A Postcard from Nietzsche's Haus

My blog this week, on Nietzsche, savagery, self-destruction, Lake Sils, Anne Frank, and stones in umbrellas, appears here, at writershouses.com.  This is one of my best essays, on one of the best essayists of all time.

Ten Days of War and Peace

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

"I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness," Prince Andrei says to Pierre in War and Peace.  Life torments from within and without, according to Tolstoy, who, like the writers of the Hebrew bible, compasses the innermost human thoughts adrift in the chaos and cosmic rancor of history.

I'm not a quick reader but I read War and Peace in ten days the February of my sophomore year of college.  I had to write a paper on it, due shortly after the end of spring break, and left it to the last minute.  Each morning I crawled into the nubby gray womb chair in my parents' living room, by a plate-glass window where mammoth icicles hung and birds occasionally broke their necks.  (Poems come to mind: "barbaric glass" and "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.")  I made it my job to read 120 pages a day, pen in hand, and if it took me six hours or even more (it seems to me my pace could really slump dangerously), then I stayed in the chair till it was done.  But it wasn't lonely, because I had Pierre and Andrei with me and all the others who lived in the felled forest of pages of War and Peace.

Biographer Ernest Simmons says "Tolstoy" means fat.  Considering that W&P is 1200 pages, this reminds me of a mason I know who happens to be named Brickley.

That Old Nerd Magic

The Lord of the Rings Box Set by J.R.R. Tolkien

As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker in 2001, “The work of Tolkien is infamously, almost scandalously, bereft of sex.”  Lane says he read it at 11 and 12 years old, exactly when I did--an age when a pretty girl was scarier than an orc.  Lane says that Tolkien's epic particularly suits "those who stand on the crumbling brink of puberty and gaze both forward and back. Tolkien’s characters, like teen-agers, feel at once lonely and sociable ... prey to private fears, and the book itself, though dazzled by innocence, is also hungry to know the worst—to confront all varieties of darkness and dereliction."

I was interested to learn from Lane’s article, written in his characteristic style (plush, jaded, yet sensitive), that Tolkien lost his father when he was three years old.  This lends an added poignance, Lane observes, to Tolkien's idea of "The Return of the King" and I think to the books' whole darkly romantic rationale.

"[A]nd yet to give in to it," Lane writes, "to cave in to it, as most of us did on a first reading—betrays a certain nerdishness, a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly.”  There's clearly partial truth in this, as some Tolkien fans attest with their near-pathological level of absorption with the pretend, with the sexless, latency world of Middle-earth.  On the other hand, Tolkien's power of conjuration derives from his own immersion in reality, if a bookish level of it.  Wizards are not born but made, by long study of their spell books.

Tolkien was a linguist and mythographer who in some cases borrowed names directly from existing traditions, such as the dwarves from the Icelandic Poetic Edda.  And if you compare Tolkien’s description of “Smeagol” in The Fellowship of the Ring to John Milton’s description of fallen angel Mammon in Paradise Lost, it’s obvious that Tolkien consciously fashioned Gollum after Milton’s gold-digging devil (which Milton had in turn borrowed from tradition in the first place).  That’s allusion and artistic theft of the most creative and delicious sort.  The result is that Tolkien, like Milton, like Mammon, taps a vein of ancient gold, treasure refined over many centuries in the alembic of human imaginations, and then of course Tolkien refines and orders it further in his own imagination.  What Lane rightly calls the “outlandish plenitude of Middle-earth” reflects the outlandish plenitude of the big and rangy reality of the human mind and the long human experience on earth.

On looking into The Lord of the Rings again, I find they hold up better than any of my sci-fi favorites from childhood and adolescence (with the possible exception of Douglas Adams).  The scene at the entrance to the Mines of Moria is a wonder.  The little band of travelers confronts a secret entrance to the Mines, and Gandalf says, “these doors are probably governed by words,” meaning that there is an Elvish password—but he might as well be speaking for the books themselves, since they are themselves words that open a secret entrance to a vast and unknown land.

Tolkien insinuates the menace and the vastness of the Mines with great sleight of hand.  He has Gandalf tell of paths ahead that a pony can’t walk because too narrow or too steep, wells and pools that you shouldn’t drink from, and shows us the steps leading up into total darkness and a passageway, but nothing beyond.  When Gandalf magically lights the way, he does so with a light that’s only bright enough to show the floor one step in front of him.  We hear the sounds of Bill the Pony being killed outside the closed doors to the Mines, but don’t get to see it.

The Peter Jackson movie versions, incidentally, employ very different, and to my mind inferior, techniques.  Tolkien hinted where Jackson tries to show everything by the light of noon.  By doing so Jackson restricts the territory available to the imagination, which does a better job than his computer animators ever could.  But Tolkien is thankfully a strong enough writer to purge from memory, after a little rereading, Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood’s painfully uncomplicated, unmagical, uninviting performances and that score that seems to parrot the trumpets of medieval heraldry more than to evoke them.

Moria—a byzantine underground complex of passages, chambers, mansions, bridges, mines, and fire pits resembling Dante’s Hell—was constructed underneath the Misty Mountains thousands of years ago, in “a happier time,” by dwarves that have long since abandoned it to who knows what—the things that live under mountains.  By sending the fellowship to revisit someone else’s creation, now abandoned, it seems to me that Tolkien has set before them his own task: to explore the mysterious, byzantine works created in bygone ages, to open the chasms of darkness within.  This sort of nostalgia mixed with curiosity is in so many ways what characterizes plain old English Romanticism.  Wouldn’t Samuel Taylor Coleridge get Middle-earth?

The Burrower

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl is the burrowing fox of children's literature.  His mind burrows deeper and deeper into a story possibility and discovers within it a world of miniature wonders.  He takes you on a voyage into mental and physical inner space--inside the labyrinth-like chocolate factory, into the underground tunnels of the fantastic Mr. Fox, inside a giant peach (in James and the Giant Peach) through a tunnel, one notes, that looks to James like a foxhole.

Willy Wonka, the fictional proprietor of the chocolate factory, is like Walt Disney a curious mixture of showman, pied piper, puritan, capitalist, and wish-granting genie--a distinctly Anglo-American figure.  The four spoiled children in the book--Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregard, Veruca Salt, and Mike Teavee--inspire Wonka and his creator, Roald Dahl, to an ecstasy of conscientious judgment.  At the same time, Wonka is himself a captain of the childhood obesity industry, an owner of a massive sweatshop of non-union Oompa-Loompas, and a celebrant of treats, goodies, excess, and culinary delight!  The moral miscalibration of the factory is creepier in the Gene Wilder movie than in the book, especially accompanied by Quentin Blake's innocuous illustrations.  But the harsh punishments of the "bad" children always make me a little nervous.  In short, Roald Dahl seems never to have gotten around to that psychoanalysis he needed.  But who has?

Or maybe it's just that he's so good at thinking like children do, in unbridled wishes and dark prophecies, in subterfuges, feints, and magical associations.  Whatever his life-story, his imaginary tales are the best--he always knows when to show and when to tell, he's very sure at the rudder.  They're entertainments of consummate craftsmanship and I don't think it can be held against him that they speak both to children's dreams and to their nightmares as well.  A parent must get his own mind straight if he's to help guide a child through Dahl's moral quandaries: it's good indeed to wait your turn, be grateful for what you get, etc., but the consequence of breaking these rules isn't being sucked up a pipe or shrunk to 2 inches tall; it's good to like the sweet taste of life, and there's no real punishment for that either; and maturity is not avoidance of punishment, as the Taliban would have it, but doing what you yourself think is happy, just, and good.

But even if you're not a vigilant interpreter of the tale, because you're tired or you forgot or you yourself don't know the answer or you don't care (like Pierre), it really doesn't matter, because Dahl's protagonists are always centers of moral calm, a perfectly safe and inviting vehicle for a child to climb into for a journey into the rabbit hole.

In the Penal Colony

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka

A Goodreads friend makes the point that Kafka is funny.  He's probably the funniest writer I've ever read.  Partly the world of paranoid fantasy he depicts is just so familiar to me.  (What?  Is there something wrong with that?  Why are you judging me?)  I have laughed till I was in tears reading Kafka, and supposedly Kafka himself, his friend Max Brod, and others of his tiny Prague literary circle would often laugh quite a bit when he read aloud from his work.  That said, it's true that Kafka's subject matter never strays far from paranoia, self-loathing, loneliness, and self-destruction; so how can it be funny?

Kafka is the great innovator of psychologically sophisticated expressionism.  Many writers before him depicted their dreams and imaginings, but Kafka does so with a certain groundbreaking insight into the psychological motives and irrational methods of dream-life.   And I believe it's that sophisticated faculty of psychological observation that makes him so funny.  More than any other writer, Kafka is alert to the conscience as a potentially overactive and irrational psychical force, a wily, tormenting inner adversary which uses the imagination as its weapon in its internecine wars against the human self.  It's that insight that allows him to parody (and describe) the conscience and its irrational methods, rather than be duped by them and take them at face value.  Borges, who was so influenced by Kafka (he invokes the name "Qaphqa" in his Kafkaesque story "The Lottery in Babylon") is rarely very funny precisely because he chooses to take seriously the perversities perpetrated on him by his conscience.  The Borgesian conscience bricks Borges up in a labyrinth, but unlike Kafka he mistakes the bricks and walls of the labyrinth for reality.  He isn't onto the mischief of his own conscience and cannot laugh at it as Kafka can.  This makes Borges rather lugubrious reading, even though his conscience destroys him and his claim on reality with grace and elegant persuasion.

Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony" is the finest parodic description of overzealous conscience ever written.  It's about a torture device for prisoners (that is faintly reminiscent of Pilates equipment) and the penal colony where prisoners are senselessly tortured.  Try reading the story as an allegory on the structure and function of the human conscience.  Where it says "penal colony" read "conscience."  Where it says "our former Commandant" read "childhood."  Certainly, where it describes the torture device, read "conscience."  "It's a remarkable piece of apparatus," says the officer in the very first line.

"In the Penal Colony," like "Metamorphosis" and the novel The Trial, is of course tragic as well as witty.  Every Kafka story is wise, profound, darkly humorous in some way, and so dense with knowledge, joy, and pain that I have to read a little bit and walk away (it's hard for me to read many Kafka stories in a row).  Some stories are more subdued (like "In the Penal Colony" or "The Hunger Artist"), some more flagrantly ridiculous.  "The Judgment" is flat-out hilarious.  So is "Report to an Academy."  But every Kafka story is brilliant, crafted with a blend of artistic control, imaginative freedom, and fearlessly scientific self-observation unique to Kafka, and realized with a nuance and specificity found only in the greatest of all works of literature.

Philosopher King

Republic by Plato

The Republic is amazing in that it contains inchoate within it many of the major arguments later put forward by Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon, Mill, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein, and many others.  Because of the style--elenchus, or Socratic dialogue--Plato's many profound insights are embedded in a rambling river of desultory, all-night sort of conversation between Socrates and Plato's brothers (or their fictive analogues, anyway) and several other interlocutors who are probably sorry they ever showed up.  The style is, however, fairly easy reading, at least in G.M.A. Grube's translation.

Among the major useful ideas: that our morals, laws, and values may in some cases only reflect the self-interest of the creators of those laws and values (both Nietzsche and Marx's thinking pivots on this fulcrum) and that people may not be aware of this, may take their values for granted without cynicism, and that the ruling class would have it that way; that people's minds contain conflicting attitudes to the same objects and that among these attitudes are--in everyone--"lawless desires," including even an unconscious desire of incest with one's mother and of parricide, and that such desires ought to be subject to rational consideration, modification, and control (Freud would in general agree); that knowledge can be more or less certain and that the philosopher seeks the daylight of certain truth when confronted with the uncertainty of incomplete perception, such as in the case of shadows and darkness; that the pursuit of truth is the highest pursuit.  You will also find such famous passages in here as "The Parable of the Cave"--a useful contribution to epistemology and at the same time the basis for a good deal of other-worldly fabulism--and such famous concepts as the "philosopher-king," the latter half of which George Bush so well exemplified.

The Republic is also, however, pervaded by a corruptive anxiety about the aforementioned "lawless desires" and the threat they represent to the security and well-being of a civic population.  This anxiety drives Plato to some extraordinarily irrational conclusions.  For example, "[H]ymns to the gods and eulogies to good people are the only poetry we can admit into our city.  If you admit the pleasure-giving Muse, whether in lyric or epic poetry, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of law...."  Hmm.  Here is another whopper: "[in a spirit of approval] Nor, I believe, does Homer mention sweet desserts anywhere."  Well, that is, after all, what we so much admire about Homer--he never tempted his readers to binge on chocolate, or even Nilla wafers.  Plato's views on art and education, which make up probably a third or a half of the text--are in general off the reservation.  Plato well understands the deep-seated irrationality of so much instinctual human motivation and the importance of reason, but he overlooks the equal human propensity for irrationality of conscience--the sort that could be said to drive fascism and other forms of political and religious extremism.  But perhaps this irrational censoriousness belonged to Socrates, truly.  Perhaps Plato was blinded by love of his dead mentor, to whom he devoted so much of his life and thought.

The Explanation of Explanations

Aspects of Scientific Explanation by Carl G. Hempel

In 1965 Carl Hempel sought to describe the process of scientific explanation.  While it may not sound like an original or important thing to do, it was.  For now you'll just have to trust me because I'm the sort of person that electively reads books entitled Aspects of Scientific Explanation.

As you might guess, Hempel's account isn't exactly entertaining, nor is it intended to be, but it is the clearest and most organized account of the subject I know.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that "recent discussion [of scientific explanation] really begins with the development of the Deductive-Nomological (DN) model. This model has had many advocates (including Popper 1935, 1959, Braithwaite 1953, Gardiner, 1959, Nagel 1961) but unquestionably the most detailed and influential statement is due to Carl Hempel."

Why is it important to describe or define scientific explanation?  Consider a recent article in The New York Times about the Catholic Church's revival of exorcism.  Here is a passage from the article:

"Some of the classic signs of possession by a demon, Bishop Paprocki said, include speaking in a language the person has never learned; extraordinary shows of strength; a sudden aversion to spiritual things like holy water or the name of God; and severe sleeplessness, lack of appetite and cutting, scratching and biting the skin.  A person who claims to be possessed must be evaluated by doctors to rule out a mental or physical illness, according to Vatican guidelines issued in 1999, which superseded the previous guidelines, issued in 1614."  Progress?  ("Not knowing what to do, we ape our ancestors; the churches stagger backward to the mummeries of the dark ages." --Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Devil possession is a way of explaining the symptoms listed above.  A particular mental illness would be another way.  The explanation that you credit has serious implications for what you do about the problem.

Everybody attempts to explain stuff to themselves and others every single day, and arguments about the validity of various explanations are plentiful in a society with the right to freedom of expression.  The senators from Oklahoma don't believe that global warming is explained by the greenhouse effect--whether they're right or they're wrong, their opinion means something significant in the computation of our national response and therefore means something for the fate of human beings on earth.

If everybody better understood how scientific explanation works, it might help to settle these arguments rationally over the validity or type of various explanations and theories (explanations and theories are much the same thing).  Hempel provides criteria by which one might assess an explanation; one could ask whether an explanation had a scientific character or not or whether it was really an explanation at all versus a different ideational product of the mind.

I was introduced to Hempel and also Hans Reichenbach while researching the scientific validity of psychoanalysis, about which endless debates rage and roar over whether it's science or "pseudo-science."  Like Reichenbach, Hempel suggests that knowledge is generalization from repeated instances (Francis Bacon's "induction by enumeration") and that explanation seeks to define specific observed relationships as instances of general relationships established in principle.  Hempel says of psychology, "[W]hile frequently the regularities invoked cannot be stated with the same generality and precision as in physics or chemistry, it is clear at least that the general character of those explanations conforms to our earlier characterization."   He makes a similar argument regarding the study of history, asserting that good historians explain historical events on the scientific deductive-nomological model, but of necessity with less than mathematical precision.  To denote the somewhat lesser degree of precision, he calls historical explanation an "explanation sketch," which is "scientifically acceptable" since further research can confirm or disconfirm it.  Says Hempel, "Explanation sketches are common also outside of history; many explanations in psychoanalysis, for instance, illustrate this point."  So ... stick that in your Popper and Karl it.  With Carl Hempel on your side, you too can win arguments staged in Goodreads reviews of books that are out of print and unrated.  But at least you yourself will know.