For Goldie Celeste and Billie Swift on Father’s Day, 2011
… anyone who thinks he can get to know Kant’s philosophy from other people’s accounts has made a terrible mistake. In fact, I would seriously warn people against accounts of this kind, particularly the more recent ones: and in these past few years I have come across descriptions of Kantian philosophy in the works of Hegelians that have entered the realm of complete fantasy. How could minds that have been disfigured and spoiled by Hegelian nonsense while still in the freshness of youth remain capable of following Kant’s profound investigations? … It is futile to look for Kant’s doctrine outside of Kant’s own works; but these are thoroughly instructive, even where he is wrong, even where he is mistaken. His originality ensures that what holds for all real philosophers holds for him as well, and in the highest degree: you can get to know them only through their own writings, not through other people’s accounts. This is because the thoughts of these extraordinary spirits cannot withstand filtration through a common mind. Born behind the broad, tall, beautifully arched brows from under which radiant eyes shine forth, they lose all strength and life and no longer look like themselves when transplanted into the narrow dwellings and low housing for the narrow, depressed, thick-walled skulls where dull gazes peer out towards personal ends. We can even say that such heads act like uneven mirrors in which everything is twisted and distorted; things lose the regular proportions of their beauty and present a grimace. You can receive philosophical thoughts only from their authors: anyone who feels driven to philosophy needs to seek out its immortal authors in the quiet sanctuary of their works. The main chapters of any one of these true philosophers will provide a hundred times more insight into that philosopher’s teachings than the sluggish and cross-eyed accounts of these doctrines that are put out by ordinary minds who, in addition, are generally deeply enmeshed in whatever philosophy is currently in fashion, or in their own pet opinions. But it is amazing how decidedly the public prefers these second-hand descriptions. In fact, an elective affinity seems to be at work here, drawing common natures to what is similar to them, so that they would rather hear from someone like themselves what a great mind has said. This might be based on the same principle as the system of reciprocal instruction, according to which children learn best from other children.
Arthur Schopenhauer
“Preface to the second edition”
The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, pp. 17-18.
Blogless Dan will probably remember “Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Romances,” Prof. Nancy Leonard’s course at Bard College, which we attended together during my freshman year there in 1979. She assigned about ten plays, to be read over the 15-week semester — but to be more precise, they were to be read, and then re-read. As we first read these texts (many of them new to us; I was 17 at the time), we were to take note of the glosses and find our way through the characters and structures of the play; then, armed with the investigations of this first reading, we were to turn back to the first page of the play and read the text once more, this time more sensitive to the nuances of a text that could more easily be read straight-through without interruptions to look up a word or a reference. This was an onerous task, especially to Languages & Literature majors such as Dan and myself; most of the instructors assigned a book (which might be a novel, a collection of short stories or poems, or a play) a week, and because a full courseload was made up of four such classes (adding up to four full-length books a week), this added up to quite a lot of time in the library.
I don’t know how many of Prof. Leonard’s students followed her advice to read these plays twice; I know I couldn’t always do so, though I did manage to keep up with at least a first reading of these texts. But in the years since I have returned to each of these plays a second, a third, even a fourth time, as I have other works that I first read in college. (Especially those that I read in the two-semester “Joyce, Proust, Mann” class that was taught by Prof. William Wilson. Prof. Wilson assigned us a syllabus which included Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Doktor Faustus and Confessions of Felix Krull. I suppose I should be happy that Prof. Wilson, with compassion, excluded Finnegans Wake from the list. Onerous, as I said — but in those halcyon days, there was little else to do with our days on a small campus a hundred miles up the Hudson River from New York City but read and, in the evenings, drink.) More and more after my graduation I spent time with the secondary literature — the criticism that grew up like crabgrass around these texts, often growing so high and dense that it obscured the texts from which it sprung.
In order to take a scythe to this crabgrass, one has to use the primary texts themselves as a blade. A few weeks ago, in “Bildungsroman,” I wrote that I was enjoying my revisitations of these texts. It is now more than 30 years since I first came across these books and plays, but I’m finding that they continue to retain their novelty, and this, I suspect, is because these are genuinely new works — that a first reading does not release all of their significance, especially when that first reading takes place in the arrogance and innocence of youth. Prof. Leonard was quite right, of course, to say that Shakespeare’s plays, in this 21st century, 400 years after their composition, require us to read them twice to begin to make them accessible to us. But I should extend her imprecation to say that the best of the great literature of the world calls our attention to them time and time again, especially as we mature into adulthood, middle age and then into what we have the ironic amusement of calling our “golden years.” In reading these plays and books again across our lifetimes, they speak to us more fully — not only of themselves, but also of us; each time we take up a book we’ve already encountered, we also take up that first experience of confronting that text, as well as what we’ve learned about the world and ourselves in those years. King Lear, Hamlet, Waiting for Godot, Ulysses, the Divine Comedy, the Greek tragedies — when we read them at 17, in our adolescence (which is becoming a longer and longer period in the midst of a Culture Industry that seeks to keep us in a permanent state of immaturity), we can’t be privy to the messages they might contain for us at 47, or even 37 or 27. We change. And so, somewhat magically, do they. The greatest works of art remain permanently new, no matter how many times we may return to them; the same pertains to music and the plastic arts. The Bach cello suites, Tristan und Isolde, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht, Feldman’s Triadic Memories; the paintings of Rembrandt, Friedrich, Dix, Picasso — they are all ever new, and they are not remotely reachable through a secondary literature of criticism: as Schopenhauer said above, ”You can get to know them only through their own writings, not through other people’s accounts.” Especially not the bookflaps or even the reviews for this secondary literature, which give us what a third-rate mind says about the writings of a second-rate reader, but which for many appear to be adequate to a self-deluding appearance of expertise.
The great Schopenhauer was 30 years old when the first edition of The World as Will and Representation was published in 1818; when he came to reissue the book in 1844 after nearly thirty years of utter neglect and silence, he not only refused to revise the first edition but had the audacity to append to it a second volume, even greater in length than the first. As he neared 60, he wrote, “I am pleased … that after twenty-five years I can find nothing to retract, and thus … my fundamental convictions have proved their worth, at least as far as I am concerned. … [If] the advantage of the first half of my work over the second lies in what only the fervour of youth and the energy of a first conception can bring, then the second half will surpass the first in the maturity and complete elaboration of the ideas, since these are the fruits that follow only from a long life and much hard work. … Accordingly, the need to deliver my work in two mutually supplementary halves can be compared to the necessity that requires an achromatic object-glass (which cannot be made from a single piece) to be constructed by combining a convex lens of crown-glass with a concave lens of flint-glass, which only together will produce the desired effect. Still, the reader will be compensated to some extent for the inconvenience of using two volumes simultaneously by the variety and diversion that comes when the same topic is treated by the same person in the same spirit but at very different ages.” (P. 16.)
The publication of a new edition of Schopenhauer’s work grants me the opportunity to read it once more — the third time, I believe, I’ve been through the book as a whole, though I’ve dipped into it innumerable times since my first reading of it in my early 20s. And it remains a first reading: it speaks to me now differently than it did when I first confronted it. The book hasn’t changed, but I have, and reading and appreciation lies not in the book itself, nor in the reader, but in the collaboration between the two that comprises the act of reading. I find now something new on nearly every page, something bright and brilliant that I had not seen before, or that I had not seen in as clear a light, a light provided by experience and life itself. It could have been written last year. And this is untrue for so many other works that I have come across since that first virginal reading. For me, it is Nietzsche, not Schopenhauer, to which the hoarfrost of archaism attaches, not least because one can’t push God off the throne only to replace Him with the spirit of Dionysus, putting the “ancient” in ancient Greece. I need Schopenhauer in a way that I do not need Nietzsche. The same holds true for so many other writers whose names have been closely associated: for all their achievements, Heiner Müller is nowhere near as contemporary for me as Bertolt Brecht, David Mamet seems hopelessly recidivist read alongside Harold Pinter, and I won’t even begin to set Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace against William Gaddis.
In 1975 the film director Billy Wilder said, “They say Wilder is out of touch with his times. Frankly, I regard it as a compliment. Who the hell wants to be in touch with these times?” I suppose I feel the same way. The books and plays I mention above speak to me more about today’s world than the aesthetic and literary products of that world itself: they are as much the product of 2011 as they are of the sixteenth or nineteenth centuries, because I read them in 2011. They also provide me with the extraordinary richness of the past and keep me in communion with it, instead of pretending that we know more now about the human dilemma and tragedy than we did when Shakespeare wrote King Lear or Sophocles wrote Oedipus. Because the fact is, we know nothing more now about that human dilemma and tragedy — the difference is in quantity, not quality. Their expression has never been surpassed. Their messages for us grow richer with time as we grow richer with experience.
In expressing the need for love and compassion for this race, as well as the horrible stupidity and cruelty of which it is capable, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Swift, Schopenhauer and Beckett know more about our time than we are willing to admit — they say it better than we ever could — and I imagine they already knew about the time in which my daughters will grow up. Along with my own love, I hope to give them these books, this music, and this art as presents, a guide to what they can expect, and as a pleasure and comfort for themselves, and as a repository that they can revisit to remind them of the necessity for kindness and compassion in our critical and creative work, our play and our lives, and the richness of the world (not to mention those most unfashionable, un- and even anti-Nietzschean virtues of humility and doubt, which have all but disappeared from our culture and without which we are more than certain to hurtle ourselves into the abyss). Perhaps if we were willing to admit this about these great artists, we might spend our time with more wisdom — and see our way clearer to a brighter future for our children, instead of condemning them to a neverending, pernicious present.
I recommend “The Cat in the Hat” as more age appropriate, and yes, I think Dr. Seuss is actually relevant here. Although Seuss hasn’t lasted long as Schopenhauer and Shakespeare and so on, I will be so bold as to nominate his work for the canon of great literature — not just children’s literature, but all literature. In Dr. Seuss, we are introduced to the pleasures of language and the wonders of the imagination, before we become brain-damaged by five-paragraph essays and endless exercises in finding out “what the poem means.” If I find myself looking forward to reading “The Cat in the Hat” to any available child, it is both to re-experience the un-edited joy with which the child experiences the work, and to relive and extend my own joy and stimulation.
I don’t know if I’m the first person to discuss Schopenhauer and Dr. Seuss in the same paragraph, but it would be nice to get credit.
I give you many thumbs up for your plans for Goldie and Billie. In a world where even people who claim to be religious are becoming ever more rapacious consumers and seekers of pleasure, love and compassion turn into acts of rebellion.
Oh, and happy Father’s Day from one proud papa to the next.
This was a beautiful, inspiring piece. I remember making my way through the first volume of Schopenhauer while to direct Hamlet in grad school, and I remember the restlessness that his brilliance would incite in me. I would need to get up and pace, and attempt to explain what I was experiencing to my boyfriend at the time. That German philosophy produced such a writer and thinker at that particular juncture will never cease to amaze.
In Thomas Bernhard’s novella Yes, there is a long Bernhardian ode to Schopenhauer and his indispensability; I would quote it if I had it nearby. For any fan of Schopenhauer, it warms the heart.
I wonder, though: where do the sentiments expressed here leave criticism? I did a doctorate in German literature but elected not to pursue an academic career because of the deplorable state of dialogue, if it can be called that, about literature that prevails in the academy now (and probably always has?). And yet, I have occasionally come across pieces of criticism that have meant a great deal to me. There is nothing that says that a book about a book must be misbegotten, even if so many are.
Anyway, thanks for your sincere words, very inspiring piece.
I’d argue there’s strong doses of humilty and doubt in Nietzsche, but this is a lovely testament to the gift-giving essence of the paternal.
You can’t cross the same river twice but the pleasures of discovery from re-reading are indeed most potent!
Wonderful to think of Goldie and Billie reading their father’s texts in years to come…
Victor: And Happy Father’s Day to you, too. I’ll let you take the credit for marrying Dr. Seuss to Schopenhauer and you’re right about the former’s books. My favorite passage may be the truly subversive conclusion of the story, which suggests that once a precious truth is found it may be wise to keep it to oneself:
Then our mother came in
And said to us two,
“Did you have any fun?
Tell me. What did you do?”
And Sally and I did not know
What to say. Should we tell her
The things that went on there that day?
Should we tell her about it?
Now, what SHOULD we do?
Well … what would YOU do
If your mother asked YOU?
Which is just beautiful — take THAT, narrative closure! Same goes for One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (celebrating the great, wonderful variety of life in the world) and Green Eggs and Ham. For personal reasons related to the condition of my 49-year-old body, I am perhaps not as fond of Hop on Pop.
Andrew: I suppose criticism can get along just fine so long as it maintains a perspective on the integrity and enduring value of the work itself. You’re right: most critics today write with an eye on either academic preferment or the health of their own cultural celebrity, celebrating the new at the expense of the old as an attempt to appear in and of their time. (And remembering that the most common current weapon of the levelling culture of democracy and the Culture Industry is snark.) As you know, Schopenhauer criticized Kant himself, so it’s not as if there’s no place for criticism, and many of the critics I’ve quoted or highlighted in the recent past manage to transcend those limitations (and the continuing value and integrity of their own work tends to confirm that). Miracles happen.
David: With all the due respect of friendship, somehow I KNEW somebody would mention that humility and doubt exist in Nietzsche’s work — along with everything else — but I remain unconvinced. If he did not consider himself Zarathustra or the Ubermensch, I’m sure that he thought he was the sole living prophet of these great truths and thereby made himself into a Zarathustra- or Ubermensch-by-proxy. And I’ll leave my remark about Dionysus to speak for itself.
Blogless Dan has forgotten many of his college courses, but I do indeed remember Nancy Leonard’s Shakespeare class. Your memory, George, is more detailed than mine. I don’t recall her instructions to read and read again, but perhaps that’s because such an instruction was unnecessary. That’s how I worked all the time. I wrote perhaps my best college paper in her class on the nature of the Ghost and what that meant for understanding Hamlet. As it turns out, most people misunderstand the play, but that’s a blog entry in itself.
I also remember Professor Wilson fondly. The course was “Self-Conscious Colloquialism in American Literature,” covering such works as Huck Finn, Winesburg, Ohio, and Go Down Moses. Prof Wilson gave me an A on a paper that I now know was completely wrong-headed. He could have slapped me in the face and called me a fool, but my arguments were well laid out, hence the high grade.
In recent years, with little budget for new books, I also have been rereading. Faulkner is even better the second time around, when the reader is no longer wrestling with Faulkner’s concatenations of dependent clauses. Schiller’s On Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime (which was mentioned by someone in this blog) is, on rereading, well . . . sublime.
As for Kant, well, my initial experience with the sage of Koenigsberg was so daunting, that I was turned off to philosophy for decades. Because I recently enjoyed Schopenhauer, however, I suppose I ought to try Kant again, as Schopenhauer’s work is influenced by and partly a reaction to Kant. Now, how to squeeze him in. My to-read list gets longer with every NPR broadcast, and then there’s my to reread list. And I don’t have Goldie and Billie to handle.
OK, people by now are saying, “Get your own damned blog.” Hug and kisses to the golden girls, George.
Actually, someone I used to know beat you to it, Victor. I believe his entire dissertation was on Dr. Seuss and philosophy, and, aside from Schopenhauer, the other main intertextual culprit there is none other than Mr. Dynamite himself: Nietzsche.
Not to sidewind the conversation, but I imagine that I was probably the “someone”, or at least one of them, expected to chime in on that note of humility and doubt . . . I have to say, if you’re not convinced, then a more intimate and prolonged encounter is necessary. Surprisingly, you’re propagating the kind of general public view. Often, the agonistic character of N’s rhetoric is not taken into consideration when hearing his tonalities, which is not to say that there isn’t a virile call to courage there as well, but David’s definitely right, and that is evident in many ways, including N’s praise of and valuation of sickness, which it’s doubtful those who oppose humility and doubt would ever admit to, let alone cultivate. It is that such as cultivated for different reasons entirely. In fact, it is humility that is the final testing ground that will enable Zarathustra to affirm the eternal return.
“Speaking” to Zarathustra one last time, the Stillest Hour informs him that, while his fruits are ripe, he is not yet ripe enough for them. “ ‘So you must go back to your solitude: for you are yet to become mellow’ [mürbe] ” (Z: II.22). Intriguingly, Zarathustra is not yet mürbe (mellow) enough to affirm the eternal return and this, in part, is what he must learn, a quality that seems out of odds with the brutal cast often given by many commentators to Zarathustra or the Übermensch. It is not through becoming more courageous or warlike as many might expect, or presume, that will enable Zarathustra to affirm the eternal return, but precisely through becoming mürbe. What is toughest is what is humble as the Stillest Hour says to Zarathustra: “ ‘What do you matter? You are not yet humble enough for me. Humility has the toughest hide.’—”
Yet, this is not perhaps that odd. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche observes that while the most savage forces build pathways and are predominantly destructive, “their work was none the less necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies—those which are called evil—are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity” (HH §246).
Similarly, aside from being made out of what is hard and fragrant, the other quality of those who have “turned out well” is that they are “delicate” (EH: “Wise” §2). One of the other ways in which Nietzsche recognizes that someone has “turned out well” is that they are “good for our senses” (EH: “Books” §2), once again stressing the sensorial dimension of life as an orienting episteme. As Duncan Large points out in a footnote to his translation of Ecce Homo, “turned out well” “is a paraphrase of the term ‘Wohlgerathenheit’ (cf. III 1), which is most often applied to children but is also a close translation of the ancient Greek concept of virtue as arête.” There is a clear relation here to the third type (the child) espoused of in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And when speaking of the necessity of not expending energy to guard oneself against danger, Nietzsche notes that “to have spikes is an extravagance, a double luxury even if one is free to have no spikes but open hands . . .” (EH: Clever §8).
It seems justifiable to claim that it is through the praxis of stillness that Zarathustra will accomplish the task of becoming mürbe, for such a mode of meditation would lead to a state of mellowness, the proper physiological frequency necessary for affirming the eternal return.
Nietzsche precisely isn’t Zarathustra or the Ubermensch (and he openly declared such, in letters and in public print), hence his necessity to create both figures. In the final section to the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explicitly declares that he is not as strong enough to that which is entitled to Z alone . . .