Hubris

LS801: Week 1: HUBRIS

Euripides: The Bacchae (407 BCE)

Marlow: Doctor Faustus (1604)

Einstein: letter to F.D. Roosevelt
(1939)

Oppenheimer: 'Now I am become Death'
(1945)

When I was young, and attended church, I recall hearing the statement “God created man in his own image”. Today, I find more and more truth in this statement as I see first-hand just how irrational, egotistical and needy we humans can be. Maybe it would be more accurate to say “Man created God in his own image”. Nevertheless, the God Dionysius in The Bacchae, rather than leaving Thebes to exist in peace, feels insulted that he is not being worshipped, and so he proceeds to infect the female Thebian population with his reckless and passionate festivities. Dionysius also has Pentheus, the King of Thebes, mutilated for his insolence because of his denial of Dionysius’ status as a god. This entirely superficial view of the play may portray Dionysius as egomaniacal and in desperate need of being praised by the very humans he considers far beneath him. However, there is much more at play in this play. Both Euripides’ The Bacchae and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus were written at a time when questions about the gods, in terms of their usefulness and their existence, were being raised. The Enlightenment of Marlowe’s time was in many ways similar to the Sophist movement of Euripides’. Here I will freely (i.e. without much structure) contrast the two protagonists of these plays, Pentheus and Faustus. (Are you ready?)

Thebes is ruled by Pentheus, a suppressive leader who, from his first lines, seems on edge and in need of a little wine and dance. From the get-go, his interaction with the gentle and compliant foreigner Dionysius (a God in disguise) is hostile - something that might have been the expected xenophobic reaction of a Greek to a barbarian. (Was this Euripides’ foresight into the outcome of the 25-year-long Peloponnesian War which was to end in 404 BCE, two years after his death? Might Pentheus, and perhaps the people of Athens, not have been better off to embrace the foreigner?) Still superficially, although at a deeper level, Pentheus characterizes the rational (Apollonian) and sceptical side of our human nature while Dionysius represents our primal drive to experience our animalistic nature, which we need in order to escape the inevitable despair and meaninglessness that comes from overly-rational thinking. Just like Dr Faustus, Pentheus’ interests lie in earthly powers and he cannot (or does not) see beyond the veil of Dionysius’ disguise. Myopic and unappreciative of the full extent of their spiritual humanity, Pentheus and Faustus - archetypes of our cerebral and analytical nature - glimpse at nothing beyond what their own crude physical senses show them.

Looking at these two compartments within each of us, one cognitive the other affective, our ability to experience the numinous is compartmentalized within our Dionysian (affective) side but it can be effaced by our cognitive gifts. That this experience stems from our primitive origins may be why it gives a sense of completeness and unity with nature.

These plays are an appeal for moderation in all things, and a cry against excess, prudery and Puritanism. What is called for is balance and respect for our humanity which encompasses our physical, spiritual as well as mental faculties. To provide one telling comparison: Faustus indulges his senses to the fullest for 24 years and for this he is considered weak, is dismembered, and spends an eternity in hell. Pentheus’ outright refusal to behave in such a way results in his limbs being torn from his torso as well. If you sit at either extreme, your detachment from nature manifests itself physically.

Despite both being fixated on the senses, Faustus and Pentheus are blind to their own salvation. Each is given ample warning and evidence that they are on the skids: p.47, (668) Dionysius warns Pentheus: “My friend, it is still possible to put this right”, and the Good Angel and Mephistopheles himself warn Faustus that he should cease his dealings with the devil. Faustus ignores whatever advice comes his way and assaults his senses to escape thinking about his fate - the best example of this is when, within a day of being dragged to hell by Lucifer, he spends the night with Helen of Troy, “Come, Helen, come give me my soul again. Here will I dwell for heaven is in these lips and all is dross that is not Helena.” For 24 years he follows Isaiah 22:13 to a tee: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we may die”, but to call him devout would be a stretch. Beyond this short line quoted from Isaiah there is a more complete story, a message. Chances are, that message does not endorse Faustus’ behaviour. Passages of the Bible that Faustus himself quotes show that he sees only what he wants to see: (the parts in italics are not quoted by Faustus; they are conveniently left out: (p.5) “The wages of sin is death. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ.” “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

In Euripides’ Medea, Creon’s blindness and arrogance lead us to believe that he was justly punished (at least we do not feel that the world will miss him very much). But consider Pentheus in The Bacchae: to be torn limb from limb merely for disbelieving. People! Is this not going a bit too far? What about Cadmus? His only “crime” was that of passing the kingship to his son, and for this he is ruined. What does this say about justice and morality of the gods and of the times The Bacchae was written? The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta produced doubt in the existence of gods that often behaved haphazardly. I wonder if the war-wearied people began hearing stories about the injustices of war - wars mandated by the gods - and had had enough.

There must be a causal relationship between the so-called Age of Pericles’ and the Golden Age of Athens. Indeed, these eras are synonymous with one another. Pericles was a rationalist and tolerant of Sophists. His friend Protagoras, at some point, was exiled because he tried to present a scientific account for some heavenly bodies. Most Sophists were agnostic or atheists, believed in natural rather than divine causation, and flocked to Athens because they felt welcome there. I wonder: Was this a threat to those in power and the reason for the Sophists’ persecution? Were they so dangerous because they questioned the existence of gods, gods that men in authority relied on to instil fear in the population? If gods could really see everything that was happening on earth, then surely politicians would not dare swindle us by being dishonest, for if they do, they will get their just desserts by being torn to shreds at the gods’ hands! The messenger (p.71) speaks like a pawn and cries against freedom and individualism: “The best thing is to know one’s place and revere the divine; I think that is also the wisest path for mortals to take.” If the community thinks as one, then no one will be harmed, whereas the price of freedom in all its forms can be severe: even the innocent (like Cadmus) can be harmed.

Politics today, as before, suffers from human nature, only on a larger scale. If anthropomorphized, governments show all the traits of a confused and emotionally undeveloped adolescent who has access to liquor and the car keys. Governments know themselves, as bodies, as little as said adolescent, and they are just as irrational and hormonally-driven. Precisely like Pentheus, governments work under the illusion of practising Logic but have a strong attraction for the “other, dark side”. Without accepting this fact and praising the Dionysian side, one gets torn apart from the inside when one comes face to face with it. (You know what happens to Pentheus…) “The policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash." (King Lear - paraphrased by Christopher Hitchens.)

Euripides’ play must be, on some level, a prediction of the outcome of the Peloponnesian War. Similar to the play, the outcome of the war was the imposition of barbarian influence upon the Greeks. I like to think that Euripides in his old age came to see war as the waste of life that it is and saw promise in accepting outsiders and their ways. P. 27 (390) …“DIONYSIUS: One who speaks wisdom will seem foolish to the ignorant. PENTHEUS: Is this the first place you have brought your god? DIONYSIUS: All of Persia now dances in these mysteries. PENTHEUS: Because they have far less sense than the Greeks! DIONYSIUS: No, they are right in this. Customs differ.”

Sometimes one must break from tradition and come face-to-face with something new (foreigners, the “Dionysian”) in order to see one’s divine nature and to progress. To stagnate within one extreme is to fester and die. This dilemma speaks to the perennial schism between physis (unchanging nature) and nomos (manmade law or convention). Is it a result of human custom that we isolate ourselves from neighbours that we view as different? Is it natural for the gods to hold power over us? These questions the Sophists brought to the stage, as did Euripides.

In creating a world where physis is altered to the point of introducing gods as characters, Marlowe and Euripides push the boundaries of what had been acceptable. They go against tradition, personified by Tiresias, who says (p.13, 168) “We do not hold intellectual debates on the gods. No logic will overthrow the traditions we have received from our fathers, traditions as old as time, no matter what clever arguments are thought up by the greatest minds…” However, dear Tiresias, when a god says, “Yes [I dismembered your family member and ruined your lives, exiling you from your hometown], for your behaviour towards me was terrible, When my name was without honour in Thebes”, it is time to have an intellectual debate. (Sounds like the god I grew up with).

The chorus speaks in support of the gods in this play. It acts as a barrier enclosing the “Dionysian” from the “rationally-minded” crowd. The chorus - acting as a filter between the stage and reality - are speaking directly to the open hearts of the spectators who are infected by the Dionysian and “the sublime”. Euripides is appealing to their sense of what is right and what is decent and human: Athens is near defeat, fighting Sparta. Accept the chorus’s message!

The Parodos (the first chorus entry) is a joyful song in praise of Dionysius followed by a choral ode that criticizes Pentheus for his denial of the god. The chorus certainly leans in favour of that which is touched by the divine and not wholly human. Similarly, both Faustus and the wholly human (depending on your beliefs) representative of God, the Pope, are in want of human and earthly pleasures. No doubt that the Pope sings a different tune on his pulpit, though. His reaction to anything that his rational mind cannot explain is one of surprise, fear and anger, implying that his Dionysian side is neglected.

The Dionysian is an escape from our everyday routine and humdrum lives. Poor Pentheus is positioned on the outside of the Bacchic party, looking in. Only when fully infected by Dionysian’s energy does he jump into the revelry and have a grand time (albeit too short a time, if you were to ask him). The Dionysian allows us this chance to live out our dreams and fantasies to and to indulge in what we might consider a religious experience. There is something very (pre-) Freudian in the idea that Pentheus’ internalization and repression of his Dionysian urges results in his ruin. I am probably way off, but I can’t help but wonder whether Marlowe had a similar idea in mind when he had Faustus speaking of himself in the third person: Is this because Faustus is so internally divided, so lost and removed from himself and his own reality, or was speaking this way common in the 1500s? P.67, “What art though, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?” Is he speaking to the other half of himself that he has neglected and allowed to wither? Ignore the Dionysian at your peril, Faustus!

Just as the transcendent Dionysian experience has roots in our primal past, so does the Christian God have its roots in the ancient Greek world. Similarities go as far back as the belief systems’ Creation stories and although there are many differences between the two, the irrationality of the gods stays constant. One should be careful, though, not to be rational in reading and in thinking about these stories as their beauty is stripped away and can be easily mocked in so doing. Think of these religious stories as poetry – if we take them too literally, they can appear a mere jumble of words, but analyzed correctly through a Bacchian lens, their beauty can shine through.

Faustus is a representative of the Renaissance. The diminishing power of the Catholic Church due to Protestantism and the rise of individualism in Marlowe’s day had an effect on Faustus. He paints himself as the centre of universe (p.19) “What boots it to think on God or Heaven? Away with such vain fancies and despair. … The god thou servest is thine own appetite.”) p.25 [2.1] (133) “I think hell’s a fable.” No doubt this is what many at the time were thinking (if not speaking aloud). This trend helped science advance and some may say that it lead to an equally explosive growth in humanity’s hubris and caused a release of forces that it had no “right” to unleash. Remember Frankenstein? His hubris was his own downfall, and only a handful of people suffered as a consequence of his doings; [Oppenheimer link]. The hell doctrine promoted in the 1500s may be a fable, but a new version of hell has been made real by scientific advances along with the threats they impose on us all. Thinking on this, along with today’s environmental disasters (natural and man-made), climate change, religious fanaticism and wars, there is something very “Biblical” about the times we live in.

Weeks 12 + 13: Kollwitz, Rilke and Dinesen (Blixen)...

...And in this week's blog, more Passion than Reason:


Käthe Kollwitz: Prints and Drawings (1898-1835)

Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke (1903-1908)


Babette's Feast - Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) (1958)

KATHE KOLLWTIZ
Kollwitz’s art is suffused with examples of agony, suffering and tension. Her art is that of the soul, a soul in such sorrow that it’s seeking to escape the boundaries that keep it body-bound. As such, nothing from the “outside” can comfort the soul. Think of this as a consequence of living in a material world where two souls can never meet, only pass each other by. This speaks to our alienation from each other. Rilke describes Love, the most intimate, personal and perfect Love, as consisting of “two solitudes [that] protect and border and greet each other.” (p.78). Like two separate worlds in orbit around each other, they can never truly meet and be one.

Kollwitz’s art shows the solitude inherent in experiencing deep grief. One can feel the hollowness of the person in pain and how she is stripped of all that once mattered to her. In the face of such despair, she is utterly alone and has only herself to depend on. In such instances, to seek lasting comfort from an exterior source would bring further disappointment. Personally faced with this, the reality of the exterior world is exposed as the illusion it is.

Kollwitz’s art is a study of how emotional grief is carried by the body. Although the source and the weight come from within the subject, the physical burden of the pain is palpable to the observer. The statue version of “The Parents”, below, shows the differences in how the mother and the father carry their grief. The father, closed off with arms crossed, holds his sadness to himself. He is determined not to show what he’s feeling, as some might expect a “typical man” to do. His chin’s to chest as though he is trying hard to keep from bawling, while the mother shows that the void in her chest may cause her to keel over.

Now here are two versions of a woodcut version of “The Parents”. Although the message in each is similar, the feeling I get from one is different from the other. I prefer the first (below) because of its harder lines, especially those on the mother’s back, over her heart. These particular lines (more than in the other version) seem to express her heartbrokenness, and her weight is more palpably supported by her husband’s hand; he is supporting her weight more completely than in the second version, as you might expect the statue version of the father to do. In the second woodcut, the parents seem to be more melded together. The harder lines in the first indicate that even though they are so close together, they are entirely separate and alone. Kollwitz’s move from lithography to woodcuts is understandable since the definition of the lines in wood etchings stress the outer edges of individuals. For instance, compare the woodcut “Mothers” here, http://www.greatwar.nl/kollwitz/kollwitzmothers.html to her other drawings. One can see that even in groups, these women are, like us all, now and in the end, alone.






Mother and Dead Child. http://www.artnet.com/artwork/184746/421/woman-with-dead-child.html What is the first thing that strikes you about this? Yes, the mother is nude, everything else stripped away. Through her grief, she is brought to the essence of herself, to the most fundamental and most basic feeling she has ever had to endure. At least that’s what I felt. From her bearing and the direction of her pining, I also felt as though she is trying with all her might to pass her own life on to her child. This is a birth and death engraving.

The other noticeable, if not disturbing, aspect is that we cannot make out her face. What we are able to see doesn’t appear human. Would you want to see her face, though? Can such grief even be shared between two individuals? Such intense, irreparable anguish cannot be soothed from anything external. It can hardly be expressed in words, never mind be comforted. I heard this on CBC radio once and thought that this haunting music came close to expressing such pain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymuF7uG6wis&feature=related

Anyway, on the flip side of the same note, it is the gazes of some of Kollwitz’s subjects that are most evocative of all. Here are examples of some very expressive faces:

- Killed in action: http://picasaweb.google.com/revswain/KollwitzKathe#5414547910363434770

- Germany’s children are starving: http://picasaweb.google.com/revswain/KollwitzKathe#5328356347882879874

- Bread: http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail-LRG.cfm?View=LRG&IRN=645&PICTAUS=TRUE
- Prisoners listening to music: http://www.masterworksfineart.com/inventory/2748

- Death seizes a woman: http://picasaweb.google.com/revswain/KollwitzKathe#5292443231439985938


Perhaps Kollwitz saw her subjects’ suffering as beautiful because any emotion that is so pure is beautiful in its authenticity. The feelings she captured and tried to replicate in her art are not at all veiled by convention. This is precisely what Rilke was trying to capture in himself. He needed solitude to tap into his pure, authentic self. Indisputably, the depth of grief her works portray is on a fundamentally individual – not collective – level. Witnessing its manifest veracity is beautiful.

RAINER MARIA RILKE
Let’s quickly compare Rilke (1905) to Oscar Wilde (1890). Although Letters to a Young Poet and The Portrait of Dorian Gray were written within fifteen years of each other, the philosophies on which they are based could not be more divergent. “The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim” (preface, Dorian Gray). Rilke would have agreed that the artist creates beauty but I think he would have argued that the artist himself is so personally and emotionally involved with his art that it would be impossible for him to conceal himself even if he wanted to. As he says, “…you will see in [your poems] as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity” (p.9). To create beauty just for the sake of beauty (Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy) doesn’t necessarily arise out of necessity. Think of what Babette said at the end of Babette’s Feast (read below…): “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart to the artist: ‘Give me leave to do my utmost!’” Sometimes it’s necessary, one way or another, to practice one’s art. Do you think Picasso could have done anything but paint?

Rilke is more concerned with feelings as opposed to the superficial 19th century aesthetic movement that Wilde was a part of. To give only two examples, Rilke feels the emotion of some poems that Mr Kappus sends him without being able to describe it. Only after Mr Kappus more fully expresses himself in the letter (presumably describing something about his life) is Rilke able to understand and articulate the source of what he was feeling… (p.5 “Your kind letter, which accompanied them, managed to make clear to me various faults that I felt in reading your verses, though I am not able to name them specifically"). The other example, (p.105), where Rilke considers the news of Mr Kappus: At first it “seems to be good news and the longer I thought it over, the more I felt that it was very good news indeed”. It’s as if his decisions came about by a grand synthesis where he weighed both his gut feeling and his reason.

I sometimes wonder whether anyone can live without Google at their fingertips. It gives people the best of both worlds: isolation and the internet. However, there is no possibility for growth in such a set-up because one is still dialed-in to social networking and “the entire world” at all times. There is no space or opportunity to look within. Rilke might have commented on how sad it is that instead of looking within, we seek affirmation and acceptance from everyone and everything except ourselves. He’d see this as the “easy way” and therefore not worth doing: “almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.” (p.35).

Rilke’s philosophy on living plainly and clearly is reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius’, especially in that Rilke uses Nature as an example: As he sees plants and animals: “patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery…” (p.37). All beings bow to necessities, difficult as these necessities may be, as though Nature’s natural unfolding is Art itself.

Like the sublime workings of Nature, when art is striven for and attained, a grand sublimation of emotion takes place. Since emotion is beyond words, it makes sense: Look at Kollwitz’s work - it’s incommunicable; Rilke is looking for the same emotion in the form of poetry. I’m again reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s quote of what poetry is - “The great function of poetry is to give the situation of our dreams.” Bachlard philosophizes about tender memories from the home he grew up in. Rilke would have agreed with him: The spaces in which one spends one’s childhood are sacred, and the external symbols “are internalized and thereby re-created into something existing both within and without. The environment is then a visible consciousness that parallels the inner consciousness”.

He cherishes his childhood memories and takes a maternal approach to his own creative process. I remember something I once saw written on a bar wall, and its beauty stuck with me ever since. I found the line so beautiful because it recognized that one can fashion one’s own fantasies into memories, and can reconcile not achieving all of the many childhood dreams one had:
“The dreams of my youth have become memories”.
Depending on your attitude, this can be beautifully melancholy or depressingly so.

BABETTE’S FEAST
Babette’s Feast is beautifully melancholic. Of all the books this term, this short story has to be one of my favourites. I wonder where the discussion for this book will take us in class. Its themes parallel those considered in other works this semester, for example those of appearances, social mores, authenticity, spirituality, blindness, Nature, illusions, authority, vanity…
The setting of the story is “at the foot of the mountains [in a] small town of Berlevaag [that] looks like a child’s toy-town…” (p.23), as though “bastilled” by Nature, to use Wollstonecraft’s expression of a Norwegian town she once observed. In this town, Babette herself lives a life of solitude, never once mentioning her being an artist. At the end of the book, she tells her friends, (p.67) “…I shall never be poor… I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor. We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing” a space within that nobody can touch. “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart to the artist: ‘Give me leave to do my utmost!’” (p.68)

It seems that those who understand or at least recognize this depth within, this source of creativity, are able to live more deeply without, in all meanings of that word. They can live without want, and can see the exterior world as it is: overrun with mere trivialities. Moreover, they can truly experience the outside world (the world without) without getting caught up in its pettiness. They see beyond the superficial, beyond what is an inch from their eyes, and can look deep.
Young Lorens, upon seeing Martine (p.26): “There rose before his eyes a sudden and mighty vision of a higher and purer life…” This is his gut reaction to this woman but he feels unworthy of her, possibly because he has no love for himself. As Rilke might have said, Lorens had dirty, undefined edges at the boundaries of his solitude, his being. “He loathed and despised the figure which he himself cut in her nearness. Tender words stuck in his throat as he looked in the maiden’s face…” (p.27). There is often difficulty and resistance to being completely honest and open with someone and to look them directly in the eyes. Perhaps this difficulty arises from the fear of what will be revealed of ourselves: In being intimate with others, we see a mirror of ourselves with all our faults and potentials. This can be terrifying.
However, Lorens “pulls himself together” (p. 27) [p.57 “For how is a man to behave when he cannot trust his senses? It is better to be drunk than mad.”] and becomes the man that Ivan Ilych was. Decades later, Lorens makes the sad realization that “all is vanity!” (p.52), “in what had been profited? Somewhere something had been lost.” (p.53)

“He would let the youth prove to him once and for all, that thirty-one years ago he had made the right choice.” This line reminds me of my grandmother who moved from Slovenia in the 1960s. To this day, she insists that life is (now) better in Canada and that she made the right decision. (Many Slovenian relatives of mine disagree given that she laboured physically for decades in Canada and left a relatively comfortable life in Ljubljana…) Now, whenever she has any visitors from Slovenia, she seeks confirmation that she made the right choice. Recently, less than a week after a relative of mine visited, one of the first questions my grandmother asked her was, “Where is life better, in Slovenia or in Canada?(!)”


Clearly something very special starts to happen during the course of Babette’s feast: “They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity.” (p.61). I’m sure the diners did not want the evening to end and I, as a reader, felt the same way.

What touched me most was the idyllic scene Dinesen paints in setting up the dinner itself. She is setting up what could be considered the diners’ highlight of their twilight years. The outside December scene is fantastically Christmassy. p.54 -“Large snowflakes fell densely; behind the sledge the tracks were wiped out quickly. General Loewenhielm sat immovable by the side of his aunt, his chin sunk in the high fur collar of his coat.” Babette’s feast is a Biblical affair, complete with twelve guests. This writing and the ending of this story was reminiscent of Joyce’s moving and final paragraph in his short story The Dead:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Reflections: Weeks 10 + 11

Reflections: Week 10 + 11

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Death of Ivan Ilych - [(Spoiler alert: He dies)] - Leo Tolstoy

Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

The Awakening - Kate Chopin

“If our sciences are vain in the objects they have in view, they are even more dangerous in the effects they produce.” (Rousseau)

While reading Frankenstein, I was reminded of the first choral ode in Antigone which states that "[Man] lacks resources for nothing the future can bring / Only from death can he devise no escape". In a way, Frankenstein's life-creating discovery is an important step towards devising such an escape. The quote is just one of countless snippets from this course’s readings that could be applied to Frankenstein. Take your pick, this book touches upon issues ranging from "the crapshoot of having kids" to "the folly of science". This book's beginnings are a bit of a soap opera. Most people know that Mary Shelley started this book in Switzerland as a result of a friendly writing competition between friends. Lord Byron hosted the gathering in Diodati where gloomy weather kept everyone indoors. Without Facebook, they were forced to apply themselves toward something creative and constructive. What is not so well known is how they all came to assemble there. Apparently, Lord Byron (a playboy) invited Mary and Percy only because Claire (Mary's half-sister who wanted to spend more time with Lord Byron), promised to bring Mary and Percy if she could visit him in Diodati. Had Claire not promised to bring the daughter of the famous Mary Wollstonecraft, Claire probably would not have been invited because Byron had grown tired of her.

The magnificent views from the villa in Diodati were inspiring to Shelley, and Frankenstein is full of the effects that nature can have on one's psyche. The philosophy of the Sublime was a popular theme of the day and describes nature as a mixture of "horror and harmony". I imagine that for many at the time, the immense vistas they experienced in nature were new to them. They didn’t have the huge-screen cinemas that assault, toy with and therefore dull our senses. In leaving the cities and hiking in the Swiss Alps, for example, the immense depths and distances perceived, the contrasts in perspective must have been so new to their sight that the vast panoramas might easily have been terrifying. That the Sublime includes the an element of horror reminds me of feelings that one can be overcome with when standing near a cliff's edge... the horror combined with the sense of freedom. What if I jump? What if I lose all sense of reason for one split second and hurl myself off the edge?
p. 97 “The sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind, and causing me to forget the passing cares of life.”

One obvious theme is that of man's hubris in exploring science without consideration of its consequences. Knowing too much too fast can be dangerous, and maybe there are things we should not know or be exposed to. (Manhattan Project comes to mind). Forget about the impact of scientific endeavours for a second, but what about their utility? Should we spend billions of dollars at CERN while people are still dying of cholera, polio, malaria, AIDS…?

It can be fascinating to watch life unfold before you in a petri plate, but remember Candide: “Legs were obviously instituted in order to wear breeches, and hence we have breeches…” Just because some species of Malayan kumquats native to a section of land "x" near the coast of "y" produces antioxidant "z" doesn't mean that thousands upon thousands of dollars should be invested towards their study (although if I were a scientist employed as a result of this I might think differently).

Frankenstein’s obsession with Science opened the door to his downfall:
p.56 “…a human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility... if this rule were observed…Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed…” “…I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade…the energy of my purpose alone sustained me…” Science has taken him over! Not only is science being criticized here, but also the way it is being pursued.

Frankenstein, from his youth, judges based on appearances: Mr Krempe: “…was a little squat man, with a scruff voice and a repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his pursuits.”

Some of language really got to me, too; I loved the way Shelley described certain scenes (they were very reminscent of her mother's descriptions of nature and emotions):

p.136 COLD nature - “The cold stares shone in mockery and the bare trees waved their branches above me…”
p. 138 - “…in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair.” … “I lighted the dry branch of a tree, and danced with fury around the devoted cottage, my eyes still fixed on the western horizon, the edge of which the moon nearly touched.” To me this conjured the idea of some pagan rite performed by someone very close to Nature.
p. 146 - Image very much like that of Rousseau’s natural man: “We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human.” From Discourse on the Origins of Inequality: (p.40) - (of man in his natural state): “I see him satisfying his hunger under and oak tree, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that supplied his meal; and thus all his needs are satisfied.”
p. 139 - “Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and passions, and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind.” Is Shelley talking to her father, here? What did Freud make of this book?
p. 168 - “Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”

No matter which of myriad themes in Frankenstein you choose to consider, they all converge on the perennial questions asked by the monster (p.128), “My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic: what did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?" I’ll have the answers to these in the next blog.

TOLSTOY
We've considered many books that prescribe ways to live, but not ways to die. This frightening short story (which I enjoyed very much) would be a good place to start.
Rousseau mentioned that the older we get the more steadfastly we cling to life, perhaps for the simple reason that we grow more attached to life and that living is all we know. Tolstoy, when still young, willingly went to war knowing that he may die, but in his later years he met with an existential crisis that changed his entire outlook. The crisis centered on the horror of death and its aftermath and one comes to terms with them.

All creatures die, but unlike animals we have a keen awareness of our eventual end and this alone can fill us with terror. At such times we take account of our lives. How did I live? Can I die comfortably remembering my past?

The symbolism of Ivan Ilych's illness itself runs deep: It cannot be diagnosed: His kidney is floating, (it is displaced just like his "heart" is). Another diagnosis is that there's something wrong with his appendix, (a vestigial organ). At one point he mentions that his heart is in his appendix; at the point of his death, his heart had become as vestigial as his heart.
Ivan Ilych lives a very inhuman life until he learns that he is going to die; only then does he begin to taste reality and to have revelations that he comes to wish he had had earlier in life.

The first line of the second chapter sums up the life of the average person who believes the same illusions as Ilych: “Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible". One classmate’s Russian friend summed up the message of the book in saying that one should not focus on the routines of life; these are illusions, meaningless, useless and fake.

What I found so interesting was that the doctors in the book perpetuate these illusions in their patient. That his doctor will not tell him the truth is very telling of his culture (although, apparently such was the case in North America until relatively recently, the 1960s!)

Basically, Ivan wanted to be pitied: he wanted assurance that he would be missed, that life wouldn’t be exactly the same with him gone. He was looking for affirmation that his life actually mattered and wanted to be consoled like a child. This, in stark contrast to him as a VIP in society.

Only two people, Ivan’s son and the peasant helper Gerasim, show compassion for the dying man… and while approaching death, Ivan realizes that he has not shown compassion to others in his lifetime.
Gerasim movements around Ilych are angelic. He appears as if from the sky (the converse of this being Ivan’s very “world-and-society-bound” widow: “A short fat woman who, despite every effort to the contrary, had continued a steady sidewise expansion from top to bottom.”) and he tiptoes gracefully around Ivan and comforts him more than anyone else.

At the time of the book’s writing, some philosophized that society should “learn from the peasants.” Tolstoy agreed with this philosophy and here it is applied in the down-to-earth character, Gerasim.


Much like Mary Shelley and her mother Mary's prose got to me, so did many lines from The Death Of Ivan Ilych. Most lines were memorable for their power of expression:
The "heaviest" examples of the power of the language:
p. 27 - sail out on a sea of veiled enmity that was expressed in their alienation from each other.
p.51 - …stay at home twenty-four hours of which every single one was raw torture.
p. 59 - He hated from the depths of his soul whenever she kissed him like that and it took an effort not to shove her away.
p.64 …look at It, look It right in the face look at It and, without doing a thing, suffer inexpressible torment.
p.77 It was all the same. A flicker of hope drowned by a raging sea of despair.
p. 80 - He loathes her with all the power of his heart, and at her touch he is smacked by a gush of surging hatred. The doctor smiled with a condescending tenderness that seemed to say, Well, you know, these people - these sick people - they sometimes think up little absurdities like that; but we must forgive them.
p.82 And Ivan began to moan; he was given an injection, and he was forgotten about.…and again it was all the same; and again the night was encroaching.
p. 87 Until three in the morning he lay in a tormented oblivion.
p.93 “What is this? Don’t I know this is death? An inner voice answered: Yes, you know it.”
p.95 “In inverse proportion to the distance from death squared. And this image of a stone plummeting and picking up speed sunk deep into his heart. Life, that series of increasing torments, flies faster and faster as it nears its end, the most terrifying suffering of all. I’m flying… he shuddered…”

And other favorite fragments, chapter by chapter:
CHAPTER I
p. 11 - “Pyotr heard her ask in great detail about various cemetery plots…” (AT the funeral!)“…It was intolerable. I do not even understand how I withstood it. You could hear him three doors down. Oh, what I’ve been through!” (!)
p. 13 Pyotr asked by Ivan’s wife how she can increase his pension… “She sighed loudly and began obviously working to get rid of him…”

CHAPTER II
p. 18 - “…but from the youngest age he had been drawn, as a bird to the air, toward people in the upper echelons of society, adopting their affect and view of life, and maintaining friendships with many of them. All the preoccupations of childhood and youth dissipated from him without leaving a trace.”
p. 24 - naïve conception of marriage; his wife and her pregnancy interfered with his ordered life…p.25 - Ivan could not understand the birth of his child just as no one could understand his needs in dying.p.27 - delves into and hides in his work.

CHAPTER III
p. 30 - Existential boredom. Looks for a job of 5000 rubles (doesn’t matter where or what… 5000 rubles non-negotiable!)
p. 34 (after the accident) - “I feel that fifteen years have been taken off my head!” How true!
p.37 - (of work) …”it was better than sitting around alone or with his wife.”
p.39 - last line of chapter: “…it was all going terribly well.”

CHAPTER IV
p.43 - Ivan sees first-hand how it feels to be condescended to, the same show he put on in court. …”The doctor said: “This-and-that and such-and-such indicate an et-cetera-and-so-forth inside you; but if my investigations don’t confirm blah-blah-blah and you-get-the-idea, we’ll have to assume so on and so forth. …the doctor ignored his mislaid curiosity…” (again, all appearances!)
p.47 - blaming his ill health on exterior factors (much like today we look for cures from the extior, rather than looking within).
p.48 - “He couldn’t fool himself: something terrifying, new, and more significant than anything else that had ever happened in his life was happening within him.”

VII Enter Gerasim, a peasant.

CHAPTER VIII
p.79 Self-delusion: “…Ivan is persuaded by it, just as he used to be persuaded by the arguments of lawyers whom he knew perfectly well were lying, and whose reasons for lying were no secret.”
p.82 - describes his surroundings; all the old decorations that he spent so much time perfecting… And Ivan began to moan; he was given an injection, and he was forgotten about.
p.83 - "and death disrupting her happiness” (his daughter’s)
“blue circles under his [his son’s] eyes whose significance Ivan knew all too well” - crying. No one else seems to cry for the misery Ivan is going through.
“Except for Gerasim, it seemed to Ivan that Vasya was the only one who understood and felt sorry for him.” Rousseau and pity. It is in young Vasya, but he has not yet been tainted by aristocratic society.

CHAPTER IX
p. 88- Ivan is unable to express his feelings in front of anyone, not even Gerasim… “HE cried for his helplessness, his terrible solitude, for the cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, for God’s absence. What have you done this for? Why have you brought me to this? For what, for what are you torturing me so horribly?”
p. 89 - Reminiscing about his past… “…now turned to something meager, even disgusting.”
p. 90 “Maybe I didn’t live as I should’ve? The thought leapt to his mind. But how could that be, when I did everything I was supposed to? (Appearances! - Recall what Rousseau said about an old man’s only thing to do… (how to die)).

CHAPTER X
p.93 “What is this? Don’t I know this is death? An inner voice answered: Yes, you know it.”
p.95 “In inverse proportion to the distance from death squared. And this image of a stone plummeting and picking up speed sunk deep into his heart. Life, that series of increasing torments, flies faster and faster as it nears its end, the most terrifying suffering of all. I’m flying… he shuddered…”
p.96 - “If only I could understand what this is all for! But that is impossible too. I could explain it all if I hadn’t lived as meticulously as I should have. But there is no way of comprehending this, he said to himself, thinking of all the rules, proprieties, and decencies of his life. There’s really no way to admit to that, he said, drawing his lips into a smile as though anyone might see him and be deceived. There’s no explanation! Torture, death . . . for what?”

CHAPTER XI
p.97 - “She did not manage to finish what she had started saying: such was the rage articulated in his glare, and directed precisely at her. “For Christ’s sake, let me die in peace,” he said.
p.99 - “It occurred to him that those scarcely detected impulses to struggle against what the people of highest social rank considered good, those feeble tendencies that he barely noticed and immediately suppressed, might in fact be what was real, and everything else what was false.”
… “all of it a monstrous and immense deceit foreclosing both life and death.”
p.105 - “Anyhow, what’s the point of talking, one must act.”
His final lesson.

Reflections - Week 9

(Making like Wollstonecraft: Contemplation on a boat).

Reflections: Week 9

Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Mary Wollstonecraft

Candide, Voltaire


Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

While reading this book I wondered how it was received (if at all) by Swedes and Norwegians… despite Mary Wollstonecraft’s poetic depictions of the Scandinavian landscape, she does not paint its inhabitants with a complimentary brush… Here are but three examples of many (all within the first 15 pages of the book) that might be quoted to show this:
p. 7. “I did not immediately recollect that men who remain so near the brute creation, as only to exert themselves to find the food necessary to fructify the faint glimmerings of mind which entitles them to rank as lords of the creation.

p.11 “…my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation for I asked him men’s questions.”

p. 14 - “The politics of the place being on a smaller scale, suits better with the size of their faculties; for, generally speaking, the sphere of observation determines the extent of the mind.”

However, Wollstonecraft does behave well towards those she meets and “exercises her understanding” (p.70) as one probably should when abroad. The fact that she’s not always tactful in her descriptions makes for interesting and entertaining reading. Her whole being is exposed in this book and her feminist, economic and political commentaries are not hard to ascertain.

This is an autobiographical travelogue, though. It’s presumed that she wrote in this genre to lessen the impact of the rebellious ideas that she “slips in”. Stating some of what she intimates in Letters from Denmark point blank in a straight-up autobiography might have made her even more reviled by her contemporaries than she was to become (although it’s hard to imagine that that could be possible).
For instance, she is critical of people whose single-minded pursuit is the acquisition of money: “The captains acquire a little superficial knowledge by travelling, which their indefatigable attention to the making of money prevents their digesting…" On this note, she was certainly an idealist, considering that she remained enamoured of Imlay despite his avarice and his neglect of her. Here, her polar personality slip into the Romantic, where Passion overpowers Reason.

Wollstonecraft seems to soak up her surroundings, making poetry out of landscapes that touch her soul…p. 16 “Eternity is in these moments: worldly cares melt into the airy stuff that dreams are made of; and reveries, mild and enchanting as the first hopes of love, or the recollection of lost enjoyment, carry the hapless wight into futurity…”
p. 34 - “I contemplated, fearless of idle questions, a night such as I had never before seen or felt to charm the senses, and calm the heart. The very air was balmy, as it freshened into morn, producing the most voluptuous sensations. A vague pleasurable sentiment absorbed me, as I opened my bosom to the embraces of nature; and my soul rose to its author, with the chirping of the solitary birds, which began to feel, rather than see, advancing day.”

Her contemplation of nature and the ravaging effects of greed bring forth ideas that tend to flow from one to another. In this sense she is seeing beyond the horizon but understanding that wherever it begins, the sky must end. p.68 - “Imagination went still farther, and pictured the state of man when the earth could no longer support him. …do not smile: I really became distressed for these fellow creatures, yet unborn." Nature is indeed the “nurse of sentiment” for Wollstonecraft. Very much like (well, it’s kind of a stretch, but bear with me!) a yodeler in the Alps hears the echoes of his yodels, Wollstonecraft metaphorically sends out her being into nature which acts as a kind of filter when her senses pick up and process the environmental stimuli. Her perception of nature is augmented by her projecting her own soul onto it.

Wollstonecraft’s curiosity of nature seems to match the meanderings of her mind. She is full of interesting ideas. For example, she notes that the Norwegians have a knack for languages which “prevents the cultivation of their own, and, consequently, limits literary pursuits.” An interesting conjecture. She might have been admiring of what was happening in America at that time, where American English was forming. It was the common people (rather than the aristocracy) that were shaping and defining their language, and this is the very language that Noah Webster (yeah, that Webster) was codifying. He claimed at the time that Americans were speaking the most pure English known. Compared to Europe, where speakers of the “same language” might have had great difficulty understanding each other, America was getting it done right. Melting pot from the start.
Wollstonecraft was, however, not so admiring of other goings-on in America - possibly from Imlay’s accounts of his travels there - and she was especially critical of the unbridled commerce that was rapidly expanding there. (p. 86/87): “England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequence; the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.” If only she could see us now! Surely she supported ideas of the Rational Enlightenment upon which America was founded but I wonder what she would have to say about the state of affairs as they are today. The superstition of religion or the devouring reality of Capitalism - which one would you choose?

Also, I found the reasoning behind her belief that man originated in cold climates remarkable… p. 29 - “[man was] led to adore a sun so seldom seen… Man must therefore have been placed in the north, to tempt him to run after the sun, in order that the different parts of the earth might be peopled.”

p. 61 “What a long time it requires to know ourselves; and yet every one has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own.” Contemplation brings one to question further and to conclude that more contemplation is needed...

CANDIDE

This book is far more brutal than what I remember the opera being. After reading it, I was not surprised to learn that it wasn't until the 1960s that the book was uncensored in French high schools (although I was very surprised to learn that France, at one point, had censors!)

My first impressions of Candide were that it is a critique of greed and globalization… It reminded me of a Kurt Vonnegut book where time and space collapse on themselves. Very much like Slaughterhouse Five, though, Candide is critical of very real issues and actions. Both books are “ridiculous” in a sense but are social commentary to very real events; “so it goes”; “best of all possible worlds”… It's ludicrousness also reminded me of PP ... learning and growing along the way.

Here are among my favourite lines:
p. 4* - “Note that noses were made to bear spectacles, and hence we have spectacles…”


p. 9 -“…It was an Avar village that the Bulgars had burnt down in accordance with the principles of international law.”

p. 15 - Reversal of Rousseau - “Men must have a corrupting effect on nature.”

p. 16* - “..Pangloss prevented him, demonstrating that the harbour of Lisbon had been purposely created for the Anabaptist to drown in.”

p. 37 - “Heaven will thank you for showing such charity, and you will be saved.”

p. 43 - “Los Padres own everything while the people own nothing. It is a masterpiece of reason and justice. If you ask me, there is nothing as divine as Los Padres, who are waging war on the Kings of Spain and Portugal here in the Americas, while in Europe they are these kings’ confessors. And they kill the Spaniards here, while in Madrid they send them to Heaven. It’s enchanting!”

p. 88 - “…in this country it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.”

p. 116 - “Pangloss declared that he had always suffered horribly, but having asserted that everything was going wonderfully, he would continue to assert it, even though he did not believe it in the least.”

p. 118 - “Work keeps three great evils at bay: boredom, vice and want.”

p. 119 On this page, The Message: Shut up, stop reasoning and get to work.
Hmm…great advice. I have to go! Bye bye!

Reflections - Week 8

Reflections: Week 8

Macbeth, William Shakespeare (c. 1605)

Pilgrim's Progress (Part I), John Bunyan (1677)

The Basic Political Writings, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1750, 1754).

JJ ROUSSEAU

The Reveries of the Solitary Walker

One can't help but sympathize with Rousseau (JJR) while reading his end-of-life reflections. In his Confessions he considers his "sensitive heart" both a gift from Heaven and "the source of all the misfortunes of [his] life..." The ambiguity of this character does not end here and makes him and his life intriguing. While reading his Reveries, I had no idea of his life story and wanted to know exactly why he was so down on life, relationships and this entire planet (except for, maybe, plantlife): “Finally, feeling that all my efforts were useless and that I was tormenting myself to no avail, I took the only course which remained - that of submitting to my fate without railing against necessity any longer”. From what I gathered, he'd become disillusioned with how his fellow "thinkers" (and his fellow humans) regarded him and his writing. His perception of how he was perceived was consistent with his belief that the world is preocupied with and deceived by appearances.

“Only profound indifference remains about the fate of my true writings and of the testimonies to my innocence.” It's hard for me to believe that someone could care so little, as stated above, and yet write so much. He clearly enjoyed the creative process of writing for writing's sake: “They will not take away from me the pleasure of having written them, nor the solitary meditations whose fruit they are and whose source can be extinguished only when my soul is” but he seems to have wanted people to view him as he truly was and as opposed to how he was popularly perceived. Maybe he was not so indifferent.

The most memorable lines in Reveries: “If there is any study still appropriate for an Old Man, it is solely to learn how to die; and this is precisely what we study least at my age. At this point, we think of anything but that. All old men having on to life more than children and leave it with more reluctance than youngsters.” ... “They have not dreamed of acquiring anything during their life that they might carry away at their death.” Of the readings we've covered so far this semester, we have looked at theories focusing on how one should live, but not specifically on how one should die. This seems to be an important issue given that we all meet this very end. Are these lines both in defence of religion and against desires and acquisitions? If so, it would be consistent with the theories of Budhism, Stoics, Hindus (among many others) that eliminating want will keep you from projecting your present self into the future... there will come a time when that projection is unrealistic because you'll be facing a wall of death.

“What kind of a support are illusions which delude me alone in the whole world? The whole present generation sees only errors and prejudices in the sentiments with which I alone nourish myself. It finds truth and evidence in the system opposed to mine.” ... “Shall I place more trust in my declining reason, thereby making myself unjustly unhappy, than in my full and vigorous reason, thereby getting compensation for the evils I suffer without having deserved them? … While meditating on these matters, I knew that human understanding, circumscribed by the senses, could not embrace them in their full extent.” To me these musings speak to the complexity of authenticity and its perception by others. This is not to say that Rousseau's ideas are correct and that others should buy into them but it does show how superficial his contemporaries were in judging him as they would understand "by the senses" and would misinterpret his writings, perhaps to the benefit of their own agendas.

The Basic Political Writings

I don't know much about anything, but I probably should seek the shelter and shade of trees as often as I can. Doing so benefited the Buddha, Newton and Rousseau with life-changing epiphanies. It was under a tree that JJR had the revelation that man is born good and is then corrupted by society. The profound experience was felt to his core and he spent the rest of his life trying to articulate his insight.

A good friend of mine was swept up by such inspiration once, while traveling abroad... With some alacrity, he was crossing a continent to be on time for a "date" but was seized with a creative force that he couldn't ignore, and for the next week or two wrote a screenplay that became the seedling to a movie he later produced. Even though (to say the least) his date was not pleased, my friend has no regrets and gives much credit to his divine inspiration. After reading Rousseau's reflections, I wonder whether he felt the same way about his philosophical creations, or at least the way he handled their publication. Was he happy with how he handled his public affairs? Did he have regrets as a result of his exile? I wonder if he would do it over again and have himself subjected to all the torment he endured for the sake of being authentic. What price would I be willing to pay to remain my authentic self?

From what little Rousseau I've read, to summarize his basic writings in a sentence or two, one can say that man stepped beyond the boundaries of Nature when his use of reason was set off and he was set free. Consequences of this include ideas of property, inequality and what Rousseau describes as love for self. He wrote a lot on the education of children but gave up (five times) the chance of getting first-hand experience in raising children. I question that he should be faulted for this. Who am I to judge and who can know what his life was like when he left his five newborns at an orphanage? Do not mix the artist with his art, as this might detract from the enjoyment of art (depending on one's sensibilities).

Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts:

In his discourse on the Arts and Sciences Rousseau gives historical examples contending that the study of the arts and sciences, as they are studied today, leads man to deviate from a "natural path". He gives evidence that probity is indeed the daughter of ignorance. “Ever since learned men have begun to appear in our midst, good men have vanished. Until then the Romans had been content to practice virtue; all was lost when they began to study it.”

As someone who was, for a short period of two years, employed as a scientist (see blog of "Week 10"), I can't wholly disagree with JJR. My first response to his discourse was that he was being a bit harsh and unreasonable. Was it because he was writing to win an essay contest that he had such forceful views? Surely he doesn't mean everything he wrote although there are seeds of truth in his writing. Did he think that one has to exaggerate his thoughts in order to be heard?

Another reaction to his writing (this example from Part One of his Discrouse on Inequality) is that I thought some of his arguments very "black and white" blind to the complexities and intricacies of life. (p.51) “…the following difficult problem: which was the more necessary: an already formed society for the invention of languages, or an already invented language for the establishment of society?” Admittedly I am taking this line right out of context and he does not believe that either was the case, but the example exemplifies JJR's oversimplification of an issue.

On p.8 he shows foresight in anticipating new "languages" spoken by men as a result of their various specializations. “Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they view themselves as the wisest of men. To my way of thinking, this presumption has completely tarnished their knowledge.” Such presumtion comes from one's ego and is an effect of - if not the beginning of - inequality.

If the desire to practise the arts and sciences stems from one's ego, “...the sciences and the arts owe their birth to our vices; we would be less in doubt about their advantages, if they owed it to our virtues.” JJR would argue that to be authentic is “…to commune with oneself and, in the silence of the passions, to listen to the voice of one’s conscience…That is the true philosophy; let us know how to be satisfied with it.” Unfortunately, based on his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, he fleshes out his thoughts in this respect but I question whether he came to know how to be satisfied with it.

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

p. 27 - “Once people are accustomed to masters, they are no longer in a position to get along without them.”

The preface develops and describes the kind of republic that Rousseau would have liked to be born in. Even though Rousseau seems to be talking about 18th Century Geneva as an ideal state, I thought he was being ironic and sarcastic, especially with the capitalization of his fawning salutations to the city's leaders: "MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED AND SOVEREIGN LORDS..." (C'mon, now.)

“Of all the branches of knowledge, the most useful and least advanced seems to me to be that of man.” Man does seem to think little about himself in the internal, reflective sense. Perhaps due to man's fixation on "appearances", as a result of society, his thoughts bend toward the external and remain there.
That's great but sometimes it is hard to reconile some of his thoughts with others...p. 42- on illness “If nature has destined for us to be healthy, I almost dare to affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.” I know my confusion stems from my ignorance of Rousseau's philosophy, but I think one must keep in mind the following in reading his works: “reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns man in upon himself”. This type of "turning in" is probably not the kind that Rousseau would advocate. This kind would constitute an implosion not a liberation which is more in line with what he talks about in his Reveries.

Basically, I found his writing fascinating but was not able to devote as much time to its study as I would have liked. Other bits that caught my attention:

p. 35 - “…two principles that are prior to reason, of which one makes us ardently interested in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow man, perish or suffer.” (compassion, empathy, pity).

Part One
Rousseau uses as a "base" his idea of man in his natural state: (p.40) - “I see him satisfying his hunger under and oak tree, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that supplied his meal; and thus all his needs are satisfied.”

p. 40 - “Nature treats them [children] precisely the way the law of Sparta treated the children of its citizens: it renders strong and robust those who are well constituted and makes all the rest perish…”

p.44 - animal as a machine (Descartes!) “…whereas man contributes to his own operations”… “and thus dissolute men abandon themselves to excesses which cause them fever and death, because mind perverts the senses and because the will still speaks when nature is silent”.

p. 45 - THE FACULTY OF SELF-PERFECTION. … "Is it not that he thereby returns to his primitive state, and that, while the animal which has acquired nothing and which also has nothing to lose, always retains its instinct, man, in losing through old age of other accidents all that his perfectibility has enabled him to acquire, thus falls even lower than the animal itself?”

p. 46 - “an animal will never know what it is to die; and knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first acquisitions that man has made in withdrawing from the animal condition” - the complexity of the modern man is then further complicated by his denial of death!

p. 48+ - on language… only conjecture (as he states in the preface) - so why does he go into such detail if this is just an hypothesis? I’m surprised at the presumption of how he believes civilized man came to be… he could be way, WAY off, although the point he is trying to make is clear.

p.52 - comparison of the suffering in savage and civilized life.

p. 54 - “with all their mores, men would never have been anything but monsters, if nature had not given them pity to aid their reason”… “reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns man in upon himself”.

Pilgrim's Progress
"The origin of the religious temperament can be traced in clear outline to the child's feeling of helplessness." (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents)

The irony that Pilgrim's Progress (PP) was written in a children's genre was not lost on me; in order to buy into Bunyan's belief system you must shed any knowledge acquired after the age of about four. I don't want to come off as being anti-religion, but what would aliens think of humanity's penchant for playing make-believe? To believe (and to want to believe) in the extreme form of religion that Bunyan advances requires a suspension of reason that children naturally possess. Anyway, thinking of all this reminds me of the oft-repeated Atheist repartée: Instead of being born again, why not just grow up?

Nevertheless, I enjoyed PP and read it with the eyes of a child. I felt like an adventurer in a fantastic "Alice-In-Wonder" land where reason does not always apply. I noticed that at one time it was considered the most widely read English book, after the Bible. Was its popularity due to its ability to teach (indoctrinate) young children?

On that note, memorable was the brutality Christian and Hopeful are subjected to for (merely) trespassing near Doubting-Castle, on Giant Despair's land (p. 110). What terrible images to subject a child's imagination to, and what insidious treachery to instill the fear of God into a kid so as to keep him on the straight and narrow. This is reminiscent of a section of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where a priest describes eternity and hell to a congregation of young school boys:

-- Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

Wow! Imagine the effect this had on any young person!

The oppresiveness and fear does not end there, though. The twisted message (albeit sweetened by a nice story of adventure) stays strong in its insistence that one's thoughts are carefully monitord by our loving Lord and that (at the end of the day, at the day of judgment) one's thoughts have more weight than one's actions. P.36 “Why, I thought that the day of Judgement was come, and that I was not ready for it: but this frightened me most, that the Angels gathered up several, and left me behind; also the pit of Hell opened her mouth just where I stood: my Conscience too within afflicted me; and as I thought, the Judge had always his eye upon me, shewing indignation in his countenance.” He was afraid of being Left Behind.

On p. 65 Satan is blamed for man's natural use of his Reason. "Christian made believe that he spake blasphemies when 'twas Satan that suggested them in his mind." ... "which [Christian] verily thought had proceeded from his own mind." What better way to explain the natural thoughts of a faithful man? Blame... Satan! The words "thought control" come to mind here but Bunyan cannot be criticized for being inconsistent as this idea is again revisited in expounding on the sin of questioning or unbelieving. Basically, it is a sin to question. Never mind neglecting, shunning and looking down on your fellow humans (which happens throughout PP), but beware of lustful thoughts!
p.40- “I walk by the rule of my Master, you walk by the rude working of your fancies”. Well, I guess this is called free will and it seems preferable to me to obey oneself over a wrathful demagogic God. But, comfort for the weak: (p.45): “keep in the midst of the Path and no hurt shall come unto thee”.

Macbeth

My pre-class thoughts:

Whenever did "hurly-burly" not describe the state of the world? That expression sums up Britain circa 1600. A time of changing monarch's, backstabbing traitors and greed. Shakespeare would feel right at home in the 21st Century.

Macbeth's first advancement is that of being granted the title "Thane of Cawdor" (and it's no coincidence that that previous Thane was a traitor). Macbeth holds this title temporarily, but remains a traitor to the end, when the story really comes to a head. (sorry). As he rises up the ranks and sets his sights on the possibility of kingship, he lives by a Machiavellian code, a code stating that men of greatness (those in charge of states) do not have to abide by the mores of individual men. He gets help in this from his wife who appeals to Macbeth's passion, not his reason, as his reasoning would advise him not to murder the king. Like Eve tempting Adam to share her Fall, Lady Macbeth coaxes her husband by questioning his manhood. In Act I Scene 5 (40-41), Lady Macbeth calls on the spirits to unsex her, and asks them to give her cruelty and “thick blood”... How often in literature do we see a man trying to tempt a woman, thus causing her downfall? Not very often. Will the converse of this ever become cliché?

At least twice (that I can think of) Macbeth gives in to temptation and makes an immoral choice that is later mirrored by someone who choses the higher road:
1) “Merciful powers, restrain in me the cursed thoughts that Nature gives way to, in repose.” Banquo is tempted by the same thoughts as Macbeth but he casts them aside; Nature endows us with Reason (and free will!) that allows us to discriminate between right and wrong.
2) Macbeth is weak-willed and allows Lady Macbeth to damage his manly ego with her doubting his masculinity. But when Ross tells Macduff that his family has been killed, and Macduff's eyes are dimmed with tears, he is urged by Ross to take the news “like a man”. Macduff does so, but only after he "feels it like a man”. Macbeth is, in the end, less potent and less manly (if I may say this without sounding sexist) for caving in to his wife's jeering. There is a time for tears and a time for war, turn turn turn.

King Macbeth, to his detriment, cannot in good conscience live as Machiavelli would recommend. Not only can he not pull it off, he cannot hold his self together and keep his guilt from devouring him from the inside. He becomes, like the citizens of his country, unable to eat or sleep peacefully.

I can see the parallels and can also question whether a heavy-handed ruler like Macbeth (and like Machiavelli's Prince) would be able to maintain rule when other leaders (never mind the people) grow to see through tyranny and despise the ruling tyrant.

Guilt
No matter how one tries to justify his actions, guilt finds a way of wreaking havoc and creating imbalance… Macbeth’s inability to sleep and eat (and this strangely being passed on to the people of Scotland!) as a result of his tormented mind. It takes root in the physical – not only his own body, but that of the country he rules. This is seen in a few instances throughout this course, which brings into question the Descartian mind-body dichotomy. Frankenstein does not fall ill after every calamity just by coincidence any more than Macbeth's inability to eat and sleep come from acute mountain sickness.
Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking is a sure sign of the agonizing guilt she is experiencing. As much as she justifies her and her husband’s actions as right, her subconscious cannot escape the evil that is eating her through the core.

Witches
I saw the witches as representing Macbeth’s subconscious. Therein lies the mixture of intuition and evil that Macbeth is predisposed to. It offers him a glimpse of the future, to his loss.
Rationalizing skewed his Reason: Macbeth tries to rationalize his evil deeds. By merely entertaining the possibility, the seed is planted and his mind works in favour of his desire.

His mind finds a way to rationalize his darkest desire. Just like you might see yourself doing something you know is wrong, you convince yourself in the moment of your doing it that it is right or that there is some value in it… this is your mind skewing Reason.
Macbeth dissociates himself from guilt, whereas it devours Lady Macbeth. He is too busy to consider his guilt anyway, but the fact that he cannot sleep and eat hints at his inner anguish.