Tag Archives: Friedrich Nietzsche

Remembering a Departed Friend in a Single Image

31 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in Literature

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Saul Bellow

“I wonder if anyone believes that the grave is all there is. No one can give up on the pictures. The pictures must and will continue. If Ravelstein the atheist-materialist had implicitly told me that he would see me sooner or later, he meant that he did not accept the grave to be the end. Nobody can and nobody does accept this. We just talk tough.

This is the involuntary and normal, the secret, esoteric confidence of the man of flesh and blood. The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop…

But I would rather see Ravelstein again than to explain matters it doesn’t help to explain.

Ravelstein, dressing to go out, is talking to me, and I go back and forth with him while trying to hear what he is saying. The music is pouring from his hi-fi — the many planes of his bare, bald head go before me in the corridor between his living room and his monumental master bedroom. He stops before his pier-glass — no wall mirrors here — and puts in the heavy gold cufflinks, buttons up the Jermyn Street striped shirt — American Trustworthy laundry-and-cleaners deliver his shirts puffed out with tissue paper. He winds up his tie lifting the collar that crackles with starch. He makes a luxurious knot. The unsteady fingers, long, ill-coordinated, nervous to the point of decadence, make a double lap. Ravelstein likes a big tie-knot — after all, he is a large man. Then he sits down on the beautifully cured fleeces of his bed and puts on the Poulsen and Skone tan Wellington boots. He smokes, of course, he is always smoking, and tilts the head away from the smoke while he knots and pulls the knot into place. The cast and orchestra are pouring out the Italian Maiden in Algiers. This is dressing music, accessory or mood music, but Ravelstein takes a Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands. Better Bizet and Carmen than Wagner and the Ring. He likes the volume of his powerful set turned up to the maximum. The ringing phone is left to the answering machine…

‘What do you think of this recording, Chick?’ he says. ‘They’re playing the original ancient seventeenth-century instruments.’

He loses himself in sublime music, a music in which ideas are dissolved, reflecting these ideas in the form of feeling. He carries them down into the street with him. There’s an early snow on the tall shrubs, the same shrubs filled with a huge flock of parrots — the ones that escaped from cages and now build their long nest sacks in the back alleys. They are feeding on the red berries. Ravelstein looks at me, laughing with pleasure and astonishment, gesturing because he can’t be heard in all this bird-noise.

You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.”

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The ending to Saul Bellow’s final novel Ravelstein.

This conclusion is remarkable, in my opinion — a richly sonorous, musical piece of writing that packs a deceitfully earnest and dignified solemnity. It was the last bit of prose Bellow published, released when he was in his mid-eighties (at the time of his death, he apparently had a memoir in the works with the unimprovable working title of “All Marbles Still Accounted For”).

Ravelstein is a Roman à clef; Ravelstein, the novel’s eponymous center of gravity, is a thinly veiled version of Bellow’s real-life bud Allan Bloom, a true bon vivant and intellectual extraordinaire whom Bellow had befriended while at the University of Chicago. In an interview with James Wood shortly before his death, Bellow elaborated: “The truth is that Allan was a very superior person, great-souled. When people proclaim the death of the novel, I sometimes think they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about.”

But Bloom certainly was one. He was quite a creature. It’s that word perhaps more than any other which inflects the ending with its somber spark. Too idiosyncratic to be a “character,” too real to be a “personality”: a creature — utterly unique and thus hard to give up. After spending 200 pages in Ravelstein’s company, after enjoying decadent stories and drink after drink in his company, it’s not easy for us to let him go, either. It’s a microcosm of giving up similar creatures in life.

Ron Rosenbaum, writing in Slate, had the following praise to heap on the book:

Ravelstein is not only my favorite Bellow novel, it’s the only one I really love. It’s a rapturous celebration of the life of the mind, as well as a meditation on the glory of sensual life and on the tenebrous permeable boundary we all eventually pass over, the one between life and death.

Martin Amis, similarly enraptured, gave it space in his own memoir Experience:

Ravelstein is a full-length novel. It is also, in my view, a masterpiece with no analogues. The world has never heard this prose before: prose of such tremulous and crystallized beauty. … [Ravelstein is] numinous. It constitutes an act of resuscitation, and in its pages Bloom lives.

Below, watch Bloom on Firing Line in 1987.

Read on:

Allan Bloom

Who Wants It More?

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in History, War

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Soldier at Wailing Wall

“The willingness to fight and die, to sacrifice for a cause, has often been vital in changing history. Napoleon Bonaparte remarked that in war the mental is to the physical as 3:1. George Patton demurred that the mental to the physical is closer to 5:1. In many revolutions (English, American, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Iranian), the side weaker in weapons and numbers but superior in will to fight triumphed. This will to power, as Friedrich Nietzsche asserted, was critical to success. Alon Peled observed that, in modern armies, the most important factors for success are internal cohesion and the dedication of soldiers. Mossad chief Meir Amit asserted that, ‘the human factor is the biggest and most crucial for our society and our security services.’

A weak will to fight has repeatedly led to disaster. In 1940, the French, despite equal numbers of tanks and manpower to the Germans, lacked a will to fight and were defeated in a six-week campaign. In 1975 the South Vietnamese army, despite massive qualitative and quantitative advantage, was rapidly routed by an inferior North Vietnamese army which lacked airplanes, tanks, or sophisticated equipment — but had a greater will to fight…

After millennia of persecution, the Holocaust and Arab terrorism, the Jews had a very strong will to fight. They were well aware that they had nowhere to go. They saw the struggle as a life-and-death one determining the fate of the Jewish people. David Ben Gurion told his commanders that ‘We will not win by military might alone. Even if we could field a larger army, we could not stand. The most important thing is moral and intellectual strength.’ Yigael Yadin, Israel’s first chief of staff, assessed the will to victory as the most important factor in the victory in 1948, for:

If we are to condense all the various factors, and there are many, which brought about victory, I would not hesitate to credit the extraordinary qualities of Israel’s youth, during the War of Independence with that victory. It appears as if that youth has absorbed into itself the full measure of Israel’s yearning, during thousands of years of exile, to return to its soil and to live in liberty and independence, and like a giant spring which had been compressed and held down for a long time to the utmost measure of its compressibility, when suddenly released — it liberated.

During the 1945-48 period they fought against the British Mandatory government and then the Arabs. The British had almost 100,000 soldiers and police, first-class equipment, international legitimacy, Arab support and the halo of their great successes in World War II. The far fewer Jews, unable to mobilize openly, with little military experience, without uniforms or heavy equipment, fought off first the British and then the numericaly superior Arabs to achieve independence in May 1948.”

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Pulled from the twelfth chapter of Jonathan Edelman’s The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State. The picture: an IDF soldier after recapturing the Wailing Wall in 1967, 18 years after Israel’s independence.

How Wittgenstein Found God (and Wrote a Masterpiece) in the Trenches of World War One

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, War

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Swansea, Wales, September 1947

“At the outbreak of World War I, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. His friend Pinsent enlisted with the British army and thus was on the opposing side. Wittgenstein volunteered not because he particularly believed in the cause of the German powers but because he felt it was his duty. As a Wittgenstein he could easily have become an officer, but he chose to remain in the ranks – an extremely dangerous decision… Throughout his service Wittgenstein continued to write down his philosophical ideas in notebooks. He was doing original philosophy, but he also remained constantly on the brink of suicide. Despite these distractions, Wittgenstein was an utterly fearless soldier, and his exemplary bravery won him two medals. (Among the soldiering philosophers, his only rival was Socrates.)

Wittgenstein was a parody of the driven personality. Characteristically he saw no reason to try to alleviate this condition by searching for its cause in his own psychological makeup. On the contrary, if only everyone were true to his nature, he thought, everyone could be like this. Wittgenstein rationalized his condition to himself by claiming that life was ‘an intellectual problem and a moral duty.’ The intellectual and moral aspects of his personality had so far remained distinct entities, each spurring the other on. It was only during the war that they fused.

World War One Trenches

Under constant intellectual pressure (from himself) and the persistent threat of death (from both the enemy and himself), Wittgenstein once again found himself in familiar territory, on the brink of insanity. One day, during a lull in the fighting in Galicia, he came across a bookshop. Here he found Tolstoy’s Gospels in Brief, which he bought for the simple reason that there was no other book in the shop. Wittgenstein had been against Christianity – he associated it with Vienna, his family, lack of a logical foundation, meek and mild behavior, and other anathemas. But reading through Tolstoy’s book was to bring the light of religion into Wittgenstein’s life. Within days he had become a convinced Christian – though his conversion had a distinctly Wittgensteinian tenor. With typical rigor he set about integrating his beliefs into his intellectual life.

Religious remarks now began appearing in the pages of his notebooks, alongside those on logic. And it soon becomes clear that these two topics have more than intellectual rigor in common. The spirit of one informs the other in compelling fashion. Even Wittgenstein’s religion had to assume a logical force and clarity: ‘I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like an eye in its visual field.’ There was something problematic about the world, and this we call its meaning. But this meaning did not lie within the world, it lay outside it. ‘The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God.’ According to Wittgenstein, to pray was to think about the meaning of life. (Which meant that he had been praying all his life, even when he didn’t believe there was a God or meaning to life. Wittgenstein couldn’t bear to be wrong – ever.)…

World War: Parade through Ruins

In 1918 Wittgenstein was promoted to officer and transferred to the Italian front…

When Wittgenstein was taken prisoner by the Italians, he had in his rucksack the only manuscript of the philosophical work he had been writing throughout the war. This was eventually to be called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and is the first great philosophical work of the modern era. Right from its opening sentences it becomes obvious that philosophy has entered a new stage.

‘1 The world is all that is the case’
‘1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’
One clear, ringing assertion follows another, linked by the absolute minimum of justification or argument:
‘1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.’
‘1.2 The world divides into facts.’
The book’s conclusion is even more memorable:
‘7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

Few others have altered the course of philosophy in quite so striking a fashion. Such succinct perspicacity is surpassed only by Socrates (‘Know thyself’), Descartes (‘I think, therefore I am’), and Nietzsche (‘God is dead’). In those parts where it is not too technical (in the logical sense), Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is the most exciting work of philosophy ever written.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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From Paul Strathern’s entertaining biographical sketch Wittgenstein: Philosophy in an Hour.

On a somewhat random recommendation, I bought this short book ($1.99 on Amazon) and read it two nights ago. I had parsed some of Wittgenstein’s nearly impenetrable philosophy before and knew he’d been a pupil of Bertrand Russell, but my knowledge of the man extended barely beyond that. Now having read Strathern’s introduction to him, I’m convinced Wittgenstein is one of the more singular and compelling people of the 20th century.

Don’t take my word for it…

Russell called Wittgenstein, “The most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating”.

John Maynard Keynes, after meeting with Wittgenstein at his arrival in Cambridge, wrote in a 1929 letter to his wife: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.”

Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein’s friend and colleague, claimed that, “He was of the opinion… that his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he were writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men.”

Rudolph Carnap, the German-born philosopher, noted about Wittgenstein that, “The impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”

W.A. Hijab, a former pupil of Wittgenstein’s, said, “He was like an atomic bomb, a tornado — people don’t appreciate that.”

Sir Colin St. John Wilson is quoted in Autism and Creativity as saying, “[He was] a magician and had qualities of magic in his relations with people.”

I’ve cited Wittgenstein a half dozen times on this blog, and have directly quoted a passage from his Philosophical Investigations. Find that selection below:

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein on God and Belief

The Challenge of Nietzsche

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy, Religion

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Hitchens Brothers

Let me ask a little more philosophical question. I’d really like to hear both brothers respond to what might be called the challenge of Friedrich Nietzsche, which assumes a large place in Christian apologetics, which is the idea that in the absence of transcendence, all you’re left with is a ferocious human will. So I just would love to hear the perspective of whether he was a crank or a prophet in these areas from both brothers.

Christopher Hitchens: I can rephrase the question in addressing it.

Nietzsche famously said that in the absence of the divine, all that there is, is the human will to power. That would be all you were left with. That’s why Nietzscheism is so often used as almost a substitute among some people I know for the work of Ayn Rand, for example. And implied in that is also that that can be admirable. I must just tell you that I was once asked by an evangelical radio station a lot of very, very polite questions about my book against God. Then at the end, they asked, was I an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche? I said, actually, I wasn’t really much of one at all.

They were clearly disappointed with this, but they went on and said, well, did I know that he’d written most of his antireligious books in a state of syphilitic paralysis? And I said, yes, I was aware of that, or certainly had heard it plausibly alleged. They said they just wondered if that would explain my own — (laughter) — more recent work — I thought, well, no, but thanks for the compassion.

Look, it might be that all of these questions are replacement questions. Is it not equally true to say that the religious impulse is an expression of the will to power? Who could deny it? Someone who says, I not only know how you should live, but I have a divine warrant here revealed to me, in some cases exclusively, that gives me permission to do so. What is that but the will to power, may I inquire? I think it’s a very, very strong instance of it.

If I don’t get asked the Nietzsche question, which I quite often do, if it isn’t that, it’s usually The Brothers Karamazov issue instead. I forget which brother it is, maybe it’s Smerdyakov. It doesn’t matter. He says, if there’s no God, then surely everything is possible — thinkable.

Everyone understands the question when it’s put like that. But is it not also the case that with God, or with the belief in it, permission can be given by anyone to do anything to anybody and has been and still is? Unfortunately, these questions are not decidable according to your attitude toward the supernatural. These are problems of human society and the human psyche — you might say, soul — whatever attitude we take to humanness or the transcendent.

Peter Hitchens: First of all, just a small objection to that.

It seems to me that the Christian Gospels are read any way you like, and especially the final few days are one of the most powerful denunciations of the exercise of power, of the behavior of mobs, of show trials, all the many activities of which governments and politicians get up to.

There is even in the jibe against Judas — “the poor ye have always with you” — the first skeptical remark about socialist idealism ever made in human history. So I think that you would be hard put to claim that the Christian Gospels gave you a license to order people about. And it seems odd that the center of Christian worship is someone who is indeed tortured to death by the powerful.

But leaving that one aside, I think atheists should pay more attention to Nietzsche because I think that he does actually encapsulate quite a lot of what they very, very seldom say they desire. Now, in my book I quote at length from a passage in Somerset Maugham’s book, Of Human Bondage, in which the hero decides — and this is an Edwardian person brought up in detail in the Christian faith in an English vicarage — decides that he no longer believes in God and says quite clearly, “This is a moment of enormous liberation. I no longer need to worry about things which worried me before, and I am no longer tied by obligations which used to tie me down. I’m free.”

What else is the point of being an atheist? But yet, when you actually put this to atheists, they tend to say, oh no, no, not me. I’m just as capable of following moral rules as you are, even if they are Christian moral rules. This constantly comes up and immediately swirls down the circle of the atheists’ refusal to accept that there is actually no absolute right and wrong if there is no God and that therefore, they are liberated.

Why aren’t they more pleased they’re liberated and why don’t they exult more about it? Perhaps because they don’t want to spread the idea too widely and have too many people joining in.

Nietzsche

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From the Pew Forum’s roundtable conversation with brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens, on the question of Can Civilization Survive Without God?.

Mark Twain claimed that the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at once, and still retain the ability to function. That said, I think both Hitchens brothers are right on this point.

This entire Pew transcript is worth reading. So often in discussions like this, the prompts do nothing to constrain interlocutors’ answers, serving instead as runways for flights into digression or monologue. The questioner cited above could have simply asked, “Do we need faith to moderate human will?” But that wouldn’t have been as restrictive. Instead, by citing Nietzsche (and thus inviting further reference to his work), and locating him within the context of a broader philosophy, the question takes on color and context.

The Pew roundtable is great for that reason; all the questions are similarly sharp and provocative. One of my bosses, Michael Barone, also asks a question further into the discussion.

Watch a preview of these two titans in conversation below.