I posted my notes on Lecture 12 yesterday from the lecture by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins on Nietzsche from The Teaching Company. The notes were fresh on my mind so I took the most notes on that lecture because it was primarily new to me. The earlier lectures were primarily review, but I did jot down some notes from lectures 1-11 for future reference…

• Nietzsche very often makes references to images Luther used.
• I thought this was very cool! Nietzsche thought Christianity had served an important historical function for people. In the passage about the madman, it’s not people who believe in God who the madman assaults. The madman assaults those who think they can eliminate the need God once filled in society. By simply focusing on science they can ignore the needs of humanity for something like myth. Nietzsche thinks this is ungrateful. The way to show gratitude is to think beyond the historical function.
• Nietzsche says we shouldn’t throw out our desires. What we should throw out is the idea that we can reach perfect contentment and that the attainment of perfect satisfaction is even desirable.
• Nietzsche is far more optimistic that Schopenhauer. Life involves the negative components, but we can become something that takes joy in.
• The meaning of life is not in reason, rationalism, or theology. It’s to be found in the passions.
• Camel stage - treats tradition with reverence. Says “yes” to it. Lion stage - evaluates tradition and asserts individuality by challenging what has been handed down. Say “no” to tradition. We have to fully make our way through the camel stage before the lion stage makes sense. The Child stage is a new affirmation of life. It is boundless energy for what is new. Experimentation. Creative energy - full creative response and full vitality.
• The Ubermensch is an idea. It is a way of being that involves risk taking. This is contrasted with the Last Man which seeks nothing but comfort - the ultimate couch potato.

Rationality, Romanticism, Consciousness

• Rationality has several meanings: 1) thinking ability, to reflect; 2) mathematics; 3) instrumental reasoning, to think; 4) having the right goals (Aristotle); 5) reason is the royal road to truth (modern understanding/Enlightenment)
• Nietzsche, like Aristotle, thinks reason involves having the right goals. He says that reason becomes a tyrant when it is thought of as the royal road to truth (contra-Kant).
• Kant preached a faith in reason and even brought religion into the realm of reason. Nietzsche felt this idea that reason is universal was a pretension. While France and Britain were moving toward the age of reason, Germany was involved in Romanaticism which puts its faith in the passions and not in reason. Nietzsche saw much wrong with Romanticism, too. He said it was a pretense of passions.
• Nietzsche says we are animals motivated by drives and instincts. We are natural, biological beings. The meaning of life is to be found in life itself. Not in the upper realms of reason. Like Freud, Nietzsche understood that what drives us are very often things we are not conscious of.
• Nietzsche asked where does consciousness come from? And he comes up with a theory: It developed because of the need for communication. Consciousness was created in our interactions with others (rather than the traditional view that consciousness was somehow already in the mind). If you live alone, consciousness becomes superfluous. We have cultured, sophisticated, individual instincts.
• Thinking, for Nietzsche, can be a sort of disease. It can be dangerous because it blinds us to our creativity and uniqueness. Therefore consciousness is dangerous. BUT!! It’s an important stage in our evolution. When a faculty is new (like the advent of language/consciousness), it is always dangerous at first. But as it matures, we learn to make better use of it.
• Nietzsche was very interested in how language (the new faculty which gave rise to consciousness) expresses the truth.
• Nietzsche was very critical of the romantics of his time. He said they pretended passion. He said that romanticism is a mask; an act. The reality is that passion contains a quantum of reason and reason contains quantum passion. Both reason and passion contain an amount of both the Apollonian (reason) and the Dionysian (passion).
• Nietzsche uses aphorisms because he doesn’t want followers. He knows the reader won’t understand the whole picture by reading a single aphorism so it will take some work to understand. An active readership achieved through a sort of companionship with Nietzsche.
• Most of philosophy is centered on formal deductive reasoning. Not Nietzsche. Some would say he doesn’t do philosophy at all. He uses a sequence of fallacies; aphorisms, rhetoric, literature and ad hominem arguments. He wants to stimulate our emotional experience.
• Sophistry is an appeal to emotions and understands argument as an art form because the use of strict rational argument convinces no one. Philosophy is a sort of rhetoric. Socrates was a great rhetoritician. This is what made him so powerful even though his arguments would be readily dismissed in institutions today. So it is no dis-service to say that Nietzsche is doing rhetoric rather than logic.

Truth

• Nietzsche says there is no truth, there is only interpretations. But he praises truthfulness. This idea is not antagonistic toward science. Science is experimental and Nietzsche is willing to allow any hypothesis which says “let’s try it”. Experimenting with ideas and philosophical view points is kindred with science. Nietzsche says it isn’t good enough to say God created it this way.
• Science is non-dogmatic. Most beliefs people have held turn out to be false eventually. So why think current theories are the truth? Theories are always tentative. Philosophy should be undogmatic like science. But Niezsche also sometimes opposes science. This opposition is based on the aesthetic perspective. The aesthetic view has ways of seeing that are non-scientific. If science and aesthetics are opposed, Nietzsche says that aesthetics always get the upper hand. If it doesn’t, science easily becomes dogmatic. And when it does, it loses it’s virtue.
• Nietzsche asks “Why is truth important? Why must we have truth at any cost?” Individual lives are ruined. People have been excommunicated for the truth. The truth has upset entire civilizations (Freud). Why are we willing to pay the cost?
• Nietzsche comes up with several reasons. Truth isn’t necessarily pursued for itself. It is very often pursued for other goals. The main motivation for searching for truth is sometimes status. Status is the primary objective, not truth. Truth is a means to an end, not the end in itself. “The truth shall set you free.” Truth as a means to an end is based on the idea that truth is rock hard and immovable. If you get the truth, you gain power because claiming to have the truth puts you in a privileged position.
• But Nietzsche says there is no way of getting to the bottom of things. All we have is our experience which is an interpretation based on other interpretations. It’s all experience and experience is always an interpretation of something else.
• Appearances depend on being some thing of which there are appearances. There is a gap between the experience and appearances on the one hand and what they are experiences and appearances of on the other hand. There is no way of getting around or behind the appearances and experiences to see reality itself. This is something Nietzsche struggles with. Traditional philosophy, science ancient times, makes a distinction between reality on the one hand and appearances on the other. Nietzsche thinks this is a bogus distinction. There is only the world of our experience and it doesn’t make sense to talk about anything else.
• But what do we say about our experience? Kant talked about “world in itself” which is the world as God might see it. Kant admitted that we can’t have a conception of “the world in itself”. But Nietzsche says there is no such thing as “a world in itself”. There is no God’s eye view. Even if there were a God, this God would have to see it from a god’s perspective which remains a perspective.
• What is truth from once perspective is not the truth from another perspective. But this doesn’t mean that one truth need exclude the other.
• Nietzsche holds what is now called “perspectivism”. There are lots of different viewpoints we can take on things. This does not rule out argument, debate or pursuit itself - just the understanding that it must always be perceptualized. Science, for instance, is a difinitive perspective.
• Perspectivism is not the same as relativism why says that every view is as good as any other. But it is always a matter of not taking one position and digging in. Philosophy is about shifting perspectives.
• Where is the truth? It doesn’t lie behind appearances. Philosophical truth is getting a sense of how all the perspectives tie together. You have to be able to entertain different truths at the same time.
• Nietzsche was a quasi follower of Darwin. The Darwinian notion of fitness as a pragmatic theory of truth fits with Nietzsche’s theories. Imagine a species of creatures who have built into their brains that the future will be unlike the past. If you see lightening strike a tall tree, you rush under the tree during the next storm expecting that lightening won’t strike in the same place twice twice (or having struck this tree it will strike elsewhere next time). It’s easy to see how such a species would be short lived. A species that developed and inductive mind and learns by experience is much more likely to survive and flourish.
• What are our truths? They are the indispensible errors of mankind. They are the truths without which we as a species would not survive. To ask if these truths exist apart from reality is nonsensical.

I’ve been watching the lecture by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins on Nietzsche from The Teaching Company. (It’s currently on sale.) I’ve made my way through the first twelve lectures so far. I didn’t take many notes on the first 9 lectures or so because they were mostly a rehash of what I’ve already written about. But I did end up taking far more copious notes on lectures 10 through 12. These are my notes from lecture 12. I’ll have to back up and provide earlier notes later, but this lecture was of particular interest to me.

I find some of the concepts within Existentialism interesting although I must admit my main interest as far as Existentialism goes are people who aren’t necessarily existentialists - Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The main thing that distinguishes Nietzsche from the existentialists is that he rejects the existential notion of freedom. Sartre’s understanding of freedom is that it is entirely up to us what it is we become. It’s almost as though we are given a blank slate and can write upon it (besides where we were born, how old we are, etc.) whatever it is we choose to write upon it.

This is not how Nietzsche understands freedom. Nietzsche’s idea of freedom can be summarized in one phrase: “Become who you are”. This is not the same thing as the meaningless comment parents often tell their children - “Be who you are”. Being who you are suggests an unchanging event. Becoming suggests something in process. We are born with talents, abilities and potentialities. But we are rarely thrown into circumstances that cultivate these abilities. It is up to us to cultivate them.

In England and France, a negative conception of freedom, Laissez Faire, had become popular. To be left alone was freedom. But in Germany, the idea of freedom was a positive notion - “freedom to”. Freedom to have a career, freedom to participate, etc.

Nietzsche had a totally different idea of freedom. He said freedom was to become who one is. He believed the idea of freedom as freedom from constraint was a fantasy - especially a fantasy of the oppressed. Great art and great things in general are not freedom from constraint. It’s the limits which define greatness and make for creativity. (For instance, the creativity that emerges through Haiku or the Japanese art form that requires a single brush stroke. When the paintbrush is lifted from the page, the drawing is finished.)

We are constrained by culture, biology circumstances of history, etc. For Nietzsche, freedom could only be understood within these constraints. He summarized freedom as “freedom to create”.

Nietzsche is an individualist, but not in the modern sense which emerged in the 12th century.  The 12th century is when the notion of individual first became prominent. The idea of the individual found even more prominence through the Enlightenment and Romanticism. What gets left out of this notion is family, community, etc.  But Nietzsche’s idea that freedom is an individual’s ability to create is not the same as an individuals ability to choose. There are always constraints and determinants on our behavior (something Sartre completely denies).

Nietzsche was a biological determinist. He said that often what appears to be choices aren’t choices at all. But we can “become who we are”. We have to spend our lives creating ourselves - not on a blank canvas saying anything goes - but within the limitations and restrictions of our individual circumstances. It’s similar to the idea of self-realization if you can drop the new-age baggage that goes along with that idea. We are born into a tradition, a culture, etc. that defines are limits.

Nietzsche would not agree with Sartre that it is our choice who it is we become. But he does say that there are many choices along the way that are already in accordance with a shape that has been given to us, from the most part, from birth. In order to become who it is we are, we have to trust our instinct. We are much more in tune with the person we can become through instinct than we are through reason. This is because reason is very often based on compliance with the culture.

We each have our own idea, our own character, our own destiny to fill out. Nietzsche rejects universal will. He asks, “Do we have a will”? Do we decide to do something or is it done through us? How much do we choose to do and how much is an expression of our natures?

This makes agency a subtle problem for Nietzsche. What makes us think we are the agents of our own actions?  Take thinking, for instance. Why are we so sure we are thinkers? Nietzsche says a thought comes when it will, not when “I” will. Nietzsche therefore thinks we overemphasize agency, freedom and choice. There is a sort of fate and it is important that we love our fate (amor fati). But we can and will be something if we work hard enough to cultivate it.

So while he definitely rejects the existentialist notion of freedom, he emphasizes what all existentialists emphasize - the imporance of individual existence and seeing to it that we take responsibility for who it is we are.

It seems true to me that we are born with a certain conditioning that limits our choice to an extent. We are interconnected beings. We don’t live in a vacuum.

I found Camus & Sartre: The Story of the Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It at the HalfPrice Bookstore. Couldn’t even believe it. I had wanted to read it since I first started researching Sartre and Camus but it wasn’t available through our library and was quite expensive so I decided to forgo it (especially since there are so many other books I’ve read that I haven’t gotten to yet.) Glad I found it because it was quite helpful.

Doing a decent summary of the book would be far too time consuming because it involves a lot of history. So here is a quick and dirty summary…

Camus and Sartre were great friends. They were both becoming famous about the same time and shared philosophical and literary interests. There were definitely differences, but nothing friendship threatening. For the most part, they were able to laugh with each other about them. With the occupation of France, Camus swung into action and joined the Resistance movement. He took huge personal risks. Sartre admired this in Camus and tried to do the same but couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. It took him several years to work through his philosophy before he could figure out how to act on it.

Both he and Camus became involved with the Communist party because it seemed to be the only means of supporting the working class. But Camus became disillusioned early on because of it’s violent nature and decided that he did not want to be a part of a system that used violence as a means of control. Sartre, on the other hand, became a spokesman for the Communist party saying that Camus no longer knew what it iwas he stood for. Passivism wasn’t a stance.

The problem was the Cold War. It drew a line in the sand and people had to choose - are you Communist anti-Communist. Camus and Sartre had both desperately attempted to come up with a third option. But there was no room for that third option at that time so the choice was either/or. Camus chose anti-Communism (although at one point he spoke harshly against anti-Communism) and Sartre chose Communism.

But Sartre wasn’t actually a Communist and Camus wasn’t actually an anti-Communist, either although those were the sides they chose. What it boiled down to was that Camus didn’t want to get his hands dirty and Sartre did. Camus had been born into a working class family in Algiers and already felt that his hands were dirty. He wanted to do the humane thing and could no longer condone violence. Sartre had been born into a well-to-do bourgeoisie family. What Sartre wanted to do was “come down” and be a spokesman for the working class. He felt the only way he could do this was through Communism because anti-Communism wasn’t speaking for the working class.

The division began after Camus published The Rebel which was his bomb dropped on Communism, linking it with violence and pointing it at Sartre. Many took the book to say that if Camus was right, Sartre was wrong. Camus expected to see Sartre’s review in Sartre’s Magazine but it didn’t come for months. When it finally did come, the review wasn’t by Sartre, it was by one of Sartre’s assistants and it slammed Camus’ book. This was insulting to Camus (because of the condemning review but primarily because it was not Sartre who reviewed the book.) Sartre replied to Camus through his newspaper and a very public quarrel was on with each man representing one side of the two sides of the Cold War division. Infact, they each became the main spokepersons for anti-Communism and Communism in France.

By keeping his hands clean, Camus’ completely lost sight of the Algerian struggles even though he became a spokesperson for Algerian issues. He was more hindrance than help. By wanting to get his hands dirty, Sartre got in touch with the people he wanted to get in touch with, but failed to notice the horrors that were being committed in the name of Communism.

It is very likely that without the divisive nature of the Cold War, Camus and Sartre would have remained friends despite their differences. But the world had moved into “either/or” thinking and it didn’t allow for dialogue. It demanded a militant stance. Aronson contends we are still living with that “either/or” thinking from the Cold War and that it is time we find a way out of it.

Both Camus and Sartre were ultimately in bad faith. Both were concerned ultimately with France - even Camus, who claimed to be so interested in Algiers, always made France the audience for his books. (He wrote to be read in France, not in Algiers.)

Aronson writes: “The deepest issues motivating and dividing Camus and Sartre are still with us…the time is ripe for a new type of political intellectual who might bring together each man’s strengths and avoid each man’s weaknesses. We can imagine someone speaking the truth at all times, and opposing oppression everywhere, uniting each man’s characteristic power of insight under a single moral standard. Such an intellectual would illuminate today’s systemic violence while accepting the challenge of mounting an effective struggle against it without creating new evils.” Aronson admits this might be like asking for an angel (as Sartre once said). “Angels do not exist, but they can be a yardstick for human beings.”

These are notes from Solomon’s last lecture from No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life.

Is Existentialism just a fashion? Something that came from France and struck the American fancy and then passed on? Does it just belong the ’40s and ’50s? Is it passe?

Solomon says it isn’t passe - that it’s just what America needs right now. We need to recover our sense of personal responsibility. Existentialism is a welcomed antidote to the wave of victimization and the sense of blame manifested in our legal system, tort law liability suits and every day life.

Existentialism started as a European movement but it’s real home is now in the U.S. Americans are staunch individualists but are keenly aware that there is a strong sense of community that lies at the basis of American society. Americans are very concerned with the idea of self-realization and self-improvement. The idea of making something new of oneself; self-improvement; trying to pick yourself up by the bootstraps defines a good deal of American society. Social mobility is distinctively American and also distinctively Existentialist.

Existentialism is considered passe in the climate of Europe and in American Universities because it is eclipsed by two generations of philosophers sense Sartre. The first generation is dominated by Claude Levi-Straus (1908). He came up with Structuralism which is an anthropological insight. He was concerned with the structural similarities which all societies shared in common. He says Sartre is not the universal picture of humanity, but a hyper-intellectual Parisian who is taking his phenomenology as an unwarranted generalization of what human consciousness and human life is like. For instance, could someone who comes from a totally different culture, perhaps a deprived culture, be expected to make the same choices of someone who is already familiar with more choices? Levi-Straus hits an important point here.

But Sartre’s second generation critics are more problematic. In particular, these critics are Michel Faoucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. They have a number of theses in common, two in particular:

1. “The Death of the Author”. This is the idea that when we read books, the idea that books are written by an author is an absolute way of misunderstanding what a book is about. We shouldn’t confuse the writer of books with the author.
2. An impersonal play of forces replaces an emphasis on agency and responsibility.

These notions together intend to kill subjectivity - especially the notion of subjectivity as Sartre understood it. There is a sort of conspiracy of silence going on here because clearly, this philosophy is based upon Sartre’s philosophy. Whether he is the model or the target, Sartre’s importance in philosophy since his death has been a well-kept secret.

The Postmodernists want to reject subjectivity and phenomenology and say that there is really only a third person way of looking at ourself. The first person way is corrupt. But this is something that Sartre anticipated. He makes clear very early in his philosophy that there is a distinction between consciousness and subjectivity on the one hand and the self on the other. But the Postmodernists reject consciousness and the self altogether.

Postmodernists also reject rationality, objectivity, truth and knowledge (although this has to be carefully stated). The rejection of rationality goes back through the history of Existentialism - that rationality is not adequate to answer the substantial questions we have about life and this pervades all the authors of
Existentialism. Sartre is the most rationalistic of the Existentialists discussed in the lecture series, but even he says that when it comes to fundamental choices, there is no ultimate criteria or rational standard or rational guideline to deal with. Rationality doesn’t have the privileged place that it has had throughout history.

Foucault and Deleuze both reject what they call Sartre’s “Enlightenment Project”. It is clear that in Sartre there is a raging sense of rationality and monism - of fitting things together. Sartre says that each of us has a fundamental purpose in life. To understand our fundamental project is to understand why we act the way we do so it has a sort of liberating affect. The Postmodernists seek liberation, too. But they seek it in a very different way. Instead of the monistic gathering together, the Postmodernists seek to get rid of “totalization” or the “rage for unity”.

What the Postmodernists are referring to in terms of Sartre’s “Enlightenment Project” is his idea of Purifying Reflection as a way of thinking about ourselves, personally and politically, which removes us from prejudice and takes us into the realm of pure freedom. But Solomon says a purifying reflection is absolutely essential in understanding the sense in which we must try to get ourselves up by the boot straps and to understand what it is we are doing and why. In an age of mindless consumerism, it becomes essential to ask ourselves what we are doing to our planet, our world, our selves.

Sartre is the last Existentialist Solomon covers in his lecture series, No Excuses (Lectures 19-23).

Sartre is the ultimate existentialist. He named the movement and when people talk about existentialism it’s usually Sartre’s philosophy they have in mind. Emphasis on freedom and choice and responsibility are the center of Satrean philosophy. (These are not central for Nietzsche or Heidegger. They are problematic.)

The title of Solomon’s lecture comes from Sartres idea of “No Excuses” and is based on the idea that one is always responsible.

Sartre denounced his fellow French men for their cowardice, their collaboration, cooperation, etc. He questioned their choices and motives. If you want to understand human nature, you have to look at humans under stress and so he watched his fellow citizens while being occupied during one of the most brutal wars in history.

What he noticed is that their answers all came out as excuses:

• What can I do? Impotence.
• I didn’t start the war. Innocence.
• Everyone else is doing it. The herd instinct.
• I’m just looking out for myself. Self-preservation.
• I had no choice. Helplessness.
• I was afraid. The appeal to emotion.

We are absolutely free, so we don’t have any excuses. We are responsible for what it is we do. We aren’t free in the sense that we can choose anything we want to do - but that we always have choices.

Absolute freedom is the absence of ultimate constraints. It is our responsibility to recognize our choices even in the most limited circumstances. One is always responsible for what one makes of what is made of one. Also, one is not caused to behave by his or her emotions or motives, but rather emotions and motives are part of the situation in which one chooses what to do. We have a picture of emotion being inside us but intruding upon our rationality. We say, I didn’t really mean it. I was just very angry. But the friend you insulted and you know yourself, that what you said was not just the product of anger but a deep and cutting insight about something you really feel. There is a sense in which the anger is a choice. When we get angry, we make a decision. We feel that flush and we have to decide - keep our mouth shut or act on it?

We are as responsible for what it is we do as well as what it is we don’t do. We make choices to the exclusion of other choices we simply choose not to think about. We are not just responsible for deliberate choices, we are responsible for choices made out of default, or out of neglect. No excuses.

Emotions are choices; they involve alternatives and options; and they involve purposiveness. They are “magical transformations of the world.” He wants to move away from the idea that emotions are bodily upsets of physiological intrusions. They are our responsibility and not a source of excuse.

William James, an American Philosopher, wrote an essay called “What is an Emotion?” in 1884. He said an emotion is an upsetting perception which causes in us a physiological disturbance. This perception of the physiological upset IS the emotion. Sartre says James ignores two important features of emotion. 1) Emotions are necessarily intentional. 2) Emotions are always about something. You can’t just be angry, you have to be angry about something. You can’t just be afraid, you have to be afraid of something. All emotions are intentional in that they are always about something. They can’t be mere sensations or feelings because sensations and feelings aren’t about anything. A headache is not about anything. It might be caused by something, like your mother in-law coming to visit. But your mother in-law didn’t cause the headache. A pain in your toe might be because you stepped on a nail. But the pain is not about the nail. But we are sad or joyful or depressed or angry about something.

Emotions have finality. Emotions are purposive. This is a bold thesis because we typically think of emotions caused in us and if they have a purpose, they aren’t our purpose. An emotion is a strategy, a way of dealing with the world. It is chosen and chosen with a purpose for a reason.

There is a story that comes from Aesop called Fox and the Grapes from Aesop that explains this. A fox sees some yummy, delicious grapes and craves them. But with all of his ingenuity, he can’t reach them. So he says, they are probably sour anyway. What Sartre says is that the fox has made a magical transformation of the world. The grapes haven’t changed. But the fox has changed his attitude - he comes to see them as sour. What has changed isn’t the world. What is changed is the fox’s way of seeing the world. This makes sense from a phenomenological point of view. But what about the magical? The fox refuses to accept himself as a failure. He refuses to see himself as up to the difficulty of getting the grapes. He’s not willing to expend anymore energy on a wasted project. This is using emotions to escape from the world. Emotions are a mode of escape behavior. We have our emotions not because they are caused in us. We have them because they are a way to deal with the world so that we can see ourselves as better off than we would otherwise be.

Sartre rejects Freud’s idea of the unconscious. Unconscious mental events are not just unconscious, but those that cannot be made conscious. They are repressed. Sartre also rejects Freud’s idea of psychic determinism. Sartre thinks they are strategies rather than forces within us as Freud says they are.

Part of the magical transformation of the world is the transformation of the body. For instance, fear could be seen as “getting ready to flee” and the bodily sensations follow from the emotion and are not causes of it.

By separating the discussion into two terms, consciousness on the one hand and the world on the other, Sartre puts himself in the French tradition in which he was raised (Cartesianism). But he had read Heidegger and was convinced by the argument that there is nothing to distinguish consciousness and the world at all.

Sartre says consciousness is freedom. Freedom is consciousness. Responsibility is the idea that we are the incontestable author of our actions. Consciousness is nothingness. Consciousness is intentionality. It is always about things. We don’t have to look at it as a transcendental ego. We can look at it as an activity. It’s like looking around a room with a flashlight. Consciousness is the beam of the flashlight (without the flahslight). It is nothing but an awareness of things in this world. Consciousness is outside of the causal relations of the world. Kant says that consciousness imposes causal categories on the world. It is by seeing the world in a certain way that we see things in terms of cause and effect relationships. But when we examine ourselves, that is not how we see ourselves. Consciousness is not an object of consciousness. It is not a thing. And consciousness is not a thing.

The idea of Spontaneity allows Sartre to carve out a middle range between indeterminism and determinism. Much of what we do is pre-reflective. We don’t think about it, we just do it. Consciousness acts and it acts without prior causality.

Sartre eventually gives up the idea that all emotions are a mode of escape behavior. Emotions are still not causes of behavior, but they are spontaneous outpourings of consciousness in which one takes the world in a certain way. Not emotions in consciousness, but emotions as ways of structuring consciousness as one way among many.

Consciousness has the power of negation. What I see is always more than what I see. When we see, we are never passive receivers. Consciousness is an activity not only of receiving, but also of shaping. Desire isn’t just seeing the world. It’s seeing the world in terms of what it is we want. We see things in terms of what we can do with them and how they fit in our plans. Consciousness is also able to perceive lack. If we are expecting our friend at the bar, we notice our friend isn’t there. We construe it in terms of what’s not there.

Sartre tries to focus on the key, essential experiences that define our experience in general. He wants to use this in place of the kinds of arguments philosophers have often given. Nausea is a dissatisfaction and revulsion with the meaninglessness of the world. The status of the external world or the status of our knowledge of the external world is in question. The broader philosophical idea is that somehow we are stuck inside our own experience or own consciousness. It’s a philosophical fabrication that comes out of the Cartesian split. But is the world “out there”? Or is it just an idea? Sartre says existence is not inferred from other experiences it forces itself upon us in a way that is undeniable. Anguish is the sudden spontaneous realization that I could, at any moment, take a step and go hurtling to my death if I’m standing on a cliff. Anguish gives one the basic experience of one’s own freedom. “Nothing stands between me and my self-destruction.” [except my own decision].

Philosophers ask, how do I know that other people exist? Sartre says we know other people exist when we notice someone looking at us when we are doing something embarrassing and we feel embarrassed.

His Being in Nothingness is a Phenomenological Ontology. It is phenomenological because it is from the first person standpoint. It is an ontology because we are describing things in this world.

He uses three concepts: 1) Being-for-itself. When we reflect, we recognize that we are conscious. Consciousness is aware of itself aware of objects all the time. 2) Being-in-itself. 3) Being-for-others. Shame and embarrassment.

The self is out there in the world like the self of another. It is an accumulation of actions and experiences. To find out who we are, we have to look back and see what it is we’ve done. Consciousness is an activity directed towards the world and its objects. Sartre also differentiates between self-consciousness (reflective sense) and consciousness (pre-reflective). We shouldn’t always think of consciousness as self-consciousness. Consciousness does not contain the “I” or the “self”. We are both being-in-itself and being-for-itself. We are both body and mind. We have two different sets of attributes. Facticity is the sum total of facts that are true about us. (That I was born on a certain date in a certain year.) Facticity is contrasted with transcendence. This is the sense in one overreaches the facts of ones life. This is also a transcendence of the present. We transcend the present into the future all the time. I am what I am not and I am not what I am.

What we all want is to be pure facticity and pure transcendence. What we really desire is to be God. (God as described as complete in himself. Everything that God can be, he is. God can do anything he wants.) On the one hand, we’d like to determine exactly who it is we are. But at the same time, we have a desire for negative freedom - to be free of constraints. But when you put these together, you get a contradiction. You can say, this is my birthday. But you may think it is too early, or too late and not accept it about yourself and replace it with another fact. How the date plays in his life is subject to transcendence.

Bad Faith: Self-deception about oneself. We can live through our hopes or our fears and deny the facts that are true about ourselves, or simply reject them (like pretending to be 29 rather than 39). Freud says there is a psychodynamic - we cannot take certain positions. Sartre says it is really, “we will not” take certain positions. When we are in bad faith, we misperceive and misjudge ourselves and we do this for a purpose. We don’t want to take responsibility.

Sartre says he is not doing ethics. But bad faith is bad. It is something to be avoided. Sarte is after a theory of integrity.

Being-for-others: Has a paranoid ring to it. Heidegger used Being-with-others which is much less paranoid and non-conflicted. When we say “being-for-others” we think of being used by others, being an object for others, or others being there to manipulate. We are only aware of our own consciousness. We cannot be aware of the consciousness of others. Philosophers sometimes suggests that taking people as other people requires a leap of faith because we cannot prove that other consciousnesses exist. What Sartre says, following from Hegel, is that we can know ourselves only with the recognition of other people. Self-knowledge is not captured by Descartes’s “I think therefore I am.” We become conscious only through our confrontation with others. Knowledge comes, not from observation, but from the experience of being looked at. Being for others is being objectified. We are always on trial in the eyes of others. Sartre says we cannot be indifferent to what other people think of us because this is as much a part of our identity as a clear determinant of who we are.

This leads to another dimension of bad faith: to accept what people think of us as the truth and to define ourselves as who we are for others. (What Heidegger talks about in terms of the Das Man self.) You could be in bad faith in the opposite way and say you don’t care what other people think. This isn’t psychology. It’s part of the essence of being human. We are social creatures in the perverse and disturbing sense that we are the objects of other people’s judgments and how we judge ourselves is very much defined by how we are judged by others.

There is a sense in which we are all guilty: for not living up to others expectations of us or living up to the expectations of others but not living up to our own expectations.

For Sartre, our relationship with other people is basically conflict. It’s always about setting aside their judgments of us or trying to get them to have judgments of us that are in line with our judgments of ourselves. Sartre explains this best in No Exist which is one of philosophies greatest contributions to the theater. The main theme of the play is “Hell is other people”. Our conceptions of ourselves are always compromised by and determined by other people,

It’s not enough to look at the facts about ourselves and what I think about myself, but we have to also take into consideration what others think of us. Even relationships like love and friendship are struggles. Love is a struggle for authenticity. We choose our friends on the basis of our conception of ourselves - those who reinforce the conception of ourselves. If we think of ourselves as not very intelligent, we might take up with someone very intelligent, etc. Friendship is a kind of agreement or contract. “I’ll approve of you in your terms if you will approve of me in my terms.” Friendship involves a mutual identity.

But when we talk about lovers, the picture becomes very different. Sartre introduces love as a seductive strategy. It’s an attempt to win someone over - a sort of control. When this love fails, it results in sadism (a desperate attempt to take control). Or, we can also take a submissive role where the other must please me. When this fails, it results in masochism (a manipulative attitude toward the other). Other possibilities of failed love are indifference (profound indifference - the other doesn’t exist) which can lead to hatred (on the part of the person who wants to exist). Love is a dynamic in which a kind of mutual manipulation is essential.

Sex, like love, is a kind of manipulative strategy in which we try to win over the other to our own self-conceptions. Pleasure is not the aim of sex, but rather a kind of vehicle one uses to control the other person. If you take too much pleasure in it yourself, the pleasure gets in the way and you are very likely to eliminate sex as the power you are trying to attain. Sex is about power. It’s a powerplay.

Hegel uses an example of two people fighting it out until one becomes master of the other and the loser becomes slave. But it’s not a stable relationship. Both parties leave quite unhappy. This is the same sort of view Sartre wants to give us. It’s not benign. Sex and love are much more complicated, threatening and dangerous than we tend to think. He’s trying to dig us out of the nonsense about love that has been piled on us for 2000 years.

And example of a traditional myth comes from Plato’s Symposium which is supposed to characterize the true nature of love: Aristophenes tells us love is the product of an ancient history. We were double creatures, two sets of legs, two sets of heads, two sets of arms. Zeus threatened to split us in two and he did. Ever since, we’ve been running around trying to find our other half. The other is a completion.

The idea of completing ourselves with another person is at odds with Sartre’s view. There is no such perfect fit. Even in the best relationship, there is a kind of struggle going on. If you pay any attention to your relationship, what becomes clear is that there is a struggle going on and there is an accommodation over the years that makes it seem like less of a struggle. Sartre says we are trying to maintain our own conception of ourselves in the face of the judgments of the other person.

Solomon corrects Sartre because he says that what he doesn’t take seriously enough is the fact that very often our conceptions of ourselves are not only in the face of the other, but there is a kind of cooperation that takes place on the level of actually trying to think of ourselves in mutual terms. But it is true that the way we think of ourselves is always at risk because of the other person.

Relationships, however stable they may seem, are never truly stable. They are exist in metastability - any situation which appears to be perfectly in balance can fall into disarray from the slightest imbalance. The same is true about our conceptions of ourselves. It may seem stable, but it is metastable. One thing can throw the entire thing into catastrophe.

Solomon says he doesn’t endorse Sartre, but what he does is opens our eyes to all the complexities of relationship. Sartre had a life long relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Despite a few infidelities on both their parts, they maintained an intimate closeness until Sartre’s death. They were one of the main couples, in fact the premiere philosophical couple, of the 20th century. Contrast this with Bertrand Russell, who despite all of his many words, went through quite a few marriages and found none of them satisfactory.

Sartre claimed that true being with others was something people found together under threat. You only learn to be with others in extreme circumstances.

Continuing with my cryptic notes on from Robert Solomon’s Lecture Series, No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life (which is still on sale), Lectures 15-17 on Heidegger.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a theology student and religion permeates all of Heidegger’s philosophy. His Being in Time is central to Existentialist thinking.

He is most concerned with “The Question of Being”. He distinguishes between Being and Beings. Philosophers have always worried about entities and what they are made of and how they relate to each other causally. But they haven’t asked “What is the ground of being that makes the appearance of entities to us even possible?”

Heidegger examines “the being through whom the question of being comes into question.” (That being is us.)

Ontology is the study of being, but it is also the study of the being through whom the question of being comes into question. Phenomenology is the study of our own subjectivity. With Heidegger, this takes on religious sensibilities. There is a sense of passivity. Under what condition can things disclose themselves.

Heidegger does not use words like experience, consciousness, or mind. But it’s difficult to discuss his philosophy in English without using these terms. The first experience is “Being there”. He calls this “Dasein”. This is a way of getting back to the basic, primordial experience and saying in what it consists. Our basic experience is a holistic unified experience of our being in the world.

We are ontological. We ask questions. In particular, we ask questions of being.

The Center piece of his philosophy is to reject the Cartesian tradition. We have to reject the distinction between being in the world and something else; between consciousness and the world outside of us; between the phenomenological world with its intentional objects and the possibility of the objects to which that refers. Dasein and the world are a unified phenomenon. To understand Dasein is to understand the world. To understand the world is to understand Dasein.

There can be no Dasein without the world. There can be no world without Dasein. Dasein is already being in the world and being in the world cannot be separated into components. Dasein blocks the sorts of questions like “Who am I?” What we think of as our identity is a false self-identity.

An uncomfortable fact about Heidegger is that he was part of the Nazi party and he never repudiated the the Nazis even though he became disillusioned with it. He said it never achieved it’s potential greatness. It became too much like the other technological societies (America and Russia). Heidegger has brilliant ideas but a despicable past. Nietzsche said that who the philosopher is has a lot to do with what the philosophy is. Heidegger claimed that Being in Time was not an ethical work. But it’s impossible to read it without seeing that it had powerful ethical implications. But Heidegger rejected this. Perhaps this rejection had to do with his inability to come to grips with the implications his philosophy has.

What bothers Heidegger is the problem of alienation. He talks about feeling at home in the world. But the truth is that he did not feel at home in the world and that modern man does not feel at home. Mass consumerism and technology have made it impossible to feel at home.

To talk about knowledge is to enter a domain that, according to Heidegger, we have not understood at all. What philosophers tend to think of is the world as something to be known. But Heidegger says we are not first of all knowers or spectators. Are first of all experience of the world is engagement. To be engaged is to care. Caring is not to be confused with caring for others or about others and should not be confused with anxiety or worry.

Heidegger talks about the World as Equipment. It’s about knowing how, rather than knowing that. It’s not about observing as a spectator, but being engaged in tasks. Under what circumstances do we stop involving ourselves in tasks and start seeing the things as we use as things - as individual instruments or items? Pre-reflection is more important than reflection.

Reflection becomes important when something goes wrong. If you are hammering nails into a floorboard, to think about the hammer and the nails and the floorboard and yourself as separate components is debilitating. But if the head flies off the hammer, then it becomes important to work through what went wrong.

If we are engaged in what we are doing, we don’t notice what we are doing. We are concerned with getting the task done. Heidegger thinks peasants have the answer to the question of being that philosophers since Plato do not because peasants are actively engaged in their world. But this is to be contrasted with using the world as a resource - especially in terms of technology. Technology makes everything the same. Consumerism is something Heidegger despised. These things separate us from the world and from each other. Heidegger’s original flirtation with Nazis was to re-capture rural Germany even though they quickly became more concerned with the same things as the Russians and Americans displayed.

Heidegger rejects Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” because he says it leads to a split between mind and body. Descartes also said that self-knowledge is immediate and unmistakable. Descartes uses this as proof that there is at least one proposition which is self-evident and undoubtable. But according to Heidegger, we don’t know what our selves are and anything recognizing true recognition is a rare thing.

To be authentic is to be one’s own person. In contrast, there is inauthenticity which is not being one’s own self. Heidegger labels this “Das Man”. It means, “one does not do those things around here”. The Das Man Self is an anonymous, individual or reflective self. It is inauthentic. It is a social, comparative self. But it is an essential part of life.

When we talk about ourselves, we talk about ourself in relationship to a group. We give our identity in terms of our social roles. But our social roles aren’t us.

Heidegger also has the notion of being thrown into the world. What would it be like had we been born in another century? We didn’t choose when and where we would be born and we didn’t choose our parents. This compromises taking hold of yourself not within a vacuum, but within a very particular historical concept. Moreover, when one takes hold of oneself, one doesn’t break free of society. That would be the height of alienation (and technological societies). Rather, one takes a hold of oneself and appreciates ones traditions, ones history (historicity), and one embeds oneself back in ones culture and ones times. It’s easy to see how he saw national socialism and German culture in general not as a herd mentality he should escape but the opposite - something he should reinsert himself into. (This is very likely how he ended up with Nazi roots.)

Heidegger does not refer to time as clock time. We talk about living in the present but the truth is we never do. Whenever we think of ourselves, we always think of ourselves from our past and in terms of our future projects. We are creatures in time.

Inauthenticity or alienation? Is that the choice we have? Heidegger says that this isn’t the choice we have, there is a third alternative.

Heidegger understands existence, in the Kierkegaardian sense - human beings have the ability to appreciate who it is we are. Reflection in the sense of being ontological. Existences precedes essence. Within the context of existence, Dasein has possibilities. We always see our world in terms of possibilities. Existence is a sense of the future - that we have the capacity to make choices. Existence is a freedom to make choices based on what we want of the future. Our moods are what “tune us in” to the world.

Facticity - the facts that are true about us. We are thrown into the world into a particular culture, a particular history, etc. This gives rise to our historicity which is the idea that we are born into a particular historical situation and tradition. Once we achieve authenticity, we reinsert ourselves into our historicity and our traditions. Fallenness is a term that is strongly reminiscent of the fall in the Bible, but it refers to the fact that we fall back from a reflective, authentic position to something Heidegger calls “preontological”. What we do is stop asking questions for a while and we fall back into tasks. This is how we live most of our lives and it is a sort of inauthenticity, but nevertheless, it is part of human existence and should be respected as such.

Heidegger talks about authenticity in terms of three different contrasts: Understanding vs. Curiosity. Modern science is curiosity. Most people when they ask questions are being curious. But this is an inferior form of cognition. Understanding is superior to curiosity. Thinking vs. Calculation. Heidegger does not admire technological advancement because it involves calculative thinking. Real thinking is philosophical thinking. Speech vs. Chatter. There is talk that entertains us, but true speech is something very different. Most of us spend most of our time just chit chatting. But speech is much more profound.

Conscience is the constant reminder within us that we are not all that we would like to be; that we are not authentic. That we are just going along with the crowd and there is this quiet voice that reminds us we could be something more. Conscience gives rise to guilt. This is something built into our very existence - it is the constant reminder that we are not being all that we can be. It isn’t built for a transgressions or an omission, it come by fact that we are human. It comes by virtue that we are ontological. We can’t help but ask questions about being and who we are. When we quit asking these questions (because we get comfortable in our job or in our marriage or in our habits), there is still a nagging conscience that there is something else.

To be authentic is to start to think about our neighborhood, marriage, job, etc. in a new way - taking hold of them and making them our own rather than simply being in a neighborhood, being in a marriage, being in a job, etc.

“Being Unto Death” is not a celebration of death, it is simply a recognition of death as a necessary fact about us. We need to live with death in mind. When you face death, what you ask yourself are some very basic questions about your life. It is death that individuates us. It is death that shakes us out of our Das Man self. When you face death, you face the sudden realization that you might not be there. When you die, you will cease to be a Dasein, the world will cease to exist for you. And therefore, for you, the world will cease to exist. It’s not the same thing as authenticity although it is one aspect of it, it is a spur that throws us out of our inauthenticity and fallen condition and forces us to see ourselves and our lives a single unity. This is when we start making resolutions of a profound sort.

Are we to be alienated as authentic? Or inauthentic and not living a full life? Once we become authentic, we can re-emerge ourselves into our historicity. It’s not too difficult to see here an excuse for his Nazi affiliations.

Just a quick little blurb on Husserl from Solomon’s No Excuses Lecture 15 (which is still on sale).

Husserl [1859-1938] created a method called Phenomenology which is a version of Cartesianism and includes a strong emphasis on subjectivity and consciousness. Simply defined, Phenomenology is the examination of consciousness. Or literally, the examination of phenomena - that which appears to consciousness.

Intentionality is the thesis that consciousness is about something. If you believe, you believe something or other. If you perceive, you have to perceive something or other. If you have an emotion like anger, you have to be angry at something or someone. All consciousness for Husserl is intentional in this sense.

Husserl gets dangerously close to the problem of solipsism except he does not examine things as objects of the world, he examines them as objects of experience. Ontology is a study of the things of the world. Phenomenology is a study of the objects of experience.

Husserl was not an existentialist. He came into philosophy through mathematics asking questions like: What is it that makes 2+2=4 true? Is it a matter of convention? A matter of logic? Husserl says it is none of these. Phenomenology is a way of talking about mathematical truth in terms of necessity, and necessity in terms of the structure of consciousness.

Husserl seeks certainty. Husserl wants a place to stand in philosophy. He needs an archimidean point and this place turns out to be the transcendental ego. This influences Heidegger and then Sartre. But the ways in which they use it is very different than how Husserl used it.

(This was only half the lecture and then Solomon moves on to several lectures on Heidegger which I’ll post tomorrow.)

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?