Resistance against Rome and several other nations

We used to have someone from France on a forum I was on.  He ran a bookstore if memory serves me.  He once took offense at my suggesting that France was a “client” of the U.S. after WWII.   It is perhaps natural that we think “my country, right or wrong,” and try to make excuses for its weakness if we lived through Vichy France, and for its excesses if we were like Heidegger, living in Nazi Germany.   I was happy to be part of the U.S. which defended Western Europe against Nazi Germany, but the aforementioned Frenchman didn’t like my attitude, nor no doubt the attitude of the arrogant Americans who swept into France in 1945 like conquerors.  In the meantime (not quite but nearly) Heidegger bemoaned the fact that the Germans hadn’t relied upon “tradition” in quite the manner he had hoped. 

I’ve been reading David Mattingly’s An Imperial Possession, Britain in the Roman Empire.  I recall reading Tacitus not especially critically eons ago, but Mattingly is noticeably critical:  In regard to the “resistance” of 47 A.D.  he writes, “Tacitus says the Briton’s chosen field of battle was a defended enclave, which illustrates the character of this so-called revolt.  Far from being on the rampage, some part of the Iceni had refused to hand over arms, and retreated into a defended site.  They only ‘chose’ the field of battle in the sense that that was where the Roman army found them.”

But when the Icenian leader, Prasutagus died, “Roman centurions and imperial slaves plundered the kingdom. . .”  Prasutagus’ widow Boudica “was flogged, her daughters raped . . .”  Tacitus implied that responsibility for this rested with minor officials abusing their power.  Only at the end of this section of his account did he reveal the key information that these events had taken place in the context of the annexation of the kingdom and its incorporation into the province.”   The enraged Boudica caused a huge force to be fielded in retaliation against the Romans and Mattingly speculates about the “Total Roman and provincial dead” was around 40,000.

In regard to the war with the Silures, Tacitus notes that the loss of several senior officers and well over 1,000 casualties were major setbacks.  “Tacitus speculated that either Rome had reduced the vigour of its operations believing the war to be over, or the Britons had been moved by some strange passion to avenge Caratacus.  The more likely scenario is that Roman pacification measures in Silurian territory misjudged the preparedness of the Silures to lay down their arms. The construction of forts, the seizure of crops and animals by foraging parties, and the pillaging of Silurian settlements were provocative acts.  After these two major actions, the Silures mainly reverted to hit-and-run tactics, although two Roman auxiliary units, incautiously engaging in pillage, were cut off by a larger-scale attack.  Roman frustration with this obdurate resistance was such that they evidently declared their intent to exterminate the people or transport them – the extreme reaction of an imperial power to unremitting resistance.”

What happened to the Silures?  The governor fighting them died and it wasn’t until 57 that Quintus Veranius resumed Rome’s offensive against the Silures.  Tacitus wasn’t impressed with Veranius, but the “Silures disappeared from the pages of Tacitus at a stroke and the policy seems to have been continued against the Ordovices by his successor.  “Suetonius Paullinus, another military careerist . . . conquered Ordovician territory within two years and at the start of his third season of campaigning stood facing the island of Anglesey (Mona) across the Menai Straits.  The island’s population was swelled by a large number of refugees (or fugitives to use the Roman terminology).  Tacitus gave the Roman view of the enemy lined up on the opposing shore: armed men, fanatical women bearing torches and druids invoking terrible curses.  From a Roman perspective these were the remaining dregs of British resistance, further tainted by their barbaric religious practices such as human sacrifice.  They could expect no quarter now they had nowhere else to run.  In a well-planned amphibious assault, Suetonius Paullinus led his army across the Straits to ‘cut down all the men’.  There is little doubt that this was a massacre, followed up by the destruction of sacred groves.”

Comment:  Bryan Sykes in his The Seven Daughters of Eve argues that all Europeans (meaning if memory serves me “western Europeans” ) are descended from seven mitochondrial “Eves” whose descendants immigrated to Europe between 10,000 and 45,000 years ago.  Perhaps there are more Eves than seven, but my impression is the Sykes arguments are generally accepted.  The point being that the Romans, who in Mattingly’s interpretations seem every bit as ruthless as German Nazis, Imperial Japanese, or Stalinist Communist are all part of the same mitochondrial groupings that we belong to (if we are genetically European).  Perhaps Rome early on sought to preemptively defeat cities or peoples likely to present a threat later on, but they became so good at it that their soldiers committed atrocities almost casually. 

Sykes also wrote Saxons, Vikings and Celts, the Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.  Unlike Mattingly, Sykes merely wants to know who we are genetically.  The British Isles have only been inhabited this last time (since the most recent ice age) for about 8,000 years.  So whichever Eve or Eves we descended from they were some place in Western Europe before then.  Y-Chromosome and Mitochondrial analyses did permit Sykes to distinguish between the Romans and those more “native” to the Islands (bearing in mind that invasions did occur prior to the Roman Invasion).  On page 287 Sykes writes “true Roman genes are very rare in the Isles.”   We might ask, if we could resurrect one of their British governors, “so what was the purpose?”  He would have his answer:  The glory of Rome, the protection of Rome against future incursions, the Roman need for food and supplies, etc.

“How would you like it if someone did that to you,” we might ask?  And he would answer, “that was done and many would have like to do it again.  That was why we became so martial in attitude.  We were forced into it.”

And as we know Hitler said something like that as did the Imperial Japanese and Stalin.  There are always reasons; which isn’t to say that none of them are legitimate, for who can determine that other than the leaders of the city state or nation in question.   It is difficult though not to sympathize with Queen Boudica after she was flogged and her daughters raped by representatives of Rome.  There seems a huge gap between the rationalizations of a British governor and the application of those rationalizations by the Roman soldiers.

Causes and Commitments

As to why the "South" fought, it wasn't for slavery. If we asked them as Fiver suggests we would be given the "Lost Cause" philosophy. The Lost Causers believed the war was fought for "freedom." The constitution was written in such a way that secession was permitted. Lincoln was denying a provision of the constitution when he denied the right of South Carolina to secede.

The South had a slave-based economy, this is true, but the understanding that slavery was wrong was growing slowly in the world. Slaves were brought to the New World mostly by the British; then the British became enlightened and declared slavery wrong. They outlawed it. But they didn't have a slave-based economy like the one they fostered in the American South.

Also, Social Darwinism was an important influence in the Western World. Darwin wrote Origin of Species in 1859 and it didn't take long before others applied the ideas of evolution to peoples. "Maybe we shouldn't enslave anyone anymore because slavery is cruel, but we all know that White People have evolved further than Black People and are therefore superior." It took a long time for that idea to be discredited.

The conclusive "proof" that no "race" is superior to any other has been generated by modern-day genetic science. The differences between the "races" are so tiny in genetic terms as to be considered inconsequential. But back in antebellum days that "proof" wasn't available. Instead there were persuasive arguments that the "Caucasian Race" was superior to all others. Anyone wanting further proof was invited to look about him in the world and they would see the differences.

Also, in most antebellum minds the human species was only a few thousand years old. The idea of an evolutionary span of time covering 200,000 years (a current approximation of the life-span of homo sapiens) didn't exist. So the differences antebellum people saw as they looked about them were more permanent and entrenched in their thinking then we can easily conceive of today.

At some point there was other evidence that "whites" were not necessarily individually superior to "blacks." Give a black person the same education as you give white people and a black person may end up first in his class. There are individual differences but they aren't dependent upon "race."

Later on, after the war, the Lost Causers emphasized the "culture" of the antebellum South. "Culture" is an argument and it is still being waged in the world. Not so very long ago, Martin Heidegger urged the Germans to seek their Cultural roots because Germans were destined (according to his view of that culture) to lead their European brethren to "greatness." Heidegger had a benign view of that "greatness," and when he saw that the other members of the Nazi party he had joined gave it an ugly turn he quit supporting it, but the less philosophical of those Nazis played out their belief in Cultural superiority in what we know of as World War II.

And in even more recent times we can find persuasive arguments suggesting that Western Civilization is superior to other Civilizations (using Samuel P. Huntington's definitions). Huntington himself didn't argue that the Western Civilization was "superior," but he was very much a Westerner in a sense that the Lost Causers would understand: This is our culture. We want to preserve it, and we will fight to do so. Huntington saw "clashes" going on between the Civilizations, e.g., the current Clash between "The West" and "The Islamic" Civilizations, indefinitely.

Perhaps at some future time there will a different and superior view about these Civilizations and their clashes, but for now we are in the midst of them and if our Western Leaders call for a war, Western young men will flock to the recruiting offices and volunteer to fight it. We all live in this "climate of understanding" and can't break free from it any more than those in the antebellum south could break free from the understanding they had.

Furthermore we have no wish to break free from our understanding. For example, there was once the belief in the U.S. that Soviet victory in the Cold War was inevitable. Therefore the argument went, let us accept that reality, for after all we are better off "red than dead." There was a minority who held that view, even among those who believed the Soviets would win the Cold war, but most didn't want to see Western Civilization replaced by Orthodox [Huntington's term for the "Eastern Orthodox" civilization led by Russia] Civilization and were willing to "fight" to preserve our Western ways.

Various historians have poured over writings, letters, memoirs and come away with the belief that Confederate soldiers, both officers and enlisted, were not fighting for the preservation of slavery. They were fighting for the preservation of their antebellum culture. Interestingly, when they poured over the same sort of writings, letter, and memoirs of soldiers fighting for the Union, they found that they weren't fighting to overthrow slavery. Most Northern soldiers wouldn't have enlisted if they were told the war was being fought to abolish slavery.

As an indication of where we are in terms of Western or more specifically American "culture," Walter Russell Mead wrote a fine book entitled Special Providence, American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World. In it he classifies Americans into several categories. The Category applicable to the current discussion is the "Jacksonian." These are the people who rush to the recruiting office to sign up for wars, but they need to be convinced by a couple of the other categories that the wars are just. The Jacksonians believe in the right to bear arms and are often referred to as "Red Necks." Mead has drawn attention to the fact that a majority of Blacks now fit into this category.

Perhaps the North or the South should be viewed as completely right or completely wrong. Perhaps the first book we pick up won't disabuse us of our preconception, but if we keep picking them up sometimes we see the other guy's point of view and can imagine that if we were raised in his time and place that we would probably have believed and behaved just as he did.

Hayden White and his Tarkegger trope

Back on May 20, 2010 in a fit of frustration over Heidegger’s Nazi involvement I wrote a little poetic fable called “Tarkegger’s Culpability”: http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/05/tarkeggers-culpability.html

Two days later I wrote “Tarkegger, Heidegger, Foucault, Hayden White, etc.”: http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/05/tarkegger-heidegger-foucault-hayden.html At the end of which I wrote “. . . I began wondering what sort of "trope" White would call "Tarkegger." I rarely consider such things as tropes, but White would have. Would White call it "irony"? Perhaps, but I wasn't feeling ironic when I wrote it. But had history developed as portrayed in "Tarkegger's Culpability," its reflection upon Heidegger's "infantile hopes for the future" and "faith in a benign [German] human nature" might have seemed ironic to the survivors -- although by that time some other trope might seem more appropriate, something more malign and involving a ravenous pack of wolves.”

Hayden White read those two articles and commented,

“Tarkegger? It is an anacolouthon.”

I wondered what trope White would apply to Tarkegger the person, but on a first reading I took White to be applying “anacoluthon” to the fable and not the person. Given that reading, any fable would be an anacoluthon in that it isn’t going to follow logically from the concept that gave rise to it. It will jump into another sphere which will have a connection, hopefully not too tenuous, to the jumping off place.

On the second reading I took White to be applying “anacoluthon” to both Tarkegger and Heidegger in the sense that there is no logical connection between them and the conclusions critics have drawn about them. To draw the conclusion more clearly he would be saying that there is a disconnect, an anacoluthon, between the evidence that exists about Heidegger’s Nazi involvement and the conclusions his critics have drawn. If that is what White intends then he would be interpreting my fable as I intended.

On a third reading and with the Deconstructionists in mind White might be saying that there is a disconnect between what Heidegger actually thought and did and my interpretation of what he thought and did. My fable in this sense would be an anacoluthon because it didn’t follow from the historical evidence. I can’t be sure that White didn’t intend this third interpretation – I hope he didn’t, but if he did I would in my own defense refer him to my earlier articles on Heidegger in which I accuse his critics (with better evidence I will assert) of this very thing.

On a fourth reading I wondered whether White was referring more generally to the difficulty of interpreting history based upon not-fully-understood culture. Those who comment upon Heidegger’s Nazi associations make assumptions about the cultural influences that inspired Heidegger. Some of those who assert the worst imagine those cultural influences to be not dissimilar from those that inspired the Nazis themselves. Those willing to view Heidegger’s politics as being similar to Thomas Carlyle’s, engage in a more benign interpretation. All these interpretations whether favorable or unfavorable are anacoluthons in the sense that there is a disconnect between the existing evidence and what is concluded about Heidegger’s character and politics. The gap is bridged by the prejudices of his critics.

Madness, Foucault, Nietzsche & Emerson

As Jose Barchilon, M.D. writes, “Naturally, it is impossible to discuss a book as complex as Madness and Civilization without oversimplifying and doing it an injustice. It is a tale of nuances, relative values, and delicate shadings.” Foucault’s intent is to provide, as his subtitle indicates, “a history of insanity in the age of reason.” Barchilon provides an example:

“Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then ‘knew,’ had an affinity for each other. Thus, ‘Ships of Fools’ crisscrossed the seas and canals of Europe with the comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.”

I read this book back in 1998 and was so impressed by it that I bought several other books by Foucault. I became interested in Foucault from a different point of view after reading Ferry and Renaut’s French Philosophy of the Sixties,” subtitled, “An Essay on Antihumanism. Foucault is one of their villains. On page 77 they write, “When the history of madness is written from a perspective borrowed from Nietzschean or Heideggerian deconstruction of the modern ratio, the ‘natural’ horizon of the topic is a strong defense for the irrational, to which the last pages of this work are unrestrainedly devoted. Passionately describing the great figures of madness (Goya, Sade, Nietzsche), Foucault praises their ‘sovereign affirmation of subjectivity’ (we will question Foucault’s use of this word in what follows), their ‘rejection of natural freedom and equality,’ their ‘excessive expression of violence’ as ‘free exercise of sovereignty over and against nature.’ Through such lightning flashes, the truth of madness returns, a truth reason tries to disguise, the truth of a ‘power to annihilate’ that suddenly rediscovers its own power; with Sade or Goya, ‘the Western world acquired the possibility of overcoming the violence of reason.’ Overcoming reason: the horizon of the interpretation is thus clearly traced, and thus is it entirely logical that the gook should end with an homage to Nietzsche, in whom the irrationality of madness triumphed over what was believed to have negated it.” In the undermining of rationality, Ferry and Renaut see Foucault as being an antihumanist and a detractor of “the subject.”

On page 78 and 79 they write “the whole group of ‘imprisonments’ . . . marked the political arrival of the bourgeoisie at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which have the names factory, prison, lycee, school barracks, psychiatric hospital – precisely the places where, since 1968 nothing works any more.’ As a result, whoever reads Madness and Civilization carefully will see that what Foucault says about the ‘great confinement’ of the classical age is clearly about the domination of the bourgeoisie, since ‘the classical age is the period of transition between feudalism and capitalism.’”

In the above, Foucault sounds like a Marxist but he considered himself a Nietzschean. In an interview in 1984 Foucault said “Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher. . . . My whole philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger. But I recognize that Nietzsche won out,’ to such an extent that one can even speak, he claims, of his ‘fundamental Nietzscheanism’: ‘I am simply Nietzschean and I try as well as I can, in a number of areas, to see with the help of Nietzsche’s texts – but also with anti-Nietzschean these (which are all the same Nietzschean!) – what can be done in one area or another. I seek nothing else, but I seek it with care.”

Why are Americans attracted to Nietzsche and through him to Foucault? In the 16^th November 2011 edition of Prospect Magazine, Adam Kirsch wrote “America’s Superman,” a review of American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. In it Kirsch (following Ratner-Rosenhagen) enumerates a great number of Americans who have been influenced by Nietzsche, Rorty for example, but Nietzsche was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Unlikely as it may seem, Emerson, as Ratner-Rosenhagen explains in a prologue, was one of Nietzsche’s own greatest influences. ‘The most fertile author of this century so far has been American,’ Nietzsche declared, and it is uncanny how many of Nietzsche’s central ideas turn up, slightly disguised, in Emerson’s essays. ‘The only sin is limitation,’ ‘the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it,’ ‘the civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet’: it is the expression more than the substance of these sayings that mark them as the product of Concord, Massachusetts, not Sils Maria.

“Emerson’s insistence on the sovereignty of the self, his skepticism about traditional morality, his metaphysical irony, all prefigure Nietzsche. So why is it that the word ‘Emersonian’ has an infinitely more benign sound than the word ‘Nietzschean’? The reason may have less to do with each thinker’s propositions than with the spirit, and the prose, in which they are advanced. Nietzsche’s Superman and Emerson’s Oversoul are not principles to think with, like Kant’s categorical imperative; they are experiences to be sought. As with all such experiences, they cannot be divorced from the language that induces them; they are, in the strongest sense, literary.

“That is why the difference in style between Emerson and Nietzsche is more telling than the similarity in their concepts. Emerson’s spacious, rippling, blurry prose is the insignia of his trustfulness, just as Nietache’s aphorisms communicate his sarcasm and aggression. Because Americans recognize in Nietzsche the bearer of Emerson’s alienated majesty, they hear the Nietzschean provocation muffled in the old Emersonian reassurance: ‘Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess today the mood, the pleasure, the power of tomorrow, when we are building up our being.’

“The prospect that tomorrow may not bring pleasure and power, but in Nietzsche’s words ‘profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished’ is – even in these days of recession and uncertainty – a notion as remote from American thought as from American experience.”

Thomas Hart’s “Reading”

http://web.mac.com/tehart/Jurassic_Rants/Books_and_Rants/Entries/2011/10/16_Reading.html

I attempted to respond to Thomas Hart’s blog note on “Reading” but his blog wouldn’t let me; so I’ll respond on mine. The first difference I noticed is that Hart’s reading program is much more organized than mine. Also, he seems to have mapped out the reading he expects to do in the next ten to twenty years he expects to live (barring accidents). I haven’t any such schedule but my doctor leads me to believe I can expect to accompany Hart through most of the next twenty years – barring accidents and illnesses such as cancer which doctors can’t always anticipate.

Hart is a Carmelite secular, we read in his note “About Me” at http://web.mac.com/tehart/Jurassic_Rants/About_Me.html . He maps out the books he expects to enjoy through his remaining years which savors of monastic order, and a resting in secure belief. I on the other hand am Presbyterian, of a denomination consistent with the early American Presbyterians whom George III accused of starting the American Revolutionary War. The early Presbyterians were Calvinists and it was Calvinism, according to Max Weber, that gave rise to the “Protestant Work Ethic.” I didn’t become a Presbyterian until I was in my early 40s, but I always had something like the Protestant Work Ethic. I wouldn’t have been out of place in Pre-Revolutionary America.

I have a library like the one Thomas Hart has in his basement. Perhaps we have some of the same books. I have a substantial number of Catholic Theologians on my shelves, but perhaps not the same ones that Hart has. I had a very brief interest in Aquinas after having been called a Thomist by a Process Theologist (Process Theology was derived from the Process Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead). At the time I knew little about Aquinas and nothing about Process Theology. In the course of debating this fellow I rectified my lack of knowledge about the latter. My counter arguments caused this fellow to resort to insult in lieu of anything better. I set out on a mild quest to read Aquinas, but in the absence of a strong incentive my interest waned. I respect Aquinas and have nothing against him. I would probably have studied him at greater length were I Catholic. I recall that Martin Heidegger was offered a permanent position if he would agree to being a Thomistic philosopher. He rejected the offer believing it would confine him too much. I had no such worry in my own study of theology. I was doing it on my own without oversight.

While I haven’t too terribly much about theology on my blog, I studied it for about eight years back in the 80s. When I retired to San Jacinto in 1998 I may have had one of the largest theological libraries in town. Mine was larger than the pastors of the Presbyterian churches we were members of. I came to Presbyterianism because it was closest to what I believed not because I was brought up in it. I was never interested in restricting myself to Presbyterian writers. On Church history I was very impressed by Jaroslav Pelikan, especially his five-volume series on The Christian Tradition. In an on-line discussion at the time a Professor at Westminster Theological Seminary (the seminary which educates most of the conservative Presbyterian pastors) asked me why I spent so much time with Lutherans so I asked him for the names of some alternatives. He mentioned Heiko Augustinus Oberman. I appreciated Oberman but I appreciate Pelikan as well. As to Catholics, I have appreciated among others Aloys Grillmeier’s series Christ in Christian Tradition, although I have not read Grillmeier in a systematic way.

My theological presuppositions, a la Cornelius Van Till, were centered on the canon. I accumulated a wide variety of points of view on each book of the Bible and would pit them against each other as I studied. After several years and numerous debates, the aforementioned professor asked me why I kept on. I wasn’t going to be a pastor or teach in a seminary, so why did I keep studying? I didn’t have a good answer.

Later I thought the best answer was that I was a sort-of lower-case polymath who believed in the ethic presented in Proverbs which isn’t inconsistent with the Protestant Work Ethic, “whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might.” I haven’t just studied theology. I mastered engineering well enough while working in aerospace. At one time I was interested in geology and went on rock and mineral expeditions in Southern California. At another time I was interested in astronomy and cosmology. I had an even greater interest in archaeology and anthropology. Later I became interested in genetics. I am very interested in European, Medieval, and Military history. All the while I have been interested in writing. I have written a good deal of poetry and seven novels, although I haven’t tried in any more than a perfunctory way to get any of them published.

Unlike Hart, after 9/11 I studied Islam, Islamism, and the histories of the most of the Muslim nations. I tend to do everything with “all my might”; which sometimes translates into a great deal of thoroughness.

Most recently I have taken up an interest in photography. One can see a number of these photographs at www.lawrencehelm.smugmug.com A few people asked if I intended to become a “professional photographer.” I understand that to be asking whether I intended to sell any of my photographs. I told them I did not. I am pursuing photography with the same intensity I have pursued everything else. Perhaps because of this I have become a better photographer than most people are willing to become, but so what? Christians are taught not to compare themselves with others but to compare themselves with themselves; which I take to mean an evaluation of one’s gifts and then a determining through self-examination whether one is exercising them to the fullest extent. I haven’t the comfort of a Carmelite framework. When I expire during the next twenty years, I hope to be “about my father’s business.”

Trilling on Eliot, V (Marx, Wordsworth, Hardy, Henley)

Trilling writes, “. . . it is incidentally significant that . . .  in every nation touched by the Revolution, the novel should have taken on its intense life.  For what so animated the novel of the nineteenth century was the passionate – the ‘revolutionary’ – interest in what man should be.  It was, that is, a moral interest, and the world had the sense of a future moral revolution.  Nowadays the novel, and especially in the hands of the radical intellectuals, has become enfeebled and mechanical: its decline coincides with the increasing indifference to the question, What should man become?

“The heightened tempo of events will go far toward explaining the change – the speed with which calamity approached, or sense of the ship sinking and our no doubt natural giving to survival the precedence over the quality of the life that was to be preserved.  Much of the change can be laid to the account of Marx, for it was Marx, with his claim to a science of society, with his concept of materialistic and dialectical causation, who, for his adherents, made the new emphasis seem unavoidable.  Considerations of morality Marx largely scorned; he begins in morality, in the great historical and descriptive chapters of Capital, but he does not continue in it, perhaps because he is led to believe that the order of the world is going to establish morality.  He speaks often of human dignity, but just what human dignity is he does not tell us, nor has any adequate Marxist philosopher or poet told us: it is not a subject which comes within the scope of their science.

“Yet not merely upon the tempo of events nor upon Marx himself can we lay the indifference to the morality and to aims.  It must fall . . . on the total imagination of our time.  It is the characteristic of this imagination so to conceive the human quality that it diminishes with ever-increasing speed before the exigencies of means.

“Lenin gave us the cue when, at the end of The State and Revolution, he told us that we might as well postpone the problem of what man is to become until such time as he might become anything he chose.   One understands how such a thing gets said; but one understands, too, that saying it does not make possible a suspension of choice already made and the making of it was what gave certain people the right to wonder whether the ethics and culture of Communism were anything else than the extension of the ethics and culture of the bourgeois business world.  For many years the hero of our moral myth was the Worker-and-Peasant who smiled from the covers of Soviet Russia Today, simple, industrious, literate – and grateful.  Whether or not people like him actually existed is hard to say; one suspects not and hopes not; but he was what his leaders and the radical intellectuals were glad to propagate as a moral ideal; that probably factitious Worker was the moral maximum which the preoccupation with immediate ends could accommodate.

“[This] diminished ideal . . . represented by that Worker is what Mr. Eliot would perhaps call, in his way, a heresy.  But from another point of view it is also a practical, a political, error.  It is the error which lies hidden in materialist and rationalist psychology.  Against it a certain part of the nineteenth century was always protesting.  Wordsworth was one of the first to make the protest when he discarded the Godwinian view of mind . . . it was in protest of the view of man shared alike by Liberal manufacturing Whig and radical philosopher, the view that man was very simple and individually of small worth in the cosmic or political scheme.  It was because of this view that Wordsworth deserted the Revolution; and it was to supply what the Revolution lacked or, in some part, denied, that he wrote his best poetry.”

COMMENT:  It is pertinent to think again of Ferry & Renaut’s French Philosophy of the Sixties, subtitled “an Essay on Antihumanism.” Ferry & Renaut’s essay was written in 1985, 45 years after Trilling’s essay on Eliot.  Not all of these Antihumanists could have been known by Trilling, but the idea of them would have been.  That is, Foucault is mentioned, but he is mentioned as deriving from Nietzsche, and Derrida from Heidegger, Bourdieu from Marx and Lacan from Freud.  Trilling didn’t assert that any of the (latter) philosophers had set out to dehumanize man, nor do Ferry and Renaut make this allegation, but an effect of their philosophies has been to diminish man.  What can the “good life” be in the face of such destructive arguments?  What can the intelligent novelist, i.e., the novelist who accepts some form of anti-humanism, write about that is not colored by despair?  Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Return of the Native, and The Mayor of Casterbridge come to mind as examples. 

Is there some way to rise above or repudiate the rampant anti-humanism that pervades our thinking?  Religion has that potential.  The Anti-Humanists have all declared God Dead, but backing away from that un-provable hypothesis is a start.  In the West we are used to Christianity.  We Christians are not left in doubt as to what we should become.  The Holy Spirit, Scriptures tell is, is transforming us into the image of Jesus Christ.  Transforming us kicking and screaming seems to be the case for most of us, but the ideal, the goal is out there for us to see and we don’t repudiate it. 

Many Christian thinkers today oppose what they perceive as an exalting of man over God, calling it “humanistic.”  But the modern philosophers they have in mind aren’t interesting in elevating man.  There is very little of that in their philosophies.  I was most recently reading Heidegger and a major concern of his was a despairing harking back to tradition as a probably-vain hope that something better could be made of Germany.   The Russian followers of Marx exalted the Worker as Trilling describes, but that Worker and his paradise were shams. 

Wordsworth was no Christian, but he saw the emptiness of a belief in Godwin’s philosophy.  He didn’t advance any alternatives that impressed Trilling.  Eliot turned to Christianity for several reasons.  Anyone who has become a Christian later in life can trace the path through several reasons (or arguments) that led to his becoming a believer.  At least one of those reasons was pragmatic.  Eliot couldn’t survive the conclusions of The Waste Land.  He couldn’t survive the conclusions he drew of the First World War and its aftermath.  

Could Eliot have been faking it, using Christianity as a means and not an end?  That doesn’t seem possible.  What benefit could he have found in a Christ he didn’t really believe in?  Paul wrote in First Corinthians 15 words to the effect that if Christ was not raised from the dead then we are the most miserable of men.  In order to be a Christian one must so believe, and if this belief is entered in to optimism becomes a possibility.  Jesus said, “In this world ye shall have tribulation, but be not afraid for I have overcome the world.” 

Or one can take the approach of Hardy who envied those who can experience optimism:

. . . At once a voice arose among

    The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

    Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

    In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

    Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

    Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

    Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

    His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

    And I was unaware.

Or one might try for the self-encouragement of William Earnest Henley partially recovering from a disease writing,

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

I tend to take a pragmatic view of these matters.  Henley was a sickly fellow who spent years in hospitals.  His unconquerable soul lasted him only 53 years. 

Trilling on T. S. Eliot, II (philosophical & theological quietism)

Trilling wrote, “Perhaps Mr. Eliot’s long if recalcitrant discipleship to Matthew Arnold gives me some justification for quoting Arnold once again:  of criticism he said that ‘it must be apt to study and praise elements that for the fullness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be maleficent.’  It is with this sentence in mind that I urge the importance of Mr. Eliot’s book.

“In the imagination of the Left Mr. Eliot has always figured with excessive simplicity.  His story was supposed to be nothing more than this: that from the horrible realities of the Waste Land he escaped into the arms of Anglo-Catholic theology.  This account may or may not be adequate; but as we review the ten years in which Marxism flourished among the intellectuals and then decayed, we can scarcely believe that this story, if true, is the worst that could be told of a man in our time.  Whatever is censurable in it depends on the blind power of that word ‘escape’ and on our attitude to theology.  For theology I certainly do not make a stand, but when Mr. Eliot is accused of ‘faith,’ of the ‘surrender’ of his intellect to ‘authority,’ it is hard to see, when the accusers are Marxist intellectuals, how their own action was always so very different.  If we have the right to measure the personal and moral value of convictions by the disinterested intellectual effort through which they are arrived at, we might find that Mr. Eliot’s conversion was notably more honorable than that of many who impugned his decision.”

COMMENT:  I was a bit surprised to read that a belief in Marxism “decayed” after a ten year period, i.e. from 1930 to 1940.  He was writing before a Cold War in which Marxism was embraced with great enthusiasm by many Western intellectuals.  I was once interested in American Marxists who advanced the cause of labor during this period.  Perhaps he had those people in mind when he used the word “decayed.”  

Trilling’s point here is that if Eliot gave up his intellectual independence by embracing Anglo-Catholic theology, those who embraced Marxism were in no position to criticize him.  Embracing a fideist or quietist approach to religion or philosophy to the extent that counter theories are rejected a priori is an extreme not many intellectuals could manage.  Perhaps people who don’t fit Trilling’s definition of “intellectual” might manage because they wouldn’t be fully aware of counter arguments, but Eliot was aware.  He worked through the problems that concerned him (perhaps described in The Waste Land) and embraced Anglo-Catholic theology as a logical solution to them.  But did that mean he quit thinking, and embraced his theology as a fideist? 

I am much more familiar with Reformed than Anglo-Catholic theology, and there is a famous controversy that developed between two Reformed theologians that bears upon this subject.  Cornelius Van Til took the position that we could not know everything God knew.  He revealed what He wanted us to know in the Scriptures, but He didn’t tell us all that He knew.  He didn’t even tell us all that he knew about what he told is in these Scriptures.  We could never know all that God knew about anything.  Gordon Clark believed that while we couldn’t know everything that God knew, we could know everything there was to know about what God revealed in Scripture.  We could know the Scriptures as thoroughly as God knew them. 

If we couldn’t know everything there was to know about Scripture, Van Til’s critics asked, how could we believe something we couldn’t fully understand?  We understood as much as God intended us to understand, but the insoluble matters we accepted on faith, Van Til responded.  Were Van Til and T. S. Eliot fideists for accepting difficult theological matters on faith?  Or was Gordon Clark arrogant for thinking he could know everything God knew about Scripture? 

Van Til & Eliot weren’t fideists any more than modern scientists are.  Modern scientists don’t believe that they know everything about nature, but they do believe that scientists will one day know almost everything.  They believe that on faith.  While some theologies are frozen in time, most subscribe to “the progress of doctrine.”  Intellectual theologians have been wrestling with doctrine for hundreds of years.  No Christian denomination holds to the theology that the earliest Church fathers advanced.  Various interpretations were advanced and debated.  Creeds and Confessions resulted.  Doctrine progressed and is still progressing.  Van Til, if not Clark, was engaged in that “progress” himself.

Heidegger’s history bears on this subject as well.  His brilliance came to the attention of the Catholic Church, and he was offered a well-paid teaching position if he would devote himself to Thomistic philosophy.  He turned the offer down.  Not because he had a better offer.  He had no other job prospects at the time, and not because he didn’t believe in Catholic theology.  He turned it down because he didn’t want to adhere to Church oversight and restriction.  His philosophy has been seen as promoting the authoritarianism of Fascism, but can we not see in, for example his invocation of ‘tradition’ hints of Roman Catholic authoritarianism?  He didn’t advocate Roman Catholicism, but might it not be there as a kind of Freudian influence? He never claimed to be an atheist and was reconciled to the Catholic Church right before he died (according to an attending priest). 

Wittgenstein adhered more closely to Christianity.  He was converted while reading Tolstoy’s paraphrase of the Bible while fighting on the side of Germany in the First World War.  His philosophy is seen by some as a kind of Quietism.  We should use the words of philosophy for comfort, and not to erect philosophical edifices.  Quietism is often associated with Fideism.  If you hunker down with the comforting words of theology or philosophy, you won’t be angrily debating contrary positions.  You will be embracing what you find comforting and not worrying very much about anything else.  There have been Quietists and Fideists present throughout Christian history.  Should the Quietism of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and Rorty be intellectually acceptable, but a Quietistic embrace of Anglo-Catholicism not be?

Lawrence

Presuppositions and Value Systems

Many’s the argument when I tried to introduce greater perspective by suggesting that we examine our presuppositions.   I can’t recall ever getting very far with that, but to treat the matter simplistically, if my “constellation of presuppositions” was based upon Liberal Democracy and my opponents “constellation of presuppositions” was based upon some form of Socialism we were probably wasting heat and anger by trying to debate only the conclusions and not at the very least relating our presuppositions to those conclusions.  H. Stuart Hughes on pages 15 & 16 of his Consciousness and Society puts that matter differently.  People are “seldom influenced by logical considerations.”  What is important to grasp, Hughes tells us, isn’t logical arguments derived from presuppositions but “Value Systems.” 

“. . . the problem of consciousness early established itself as crucial. . . it was the period in which the subjective attitude of the observer of society first thrust itself forward in preemptory fashion – hence the title of this study.  Earlier it had commonly been assumed that this attitude presented no serious problem: rationalists and empiricists alike agreed on an identity of view between actor and observer in the social process, and on assuming this common attitude to be that postulated by scientific investigation or utilitarian ethics.  All other standpoints, it had been argued, could be dismissed or discounted as intrusions of irrelevant emotion.  Now rather suddenly a number of thinkers independently began to wonder whether these emotional involvements, far from being merely extraneous, might not be the central element in the story.  By slow stages of reorientation – and often against their original intention – they were led to discover the importance of subjective ‘values’ in human behavior.  Man as an actor in society, they came to see, was seldom decisively influenced by logical considerations: supra- or infra-rational values of one sort or another usually guided his attitude might diverge from that of the actor – was himself in no radically different situation: for him also a value-system, however little articulated, dictated the selection of the problems worth of investigation and thereby prejudiced the nature of their solution.

“Thus the various thinkers with whom we shall be dealing were all in their different ways striving to comprehend the newly recognized disparity between external reality and the internal appreciation of that reality. . . .”

I wonder if this is true.  The people I’ve debated have never, without exception (to the best of my recollection) sought to “recognize disparity between external reality and the internal appreciation of that reality.”  They presupposed (sorry Hughes) the truth of their value system and their conclusions were based upon their presuppositions which was in their estimation external reality. 

My political value system is Liberal Democracy.  The basic system (as Fukuyama argues) is superior to anything else that is out there.  Someone whose value system is some form of Socialism will describe a different set of conclusions and dismiss Fukuyama. 

We know from reading Heidegger that he never embraced Liberal Democracy.  We also know that many of the European thinkers in the period Hughes is interested in did not embrace it.  Europe for centuries had authoritarian forms of government.  It wasn’t until well after the period Hughes hopes to illuminate that the bulk of these Europeans abandoned authoritarianism. 

But here I am imposing my own value system.  I am assuming that Liberal Democracy is good and Authoritarian forms of government are bad.  Plato, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger would disagree with me.  Many in the EU today would disagree with me.  In a loose translation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, embodied in a growing number of entitlements, come before democratic ideals. 

On page 17 Hughes writes, “Some of these thinkers never quite realized the implications of their own theories: they clung tenaciously to a set of philosophical presuppositions that their thought had long outgrown.  A second group welcomed the advent of the irrational and sought to ground in ‘intuition’ the social philosophy of the future.  Finally there were a few thinkers – and I believe these were the greatest – who while fighting every step of the way to salvage as much as possible of the rationalist heritage decisively shifted the axis of that tradition to make room for the new definition of man as something more (or less) than a logically calculating animal.”

My mind wandered again.  I had a friend who as a young child was taken out of Russia shortly after the Revolution.  Unfortunately they chose to flee through China and were captured by the Japanese.  As a consequence of those years in Japanese incarceration he never abandoned a hatred of all things Japanese.  I think also of the American South.  They were defeated by the more authoritarian Lincoln and his Union but one of their watchwords was “the South shall rise again.”  I remember hearing that from Southerners in the Marine Corps.  Another watchword was “comes the revolution we’ll all ship over.”  I never understood where that came from or precisely what it meant, but it may have been part of another value system that only the death of those who held up could cause it to be abandoned – there is no rationalism in any of this.

(2) on T. S. Eliot, a Heideggerian Poet?..

Malcolm MacPherson left the following comment in regard to the post   "RE: on T. S. Eliot, a Heideggerian Poet?.":

Lawrence:

No need to take offense, or to prepare your "debating" skills.

I will put it in terms you can understand. My post speaks to "new criticism," a movement in American literary criticism from the 1930s to the 1960s, which concentrates on the verbal complexities and ambiguities of poems considered as self‐sufficient objects without attention to their origins or effects.

Eliot held this viewpoint, but surely someone as "learned" and "civilized" as you would already know this.

Cheers,

Malcolm

LAWRENCE RESPONDS TO MALCOLM:

            It has been a considerable time, but yes I'm familiar with "New Criticism" but I don't quite see your comments as reflecting that school of criticism.  Here is an comment from Wiki:  "For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to 'God' by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to."

            I wasn't attempting to reflect "New Criticism" in my comments, "New Criticism" being no longer new, but in my attempting to see The Waste Land as expressing the torment and contradiction of an intellectual viewing the results of World War One, my comments, it seems to me, reflect the "New Critics" better than yours.  But perhaps you are referring to something like Eliot said in his The Sacred Wood, Essays on Poetry & Criticism, page 53, "Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.  If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of the poets in great number; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it." 

            Those may be Eliot's beliefs but it is at least coincidental that they are also self-serving, for if we became like his "Newspaper Critics" we would not put just Eliot's name to The Waste Land, but Ezra Pound's name as well.  Eliot and Pound might well have been most comfortable discussion the metaphors and symbolism, but one of the basic truths of poetry, it seems to me, is that the poet must be responsible for all the ambiguity in his poem .  He is not permitted to say I didn't mean this or that if the critic can get it out of the poem (an NC tenet by the way).  Freud forever denies us the right to say, "because I didn't intend to put it there, it isn't there." 

            What I have described seeing in Eliot's poem is also something I have read in the histories which describe what anyone living in England at the time would have seen.  Is it a coincidence to be ignored, or am I right in saying that if Eliot intended no reference to the aftermath of World War One then he either made a mistake in his poem, or he in a Freudian sense reflected it "unconsciously."  If he Eliot didn't intend it in his poem, then I am at least following "New Criticism" in finding it there despite him. 

RE: on T. S. Eliot, a Heideggerian Poet?.

Malcolm P. MacPherson left the following comment in regard to my  post "T. S. Eliot, a Heideggerian Poet?":

Eliot may have been making references to "wastes" of war, and then again, he may not. We have to take the poem, I think, as it can be interpreted "on its face." It says what it says, nothing more, nothing less.

An astute reader will orient themselves in the period of its creation, but won't be a slave to such period. After all, some poems, though from times distant past, still ring true today. In the poems of the masters, there are, of course, literal references which often date poems to linear time and place, but there are also spiritual and non linear time and place references that are impervious to the historical milieu in which the poem was created.


Malcolm P. MacPherson

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LAWRENCE RESPONDS TO MALCOLM P. MACPHERSON:

            If MacPherson had said that Eliot may not have meant what I am suggesting, I wouldn't argue, but he doesn't say that.  He says something that strikes me as slightly barbaric when in the world of poetry interpretation.  But I probably don't understand him.  His saying that The Waste Land must be interpreted "on its face" and that "it says what it says, nothing more, nothing less" is quite a bit less than an argument.  When Eliot wrote, "ambiguity" was probably understood quite a bit better than it is today -- at least that is my impression.  Yes, all statements involve some ambiguity.  And Poems, especially poems written by complex people like Pound and Eliot involve quite a lot of it. 

            I am curious to know why MacPherson what it is MacPerson thinks the poem means "on its face . . . nothing more, nothing less."  I shall hone my debating skills while I await MacPherson's response, for if ever there was a poem that could not be interpreted on its face and did not "say what it says, nothing more, nothing less," it is Eliot's The Waste Land. 

Tarkegger, Heidegger, Foucault, Hayden White, etc.

 

            While my little prose snippet, "Tarkegger's Culpability" [http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/05/tarkeggers-culpability.html ], was written during a fit of frustration, I later tried to think of it as a poem.  Poetry often dredges more out of my subconscious than I know is there.  Tarkegger says to me, you are wasting time with French angst over how much of a Nazi Heidegger was when you should be considering what would have happened had Heidegger gotten his way, that is, if Germany had become the spiritual leader of Europe as Heidegger hoped.  Consider Heidegger's dream in counterfactual terms -- the sort of exercise that Niall Ferguson loves. . . and I did consider it --  for several moments -- it would have required a benign leader, not Hitler, and the resultant Pan-European meta-nation, that Heidegger dreamed would be spiritual and benign, wouldn't be.  Nazi Germany worked against itself, sort of the way the present-day Islamists do by antagonizing everyone rather than seeking allies, but a benign, spiritual, Germany would have sought allies.  Then, much later, after Pan-Europe had become the most powerful economic power in the world, a Hitler would arise and make it the most powerful military power as well.  A spiritual Hitler would have been more disastrous than the anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic, anti-everything Hitler that we knew and hated.             Heidegger must have been very like the "anarchist Left" that Foucault referred to.  Hayden White says about Foucault (on page 105 of his The Content of the Form) "The anarchist Left he dismisses as infantile in its hopes for the future and naive in its faith in a benign human nature."  I presume that Heidegger learned his lesson, that is, that he got past his 1933-34 "infantile hopes for the future" and "faith in a benign [German] human nature."   Heidegger was sufficiently vague for us to be permitted to consider our own tradition in ways that do not embrace an "infantile hope" for the future or a "benign" view of "human nature." 

            Since I had taken Hayden White's book down, I thought about him as well.  He reminds me of J. L. Speranza.  Where Speranza sees everything in terms of what Grice would say or think about it, White sees everything in terms of tropes.  When he considers the work of Foucault, for example, he has to assign a trope to him.  Foucault's "style privileges," White tells us [p. 106] "the trope of catachresis in its own elaboration; and that, finally, this trope serves as the model of the world-view from which Foucault launches his criticisms of humanism, science, reason, and most of the institutions of Western culture as they have evolved since the Renaissance." 

            This is precisely what Ferry and Renaut railed against in French Philosophy of the Sixties, An Essay on Antihumanism; which was published in France in 1985.  White's essay, "Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism" was published in 1979 as one of the essays in Structuralism and Since: from Levi-Strauss to Derrida.  But I wonder if Ferry and Renaut read it.  I don't recall their crediting White, and I think I would recall that since I admire White.

            And then, perhaps because I am tired, I began wondering what sort of "trope" White would call "Tarkegger."  I rarely consider such things as tropes, but White  would have.  Would White call it "irony"?   Perhaps, but I wasn't feeling ironic when I wrote it.  But had history developed as portrayed in "Tarkegger's Culpability," its reflection upon Heidegger's "infantile hopes for the future" and "faith in a benign [German] human nature" might have seemed ironic to the survivors -- although by that time some other trope might seem more appropriate, something more malign and involving a ravenous pack of wolves.

           

Re: Heidegger's culpability -- and Tarski's

Robert Paul writes,

Donal wrote

Intriguing thread title. Swallowed bait. The post asks:

"Was Heidegger more culpable for sincerely supporting an ideology that later was responsible for heinous acts than Tarski for insincerely engaging in mathematical and logical work?" The answer is yes. Engaging in maths and logical work, as Tarski did, does not lead to the murder of millions or promote an inhuman fascistic social philosophy. It is also questionable how "_sincere_" is used here: it is usually taken as a term of approbation - but perhaps not when referring to a sometime Nazi supporter:-give me insincerity any day. That Tarski doubted the reality of mathematical objects, in whatever philosophical sense, would not make his work insincere either - no more than Berkeley was insincere when he looked for what he couldn't presently perceive. To even ask whether Tarki's nominalism leaves him "culpable", on the plane on which MH is culpable, is risible. It would be less fatuous to ask whether the risks of passive smoking from Einstein's pipe put Einstein in the same bracket of  "culpable" as Hitler with his "sincere" use of death squads. Of course, if a strong argument can be made, by examining the history and impact of ideas, that Tarski's math and logic work helped produce murderous regimes and a senseless World War, then these peepers will be agog.

Lawrence replied (I’m cutting and pasting from his blog)


            Donal's outrage would be valid only if something like the criticisms that Emmanuel Faye advanced were also valid and I am have assumed they are not based on my own reading of Faye, Heidegger, and others --  and the further evidence of Albert Kissler (see http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/05/albert-kissler-examining-fayes-smoking.html ).  His outrage is valid, in other words, only if he doesn't know or understand the evidence.

[My—RP’s—comments are enclosed in square brackets like the ones that enclose this sentence.]
           
[Donal is not examining the evidence for or against the claim that something like the tenets of National Socialism can be found in Heidegger’s work, of whatever period. He is responding to the foolish claim that if Heidegger had somehow embraced, endorsed, or promoted them, then Tarski would be ‘culpable,’ (of what, I’m not clear) just as Heidegger would have been (in some way) ‘culpable’) had he somehow endorsed or promoted National Socialism, or at least some of its principles. This claim is so foolish that I know it can’t be what Lawrence means.]

[What does he mean? It seems to be this. The claim that Faye made about Heidegger’s sympathy with National Socialism is false. Had it been true though, he would have been guilty of something, and guilty in a way that would have, by parity of reasoning, made Tarski ‘guilty’ (of insincerity). Yet Heidegger’s guilt or innocence with respect to his having endorsed, etc., or denounced, etc., National Socialism has absolutely nothing to do with the ‘sincerity’ (or bad faith) of formalist mathematicians. A formalist in mathematics (I’m simplifying a lot) is someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of numbers as quasi-Platonic entities that lie outside the ordinary realm of experience. Simply: numerals do not refer to anything beyond themselves (and so with other mathematical ‘entities’).]

[An oversimplified analogy might be that the names of chess pieces do not refer to e.g., actual wood, ivory, or gold objects; to point out to someone that a certain chess piece is the King will only make sense if he or she knows the rules of chess: it’s the King that may be moved, checked, and so on—and in a particular game, this piece is the one that obeys these rules. Tossed into a box with the other pieces, this particular bit of stuff differs only in size and shape from them.]

[Talented chess players can play by email, or even through exchanging postcards, and if they set out actual chess pieces in front of them, these will serve—their arrangement will serve—only as a mnemonic. It would be silly to imagine someone’s saying that they were insincere—only playing at playing chess—because they weren’t moving actual wooden pieces about.]

[To say that anyone who doesn’t believe that numbers have a sort of Platonic existence can’t be doing serious mathematics, mathematical logic, ‘meta-mathematics,’ or whatever, can only be supported by rhetoric.]

[Formalism, finitism, intuitionism, and realism are all forms of mathematics. Each has its limitations and each has achieved something worthwhile. What adherence to one or the other of them though might have to Heidegger’s political beliefs is a mystery.]

[But, then, lots of things are.]

Robert Paul

LAWRENCE RESPONDS: 

            Donal writes, "Was Heidegger more culpable for sincerely supporting an ideology that later was responsible for heinous acts than Tarski for insincerely engaging in mathematical and logical work?"  I can't read this in the way that you do

            You write, Donal is not examining the evidence for or against the claim that something like the tenets of National Socialism can be found in Heidegger’s work, of whatever period. He is responding to the foolish claim that if Heidegger had somehow embraced, endorsed, or promoted them, then Tarski would be ‘culpable,’ (of what, I’m not clear) just as Heidegger would have been (in some way) ‘culpable’) had he somehow endorsed or promoted National Socialism, or at least some of its principles. This claim is so foolish that I know it can’t be what Lawrence means.]"

            Thank you for the disclaimer in the last sentence.  Indeed I don't mean what you suggest.  And I don't think Donal is taking it in that sense either.  But I didn't mean to say that Heidegger and Tarski are guilty of the same thing, nor that I was comparing their respective guilt.  Donal had it right up to a point, I was considering Heidegger's guilt in regard to having supported National Socialism in 1933-34 in loose relation with Tarski's guilt at claiming to be Nomalistic about his work in Logic.  I say "loose relation" because I only paired their comparative guilt because a commentator on my blog, enowning related them when he wrote, To my mind one needs to seperate Heidegger's actions with the Nazis and his culpability (or lack of prescience, if you will) from his works. Mathematicians, scientists, engineers, don't have this problem; if an equation is correct and useful, it is a good equation irrespective of the history of the person who thought it up." 

            My intention was not so much to compare Tarski's "guilt" to Heidegger's as it was to disagree a bit with enowning who asserted that Mathematicians were not faced with problems of culpability like philosophers were.  But also, I found the "guilt" of Tarski interesting and hoped to go off on a tangent.  I've spent a lot of time on Heidegger and only posted the "smoking gun" of Faye; which turned out to be smokeless, because it was an important bit of information that was missing from earlier discussions on Heidegger's guilt.  As a result of enowning's comment I thought a bit more about Tarski, and while I am far from drawing more than tentative conclusions, I do wonder about him

Tarkegger's culpability

            The year was 2053.  Mars has been explored and the beginnings of towns, if not cities had been well established, but living on Mars was to be a hardship, and the numbers volunteering to do that were small.  Then Alf Tarkegger started a crusade.  Let Mars become the religious outpost of humanity, a purer Catholicism.  And not just an outpost, let it bring the pure religion and love of God that comprised early Catholicism back to earth -- and through its evangelism let it turn earthly humanity away from its lascivious ways, away from its abortions, divorces, pornography and all other sins deplored by God.

            Thanks to the efforts of Tarkegger, by 2073 Mars had become well colonized.  Technological developments made the living easier with each passing year.  But Tarkegger's hope that Mars would become the New Jerusalem had failed.  He lived just long enough to know this failure for what it was, and some say it hastened his death.

            By 2093 Mars, militarily united, was more powerful than any nation on earth.  Also, the anti-war sentiments of many nations had done its work.  No nation, in that year, was militarily or psychologically equipped to opposed a Martian invasion -- at least not very effectively.  The Martians by this time approximated the Greek God's personality more closely than it did the Roman Catholic Religion. 

            Mars issued the same ultimatum to all nations, surrender or be destroyed.  France surrendered immediately.  The Benelux nations followed the next day, then Spain, Italy and the rest of Western Europe.  The Poles, Czechs, and the members of the Russian Federation resolved to fight.  China and the United States also decided to fight.  Canada wanted to surrender but the U.S. threatened to invade before the Martians got there if it did.

            By 2099 the first Martian-Earth war had ended.  Though Western Europe had hoped to save itself by surrender, when the Martians set up their Army near Paris, with wave after wave of battalions still coming to earth from Mars, the Polish-Czech-Russian Federation alliance attacked from the East, and the American-British-Chinese- Japanese-Canadian-Australian Federation attacked from the West.  Not only Paris, but the rest of France and much of the rest of Europe was destroyed beyond restoration.  What was once Paris became a gigantic bomb crater 3,057 meters deep -- even to this day.  Without the availability of European food and manufacturing, the tide of battle swung away from the Martians.  By the middle of 3000 they returned to Mars to lick their wounds.

   There were subsequent wars, and with each one, the Earthlings became stronger and the Martians weaker.  By 3033 Mars experienced a revolution that overthrew the leaders who retained military ambitions.

            In this year, 4010, we Earth-historians are spending a good deal of time debating whether Tarkegger should be considered morally culpable or not.  Some critics say that he should have known that his plan was naive and against human nature.  Other critics say that he knew in advance what Mars would become and set the wheels of Martian aggression into motion.  The historian Emmanuel Fey claimed to have discovered a hitherto unknown journal written by Tarkegger in which he details his plans for the military conquering of earth by Martian Armies.  When the journal was finally published it could be seen, at least by the historians bothering to read it, that Tarkegger was speaking of Evangelism and not military battle. 

            Tarkegger's place in human history has still not been resolved to everyone's satisfaction.  Many, especially simple people who don't study history, think he was an unmitigated disaster, entirely culpable for every one of Mars' wars against earth and for all the millions that died.  "He should have been smothered in his cradle" is commonly heard.  But the more sober among us take note of Tarkegger's well-meaning sincerity, and, we remind those of our number who weaken, how could anyone have known?

Tarski's conversion to Catholicism and Heidegger's abandonment of it

            Many, apparently, questioned Alfred Tarski's nominalism.  How could he devote his life, they asked, to something he didn't believe?   That he himself agonized over this is evident.  On one occasion he described himself as "an extreme anti-Platonist . . . . However, I represent this very crude, naive kind of anti-Platonism, one thing which I could describe as materialism, or nominalism with some materialistic taint, and it is very difficult for a man to live his whole life with this philosophical attitude, especially if he is a mathematician, especially if for some reason he has a hobby which is called set theory."

            Tarski practiced something else he didn't really believe in, Catholicism.  He was born Alfred Teitelbaum, but greater opportunities, he was told, would open up to him if he changed his name and converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and so he did.  His name change became official days before he received his PhD, and it was important to him that it bore his Polish name Tarski, rather than his Jewish name Teitelbaum. 

            To contrast Tarski once again with Heidegger.  Heidegger was assured continued support from the Catholic Church if he would remain a Catholic and practice Thomist philosophy, but he wouldn't submit to the Church's authority.  He said he wouldn't be able to pursue philosophy honestly if he had the Church looking over his shoulder.  Heidegger had no other means of support at the time; so he had to scramble to find something.  Tarski had no adequate means of support (his parents had been wealthy but had begun to struggle financially); so he converted to Catholicism in order to gain support. 

            Samuel Eilenberg later became a "distinguished mathematician and professor at Colombia University.  "In his first year at Warsaw University, Eilenberg had taken a logic course from the docent, Alfred Tarski.  He was one of the few who claims to have been 'only moderately impressed' by Tarski's lectures.  In Eilenberg's frankly hostile opinion, Tarski, should neither have changed his name nor -- even worse -- become Catholic:

            "He did it so that life would be easier and he did it with great zeal.  People poked fun at him because suddenly he was interested in all kinds of things which were strictly not in the Teitelbaum repertoire, if you know what I mean.  Things like Catholic liturgy and the rites associated with it.  He wasn't very popular and not just because he switched.  Other did it; in fact, his colleague Bronislaw Knaster did it, and nobody poked fun at him.  It's just because Tarski acted so pious.  People told stories about him and treated him as a comical figure.  He, himself, had absolutely no sense of humor." [pp 54-5 of Alfred Tarski, Life and Logic]

            Did Tarski need to convert to Catholicism because he was being persecuted as a Jew?  Only in a sense.  Warsaw at the time had the second largest Jewish population in the world and the Jewish population did very well at the time.  Tarski would have been discriminated against in regard to career opportunities if he remained Alfred Teitelbaum.   So it was to avoid career discrimination that he converted to Catholicism.  But as we see this conversion was no hardship for him for even then, I suspect, he was an atheist.

Re: Heidegger's culpability -- and Tarski's

A rather outraged response was posted by Donal: 

Intriguing thread title. Swallowed bait. The post asks:- "Was Heidegger more culpable for sincerely supporting an ideology that later was responsible for heinous acts than Tarski for insincerely engaging in mathematical and logical work?" The answer is yes. Engaging in maths and logical work, as Tarski did, does not lead to the murder of millions or promote an inhuman fascistic social philosophy. It is also questionable how "_sincere_" is used here: it is usually taken as a term of approbation - but perhaps not when referring to a sometime Nazi supporter:-give me insincerity any day. That Tarski doubted the reality of mathematical objects, in whatever philosophical sense, would not make his work insincere either - no more than Berkeley was insincere when he looked for what he couldn't presently perceive. To even ask whether Tarski's nominalism leaves him "culpable", on the plane on which MH is culpable, is risible. It would be less fatuous to ask whether the risks of passive smoking from Einstein's pipe put Einstein in the same bracket of  "culpable" as Hitler with his "sincere" use of death squads. Of course, if a strong argument can be made, by examining the history and impact of ideas, that Tarski's math and logic work helped produce murderous regimes and a senseless World War, then these peepers will be agog.

Lawrence responds:

            Donal's outrage would be valid only if something like the criticisms that Emmanuel Faye advanced were also valid, and I am have assumed they are not based on my own reading of Faye, Heidegger, and others --  and the further evidence of Albert Kissler (see http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/05/albert-kissler-examining-fayes-smoking.html ).  His outrage is valid, in other words, only if he doesn't know or understand the evidence.

            National Socialism (the "ideology" I referred to) was not in the 1933/34 time period equivalent to what it became later, say by 1940.  No one, not even Emannuel Faye is suggesting that it is.  What Faye argues is that Heidegger's beliefs were demonstrably the same as National Socialism at the later time.  In his book he offered what he claimed was proof, but when the "smoking gun," the document Faye based his allegation upon was published and could be seen as not supporting Faye's argument, then we are back to the original claim that Heidegger made: that he believed in National Socialism as he conceived it.  He thought with the right leader, Germany could become the "spiritual" leader of Germany. 

            Thus, the evidence that Heidegger was not culpable for what National Socialism became seems incontrovertible. 

            Now as to Tarski's culpability for practicing his whole life in a field he didn't believe related to reality, this is the more open question.  Did Tarski treat his mathematics and logic like a chess game?  If so, why does Tarski say what he says, that "People have asked me, 'How can you, a nominalist, do work in set theory and logic, which are theories about things you do not believe in?"   One has only to be reminded of the comment by enowning that preceded my note:

            "To my mind one needs to seperate Heidegger's actions with the Nazis and his culpability (or lack of prescience, if you will) from his works. Mathematicians, scientists, engineers, don't have this problem; if an equation is correct and useful, it is a good equation irrespective of the history of the person who thought it up.

            "The notion that Heidegger's insights are wrong because of his acts, is a symptom of political correctness gone wild. "

            Enowning, unlike Donal, has examined the evidence that refutes Faye's allegations; so he (or she) is clear about there being no valid argument that Heidegger was culpable for what German National Socialism became.  Where I took issue with Enowning was in his assumption that "Mathematicians . . . don't have this problem, if an equation is correct and useful, it is a good equation irrespective of the history of the person who thought it up."  Perhaps Enowning's terms "this problem" and "useful" are his out.  The problems for Tarski was that many thought they were being mislead about what he had produced.  But if Tarski's mathematics were as useless as he implies then he, and Enowning, could argue that Tarski was not being a hypocrite by practicing something that other people assumed related to reality, but that he did not.  While that may be an out for Enowning, I'm not as sure, as Donal seems to be, that it is for Tarski.