I read The Castle because Thomas Merton had highly recommended it in connection with with Camus. In Myth of Sisyphus, Camus devotes a chapter to “Hope and the Absurd in Kafka”. But it is Camus’ The Plague where Merton makes the comparison. He says that both The Castle and The Plague “deal symbolically with the relation between and and the inscrutable powers that influence his destiny without his being able to understand them.” Merton seems to take it for granted that K. has been summoned by the Castle. But I’m not so sure I agree.

For me it was difficult to tell whether K. was actually summoned by the Castle or if he, for whatever reason, decided he wanted to leave his hometown and find a new place to live so made up the summons. He clearly has no intention to go back home and frequently says he plans to make the village his home. It’s very ambiguous. Whatever the case may be, he is given the run around and cannot penetrate The Castle no matter how hard he tries.

Merton says that Kafka is speaking about religious alienation: “man’s struggle to bridge the gap between himself and a realm of utterly inaccessible transcendence.” The problem is that man attempts to “imagine and understand grace in terms of hierarchic organization, that is to say, in terms of “law”‘. For anyone who understands the New Testament, it is clear that this involves a contradiction that is beyond any solution. But for anyone who knows church history, it is also clear that the contradiction is in fact, inevitable. They cannot understand grace in any other terms.”

For Merton, the hero of The Castle is Amalia. She refuses an insulting summons from the Castle and she and her family are disgraced by this refusal. The Castle is always to be obeyed but she chooses to do what is “wrong” (yet she is in the right). She is Sisyphus. “She refuses unquestioning obedience to an arbitrary and revolting command. Her act is precisely the kind of choice which Camus describes as “revolt” against the arbitrary and the absurd, in affirmation of one’s personal life, one’s own authenticity and existential truth.” A significant point: it is not the Castle who ostracizes Amalia’s family, it is the villagers. Also, Irving Howe points out that part of what makes Amalia heroic is that she does not challenge the Castle’s dominance or criticize it. She simply refuses to have any connection with it. She is sustained by suffering and a quiet resolve. (Olga calls Amalia’s refusal “the original cause” of the family being despised. (Original sin that creates the fall?)

K. is “the stranger” to the village. He doesn’t understand the internal workings of the society and is constantly bungling his efforts to get into the Castle. The administrators of the Castle seem to be unsure what it is he has come to the village for but because they never make an error, they assume he is there to do land surveying, as he says. But rather than employ him, they do what they can to keep him somewhat complacent while giving him the runaround. On the one hand, he is standing against the system. On the other, he’s trying to figure out how to become a part of it. He’s no hero like Amalia is a hero. But that he wants to reach the heart of The Castle puts him in stark contrast to most of humanity is prefers comfort and complacency to struggle.

Max Brod was a friend of Kafka’s who pieced the book together after Kafka’s death. He, like Merton, put a strong emphasis on the religious aspects. He said the Castle represents a wish “to get clear about ultimate things” with the recognition that it is impossible to get clear about ultimate things because the world will not yield to lucidity.

Kafka wrote, “Man cannot live without permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, and at the same time that indestructible something as well as his trust in it may remain permanently concealed from him.” K. searches for a way to penetrate the castle, completely exhausts himself, but his lifelong quest does not lead to a conclusion.

Kafka was Jewish so it is possible the book could also have to do with being displaced from your home and trying to fit into a totally different culture. There are many instances where it is clear that people don’t really want him in the village but simply tolerate his being there. Even the Chambermaid claims that K. is lower, socially, than she is. But at the same time, several people look to K. to help them break out of the system.

It could be specifically about a Jewish experience, but this experience has now become common within all of modern man. Irving Howe writes, “No other writer of our century has so strongly evoked the caustral sensations of modern experience, sensations of bewilderment, loss, guilt, dispossession. These are sensations known to millions of people quite unaware of Kafka’s writings and without any claim to philosophical reflection.” Robert Atler says that the distinctive quandaries of Jewish existence have become quandaries for all mankind. Kafka merely recognizes them. (He’s not out to convert anyone.)

I found the book to be incredibly tedious in parts which was very likely intentional on Kafka’s part. When K. falls asleep during Brugel’s advice, I thought I might fall asleep, too! It just went on and on and on and on… And you never know, is Brugel offering something of value? Should I be paying closer attention to his ramblings? Or is this just more of the same old runaround K. comes up against at every turn.

The book actually ends mid-sentence. Max Brod said he once asked Kafka how he intended to end the book and Kafka replied:

The ostensible land surveyor was to find partial satisfaction at least. He was not to relax his struggle, but was to die worn out by it. Round his deathbed the villagers were to assemble, and from the Castle itself word was to come that though K.’s legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was to e permitted to live and work there.

So Kafka never intended to have K. reach the castle.

Just a few quotes I found interesting:

After Freida has allowed K. to look through the peephole at Klamm (the Castle authority), the landlady chastises him: “But just tell me, how did you have the face to look at Klamm? You needn’t answer, I know you think you were quite equal to the occasion. You’re not even capable of seeing Klamm as he really is; that is not merely an exaggeration, for I myself am not capable of it either.” (This from a woman who was summoned by Klamm so apparently has slept with him.)

The Mayor: “Is there a Control Authority? There are only Control authorities. Frankly, it isn’t their function to hunt out errors in the vulgar sense, for errors don’t happen, and even when once in a while an error does happen, as in your case, who can say finally that it’s an error?”

K. to the teacher: “…but that I had other things to think of than polite behavior is true enough, for my existence is at stake, which is trheatened by a scandalous official bureaucracy whose particular failings I needn’t mention to you, seeing that you are an acting member of it yourself.”

Olga to K. on getting official appointment in the Castle: “…let us say someone like that [someone wanting to seize an opportunity for Castle promotion] goes in for the examination, for years he waits in fear and trembling for the result, from the very first day everybody asks him in amazement how he could have dared to do anything so wild, but he still goes on hoping - how else could he keep alive?” (Kierkegaard?)

The movie presented Steppenwolf as though it was one long drug trip after another and perhaps that is what it was. But if Hesse had been involved in Buddhist meditation and Jungian dream interpretation (he knew Carl Jung personally), I’m not sure it is completely accurate to conclude the book is about a drug trip even though some of our best literary works come to us via the drug trips of authors.

In the intro. to my copy of the book, Hesse says Steppenwolf has been more misunderstood than any of his other novels. In fact, he says it has been violently misunderstood by those who are most enthusiastic about it - especially his younger readers. He wrote this book about his problems when he was 50 and the younger individuals who read it tend to completely misunderstand it. And as for those of us who are his age now when he wrote the book, he wants us to know it is not about a man despairing, but a man believing. “May everyone find in it what strikes a chord in him and is of some use to him! But I would be happy if many of them were to realize that the story of the Steppenwolf pictures a disease and crisis - but not one leading to death and destruction, on the contrary - to healing.”

It’s like a dark night of the soul, like in Martin Scorcese’s After Hours. The imagination is heightened in our dark nights. But dark nights are always cleansing if we allow them to be.

The person who introduces the story Haller left to him says, “I have no doubt that they are for the most part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention. They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experience.” He goes on, “I see them as a document of the times, for Haller’s sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but a sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.”

Haller said, “Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage would in our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, everyone doesn’t feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.”

The rest of the book is Harry Haller’s records which doesn’t play out as a formula. It isn’t 2+2=4. It’s the realization that the self is comprised of onion layers, not a Cartesian split self between lived experience and rational understanding (wolf and man). Rather, the self is comprised of an infinity of selves which is the same as saying there is “no-self”. Instead of thinking in terms of Cartesian dualism, he comes to understand himself in terms of an onion where layer after layer can be pealed away until at last there is nothing (or everything).

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 and died at the age of 40 (1924) by starvation (he had tuberculosis which made it painful to eat). He came from a middle class Jewish family in Prague.

According to Joachim Neugroschel, in the nineteenth century, traditional absolutes were being replaced with scientific and technological absolutes. With this shift, the concept of “nature” and “natural” shifted.

Neugroschel writes, “For Christianity and European civilization, “nature” has always been something to overcome, conquered, tamed, domesticated - subdued and subjugated for human use. The West draws an artificial line between “nature” and “human” or “man-made” - as if a beaver’s “natural dam” and an engineer’s technological dam were not subject to the same physical laws, the same “natural” laws.” But “natural” was also used to uphold the ethical. Some forms of behavior were attacked for being natural while others are upheld, like men’s dominion over women, Europe’s domination over the rest of the world, the nuclear family, family values, etc. To make things more confusing, “unnatural” is considered to be a put down. Fascism saw itself as lending mother nature a helping hand by killing anyone that the fascist state declared unnatural.

Kafka uses “nature” in an almost sort of divine sense. His protaganists very often have to pay a terrible price when they go against “nature” (like Gregor Samsa turning into a bug). The punishment is as severe as the punishment meted out by a vengeful deity in a Greek tragedy.

So the question becomes, how natural are these systems that have been deemed natural? Kafka wants to expose the destructive basis of systems but at the same time wants to restore things back to their “natural” order in some way.

My favorite stories in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories (translated by Joachim Neugroschel) are: “The Judgment”, “The Metamorphosis”, “In the Penal Colony”, and “A Report for an Academy”.

Kafka wrote “The Judgment” when he was 29. I think the story has to do with the changing times. The father held the punitive patriarchal role of the family, but the mother has died which has subdued him somewhat and the son has stepped in and assumed increasing responsibility of the family business. It seems to him the natural progression. But as the son has become more powerful, the father has become less powerful and sees this as a threat. The father is hugely judgmental, critical, says his mother’s death was harder on him than on the son and ultimately condemns his son to death. The minute the father starts lashing out at his son in this way, the son immediately cowers and reverts back to the original father-son relationship with father as all-powerful and son at his mercy. The son obeys his father and throws himself over a bridge.

Psychologically speaking (which would only be a very shallow interpretation) it is extremely difficult in households with controlling, judgmental parents for children to establish their own power and control. The individual is subjected to the judgment of the parent which declares the individual non-existent until he judges him as existent. Even as an adult, it is very difficult to establish a sense of self-mastery when the value of individual existence is left up to an authority figure.

In “The Metamorphosis”, the father has lost a lot of money so the son which has depleted his strength and so the son has stepped in to become the sole income earner of the family and does a good job. This increases the power of the son and decreases the power of the father. When the son becomes a bug, the fathers power slowly increases and rapidly increases when he lodges the apple in Gregor’s back that leads to Gregor’s death.

“In the Penal Colony” has a slightly different theme, but I think it’s in the same ballpark. An officer has been maintaining an inhumane, elaborate execution system that his previous Commander built. People are judged as guilty without being able to defend themselves and without even being told that they have been judged. The apparatus works by writing the nature of the crime into the skin of the judged over and over again. By the 6th hour the judged finally realizes that he has been judged (enlightenment comes) and likewise recognizes the judgment. The officer explains the observance of the judge at this point an almost spiritual experience. But a new commander is now in place and he is not in favor of this execution system. So the officer is trying to talk the traveler into telling the Commander that it is a beautiful system. The traveler says he can’t do this so the officer tells the condemned man to get off of the apparatus and places himself there instead. The apparatus malfunctions and stabs the officer through the forehead. There is no spiritual experience that takes place - no look of enlightenment. The expression the officer had before he was on the apparatus is the same as in death.

I think this story could be understood on many different levels. But what I keep seeing in Kafka’s stories is this idea of judgment.

In a patriarchal system, the father who is head of the household and a Commander of a penal colony hold similar positions. They both function very much like the traditional abstract punitive God. In all of these stories, there is the sense that a new understanding is taking hold but this new understanding cannot be understood by those who still exist within the patriarchal system. (Gregor in “The Metamorphosis” can’t make himself understood, Georg in “The Judgment” realizes his father is senile and so cannot understand Georg.)

In “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis”, a shift is taking place that is disallowed by the power structure currently in place. In both stories, the father figure is waning (God is dying), but in a last burst of energy, manages to denounce the son and the son accepts this denouncement and dies. The old system remains in place, however tentatively. But clearly, this system is nihilistic rather than life giving.

“In the Penal Colony”, a new system is likewise taking the place of the old. A more humane view is replacing the previous, inhumane view.

God, in a patriarchal system, represented a deity who could give or take on whim. Disobedience was punished and very often, the punished didn’t know what it was he was being punished for. The same is true in the family structure. A child is affected for life by the punitive judgments of the father in a patriarchal household. It’s as though this judgment is being written over and over again into the child so that it is always with the child through adulthood and until death. The child must walk a slippery slope into adulthood because what he perceives to be the natural progression is perceived by the father as disobedience. This is true of patriarchal societies as well.

But in “In the Penal Colony”, the commander is dead. (God is dead) and has been replaced. There is a young officer fanatically trying to uphold the system that his Commander put in place, but he knows the system is no longer powerful. His apparatus is in disrepair and he suspects that it is scheduled to be destroyed altogether. But he is still a part of the system and cannot go on without it. As though the Commander (a potential father figure to the young officer) is judging him from his death bed, the officer intends to place himself on the apparatus and his judgment is simply “Be Just”. But rather than have this written on his body and having enlightenment come to him at the 6th hour, the apparatus malfunctions and he is killed immediately.

What does it mean to “be just”? Especially if God (the patriarchal system) has died or is dying and the system that had been based on this God is now malfunctioning?

In “A Report to an Academy”, and ape has become human and is making a report to a scientific academy. He was caged and pinned down and realized there was no way out. His only choice was to be stuck in a zoo or to become human. He decided it would be better to become human so he learned to imitate humans (which he found to be quite easy) and became quite successful at it that he was able to perform on the Vaudeville stage. His only freedom existed in becoming something he wasn’t. The ape says, “I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason.”

At night he comes home to a half-trained female ape. But during the day, he doesn’t want to see her because her gaze has the madness of a bewildered trained animal that only he can see. He can’t stand to look at that gaze because it pains him too much.

This is another story that can be understood on many levels. But I think it still has to do with the idea of judgment. In a patriarchal society, it isn’t enough that we exist, we have to justify our existence in some way. And if we can’t justify it, then we die, either figuratively or physically. At the end of the story, the ape says, “In any case, I don’t want any man’s judgment. I only want to expand knowledge. I simply report. Even to you, esteemed gentlemen of the Academy, I have only made a report.”

So another question: Does modern man truly live? Or does he simply report? Is he just more data to add to the formula Dostoevsky talks about in Notes from Underground? We’ve gotten rid of the punitive God, but are we now caged by our reason?

Walter Kaufmann is a renowned Nietzsche scholar. He is credited with having cleared up all of the mess around the mistranslations of Nietzsche’s books that made people think he was in favor of Nazism. (Nietzsche’s sister had added white supremist language to some of his unpublished works and then published them with her additions after he had gone insane and was under her care.)

Kaufmann says the heart of Existentialism is “the refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life.” He says Dostoevsky’s Part 1 of Notes from Underground is the best overture for Existentialism ever written. All of the major themes from Kierkegaard to Camus can be found in this text.

It is one of the most revolutionary and original works of literature. There is nothing even remotely similar in the long past of European literature. But it is in Christianity where we first find man’s depravity and the dark side of man’s inner life as set against the background of original sin. Rousseau talked about depravity, but he turned against original sin and affirmed the goodness of man, blaming all depravity on society rather than the individual. Depravity could be abolished through the creation of a good society, ruled by the general will. But what Dostoevsky says in Notes from Underground is that a good society cannot get rid of the depravity of man. The book is a polemic against Rousseau and the whole tradition of social philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Hobbes and Locke to Bentham, Hegel, and John Stuart Mill.

The man in the Notes doesn’t believe in original sin or God and he doesn’t think man’s self-will is depravity. Man’s situation is only perverse from the point of view of rationalists and those who value neat schemes above the rich texture of individuality.

Kaufmann says that Nietzsche read Notes from Underground in 1887. Nietzsche wrote: “I did not even know the name of Dostoevsky just a few weeks ago… an accidental reach of the arm in a bookstore brought to my attention L’esprit souterrain, a work just translated into French . . . The instinct of kinship (or how should I name it?) spoke up immediately; my joy was extraordinary.”

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My cryptic summary…

From what I can gather, the underground man, not surprisingly, lives underground and is listening to what man says through the cracks in the floor. He claims he is writing his notes because he wants to experiment with being totally open and not be afraid of the whole truth. He thinks Heine is right that all autobiographies will be full of lies. But Heine makes his criticism of those who write to the public. The Underground Man knows he will not have readers.

The Underground Man says that he did not know how to become anything: “neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.” In the 19th century, an intelligent man cannot become anything; It is only the fool who can become something.

The man has tried to become an insect several times but the reason he can’t even become an insect is because to be too conscious is an illness. It’s a disease. The problem is the too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation which makes you feel as though you have reached the last barrier (a wall) and that there is no escape and no way to become anything else. Two plus two is four and that’s that. Nature has nothing to do with your wishes or whether you like her laws or dislike them. You have to accept her as she is and all of her natural conclusions. But this creates an ache because the more you don’t know, the worse the ache.

Modern man thinks his advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace and so on. But surely there must exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his great advantages? A most advantageous advantage? Because in truth, man is ready to act in opposition to all of the laws, in opposition to reason, honor, peace, prosperity and all the excellent and useful things for the most advantageous advantage.

Logically, it seems that mankind would become softer through civilization. That he’d be less bloodthirsty and less inclined for warfare. But man is willing to distort the truth intentionally and is willing to deny the evidence of his sense in order to justify his logic. The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of the senses - and absolutely nothing more. In this way, man comes to find enjoyment in bloodshed.

Even if man is able to see more clearly and reasonably than in barbarous ages, he has yet to be able to learn what reason and science dictates. Yet modern man is fully convinced that he will learn when he gets rid of old bad habits and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature. And let’s say he does learn and everything becomes extraordinarily rational, then won’t life become frightfully dull? In boredom, they will start sticking themselves with golden pins and will be thankful for the golden pins!

Of course, there will be those who will want to get rid of rationalism altogether. And what is annoying is that these people will even find followers because man has always preferred to act according to his choice and not according to dictates - even the dictates of reason.

“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy - is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.” These people who claim that reason should dictate our behavior - what has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is independent choice, no matter what that independence may cost him and wherever it may lead.

Reason is an excellent thing - there is no disputing that. But reason is nothing but reason and only satisfies the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole human life, including reason and all its impulses. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning and there are likely some things it will never learn. Human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and even if it goes wrong, it lives. Very often and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason.

“…if man is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity, perpetual - from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period. Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity … one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational … The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving that he is not a piano key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we do not know? … Good Heavens gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will be a case of twice two makes four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that! ”

Modern man wants to cure men of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense, but how do they know this is possible? And is it desirable to do this anyway? How do they know that such a reformation will be of benefit to man? It may be a law of logic, but not a law of humanity. Perhaps the only goal to which mankind is striving has nothing to do with what is attained (which must always be expressed as a formula: 2+2=4), but with life itself. As positive as twice two makes four, such positiveness is not life, it is the beginning of death. Consciousness is infinitely superior to twice two makes four because once you have mathematical certainty, there is nothing left to do or understand.

Modern man boasts of consciousness, but isn’t sure of the ground of consciousness or how the mind works. Man’s boasting may be sincere, but it lacks modesty and is full of lies.

I’m on Lecture 14 of Solomon’s lecture series, No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life. (Still on sale. )

For this lecture, I read the first part of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. I highlighted a whole bunch of stuff I’ll try and make sense of that later. I’ve read Crime and Punishment several times and just read Brothers Karamazov last August. I think that’s all I’ve read by Dostoevsky.

I also bought Kafka’s Metamorphoses, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories intending to just read Metamorphosis, but got totally engrossed and ended up reading the entire book. (This is all I’ve ever ready by Kafka but definitely want to read a novel or two now.)

“Metamorphosis” is heart wrenching!! Just way to close to home - the idea that you completely deny who it is you are and what you are passionate about in order to fulfill a duty, only to find out that your existence was completely reliant upon fulfilling that duty AND that in the fulfilling of that duty, you were incapacitating others around you as well. (Probably a shallow reading, but that’s what I took away from it.) What’s interesting is that the Underground Man in Dostoevsky’s Notes says he can’t even turn into an insect. Yet here Gregor Samsa turns into a monstrous vermin that seems to resemble a huge insect of some sort. (But I’ll try to make sense of that later.)

I also just finished reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. I read Siddhartha several years ago and in 2005 I read Demian. Besides Willa Cather and Ray Bradbury, he may very well be my favorite author! Steppenwolf, the movie, is available to “watch now” on Netflix, so I did. I think it stayed fairly true to the novel, but I found it incredibly annoying. I didn’t envision the characters in the same way or the events as being quite so “big”. But it’s probably worth watching. (Not sure how much you’d get out of it if you haven’t read the novel, though.)

I think what I relate to most in Hesse novels is the idea that as a child, there was a “wild side” that our dutiful parents felt had to be beaten out of us which left us with a split that is very difficult to reconcile. (My biggest concern in elementary school, junior high, high school, and well into my 20s with remnants that show up here and there now was that I wasn’t “sweet” enough. I woke up every day praying to God that he’d make me “sweet”. But I was far too inquisitive to be sweet!)

I highlighted a ton from Steppenwolf, too. But this post is supposed to be about Solomon’s ideas on these writers so in true form of a child who has had the wild side almost totally beaten out of her, here are my notes…

Dostoevsky anticipates some central themes in Heideggers works. In Notes from Underground, we are introduced to an unlikable character. Spite and resentment characterizes everything he does. The central theme is that of freedom and free will. Dostoevsky is attacking the enlightenment and the idea that people can improve themselves (which is something Nietzsche also attacks). And he attacks the idea that people can have free choice in a way that it leads to happiness.

Dostoevsky shows that freedom and happiness are opposed. Happiness is very often the absence of freedom. Dostoevsky attacks the entire Enlightenment. What he specifically attacks is the idea that we can create a society that will make everyone happy. But what gets left out with this idea is our personal freedom. What is most important to us is our free will. But in so far as we go along with the plans that are supposed to make us happy, what we loose is our freedom. The Underground Man sees being spiteful as a philosophical freedom, not a character deficiency.

Freedom is a good in it’s own right, it is the most important benefit that we have. Joining and sacrificing freedom for the grand plan of society is to render us inhuman.

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky challenges the assumption that a person who is “very good” will contribute to the well-being of society. Aristotle, Christianity (through the idea of following Jesus’ example) and the Enlightenment all subscribe to this idea: the better the person, the better society. In contrast, the main character of The Idiot, by doing good, makes everybody’s lives terrible. The consequences of goodness are not always good themselves.

Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky’s crowning achievement. The main concern of the novel is nihilism which Dostoevsky is radically against (as is Nietzsche and Kierkegaard - nihilism was taking over Europe during their time.) Ivan has represented the Enlightenment philosophy and represents the nihilistic principles. Through Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha - we see the whole spectrum of society with Ivan caught in the middle.

The idea that freedom is central to Christianity is something Dostoevsky wants to throw into question. This isn’t just a religious problem, it’s a dilemma of humanity writ large. He shows this through the Grand Inquisitor who is stunned by Jesus’ reappearance. He decides Jesus has to go because what Christianity has done over the past 1400 years is succeeded in making people happy. They are happy at the hopes it raises, in being saved, in being in the shadow of Jesus who has not yet appeared. But with the appearance of Jesus, people now have to face reality. Given the choice between freedom and happiness, the Grand Inquisitor says people will always choose happiness. So in the end, Jesus is re-crucified.

The same story is presented in Crime and Punishment. A man commits a brutal crime under the spell of nihilism - there is nothing worth obeying. Although the crime itself is petty, the man is haunted by a deep guilt. In Brothers Karamazov, Ivan said that if there is no God, then everything is permitted. But what we get from Ivan is a picture of nihilism at it’s absolute worst. Ivan’s world is a world that entirely depended upon God for it’s values and depended upon God for the authority for us to obey those values - and it had cast off that God. If we are dependent upon this God, then it follows that without this God we are left with nothing. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were against this sort of nihilistic thinking. This is why Nietzsche said “God is dead and we have killed him”. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky think this dependence on an abstract God is hugely problematic.

The absurd is taken to spectacular heights in Kafka. The novella, Metamorphosis, is likely his most spectacular work. It deals with self-identity. In this story, the body is thoroughly changed, but the mind remains exactly as it is. Samsa has to cope with this change. He has to work with his horrible effect on his family. Kafka explores how our self-identity is construed by our body, but especially by our role in society and especially how other people treat us. His family comes to despise him and hate him. (What happens when you redefine the role in your family?)

Kafka’s The Trial sets the stage for Camus’ trial for Mersault in The Stranger. The idea is that we are all essentially guilty and it doesn’t have to do with any particular crime, there may be no crime at all. Just being human, just being conscious, makes us guilty. Consciousness is not just a blessing, it is also a disease. It allows us to see ourselves as inadequate creatures. With that self-consciousness comes not only guilt, but despair. If we say something is Kafkaesque, what we mean is that something is not only absurd, but also upsetting to our very notion of ourselves as human beings and our concept of life as it should be. We think life should be orderly, but life is not orderly.

Hermann Hesse was primarily influenced by Nietzsche and Buddhism. Hesse is one of the few writers who tries to bridge European and Indian thought. Siddhartha (1922) is an entire novel attempting to make this bridge. In Demian, Demian is a very well-adjusted young man. So well-adjusted that he is independent in a way that young men and children are not supposed to be independent. It is a refusal to go along. His influence on his fellow classmates and friends is far from being demonic. It’s just the kind of challenge that philosophers in Existentialism like to talk about.

In Steppenwolf, the central metaphor is of a 45-year-old man who is half man and half wolf. This was a metaphor used by Goethe and secularized by Descartes. Hesse wants to challenge this bifurcated notion of the Cartesian self - not in terms of a unification of the self, but a further fragmentation or elimination of the self altogether.

Harry Haller, the main character, is in every way a Nietzschean man. He considers himself to be one of the Masters but not in a brutal way. He is polite, mannered, and a good citizen. But he is brilliantly educated, extremely creative and exactly what Nietzsche represents in his discussion of the higher man. Like Kafka, Hesse challenges the very idea of NIetzsche’s “self” (the idea of aspiration, the idea of taking life so seriously). What Haller is mistaken in is thinking is that his personality is split half and half (half man, half wolf). Instead, Hesse says Haller has “no self” (which is the same as saying he has many selves). This is demonstrated through the Magic Theater where all values are turned upside down.

The Western conception of the self imagines the self as a fruit - peel off the skin and there is a hard pit core at the center. In Steppenwolf, the self is presented as an onion. Peel off one layer and there is another layer. Peel of that layer and there is yet another layer. There is no center. This is a Buddhist picture. In accepting this picture, Haller can accept a joy and happiness that he was unable to learn otherwise.

Nietzsche’s theory is admirable and persuasive, but there is something obviously missing and that is humor, joy, and happiness. Nietzsche talks about these things, but we are never convinced. Hesse makes us convinced that we can start with something like Nietzsche but attain a passion that even Nietzsche didn’t understand.

It’s interesting!! Merton came to grips with his problems within Westernized Christianity through Buddhism and Solomon thinks it is very likely that Camus would have come to grips with his problems as an atheist through Buddhism had he been allowed to make the trip he was planning to India to study Buddhism rather than being killed in a car accident.

It’s not that Buddhism is “the answer”, but it provides the missing link in Western man’s understanding of himself. Buddhist philosophy bridges the vast divide that has been created over the centuries in Western thought between lived experience and reason. Building the bridge doesn’t require that we become Buddhists. Merton remained a devoted Catholic. All that is required is a shift in perception.

Interesting quotes from the rest of Merton’s essays on Camus…

Camus: Journals of the Plague Years

“This is the source of Camusian anguish: Cartesian man, the detached subject, who is because he thinks (and thinks because he is Cartesian man), having started out with the assumption that everything thinkable is comprehensible, suddenly finds out that everything thinkable is absurd. Why? Not because of a metaphysical flaw in objective existents but because there is something the matter with the relation of the thinking subject to the object of thought. And what is wrong seems to be the relationship itself, to which Cartesian man has condemned himself by making it the ground of all his certitudes, including the certitude of his own existence.”

“Camus is, if anything, a classic moralist on the stoic pattern rather than an existentialist thinker.”

“To prefer abstractions to life is to end in absurdity and despair. Suicide is the collapse of the individual in the presence of the absurd. Murder - mass murder, war, genocide, and even capital punishment - is a moral collapse of society under pressure of the absurd.”

“The whole point of his first novel, The Stranger, is that innocence begins with the refusal to say what one does not and cannot mean, but that society demands of us that we repeat a whole series of prescribed declarations which we could not possibly mean if we reflected on their full implications… This is more than a judgment that society tends to be absurd: society will kill the man who refuses to be absurd along with it. Lucidity is punishable by death… The revolt is itself the beginning of authentic existence.”

“Clamence [from The Fall] is perhaps a kind of “saint without God”. He is activated not by life giving grace, but by the self-scrutiny of an ironic and hatefully lucid mind that is incapable of love. To be so activated is to be purified and damned at the same time, a kind of extreme Augustinianism in which to be judged is not a final end but only an endless fall into the void, a fall for which there is no ultimate landing. The only possible relationship with another is the relationship of subject to object, of judge to penitent - proving to the other that all have sinned and all are in despair, that all must condemn each other; proving that we are all in the void, that if God is dead all is permitted and all is meaningless… In such a universe, Love does not exist… Whether Nemesis or plague, The Fall represented a dead end beyond which there was no further progress possible in Camus’ artistic development. He had to take another course.”

” ‘The Absurd’ is not an object. It has no metaphysical existence of its own. It is not there until you put it there. You put it there by standing outside reality and looking in. You make life absurd by holding it at arm’s length. Once you step over the boundary line between subject and object, void and the absurd are no more. There is only that fullness which we begin to experience when we realize that “lucidity” is the light itself - the light we look not at, but with; the light that we not only have, but in some way are; “the true light that enlightens every man that comes into the world.” What Camus needed still to discover was that this light is pure mercy and pure gift and not the reward for a subtle, ironic. and self-conscious ethical concern.”

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Terror and the Absurd: Violence and Nonviolence in Albert Camus

“Absolute liberty becomes a prison of absolute duties” - including the duty to exterminate thousands of one’s fellow men in the name not of a happy and life affirming present but of a hypothetical happiness in the future. The “death of God” means in the end an imperialism of the spirit that seeks world hegemony and total control at the price of unlimited murder and terror.”

“God is regarded somehow as a need of man’s mind and heart; and indeed a certain kind of apologetic in the past has been all too ready to advance this distorted and inadequate view of God. Here God is seen simply as the projection of man’s need for clarity, for rationality. The act of faith, then becomes a determination to convince oneself that no matter how absurd things may look, they are in fact quite reasonable because God must make them reasonable. One believes because one refuses to despair of an absolute and infallible reason… But this assumes that God is merely called in to our lives as a kind of logical Deus ex machina and that he is little more than a convenient hypothesis. Is this what is really meant by God in Christianity?”

“…The vision of a St. Francis is not the vision of an abstract and purely transcendent God dwelling in eternity, but the immediate, overwhelming, direct, tangible confrontation of “God who is” simply in the “is-ness” of every day reality. The belief of a Franciscan in eternal life does not determine how he lives - it flows from his life and is part and parcel of that life. If Camus had been able to follow this through he would have realized that the abstract God he could not believe in was not, and never had been, the living God of authentic Christianity.”

Camus’ ethic was exactly that of Franciscan poverty. Camus writes: “If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write ‘I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.’ And as far as everything else is concerned, I say no.”

“The logic of revolt demands dialogue, openness, speech. Therefore revolt protests against the conspiracy of silence which, everywhere, both under totalism and under capitalism, seals men’s lips so that they do not protest against organized murder but approve it.”

“The question arises why Camus so easily identifies nonviolence with silence, submission and passivity when authentic nonviolent resistance is active and should be highly articulate, since, if it is understood in the Gandhian sense, it demands much more lucidity and courage than the use of force does… In any case, Camus refuses to accept absolute nonviolence. His Rebel may take up arms, and may indeed by compelled by duty to do so, but with one most important reservation: “Authentic action in revolt will consent to arm itself only for institutions which limit violence, not for those that give it the force of law.”… This is all very fine - but what war-making institution does not in practice claim to be limiting violence and fighting for peace? The escalation of the Vietnam War by the Pentagon is all, allegedly, in order to limit violence!”

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Prophetic Ambiguities: Milton and Camus

Merton compares Nietzsche’s “Superman” to Milton’s Satan which makes me think he’s probably completely misread Nietzsche. (He was writing in the 1960s so that’s not surprising. It’s taken a long while to weed out the truth from fiction about Nietzsche - especially since his “Will to Power” became heavily and falsely associated with Nazism thanks to his sister who edited his texts in favor of Nazism without his knowing.)

Paradise Lost: “The title itself states the problem: man is created for peace, delight, and the highest spiritual happiness. In traditional language, he is created for contemplation. Not a loss of self in mystical absorption but self-transcendence in the dynamic stillness which, as the Zen Masters said, is found not in rest but in truly spontaneous movement. But man’s weakness and superficiality, his inordinate love of a self metaphysically wounded with contingency, makes the Paradise life impossible. And yet here too was no solution, only a kind of despair. What for Milton was a blind alley has become in modern consciousness, an obsession with illusory vitalism.”

“Though Camus may have started with Sisyphus, a figure somewhat similar to Milton’s Satan, he soon distinguished between liberty and anarchy, authentic rebellion and totalist nihilism, and in the end rejoined the kind of classic view of liberty which was the one Milton himself really held.”

“All these contradictions are symptomatic of one truth: our seemingly well-ordered and well-functioning society is a nihilist city of pandemonium, built on hybris and destined for cataclysm…But our future depends above all on this: the recognition that our present nihilistic consciousness is fatal and the development of a toally new state of mind, a whole new way of looking at ourslves, our world, and our problems. Not a new ideology, not a new formula of words, not a new mystique: but as Tillich said - a new man.”

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Camus and the Church

“If there is to be a choice between faith and the absdurd, his [Camus'] stoic consciousness will, in the end, dictate the choice of the absurd. And the “absurd man” of Camus remains strangely isolated, even though, if he is consistently faithful to his steady view of the absurd, he should proceed to a revolt that joins him in solidarity with other men of his own kind. But this solidarity lacks human validity unless it is in the service of life and humanity. In otherwords, revolt is legitimate only if it refuses all complicity with mass murder and totalitarianism of whatever kind, whether of the right or the left.”

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Three Saviors in Camus: Lucidity and the Absurd

“The Augustinian concept that the love of God was the ground of true communion among men because the caritas for God and man was one love, not two, apparently never struck Camus, though he knew Augustine up to a point. One of Augustine’s most characteristic doctrines is that the love of God is worthless if it does not imply communion with our brother: and the living unity of those united in charity forms one body, the Mystical Christ, “the city of God.” Here, one would imagine, was a basis for the kind of communication and solidarity Camus was really looking for. But we cannot question the sincerity or the reality of his repugnance for the pseudo Christianity that has so deformed the veritas caritatis and the caritas veritatis of Augustine!… Instead, Camus comes out with a rather feeble maxim of liberal and humanist morality. One respects his intention. Yet in reading the story, one feels that the ending is inconsistent with what the story itself has told us about the people he claims to love.”

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The Stranger: Poverty of an Anti-Hero

“Neither for Milton nor for Camus is the mere fact of rebellion sufficient to justify either Satan or Mersault. (Of course it is clear that the utter poverty and in some ways the helplessness of Mersault, and above all the total refusal of rhetoric and declamatory self-justification set him apart from the Satan of Paradise Lost.) But students and critics have habitually fallen into the temptation of thinking that the Satan figure is justified by his own rhetoric and by his own revolt.”

“Acceptance of the absurd, in Camus’ terms, does not justify life, does not give it meaning; it is the lucid acceptance of unmeaning. Furthermore, this is not the end, only the beginning: for to live in meaninglessness and absurdity is not an end. That would be simple nihilism and Camus was completely opposed to nihilism. But when one can face a life that is “without justification”, one is, according to Camus, prepared to go beyond to that solidarity in revolt and ultimately to that unity in love which he intended to explore in his later works. One starts, in other words, by renouncing the desire to be justified - one renounces hope of a consoling sense of one’s own clarity and rightness - in order to go on to that lucid solidarity in action and resistance that are conscious of their own limitations and respectful above all of life.”

I broke down and bought The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton. I was going to wait until the summer but decided while I was in the motion…

There are seven essays in this collection on Camus and supposedly these are among his best (and also what made him so well-known in the 1960s).

The first essay is on The Plague. The essay is excellent and well-worth reading. Here is a cryptic (but lengthy) summary based on what I highlighted…

In 1936, Camus wrote his thesis at the University of Algiers on St. Augustine. He specifically attempted to explain Augustine’s attitude toward evil which he found repugnant. It’s this idea of original sin that he presents in The Plague. Like traditional Christianity, Camus solves it in terms of human freedom, but where Christianity likewise introduces grace as the higher form of liberty, Camus refuses to recognize it because he doesn’t understand it. Merton says Camus has has been deceived by a distorted notion of grace because so many Christians have a distorted notion themselves. Nevertheless, there are elements in Camus where clearly the undistorted view of Christian grace and liberty have contributed unconsciously to the formation of his “austere and compassionate ethic”.

According to Camus, he attempts to show men how to “fashion an art of living in times of catastrophe, to be reborn by fighting openly against the death instinct at work in our society” in all of his works. Merton says he does this most convincingly in The Plague.

The reason that Camus has the story take place in Oran is because it is an entirely European story. He needed a new city that was made up of French colonialists and didn’t have a Kasbah. That’s why there are no Arabs in the story. The idea Father Paneloux presents, that the plague is a punishment for sin, echoes the ideas of the French Catholic Priests and Bishops after the fall of France during “the great penitence of Vichy” (1940-1944). Paneloux revises his ideas after watching a child, injected with a serum taken from the victims itself, suffer greatly. The reason the child suffers so horribly is because the serum was actually helping him gain strength to fight against the plague. The child eventually dies anyway and Paneloux is changed by the experience and likewise changes his attitude from one of judgment and punishment to self-abandonment and sacrifice. He joins the sanitary squad with Rieux and Tarrou which represents the French resistance units. (Many French Catholic priests joined the French resistance movement after France fell.)

Merton says “The Plague is the most positive and conclusive of all Camus’ novels. The real drama of the book is found in the treatment of the theme of evil on two levels: The Plague as physical evil and the Plague as a deficiency in the human spirit. Merton writes, “Camus summons the Plague to bear witness to the fact that no systematic thinking can be fully realistic if it excludes the radical absurdity of an existence into which evil or irrationality can always break without warning. Yet we seem to assume that human affairs can be laid out neatly in reasonable patterns, as if everything were always in order and as if this order were completely accessible to any mind that carefully studied causes and their effects.”

Modesty is a key word in the book. It implies a capacity to doubt one’s own wisdom. This hesitancy to trust our own wisdom is created by the presence of doctrines and systens that have already explained everything for us an far too conveniently. These systems justify evil as a kind of good. Modesty is a lesson to be learned int he school of the absurd. For instance, modest people like Rieux and Tarrou are willing to do their job without trying to prove anything. They are willing to lay down their lives without insisting that there is something to prove by this action. They don’t feel the need to justify what it is they do.

Merton suggests that one of the reasons for Camus’ modesty is that he distrusts success. He is repulsed by the idea that material success is an implicit reward for virtuousness. (This is definitely one of the more complacent myths that abounds in bourgeois society.)

“Comprehension” is another key word in The Plague. The word comes up when Tarrou tries to explain what would motivate him to create the sanitary squads. It would seem he has a code of morals but can’t define what they are so uses the inadequate word, “comprehension” instead. This implies that what is “good” about Tarrou isn’t that he is doing something courageous. It’s a comprehension that sees and loves the goodness in his fellow man. Ignorance, on the other hand, is the lack of comprehension. It ignores the absurd and prefers its own values to the values that are worth defending.

Camusian modesty and comprehension are antiheroic. To call Sisyphus the hero of the absurd is really to say he is a non-hero. What Rieux and Tarrou do is non-heroic in the same Sisyphean sense. At times their task seems hopeless but they continue anyway, not in order to prove themselves better than the Plague, but because they are alive and want to help others to stay alive, too. To act in the Sisyphean spirit is to act not on grounds of moral good or evil. Nor is the act a means to receive a reward or avoid punishment. It’s simply a witness to human truth.

For Camus, modern day virtue is a sort of social disease. It’s a matter of talk, conventional attitudes, and cliche thinking. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the classic ideas of virtue. It’s more about obtaining compliance in order to keep the machine running. But in the face of something like the Plague, the automatic functioning of society ceases and there arises a new order of freedom and love in which everyone who takes part does so by choice rather than by default of being a part of society. This choice is based on two motives that Camus approves: revolt against the absurdity and arbitrariness of an evil destiny and determination to give their lives in the affirmation of man, of life, and of love. Those who do not manage to arrive at this solution are either passive and helpless victims of the Plague or its accomplices.

Often what society preaches as justification of man’s existence turns out to be an almost satanic repudiation of that existence. What society calls “the good life” is in fact a systematically organized way of death. It is built on the death of the noncomformist, the alien, the odd ball, the enemy, the criminal. While life, joy, love and peace are theoretically extolled, what keeps the machine running is murder, greed, violence, hatred and war.

The first step toward freedom is the affirmation that though the reasons which are supposed to justify existence don’t justify anything at all, there is reason to affirm life as a matter of stubborn Sisyphean choice. This revolt against the absurd sets man on the right path. Existence is a fundamental value in itself. It needs no justification. One must live in constant revolt against an absurd social philosophy which is nihilistic and based on murder. One must live in solidarity and love with those whom one is ready to defend against the attacks of “the absurd” - against the death drive built into the structure of social existence. We must build a new order of love to confront the false order of hate. But how do we go about building this new order?

Camus doesn’t answer this question. Christians would answer this through an understanding of Grace. But Camus has rejected the notion of Grace. He sees it as simply another form of justification - in this case, justification for the existence of God and proof of the righteousness of the Christian establishment. But this is a greatly distorted understanding of grace. The truth is that an act which springs from grace is purely gratuitous and seeks no justification other than its own gratuitousness. Grace seeks freedom from any limitation and any need for explanation other than itself. Without realizing it, Camus put himself in the thick of a very old argument of grace versus the law and is on the side of grace.

Merton notices the same problem of Original Sin that Solomon does in Camus. (Solomon said that Camus attempts to drop God but maintains original sin.) Merton says the Plague draws its real power on the death wish and the destructiveness that is built into man’s own life. It’s power is based on an indifference to life and to authentic values. On this, Merton writes:

The power of a dictator and of an authoritarian and violent party is made possible by the attitudes and dispositions already present in the people who submit to them, because in the depths of their hearts they want to submit. That is why, in Camus’ eyes, the sermon of Paneloux urging people to submit to the Plague as a just punishment is - like the sermons of French clerics urging acceptance of Nazi rule - simply a form of collaboration with the evil in man, an act of obedience to the innate fury of pestilence and of death. But how can Rieux believe this if he does not also, in some form or other, believe in something remarkably like original sin? This Camus fails to explain.

But then again there is Tarrou’s ethic of comprehension which demands constant attention (although it continues to maintain an idea of original sin) …

“We can’t stir a finger in the world without the risk of bringing death to somebody.” But does that not make all life unlivable? Once again innocence is equally impossible whichever way you look at it. But Tarrou reaches certain practical conclusions. First: it is possible to refuse all conscious and deliberate co-operation in any social action, any doctrine, any policy, whether revolutionary or conservative, which justifies murder in order to exploit it freely. In other words, though one cannot avoid all implication in some form of violence, one can at least refuse to co-operate with the social machinery of systematic and self-justifying violence. One can reject specious ideologies which permit massive killing in war, in pogroms, in nihilistic violence on the grounds of race, religion, class, nationalism and so forth.

Merton says that this is a form of the monastic spirituality of exile because he who refuses to cooperate with the establishment can no longer be considered a part of the establishment. It’s a Christian attitude. Also, Merton says that Tarrou’s desire to be a “saint without God” is not as anti-Christian as it sounds. St. John of the Cross, for instance, wrote: “You should do your actions in such a way that, if it were possible, God himself would not know you were doing them.”

Of course, Merton contests Camus’ conclusion that a Christian must inevitably by someone like Paneloux. He says Camus assumes that grace is that which gives one the ability to submit to a God who acts like an aribtrary tyrant. That it gives one the power to submit to a will one does not understand and even to adore and love what appears horrible. Camus finds this idea revolting and Merton says he is absolutely right to find it revolting. But Camus is wrong to assume that this idea is central to Christianity. Merton calls Paneloux a spiritual profiteer. His form of spirituality exists in symbiotic unity with the establishment which creates a sort of false supernaturalism. If you try to divert man’s capacity to love and turn it aside from concrete human reality to the purely abstract and spiritual, this deadens and distorts man. The Christian theologian Teilhard de Chardin writes: “The capacity to love cannot with impunity be dissociated from its object: if you try, mistakenly, to cut off our affectivity from love of the universe, are you not in danger of destroying it?”

Merton, like Solomon, concludes that Camus’ “modesty” might lend itself to too much desperation. But Camus still managed to have scruples over the murder of an innocent child. “He refused to justify that death in the name of God. He also refused to justify it by an appeal to history, to evolution, to science, to politics, or the glorious future of the new man.” That is at least a step in the right direction.

I have to send Death in Venice back to Netflix. This is another film I really don’t want to let go!

It’s based on Thomas Mann’s novella by the same name. Thomas Mann said the character of Prof. Aschenbach was, in part, based on Gustav Mahler. He had been inspired to write the novella after seeing Mahler break down in tears on a train departing Venice. It was the physical appearance of Aschenbach, not his character, that was based on Mahler. Mahler’s Third and Fifth Symphonies are used in the movie and Gustav von Aschenbach looks very similar to Gustav Mahler in the film. Director Luchino Visconti turns Aschenbach into composer rather than the writer Mann portrayed him as in the novella.

I don’t know who Arthur is, maybe a friend, or maybe the devil’s advocate? There isn’t a lot of dialog in the film, but I did write down the conversation between Gustav von Aschenbach and Alfred on beauty. It seems likely that I’ll want to come back to it after Nausea because it seems to reflect some of Sartre’s thoughts on art….

By aligning himself with Apollo (the god of reason and intellect), Aschenbach has denied Dionysus, the god of unreason and passion (a theme straight out of Nietzsche).

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Alfred: Beauty. You mean your spiritual conception of beauty.

Gustav: But do you deny the ability of the artist to create from the spirit?

Alfred: Yes, Gustav. That is precisely what I deny.

Gustav: So then, according to you, our labor as artists is –

Alfred: Labor, exactly! Do you really believe in beauty as the product of labor?

Gustav: Yes, I do.

Alfred: That’s how beauty is born, in total disregard for your labor or mine. It pre-exists our presumption as artists. Your great error, my dear friend, is to consider life… reality as a limitation.

Gustav: But isn’t that what it is? Reality only distracts and degrades us. You know, sometimes I think that artists are rather like hunters aiming in the dark. They don’t know what their target is, and they don’t know if they’ve hit it. But you can’t expect life to illuminate the target and steady your aim. The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.

Alfred: No, Gustav. No. Beauty belongs to the senses. Only to the senses!

Gustav: You cannot reach the spirit through the senses. You cannot. It’s only be complete domination of the senses that you can ever achieve wisdom, truth and human dignity.

Alfred: Wisdom? Human dignity? What use are they? Genius is a divine gift. No: a divine affliction. A sinful, morbid flash fire of natural gifts.

Gustav: I reject the demonic virtues of art.

Alfred: And you are wrong! Evil is a necessity. It is the food of genius….

Gustav: You know, Alfred, Art is the highest source of education, and the artist has to be exemplary. He must be a model of balance and strength. He cannot be ambiguous.

Alfred: But art is ambiguous. And music, the most ambiguous of all the arts. It is ambiguity made a science. Wait! [Sits down at the piano.] Listen to this chord, or this one. You can interpret them in any way you like. You have before you an entire series of mathematical combinations unforeseen and inexhaustible. A paradise of double meanings in which you, more than anyone else romp and roll about like a calf in clover. [Plays a melody.] Don’t you hear it? Do you recognize it?

….

Alfred: That’s not shame, that’s fear. Shame’s a spiritual distress to which you are immune because you are immune to feeling. You are a man of avoidance, of dislike, the keeper of distances. You are afraid to have direct honest contact with anything! Because of your rigid standards of morality you want your behavior to be as perfect as the music you compose. Every slip is a fall, a catastrophe, resulting in irreparable contamination.

Gustav: I am contaminated!

Alfred: If only you were! To be in debt to one’s own senses for a condition which is irredeemably corrupt and sick. What joy for an artist! Think what a dry and arid ting good health is. Especially if it’s of the soul no less than the body.

Gustav: I have to find my balance somehow.

Alfred: How unfortunate that art is so indifferent to personal morality otherwise you would be supreme, unreachable, inimitable. Tell me, do you know what lies at the bottom of the mainstream? Mediocrity.

Gustav: Stop!

Alfred: It’s yours! It’s all your music!

SPOILER WARNING!!!

Toward the end of the movie, Gustav has a flashback of presenting a composition that angers the audience. He is hissed and booed and retreats to a room where people try to storm him, but his wife pushes them out. Alfred tells him there are people who want to see him, and Gustav asks him to send them away. Alfred says, “Send them away? I will deliver you to them … They will judge you. And they will condemn you.” As Gustav comes back to the present, Alfred’s words continue, “Truth – human dignity – all finished. Now there is no reason why you cannot go to your grave with your music. You have achieved perfect balance. The man and the artist are one: they have touched bottom together.”

At the very end of the movie, upon Gustav’s death, we hear Alfred’s voice again: “Chastity is the gift of purity, not the painful result of old age. And you are old, Gustav – and in all the world there is no impurity so impure as old age.”

I finally started reading A Happy Death by Albert Camus for the Analogical Imagination Vox group. A few chapters into the book I thought I should get a little back ground information because I know nothing about Camus, although I did find this in my notes from the Dreyfus What is Existentialism lecture: