The Germans alternate between complete devotion to the foreign and revengeful craving for originality…. The Germans––to prove that their originality is not a matter of their nature but of their ambition—think it lies in the complete and over-obvious difference: but the Greeks did not think thus about the Orient … and they became original (for one is not original to begin with, but one is raw!)
[Birth of Tragedy XI, 110; cf. V, 246; VI 339]Â Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. 1950. Fourth Edition. 1974. Â p. 154.
Does this not explain the kitsch phenomenon of Heino?
Rosalind: “A traveler? By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.â€
Jacques: “Yes, I have gained my experience.â€
Rosalind: “And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad— and to travel for it, too.â€
The traveller that distrusts every person he meets, and turns back upon the appearance of every man that looks like a robber, seldom arrives in time at his journey’s end.
It must be confessed in the main that travelers who withdraw from the limitation of their homes think they step into not only a strange but a perfectly free nature, and this delusion we could at that time cherish the more as we were not yet reminded every moment by police examinations of passports, by tolls, and other such like hindrances, that abroad things are still more limited and worse than at home.
All the arts commonly aspire toward the principle of music….. The aim of our culture should be to attain not only as intense but as complete a life as possible…. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.
Proust: the work of art is the mistress of the artist.
Proust teaches us:
People often say that, by pointing out to a man the faults of his mistress, you succeed only in strengthening his attachment to her, because he does not believe you; yet how much more so if he does!
But is this not even truer for artists? The work of art is the mistress of the artist. All his time and energy are spent with and on his mistress. But problems crop up. The artist starts to fall in love with the flaws in the work of art. The work of art can then never become a masterpiece. Hence, the artist in love with the flaws in his own work is a failed artist. For as Proust puts it:
“The danger of that kind of love, however, is that the woman’s subjection calms the man’s jealousy for a time but also makes it more exacting. After a little he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells they keep lighted day and night, to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble.â€
À la recherche du temps perdu. (In Search of Lost Time.) Vol. II. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. (Within a Budding Grove / In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.) 1919. “Madame Swann at Home.â€
Brainstorming Ideas about Institutions, Communities, & Citizens
For G. E. M. Ascombe: “What is institutional must exclude all that is personal, casual or sporadic.â€[1] This is because institutions:
erode individuals,
corrode their creativity,
and commode only resentment.
Despite our institutions, we must strive to be good citizens, right? Why not ask Goethe?
“Well,†said Lothario, “I hope to be able to make a good patriot out of you. A good father is one who at mealtimes serves his children first; and a good citizen is one who pays what he owes the state before dealing with everything else.â€[2]
Examples:
The dutiful citizen pays the police before going out to buy his own gun.
The sincere confessor gives consent before receiving his reward.
The merciful cop shoots the criminal before turning the gun on herself.
And while Trump has paid few taxes and given little to charities, he now must serve the community. For what is a community but a collection of institutions?
NOTES
[1] Anscombe, G. E. M. “On the Source of the Authority of the State.†From Ratio 20 (1), 1978. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe Vol. III: Ethics, Religionand Politics. Blackwell: Oxford. 1981. p. 131.
[2]  Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.) VIII, ii, 311.
The other day I was driving and glimpsed out the window at some power-lines strung parallel to each other as well as parallel to the road, and in the brevity of the moment, the flicker-flash of the window-framed image seemed to me as though it were a wire skeleton of Old Glory, as if the American flag had been burned and only its outline, made of cables, remained. The form was fixed; and instead of substance, there was only space. Utter emptiness. Surface sans depth.
Instead of the U.S. being on the receiving end of an information war propagated by Russia, Smith seems to argue that the U.S. and Russia are actually allied on good number of things, and that the only ones left in the dark about how reality really works are everyday American and Israeli citizens who are the targets and victims of a Russo–American disinformation campaign with regard to Syria and Ukraine. Susan Hennessey and Jordan A. Brunner’s January 25 piece of LawFareBlog.com “What Do We Know About Investigations into Trump’s Associates’ Ties to Russia?†seems to show that while friendliness between the two counties may not exist, a certain absence of malice has started to emerge.
I agree we Westerners should not goad literature to explain the world’s problems. Reading translations of Russian nineteenth-century literature is no panacea for twenty-first century political engagement. Yes, this can become a form of so-called “orientalismâ€â€”but outside the acolytes of Edward Said, does anyone in the East or the West of 2017 even believe or act on or behave as if orientalism is something related to tangible reality? Something tells me no. Something tells me those ideas remain trapped in the 1980s (like New Wave music).
How do we proceed? When we are actually confronted with specific answers, we soon complain of being suffocated or inhibited, of being denied the opportunity to contribute “creatively†and “freely†on our own; and we at once begin—usually with some success—to pick holes in what has been presented us. But as soon as we feel we have pushed all this aside, and at last stand free and ready to make our own contribution, the human heart shrinks at its new nakedness and its new gift of what Santayana calls “vacant liberty.†We start once again to crave specific direction, and turn reproachfully, notebook in hand, on those who are now exhorting [strongly urging] us—in the very spirit we had before demanded—to “go and do likewise….â€
On this issue of misappropriating literature for political purposes at her Tumblr account, Sandra Afrika complains (via Alexey Kovalev) about clickbait coming from Harvardpolitics.com, as if that URL alone wasn’t enough of a warning sign not to read any further. I think her complaints are a little overblown. A little. I wouldn’t believe anything from Harvardpolitics.com, or Kremlin.com, or Breitbart.com, or the Wrap or the Onion or Rotten Tomatoes. These sites are made for nothing but clickbait, and one cannot legitimately complain and moan at a baker for baking bread.
But that doesn’t mean old literature has no use or relation to the world’s current problems. I don’t think I was wrong to recently pull some of my favorite quotations from Russian works, again, translated into English, amid a discussion of the (non)relationship between the White House and the Kremlin. But I nonetheless need to be more careful about doing so from now on.
So perhaps we are not wiser than we know. Perhaps the world is too wise for us.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;––
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
––Wordsworth
NOTES
[1] For Jefferson and Santayana see: Kallen, Horace. M. “The Laughing Philosopher.†The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 1. (January 1964.) 19–35 at 24–25. For Emerson, see “The Over-Soul.”
[2] Bate, Walter Jackson. The Burden of the Past. 1970. Harvard UP, Cambridge. p. 56. Continuing with Bate:
In a very real sense, therefore, human feelings, at least potentially, work outward toward reality, hoping to re-enforce and secure themselves by the ‘stability of truth.’ To this extent, they contain their own tension upwards and outward, if only in their need for reassurance, for external justification and support. But in order to use this to advantage there must first be some sort of exposure to what will arouse or satisfy us; our desires cannot clarify themselves or find objects to satisfy them unless we know or suspect the existence of such objects. Unless we have first tasted what we desire, hunger often remains only an uneasy and painful sensation, without a clear object. Accordingly, as a contemporary of Johnson pointed out, very young babies, suffering from physical hunger, often fight against food unless they have already experienced the taste of it….
The channeling effort toward achievement, in other words, constitutes a certain limitation: to be one thing is, by definition, not to be another. It is limitation, at least, when compared with what Santayana calls ‘vacant liberty,’ even though this blank liberty to drift without purpose in the dark is meaningless until it is again channeled into specific aims and renewed efforts. The history of human achievement is strewn with compulsive by-products—and with by-products that become, if not more pronounced, at least more striking, in proportion to the degree of concentration on the end desired. Too often, of course, we find a tendency to interpret the achievement as either the flowering or else the compensation of the secondary traces that accompany it, putting the hoof-prints before the horse, and regarding them as a pre-determined path. We are never unwilling to ‘lessen our disparity.’ We all feel disturbing psychological quirks in ourselves; and it is not unpleasing to imagine that if we allowed them to be a little more pressing, the achievement we are interpreting could be our own. (The Achievement of Samuel Johnson. Oxford UP. 1955. pp. 140–41, 155)
I voted third party. So I didn’t partake in any protest today. But I don’t disapprove the idea of protesting; although I’m sure if particularly extreme examples of that protesting were presented to me in a biased, dishonestly-framed context (as this country’s institutional and individual-social-based media tend to present such things), I’m sure I too would disapprove of those things presented.
I confess to being in the habit of saying things like, “yeah, protesting in the streets may have worked in the 60s, but it doesn’t do dick these days….†But as I get older and learn to be more attune to my body’s aches and pains, I know that for corporate political bodies (like those protesting today) as well as for corporal individual bodies (like my poor hungover aching-self) that sometimes it feels good, indeed, cathartic (in every Aristotelian sense of the word), to purge oneself of anger and frustration the same way one would purge oneself of gas or snot the way one does when farting or belching or sneezing.
Yes, many onlookers–particularly many onlookers from very far away–see such farting and belching and sneezing as disgusting, but that has nothing to do with the individual need to expel the anxiety and frustration and infection that has been physically or mentally frustrating certain individuals with regard to the current political situation.
But spare me the holier-than-thou arguments: if Hillary had won there would still be rioting in the streets. The original tea party was a protest, the neo-tea party was a protest, and today’s marches and gatherings are but a protest.
So go ahead protestors. Fart it all out. It won’t change the status quo. But it may nonetheless be necessary in order to maintain our political health.
La Dolce Vida: Novelists on American versus French Food in the 1930s
First, from George Orwell (1903-1950):
Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it….[1]
According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the big, expensive ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hôtel X were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English–no French–and seemed to know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves with disgusting American ‘cereals’, and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vermouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce. One customer, from Pittsburg, dined every night in his bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are swindled or not…. [2]
While the Frenchman ate, the patron’s wife stood behind the grille of the kitchen door and watched the expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came back with two other Frenchmen. This meant that we were earning a good name; the surest sign of a bad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Probably part of the reason for our success was that the patron, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in fitting out the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, are the secret of a successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps we were a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in which case the bad ones must be past imagining. [3]
And from Henry Miller (1891-1981):
The only place to find a good loaf of bread is in the ghettos. Wherever there is a foreign quarter there is apt to be good bread. Wherever there is a Jewish grocer or delicatessen you are almost certain to find an excellent loaf of bread. The dark Russian bread light in weight, found only rarely on this huge continent, is the best bread of all. No vitamins have been injected into it by laboratory specialists in conformance with the latest food regulations…. [4]
Another fact…. Food, when it is not enjoyed, kills. The best diet in the world is useless if the patient has no appetite, no gusto, no sensuality. On the whole, Americans eat without pleasure…. [5]
We throw bones to the dogs and eat the dogs instead of the bones…. [6]
Americans can eat garbage, provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup, mustard, chili sauce, tabasco sauce, cayenne pepper, or any other condiment which destroys the original flavor of the dish. On the other hand, olive oil which the French eschew when preparing salads because it has too strong a flavor, Americans hardly ever use in their salads. [7]
NOTES
[1] Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. 1930. XIV.
Did Arthur Balfour Predict Facebook a Century Ago?
Did Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, and twice the giver of the Gifford Lectures,  stumble upon the idea behind Facebook–that it can collect data on people and try to predict their behavior–nearly a century before its advent?
The region where these uncompromising doctrines show to least advantage is human character. I do not propose to discuss causation and free will; but I may with advantage say something on a less hackneyed theme, namely, negligibility and foreknowledge. The thesis I desire to maintain is that, in dealing with a human character, full foreknowledge is theoretically impossible, even though free will be wholly absent, and the succession of psychic states be completely determined. Practically impossible we know it to be. But most determinists would hold that this impossibility is due partly to our ignorance and partly to our incapacity. We know too little either of the general laws of mind, or of individual character, or of surrounding circumstances, to make accurate forecasts; and, even if we possessed the requisite information, we could not use it, owing to the irremediable weakness of our powers of calculation. It is this contention that I wish to traverse. I hold that, had we the supernatural powers of Laplace’s calculator, armed with a knowledge of the human heart which supernatural powers of observation could alone supply, we should still fail, because we are face to face with that which is inherently incalculable.
The contrary opinion is due, I think, to an imperfect comprehension of the doctrines I have touched on in this lecture. All human foreknowledge depends on detecting old sequences in a new context. The context, of course, is always new. There is never full or complete repetition. But, unless there be partial repetitions embedded in the universal flux, prescience is impossible. This is the doctrine of “negligibility.â€
Now consider two illustrative examples. First, imagine yourself standing on the edge of a valley down which a landslip has just let loose the waters of some great reservoir in the hills. The catastrophe is sudden in its onset, brief in its duration, wildly irregular in its character. Even the most tumultuous cataract retains a certain steadiness of outline: and few sights are more impressive than the stationary waves in a great rapid. But there is here no trace of order imposed on disorder, fixity on motion. The rushing wall of water, spouting into foam over every obstacle it encounters, the tossing flood that follows furiously behind, seem in their brief violence to present the very ideal of incalculable confusion. But we know it is not so. In the presence of such a spectacle our calculator would not feel a moment’s embarrassment. He could forecast without difficulty the whole scene down to its minutest eddy; the motions of each drop obey laws with which he was perfectly familiar; and the total effect, catastrophic though it be, is but the sum of all these component examples of natural uniformity.
Turn now and contemplate a calmer scene. Consider the commonplace life of a commonplace man as it develops in the untroubled prosperity of a steady business and a quiet home. Such a career seems as orderly and uniform as the flood I have been describing is terrible and strange. Surely no supernatural calculator is required to cast the horoscope of its hero: for he does, and leaves undone, the same actions, he thinks and leaves unthought the same ideas, as thousands of his contemporaries; and, so far as outward appearance goes, he is an indistinguishable member of an undistinguished crowd.
Yet, in spite of this, we know him to be unique. There never has been before, nor will there ever be again, another individual exactly like him. A similar statement, it may be urged, can be made about our catastrophic flood. Though this has plenty of parallels, none of them, strictly speaking, are exact. Where, then, lies the distinction on which I am trying to insist? Let me endeavour to mark the contrast.
If the material world be conceived as a mechanical system, the flood in my illustration may be regarded as a piece arbitrarily cut out of it at the whim of the spectator. It possesses no natural unity; and, like the whole of which it is a fraction, the moving particles which compose it do each obey laws which are (we assume) perfectly well known, and have been endlessly exemplified. Its behaviour is the sum of the behaviour of these several parts; and it is by estimating their movements that our imaginary calculator can prophesy its course with absolute exactness. He is never perplexed by the problem of negligibility; for negligibility in such a case can be accurately measured, and our calculator possesses all the data required for its measurement. In short, the principle of regularity may here be applied in its most uncompromising form; it requires no qualification, nor can it be pressed too boldly or too far.
–Balfour, Arthur James. Theism and Humanism: Being the Gifford Lectures. NY: Doran. 1915. p.  207–11.
