vitalism is Vital

With the ascendancy of the mechanistic outlook throughout most of the twentieth century, ‘vitalism’ became a dirty word in scientific circles. For a biologist to be accused of vitalist tendencies was equivalent to a charge of heresy. When Rupert Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life came out in 1981, the editor of a leading scientific journal used language more appropriate to the time of the Inquisition, in calling for it to be burnt.

The mechanistic view alone is singularly ill-equipped to understand the immense variety and depth of human experience, to say nothing of the more subtle aspects of the phenomenon of consciousness. Whenever any given outlook – scientific, philosophical, political, economic or religious – becomes closed and dogmatic, it sooner or later has to undergo its own creative evolution and become more open to new ideas and insights. The fact that a mechanistic approach is essential for many aspects of scientific research does not mean that everything in life can be accounted for in reductionist, nothing-but mechanistic terms.

From the 1960’s onwards, some scientists became increasingly aware that something vital was missing from the prevailing worldview. In his book The Living Stream, for example, the eminent marine biologist, Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS, stressed the importance of non-material aspects of evolution. The subtitle reads: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and its Relation to the Spirit of Man. In order to investigate methodically this aspect of human experience, Hardy set up a research unit, originally at Oxford. It is now at the University of Wales at Lampeter and is named after its founder (The Alister Hardy Research Centre).

It was William James who had originally pioneered this work over a century ago and not much was done in this field until the Hardy unit was set up in 1969.

Bergson believed that mental and spiritual aspects of human experience were greatly neglected as a result of focussing so single-mindedly on the physical and material. He once speculated on how things might have developed had modern science devoted more attention to exploring the non-material realm. He believed that we would by now have had a psychology of which today we can form no idea, any more than before Galileo people could have imagined what our physics would be like. A biology quite different to ours would also have emerged: “A vitalist biology which would have sought, behind the sensible forms of living beings, the inward invisible force of which the sensible forms are the manifestations. On this force we have today taken no hold precisely because our science of mind is in its infancy ...” He went on to say: “Together with this vitalist biology there would have arisen a medical practice which would have sought to remedy directly the insufficiencies of the vital force: it would have aimed at the cause and not the effects, at the centre instead of at the periphery ...”

Over the past twenty or thirty years, there has been an ever-increasing growth in demand for many varieties of alternative healing, some of which are becoming part of medical practice, the development of psychosomatic medicine and many different therapies. Quite apart from the efficacy of any given remedy or therapeutic technique, this growth represents a widespread revolt against reductionist, materialist, mechanistic fundamentalism.

Terms such as ‘life force’ and ‘vital energy’ are now back in general usage. Recent advances in the new physics and cosmology have also led to a radical reappraisal of old ways of thinking about time and causality, subject/object, observer/observed.

Bergson is sometimes claimed to have anticipated features of relativity theory. He wrote a paper on ‘Duration and Simultaneity with regard to Einstein’s Theory’ (1921). In the public debate between the two, it was generally held that Einstein ‘won’. But there aren’t really winners or losers in any debate about time.

The way we perceive time is surely a core perception, which affects all other perceptions. It determines our philosophy of life, matters of war and peace, how we perceive work and the amount of quality time we devote to the people and things that really matter.

Despite the recovery of a more vitalistic outlook in attitudes towards physical and mental wellbeing, the main underlying perception of our modern, urban-industrial society remains mechanistic and soulless. Over the years, the dominant western worldview has become de-vitalised and devalued, especially in politics and economics. Let’s suppose things had developed in a more balanced, Bergsonian way over the sixty years or more since his death: reason and intuition, intellect and imagination, matter and mind, the physical and the spiritual. Perhaps we would have learned from this a greater respect for all expressions of the life force, including our own species.

To extend Bergson’s speculations, let’s imagine that the present green awakening and concern over the environment had started to get under way sixty years ago – I mean really take off, not just lone voices in the wilderness, such as Rachel Carson. By now we would have had an environmentally-friendly form of global politics that we can barely imagine. Had such a re-valuation of our natural habitat and its human, plant and animal inhabitants taken place half a century ago, our planet would probably be in much better shape today, allowing us to pass it on in a healthy state to our descendants. Political and economic priorities would by now have changed radically and war would be seen as an absolute last resort. There can be no place in a genuinely ethical foreign policy for the doctrine that might is right. There could therefore be no question of any nation, however powerful, embarking on pre-emptive wars against any other nation.

With a more vitalistic perception, the intrinsic value of others and of humanity as a whole would by now have become something so written into our lives that it would be that much harder to demonise those we disliked. In order to exploit and abuse others and make war against them, you first have to devalue them. Seeing them as of no greater value than devitalized machines is one way of doing this.

Writing in The Independent (14 May 04), Terence Blacker observed that the fascination of cruelty is now so pervasive that we hardly notice it’s there. He believes there is a direct line from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to millions of home computers across the western world. Pictures not at all dissimilar to the shocking images from Abu Ghraib are available as a form of home entertainment. “If you tap the words ‘torture’, ‘rape’ or ‘slave’ into a search engine,” wrote Blacker, “You will not be led to human rights organizations or academic reports, but to thousand upon thousand of websites specialising in recreational sadism. All this is mind-bogglingly profitable, because it taps into the age’s most compelling vices and weaknesses: cruelty, voyeurism, boredom. The problem is consumers are never satisfied by what they’re offered.”

The production line mindset defines the consumer as a buying machine with an insatiable appetite, whose tastes, fads and fashions can be manipulated, via advertising, with artificially contrived, largely unnecessary and usually environmentally destructive, wants. When one buying machine finally breaks down (when a customer dies), it is replaced by a new one, already well groomed in the dark arts of consumption. Underlying the consumerist juggernaut is the mechanistic view of time, the great fear of boredom that goes with it and the compulsion to fill up every waking moment with more and more graphic images, leaving less and less time for the things that really matter.

Our deeper needs are vitally real – not at all the same thing as contrived wants. One of our deepest needs is to find and express that vital creative spark that lies somewhere in all of us. If we saw ourselves as potentially creative artists of one kind or another, if this was the main view of ourselves and each other, we would spend more time creating our own images, writing our own stories, rediscovering our own myths. The artist is not a special kind of person. Every person is a special kind of artist.

In a society that put greater emphasis on creation than production, boredom would not even be an issue. Instead of fearing time and thinking of it as an endless space that has to be filled in, we would value it more and make sure we had time to express our own particular form of creativity, time to dream, time to do nothing in particular, to have a fallow period, time to sit silently, or walk mindfully.

In The Rebel (l’Homme Révolté, first published in 1951), Albert Camus observed that the society based on production is only productive, not creative. We’ve grown so used to living in a society ruled by production that we can barely even imagine one ruled by creation. Bergson enables us to envisage a society based more on creativity than the soulless, mechanistic, produce consume model. His philosophy offers a more integrated view of life, where science, technology, art, economics, politics and spirituality can all work together.

You do not need to subscribe to any kind of religious faith, or belief in the supernatural, to stand in awe at the creative beauty of the evolutionary life force in all its incredibly varied and wonderful manifestations. This sense of wonder comes as naturally to a person of scientific inclination as it does to an artistic or spiritually-minded person. Bergson’s philosophy has the effect of opening doors in the mind, enabling us to think more deeply about the nature of time and how we, in our western culture, perceive it – or rather, misperceive it. Above all, his philosophy provides a basis for a more creative, revalued and revitalized general outlook.

Adam Savage

Yasuke

“His name was Yasuke. His height was 6 shaku 2 sun” — roughly six feet, two inches — “he was black, and his skin was like charcoal.” Those words come from the 16th-century samurai Matsudaira Ietada, and they describe one of his colleagues. Though we don’t know much detail about his life itself, we do know that there once lived a black samurai called Yasuke, a version of the name he had in Africa, probably the then Portuguese Mozambique. Brought to Japan in 1579 by an Italian Jesuit named Alessandro Valignano on a mission-inspection tour, Yasuke’s appearance in the capital drew so much attention that thrilled onlookers clambered over one another to get so much as a glimpse at this strange visitor with his unfathomable stature and skin tone.

“His celebrity status soon piqued the curiosity of Oda Nobunaga, a medieval Japanese warlord who was striving to unify Japan and bring peace to a country racked by civil war,” writes Ozy’s Leslie Nguyen-Okwu. “Nobunaga praised Yasuke’s strength and stature, describing ‘his might as that of 10 men,’ and brought him on as his feudal bodyguard.”

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As many foreigners in Japan still discover today, the foreigner’s outsider status there also has its benefits: “Nobunaga grew fond of Yasuke and treated him like family as he earned his worth on the battlefield and on patrol at Azuchi Castle. In less than a year, Yasuke went from being a lowly page to joining the upper echelons of Japan’s warrior class, the samurai. Before long, Yasuke was speaking Japanese fluently and riding alongside Nobunaga in battle.”

The legend of Yasuke ends soon after, in 1582, with Nobunaga’s fall at the hands of one of his own generals. That resulted in the first and only black samurai’s exile, probably to a Jesuit mission in Kyoto, but Yasuke has lived on in the imaginations of the last few generations of Japanese readers, all of whom grew up with the award-winning children’s book Kuro-suke (kuro meaning “black” in Japanese) by Kurusu Yoshio. This illustrated version of Yasuke’s life story, though told with humor, ends, according to a site about the book, on a bittersweet note: the defeated “Nobunaga kills himself, and Kuro-suke is saved and sent to Namban temple. When he sleeps that night, he dreams of his parents in Africa. Kuro-suke cries silently.”

Leszek Kolakowski

It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way. —Marx to Engels, 1857

What socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything. —V. I. Lenin, 1917

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. —Pascal, Pensées

Born in Radom, in eastern Poland, in 1927, the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski is closing in on his eightieth year. He has come a long way. He was a boy of twelve when the Nazis stormed into Poland. “I remember the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto,” he writes in “Genocide and Ideology” (1978),“which I saw from outside; I lived among Poles who were active in helping Jews and who risked their lives every day trying to save those few who could be saved from the inferno.” In 1945, the war over, he joined the Communist Party: the Communists were anti-fascist, weren’t they? (Were they?) He studied and then taught philosophy in Warsaw, where he also edited a scholarly journal.
Maturity brought forth doubts; doubts brought forth criticism; criticism was a dangerous commodity in Soviet-controlled Poland. In 1954, Kolakowski was accused of “straying from Marxist-Leninist ideology.” (True, all too true.) In 1966, after delivering a speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the “October thaw,” he was expelled from the Party with all the usual ceremony. The state-controlled press launched a series of attacks on the renegade. He was removed from his university chair for “forming the views of the youth in a manner contrary to the official tendency of the country.” In 1968, he went into exile. His works were promptly enrolled in the Index of forbidden authors and, until 1981, could be neither referred to nor cited officially. After leaving Poland, Kolakowski taught at several Western universities, including McGill, Yale, the University of Chicago (for more than a decade he was part of the Committee on Social Thought), and Oxford, where he now lives in semi-retirement. Throughout the 1980s, he aided and abetted the Solidarity movement, which was instrumental in ridding Poland of its Communist oppressors.

Jacques Barzun once said of Walter Bagehot that he was “‘well-known’ without being known well.” Something similar can be said of Kolakowski. No academic is more distinguished than Leszek Kolakowski. He boasts a string of glittering honors and prizes that includes—I confine myself to a few A-list American awards—a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called “genius” award, justified for once), the Jefferson Award, and, in 2003, the first Kluge Prize for “lifetime achievement in the humanities,” a commendation that carries a purse of $1 million.

Kolakowski’s bibliography is equally long and distinguished. It includes plays, moral and theological tales, and a long shelf of books and articles on the Church Fathers, on Pascal, on Henri Bergson, on English empiricism and the tradition of positivism, on the fate of religion in a secular age and the prospects of secularism in the hands of an animal as obstinately given to religious preoccupations homo sapiens sapiens. Above all, perhaps, Kolakowski is known as a keen anatomist of totalitarianism. His patient investigations into the origins and the murderous legacy of Marxism—culminating in his magnum opus, Main Currents of Marxism (English translation, 1978)—occupy pride of place in the precious library of philosophical and political disenchantment.

It would be an injustice, however, if this impressive inventory were to obscure one of Kolakowski’s most conspicuous gifts: I mean his humor. Consider, for example,this title: “A Comment on Heidegger’s Comment on Nietzsche’s Alleged Comment on Hegel’s Comment on the Power of Negativity.” This orotund pseudo-scholarly rubric neatly ushers Kolakowski into a serious point. In a famous interview with Der Spiegel published in 1976 shortly after his death, Heidegger was at pains to exonerate himself from his association with the Nazis. Among other things, he suggested that anyone who had ears to hear would know that he had criticized the Nazi regime in his lectures on Nietzsche and the Will to Power.“It probably takes an ear subtler than mine,” Kolakowski notes, “to hear this criticism.” Indeed, he shows that Heidegger “obliquely but clearly” expressed his commitment to German imperialism in those lectures. While on the subject of humor, I should also direct readers to Kolakowski’s book The Key to Heaven: Edifying Tales from Holy Scripture to Serve as Teaching and Warning. You will never regard the story of Job (or Noah, Lot’s wife, Sarah and Abraham, or Jacob and Esau) in quite the same light. (“In the highest sphere of heaven stood an elegant bar where Jehovah was wont to receive the reports of His scouts …”)

Despite his eminence, however, Kolakowski has largely escaped, at least in America, the dubious accolades of celebrity. Jacques Derrida has much greater brand recognition, as do Michel Foucault and, probably, Richard Rorty and others further down the intellectual food chain. Kolakowski inhabits a different order of distinction. The publication last year of The Two Eyes of Spinoza,[1]a collection of philosophical essays, the upcoming publication of My Correct Views on Everything[2](another collection of essays), and a new edition of Main Currents of Marxism [3]afford a welcome opportunity to say something about the achievement of this extraordinarily subtle and illuminating thinker.

Perhaps the first thing that should be said about the new edition of Main Currents of Marxism concerns the peril it presents to those with weak backs or delicate wrists. When first published in English by Oxford University Press, the book appeared in three large volumes. Norton has chosen to supersize the book, offering it to us in one enormous, unwieldy tome. I suppose this is cheaper to produce. It is also harder to use.

As far as I can tell, the text is unchanged except for the addition of a brief preface. Although only a few pages long, the preface is valuable for three things. It reminds us straightaway—this emerges as a theme of the book—that Marxist doctrine, by calling for the abolition of private property and the more or less total subordination of the market to state control, provided “a good blueprint for converting human society into a giant concentration camp.”(“[T]he abolition of the market,” Kolakowski comments elsewhere, “means a gulag society.”) Kolakowski also makes the important point that, notwithstanding the collapse of the Soviet Union, Marxism is still eminently worth studying, not least because its aspirations continue to percolate in the dreams of various utopian planners. (You needn’t go to China or even Cuba: just look at the increasingly pink and authoritarian complexion of the European Union.) Moreover, as Kolakowski puts it in his introduction to My Correct Views on Everything,
Communism was not the crazy fantasy of a few fanatics, nor the result of human stupidity and baseness; it was a real, very real part of the history of the twentieth century, and we cannot understand this history of ours without understanding communism. We cannot get rid of this specter by saying it was just “human stupidity,” or “human corruptibility.” The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life.

Finally, Kolakowski’s new preface contains an arresting aside about the book’s publication history. Written in Polish between 1968 and 1976 “when their publication in Poland could only be dreamed of,” the three volumes of Main Currents were first published in Paris by the Institut Littéraire from 1976–78 and were circulated underground in Poland. They were not published legally in Poland until 2000. In the intervening years the book has been translated into many languages, including Chinese. In French, however, only the first two volumes, which take the story of Marxism through the death of Lenin, have been published. The third volume, which deals with Stalinism and its allotropes—including New Left thinkers like Louis Althusser and Sartre—is still waiting for a French translation. Why? Perhaps, Kolakowski speculates, because its publication “would provoke such an outrage among French leftists that the publishers were afraid to risk it.” I wish that some public-spirited soul would publish a French version so that we could make the experiment.

The philosopher David Stove once observed, “As an item on the intellectual agenda, Marxism is scarcely even a joke. ... Marxism is a fearful social—and police—problem, but so is the drug trade. It is a fearsome political problem, but so is Islamic fundamentalism. But an intellectual problem Marxism is not, any more than the drug trade or Islamic fundamentalism.”Kolakowski has devoted the 1500 pages of Main Currents of Marxism as well as a dozen or more essays to Marxism, its genesis, its permutations, its horrifying record of mass murder. In an essay in My Correct Views of Everything called “What is Left of Socialism?” (1995), he apostrophizes Karl Marx as “a powerful mind, a very learned man, and a good German writer” (“good,” I feel constrained to add, in the way the curate’s egg was good: The Communist Manifesto, the Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology contain some powerful rhetoric, but have you looked into Das Kapital or the Grundrisse lately?).

Yet I suspect that Kolakowski would agree with Stove. He does not endorse Marxism as an intellectual phenomenon. Rather, he takes it seriously as a product of human spiritual striving. This involves him in a complicated historical itinerary. Looking for the origin of the dialectic, Kolakowski takes readers back to “the soteriology of Plotinus,” providing a lofty vantage point from which to regard the sage who assured his audience (in the endlessly quoted snippet from the Theses on Feuerbach) that “hitherto, philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it. ”Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa loom as large in Kolakowski’s exposition of Marx as do the proletariat, the labor theory of value, and the “contradictions of capitalism.” He does not give Marxism the benefit of the doubt, exactly, but he does give it the benefit of patient scrutiny and the highest level of historical intelligence.

The results of that scrutiny are devastating. Notwithstanding its pretensions to “science” (perhaps the most grotesque aspect of Marxism’s intellectual pretension—remember, for example, Engels’ insistence that social laws were no less objective than geological deposits), Marxism has proven to be completely barren as an instrument of social understanding or prediction. This does not mean, as Kolakowski points out, that Marx’s theories have not been useful. It’s just that their usefulness has been confined entirely to providing “a set of slogans that were supposed to justify and glorify communism and the slavery that inevitably goes with it.”

All of Marx’s major predictions have turned out to be wrong. He said that societies based on a market economy would suffer spiraling class polarization and the disappearance of the middle class. Every society lucky enough to enjoy the fruits of a market economy shows that Marx was wrong about that. He predicted the growing immiseration and impoverishment of the working class in capitalist societies. (Actually, he didn’t merely predict that it would happen, he predicted that it would happen necessarily and inevitably—thanks, Hegel!) The opposite has happened. Indeed, as Kolakowski notes, “in the second edition of Capital Marx updated various statistics and figures, but not those relating to workers’ wages; those figures, if updated, would have contradicted his theory.”

Marx further predicted the inevitable revolution of the proletariat. This is the very motor of Marxism. Take away the proletarian revolution and you neuter the theory. But there have been no proletarian revolutions.The Bolshevik revolution, as Kolakowski points out,“had nothing to do with Marxian prophesies. Its driving force was not a conflict between the industrial working class and capital, but rather was carried out under slogans that had no socialist, let alone Marxist, content: Peace and Land for Peasants.” Marx said that in a capitalist economy, untrammeled competition would inevitably squeeze profit margins: eventually—and soon!—the economy would grind to a halt and capitalism would collapse. Take a look at capitalist economies in the hundred and fifty years since Marx wrote: have profit margins evaporated? Marx thought that capitalist economies would hamper technical progress: the opposite is true.

No, Marxism has been as wrong as it is possible for a theory to be wrong. Addicted to “the self-deification of mankind,” it continually bears witness to what Kolakowski calls “the farcical aspect of human bondage.” Why then was Marxism like moral catnip—not so much among its proposed beneficiaries, the working classes, but among the educated elite? Well, beguiling simplicity was part of it. “One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people,” Kolakowski notes, “was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy.” Marxism—like Freudianism, like Darwinism, like Hegelianism—is a “one key fits all locks” philosophy. All aspects of human experience can be referred to the operation of a single all-governing process which thereby offers the illusion of universal explanation.

Marxism also spoke powerfully to mankind’s unsatisfied utopian impulses. How imperfect a construct is capitalist society: how much conflict does it abet, how many desires does it leave unsatisfied! Can we not imagine a world beyond those tensions and conflicts in which we could realize our full human potential without competition, without scarcity, without want? Sure, we can imagine it, but there is a reason that “utopia” means “nowhere.” Kolakowski shows how Marxism speaks powerfully to those unrealized, and unrealizable, utopian dreams. Marxism, he wrote, was the “greatest fantasy” of the twentieth century, not because it offered a better life but because it appealed to apparently ineradicable spiritual cravings.
The influence that Marxism has achieved, far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects.… In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.

Of course, it is not just to mankind’s spiritual cravings that Marxism appeals. It also speaks to its inherent thuggishness. This cannot be emphasized too much. These days, Stalin and Stalinism are in bad odor. We forget the romance that Western intellectuals indulged for this mass murderer. We also tend to overlook the fact that thuggishness is an integral, not an accidental, feature of Marxism. Marx spoke of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” What did he meanby “dictatorship”? Lenin explained. “Dictatorship,” he wrote in 1906, “means unlimited power based on force, and not on law.” In case that was not sufficiently compelling, Lenin added the word “scientific”: “The scientific term ‘dictatorship’ means nothing more nor less than authority untrammelled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on violence.” In 1917, Lenin got the chance to show the world what this theory would look like when put into action. “He created a system,” Kolakowski observes,“in which, depending on the whim of a local party or police authority, any criticism might be regarded as counter-revolutionary and expose its author to imprisonment or death.” Hence the importance of terror, an essential ingredient in the revolutionary’s utopian program at least since Robespierre spoke of “virtue and its emanation, terror.” “The courts,” Lenin wrote in 1922, “must not ban terror … but must formulate the motives underlying it, legalize it as a principle, plainly, without any make-believe.”

The crucial thing to bear in mind, however, is not the brutality of Communist rule—what we might call really existing Marxism—but its spuriousness and contempt for law. This is what distinguishes ordinary despotism from its totalitarian counterpart. “A law,” Kolakowski notes, “may provide draconic penalties for small offenses without being specifically totalitarian; what is characteristic of totalitarian law is the use of such formulas as Lenin’s: people may be executed for expressing views that may ‘objectively serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.’ This means that the government can put to death anyone it chooses; there is no such thing as law; it is not that the criminal code is severe, but that it has no existence except in name.”

In other words, the very arbitrariness of Communist rule is a coefficient of its ambition to total control of life. Lenin said that what socialism implies above all is “keeping account of everything.” Everything was subject to regulation from above because nothing had significance apart from the diktats ofthe Party. In this sense, Marxism is a solution in which the idea of intrinsic value dissolves into absolute expediency. For the Communist there is no such thing as impartiality or disinterestedness because there is no such thing as an independent object of value. Nothing has inherent significance because everything acquires value from its function in the impersonal engine of utopia.

Stalin once remarked that the death of an individual is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic. What he neglected to add is that, for the Communist, there is no such thing as the individual. By the same token, there is no such thing as independent judgment—scholarly, judicial, or even aesthetic judgment. Our postmodern literary critics are fond of declaring that “there is no such thing as”—take your pick: intrinsic value, objectivity, disinterestedness, impartiality, even truth. It landed them in a cloud-cuckoo-land of self-contradictory nihilism. But Marx and Lenin got there before them. For the Marxist, art and literature are not human pursuits guided by their own rules of achievement but rather instruments to be used for the shifting and arbitrary ends of the Party. “Down with non-partisan writers!,” Lenin wrote in 1905, “Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class!”

Sidney Hook described Main Currents of Marxism as “magisterial.” Quite right, too. In its nimble mastery of intellectual history and generous humanity, the book has no equal. Kolakowski’s survey of Marxist thought is breathtaking in its sweep—from the Bible and the Greeks through the web of nineteenth-century socialist thought and the florid dissemination of Marxist and quasi-Marxist ideas in the “new-age” redoubts of the twentieth century, Kolakowski has provided the definitive account of a spiritual-political itinerary gone terribly wrong.

But what impresses one about Main Currents of Marxism is not only Kolakowski’s breadth or learning but also his economy. This is a book from which the reader benefits from the author’s great powers of distillation. It is a long book. In the hands of most writers, it would have been much longer. Kolakowski has an uncanny ability to seize upon and express the essential features of the doctrines he discusses. No doubt this is partly a matter of talent. It is also a testament to the huge labor, not only of reading but also of sifting and synthesizing, that went into the book. Kolakowski gives us not his first thoughts but his considered judgments, honed of the superfluous. Anyone who reads these sobering volumes will come away with not only an understanding of the intellectual and spiritual precursors of Marxism, but also a good grasp of the essentials of “classical” Marxist doctrine and its hybridization in the Soviet Union, the Frankfurt School, and other left-wing impulses. Writing about the amorphous New Left of the 1960s, for example, Kolakowski notes that although
the ideological fantasies of this movement … were no more than a nonsensical expression of the whims of spoilt middle-class children, and while the extremists among them were virtually indistinguishable from Fascist thugs, the movement did without doubt express a profound crisis of faith in the values that had inspired democratic societies for many decades.… The New Left explosion of academic youth was an aggressive movement born of frustration, which easily created a vocabulary for itself out of Marxist slogans … : liberation, revolution, alienation, etc. Apart from this, its ideology really has little in common with Marxism. It consists of “revolution” without the working class; hatred of modern technology as such; …the cult of primitive societies … as the source of progress; hatred of education and specialized knowledge.

Sound familiar?

Any student of Marxism is perforce a student of intellectual and political pathology, and Main Currents of Marxism, in addition to its other accomplishments, is a pathologist’s scrapbook, a catalogue of brutal, often phantasmagoric, deformations. Kolakowski’s approach is generally more descriptive and diagnostic than polemical, but he can wax polemical to deadly effect when the occasion arises. The title essay of My Correct Views on Everything is Kolakowski’s devastating response to a 100-page “Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski” published by E. P. Thompson in the Socialist Review in 1973. Thompson is the author of The Making of the English Working Class (1963), an object of pious veneration among the Marxist and socialist brotherhood. His “Letter” is an expression, by turns righteously indignant and cloyingly sentimental, of his feelings of “injury and betrayal” at Kolakowski’s criticisms of Communism.“We were both voices of the Communist revisionism of 1956,” Thompson sniffed, “we both sought to rehabilitate the utopian energies within the socialist tradition.” What happened?

Kolakowski’s response is a salvo that would have made Cato the Elder proud. Recalling Thompson’s refusal to sit down at a table with Robert Cecil because he once worked in the British diplomatic service: “O blessed Innocence! You and I, we were both active in our respective Communist Parties in the ’40s and ’50s, which means that, whatever our noble intentions and our charming ignorance (or refusal to get rid of ignorance) were, we supported, within our modest means, a regime based on mass slave labor and police terror of the worst kind in human history. Do you think that there are many people who could refuse to sit at the same table with us on these grounds?” Kolakowski quotes this effusion, reminiscent of the more utopian passages of Marx’s German Ideology: “My own utopia,” Thompson wrote,
two hundred years ahead, would not be like Morris’s “epoch of rest.” It would be a world (as D. H.Lawrence would have it) where the “money values” give way before the “life values,” or (as Blake would have it) “corporeal” will give way to “mental” war. With sources of power easily available, some men and women might choose to live in unified communities, sited, like Cistercian monasteries, in centres of great natural beauty, where agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits might be combined. Others might prefer the variety and pace of an urban life which rediscovers some of the qualities of the city-state. Others will prefer a life of seclusion, and many will pass between all three. Scholars would follow the disputes of different schools, in Paris, Jakarta or Bogota.

As Kolakowski notes, “This is a very good sample of socialist writing. It amounts to saying that the world should be good, and not bad.” Nice work if you can get it! But of course, Thompson cannot get it, and neither can anyone else. It is just unadulterated hokum, nauseating in its sentimentality, dangerous in its appeal to the credulous. Thompson dreams of a world in which “corporeal” war gives way to merely “mental” war (Lawrence and Blake would be among his heroes), but Kolakowski is right that this dream is thoroughly utopian: “We do not know how to harmonize the contradictory tasks contemporary society imposes upon us. We can only try to reach an uncertain balance between these tasks because we have no blueprint for a conflictless and secure society.”

To be an anatomist of totalitarianism is also to be a connoisseur of freedom, its many beguiling counterfeits as well as its genuine aspirations.The question—the lure, the never fulfilled but inescapable promise—of freedom stands at the center of much of Kolakowski’s work. In “The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society,” reprinted in Modernity on Endless Trial (1990), Kolakowski dilates on an antinomy of liberalism that beset Western societies during the Cold War and is, if anything, even more pressing today as we negotiate what amounts to a moral war with fundamentalist Islam.The antinomy is this: liberalism implies openness to other points of view, even (it would seem) those points of view whose success would destroy liberalism. Tolerance to those points of view is a prescription for suicide. Intolerance betrays the fundamental premise of liberalism, i.e. openness.

Kolakowski is surely right that our liberal, pluralist democracy depends for its survival not only on the continued existence of its institutions, but also “on a belief in their value and a widespread will to defend them.”

Do we, as a society, enjoy that belief? Do we possess the requisite will? The jury is still out on those questions. A good test is the extent to which we can resolve the antinomy of liberalism. And a good start on that problem is the extent to which we realize that the antinomy is, in the business of everyday life, illusory.The “openness” that liberal society rightly cherishes is not a vacuous openness to all points of view: it is not “value neutral.” It need not, indeed it cannot,say Yes to all comers. American democracy, for example, affords its citizens great latitude, but great latitude is not synonymous withthe proposition that “anything goes.” Our society, like every society, is founded on particular positive values—the rule of law, for example, respect for the individual, religious freedom, the separation of church and state. Western democratic society, that is to say, is rooted in what Kolakowski calls a “vision of the world.” Part of that vision is a commitment to openness, but openness is not the same as indifference.

In his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton championed freedom of thought, but wisely noted that “There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” Our society is extraordinarily accommodating of diverse points of view—especially, it sometimes seems, to those that are hostile to the ideal of diversity. In order to continue to enjoy the luxury of freedom, we must say No to those movements that would exploit freedom only to abolish it. “In order to defend itself,” Kolakowski writes,“the pluralist order should voice [its fundamental] values ceaselessly and loudly. There is nothing astonishing or outrageous about the fact that within the pluralist society, the defenders and enemies of its basic principles are not treated with exactly the same indifference.”

Part of what makes Kolakowski’s reflections on freedom and its vicissitudes so fruitful is his understanding that human freedom is inextricably tied to a recognition of limits, which in the end involves a recognition of the sacred.This has been a leitmotif of his work from the beginning. In The Alienation of Reason (1966), he criticizes positivism as “an attempt to consolidate science as a self-sufficient activity, which exhausts all the possible ways of appropriating the world intellectually.”

In “Man Does Not Live by Reason Alone” (1991), Kolakowski argues that “mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be ex-communicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.” He shows how the tendency to believe that all human problems have a technical solution is an unfortunate inheritance from the Enlightenment—“even,” he notes, “from the best aspects of the Enlightenment: from its struggle against intolerance, self-complacency, superstitions, and uncritical worship of tradition.” There is much about human life that is not susceptible to human remedy or intervention. Our allegiance to the ideal of unlimited progress is, paradoxically, a dangerous moral limitation that is closely bound up with what Kolakowski calls the loss of the sacred. “With the disappearance of the sacred,” he writes,
which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is “in principle” an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man’s total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.

These are wise words, grippingly pertinent to an age conjuring with the immense technological novelties of cloning, genetic engineering, and other Promethean temptations. We pride ourselves today on our “openness” and commitment to liberal ideals, our empathy for other cultures, and our sophisticated understanding that our way of viewing the world is, after all, only our way of viewing the world. But Kolakowski reminds us that, without a prior commitment to substantive values—to an ideal of the good and (just as important) an acknowledgment of evil—openness threatens to degenerate into vacuousness. Given the shape of our post-Soviet, technologically infatuated world, perhaps it is that admonition, even more than his heroic demolition of Marxism, for which Leszek Kolakowski will be honored in the decades to come.


Notes

Go to the top of the document.The Two Eyes of Spinoza: and Other Essays on Philosophers, by Leszek Kolakowski; St. Augustine’s Press, 311 pages, $32. Go back to the text.
My Correct Views on Everything, by Leszek Kolakowski; St. Augustine’s Press, 368 pages, $32. Two essays in this collection appeared in The New Criterion: “Crime and Punishment” (November 1991) and “Leibniz and Job: The Metaphysics of Evil and the Experience of Evil” (December 2003). Go back to the text.
Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown, by Leszek Kolakowski; W. W. Norton, 1504 pages, $49.95. Go back to the text.

Robert Graves

Dressed in corduroys, mariner’s sweater, black horsehide jacket, and with a blanket wrapped around his middle, Robert Graves rolled his own cigarettes and chain-smoked throughout the interview. Reading glasses hung from his neck on a ribbon, which frequently became tangled in his hair. Tall, loosely built, Graves has always been physically powerful, but owing to a climbing accident during his school years he cannot swivel his head and so uses a reading stand, fidgeting it into strategic positions on the desk in front of him while he talks. Tins of small Dutch cigars, jars of tobacco, marbles, pencils, and porcelain clown heads are on the desk. There is a carton brimming with press clippings on the floor. Over the fireplace is a shelf with the works of T. E. Lawrence; on the mantel, Greek, Roman, Oriental, and African figurines. “This dial of wood? From a tree hewn in Shakespeare’s yard.” He fingered it, spoke of continuity. He knew Hardy, and Hardy knew—

Gertrude Stein first told Robert Graves about Majorca. He and Laura Riding moved there in 1929; they built the stone house in Deyá he now occupies and lived there together until 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out. He returned ten years later and has lived there ever since. There is an orchard with fifteen kinds of fruit trees, a large vegetable garden, and an English-style lawn of Bermuda grass.

Robert Graves is the author of over one hundred books, besides a number of anonymous rewrite jobs for friends. His most important prose work is The White Goddess, a history of poetic myth—“the language of poetic myth … was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honor of the Moon goddess, or Muse … [and] this remains the language of true poetry—‘true’ in the nostalgic modern sense of the ‘unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute’.” The true poet worships the White Goddess, or goddess of creation; unswerving and absolute devotion to her is the poet’s only path. He “falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse.” The present Muse is fifty-two years younger than Graves—“but we are the same age” … “I am at the top of my manic cycle because good things are happening to her just now.” She is a classical dancer performing in a far-off city.

At various times during the following interview, he was setting the table, correcting a manuscript, checking references, cutting his nails with an enormous pair of scissors, picking carrots, singing folk songs, and slicing beans. He was not an easy man to keep up with.

Interview with George Steiner

The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin : published verbatim from the original manuscript

David Hawkes

 

Ovid

The Metamorphoses is a long poem in 15 books written in hexameter verse and totaling nearly 12,000 lines. It is a collection of mythological and legendary stories in which metamorphosis (transformation) plays some part, however minor. The stories are told in chronological order from the creation of the universe (the first metamorphosis, of chaos into order) to the death and deification of Julius Caesar (the culminating metamorphosis, again of chaos—that is, the Civil War—into order—that is, the Augustan Peace). In many of the stories, mythical characters are used to illustrate examples of obedience or disobedience toward the gods, and for their actions are either rewarded or punished by a final transformation into some animal, vegetable, or astronomical form. The importance of metamorphosis is more apparent than real, however; the essential theme of the poem is passion (pathos), and that gives it more unity than all the ingenious linking and framing devices the poet uses. The erotic emphasis that had dominated Ovid’s earlier poetry is broadened and deepened into an exploration of nearly every variety of human emotion—for his gods are nothing if not human. That undertaking brought out, as his earlier work had not, Ovid’s full powers: his wit and rhetorical brilliance, his mythological learning, and the peculiar qualities of his fertile imagination. The vast quantities of verse in both Greek and Latin that Ovid had read and assimilated are transformed, through a process of creative adaptation, into original and unforeseen guises. By his genius for narrative and vivid description, Ovid gave to scores of Greek legends, some of them little known before, their definitive form for subsequent generations. No single work of literature has done more to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to posterity. By 8 CE the Metamorphoses was complete, if not yet formally published; and it was at that moment, when Ovid seemed securely placed on a pinnacle of successful achievement, that he was banished to Tomis by the emperor.

Ovid arrived at his place of exile in the spring of 9 CE. Tomis was a semi-Hellenized port exposed to periodic attacks by surrounding peoples. Books and high society were lacking; little Latin was spoken; and the climate was severe. In his solitude and depression, Ovid turned again to poetry, now of a more personal and introspective sort. The Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto were written and sent to Rome at the rate of about a book a year from 9 CE on. They consist of letters to the emperor and to Ovid’s wife and friends describing his miseries and appealing for clemency. For all his depression and self-pity, Ovid never retreats from the one position with which his self-respect was identified—his status as a poet. That is particularly evident in his ironical defense of the Ars in Book ii of the Tristia.

JAVIER MARÍAS

A waiter at a restaurant in Madrid gasped when I mentioned that I was in town to interview Javier Marías. “You know him?” he asked, as if I’d named a president or a movie star. “Sometimes we see him walking down the street.”

Although Marías is not yet well known to readers in the United States, in Europe he is a literary and intellectual sensation—the author of eleven novels, two books of short stories, a collection of biographical essays, and a column on politics, literature, film, sports, and social issues for the Madrid newspaper El Pais’s weekly magazine. He is also one of Spain’s leading translators from English. His own books have been published in more than thirty languages and have sold over five million copies worldwide, and he is often mentioned in the European press as a contender for the Nobel Prize. Critics and admiring colleagues (J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and the late W. G. Sebald) have praised the way he pits Spanish black humor against English grandiloquence to produce novels that are simultaneously fast-paced and meticulous, speculative and clinical, stylish and classical.

In person, too, Marías presents a fine balance of opposing qualities—alternately a grandee and a recluse, gregarious and reticent, punctilious and totally laid-back. Like the ghostly narrators in his novels, he is a little hard to pin down. He tends to perch rather than sit on his couch and to overenunciate when he speaks in English. He habitually drinks Coca-Cola, subsists on a diet of serrano ham and Manchego cheese, and will not wear a tie unless it is pressed upon him. Marías has a blog but has never seen it and refers to it only as “the Web that wears my name.” It is managed by an assistant, who posts his newspaper columns and writings. He does not own a computer or mobile phone. He rents two nearly identical apartments just off of Madrid’s famed Plaza Mayor. In one, the furniture is dark; in the other, the same furniture is white. Not far from the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that houses his Greek, Latin, and Byzantine books is an entire room of DVDs stocked with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin movies as well as episodes of Bonanza, Maverick, and Friends. Despite the fact that his living space is cluttered with toy soldiers, literary memorabilia—Dashiell Hammett and Joseph Conrad letters, a bust of Laurence Sterne, photographs of various writers—and fan mail, Marías insists that he is orderly. “It’s just that I have no time to put things in order,” he says.

Marías is forever redrawing the thin line that separates illusion from reality, and they are central elements of his work. It is not only his narrators who are unreliable; the entire world of his novels is unreliable. His books enact the Nabokovian principle that memory is ultimately false, which gives his stories a sense of timelessness.

Marías was born in Madrid in 1951, twelve years after Franco took power throughout Spain. His father, Julián Marías, a renowned philosopher, was imprisoned and later prohibited from teaching in Spain for opposing the Franco regime, and Marías spent brief periods of his childhood in the United States. He completed two novels before the age of twenty-one, both of which were published: Los dominios del lobo (The Dominions of the Wolf, 1971) and Voyage along the Horizon (1973). He studied English at Complutense University in Madrid, and after his graduation did not write another novel for six years, working instead on translations of American and English writers as diverse as Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery. He taught translation theory at the University of Oxford, where his sixth novel, All Souls (1989), is set. In that novel, Marías lampoons life among the Oxford dons and sympathetically portrays the writer John Gawsworth, who inherited the title of king of Redonda, a small island off of Antigua. The publication of All Souls led to Marías being named the new king of Redonda, a title he still holds today. Marías’s seventh novel, A Heart So White (1992), won the IMPAC Award, and he has since published four more novels, including Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (1994) and Dark Back of Time (1998).

This interview took place over six spring evenings in Marías’s apartment—the one with the dark furniture. His father had died a few months earlier, and Marías’s eyes were set in deep shadows. “I sleep badly,” he confessed. He chain-smoked guiltlessly, often ambidextrously, while the nearby fax machine overflowed with proofs of book jackets awaiting his approval and details concerning an award Marías had just given under his publishing imprint, Reino de Redonda. Marías speaks in winding sentences, full of dependent clauses and parenthetical statements, that suggest what it might have been like to talk to Henry James, who, as Marías notes approvingly in his book Written Lives (1992), spoke as digressively and obliquely as he wrote and once referred to a dog as “something black, something canine.”



INTERVIEWER

In addition to being a Spanish citizen, you are the king of the island of Redonda, a micronation in the West Indies. I believe you are the first monarch The Paris Review has interviewed. How did you come by your crown?

JAVIER MARÍAS

There was a shipping magnate in the nineteenth century by the name of Shiel, who lived in the Caribbean, and he had eight or nine daughters but no son. Finally, he had a male baby, Matthew Phipps Shiel, who became a writer. To celebrate his son’s fifteenth birthday in 1880, Shiel claimed ownership of the uninhabited island of Redonda, which is close to Montserrat and not far from Antigua. He organized a coronation with a Methodist minister from Antigua, and M. P. Shiel was crowned king of that island. Recently, I learned that Redonda is the equivalent to Transylvania in Europe, which is appropriate for a literary legend. It’s a very rocky place with limited access. It was used as a harbor for smugglers, and there were legends of terrible beasts and horrific events that happened there. Shortly after Shiel’s coronation the British decided to annex the island because aluminum phosphate was found. The Shiels disputed the British for years, and finally the colonial office said they were not going to give the island back to anyone, let alone a crazy ship owner and a writer, but they had no objection to Shiel using the title of king of Redonda as long as it was, as they said, void of content.

Eventually, Shiel settled in Britain, where a younger writer named John Gawsworth helped him in his old age. When Shiel died in 1947, Gawsworth became his literary executor and heir to his estate. Gawsworth activated an intellectual aristocracy, as it was called, and named dukes and duchesses, including Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, and Dylan Thomas. Gawsworth had been a very promising figure, publishing books at nineteen. He fought in India, Algeria, and Egypt during the war. Amazingly, he published small booklets of poetry everywhere, even in Calcutta. I don’t know how he managed to do that during the war. He was one of the youngest members of the Royal Society of Literature and was in touch with many of the major literary figures of the time, from Thomas Hardy to T. E. Lawrence. But Gawsworth became a drunkard and was soon penniless. He had a lot of debts with his landlord and bartenders and started to sell titles to these people. He even put an ad in the Times to sell the title of king of Redonda. A lot of people were interested. I reproduced a telegram in one of the books I published under my Reino de Redonda imprint. I have it here. Carl Werner Skogholm of Denmark wrote:

Your Royal Highness, King John Gawsworth of Redonda,

Regarding your advertisement I beg to send you the following questions which I hope you will kindly answer:

1) What is the King’s duties?

2) What is the King’s rights?

3) Is the Isle of Redonda a good place to live in?

4) Is it possible for the King to contact Diana Dors?

5) I have two daughters. Is it possible for girls to inherit the throne?

It would be wonderful to become a king suddenly. I hope to be able to—if you are still willing to sell.

INTERVIEWER

“It would be wonderful to become a king suddenly”—that’s what happened to you.

MARÍAS

Yes. But for me, except for the fun of the legend, it has not been particularly wonderful. It seems that during the worst years of his life Gawsworth did sell it—he issued documents to different people—so there is some controversy regarding the title. Some of the heirs to those bartenders who claim they are inheritors to the throne are very angry with me. One said, It was so difficult to overthrow the Spaniards, and now you’re giving it back to them! That makes me laugh. I have never said that I am the king of Redonda or signed anything other than my name, Javier Marías. I have never been monarchic. I am rather a republican.

INTERVIEWER

But how did you become this reluctant king?

MARÍAS

These “pretenders,” as they are called, say that I bought the title at an auction, which I did not. In 1997, after I included one of Gawsworth’s stories in an anthology and mentioned his story in my novel All Souls, Jon Wynne-Tyson, who had become king after Gawsworth, wrote to me and said he wanted to abdicate because the pretenders had been writing to him for years. He is an extremely nice person, I must say. Since I had an understanding of Redonda and made it more famous than it ever was, he asked who I thought would be a good successor. He mentioned Seamus Heaney because Shiel was of Irish descent, and because he is such a great writer. I said, Yes, I thought it should be a “real” writer—the throne should be inherited not by blood but by letters. We had very British conversations with a lot of understatements—If you are saying what I think you are saying, but I would not dare to think that you are really saying what it seems you say—until he openly said, I think you would be a good choice. I said that if something this novelistic intrudes in my life and I don’t accept it, I should not be considered a novelist. So I accepted.

It is only a title. The island was recovered by Antigua, it belongs to Antigua, and I am not going to have dynastic disputes about anything that is more fictional than real. In my opinion, Jon Wynne-Tyson made the mistake of answering to the pretenders, and he was disputing with them all of the time, probably more privately than publicly. I decided never to reply to anyone. And that is what I have done. I have said, tongue in cheek, that this is the only kingly thing to do: not reply at all. What would the king of England or the king of Spain do? They would not reply.

INTERVIEWER

Given the way you weave fiction and truth in your novels, some people have wondered if the island is completely fabricated.

MARÍAS

But there are maps. The island is there.

INTERVIEWER

Have you seen it?

MARÍAS

No, not personally. Jon Wynne-Tyson did. But visiting it is not very important in my opinion either.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve continued the tradition of granting titles to writers and artists, such as Pedro Almodóvar (Duke of Trémula), John Ashbery (Duke of Convexo), Francis Ford Coppola (Duke of Megalópolis), among others. What are their duties?

MARÍAS

There are no duties whatsoever, not even that of loyalty. All of the dukes and duchesses have names—funny names—which is a tradition started in the 1930s. Otherwise, I have tried to keep a low profile.

INTERVIEWER

Each year, you also give an award in the name of the island.

MARÍAS

Yes. The problem is that when I write to the winners, it helps if they know who I am, but if they don’t I have to explain the whole legend of Redonda and it sounds crazy. Doesn’t it? I have to ask them not to take the whole kingdom thing seriously just so they won’t think that I am a madman or something. It’s a bit complicated. So far, it’s been OK. This year the winner is Ray Bradbury. We have to see if he understands the joke, because if he doesn’t I will have to go to Jean-Luc Godard—who came in second—and explain the whole thing again, this time in French. Mr. Bradbury will need to decide what title he would like to have as a duke of Redonda. I suggested a few: Duke of Diente de León—Dandelion; or Duke of Carnaval Oscuro—Dark Carnival. But of course he may choose anything.

INTERVIEWER

In your book of biographical essays, Written Lives, you portray twenty-six writers, including William Faulkner, Yukio Mishima, James Joyce, and Isak Dinesen. Most of the writers you chose had disastrous personal lives. They failed at love and relationships.

MARÍAS

They were rather calamitous, yes.

INTERVIEWER

Are you a disastrous individual?

MARÍAS

Yes, but not as blatantly as some of them. I have not tried to kill my wife—I do not have a wife at the moment, nor do I think I will have a wife—the way Malcolm Lowry did. But I suppose I have been modestly calamitous in my life.

INTERVIEWER

How so?

MARÍAS

Well, from my parents’ point of view, I suppose I oscillated too much. I didn’t establish myself professionally. For years, it was not clear if I could make a real living. Certainly translating doesn’t allow you to make a living. I had periods of great distress and restlessness. I lived in other countries. I did not marry. I had different girlfriends—some were married, and some wouldn’t marry me or maybe I wouldn’t marry them, some were foreign and lived somewhere else. There was always some kind of difficulty. I remember my mother, who died twenty-nine years ago, said that of her five sons I was the one who put myself in danger. She worried about me the most. I crossed the street when the light wasn’t red—things like that.

It might have been much worse if I had not been successful as a writer. That is something that could very easily have happened. I never forget that. I don’t think my books are easy—they aren’t too difficult either—but if my novels had sold only ten thousand copies, that would not have been strange. There are many writers who sell much less than that. I have been very lucky, and it was gradual. I was not the kind of writer who wrote one book and became an instant success. The Man of Feeling was more successful than all of the previous novels, and All Souls more successful than that, and then A Heart So White was much more successful than all of the others. I have come to have loyal readers, but it might not have been that way at all.

INTERVIEWER

Another common quality among the writers you profile is that they didn’t take themselves too seriously. The notable exceptions are Thomas Mann, Joyce, and Mishima. How do you avoid taking yourself too seriously?

MARÍAS

It’s not a matter of avoiding it. Either you have a feeling that you are important and that you are going to be remembered, or you do not. Those three seemed to consider themselves very important and to think very much of their posterity. There is a poem by Stevenson that I translated many years ago in which he calls writing “this childish task.” In the poem he addresses his ancestors, all of whom built lighthouses. He apologizes for not having followed the tradition and for staying at home and playing with paper like a child.

To think of posterity nowadays is ludicrous because things do not last. Books seem to last more than films or records but even they do not last very long. Now more than ever, we depend on the mercy of the living. When writers and filmmakers die there are three or five days during which, with any luck, the newspapers and the TV devote pages and programs. There is a big fuss, but then you have to wait ten years until there is a commemoration. The moment you are not here to defend your work in interviews, you literally do not exist. There is a penalty.

Of course, some people are lucky with posterity, or they deserve it. Elvis Presley has been lucky. He is on the minds of many people, including my own, very often. I think Elvis Presley deserves to be remembered very often. But for most, it is not like that. On Faulkner’s centenary, I made a small volume, a tribute to him, with a few texts I had written, the poems I had translated, and a text by someone else. The booklet made people from the press take an interest in Faulkner. When they called and asked me about him, I had the feeling that a mediocre writer like myself was doing Faulkner the favor of talking about him. I am not trying to be falsely modest—you always have your heroes and you never will surpass them, never. So, from my point of view, thanks to a mediocre Spanish writer—me—and because of the accidental fact that I was alive and well known, people in Spain read Faulkner. But Faulkner should not need favors from anyone

Zora Neale Hurston

Friedrich Schlegel

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/




Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) is of undisputed importance as a literary critic, but interest in his work among philosophers has until recently tended to be confined to a rather limited circle. However, as scholars have come to reassess in the last several years the philosophical importance of early German Romanticism—both as something of a counter-movement to German Idealism and as a contributing factor within idealism’s development—so interest in Schlegel’s distinctive philosophical contribution to his era has increased. The entry below will consider the philosophical aspects of Schlegel’s development and their relation to his contributions to literary theory and practice.

Wang Yangming

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wang-yangming/






This philosopher’s family name was “Wang,” his personal name was “Shouren,” and his “courtesy name” was “Bo–an.”[1] However, he is normally known today as “Wang Yangming,” based on a nickname he adopted when he was living in the Yangming Grotto of Kuaiji Mountain. Born in 1472 near Hangzhou in what is now Zhejiang Province, Wang was the son of a successful official. As such, he would have received a fairly conventional education, with a focus on the Four Books of the Confucian tradition: the Analects (the sayings of Confucius and his immediate disciples), the Great Learning (believed to consist of an opening statement by Confucius with a commentary on it by his leading disciple, Zengzi), the Mean (attributed to Zisi, the grandson of Confucius, who was also a student of Zengzi), and the Mengzi (the sayings and dialogues of Mencius, a student of Zisi). The young Wang would have literally committed these classics to memory, along with the commentaries on them by the master of orthodox Confucianism, Zhu Xi (1130–1200). The study of these classics–cum–commentary was thought to be morally edifying; however, people also studied them in order to pass the civil service examinations, which were the primary route to government power, and with it wealth and prestige. At the age of seventeen (1489), Wang had a conversation with a Daoist priest that left him deeply intrigued with this alternative philosophical system and way of life. Wang was also attracted to Buddhism, and remained torn between Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism for much of his early life. Whereas Confucianism emphasizes our ethical obligations to others, especially family members, and public service in government, the Daoism and Buddhism of Wang’s era encouraged people to overcome their attachment to the physical world. Wang continued the serious study of Zhu Xi’s interpretation of Confucianism, but was disillusioned by an experience in which he and a friend made a determined effort to apply what they took to be Zhu Xi’s method for achieving sagehood:
…my friend Qian and I discussed the idea that to become a sage or a worthy one must investigate all the things in the world. But how can a person have such tremendous energy? I therefore pointed to the bamboos in front of the pavilion and told him to investigate them and see. Day and night Qian went ahead trying to investigate to the utmost the Pattern of the bamboos. He exhausted his mind and thoughts, and on the third day he was tired out and took sick. At first I said that it was because his energy and strength were insufficient. Therefore I myself went to try to investigate to the utmost. From morning till night, I was unable to find the Pattern of the bamboos. On the seventh day I also became sick because I thought too hard. In consequence we sighed to each other and said that it was impossible to be a sage or a worthy, for we do not have the tremendous energy to investigate things that they have. (Translation modified from Chan 1963, 249)

As we shall see (Section 2, below), it is unclear whether Wang and his friend were correctly applying what Zhu Xi meant by “the investigation of things.” However, Wang’s experience of finding it impractical to seek for the Pattern of the universe in external things left a deep impression on him, and influenced the later course of his philosophy.

Wang continued to study Daoism as well as Buddhism, but also showed a keen interest in military techniques and the craft of writing elegant compositions. Meanwhile, he progressed through the various levels of the civil service examinations, finally passing the highest level in 1499. After this, Wang had a meteoric rise in the government, including distinguished service in offices overseeing public works, criminal prosecution, and the examination system. During this period, Wang began to express disdain for overly refined literary compositions like those he had produced in his earlier years. Wang would later criticize those who “waste their time competing with one another writing flowery compositions in order to win acclaim in their age, and…no longer comprehend conduct that honors what is fundamental, esteems what is real, reverts to simplicity, and returns to purity” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 275).

In addition, Wang started to turn his back on Daoism and Buddhism, which he came to regard as socially irresponsible: “…simply because they did not understand what it is to rest in the ultimate good and instead exerted their selfish minds toward the achievement of excessively lofty goals, [Buddhists and Daoists] were lost in vagaries, illusions, emptiness, and stillness and had nothing to do with the family, state or world” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 244, gloss mine). Nonetheless, Wang continued to show an intimate familiarity with Daoist and Buddhist literature and concepts throughout his career.

A life–changing event for Wang occurred in 1506. A eunuch who had assumed illegitimate influence at court had several able officials imprisoned for opposing him. Wang wrote a “memorial” to the emperor in protest. The eunuch responded by having Wang publicly beaten and exiled to an insignificant position in a semi–civilized part of what is now Guizhou Province. Wang had to face considerable physical and psychological hardship in this post, but through these challenges he achieved a deep philosophical awakening (1508), which he later expressed in a poem he wrote for his students:
Everyone has within an unerring compass;
The root and source of the myriad transformations lies in the mind.
I laugh when I think that, earlier, I saw things the other way around;
Following branches and leaves, I searched outside! (Ivanhoe 2009, 181)

In other words, looking outside oneself for moral truth, as he and his friend Qian had tried to do when studying the bamboos, was ignoring the root of moral insight, which is one’s own innate understanding.

Fortunately for Wang, in the year when his term of service in Guizhou was over (1510), the eunuch who had Wang beaten and banished was himself executed. Wang’s official career quickly returned to its stratospheric level of achievement, with high–ranking posts and exceptional achievements in both civil and military positions. This inevitably led to opposition from the faction–ridden court. Wang was even accused of conspiring with the leader of a rebellion that Wang had himself put down.

Wang had begun to attract devoted disciples even before his exile to Guizhou, and they gradually compiled the Record for Practice (the anthology of his sayings, correspondence, and dialogues that is one of our primary sources for Wang’s philosophy). It is reflective of Wang’s philosophy that the discussions recorded in this work occurred in the midst of his active life in public affairs. Near the end of his life, Wang was called upon to suppress yet another rebellion (1527). The night before he left, one of his disciples recorded the “Inquiry on the Great Learning,” which was intended as a primer of Wang’s philosophy for new disciples. Wang put down the rebellion, but his health had been declining for several years, and he died soon afterward (1529).

On his deathbed, Wang said, “ ‘This mind’ is luminous and bright. What more is there to say?”[2]
2. Intellectual Context

During Wang’s lifetime, the dominant intellectual movement was Neo–Confucianism (in Chinese, Dàoxué, or the Learning of the Way). Neo–Confucianism traces its origins to Han Yu and Li Ao in the late Tang dynasty (618–906), but it only came to intellectual maturity in the Song and Southern Song dynasties (960–1279), with the theorizing of Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, Cheng Yi, his brother Cheng Hao, and Zhu Xi. Neo–Confucianism originally developed as a Confucian reaction against Buddhism. Ironically, though, the Neo–Confucians were deeply influenced by Buddhism and adopted many key Buddhists concepts, including the notions that the diverse phenomena of the universe are manifestations of some underlying unity, and that selfishness is the fundamental vice.

Zhu Xi synthesized the thought of earlier Neo–Confucians, and his interpretation of the Four Books became the basis of the civil service examinations (see Section 1, above). Zhu held that everything in existence has two aspects, Pattern and qì. Pattern (lǐ, also translated “principle”) is the underlying structure of the universe. Qi is the spatio–temporal stuff that constitutes concrete objects. The complete Pattern is fully present in each entity in the universe; however, entities are individuated by having distinct allotments of qi (variously translated as “ether,” “psychophysical stuff,” “vital fluid,” “material force,” and others). In addition to having spatio–temporal location, qi has qualitative distinctions, described metaphorically in terms of degrees of “clarity” and “turbidity.” The more “clear” the qi, the greater the extent to which the Pattern manifests. This explains how speciation is possible. For example, plants have more “clear” qi than do rocks, which is reflected in the more complex repertoire of interactions plants have with their environments.

Neo–Confucian metaphysics, ethics, and philosophical psychology are systematically connected. Humans have the most clear qi of any being. However, some humans have especially clear qi, and as a result manifest the virtues, while others have comparatively turbid qi, and therefore are prone to vice. The state of one’s qi is not fixed, though. Through ethical cultivation, any human can clarify his qi, and thereby become more virtuous. Similarly, through laxness, one can allow one’s qi to morally deteriorate. Because the Pattern is fully present in each human, everyone has complete innate ethical knowledge. However, due to the obscurations of qi, the manifestations of this knowledge are sporadic and inconsistent. Thus, a king who shows benevolence when he takes pity on an ox being led to slaughter and spares it may fail to show benevolence in his treatment of his own subjects (Mengzi 1A7). Similarly, a person might manifest righteousness when he disdains to even consider an illicit sexual relationship; however, the same person might see nothing shameful about flattering the worst traits and most foolish policies of a ruler whom he serves (Mengzi 3B3). Because humans all share the same Pattern, we are parts of a potentially harmonious whole. In some sense, we form “one body” with other humans and the rest of the universe. Consequently, the fundamental human virtue is benevolence, which involves recognition of our shared nature with others.[3] Correspondingly, the fundamental vice is selfishness. Cheng Hao uses a medical metaphor to explain the relationship between ethics and personal identity:
A medical text describes numbness of the hands and feet as being “unfeeling.” This expression describes it perfectly. Benevolent people regard Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things as one Substance. Nothing is not oneself. If you recognize something as yourself, there are no limits to how far [your compassion] will go. But if you do not identify something as part of yourself, you will have nothing to do with it. This like how, when hands and feet are “unfeeling,” the qi does not flow and one does not identify them as part of oneself. (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 201)

Just as those whose hands and feet are “unfeeling” are not bothered by injuries to their own limbs, so do those who are ethically “unfeeling” fail to show concern for other humans. In both cases, one fails to act appropriately because one fails to recognize that something is a part of oneself.

Neo–Confucians regarded the ancient philosopher Mencius (4th century BCE) as having presented an especially incisive interpretation of Confucianism. They referred to him as the “Second Sage,” second in importance only to Confucius himself, and often appealed to his vocabulary, arguments, and examples.[4] In particular, Neo–Confucians adopted Mencius’s view that human nature is good, and that wrongdoing is the result of humans ignoring the promptings of their innate virtues. Physical desires are one of the primary causes for the failure to heed one’s innate moral sense. There is nothing intrinsically immoral about desires for fine food, sex, wealth, etc., but we will be led to wrongdoing if we pursue them without giving thought to the well–being of others (Mengzi 6A15). Neo–Confucians also adopted Mencius’s list of four cardinal virtues: benevolence, righteousness, wisdom, and propriety. Benevolence is manifested in the emotion of compassion, which involves sympathizing with the suffering of others and acting appropriately on that sympathy. For instance, a benevolent ruler could never be indifferent to the well–being of his subjects, and would work tirelessly to alleviate their suffering. Righteousness is manifested in the emotion of disdain or shame at the thought of doing what is dishonorable, especially in the face of temptations of wealth or physical desire. For example, a righteous person would not cheat at a game, or accept a bribe. Wisdom is manifested in approval or disapproval that reflects sound judgment about means–end deliberation and about the character of others. Thus, a wise official would know which policies to support and which to oppose, and would be inventive in devising solutions to complex problems. Propriety is manifested in respect or deference toward elders and legitimate authorities, particularly as expressed in ceremonies or etiquette. For instance, a person with propriety would willingly defer to elder family members most of the time, but would be motivated to serve a guest before his elder brother.

The preceding views are shared, in broad outline, by all Neo–Confucian philosophers. The primary issue they debated was the proper method of ethical cultivation. In other words, how is it possible for us to consistently and reliably access and act on our innate ethical knowledge? Other disagreements among them (on seemingly recondite issues of metaphysics and the interpretation of the Confucian classics) can often be traced to more fundamental disagreements over ethical cultivation. For Zhu Xi, almost all humans are born with qi that is so turbid that it is impossible for them to consistently know what is virtuous and act accordingly without external assistance. The remedy is carefully studying the classics written by the ancient sages, ideally under the guidance of a wise teacher. Although the classics were written in response to concrete historical situations, their words allow us to grasp the Pattern at a certain level of abstraction from its instantiations. However, Zhu Xi states that merely understanding the Pattern is insufficient for the exercise of virtue. One must achieve Sincerity (chéng), a continual awareness of moral knowledge in the face of temptations.[5]

In his own lifetime, Zhu Xi’s leading critic was Lu Xiangshan (1139–1193). Lu argued that, because the Pattern is fully present in the mind of each human, it is not necessary to engage in an intellectually demanding process of study in order to recover one’s moral knowledge:
Righteousness and Pattern are in the minds of human beings. As a matter of fact, these are what Heaven has endowed us with, and they can never be effaced or eliminated [from our minds]. If one becomes obsessed with [desires for] things and reaches the point where one violates Pattern and transgresses righteousness, usually this is simply because one fails to reflect upon these things [i.e., the righteousness and Pattern that lie within one]. If one truly is able to turn back and reflect upon these things, then what is right and wrong and what one should cleave to and what one should subtly reject will begin to stir, separate, become clear, and leave one resolute and without doubts. (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 251–52, glosses in original translation)

In emphasizing the innate human capacity for moral judgment, Lu adopted the phrase “pure knowing” from Mengzi 7A15. In its original context, Mencius writes that “Among babes in arms there are none that do not know to love their parents,” and describes this as an instance of “pure knowing,” which humans “know without pondering” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 218). Lu explains:
Pure knowing lies within human beings; although some people become mired in dissolution, pure knowing still remains undiminished and enduring [within them]. … Truly, if they can turn back and seek after it, then, without needing to make a concerted effort, what is right and wrong, what is fine and foul, will become exceedingly clear, and they will decide for themselves what to like and dislike, what to pursue and what to abandon. (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 252)

Although there were always Confucians like Lu who disagreed with Zhu Xi, the latter’s interpretation became dominant after the government sponsored it as the official interpretation for the civil service examinations. By the time of Wang Yangming, Zhu Xi’s approach had ossified into a stale orthodoxy that careerists mindlessly parroted in an effort to pass the examinations.
3. Unity of Knowing and Acting

Some aspects of Wang’s philosophy can be understood as refining or drawing out the full implications of Lu Xiangshan’s critique of Zhu Xi. Like Lu, Wang stressed that the Pattern is fully present in the mind of every person: “The mind is Pattern. Is there any affair outside the mind? Is there any Pattern outside the mind?” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 264)[6] As a result, the theoretical study of ethics is unnecessary. All a moral agent needs to do is exercise “pure knowing.” This view may seem naive at first glance. However, this is partially due to the different foci of Chinese and Western ethics. Metaethics and normative ethical theory are substantial parts of Western ethics, but less central to Chinese ethics. In addition, recent Western ethics manifests an interest in abstract ethical dilemmas that is perhaps disproportionate to the relevance of these quandaries in practice. In contrast, the focus of much Chinese ethics, particularly Confucianism, is applied ethical cultivation. Consequently, Lu and Wang were primarily interested in having a genuine positive effect on the ethical lives of their followers. There is some plausibility to the claim that (even in our own complex, multicultural intellectual context) most of us know what our basic ethical obligations are. For example, as a teacher, I have an obligation to grade assignments promptly and fairly. As a colleague, I have an obligation to take my turn serving as chair. As a parent, I have an obligation to make time to share my children’s interests. Due to selfish desires, it is tempting to procrastinate in grading essays, or try to evade departmental service, or ignore the emotional needs of one’s children. However, it is not as if it is genuinely difficult to figure out that these are our obligations.

Wang’s most distinctive and well-known doctrine is the unity of knowing and acting (zhī xíng hé yī). In order to grasp the significance of this doctrine, consider a student who is being questioned by a college honor code panel after being caught plagiarizing an essay. If the honor code panel asked the student whether he knew that plagiarism was wrong, it would not be surprising for the student to reply, “Yes, I knew it was wrong to plagiarize my essay, but I wanted so much to get an easy A that I gave in to temptation.” Western philosophers would describe this as a case of akrasia, or weakness of will. Zhu Xi, along with many Western philosophers like Aristotle, would acknowledge that the student had correctly described his psychological state. However, Wang Yangming would deny that the student actually knew that plagiarism was wrong: “There never have been people who know but do not act. Those who ‘know’ but do not act simply do not yet know” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 267). One of Wang’s primary claims is that merely verbal assent is inadequate to demonstrate actual knowledge: “One cannot say he knows filial piety or brotherly respect simply because he knows how to say something filial or brotherly. Knowing pain offers another good example. One must have experienced pain oneself in order to know pain.” Wang also adduces cold and hunger as things that one must experience in order to know. We might object that Wang’s example shows, at most, that someone must have had an experience of goodness or evil at some point in his life in order to know what it means for something to be good or evil. This falls short of the conclusion that Wang needs, though, for just as I can know what you mean when you say “I am hungry” even if I am not currently motivated to eat, so might I know that “plagiarism is wrong,” even if I am not motivated to avoid plagiarism myself in this circumstance.

A more promising line of argument for Wang is his appropriation of an example from the Great Learning (Commentary 6), which suggests that loving the good is “like loving a lovely sight,” while hating evil is “like hating a hateful odor” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 191). To recognize an odor as disgusting (a kind of knowing) is to be repulsed by it (a motivation), which leads to avoiding the odor or eliminating its source (actions). The Chinese phrase rendered “loving a lovely sight” (hào hǎo sè) has connotations of finding someone sexually attractive.[7] To regard someone as sexually attractive (a kind of cognition) is to be drawn toward them (a kind of motivation that can lead to action). To this, one might object that Wang’s examples show, at most, that knowing something is good or bad requires that one have some level of appropriate motivation. Even if we grant the relevance of Wang’s examples, it is possible to have an intrinsic motivation that does not result in action. Recognizing that someone is sexually attractive certainly does not always result in pursuing an assignation, for example.

Perhaps Wang’s most compelling line of argument is a pragmatic one about the aim or purpose behind discussing knowing and acting. He allows that it may be useful and legitimate to discuss knowing separately from acting or acting separately from knowing, but only in order to address the failings of specific kinds of individuals. On the one hand, “there is a type of person in the world who foolishly acts upon impulse without engaging in the slightest thought or reflection. Because they always act blindly and recklessly, it is necessary to talk to them about knowing…,” without emphasizing acting. On the other hand, “[t]here is also a type of person who is vague and irresolute; they engage in speculation while suspended in a vacuum and are unwilling to apply themselves to any concrete actions” (268). These latter people benefit from advice that emphasizes action, without necessarily discussing knowledge. However, those in Wang’s era who distinguish knowledge and action (and here he has in mind those who follow the orthodox philosophy of Zhu Xi) “separate knowing and acting into two distinct tasks to perform and think that one must first know and only then can one act.” As a result, they become nothing more than pedantic bookworms, who study ethics without ever living up to its ideals or trying to achieve positive change in the world around them. Wang concludes, “My current teaching regarding the unity of knowing and acting is a medicine directed precisely at this disease.”
4. Interpretation of the Great Learning

In the standard Confucian curriculum of Wang’s era, the Great Learning was the first of the Four Books that students were assigned, and Zhu Xi’s commentary on it often made a lasting impression on them. In the opening of the Great Learning, Confucius describes the steps in self–cultivation:
The ancients who desired to enlighten the enlightened Virtue of the world would first put their states in order. Those who desired to put their states in order would first regulate their families. Those who desired to regulate their families would first cultivate their selves. Those who desired to cultivate their selves would first correct their minds. Those who desired to correct their minds would first make their thoughts have Sincerity. Those who desired to make their thoughts have Sincerity would first extend their knowledge. Extending knowledge lies in gé wù. (Translation slightly modified from Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 188–189)

Ge wu is left unexplained in the Great Learning. However, Zhu Xi, following the interpretation of Cheng Yi, claims that
…what is meant by “extending knowledge lies in ge wu” is that desiring to extend my knowledge lies in encountering things and exhaustively investigating their Pattern. In general, the human mind is sentient and never fails to have knowledge, while the things of the world never fail to have the Pattern. It is only because the Pattern is not yet exhaustively investigated that knowledge is not fully fathomed. Consequently, at the beginning of education in the Great Learning, the learner must be made to encounter the things of the world, and never fail to follow the Pattern that one already knows and further exhaust it, seeking to arrive at the farthest points. When one has exerted effort for a long time, one day, like something suddenly cracking open, one will know in a manner that binds it all together. (Translation slightly modified from Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 191)

Following Zhu Xi’s interpretations, most translators today render ge wu as “investigating things.” Wang and his friend Qian were trying to “investigate things” in this manner when they stared attentively at the bamboos, struggling to grasp their underlying Pattern. It is questionable, though, whether this is what Zhu Xi had in mind. Zhu certainly thought the Pattern was present in everything, and could potentially be investigated in even the most mundane of objects. However, he emphasized that the best method to learn about the Pattern was through studying the classics texts of Confucianism, particularly the Four Books.

As important as learning was for Zhu Xi, he stressed that it was possible to know what is right and wrong yet not act on it: “Knowledge and action always need each other. It’s like how eyes cannot walk without feet, but feet cannot see without eyes. If we discuss them in terms of their sequence, knowledge comes first. But if we discuss them in terms of importance, action is what is important” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 180–81). What connects knowledge and action, on Zhu Xi’s account, is Sincerity. Sincerity (chéng) is a subtle and multifaceted notion in Neo–Confucian thought. However, the Great Learning focuses on one key aspect of it: “What is meant by ‘making thoughts have Sincerity’ is to let there be no self–deception. It is like hating a hateful odor, or loving a lovely sight. The is called not being conflicted” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 191). In other words, humans engage in wrongdoing through a sort of self–deception in which they allow themselves to ignore the promptings of their moral sense, and become motivated solely by their physical desires for sex, food, wealth, etc. Once one knows what is right and wrong, one must then make an effort to keep that knowledge present to one’s consciousness, so that it becomes motivationally efficacious. As Zhu Xi explains, “…those who desire to cultivate themselves, when they know to do good in order to avoid the bad, must then genuinely make an effort and forbid self–deception, making their hatred of the [ethically] hateful be like their hating a hateful odor, and their loving what is good like their loving a lovely sight” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 192).

Wang challenged almost every aspect of Zhu Xi’s interpretation of the Great Learning. He regarded Zhu Xi’s account as not just theoretically mistaken but dangerously misleading for those seeking to improve themselves ethically. However, Wang recognized that students who had memorized Zhu Xi’s interpretation to prepare for the civil service examinations would have difficulty understanding the text any other way. Consequently, when he accepted a new disciple, Wang often began by explaining his alternative interpretation of the Great Learning, and invited students to ask questions. Wang’s approach is preserved in a brief but densely argued work, “Questions on the Great Learning.” Let’s begin at the apparent foundation of the Great Learning’s program: ge wu. Whereas Zhu Xi argues that ge wu is literally “reaching things,” meaning to intellectually grasp the Pattern in things and situations, Wang argues that ge wu means “rectifying things,” including both one’s own thoughts and the objects of those thoughts. For Zhu Xi, ge wu is primarily about gaining knowledge, while for Wang it is about motivation and action.[8]

The fact that the Great Learning explicates ge wu in terms of “extending knowledge” might seem to support Zhu Xi’s interpretation. However, Wang offers a plausible alternative explanation: “To fully extend one’s knowledge is not like the so–called ‘filling out’ of what one knows that later scholars [like Zhu Xi] talk about. It is simply to extend fully the ‘pure knowing’ of my own mind. Pure knowing is what [Mencius] was talking about when he said that all humans have ‘the mind of approval and disapproval.’ The mind of approval and disapproval ‘knows without pondering’ and is ‘capable without learning’ ” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 248, glosses mine).[9] Wang is suggesting that “extending knowledge” refers simply to exercising our innate faculty of moral awareness, which Mencius refers to as “pure knowing.” As David S. Nivison explains, “We might say that Wang’s ‘extending’ of knowledge is more like extending one’s arm than, say, extending one’s vocabulary” (Nivison 1996a, 225).

According to Zhu Xi, the opening of the Great Learning lists a series of steps that are, at least to some extent, temporally distinct. Wang demurs:
While one can say that there is an ordering of first and last in this sequence of spiritual training, the training itself is a unified whole that cannot be divided into any ordering of first and last. While this sequence of spiritual training cannot be divided into any ordering of first and last, only when every aspect of its practice is highly refined can one be sure that it will not be deficient in the slightest degree. (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 250)

Wang’s argument here is similar to the one he made about the verbal distinction between knowing and acting (Section 3, above). He claimed that the ancient sages recognized that knowing and acting were ultimately one thing, but sometimes discussed them separately for pedagogic purposes, to help those who underemphasized one aspect of this unity. Similarly, Wang suggests, the Great Learning uses multiple terms to describe various aspects of the unified exercise of moral agency, but does not mean to suggest that these are actually distinct temporal stages:
…we can say that “self,” “mind,” “thoughts,” “knowledge,” and “things” describe the sequence of spiritual training. While each has its own place, in reality they are but a single thing. We can say that “ge wu,” “extending,” “making Sincere,” “correcting,” and “cultivating” describe the spiritual training used in the course of this sequence. While each has its own name, in reality they are but a single affair. What do we mean by “self”? It is the way we refer to the physical operations of the mind. What do we mean by “mind”? It is the way we refer to the luminous and intelligent master of the person. (Translation slightly modified from Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 247)

Wang even interprets the key metaphor of the Great Learning in a very different way from Zhu Xi. For Zhu Xi, hating evil “like hating a hateful odor,” and loving good “like loving a lovely sight” are goals that we must aspire to, but can only achieve after an arduous process of ethical cultivation. For Wang Yangming, these phrases describe what our attitudes toward good and evil can and should be at the very inception of ethical cultivation:
…the Great Learning gives us examples of true knowing and acting, saying it is “like loving a lovely sight” or “hating a hateful odor.” Seeing a lovely sight is a case of knowing, while loving a lovely sight is a case of acting. As soon as one sees that lovely sight, one naturally loves it. It is not as if you first see it and only then, intentionally, you decide to love it. Smelling a hateful odor is a case of knowing, while hating a hateful odor is a case of acting. As soon as one smells that hateful odor, one naturally hates it. It is not as if you first smell it and only then, intentionally, you decide to hate it. Consider the case of a person with a stuffed–up nose. Even if he sees a malodorous object right in front of him, the smell does not reach him, and so he does not hate it. This is simply not to know the hateful odor. (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 267)

In summary, Zhu Xi and Wang agree that the Great Learning is an authoritative statement on ethical cultivation, expressing the wisdom of the ancient sages. However, for Zhu Xi, it is analogous to a recipe, with distinct steps that must be performed in order. For Wang, the Great Learning is analogous to a description of a painting, in which shading, coloring, composition, perspective and other factors are aspects of a unified effect.
5. Metaphysics

Wang was not primarily interested in theoretical issues. However, some of his comments suggest a subtle metaphysical view that supports his conception of ethics. This metaphysics is phrased in terms of the Pattern/qi framework (see Section 2, above), and also makes use of the Substance/Function distinction. Substance (tǐ), literally body, is an entity in itself, while Function is its characteristic or appropriate activity or manifestation: a lamp is Substance, its light is function; an eye is Substance, seeing is its Function; water is Substance, waves are its Function. The Substance/Function distinction goes back to the Daoists of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) and became central among Chinese Buddhists before being picked up by Neo–Confucians. Part of the attraction of this vocabulary is that it gives philosophers drawn to a sort of monism the ability to distinguish between two aspects of what they regard as ultimately a unity.

Wang argues that the human mind is identical with the Pattern of the universe, and as such it forms “one body” (yì tǐ, one Substance) with “Heaven, Earth, and the myriad creatures” of the world. The difference between the virtuous and the vicious is that the former recognize that their minds form one body with everything else, while the latter, “because of the space between their own physical form and those of others, regard themselves as separate” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 241). As evidence for the claim that the minds of all humans form one body with the rest of the universe, Wang appeals to a thought experiment first formulated by Mencius: “when they see a child [about to] fall into a well, [humans] cannot avoid having a mind of alarm and compassion for the child” (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 241–242; Mengzi 2A6). Wang then anticipates a series of objections, and offers further thought experiments to motivate the conclusion that only some underlying metaphysical identity between humans and other things can account for the broad range of our reactions to them:
Someone might object that this response is because the child belongs to the same species. But when they hear the anguished cries or see the frightened appearance of birds or beasts, they cannot avoid a sense of being unable to bear it. … Someone might object this this response is because birds and beasts are sentient creatures. But when they see grass or trees uprooted and torn apart, they cannot avoid feeling a sense of sympathy and distress. … Someone might object that this response is because grass and trees have life and vitality. But when they see tiles and stones broken and destroyed, they cannot avoid feeling a sense of concern and regret. … This shows that the benevolence that forms one body [with Heaven, Earth, and the myriad creatures] is something that even the minds of petty people possess. (Tiwald and Van Norden 2014, 242)

Wang’s first three thought experiments seem fairly compelling at first glance. Almost all humans would, at least as a first instinct, have “alarm and compassion” if suddenly confronted with the sight of a child about to fall into a well. In addition, humans often do show pity for the suffering of non–human animals. Finally, the fact that humans maintain public parks and personal gardens shows some kind of concern for plants.

It is not a decisive objection to Wang’s view that humans often fail to manifest benevolence to other humans, non–human animals, or plants. Wang is arguing that all humans manifest these responses sometimes (and that this is best explained by his favored metaphysics). Like all Neo–Confucians, Wang readily acknowledges that selfish desires frequently block the manifestation of our shared nature. However, there are three lines of objection to Wang’s view that are harder to dismiss. (1) There is considerable empirical evidence that some humans never manifest any compassion for the suffering of others. In the technical literature of psychology, these people are a subset of those identified as having “Antisocial Personality Disorder” as defined in DSM–V.[10] (2) Wang asserts that when humans “see tiles and stones broken and destroyed, they cannot avoid feeling a sense of concern and regret.” This claim is important for Wang’s argument, because he takes this reaction to be evidence for the conclusion that our minds are ultimately “one Substance” with everything in the universe, not merely with members of our species, or other sentient creatures, or other living things. We can perhaps motivate Wang’s intuition by considering how we might react if we saw that someone had spray painted graffiti on Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. The defacement of this scenic beauty would probably provoke sadness in those of us with an eye for natural beauty. However, it is certainly not obvious that everyone manifests even sporadic concern for “tiles and stones,” which is what he needs for his conclusion. (3) Even if we grant Wang his intuitions, it is not clear that the particular metaphysics he appeals to is the best explanation of those intuitions. As Darwin himself suggested, our compassion for other humans can be explained in evolutionary terms. In addition, the “biophilia hypothesis” (Wilson [1984]) provides an evolutionary explanation for the human fondness for other animals and plants. There is not an obvious evolutionary explanation for why humans seem engaged by non–living natural beauty, like mountain peaks, but as we have seen it seems questionable how common this trait is.
6. Influence

Wang is regarded, along with Lu Xiangshan, as one of the founders of the Lu–Wang School of Neo–Confucianism, or the School of Mind. This is one of the two major wings of Neo–Confucianism, along with the Cheng–Zhu School (named after Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi), or School of Pattern. He has frequently been an inspiration for critics of the orthodox Cheng–Zhu School, not just in China but also in Japan. In Japan, his philosophy is referred to as Ōyōmeigaku, and its major adherents included Nakae Tōju (1608–1648) and Kumazawa Banzan (1619–1691). Wang’s thought was also an inspiration for some of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration (1868), which began Japan’s rapid modernization.[11]

In China, Confucianism underwent a significant shift during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) with the development of the Evidential Research movement. Evidential Research emphasized carefully documented and tightly argued work on concrete issues of philology, history, and even mathematics and civil engineering. Such scholars generally looked with disdain on “the Song–Ming Confucians” (including both Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming), whom they accused of producing “empty words” that could not be substantiated.[12] One of the few Evidential Research scholars with a serious interest in ethics was Dai Zhen (1724–1777). However, he too was critical of both the Cheng–Zhu and the Lu–Wang schools. The three major prongs of Dai’s critique of Neo–Confucians like Wang were that they (1) encouraged people to treat their subjective opinions as the deliverances of some infallible moral sense, (2) projected Buddhist–inspired concepts back onto the ancient Confucian classics, and (3) ignored the ethical value of ordinary physical desires.

One of the major trends in contemporary Chinese philosophy is “New Confucianism.” New Confucianism is a movement to adapt Confucianism to modern thought, showing how it is consistent with democracy and modern science. New Confucianism is distinct from what we in the West call Neo–Confucianism, but it adopts many Neo–Confucian concepts, in particular the view that humans share a trans–personal nature which is constituted by the universal Pattern. Many New Confucians agree with Mou Zongsan (1909–1995) that Wang had a deeper and more orthodox understanding of Confucianism than did Zhu Xi.[13]

Wang’s philosophy is of considerable intrinsic interest, because of the ingenuity of his arguments, the systematicity of his views, and the precision of his textual exegesis. Beyond that, Wang’s work has the potential to inform contemporary ethics. Although his particular metaphysics may not be appealing, many of his ideas can be naturalized. It may be hard to believe that everything is unified by a shared, underlying Pattern, but it does seem plausible that we are deeply dependent upon one another and upon our natural environment for our survival and our identities. I am a husband, a father, a teacher, and a researcher, but only because I have a wife, children, students, and colleagues. In some sense, we do form “one body” with others, and Wang provides provocative ideas about how we should respond to this insight. In addition, Wang’s fundamental criticism of Zhu Xi’s approach, that it produces pedants who only study and talk about ethics, rather than people who strive to actually be ethical, has considerable contemporary relevance, particularly given the empirical evidence that our current practices of ethical education have little positive effect on ethical behavior (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2014; and cf. Schwitzgebel 2013 (Other Internet Resources)).