mills

A syphilitic Friedrich Nietzsche in the chapter of Ecce Homo titled “Why I am so Clever,” though I should add that this is an example of an idea -amor fati- not without its value despite the increasing dementia of its author. I came across it again while reading Wikipedia’s brief treatment of Nietzsche’s comments concerning eternal return, which related to the previous post.

That idea is probably familiar to most from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which questions at its outset whether the lightness of an existence that vanishes irretrievably into the past is terrible or fortunate; would it better for everything that happens to happen eternally, so to speak?

It’s worth noting that physicists would dispute the assumptions these questions make about time; the great Unburying the Lead quoted Albert Einstein recently:“For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

Update: Nick Barr noted that “the whole syphilis thing is probably untrue,” an assertion which surprised me as the last time I read Nietzsche it seemed fairly widely accepted; much of his lifelong medical trouble is explained by such a diagnosis. But Barr has scholarship on his side, and I thank him for the correction; it appears now to at least be again in dispute, and strong arguments against syphilis have been made.

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. Sebald’s novels, it is said, are thematically haunted by the Holocaust even when they do not overtly treat it as a subject. It is perhaps true as well that the Holocaust haunts his novels because as the destruction of a culture and its memory par excellence it exemplifies his real thematic obsession: memory and its disappearance.

That said, the sentence quoted above is exemplary of his style: an ordinary observation of a European scene imbued metaphorically with sorrow or horror. As I read it, I thought of how uniquely we are marked by our metaphors, or by their absence.

When you see a crowded train platform, what do you see?

• “…people…fleeing from a city doomed or already laid waste”?
• Enthusiastic moshers heaving to some thrumming cacophony?
• A scarcely distinguishable mass of froth and scum?
• The long-sought crowd into which you can disappear?
• Enormous atoms in a kind of Brownian motion?
• The lonely wanderers of urban life as painted by George Tooker?

Probably something else yet: the process of metaphor-making, which can be rather automatic, is a highly individual one, as one learns in childhood when one describes clouds with a friend: dinosaurs, cars, houses, letters. The last point in the list is notable: when one sees Tooker’s work, it affects one’s metaphor-making dramatically, a process described in this lovely quote posted by Meaghano.

How creative one’s metaphors are varies, but so too does one’s instinct towards metaphorical thought. I imagine many think not of imagery but of description: all these people! Or analysis: it must be rush hour, or perhaps a station is closed. Or some combination, etc.

In Immortality, Milan Kundera says he would like

“…an experiment that would examine, by means of electrodes attached to a human head, exactly how much of one’s life a person devotes to the present, how much to memories, and how much to the future. This would let us know who a man really is in relation to his time. What human time really is. And we could surely define three basic types of human being depending on which variety of time was dominant…”

He calls this a form of the aforementioned “existential mathematics.” I would like a poetic psychology which could class humans by their instinct for metaphors, how variegated and constant it is, and whether it delights or upsets them. Surely for every metaphor that amuses or engages there is one, like Sebald’s, that disturbs or discomfits, triggering through the imagination a panic attack or despair.

Irish Murdoch, quoted in an excellent post by B. Michael titled “Art, Love, and Sex - Iris Murdoch.” Murdoch, a novelist as well as a philosopher, makes this assertion against art in conjunction with a Platonic emphasis on the importance of love, which B. Michael very lucidly explains: if transcendence is our goal, does art offer a false shortcut while love, and sex, are better starting points for “moral attention”?

It is an interesting and open question, and I’ll only say this: I have sometimes felt in museums like someone looking for a clue, some bit of sculpted gnosis which will help me ahead of myself, beyond myself, as though this or that painting or novel can spare me the anguish of experience and bring me to an unearned understanding. This is art as a tool for attaining depth one lacks.

On the other hand: some speak of art as a means to do just that, and philosophy might be considered the same: we encode more wisdom into our species and at a faster rate than painful experience, which must be lived by every individual, permits. We learn by doing, but by sharing we spare others. When Kundera says art takes suffering and redeems it by turning it into existential wisdom, we might note that religion, philosophy, and all humanist disciplines attempt to do the same.

B. Michael’s post is worth reading.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. Sebald’s prose alternates between the most luminous, affecting descriptions imaginable, not at all lyrical but structured with unfailing prosaic perfection and a visual density that draws his subjects in your mind almost against your will, and ponderous, subtly amusing formulations of a very Germanic sort. Above, one of the latter that struck me.

Through the various concerns of Sebald and his fictional character Austerlitz runs the quality of futility: whether in shatteringly fruitless pursuit of a history annihilated by the Holocaust or laboring vainly to recompose lost memories from his own life, the terrible elusiveness of the past -which literally does not exist and whose barest outlines fade rapidly from mind despite this or that artifact or record- reduces Austerlitz to exhausted despair. Once one loses continuity with one’s past there is no recovering it, and it is on such continuity that our sense of identity is built.

The furious efforts of totalitarianism in the 20th century to subsume us into their “all-embracing and absolute perfection” involved attacks on identity and historical continuity alongside the actual slaughter of innocents. Nearly as vile as the Communist and Nazi atrocities were the sophisticated measures undertaken to deprive both ordinary citizens and the persecuted of their identity, their sense of connection to the past. The real meaning behind revolution is more than the assumption of power: it is the placement of a caesura, the cutting of the ties to the past. Doctoring photographs, making new calendars, razing buildings, dispossessing business owners, evicting minorities: it is not mere symbolism.

The destruction of culture, of history, and of human beings for the perfecting of scientifically inarguable ideologies went on quite apart from the “chronic dysfunction” of such systems: further evidence that it is the assertion of “being undeniably right,” rather than the quality of being right or wrong, that permits authoritarianism. Error and futility define us.

Milan Kundera famously said that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Inside of a society with sufficiently ambitious control systems, whether it is Marxist-Leninist or National Socialist or Wahhabist or otherwise in possession of absolute truth and an eschatological sense of its inevitability, this is a struggle most lose. They are erased and forgotten, or reduced to figures in textbooks which recount only the “chronic dysfunction” of failed movements without illuminating how it is that, again and again, we rationally conclude that we must kill in pursuit of an “absolute perfection” as elusive as memory; I think it is because, like memory, it is integral to our identity, and for that we will kill readily.

Will, quoting (and posting a photo of) a favorite piece of New Orleans graffiti. A perpetually interrogatory relationship with one’s conclusions can lead to the archetypal paralysis of Hamlet, but it is a crucial element of real humanism and the only possible defense against arrogance and intellectual atrophy.

The always-excellent Rabsteen added an amusing anecdote and, to complement a cited Karl Popper aphorism, this quote from Betrand Russell: “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” Immediately we see the tension between doubt and self-assurance, between the courage to question oneself and the courage to not.

Not long ago, Jeff Miller and I had an appropriately inconclusive discussion about the problem of certainty, of ideological passion: it drove the Inquisition and the abolitionists, the Nazis and the Founders, Lenin and Gandhi. Milan Kundera noted that the eternal precondition of tragedy is the “existence of ideals that are considered more valuable than human life,” but that is also one of the components of historical progress, individual transcendence, and heroism. For every erroneous conviction there may be one that advances us all. Certainty, then, cannot be the enemy; only error can. And, for the umpteenth time, “Error is the central feature of human existence.”

I’m fortunate to be wrong all the time, often in crucially important ways (as many here can attest). This idea is thus never far from my mind, although it scarcely saves me the frequent embarrassment. But it does remind me of my limitless fallibility, a lesson I cannot learn too often (apparently!).

Eugenio Montale, quoted by James. This is not a condemnation of experimentation, but an observation about the relationship between an experiment’s purpose and its result’s endurance. The purpose must not be the experiment itself.

Milan Kundera said that the “sole raison d’être of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”

As a fan of much abstract and experimental art, Kundera echoes Montale: both assert that whatever the formal nature or concerns of a work, its attention and aesthetic must be directed towards apprehending or expressing something like knowledge or truth, and in a new way. The truth pursued is existential, experiential, human, by and large; this is the most important sort. Indeed, Kundera says that the obligation to seek it is moral and that art which fails to meet this standard is not just “pulp” or “ordinary” or “bad” but in fact immoral.

This is radical among men as modern as they because it is so traditional; in my view, it is also true.

Milan Kundera, The Curtain. Almost all discussions about the aesthetic values must address this problem: are judgments about art subjective or not? It is common enough in our time to consider everything subjective, but this is not so: indeed, it is the supposition of objective aesthetic values that permits art to have historical continuity in the first place, despite being the work of many thousands or millions of individuals:

…in the absence of [presupposed objective] aesthetic value, the history of art is just an enormous storehouse of works whose chronologic sequence carries no meaning.

This is clearly not the case, as anyone who knows the full catalog of a band or the arc of a painter’s career will attest; it is even truer when one looks at movements and counter-movements. The history of the arts is comparable to a conversation with consequential threads, and like a conversation this history presupposes certain values; what the content of those values is, whether they are to be celebrated or violated, traced or transgressed, is another matter.

But what is striking about Kundera’s passage, to me, is that he refrains from acting as a philosopher: he does not argue that aesthetic judgments are subjective or objective, but rather than they are in a zone between those categories: each one is a personal wager which aspires to objectivity.

Although most debates about art and aesthetics quickly become debates about the implicit morality, politics, or personality-associations of the debaters, those that don’t still may come to dead ends: someone will say, “Well, it is only your opinion,” or someone else will say, “It’s all just taste.”

And it at once is and isn’t. We may all have our happenstance proclivities, but these are irrelevant except to us. What makes an aesthetic judgment defensible is the degree to which its aspirational objectivity is supported by context, by historical observation, by comparison and contrasting, by references to the internal coherence, logic, structure, and intention of the art in question (I apologize to anyone who strictly supports the notion that there is an ‘intentional fallacy’).

Such qualities buttress an aesthetic judgment, but while it may asymptotically approach objectivity it will never achieve it, not even in the cases of the greatest artists: when Nabakov hates Dostoevsky and Musil finds Kafka dull, you know that understood objectivity is a myth (and those were all roughly contemporary European men!).

Witold Gombrowicz said that any artist is an anti-scientist, and Kundera’s unscientific assertion that aesthetic judgments are personal but not merely subjective, individual gambles communing with the objective, is an excellent example of why I prefer this mode of thought.