I decided to take a look at Brian Aldiss’ Report on Probability A. Any book that opens with the passage “One afternoon early in a certain January, the weather showed a lack of character.” is going to be nice. I’m sure there will be more on it later, but for now: There’s a stylistic aspect that reminds me of Tolstoy’s “The Death Of Ivan Ilych”.
I hate Kant. Maybe that’s putting things too strongly. Maybe not. No, not. Kant was wrong. About everything. Kant makes me more cranky, the more I read of him. Kant did important (or important-sounding) things for unimportant reasons. Kant was shallow, and sounded deep. Everything Kant said was either obvious or obviously wrong. Kant used big words where he could have used small words. Kant was not stylin’. Kant was what is wrong with modernity. I can’t read Kant. Kant thought homosexuality violated Kant’s categorical imperative (but not for the reasons you might think he thought that). Kant used radical philosophy to maintian the status quo. Kant changed his name from ‘Emanuel’ to ‘Immanuel’. Kant worked hard. Kant agreed with Hitler (or Hitler agreed with Kant). Kant never married. Kant’s givens are not my givens. Kant hid things so that he could keep them. Kant supported racial (racist) heirarchies. Kant was not a clock. Kant probably ate alone.
I’ve just been having some cuddle time with Nietzsche, and poking through Beyond Good and Evil. In #187, Nietzsche says:
There are moral codes that are meant to justify their author to other people; other codes are meant to soothe the author and allow him to be content with himself. Some are intended to nail him to the cross and humiliate him, others to exact vengeance for him, or hide him, or transfigure him and set him above and beyond.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I see Schopenhauer as the “nailing myself to the cross” type. And this, I think, is Schopenhauer’s cross:
This universal conflict is to be seen most clearly in the animal kingdom. Animals have the vegetable kingdom for their nourishment, and within the animal kingdom again every animal is the prey and food of some other. … Thus the will-to-live generally feasts on itself, and is in different forms its own nourishment, till finally the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as manufactured for its own use.
The final answer, the only answer for Schopenhauer, to this universal conflict, is to turn away from it entirely. Since turning away from this picture is turning away from the will, which is turning away from what we are (and everything else is) on the inside, we can only achieve peace by turning our backs on ourselves. This, I think, bears repeating: Schopenhauer demands that the moral person reject themselves. Schopenhauer demands that Schopenhauer say “no” to Schopenhauer.
I’m writing a paper about a group of Russian Christian sectarians that got started in the late 18th century and were actually fairly big in the 19th. The guy who started them, Kondratii Selivanov, was one of the many people who claimed to be tsar Peter III (no really, the number of people who claimed to be Peter III is surprisingly large!), castrated himself, claimed to be Christ returned, became a sort of saint-like figure, and started a movement. They called themselves the Skoptsy, and were an interesting group of people. They weren’t, however, well liked. Even the intelligenty, desperate to start a revolution – so desperate, in fact, that they were courting sectarians – shunned them. Which brings me to my point.
I found a great book about them, Laura Engelstein’s Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale. It was engaging from the start, and after a few pages I flipped ahead to see what was in store, and the book opened to a page with two photographs of fully castrated Skoptsy without clothes. At first I was uncomfortable, squeamish, but then I felt bad for these people. Not because they had castrated themselves for God, something I personally think is weird but, you know, at least consistent with the tenets of their belief system. I felt bad because these people, uncomfortable enough with their sexuality in order to physically remove it from their lives, had been forced by Soviet authorities to take off their clothes and pose for photographs. And they had been forced to do so in order to foment disgust toward themselves and others like them, to betray their beliefs for an ideology which sought to destroy them.
It would be comfortable to chalk this up to the inhumanity of the Soviet Union, but I also felt bad because it rang familiar. It resembled ways in which communities and states around the world, mine included, have used members of undesirable subcommunities against others like them, the ways in which the very signifiers of those subcommunities have been manipulated to evoke indignation and hate, and the ways in which people’s bodies are turned against them by states consistently positing them as foreign to begin with.
Back to reading…
Tolstoy, for me, has always seemed like one of those annoying masses of contradictions. He did all sorts of nice things for his serfs (short of actually freeing them), but had sex with the serf women he owned, and seems to have seen this as his right as their owner. He lived during a time when he could “free” his serfs (they still wouldn’t have the status of free persons, but they wouldn’t be subject to corporal punishment), but instead petitioned the Tsar to abolish serfdom, leaving his own serfs to work for him. until that time His writing was very critical of middle class life, with its card games and parties, but he very much participated in this life himself. But there’s more than that: I just don’t trust him.
His writing is full of bland indictments, implicit claims of moral superiority, religiosity, and I don’t believe that he believed a word of it. I feel, and this might be something peculiar to me, that I’m being lied to when I read him, that there’s something deeply dishonest about him. When he describes a sunset I feel like I’m hearing the description from someone who’s never seen a sunset. Perhaps the only honest sentiment I’ve felt from him is in his descriptions of mediocrity and his (self-)disgust with it.
I guess, most of all, like a lot of nineteenth century Russian intelligenty, I just don’t feel like he knew what he was talking about. His idolization of serfs and serf life was a version of a myth that drove much of Russia for nearly a century, but in the end it wasn’t even a myth that could sustain life, but just another mode of expressing dissatisfaction with this life.
So I was literally forced to read the first book of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation which was, for the most part, fairly uninteresting. Except, that is, for this one part that was really interesting. For someone like me, anyway.
Schopenhauer builds this whole pseudo-Kantian structure around the world, but where Kant divides the world in two for primarily epistemological reasons, Schopenhauer’s interest is mostly metaphysical. Kant says we can know all about one half, and nothing about the other (not even that it exists), while Schopenhauer insists that we can know all sorts of things about both halves. Kant’s main interest in all this halving business is to make room in that inaccessible place for all the philosophically problematic stuff like God or free will. So if its something that he likes, but its hard to deal with philosophically, he calls it noumenal and says we can’t really know anything about it. Since Schopenhauer lets us access the other side, its clear that he’s up to something different.
Wait for it, we’re still not to the interesting part. So for Schopenhauer, the split sort of follows outside/inside lines, which lets us know things in different sorts of ways. I can look at my body as an object and learn all about it, from the outside. But I can also access it from the inside, because its my body: I can know all sorts of things about what it is to be me that just can’t be learned by looking at me from the outside. And for Schopenhauer, everything is like this – there’s something that is what-it-is-to-be-a-rock-from-the-inside, etc.
Still not to the interesting part. So Kant made a big deal about things like space, time, and causation being things that our understanding of the world forces onto it – the world-in-itself (if there is such a thing) has none of those things going on in it. Schopenhauer agrees, but adds that plurality must be one of those things that gets added by our understanding, since plurality can’t exist without space and time. So (maybe you can see where we’re going with this), although on the outside there are desks and people and me, on the inside (where things are as they are without my understanding imposing itself on them), there can be only one thing.
What-it-is-to-be-Khrushchev-on-the-inside is the same as what-it-is-to-be-Khrushchev’s-desk-on-the-inside, and so on. I know, who cares.
So we’re almost to the interesting part. Schopenhauer’s ethical system, built on this picture of the world, revolves around realizing all this through our sense of compassion. That is, compassion lets us see the world as it truly is and leads to a whole other set of bonuses that aren’t really important here. Our compassion is supposed to lead us to reject what-it-is-to-be-everything-on-the-inside, which ends up being the only moral, maybe even the only possible, option once this realization occurs. The thing is, Schopenhauer was a dick. He pushed a woman, Caroline Marquet, living in his apartment building out of the house, injuring her, just because she was irritating him by making noise. He didn’t speak to his mother or sister for eleven years because they didn’t follow his advice on some investment.
So, and for me this is the interesting part, we have this philosopher who makes compassion the cornerstone of his ethics but himself seems particularly uncompassionate. In a sense, the whole World As Will and Representation then becomes an elaborately (and unnecessarily) argued case for Schopenhauer’s being a very, very bad person, on his own terms. More interesting, to me, is that the book was written, published, on Schopenhauer’s account, because he had a very important message to tell the world. It became a marginal classic of Western philosophy. And possibly because a cranky, callous man felt guilty for being such a cranky, callous man.
Apparently, the Russian government (headed by Putin’s Unity Party) has been trying to get rid of its competition: The leading liberal party, Yabloko, has been denied participation in the St. Petersburg elections. For a party to participate, it either needs financial backing or to collect 35,000 signatures, which Yabloko did. The election committee, however, decided that some 12% of those signatures were invalid. Their reasons? Two of the signatures, they claimed, resembled one-another, and were therefore disqualified, even though the signers in question both showed up in court to prove they were separate people who did, in fact, both sign the petition. Another was disqualified because the Russian government did not have the signer’s building number in their address databank. If these resemble the rest of the 12%, there’s some shady business going on in Russia (I know, what’s new) that even trashy nationalistic techno songs can’t prettify.
This, by the way, is why I love Russia:
Ivan Turgenev has a certain awesomeness about him. He starts you off with some realistish narrative, then throws you off with a bizarro description like:
Bazarov frowned. The small and unprepossessing figure of the emancipée was not in the least ugly, but the expression on her face had an unpleasant effect on someone looking at her. One felt like asking her: ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you hungry? Are you bored? Are you shy? What are you all tensed up about?
And then goes back to his usual mode of writing. He’ll also throw in all sorts of Gogolesque trivia like “It is a well known fact that our provincial towns burn down once every five years.” The more I look at him, the less certain I am of how to read him. Is he playing a joke on me? Is he just tangental? Is he hungry? This raises all sorts of suspicions about all sorts of authors. Take Gogol, supposed by Soviet literary critics to have written firmly in the realist tradition (had they not read “The Nose“?):
In this connection the author feels bound to confess that the appetite and the capacity of such men are greatly to be envied. Of those well-to-do folk of St. Petersburg and Moscow who spend their time in considering what they shall eat on the morrow, and in composing a dinner for the day following, and who never sit down to a meal without first of all injecting a pill and then swallowing oysters and crabs and a quantity of other monsters, while eternally departing for Karlsbad or the Caucasus, the author has but a small opinion. Yes, THEY are not the persons to inspire envy. Rather, it is the folk of the middle classes–folk who at one posthouse call for bacon, and at another for a sucking pig, and at a third for a steak of sturgeon or a baked pudding with onions, and who can sit down to table at any hour, as though they had never had a meal in their lives, and can devour fish of all sorts, and guzzle and chew it with a view to provoking further appetite–these, I say, are the folk who enjoy heaven’s most favoured gift. To attain such a celestial condition the great folk of whom I have spoken would sacrifice half their serfs and half their mortgaged and non-mortgaged property, with the foreign and domestic improvements thereon, if thereby they could compass such a stomach as is possessed by the folk of the middle class. But, unfortunately, neither money nor real estate, whether improved or non-improved, can purchase such a stomach.
Gogol definitely has a knack for this sort of thing – the weird, and weirdly compelling, details that drive his stories in ways that plot doesn’t seem capable of. More than just weirdness of details, the lists (and they are often enough just lists) of things he describes are weirdly long: pages of foods, names of serfs, objects in the distance. But, of course, the weird attention to weird details doesn’t stop with Gogol and Turgenev. Take Dostoyevsky:
Sonia’s room looked like a barn; it was a very irregular quadrangle and this gave it a grotesque appearance. A wall with three windows looking out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light. The other corner was disproportionately obtuse. There was scarcely any furniture in the big room: in the corner on the right was a bedstead, beside it, nearest the door, a chair. A plain, deal table covered by a blue cloth stood against the same wall, close to the door into the other flat. Two rush-bottom chairs stood by the table. On the opposite wall near the acute angle stood a small plain wooden chest of drawers looking, as it were, lost in a desert. That was all there was in the room. The yellow, scratched and shabby wall-paper was black in the corners.
Since when does a room’s being a quadrangle, however irregular, make it grotesque? And yet, Dostoyevsky succeeds in making his quadrangular room seem just that. He focuses on the corners, almost nervously noting the one as very acute before he moves on and lists what must be all of the objects in the room, and somehow creates just that illusion of Petersburg as frighteningly off-kilter.
All of this is really, really weird in a way. It seems to me that authors, when they write – good authors, anyway – should be trying to do something, beyond just taking up space, and all three of the above are good, even great, authors. I can’t, though, get a good feel for what the hell they’re trying to do, and yet, it is in these minute, disproportionately described, and varied details that these authors are most compelling to me.
