Digressions&Impressions

RIP: Rob Brouwer 1938-2022

In a few weeks, Neglected Classics of Philosophy 2 (OUP, 2022) will appear. As you can see at books.google, it's dedicated to "Anneke Luger-Veenstra, Jan Stronk, and Rob Brower, my learned high school teachers, who encouraged a love of the classics." Two days ago my high school classmate, Jorine Lamsma, called my attention to an announcement in the newspaper that Rob had died June 1, 2022. The memorial service and funeral are today.

Rob was my high school Latin teacher for four years at Amsterdam's Vossius Gymnasium. My class (1c, 2c, 3c) was known to be 'trouble' and quite a few teachers fought trench warfare with us, as we found ever more creative ways to prank and be disruptive. But not in Rob's classroom. We called him "Mijnheer Brouwer," of course. He was not on first name basis with his charges.

Rob commanded our instant respect not because he was strict (which he was) and unperturbable (which he was), but because he somehow managed to convey that he instantiated the promise of bildung (without having to say so); he wasn't aiming to reach some learning target decomposed in weekly grammar, vocabulary, and syntax acquired. But rather he always made clear that whatever task of memorization and repetition we were assigned was in the service of our introduction to the classics and, without veneration, their wider cultural significance. As another classmate, Max Rosenberg, put it, each class was part of a much broader whole. And as the years passed, I slowly grasped -- hence my use of 'bildung'  --, these classics in turn would be good friends accompanying me in a life-time of imperfect self-cultivation.

Once, I was fourteen or so, a classmate pushed his button, and the unfathomable happened: the boy (no, not me) got sent out of class, with the archaic, 'gaat heen' and Rob, visibly steadying himself, pointing a finger at the door. For years we could get a good laugh trying to mimic that 'gaat heen,' but we had to acknowledge simultaneously that we were in awe of him. 

Not just because of his formal language and dress, Rob seemed like a character from a different age -- his classroom had the surprisingly bittersweet smell of his pipe --, he was the subject of myths: his son had died tragically (which turned out to be true), he suffered from Leukemia (which turned out to be true), he had studied to be a Jesuit (possible), and he was dating the German teacher, Erika Langbroek (which also turned out to be true). 

I had a very checkered high school career; I should have flunked out at the end of my third and fourth years (ninth and tenth grade). Mevrouw Luger played a big role in bending the rules my way each year. But I always passed my Latin, and to this day, I recognize that I have built a scholarly career on the years Rob put into me. (And I often regretted he was not my Greek teacher.) 

I forget if it was my junior or senior year, but I got wind that Rob was doing a reading group in philosophy with some interested class-mates at his home not far from the school in an apartment on the Beethovenstraat. (At this point he wasn't my teacher anymore, but it was before he moved into a different apartment with Erika also on the Beethovenstraat.) I invited myself along for the wine and the mystique. They were reading Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft (in German). I would like to say it got me excited about philosophy, but I suspect the main effect of the reading group was to make me excessively and irresponsibly fearless in the face of any text. 

Some time after college, I got back in touch with Rob. I suspect in order to brag to him that I had been taking philosophy classes with Dan Dennett (he was underwhelmed) and Martha Nussbaum. Rob, it turned out, was a real fan-boy of Nussbaum who, in graduate school, was one of my supervisors of my qualifying paper on the puppet image in Plato's Laws. Alongside E.B. England's commentary, Rob's wisdom became instrumental in helping me figure out the nuances of Plato's Greek and thought.

But perhaps I had simply bumped into him with Erika at the kleine zaal at Concertgebouw. Even long after he was struck by an increasingly visible Parkinson, he was a transfixed presence in the little balcony. I didn't share his love for nineteenth century Lieder, but we often discovered that we (or, in my case, my mum) had acquired season tickets for the same chamber music series.

We started to see other more frequently during my Summer visits back home while I was in graduate school. I am also unsure of the exact sequence of events that led to our first reading group with Martin Claes, then a Jesuit getting a PhD (now a pastor and a scholar), on Augustine's De Magistro. I  never asked Rob if he identified with Augustine's loss of his son. He never spoke of him to me, but he often expressed pride in his daughter (a lawyer). It was the start of numerous partially overlapping, reading groups with Rob in varying combinations with people from his life -- often people who adored Dante or choir (or both) -- or my own circle of Dutch academics and friends. 

Meanwhile, we started corresponding and as I look through our letters, I see that he never stopped trying to broaden my horizon. His letters reflect his curiosity, even an excessive strain of enthusiasm; he offered a never ending stream of suggested novels or works of scholarship. While in his own work, he had an exacting low tolerance for minute error, in his reading habits he was primarily searching for bold and expansive interpretations. As I advanced in academia he relished keeping me informed of scholarly fashion that had somehow captured the imaginations of the culture and book sections even editorial pages of the Dutch broadsides.

In addition to being a teacher, Rob was a scholar, translator, and poet. His translations of Dante's Divine Comedy, Statius' The Thebaid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Virgil's Bucolica/The Eclogues combine vast erudition with linguistic and poetic sensitivity. He also translated Epictetus. He would probably be very amused to hear me claim modest credit for triggering his renewed interest into Lucan just as he was completing his stupendous Dante translation. But it's true: while teaching the Treatise in my first seminar at Wesleyan in 2002, I was confused by the way the motto of book 3 of Hume's Treatise had been translated in the then new 'student edition' published by OUP. (The motto is from Lucan.) We started a correspondence about it, and I date to it the start of my interest into Seneca.

When I heard Rob had died, I looked at our correspondence to see when we last had written. I noticed to my horror he had never acknowledged my word that I had dedicated the forthcoming Neglected Classics volume to him. I had not registered this silence at all during the depths of my own illness.

Before I close, I don't want to suggest Rob was an ethereal personality only. He was happy whenever he could talk about Erika or Sabine. And our reading groups were carefully planned around not just his choir practices, but also his cycling holidays.

I also don't mean to suggest he was above name-dropping. Once he asked me slyly if I knew who Henny Vrienten was. They had met swimming their laps in de Zuiderbad. Later Vrienten became involved in the recording of Rob's Dante.

Near the end of De Magistro, Augustine suggests that when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves and this never seems to me more true than in the Academy during the many, lovely ritual practices of acknowledging the roles of supervisors in one's education. Self-praise does not strike me as a sin, but I have to admit that all of these academic practices (fests, collections, memorial conferences, etc.) seem, however sincerely felt and expressed, a bit tainted by the multiplicity of self-advancing roles they play in our prestige hierarchies and zero-sum political economy. (Perhaps this also accounts for the sincerity.)

We encounter our high school teachers through their words, their curriculum, their classroom, and features of their personality as well as the school yards myths about them. The older, and more experienced I get in the classroom, the more it seems to me they -- I mean all true teachers -- use a feature of their personality, perhaps made excessively visible to the student, to find a way to connect with the longings and desires, perhaps vanity even (as Adam Smith claims), of their students, and turn this connection, however tenuous, into the engines of shared enquiry. This also means that not every teacher is the right fit for each student.

The reason why when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves according to the closing lines of De Magistro is that teachers are kind of puppets or actors speaking thoughts of others and that it's the student's reason or intuition that is doing the real work of understanding even if the words of the official teacher trigger or guide such understanding. The Platonic idea with which De Magistro closes, that nobody teaches another anything, has, thus, generated learned philosophical commentary that betrays non-trivial professional anxiety.

Augustine does make an exception to this quite general claim at the start of De Magistro, which I doubt is retracted during the dialogue. He suggests that when we ask questions we're really teaching something about our needs or our plans. The latter includes, of course, the path of inquiry, as Augustine explicitly notes. Rob was magisterial in asking questions that directed our gaze to the inner, guiding light that we need on life's path.

 

 

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That dog – called aptly Dog – has a status that’s uncertain. He was dumped two years ago at the homeplace of a neighbor some few hundred yards away. Because the neighbor neither ran him off nor shot him, Dog counts in the calculus round here as belonging to that man. Dog accedes to this some days and patrols the yard around the neighbor’s trailer, but he is more usually just a rambling presence, a creature mysterious in his ways and unaccountable to any. Some days no one sees him, some days he never leaves our porch. Most days, he likes some petting, but some days, not – he once showed up carrying a slice a pizza and kept his distance lest I try to steal it. One day he cornered an armadillo only to sniff it with disdain and walk away. On another he tortured a groundhog, mortally wounding it but declining to finish what he started. I then went for my rifle and did the work he wouldn’t. Every night they’re near and howling, he answers the coyotes with his voice – in this at least, Dog is reliable. I suspect he is unsure if he wants to count himself as feral or as tamed. He is, in short, about what someone might expect from a dog that has learned Zhuangzi.--Amy Olberding

In order to save my marriage, and to get some research done, I rented a small office -- yeah don't cry for me -- in a different part of town a few weeks ago. I go there every day, and when I am not needed in zoom meetings, I work on my Newton's Metaphysics manuscript. The tube runs on a frequent schedule and the ride is under fifteen minutes.  Most of the time it's very easy to social distance inside the carriages. 

I found an excellent espresso bar a seven minute walk from my new office in the heart of Fitzrovia. It's one stop on the tube, but because the weather has been so nice, as it has been this whole pandemic year, it's a lovely amble through the back streets of the neighborhood. I enjoy the blue plaques with the names of former (mostly nineteenth century) prime ministers and (mostly twentieth century) authors and social reformers. Sometimes I first get a wrap at a very fine middle eastern hole in the wall on Goodge street.

On Tuesday, at my favorite espresso bar I noticed he had no sweets on offer. When I asked about the lack of brownies, the barista/owner mentioned that his supplier had stopped delivering because his orders fell below the minimum. I quietly wondered whether there were payment issues. I said that must cut into your profit margins. Behind his face mask I guessed a dry smile, because I was told that he just broke even. Emboldened by the small talk, I asked the barista whether the landlord had offered a discount. Indeed he had, 50%. But this had been declined because it was supposed to be added to next year's rent. The purpose behind this offer struck me as a bit dubious, too. I wondered if his rolex was a fake.

I mentioned the story about the brownies to the building manager on the way back. In response she told me the Pret around the corner had stopped selling her favorite tuna mayo sandwiches. She had complained to the store-manager, who informed her they stopped selling it because too few people were coming into the store. 

Anyway, today, i walked through the rain, to find the espresso bar closed. (This will not have surprised you, my perceptive reader.) I looked around and suddenly I realized the street was near empty. I checked my watch (no, not a rolex). It was 3:15pm. On the way back to my office I started counting closed bars and shops. Many were, in fact, boarded up; I stopped at two dozen. I found a bakery near Warren St. with decent espresso. On my way back to the office, on Euston Road, I registered the half a dozen homeless people hiding in front of a (closed) furniture store.

One of my son's favorite classmates' step-dads drives a real London black cab. It has the largest sky roof I have ever seen in a taxi. Anyway, recently he told me (the cabbie, not the son) that he was doing one third the business he did last year. This is no surprise: London is a city that thrives on international travel (tourism and business), and wealthy expats for a lot of its traffic.

A few weeks ago the official unemployment rate in the UK was 4,1% (that was up  to July). All kinds of temporary measures have ended since then. In August 2020 "the number of employees in the UK on payrolls was down around 695,000 compared with March 2020." It's getting worse. 

Let me change tack for a second. 

A few novelists -- Arnon Grunberg, Zadie Smith, and Niña Weijers -- tell the story of my social habitat especially well. (I leave you to guess who have satirized me effectively,) But during this pandemic I have been drawn to Amy Olberding and her epic Ozark Stoics. While I once commented on one of her papers, and am proud she has guest-blogged for me, I have never met Olberding. But as my life has closed in on itself, I have grown needy of her story-telling. 

I imagine her in her pick-up truck in the parking lot of a giant Wallmart, stealing wifi; after she has responded to student emails, and has uploaded her lecture, she writes up her intellectual diaries, with her rifle and her laptop on her lap. One of my favorite passages is this one:

The region around our farm is a lacework of gravel roads that trace through hill country, and what happens when families like ours just can’t keep it all going is told everywhere upon these roads.  Abandoned farmhouses sit in fields given over to elaborate beef cattle operations held by wealthy ranchers who buy up old places when a family can no longer keep them.  In these places, the fencing is bright and taut, well maintained but by people who live elsewhere.  The tarpaper and rock homes that once sheltered families working the land become just bits of a landscape, too much trouble to tear down when the elements will eventually do the work for you.  Some old homeplaces don’t even have the care of wealthy ranchers but instead sit nested in trees that have come up since the families left, the houses now effectively forested.  Bereft of the people who kept the houses whole, they become home to all manner of wildlife, though given the area, some also come to host meth cookers.  But the most haunted examples, I find, are the old family farms where no house at all still sits.  On spring’s arrival they emerge like ghosts across the landscape, as vast armies of yellow daffodils arise to tell of what once was.  The daffodils stand in fragile, temporary signal, their patterns marking out where a house once stood – now lining a path where no path sits or surrounding where a porch once stood.  The daffodils stubbornly outlast the ones who planted them and abide as the only sign of what was once a homeplace. 

Without thinking, I turn left to the tube station. It's slightly longer that way in the shadow of the BT tower. On the sidewalk I evade two boys  on their electric step-scooters who seemed indifferent to the possibility of running me over. It's pouring.

It's been a decade since Lehman. I see myself reflected in the window of another abandoned shop. I am clean-shaven today; not quite an old man yet, but when I look around I see an older man shuffling in a Zimmer-frame. He is drenched. I know I see the dreary future staring at me. He smiles. It's the first maskless smile from a random stranger in months.

As I walk to the entry of the station, all I can think of are those vast armies of yellow daffodils filling Fitzroy Square.

RIP: Arthur Wijnschenk (1971-2020); On Caravan Camp Sollicitude

This morning my sister informed me that she had learned from Maureen Wijnschenk (his sister) that my distant distant cousin, classmate, and friend, Arthur Wijnschenk died. I have known Arthur, and his family, my whole life. Before his coming out he dated my oldest living friend, Liora the youngest daughter of my father's best friend (Chaim), in high school. (I sat next to Arthur at her wedding.) We were not mates in high school, but each in our own way, we tried to escape our childhood environment by fleeing into the wider world--Arthur more boldly and with more panache. But despite cultivating a bad-boy, go-happy, work hard, party harder image, he was loyal to his roots and kept in touch. From my distant perspective, he was one of the early hackers; then let himself be paid by financial firms to protect them from attack; serial entrepreneur (including his favorite, Barcelona Car Tours), moving among Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Madrid,  Barcelona, and even our Amsterdam in restless fashion celebrating each trip with a champagne toast in first class. Even so, he would always track me down all over the world and, when I was broke or trying to make ends meet on an academic salary, would treat me to lavish meals in fancy restaurants always just before they were to become famous.  Often at the end of a night, as I went home, the night would start for him. Sometimes I saw pictures of his adventures in the clubs on social media the next day before he went to the gym.

When my family moved to London a few years, I learned I was not his only regular on his itinerary. There were other distant relatives he kept track off, happily being drawn into their family milestones--giving and accepting nurture along the way. 

I tell you about Arthur, dear readers, not just because I can't think of anything else right now, but because he is one of the proximate causes for my blogging. A decade ago, when I was trying to turn myself into a Dutch public intellectual, I mentioned to him I couldn't get a piece published by any of the main newspapers. Arthur asked to read it. Then told me he had created a website and started advertising the piece on Google up to €50 per day. The effect was shocking: I got an endless stream of hate mail, threats, including death threats, and for many years you could find my name denounced on far-right websites.* To me this was eye-opening because I recognized that one didn't need mainstream media to find an audience; and this helped me reconcile myself to my failure as a public intellectual and develop into this different kind of authorial persona. 

You can read a translation (by his friend Brian Gross) of the piece on NewAPPS. If you look at the NewAPPS archive, you'll see it is one of the very first pieces I published at NewAPPS when it was just a week old (and we had a few dozen daily readers).  Arthur read nearly all of my blogs, always welcoming the pieces in which I dropped my scholarly guard and shared my views in forthright manner. Sometimes, he would send me a quick note thanking me for the occasional, lucid paragraph in the middle of a digressions. 

Eventually Arthur stopped advertising my piece, and discontinued the webserver that hosted it. The right-wing websites that polemicized against it mostly disappeared (today I could only locate one that notes its existence).

Recently, after I won a grant to study debt, just before the corona-lockdown, I was contacted by a leading Dutch banker to come meet with her and discuss. I thought she had read about the grant in the newspaper, but it turned out Arthur had nudged her into meeting me. During our last dinner, a few weeks ago on the back balcony at “Bickers a/d Werf” during one of the endless corona-Summer days, he told me he knew her since his membership of the JOVD, the youth wing of the Dutch main right wing party, and that they had stayed in touch. 

To my delight I found a splendid essay by him (1993) in the JOVDs zine, railing against the internal shenanigans and lack of internal democracy at the JOVD's annual conference -- the article makes clear he was a regular --, and in it he unmasks self-serving careerism and opportunism and he pleads for one-man-one-vote. Anyway, behind the bad boy, there was true engagement. I dont think Arthur had much formal education, or that he was especially bookish, but, not unlike our classmate Arnon Grunberg, he had the gift of an excellent polemicist.+

I mention Arnon not just to name-drop; as it turns out that for a few years we had an intense three-way email correspondence, which started with a note by Arthur to Arnon in September 2000.**  The note congratulates Arnon on his literary success and implies that Arthur is earning money as a porno-producer.*** In our letters we recognized ourselves as prisoners/wardens of 'caravan camp sollicitude' (woonwagenkamp de eenzaamheid).

Because Arthur and I traveled a lot, we started talking about Corona in January. We were both mystified, even outraged by the utter lack of care and reaction by national authorities. We found the role of the WHO mysterious. I tried to nudge him into developing mobile and airport testing capacity. Corona has been very tough for him. It hurt his businesses and undermined his life-style. He was (quite rightly) angered by the ways governments supported better connected businesses than his own. But most importantly it threw him back onto himself.

In response, while he tried to keep his businesses afloat, he checked in almost daily, including with my mom--they both would express concern for the other to me. (Early in the lock-down with PPE shortages everywhere, he surprised her with state of the art face-mask.) I found their mode of contact reassuring, perhaps too re-assuring. 

Arthur and I came from families shaped by the Holocaust, by betrayal and by great acts of compassion and rectitude. It would be tempting here to write something about our shared sense that all of that was not an aberration, that we're sleepwalking into more disaster. So often he would ask me what we could do.

I wish I were better at capturing the cocktail of survivor guilt, perseverance, love, and hardness of those we grew up with; the focus on money-making, the impatience with official delusion; the moving between many different worlds at once; the sense of connection with distant relatives who had to stand in for never-born cousins and uncles/aunts. But we rarely talked about the past; we were immersed in a present haunted by omissions and ellipses. Adult friendship is the art of tactful silence. And during the last few years, after my dad died, and as he quietly become a more regular fixture in my life, I learned from him to be more accepting of good fortune as our lives glide too closely alongside the precipice.   

Arthur's mom, (like my own) youthful when she had her first child, died early at the age of 45 from cancer. My heart goes out to his dad, and Maureen. 

 

On Aftermath

The point was this darkness -- call it what you will -- this darkness and disorganisation were not mere negation, mere absence. They were both aftermath and prelude. The etymology of the word 'aftermath' is 'second mowing', a second crop of grass that is sown and reaped after the harvest is in. Civilisation, order, meaning, belief: these were not sunlit peaks to be reached by a steady climb. They were built and then they fell, were built and fell again or were destroyed. The darkness, the disorganisation that succeeded them had their own existence, their own integrity; were betrothed to civilisation, as sleep is betrothed to activity. In the life of compartments lies the possibility of unity, just as unity contains the prospect of atomisation. Better, in Mrs. Lewis's view, to live the compartmentalised, the disorganised life and feel the stark stirrings of creativity, than to dwell in civilised unity, racked by the impulse to destroy. (5)

[Clytemnestra] is seeking equality. Children will not be born from equality, not will it empires be  built or frontiers expanded, for the pure peace of equality begets nothing. It is all aftermath, predicated on the death of what was before. To beget requires the domination of one thing by the other, the domination of female form by male content; then, in order to nurture what has been begotten, the reverse. Clytemnestra wants no more begetting. She wants the peace of equality but to get it she will have  to use violence. To reach aftermath, first there has to be the event itself. (54-5)

The world Creon has inherited is a post-authority, post-familial world: it is aftermath, and Creon has the job of governing it. But how do you make people obey you, respect you, believe in you and in the reality you represent? Creon's idea is that you give  commands and then don't turn back on them, no matter what--a strategy the modern parent, presiding over chaos and unrule, occasionally adopts, only to find themselves insisting on a course of action long after its necessity and even its rationality have passed. (103)

Narrative is the aftermath of violent events. It is a means of reconciling yourself with the past. He says, the violence in the Odyssey is a story told afterwards, in a cave. (121)-Z

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk is greedily treated as a 'memoir' by reviewers (see here; here) and puff profiles. While understandable (the publisher's material encourages it), this focus is peculiar because it ignores the guidance of the title (which is akin to an essay or, to be self-referential, a blog post). This focus on it being a memoir is a bit unfortunate not just because it leads to mistakenly conflating Cusk's biography with narrated details. One example is Camilla Long's careless hatchet job ("the book is crammed with mad, flowery metaphors and hifalutin creative-writing experiments").

Unfortunately, these reviewers ignore the central narrative and structural puzzle of the novel (which reads as a series of lengthy autobiographical blog posts). This is odd because the narrative itself calls attention to the issue: "form...conceals truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. (55) The first seven chapters read as would-be-memoir of the aftermath of a divorce; while the first-person narrator makes no effort at fairness (and seems to think it is deeply ingrained but false move when applied to marriage), the narrative and narrated chronology seems fairly straightforward (with meditative reflections on Greek tragedy thrown in). It can't be fully straightforward because the first chapter has (fractal-like) the same title as the book. But the eight chapter "XYZ" is a series of very short vignettes involving three unnamed men (XYZ): one a therapist (Y), but the other two (X/Z) are undefined: are they hints of an affair that destroyed the narrator's marriage, are they post-marital flings, or are they mere possibilities? It's hard to say. Long is probably right that X is the divorced husband at a later date (see for some evidence here), but we can't be sure.

However, nearly all the reviews (except Long's) are silent on the final (ninth) chapter, which is told from the perspective of a Belgian (I think)* live-in nanny, who grew up in a (shall-we-say) unstable family environment and who witnesses the break-up of her host family in England. But that family is -- pace Long --  not the narrator's family. The book ends with the live-in nanny moving to another family in London (also not the one narrated in the  first seven chapters). Why do I think the nanny is, in some sense, a different story altogether? For two reasons: (i) the division of labor as seen by her in the home does not fit the division of  labor narrated in the first seven chapters; (ii) the emotional/physical collapse of the mom occurs in the nanny's perspective before the divorce and not after (as the narrator implies). Obviously, the two reasons are not decisive; part of the point of the first-person narrative is that the narrator is unreliable in some sense, unwilling to tell us the causes of the marriage's collapse nor quite capable of explaining her own dissolution. The problem is, if we treat the final chapter as the perspective of an impartial bystander, we're still stuck with imperfect access to the underlying facts; the live-in nanny's comprehension of English is so mediocre (she flunked her language test), that she is not a reliable witness. That is, the novel enacts the slipperiness of establishing the narratable 'facts.' 

I do not mean to suggest that it is not a memoir (I don't care); nor that it is not a meditation on feminism, the novel introduces the theme repeatedly at the start of the novel, and transformative experience;** nor that it is not an extended analysis of divorce from the vantage point of parents and children ("I have two homes...and I have  no home" (64-5)); nor that it does not raise complex questions about the ethics of writing about people known to the author.+ But here I want to close with a reflection on the title. I have to admit that when I first read 'aftermath,' I thought of it as saying, after numbers or after counted order, that is, (a species of) disordered meaninglessness. At times the novel affirms this thought: in reflecting on marriage, the narrator writes, "It is not to dismantle but to conserve it that strength is required, for it will come apart in an instant. It will come apart, that image, and what remains not a new or different image but a pile of pieces that mean nothing at all." (69)

But in the novel we are reminded of the etymology which refers to a seasonal moment after mowing. And the temporal framework is circular. Soon again there will be sowing and another harvest. As the narrator's teacher (Ms. Lewis) insists the aftermath is the unwanted -- by the propertied farmer -- grass after the harvest, which then needs to be mowed too in an eternal return. It is the yearly reminder of the denial that nature does nothing in vain; that from the perspective of man's estate of nature guarded by a benevolent divine there is, in fact, no sufficient reason for this presence and  subsequent activity. It is necessary, but pure waste.

Paradoxically, this perspective, the official story on  aftermath, is introduced by an authority figure (the teacher) who herself seems to advocate for a reversal of values (namely to treat aftermath as the site of freedom and creativity). That is to say, the novel articulates the battle between at least two takes on the nature of marriage, which throughout is treated not just as the ground of traditional political unity (peace by one name, institutionalized violence by the other), but itself also as a site of order, where in one conception one becomes complete in it, whereas in the other, one is annihilated by it. One is tempted into thinking that these are attributes of the same substance.++

Near the end of the book (with a nod to Plato),*** aftermath is equaled with the post-violence survival narrative. It's a backward looking. Reconciliation need not involve  truth. If we listen to its etymology, narrative reconciliation is a renewal (we tell again in order to give birth to something new that represents the old). It is tempting to see in aftermath a form of therapy (and throughout the novel we're invited to do so), but even so, I am more inclined to see it as a means to exert control. Why? Not just because the narrator tells us on the first page, in commenting on one of her daughter's love  of jigsaws and the other's building of silent card houses, that she sees these activities as 'attempts to exert control.' Aftermath is a way to control the narrative, not just about the failed marriage (and perhaps the causes of failure), but also to keep a sense of order while the narrator is presenting us with evidence of her engulfing  dissolution (anorexia, depression, numbness, alienation, etc.)--she seems close to being destroyed by a species of post traumatic stress.  From that perspective the whole narrative is an act of self-definition required by a state of emergency. This last thought is a bit fanciful, I admit, but on the opening page we are told that An argument is only an emergency of self-definition.

That is, we philosophers tend to tell ourselves that arguments are means to compel agreement; I am not the first to note the role of argument as a means of forcing the other into submission or silence. The novelist replies that argument is a means, an exceptional one, to self-definition. And, indeed, arguments never succeed at silencing others; but if we own arguments (as Socrates urged), they make explicit who we (ahh) come to be. To the novel's credit we are left unsure if that's a viable route.

 

 

 

 

Middlemarch, Spinoza, and Zadie Smith's Wisdom

In fact, her ability to animate ideas is so acute she is able to fool the great Henry James into believing Fred Vincy a commonplace young man who has wandered into Middlemarch with no purpose, when really nothing could be further from the truth...Fred is in love with a bright, plain girl called Mary Garth who is not convinced Fred is worthy of her love. On reflection, Fred agrees. Of the Three Love Problems that dominate Middlemarch...Fred would seem the least edifying. Yet to Eliot all were equal, and of equal interest, and worthy of an equal number of pages. All her people are striving towards the fullest truth, the least partial good. Except when Eliot thought of striving, she had more in mind than Austen's hope of happy marriages, or Dickens's dream of dream of resolved mysteries. She was thinking of Spinoza's kind of striving, conatus...Instead, wise men pursue what is best in and best for their own natures. They think of the good as dynamic, unpredictable combination of forces, different in practice, for each of us, It's that principle that illuminates Middlemarch. Like Spinoza's wise men, Eliot's people are always seeking to match what is good in themselves in joyful combination other good things in the world...

It's worth looking again at the facts, which means, in the world of Middlemarch, the emotional facts. Fred is in love with a good girl, a girl who does not love him because he is not worthy; Fred agrees with her. Maybe the point is this: of all the people striving in Middlemarch, only Fred is striving for a thing worth striving for...He is not as dim as he seems...What Fred surmises of the good he stumbles upon almost by accident, and only as a consequence of being fully in life and around life, by being open to its vagaries simply because he is possession of no theory to impose upon it. In many ways bumbling Fred is Eliot's ideal Spinozian subject. Here is Gilles Deleuze on Spinoza's wise man; he could just as well be speaking of Fred:

That is why Spinoza calls out to us in the way he does: you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination--

Zadie Smith (2009) "Middlemarch and Everybody" in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, 34-36 (emphases in original).

Today is Arnon Grunberg's birthday, so I decided to write a Digression about essay-writing philosophical novelists.+

The mark of a great essay is that it both invites us to read (or see/visit) the book (site, etc.) discussed and illuminates us on its own terms. Smith teaches us to read and re-read "Middlemarch...a book about the effects of experience that changes with experiences. It gets better as you age, being, as Woolf, knew, 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.'" (3o) I have long liked Woolf's quip, but it is nice to see it illuminated by Smith by way of correction of the youthful Henry James's inability to understand Eliot's novel.

This is not to deny that Smith does not also give James "his due" (38) -- in 1873 he had claimed that "it is an indifferent whole" [she does not quote this, but hints there is truth in it] --, but she is gentle toward James. Smith does not mock the romantic providentialism he exhibits when he writes about Dorothea, "She exhales a sort of aroma of spiritual sweetness, and we believe in her as in a woman we might providentially meet some fine day when we should find ourselves doubting of the immortality of the soul." After reading Smith it is obvious that James, who could sense the "philosophic" and guessed, in part, the mixture of "Darwin and Huxley" -- missed the important bits, that is, not the metaphysics, but the art of living, in Eliot's Spinozism.

There are, really, two distinct claims in Smith's quoted treatment of Middlemarch. (There is a larger issue in her essay that I ignore here: the fate of being on "the border of the new" (40) qua novelist.) First, the embrace of radical epistemic uncertainty -- Vincy's bumbling "accident"; Deleuze's lack of foresight -- that must be combined with a kind of practical decision-ism when opportunity presents itself to attain the good for one's nature. Moral luck, and bad luck, is ineliminable, but it takes considerable wisdom and self-knowledge to recognize and grasp the good in one's fortune. In his review of Middlemarch, James is so preoccupied with the fate of the intellectual and noble Lydgate (and, amazingly, James faults Eliot for seeming to prefer Ladislaw over Lydgate, who he takes to be "the real hero of the story" [again Smith is too generous to point this out]),* that he completely misses this theme.

So far so good.

But, second, Smith also implies that Fred Vincy's wisdom is a product not just of an immersion in life, but also, -- and this is troubling--, a lack of theoretical knowledge: "only as a consequence of being fully in life and around life, by being open to its vagaries simply because he is possession of no theory to impose upon it." This could easily be read as suggesting that the theoretical life is itself a source of foolishness. To be sure, I agree with Smith's Eliot that (a) we should in our theorizing and writing not bias toward those alike to us, and that (b) imposing a theory on life is a source of great foolishness [recall Hume on De Witt]--one all too common to intellectual and educated people, our people, really. But here she comes close to suggesting, also, that taking theory and theorizing seriously prevents one from the proper form of receptivity toward grasping opportunity in life: theory makes one unwise in action. How to understand then the wisdom of Eliot, who took Spinoza's Ethics so seriously. Are we being told that she could write persuasively about wisdom without being wise? Is she really, at bottom, on the side of the poets against the philosophers?

It is only a partial consolation that Smith allows Eliot a species of practical knowledge conducive to the good life: "In Middlemarch loves enables knowledge. Love is a kind of knowledge..." (37) In fact, the knowledge we gain is the skill at sympathizing with other (Eliot was also quite clearly a careful reader of Adam Smith). The skills that go into such sympathetic ability (e.g. "to feel another's pain as if it were his own" (37)) are, indeed, practical and theoretical; some other time I'll explore if these sympathetic skills can partially vindicate a theoretical life. 

 

On Being a Hypocrite; or on True Teaching

I could swagger about Fortitude and the Contempt of Riches as much as Seneca himself.---Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (recall).

Far different is the purpose of those who are speech-making and trying to win the approbation of a throng of hearers, far different that of those who allure the ears of young men and idlers by many sided or fluent argumentation; philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak; it exacts of every one that he should live according to his own law [facere docet philosophia, non dicere, et hoc exigit, ut ad legem suam quisque vivat, ne orationi vita dissentiat vel ipsa inter se vita], that his life should not be out of harmony with his words, and that, further, there is unity to the color of one's actions [unus sit omnium actio num color].  This, I say, is the highest duty and the highest proof of wisdom, - that deed and word should be in accord, that a man should be equal to himself under all conditions, and always the same.--Seneca, Letter XX (slightly modified translation).

I am no stranger to falling short of my personal ideals (recall) and know plenty of well-established professional philosophers who are moralistic yet routinely exhibit lack of basic decency. I know extremely kind and generous folk who advocate hardship and worse for less articulate and connected others (in the name of utility, good governance, etc.). I know courageous advocates of civic liberties who fail their students by their incapacity at sublimating intellectual eros. So I did not expect it to find it so difficult to continue my series on Seneca's Letters and write about Letter XX in which Seneca addresses the discord between words and actions (and, thus, extends the theme of Letter XIX, recall). Given that Seneca is notorious for the mismatch between words and deeds, it is tempting to read this letter as Seneca's Apologia Pro Vita Sua addressing the known criticisms of his activities under Nero in which he grew rich in the service of a tyrant.

Upon extended reflection: the key to the letter is the implied distinction between being a teacher and being a philosopher (aka being wise and, explicitly, being great-souled [ingentis animi est]). Seneca identifies himself as a teacher not as a philosopher. He teaches, not unlike Plato [and unlike Nietzsche], in part, by pointing away toward proper exemplars (e.g., Demetrius the Cynic) and by drawing on Epicurean themes. Such exemplars have a three-fold function: (a) they offer an existence-proof that a comportment with integrity, that is, a harmony between right action and words, is humanly possible; (b) he holds up exemplars to be emulated (recall my treatment of Letter 5); (c) it allows him to deflect, in part, the charge of hypocrisy--for he very clearly implies that he falls short of the comportment with integrity while not being so corrupted (by the axiology of the marketplace/public [recall Letter 14]) that he cannot recognize true wisdom in others.

More important, from (c) it follows that (d) Seneca thinks he can bypass the more fundamental version of Meno's paradox (see Abe Stone); he can teach some virtue to Lucilius without being fully virtuous himself in a context where, as he implies, ordinary social institutions do not facilitate even such limited virtue. We may even add that Seneca shows some wisdom by recognizing his own limitations not only in light of exacting pure standards of integrity, but also in light of available human instantiations. (It is, thus, important that Demetrius is not merely a mythical or historical figure.)

So, Seneca knows he falls short of and he does not hold himself up as the standard for comportment with integrity. Thus the traditional charge against Seneca is (somewhat) misguided. Seneca may even hint that he knows intimately what he is warning against (do as I say, not as I did) and, thereby, (against Deleuze's protests) become a better teacher for some pupils (say, ambitious types like Lucilius). It is, after all, by no means obvious that Demetrius un-mediated by, say, a Seneca would be recognized as wise by an untutored pupil. Sincerity of even the noblest expressions does not guarantee moral approval, after all.

Ever since Socrates's trial we know that students' actions can reflect badly on the quality and reputation of their teachers' activities. Seneca embraces this fact--again, like Plato who shows us some of Socrates's more disastrous teaching methods (that's compatible with admiration of Socrates). So, it turns out, that Seneca is closer to the modern university professor than one might initially have thought. Like most of us, he is no holy man, and he does not expect to be evaluated as one.

Rather, Seneca correctly expects to be evaluated, in part, on the consequences of his teaching on his pupils (that is, the addressee and other, later readers of his Letters) and the societies their actions help shape. This is no eternal moral-get-out-of-jail-free-pass. Rather (at least late in life) Seneca embraces that he lives by a rather demanding standard that in addition to complex skills requires considerable luck (recall) and turns each of our teaching and writing lives into trials in which we are judged, fairly (with satire) or not, as causes of unknown (and potentially extended) multiplicity of effects (recall).* We may, then even say -- echoing Spinoza (Ethics 1p36 [recall]) -- that Seneca claims there is true glory [mea enim gloria erit] in being in virtue of such effects.

 

A Further note On the Trigger Warnings Controversy

[T]hey bewitch our souls...so that I myself, Menexenus, when thus praised by them feel mightily ennobled, and every time I listen fascinated I am exalted and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome. And as I am generally accompanied by some strangers, who listen along with me, I become in their eyes also all at once more majestic; for they also manifestly share in my feelings with regard both to me and to the rest of our City, believing it to be more marvellous than before, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker. And this majestic feeling remains with me for over three days: so persistently does the speech and voice of the orator ring in my ears that it is scarcely on the fourth or fifth day that I recover myself and remember that I really am here on earth, whereas till then I almost imagined myself to be living in the Islands of the Blessed,—so expert are our orators.--Plato, Menexenus, 235a-c*

It is odd to read about the scorn ('new infantilism') heaped by self-described friends of a humanistic or classical education -- professors and commentators alike -- on the request for trigger warnings by college students encountering poetic and graphic scenes of rape in their required courses (recall this post to which the current one is a footnote). For in their ridicule, these cosmopolitan, mature types suggest that they do not really believe the once common rhetoric of the transformative potential of literature and the other arts. From their public utterances we may  infer that these false shepherds of culture appear to practice a detached, ironic stance toward the texts and material they teach and study; they seem literally unable to imagine to be swept away by poetry and rhetoric, to be un-moored from one's own identity by film,  and to be captivated by another's train of thought in a work of fiction. They understand themselves as stewards of traditional learning, but they reveal that they read with detached minds and closed hearts who are unable, it seems, to learn from their students' searching questioning.   

That works of art, including many thought canonical, can be dangerous to their readers and the society that permits them is an un-cool thought--one that gets suppressed by the banality that pases for a literary education. For, too many of our teachers assume that by branding a work 'fiction' we have created a convention by which it is treated as harmless speech a mere diversion without anything at stake (recall my exchange with the Dutch novelist Grunberg). But dictators and censorious religions (not to mention Plato) know better--imaginative works can inflame the soul and worse--some of them known to incite killing (cf. Charlie Hebdo).

One belittles our civic religion, which embraces a hard-won freedom of speech protected by law and people's hearts, by failing to recognize what is at stake in it: it is not just intended to protect "the language and imagery" of beautiful and harm-free speech. We do not get the (for lack of a more lovely term) freedom-enhancing effects of texts without risking incurring some of the dangerous effects; this is both why free speech is nowhere absolute and the limits of it are constantly contested as well as why the nature of responsible speech is of recurring significance in philosophy and the arts. A true educator recognizes the fragility of the experiment in living that occurs when student and teacher are receptive to (well) the demonic.

The above is not meant to deny the legitimate concern over the spread of trigger warnings if, as is likely, these become yet another instrument of the rent-seeking technocrats that run the modern university by which they curtail and intimidate professors and instructors (see here).** But if one treats the Liberal Arts as merely about lovely language and escapist fantasy, one should not be surprised if the rest of society decides one is dispensable.

 

On Not Being a Movie Star

Once, about twenty years ago, I appeared in a short movie, Left Shoe,+with Gael Garcia Bernal.* In what has to count as one of the greatest casting blunders ever, I was the star of the film (which flopped) and not him. At the time I had already decided to become a college philosophy professor; but as I struggled through the first few months of graduate school, after we shot the movie, I would amuse myself with selecting philosophical quotes to accompany my Hollywood star/footprints down the road.  Until I re-read Grunberg's summary of the movie's conceit, I had assumed I had played a traveling salesman selling foot-materials; but I just learned that I was supposed to be "a shampoo salesman." (Perhaps that explains my generally bewildered look in the film?)

The morning of the shoot, I was introduced to Leonard Cohen's Take This Waltz and, of course, First We Take Manhatten, while we were driving from Queens (with a stop in the Village to pick up Garcia Bernal)) to Coney Island to shoot the film. I always think of my failed career as a movie star and that glorious Summer day when I hear Cohen.

During the shoot, a crowd gathered at a distance when I shot the scene in which I walk into the ocean and find a floating body part. After we completed that scene, we even got applause. An old lady with a faint Russian accent walked up to me (my suit dripping with sea water), and told me she thought it was a brilliant campaign commercial, and would vote for me in the next election.

Novels are bad for you!

From learning to pity the misfortunes of the heroes of our novels, we wind up feeling too much pity for our own.--Borges (The End, translated by A. Hurley) [HT Michael Deckard]

If one grants that moral education is a possible consequence of engaged reading of novels, then an immoral education is also possible. This thought is familiar enough from Platonizing concerns about being stained in enduring fashion by entering into and, thereby imitating, characters that practice wickedness (recall). Borges takes the less familiar road, as if to say, who needs Philosophers to indict poetry?* His narrator does not explain how practicing pitying (fictional) others may lead to too much practice of pity of self. The problem may be that reading cultivates excessive reliance on a single virtue or psychological mechanism (let's call this the overshooting thesis); but upon second thought, I suspect that the point is that novels do not cultivate other virtues or psychological mechanisms that prevent excessive self-pity (let's call this the incomplete virtues thesis); such virtues are self-command, patience, cultivated hatred, etc. --unsurprisingly, these are all exhibited in The End.

To avoid confusion: having no self-pity at all -- Borges's Recabarren -- is also excessive. It may easily turn into habituated un-reflective "living in the present, as animals do." That is, pity, of others and self, may, as Adam Smith teaches, prompt thought; in particular if properly cultivated it will make us seek out the contextually salient causes that prompt our response.**

One may think that it is a cruel joke to interpret Borges's The End as a (lyrical) contest with Plato's Meno about the very possibility of moral education (see this piece by Stone). It is [spoiler alert], after all, about a deadly duel in which a prior killing is to be avenged. But the duel is preceded by a short exchange:

"I gave [my kids some advice," he said, "which is something you can never get too much of and doesn't cost a lot. I told them, among other things, that a man ought not to go spilling another man's blood."

A slow chord preceded the black man's response: "Good advice, too. That way they
won't grow up to be like us."

"Not like me, anyway," said the stranger

Is it possible to teach virtue if one is not virtuous by saying, as it were, Do as I say, but do not imitate me? Given the rarity of genuine virtue the hopeful answer to this question  is 'yes;' because I am professional educator, self-interest and public prudence tempt me into claiming the affirmative, but it is unclear what the grounds of such hope might be.+

On a Reading List When (Academic) Good Fortune Runs Out

Yesterday, at an informal fund-raiser, I bumped into a former student who had taken a seminar on Coetzee that I had co-taught with the Dutch novelist, Arnon Grunberg, half a decade ago. (Grunberg was the star attraction of the fund-raiser, so I wouldn't suggest a role for chance here.) I am bad with names, but decent with faces, so even though I couldn't recall his name, I recognized him -- a tall man now -- at once (despite the beard he has fashionably allowed to be grown); we re-introduced and I was reminded his name is 'Bram Esser.' We talked a bit about the poor sales of the book, Snelwegverhalen, (that is, 'highway stories,' but it can also mean: 'quickly-gone-stories') about Dutch highways that Bram has published since I saw him last. I was surprised by this lack of good fortune because the book had gotten considerable local media attention.

At one point I wasn't sure what to say, so I mentioned that a few years after the Coetzee class he had attended, I gave a public lecture about Coetzee's "What is a Classic?" and related it to magnanimity in Middlemarch, Grunberg's Huid en Haar (which has not been translated yet), and some of Ruskin's musings. I had put a lot of effort into the lecture, which I delivered as a keynote at an interdisciplinary conference (in Dutch). It fell flat. And when I offered it for publication a few years later, one of my departmental colleagues rejected it (with very kind words) for a collection he was editing. Bram reminded me that we had not, in fact, read "What is a Classic?" in the Coetzee seminar.  I mumbled something that I may have read it in preparation of or during the seminar. After an awkward silence (well, I thought it was awkward), I added that I had used a paragraph or two of that ill-fated lecture in a forthcoming preface to a volume on Neglected Philosophical Classics I edited. 

I was about to launch into explaining how I used Coetzee's essay to help characterize in some sense, the nature of a philosophical classic, when Bram asked me, if since our class, I had read Paul West's The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg--a book that plays a considerable role in Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and also in our seminar discussion (even though it had not been assigned) [I have mentioned it a few times, see especially here and here].

'Have you?'

'No, except for some of the strangulation-with-a-wire scenes.'

'Me neither..I am afraid to do so.'

I paused. I wondered if I should ask him more about his, rather partial interest in West's novel.

Instead, I added that 'afraid' was the wrong word. I said that I would read West's novel when I have less good fortune.

I surprised myself, why would I say that?

It's not that I am afraid to be contaminated by the malice of West's novel. The malice is visible all around us if you allow yourself to think about it: every day I bike along the beautiful Prinsengracht and see the long line of visitors to Anne Frank's house--kitty-corner from where I live. (These days the city is covered with posters advertising the musical based on her diaries.) She was betrayed by somebody who may still be alive among our neighbors. One of my favorite places to write philosophy, Vinnies, is itself kitty-corner with the West-Indisch Huis (West Indian House), the former head-quarters of the Dutch West India company--built with money earned on the slave-trade and sugar plantations. It's a charming place for weddings as well as meetings by Dutch academic bureaucracies with money to burn. My son and I played voetbal in the playground alongside it yesterday in the sun that could not make much of a dent in the very late-fall-frost.

 I have long stored up a list of works for that broadening-my-mind-sabbatical I keep promising myself (careful re-reading or first reading of all of George Eliot's novels, Montaigne's Essays, D'Alembert's Encyclopedia, all of Plato, etc). Evidently, I am also storing up some works for when my fortune has run out: upon reflection, listed on my 'nadir-reading list' is not just that West novel, but also Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, The Triple Mirror Of The Self (which I have already read once, but am terrified to read again), and a few others.

Bram helpfully suggested West's work would be a final shot in the neck. On the contrary, I said, I expect West's novel to cheer me up then.