The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll: Unexpected Essays on Philosophy, Art, Life, and Death 9780226105895

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The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll

The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll u n e x p e c t e d e s say s o n p h i l o s o p h y, art, life, and death

Ben-Ami Scharfstein

The University of Chicago Press  c h i c a g o & l o n d o n

b e n - a m i s c h a r f s t e i n is professor emeritus of philosophy at Tel-Aviv University. He is the author many books, including Of Birds, Beasts, and Other Artists and Art Without Borders, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14   1  2  3  4  5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-10575-8 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-10589-5 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226105895.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scharfstein, Ben-Ami, 1919– author. The nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll : unexpected essays on philosophy, art, life, and death / Ben-Ami Scharfstein. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-226-10575-8 (cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 978-0-226-10589-5 (e-book) 1. Philosophy, Comparative.  2. Art, Comparative.  3. Machiavellianism (Psychology)  4. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804.  5. Carroll, Lewis, 1832–1898.  I. Title. b799.s38 2014 100—dc23 2013040563 a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my family and, again and always, to Leonardo da Vinci, who wanted to know everything about everything.

Curiouser and curiouser! Alice in Wonderland

contents

Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  •  You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  1 1  •  The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll  32 2  •  A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards  38 3  •  A Handful of Rules against Philosophical Self-Isolation  49 4  •  What Death Makes of Philosophy  59 5  •  Keeping the World Together  68 6  •  The Common Universe of Aesthetics  83 7  •  Are the Deaf and Blind Epistemologically Isolated?  97 8  •  Pain, Cruelty, and Pathology in Art  104 9  •  On the Transparency and Opacity of Philosophers  110 10  •  The Three Philosophical Traditions  121 11  •  Does Philosophy Progress?  138 12  •  Nonutopian Observations on Machiavellism  152 13  •  On the Nature and Limits of Ineffability •  Ineffabilities Are the Demons and Angels of Incompleteness and Incompletability •  What Can and Cannot Words Express?  192 14  •  The Bird with Bread in Its Beak  217 15  •  You, Me, and Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind  222 Sources  229 Notes  231

acknowledgments

I owe thanks to all those at the University of Chicago Press who helped to create this book, especially to my editor, David Brent, his assistant, Priya Nelson, and my copyeditor, Michael Koplow. I owe my thanks to David, who, having determined that he liked the book, guided it through an eventful process of acceptance; to Priya for her companionable readiness to overlook my confusing messages and to help in any way; and to Mike not only for his linguistic sensitivity, but also for his fearless readiness to venture into the brambly thickets of endnotes and prune them into civility. I also owe thanks for solving sundry problems to my wife, Ghela, my beloved adviser-in-everything; to my daughter, Doreet, who turned my love for art and books into her own profession of designing books whose covers have an expressive acuity and power that make us both proud; and to my granddaughter, Efrat, whose reasoning is even brighter than the fun jewelry that graces her person.

introduction

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll

What do I think there is to like in this book of essays? Well, as you can see, I don’t pretend to be simply objective, and I want to talk with you like one person to another. And I want this book to encapsulate my nature as a thinker and, by its variety, reasoning, humor, and persistence, entice you to participate in my not easily satiable desire to understand. To understand, to begin with, for myself, and, to end with, for you. By profession, I’m a philosopher, and I want to solve the great philosophical problems, not for everyone forever—a recurrent but futile ambition—but subjectively, to ease my feeling of incomprehension. Since I want to know so much, I erase the lines between the different disciplines. And since curiosity and imagination are twins, my imagination has to be very active. I enjoy joking, and my humor can be odd. You’ll see this in the very first essay, in which I invite that extremely serious philosopher, Immanuel Kant, to drop down the rabbit hole of Alice’s adventures in wonderland, while I, and you with me, imagine—guided by what Kant wrote—how he will react. All I’ve said and the way I’ve said it show that I love the craft of writing, that is, of communication with anyone I can reach with my words. Like artists and true teachers, I want to live in others so I can live more fully in myself. But in this book, we are necessarily unequal. I don’t know and can’t really imagine who you are. With myself, in contrast, I’ve had a long acquaintance—ninetyfour years. Like everyone, I find myself in my memories. I’m also in my essays and books, which are far more reliably fixed and far easier to share than memories. But I find myself  best in the act of writing to the unknown you, whose only

  Introduction

trait is to serve as a receptive mind. The spontaneous act of communicating takes over, and though the basic subject of the writing has been decided in advance, there are many surprises in the way the writing works itself out and reveals something of myself I did not notice before. I create a structure made of word-borne ideas that, as they come alive, teach me what I am experiencing. I feel that I create the written object by imagining its structure and finding the words or ideas—how can I separate the two?—that coalesce to make up the structure. Every time I do this, I discover, as Montaigne did long ago, that the writing creates me no less than I create both the writing and you, the reader. I use the words “me,” “I,” and “you,” but they are misleading because in the course of writing I vanish from myself and remain consciously nothing but the activity of writing. To be nothing but writing alone is not to be solitary; the consciousness of the activity is the self in its own full company. Loneliness can begin only when the writing ends. Or I and you are so much within me that I need not think of any of us because we two are too much the same to distinguish ourselves from one another. In this state the difficulty we ordinarily have in capturing sights, emotions, and experiences in fitting words is not at all bothersome. All I’ve said on the superiority of process over its fixed result and on selfforgetfulness in writing applies, of course, to every intensive effort to create. But I hope to say enough about these essays to make clear the ways in which they are individual and yet coherent with one another, that is, in which they are mine rather than those of anyone else. Like a smile, they show my plea­ sure in writing them and sharing them with you. They may refer to you, their reader, directly. If the words in an essay were first spoken to actual listeners, I may quote them here. For instance, I say to the audience, “At this point I raise my eyes from my text . . . to make out if you are smiling or frowning,” or, in another instance, “My wife—she’s here, and you can identify her by her green shoes—said to me that she likes the speech, but I said, ‘No, it’s the audience,’ you, ‘that has to decide.’ ” Except on the rarest occasions, I refuse to be obscure. And if relevant, I use psychology, anthropology, or any other subject, as if it were one with philosophy. Everything I write is at least tinged with my interest in psychology and art. Often I write what is called metaphilosophy, philosophy on philosophy, or I write on what one philosophical tradition says as compared with another. And except in a few of my books, such as The Philosophers and A Comparative History of Philosophy, I rarely expound or argue with other philosophers

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  

in intensive technical detail. I just say what I want to and leave it to you, the reader, to take it or leave it. * I begin to introduce my individual essays with “The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll,” a title I’ve adopted for this book as a whole. I like this essay especially because its seriousness and its humor go hand in hand. It is remarkable how nonsensical humor can arouse the imagination and the imagination, the intellect. How do they influence one another? Suppose I ask a nonsensical question now, one I do not ask in the essay, “How would my story develop if I, its teller, would imagine that Alice fell not into the rabbit hole but onto Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?” Can this question be turned into an imagin­ able condition or situation? Suppose she fell, to her great surprise, on the title Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, and a resident Form of Appearance dressed in crow’s feathers explained to her that “transcendental” meant “up in the sky” and “elements” meant “something, that’s a part of something else and quite sweet.” Would Alice then be inspired to say, “Oh, you mean pie in the sky? Give me some.” And then, when she ate it, would she turn into a young unreal Phenomenon or into a gloriously invisible Thing in Itself ? I don’t know what Carroll thought of Kant, but Carroll is too dead to continue the story, and I have to go on to the other essays, so I ask you, if you want, to finish the story and draw the moral, if there is one, for yourself. The most serious point that this essay makes is that “nonsense,” the willful departure from verbal or logical conventions, has creative potential not only in literary narrative and poetry but also, if my example of Kant is plausible, in philosophy, and, beyond my examples, in mathematics. The full- or deminonsense poetry that appears in Alice and Alice’s fun with fantastic transformations of ordinary reality and with translogical use of logic may seem merely amusing or refreshing, but they are psychologically involved in all our creative uses of thought. I think that Kant’s absolute distinction between ordinary thought and perception and reality-in-itself is empirically empty or nonsensical, but just because it is nonsense pursued with masterful meticulousness, it has generated a great deal of insightful thought. I think, too, that the ability to create new forms of mathematics turns very odd or impossible-seeming mathematical ideas into new, fantastic, self-sufficient worlds of thought. My ability in math being limited, the only example of these worlds I’m familiar with is the math of the infinite and its hierarchies (given visible form in the perspective

  Introduction

illustrations of M. C. Escher). Maybe like me, you will find most of the philosophy of math much easier to understand than the math that is its subject (I like the anthology Philosophy of Mathematics, edited by P. Benacerraf and H. Putnam, 2nd ed., 1983). I’ve gone well beyond what the essay actually says, but it does hint strongly at what I take to be the truth: words that are put together in ways that depart from their ordinary usage and become close to indeterminate exert strong creative pressure on the imagination. Briefly, you can’t discover new sense without knowingly or unknowingly invoking nonsense. * The “Nonsense” essay is followed by an autobiographical one, “A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards,” which explains how and why, after a fateful dis­ cussion with a teacher for whom I had great respect. I fell, so to speak, into the barely existent profession of comparatism. What justifies the phrase “barely existent”? My discovery that the fullest English dictionary I have (the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 5th ed.) does not recognize it at all, as it does not recognize the possibility of “comparativism” or “comparatism” in the sense in which I use it. But as I write in the essay, “my comparatism . . . reflects my nature, and, for better or worse, it’s my nature because I think that way.” “A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards” contains a few indignant pages on the failure of a great majority of English-speaking philosophers to believe that China or India ever developed philosophy worthy of their consideration. This failure is the result of nothing but a so-far-indomitable ignorance. Even if one limits the condition for philosophical interest to acuity of reasoning, Indian philosophy has often surpassed that of the West. Maybe the growing influence of India and, above all, China will weaken the denial, or, given time, will show how hollow it has always been. However, my indignation is only a sub-theme of the essay. The main theme is the at least apparent disparity between my ambitions and my ability and the fear that I cannot know enough to to fulfill the goals I set for myself. So in the essay I ask myself what, apart from my desire, can justify my audacity, which the Greek word “hubris” best expresses. My answer here first elaborates the common-sense calculation I make in the essay on the length of time it might take to read the works of a given philosopher. How many pages, I ask myself, can I read in English, the language I know best, at a normal speed—three minutes a page for ordinary writing but ten to fifteen for often difficult philoso-

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  

phers such as Kant—for 5 hours a day. Unless I have miscalculated, the answer (for Kant) is 20 per day or, for a year (300 reading days), 6,000 pages. My copy of Kant’s works, in the standard Akademie edition, has 9 volumes of about 500 pages each, making a total of 4,500. So it is possible that I or anyone might read through the whole of Kant’s works in the course of a single year. But this is a deceptive calculation. Kant’s correspondence fills volumes 10 through 13; 14 through 23 contain the (handwritten) manuscripts unpublished during his lifetime; and 24 through 29 contain his lectures. But reading the whole of Kant’s published and unpublished works is not enough for a scholarly understanding of Kant. As a Kant scholar, you have to grasp the philosophical context in which he wrote, taught, and polemicized. You should certainly read Kant’s older, very influential contemporary, Christian Wolff, who wrote copiously, in Latin and German, on philosophy, mathematics, and physics, all subjects that interested Kant. I won’t continue to enumerate everything that a complete Kant scholar is obliged to know, because it quickly becomes clear that the complete Kant scholar has to spend his lifetime studying Kant and his contemporaries—it would help ambitious Kant scholars if, their memory remaining intact, they could undergo a reincarnation or two. I won’t make the Kant scholar’s life grotesquely difficult by requiring that he or she also study Newton, whose kind of proof Kant preferred for himself as well, or study mathematics and physics in order to assess Kant’s thought competently. But I conclude that to know any productive philosopher really well, you need a whole scholarly lifetime. If so, what happens to my hope to compare Western, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese philosophy, each with its own list of eminent philosophers or, if the term is inapt, thinkers? The crux of the answer is that because I cannot know even Kant really well, I have no choice except to depend upon someone who does, or, to generalize the solution, to depend on the multitude of scholars I need for my project. Instead of a primal scholar, I have to be a secondary one, a scholar of scholars, a reader more of translations and reference books than of originals in their original languages. For me that’s not much change, because it’s what I’ve always been doing, writing on large subjects to make them clear to myself—the need to believe, mystical experience, the mind of China, philosophers’ lives in relation to their thought; the dilemma of context; ineffability (on the failure of words in philosophy and religion); amoral politics everywhere; a comparative history of world philosophy; the openness and intermingling of the world’s art; and the art of birds (singing), of elephants (playing musical instruments and painting), and apes (painting)—all in relation to human art. All this and more, accompanied by the reading of what is, in retrospect, a

  Introduction

bewildering number and variety of books. I live by wondering, asking, read­ ing, teaching, and writing. In the last paragraph I seem to have written myself into a hole. While I mean to emphasize how much less I know than I need for my purposes, the list above makes me sound as if I were wholly composed of a mass of information. My way out of the hole is to report that my memory often fails me, and what I may recall of the past is not enough or not relevant enough for comparative philosophy that depends directly on its original sources. In relation to my hopes, I am far too limited, and my limitations are inevitable. Luckily, however, I can make constructive use of them. What do I mean? Both my Kant expert and my Dignaga expert accept that their respective philosophers argue that because human reason imposes its structure on the Real, the Real as such is inaccessible to it. Another expert tells me to count Dharmakirti among those who accept the same conclusion. Given this information, I can write a chapter in a unique history of comparative philosophy titled “Fideistic Neo-skepticism” (see A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant, 1998). The answer to the question of whether I am not too ignorant to write comparative philosophy is this: I am modest and secondary so that I can be bold and original. Bold? Bold enough to undertake what might seem to be beyond my powers, that is, bold enough to compare the salient traits I choose of all the great cultures—Western, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese—together with a choice among the peoples called or miscalled “primitive.” Original? Enough to deal with problems missed or misconceived by others. Of course, the proof is in the doing. I’m sure I show here, too, that it is possible to write accurate, original, and responsible comparative philosophy. It takes some nerve, but it can be done. These essays should give you the proof. * “A Handful of Rules against Philosophical Self-Isolation,” which follows, is my credo of philosophical openness. It is a polemic that dramatizes the need, as I see it, for philosophy now to preserve its relation to all forms of knowledge, a relation obvious to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and many others, but much less evident now. It is only by preserving this relationship that philosophy can remain relevant to life as a whole and the world at large. The essay’s five categorical rules are these: 1. Do not cut off philosophical problems from their historical context, their contemporary context, or their

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  

context in your own life. 2. Do not be taken in by the claim of any tradition that its philosophical or theological thought is generally superior to that of all other traditions. 3. Reject the conviction that any particular person or school has arrived at the one true philosophy. 4. Avoid a harshly exclusive sense of what is relevant to philosophy. Do not isolate philosophy from other disciplines or sciences. 5. Suspect words. Remain aware of the danger of thinking in abstractions and antitheses. Keep actual persons and inconvenient examples in mind. Except for the last rule, which is the least observed, I do not argue much— the rules seem self-evident to me—but give only a suggestive example or two. Yet to dramatize each of them, I’d be happy if it were read aloud accompanied by a clash of cymbals or the beat of a drum. If I could be a god for the moment, a peal of thunder would seem to be an aptly dramatic awakener. The first rule “Do not cut off philosophical problems from their historical context, their contemporary context, or their context in your own life.” The unusual part of the rule is the last, which I’m observing in this book and wish were widely observed. The second and third rules, which outlaw belief, personal or social, supposed to be final and infallible clash directly with most prevailing religions, with belief in gurus or other supposedly inspired teachers, and with extreme forms of nationalism. The third rule also clashes with the not infrequent belief of a philosopher in his own doctrine or method—for Wittgenstein for example, who did not believe in any philosophy, the belief is in his method. The clash between the second rule and most religions means not only that it cannot be widely accepted but will also be attacked as pernicious. Yet, along with the second rule, it is supported by much more than enough historical evidence. It’s excruciatingly wonderful to see how easily, in the name of faith, we can deceive ourselves. The fourth rule, not to narrow the conception of philosophy harshly, may conflict with local fashion, but it’s important to remember that reality, truth, and experience do not fit neatly into any predetermined categories. Science is always suggesting new ways of pursuing the truth—I choose neurobiology and and its extension into neuroaesthetics as enlightening examples. The fifth and last rule, “Suspect words. Remain aware of the danger of thinking in abstractions and antitheses. Keep actual persons and inconvenient examples in mind” is, to my mind, the most interesting. The indispensable antitheses true-false, right-wrong, good-bad, and relative-absolute can be devastating to the attempt to grasp anything complex or subtle. And who, in or out of science, is not tempted to forget inconvenient examples? My own not

  Introduction

necessarily clear conclusion, buttressed by the example of different persons describing the same perspective from different angles is that “the truth as a . . . humanly accessible ideal can be neither relative nor absolute alone, but only both at once.” * “What Death Makes of Philosophy” recalls the effect on philosophers of the fear of death, which they of course share with other humans. Among the fearful philosophers it mentions there are, to start with, myself and my fatherin-law. Then come the examples of Descartes, William James, Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. But the essay deals in detail sufficient to convince only with the contrasting pair of Hume and Kant. It describes the reasons for the early fears and late-life miseries of Kant, as compared with the early depression but later tranquility of Hume. Hume is this essay’s hero. This essay shows or, more modestly, contends that Kant’s fatal error—the near total detachment of human perception and reason from reality, the thing in itself—was, at least in large part, a response to his relations with his parents and to his fears. It shows, too, I think beyond question, that Hume’s philosophical doubts about causality, which later abated, were caused by a long depressive illness. Considering that Kant and Hume are great, greatly influential philosophers, and that many philosophers must regard my account of the basic origins of their thought as insufferably reductive, the essay is quite provoking. It has the emotional implication that life punished Kant for his disbelief in the reality of natural causation and rewarded Hume for his acceptance of at least psychological causation. Taken in full seriousness, such an approach would require the rethinking of the history of modern philosophy, the only period for which there is good enough biographical evidence. Whoever wants more of the same will find it in my book The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought, from which the factual evidence for the essay is taken. * In the succession of this book’s essays, the subject of death is followed by that of art, in the essay “Keeping the World Together.” What do I mean by a world? I define it as “a bounded complex whole the elements of which are related to one another.” In answer to the question “What’s a world?” the essay answers, “Just now, the most direct example is ourselves, me and you, you in the singular and the plural, all together in this book. We are a world

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  

because as writer and readers we’re related to one another by a common immediate interest and are either present in or reading the pages of the same book.” The most abstract problem the essay deals with, always in relation to art, is the effect on us of our conception of the whole that we have in mind. If we are thinking small, the world we have in mind may be a particular picture or a particular artist. If we are thinking larger, the world may be an art movement or style, maybe Impressionism, or twentieth-century American art. When our subject is larger still, our world may be modern art as a whole. How large can our art-world be? I’ll stop at art through the ages. In this book, the “art” under consideration would be visual, mostly painting, the time would be historic times (not prehistory), and the place would be the world, defined as the sum of the art of the West, India, China, Japan, and the “primitives.” Does the choice of the art-world we prefer to think about make any difference to the nature of the thought? Yes, because the conception of the world leads us to concentrate on the relationships of its main visible contents and neglect or deemphasize whatever is less immediately relevant. There is no right or wrong in the choice of an art-world and no necessary implication of the superiority of one such world over another. Certainly, if I speak of the traits of the large world of Chinese art as a whole, I am not entitled to deny the uniqueness of any individual Chinese artist, who is a whole world unto himself, or even possibly, though rarely, herself. The subject of “Keeping the World Together” is the recognition of the mutual influence of the great art traditions on one another. Can this influence be measured in the large accurately? With reservations, the answer is yes. I mea­ sure the mutual relevance of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African, and Western art by means of a subtractive technique—in my imagination I subtract the art whose influence I want to measure from the rest of the world of art I begin with. For example, I ask what European art would be like if it had never encountered Japanese art, and what Japanese art would be if it had never encountered European art. How can we tell or make a good, educated guess? The artists involved, the European Japanizers on the one side and the Japanese Europeanizers on the other, could tell us easily (in fact, they have told us—the details are given in the essay). If there had been no Kiyonaga or Hokusai prints in France, then there would have been no Degas women bathing, or drying or combing themselves and one another. If there had been no African masks or statues in France, Picasso would never have painted his revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and might not have invented Cubism. So when we keep our great art-world together, we can perceive much to which we would otherwise be

10  Introduction

blind. And I know that there would be much for me to mourn if any of the great art traditions, having once entered my life, were to vanish from it. * “The Common Universe of Aesthetics” is short for “The Common Human­ ity Evident in European, African, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Aesthetic Theory.” The title alone is formidable, and the reading to justify it, daunting. This essay has a preliminary section that spells out in detail what common sense is likely to assume without argument: whatever the cultural variations among humans, all of them resemble one another in the ways they see, hear, feel, move, emote, remember, and socialize. These resemblances, I argue, lead to resemblances, open and hidden, in their art and aesthetic doctrines. It is the doctrines, the different aesthetic theories, that are the essay’s basic subject. To compare theories of whole cultures with one another is a very different venture from comparing individual artists. You can buy an artist’s picture or get the artist to paint your portrait and even, when aroused by the artist’s intense interest in your appearance, sleep with him or her. But when you compare encompassing theories, you have no choice but to see the individual artists as parts of something intangible that contains them just as a cloud contains the drops of moisture that make it up. You can’t buy that cloud or sleep with it but only look at it and think about it, abstractly. When it came to the description of the aesthetic theories of the different traditions, I assumed I would have most trouble with the European or Western and the African: the European or Western because of the variety and quantity of the evidence, and the African because of Africa’s colonial past, its complexity, and the absence of enough detailed, reliable evidence. To my surprise the European more or less solved itself, while for the African I made what seems to me a decent though inadequate compromise. European or Western art might once have been described in terms of the standards of its art academies, but it is long since the West has had any general authoritative standards for art. But after considering the accounts I found and reading the opinions of many artists, especially of modern times, for which there is a good deal of detailed biographical evidence, I concluded that there was a prevailing mystical tendency. To be more exact, I felt that the prevailing aesthetic doctrines were mostly variants of Neoplatonism, a kind of thought that is deeply ingrained in Western theology, philosophy, and literature. These Neoplatonisms are not borrowed directly from Plato or Plotinus, but express belief in a transcendent spirituality that inspires the artist and can inhere, the

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  11

artist believes, in his work. This description fits the history of Western art moderately well, better than any competing doctrine I am aware of. Although in my writing I refer often to “primitives” (a term I use only for lack of a better one) of various kinds, they are much too numerous to deal with at once, and so I confined myself to indigenous black Africa, and for Africa to the Baule, of the Central Ivory Coast, and the Bamana (the erstwhile Bambara), of Mali, for both of which I found good sources. The heading by which I represent African aesthetics is “Africa: Statue-like Beauty, and ‘Goodness’ and ‘Clarity.’ ” There is a full explanation of this wayward-seeming heading in the essay, along with anthropological generalizations about African art as a whole. The headings for the accounts of the aesthetic thought of India, China, and Japan are respectively: “India: Aesthetic, Depersonalized Emotions” “China: Aesthetic Reverberation of the Life-Breath” “Japan: Aesthetic Beauty Tempered with Regret” There is no good reason for me to summarize the text that falls under these headings, though I can assure any doubting reader that, under each heading, there are conceptions that that are enlightening and, at times, moving. It is notable that Indian aesthetic thought, based primarily on poetic drama and dance, had its first classic expression in about the second century CE. Unlike the aesthetic thought of China and Japan, the creative aesthetic thought of India was cut short by invasion during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE. Between these two dates it had a flourishing history. It had two Kashmiri exponents, Ananda (Anandavardhana) (ninth century CE) and Abhinava (Abhinavagupta) (tenth century). Ananda emphasized the power of the flashes of suggestion that light up poetic beauty and are, therefore, he said, its soul or the very essence of poetry. Abhinava, the greatest of the Indian aestheticians, goes much further than Ananda and is still able, I think, to teach us something important about the nature of art. His aesthetics relies on the belief in reincarnation, which most of us, I assume, do not share. Reincarnation, in his thought, plays a role like the unconscious and like inheritance in ours. Our ordinary experience, he says, is filled with pain, weariness, death, and the weakness that accompanies ascetic practices. But these are countered by the theater’s power to calm sadness, distract from illness, overcome weariness, and, by teaching us, to our pleasure and lasting profit, how the world works. Drama, says Abhinava, like poetry, has such a therapeutic effect because it uses the difference between the emotions of ordinary life and the weaker emotions we experience as we watch the

12  Introduction

actors. As we watch them, we draw on memories, residues of our experiences in earlier life. Then, assuming we are not too wrapped up in ourselves, too narcissistic, our lives are, as if magically, separated from space, time, and trouble, and then, as much out of as in ourselves, we profit from the poet’s active ge­ nius. The true poet’s accomplishment transforms everything by his vision and makes him like the God whose will creates the world. As spectators, our ego is then transcended for the while and we enter into the higher, undifferentiated pleasure of the peace in which all sensual desire dies, having given way to the aesthetic emotion of peace. * “Are the Deaf and Blind Epistemologically Isolated?” “Epistemology” is a relatively new term for the study of the varieties, grounds, and validity of knowledge. The proper functioning of the senses, notably hearing and sight, are of course essential to knowledge. Hence the question that is the title of the present essay. For deafness and blindness are such isolating afflictions that it is hard for us who hear and see to imagine what the world is like to those who are deaf or blind. The education of the deaf raises questions that can be hard to answer. How does one teach a person deaf from birth to speak? To communicate with those who hear, lip-reading is essential. But for the individual’s own self-development and for communication with other deaf persons—the deaf may live together—it is essential to learn a standard gesture language. Yet deafness may strike us as a lesser affliction than blindness. Hearing aids may be effective, and in daily life we may find deafness to be only temporary or corrigible—when water in our ears prevents us from hearing, the loss ends as our ears dry out; and when we are deaf to the meanings of a language we do not understand, we make do with an intuitive language of gestures, which uses sight to replace hearing. Blindness of course makes even gestures useless except for the much more limited medium of touch. How, we ask ourselves, do the blind get around? How, for example, do they cross streets—must they use seeing-eye dogs? Or, how can they learn to use complicated instruments? It’s especially intriguing to ask how the blind dream. If blind from birth, can they see anything in their sleep? Can they see objects they know from touch alone? Or if they became blind during their lifetimes, can they still see what they can’t see when they are awake, or can they see from memory? To the question “are the deaf and the blind epistemologically isolated?” the answer the essay gives is the expected “yes,” but, more interestingly, also “not

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  13

nearly as much as one might expect.” Usually the blind develop a remarkable ability, by way of a great tangle of associations, to grasp an incomplete but accurate sense of the sight they lack. As the essay explains, an intelligent adult blind from birth can define and distinguish between words as close in meaning as “to see,” to look,” and “to notice.” Mathematics as such can abolish the gap between the blind and the sighted completely. Consider the extraordinary case of Nicholas Sanderson (1682–1739) that the essay recalls. Although blind by the age of one, Sanderson, helped by his very retentive memory and extremely acute hearing and sense of touch, became an eminent mathematician. His especial interest in the workings of the eye led him to study the nature of light, color, optical lenses, and the rainbow. To what the essay tells of Sanderson, I add that it required the advocacy of Newton and an honorary degree granted by the Queen to assure Sanderson a position as lecturer at Cambridge. Sanderson’s accomplishments were so unbelievable that it took a Newton to create confidence in them. * The unbelievable intellectual exploits of Sanderson are followed by an es­ say, “Pain, Cruelty, and Pathology in Art,” that takes as its subject the unbelievably strange, cruel, sado-masochistic, and otherwise troubling acts performed and objects created in recent Western art. Those who particularly resent such art would be better served if we changed the verb we use for art making: ordinary art, we could continue to say, is created; cruel art, we could now say, is, like a crime, committed; and filthy, excretory art, like the feces and urine it makes use of, we could say is excreted. The acts and objects I refer to have been justified by the unparalleled freedom allowed contemporary artists. In the essay, I give many brief examples of such art. Here I add the example of the work of Damian Hirst, whose fame and wealth have stimulated artists to depend on other but equally shocking means. I set aside Hirst’s unconventional attempts to draw attention to himself, most likely made under the influence of drugs or alcohol, as when he exposed himself with a chicken bone inserted into his penis. My account of Hirst’s art is limited to a brief description of his great, extremely expensive show on November 10, 2007, in the lobby of the Lever House, Park Ave. and 54th St. in New York City. The show was given the name, meant to arouse the greatest possible expectations, School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge. What did a visitor see when the show opened? A lobby “lined with medicine cabinets with empty boxes and bottles

14  Introduction

with labels of antidepressants, cough medicines, and other drugs. Submerged in a very large tank filled with formaldehyde there are two sides of beef, a chair, a chain of sausages, an umbrella and birdcage with a dead dove. Mr. Hirst describes this show as an homage to Francis Bacon’s 1946 ‘Painting’ at the Museum of Modern Art, which depicts cow carcasses suspended in a crucifix shape” (New York Times, November 9, 2007). There are also a dead shark and the bodies, lined up in rows, of thirty dead sheep in, I suppose, separate formaldehyde-filled tanks. The clocks on the walls run backwards. In imitation of writers and cinematographers, Hirst has inserted references to predecessors he is interested in: to Dan Flavin, the fluorescent-light artist, by means of strips of fluorescent lights; to Andy Warhol’s use of repetition by means of rows of dead sheep; to Joseph Cornell by means of the boxes encasing the dead animals; to Jannis Kounellis, who makes use of live birds; by means of the dove; and to René Magritte, who painted an egg in a bird cage, by means of the same dove. Hirst regards this exhibit as so far his most mature work, no doubt because it includes examples of so many of his characteristic modes of work. The whole is a retrospective synthesis of his art and his artistic affinities. “Pain, Cruelty, and Pathology in Art” begins with the sadistic and mas­ ochistic acts committed in the name of contemporary body art, acts for which the artists sometimes give mystical justifications. But most of the text is devoted to the unique “carnal art” of Orlan, who exhibits herself as she is subjected to plastic surgery. Most of what I know about her art is derived from the exemplary doctoral thesis of Leah Klein, Between Pathology and Aesthetics: The Body Art of Orlan. It is Orlan’s feeling that she transforms her televised plastic surgery into revelations that make it possible for her to live in spite of the severe psychopathological condition she recognizes in herself. The essay’s ambivalent verdict is that Orlan’s cruelty to herself is cause enough for refusing to see her art, even though psychologically she needs it, and even though, regarded abstractly, it has undoubted aesthetic aspects. The moral problems of her carnal art remain unresolved; but moral ambivalence in art is not unusual, and we lose a good deal if the ambivalence leads us to avoid the art that inspires it. * At this point we turn to philosophy proper, to the essay “On the Transparency and Opacity of Philosophers.” I recently rediscovered this essay, which was published in The Monist in 1988, and found that I liked it for its subject

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  15

matter and its stubborn attempt to describe and account for the differences between thought that is clear, that is, transparent, and thought that is unclear, that is, opaque. It is not surprising that, of all subjects, mathematics, although it is incomplete and, by arriving at a paradox, can break the tie between clarity and correctness, is the most transparent. The exact sciences, which need empirical support, are at best translucent. The rest, including philosophy, is more opaque and dense. Although a philosopher, I try to be clear, but I must remember that my conscious thought is winnowed from an indefinitely complex self the details of which I am often ignorant of. Although a philosopher, I do not know why I remember one phrase but not another, why I am better with words than with mathematical symbols, why something or other makes me angry or not, and so on and on. I do not at all feel or believe that I am an instance of applied mathematics or a clearly calculable derivative of a known constellation of genes. But if I know that I do not know, I fill an old condition for being a philosopher. But if I do not know myself, I miss an old commandment a philosopher is supposed to fulfill. Isn’t it all a muddle? Yes. No. Maybe. Does the difference between these three answers unsettle you? To be human, even if a philosopher, one has to be opaque (hard to see into clearly) and dense (hard to get below one’s surface). In keeping with my character, I try to be reasonable, as the essay shows, by appealing not only to reason and psychology, but to examples, for instance that of Nietzsche, who denies the validity of logic and science but uses them when it suits him (he wanted to study atomic theory in order to validate his idea of the eternal return), glorifies resistance to pain, which so troubled him, and insisted on creativity that defies a difficult environment. Another example is Bertrand Russell, who saved himself, he says, from suicide by the fascinations of mathematical abstraction, did his best work in the philosophy of mathematics, and invented a logical atomism that led him to analyze human experience into its simple basic constituents and has no ruling unity. As best I can, I explain Nietzsche’s truculent ambivalence, stress on creativity in the face of obstacles, and self-glorification psychologically, in terms of his relations with his father, mother, sister, and Lou Salomé, whom he loved but failed to win. Likewise, I explain Russell, almost as he explains himself, by the early death of his parents and grandparents. Nietzsche’s prolonged failure with women and Russell’s hungry need for all of them are respectively inseparable from the two philosophers as persons and, hypothetically, as philosophers. Is Russell’s way of falling instantaneously in love with a woman and later, after having married her, instantaneously out of love with her related to a tendency to fall in and out of love with ideas?

16  Introduction

What do philosophers want and why do they try so hard to persuade others? They want the truth; and they want to use their quest for the truth to come into intellectual and emotional contact with others who share their quest; and they want to be persuaded of their importance by their ability to influence others intellectually. The essay contends that a philosopher’s search for the truth is also an invitation to company. I’m no exception. As I said at the beginning, I want this book to capture my nature as a thinker and, by its variety, reasoning, humor, and persistence, entice you to participate in my not easily satiable desire to understand. * The following two essays in this collection are taken respectively from the first chapter and (with some abbreviation) the last chapter of A Comparative History of Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant, published in 1998. A Comparative History is a long book, more heavily annotated than most histories of philosophy. For the sake of more helpful comparisons, it follows the rule that a developed philosophy of one culture is compared only with a developed philosophy of another. It also categorizes philosophies in a culturally neutral way. Looking back, I don’t know why the undertaking did not frighten me. I appealed for advice to specialists, the most generous of whom, an Indologist, covered page after page of the manuscript’s margins with pale, carefully penciled annotations. The book played so great a part in my self-education that I wrote at the beginning of its final, retrospective chapter, “It takes an effort to dismiss the idea that now that I have finished I know enough to begin again.” I kept hearing an imaginary reader alert to the cultural borders that were being crossed, “How can I be sure that you’ve got this argument right?” I had to confess that I was not completely sure, so I always obliged myself to give exact references, to allow the reader to check my sources and judge independently. Of course, such a history faces stubborn old problems. How many identifiable philosophical traditions have there been? Is the conception of philosophy basically the same in the different philosophical traditions? Are Eastern philosophies different as a whole from those of the West? Has one philosophical tradition been superior, in particular or in general, to another? Has philosophy been essential to human culture? Has it in any way made general progress? *

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  17

The first of the essays drawn from A Comparative History is called “The Three Philosophical Traditions.” It establishes criteria for philosophy in its strict sense, which is different from the looser, more general sense of philosophy as culturally inherited wisdom. The strict sense demands that philosophy be historically cumulative and articulated and argued pro and con by means of explicit principles and conclusions drawn logically from these principles. This essay contends that the study of philosophy is most illuminating if the three philosophical traditions are studied simultaneously rather than separately or successively (who does not defend his own favorite practices?). The essay also asks in what ways the three traditions’ terminologies and modes of reasoning and disputation are the same or different, and what schools of thought have been most prominent in each tradition. The essay then tries to exemplify the unique linguistic character of each tradition by means of literal translations into English. It also says what it briefly can about the aesthetic individuality of each of the three great philosophical traditions. Because “The Three Philosophical Traditions” is a careful introduction to A Comparative History, there is no point in continuing to write an introduction to this introduction, a practice that, to be consistent, would require the introduction to the introduction to have still another introduction and turn into an infinitely long regress of introductions into which this whole book would vanish like a mite in an endless ocean. * The second essay drawn from A Comparative History is called “Does Philosophy Progress?” It distinguishes between the reciprocal natures and social functions of philosophy, science, and art. It does so in a way that seems to me persuasive enough and complete enough to make it difficult for me to comment on it without quoting it. “Does Philosophy Progress?” begins with some pages on the attitude that seems best for the pursuit of comparative philosophy and on the historiographical traditions of the different cultures. Because these pages are omitted from the text reproduced in this book, I recall here some points they make. I say in the omitted pages that comparative philosophy ought to give an example of fairness of exposition and decency of appraisal, but that such a watchful neutrality is not easily compatible with creative thought or with one’s difficult-to-escape identification with one or another position. As for history, including the history of philosophy, there are great variations, at which I can only hint here, from culture to culture (see A Comparative

18  Introduction

History, pp. 518 ff.). A fourteenth-century Tibetan historian of of Buddhism, Buston, and another historian, Taranatha, of the sixteenth, are both unrestrainedly partisan. In India, the Jains were interested in recording what all philosophical schools thought because they believed that all points of view express some truth, the different partial truths merging in the full, Jain truth. The Advaita Vedantins recorded other doctrines in the ascending order of their resemblance to their philosophy, which they supposed to include and transcend the others. The Chinese, whose historical sense was well developed, composed encyclopedias of excerpts from all forms of literature, including what we call philosophy, which was not as a rule distinguished as such. There is an exceptionally historical-minded account of Chinese philosophy in the Chuang-tzu book, which laments departures from the Way. The great Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien (c. 185 BCE–145 BCE) tries to be objective and writes Plutarchlike biographies from which he draws moral lessons. As for Greek philosophy, it becomes self-consciously historical with Aristotle, who, in his Metaphysics, follows his declaration that “all men by nature desire to know” with summaries of the views of philosophers from Thales to Plato. Unfortunately, the only other surviving account of philosophers’ lives and doctrines is Diogenes Laertius’s tale-filled Doctrines of Eminent Philosophers. In later Europe, the first outstanding history of philosophy was that written in the mid-eighteenth century by Johann Jacob Brucker. His comprehensive five volumes were read by, among others, Diderot, Goethe, Kant, and Hegel. But the interest in progress that is our present theme first becomes a ruling concern in Diedrich Tiedemann’s six-volume Spirit of Speculative Philosophy, published between 1791 and 1797. Beginning with Thales, Tiedemann shows that philosophy has progressed relentlessly, each philosophy having in its own way improved on its predecessors. Hegel develops this idea of the interconnection of all philosophical thought, up to the climax he discovers in his own philosophy—the discovery does not surprise him. According to Hegel, it is the historian’s task to withdraw temporarily from any view he may hold in order to demonstrate how a philosopher’s views were once plausible and, for that matter, remain plausible—a historian’s temporary attitude that displays a philosophy to its best advantage. One finds, so Hegel thinks, the slow but relentless unfolding of the inherent philosophical truth by means of the contrast between view and counterview. The truth develops itself like a ladder in which a rung always rises out of the rung that precedes it. By this idea, Hegel was born of Tiedemann. But what, I ask, can be born of our inquiry if we ask about the progress of philosophy not of one philosophi-

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  19

cal culture but of three, the Western, the Indian, and the Chinese or, better, the Sino-Japanese (or, better still, Sino-Japanese-Korean)? Are there any interesting answers that apply to all three? Have all three progressed as if by a rule that governs them all? My typically philosophical kind of answer to the question is yes and no. I say “yes, it does progress,” because of each philosophical school’s increasing elaboration and polemical acuity and in more recent times either its assimilation of scientific evidence and attitudes or, on the contrary, its objection to the reductive, technocratic world-view associated with science. The equally clear “no” reflects what I take to be a general truth: the philosophical traditions’ ability to enlighten or inspire has not increased. This is because more elaborate philosophy is not necessarily more convincing than earlier, simpler philosophy. Often, the simplicity, directness, or humanity of earlier times is more affecting and plausible. In India, the mysterious Rigvedic hymn on the self-creation of the world out of desire charges the imagination more simply but as affectingly as the Big Bang theory. In China, Confucius’s Analects remains ordinary conversations between teacher and students, yet conversations that have proved to have the mysterious ability to stimulate and justify the ethos of a whole civilization. And the Chuang-tzu book remains an incomparable blend of paradoxical humor, fantastic stories, and sharp intelligence. In the West, nothing can replace or lure us into philosophy better than Plato’s always-changing, sharp-minded philosophical dramas or Plotinus’s mystical rhapsodies. Montaigne’s best essays, such as “On Experience,” combine common sense with uncommon tolerance, humanity, and a cornucopia of apt quotations from classical literature. Descartes’ search for certainty, despite the flaws that can be attributed to it, still affects us as a kind of quest that each person can repeat. As Montaigne says, even on stilts, we can walk only on our legs. Philosophy remains more nearly an art than a science, for which reason philosophers, especially those that are founders of their culture, remain perpetually attractive classics. Yet as Montaigne says and Wittgenstein repeats, every person has to search for philosophy as an individual. So unlike scientists, who aspire to all reach the same truth, philosophers, like artists and ordinary humans, have no choice except to find their individual truths. As I say in the essay, “The failure of philosophy to be provably right or wrong has turned out to be a reason that it does not become superfluous” to us. It has paired naturally with both science and art. The three make a family to which each is indispensable. *

20  Introduction

The essay “Nonutopian Observations on Machiavellism” is the last part of Amoral Politics: The Persistent Truth of Machiavellism. Amoral Politics is a wide-ranging study of what I call Machiavellism, “the political use, limited only by expediency, of every kind of deception and force” in human societies. The book begins with a description of some famous or, better, infamous Chinese, Indian, and European Machiavellis. The closing chapter of Amoral Politics, “Nonutopian Observations” is the bulk of the essay now under discussion. When I began Amoral Politics, I had little idea of what I would find. I discovered political ruthlessness was common almost wherever I looked: in preliterate societies from large to very small; in the lands of the ancient Aztecs and Incas; in ancient India; in ancient and modern China; and in the West at all periods. Of course I also found the opposite of ruthlessness, and I tried to calculate the balance between the ruthless or amoral and the considerate or humane. I learned that the European philosophers who thought well of Machiavelli included Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, and Spinoza. I ended with the conviction, not distant from theirs, that political ruthlessness has been so common that it is a mistake to assume, along with some religions, that it is a perversion of humans’ innate decency. Instead, what the essay calls Machiavellism is, like humane behavior, normal to human beings, as normal as it is to, say, chimpanzees (Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics shows that this little joke is no joke). If we go so far as to attribute conscious thought to birds, some of which are surprisingly clever, we can reckon cuckoos among the Machiavellians because the egg they surreptitiously lay in a warbler’s nest grows quickly into a nestling that pushes the warblers’ eggs out of the nest and remains alone, beak agape, to receive the food the warblers bring back. The framework of “Nonutopian Observations on Machiavellism” is set by four questions: “Does an established moral tradition make it difficult for a Machiavelli to succeed?” “Does history teach whether or not Machiavellism has been successful?” “How adequate is the Machiavellian description of political life?” and “Have philosophers raised any decisive objections against Machiavellism?” None of my answers to these questions is simple. If it were, it would be untrue to the incessant complexity of life, personal and social, and to the often unexpected beliefs and behaviors that become evident only when one looks at social life closely. Without prior study, who would entertain the idea that Buddhism, on its face the kindest of the great religions, was not infrequently very intolerant—look up, for example, the career of the Japanese Buddhist, Nichiren (1222–82). Still more unexpected are the reasons of the sort, which

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  21

appear in the life-story of the Buddha himself, that redefine a cruel act as a kind one and a murderer as a savior. What makes this redefinition possible is the belief that there are persons, most likely holy, who can see into the future—the Buddha’s insight was utterly infallible. For instance, if a Buddhist gifted with foresight sees that a certain person is going to commit a crime, it is a kindness to that person to kill him so that his still uncommitted crime will not cause him to be reborn in a worse, more painful form, or perhaps to be tortured in some floridly ghastly Buddhist hell. “Nonutopian Observations” gives examples of Buddhist intolerance and cruel kindness. Of the four questions asked in “Nonutopian Observations,” the relatively easiest to answer turned out to be “Have philosophers raised any decisive objections against Machiavellism?” I say in the essay that of all the philosophers I know, the most satisfactory answer was given by Kant in his essay “Perpetual Peace.” Kant had no great opinion of the native virtuousness of human beings. Yet he thought that their very selfishness might save them if and when they came to recognize that war makes it too difficult for society to remain financially healthy and keep its members prosperous. In spite of my view that political amorality is inherent in being human, it is not unreasonable to join Kant and hope that humans will become so afraid of destroying themselves that they may yet invent ways of limiting the chances of a war that may exterminate them. In somewhat different words, that is how the essay ends. * On the Nature and Limits of Ineffability Ineffabilities Are the Demons and Angels of Incompleteness Intermittence, Incompletability, and the Silence of Words The essay I next discuss, on ineffability, has these three titles. The first, matterof-fact name did not fully satisfy me, so I supplemented it with two other, more dramatic names inspired by the essay’s last few sentences. Each name suggests a rather different attitude toward the text. I’ve not added more names because their multiplication might become more interesting than the message of the text. It would not make sense here to attempt a literary tour-de-force consisting of so many titles that the text would become subsidiary to them or, at the limit, reduced to a mere hypothesis. I must admit, in all proud modesty, that when, for the sake of this introduction, I read what I had written years ago on ineffability, I was moved at the end to the point of tears. I had never undergone such an experience when reading

22  Introduction

anything else I had written, not even poems. Yet I could understand why I cried. Here was a subject, ineffability, that we encounter every time we say “I can’t put it into words.” It’s easy to list the occasions when we resort to this excuse, but the conception itself of ineffability seems meant to put an end to questions. How and why should one try to scrutinize what one has recognized to be inscrutable? In this case, however, the answer was plain. I had read a great deal for the sake of a book on ineffability, and in the course of its writing had come on many ideas new to me and had, in response, invented some of my own. I came to see and stress that, however good these ideas, the explanations they led to, whether separate or combined, reductive or holistic, were never quite enough. However I tried to channel them, something was always spilling over. Could this be another case of ineffability—the ineffability of “ineffability:—or was it no more than the spillover of some of the term’s many associations? This spillover caused no emotion. Instead, the cause was what may be called the poetic completeness of the text: There. at the book’s end, I summarized what I had written, what was incomplete in it, and how I felt about the summary and its conclusions and incompleteness. As I read the summary I had the feeling that it was, from my standpoint, perfect. I was so moved because the ending represented me so well that I could not better it. All I wanted to say then was there, so all of me was on the page, where I could read it. This explanation falls in well with my account of the experience of ineffability. I now think that an understanding of how and why we use the concept of ineffability helps us to understand our reactions to art, literature, religion, philosophy, and life in general. (No, this understanding is not a universal key; nothing is). As you read the essay, however named, you will find that it assumes that there are two basic attitudes towards language, the one of exaltation and the other of devaluation (see Ineffability: The Failure of Words in Religion and Philosophy, from which the essay is taken). Among the more familiar exalters of words, the most important must be God, who in Genesis uses peremptory verbal commands to create the world. The belief that words can have creative force was held in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and India, and among so-called primitives. In ancient India, Speech was regarded as an omnipotent goddess, seconded by Syllable, Word, and Formulation (Vac, out of which heaven and earth were formed). Among the ancient Indian mantras, believed to be powerful concentrations of energy, the most powerful was the syllable om. The ancient Indian philosopher Bhartrihari (c. 450–510 CE) believes that “words,” by which he means meaningful sentences or thoughts, are grasped intuitively as a whole; that all thought and

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  23

therefore all knowledge are inseparable from “words”; and that the world is essentially the same as the “words” or thoughts by which it is known, that is, nothing other than the structure of meanings as grasped in “words” or thoughts. I skip some of the steps of Bhartrihari’s reasoning without explaining and go directly to his conclusion: Even though the world is nothing other than a structure of meanings, latent and expressed, its indwelling principle, brahman, is utterly beyond words. At this point I switch, maybe too suddenly, to the modern German philosopher H. G. Gadamer, because his view of language is at times surprisingly like Bhartrihari’s. Gadamer writes: “In language the world presents itself. The experience of the world in language is ‘absolute.’ It transcends all the relativities of their positing of being, because it embraces all being-in-itself . . . Every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word” (Truth and Method, pp. 408, 415). The various devaluers of language are legion. Some, like the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who influenced Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, thinks that language, judged by its own logical standards, is self-contradictory and therefore empty, meaningless. This is true, he says, of even the Buddhist scriptures. To him, our language is part of the dream we confuse with reality. In Europe, in contrast, Kierkegaard, who loves the power of words to transform, says he recognizes the truth by its self-contradiction and the pain it causes him. Nietzsche claims that words, logic, and science hide the real differences in the world because the axioms of their logic rest on the false assumption that things can be identical with one another. Wittgenstein contends that language is helpless to express values, whether of ethics, art, or religion. Heidegger searches for the primordial speech once current, he believes, in ancient Greece, especially in its tragic poets. Such speech, he says, is still possible in poetry, which unites the musical, imaginative, and logical powers of language and brings into being for the first time something that is, and so creates our world. The philosopher Derrida, admittedly descended from Heidegger, lacks his romantic enthusiasm for poetry and rejects his search for an ineffable, nameless Being. Derrida adopts Nietzsche’s distrust for whatever is fixed in language and philosophy. He searches, he says, for the cracks through which he may glimpse elusive traces of the otherwise ineffable, traces that escape from the sameness of philosophy and, by doing so, restore the source of philosophy’s life. Like someone yelling “Look at me, I’m not here!” all these doubters of the value of comprehensible language and logical rules are not deterred by the fact that their attacks are carried out in the very medium whose validity they

24  Introduction

deny. I of course exempt from this charge the monks who obey a vow to remain silent. Both exalters and devaluers of language may believe that reality has a hierarchical structure the pinnacle of which is the real-in-itself, the absolute One, from which the (relatively unreal) world is radiated. Such is Neoplatonism. But to Taoists and Ch’an Buddhists the most significant contrast is between primary or authentic experience and the secondary or inauthentic. The Neoplatonists try to find the rungs of the ladder that leads to the One; the Buddhists (generally) look for the salvation that comes from realizing that there are no rungs and no ladder, and happily deny their own metaphysical unity as selves. For both exalters and devaluers the solutions may involve what nonbelievers regard as unworkable magic, or involve systematic exercises in the dematerialization of themselves and the world around them. The result, the solution of the problem of radical ineffability, is (presumed) mystical insight, however achieved. The yearning for what one hopes will be superlative experience can be very strong. Why? The cause is the need for closeness and, with it, emotional and maybe physical safety. Closeness to what or to whom? One’s child, parent, spouse, or family. If you need to feel identification with something much greater than yourself, it may be closeness to one’s country, community, religion, or sect. Or often, maybe beginning in childhood, one looks up to and tries to imitate a hero. If you are a writer, artist, musician, or philosopher, you may have a particular hero of your kind, or may develop closeness to your profession, that is, to others of your kind, who make up a professional community whose members reinforce one another. If you are a disciple, you have your teacher or master. If you have a guru, you may stare fixedly at him, to become him by assimilating him, drawing him into yourself, by means of your adoring, concentrated gaze. If you are a lover, or if you take love poetry seriously, your ideal is to be somehow emotionally merged with the person you love, or, by proxy, the lover or beloved in the poems. But the primal closeness, which nourishes and underlies all the other instances, is most likely to be that of mother and infant or young child. When this relation is good, the two mirror and, warmth touching warmth, live in and with one another. The mother talks with, holds, and pets her infant, who literally feels her love and lies, erotically aroused and emotionally secure, in its erotically aroused mother’s arms. All these needs for closeness help explain why many people undergo emotional experiences they identify with mystical (rationally inexplicable) insight.

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  25

How can they doubt the sort of thought or identification that comes to them from nowhere they know and may strike them with even orgasmic force? Mystical insights apart, ineffability is characteristic of poetry and music. Poets, says Valéry, have to go beyond words in their search for and discovery or invention of what they cannot exactly verbally conceive, so that we glimpse in their words what they cannot directly say and yet somehow glimpse. This is as likely to happen with nonsense verse as with serious poetry—Lewis Carroll discovered that “words mean more than we mean to express.” Philosophers have helped contend with ineffability by using technical terms—“tao,” “emptiness,” “brahman,” “noumenon,” for example—as though the existence of the terms were evidence for the existence of an unattainable something of which nothing intelligible can be said. Skeptics naturally raise their skeptical objections, and psychologists undertake experiments and use reductive arguments against the turning of poetic sensitivity and mystical exaltation into unintelligible absolutes. In the essay I use psychology to explain the difference between those who believe in their ability to use language in order to explain themselves and to love and be loved—human Krishnas I call them—and those who pessimistically believe they are so unlikely to be understood that it does not pay to make the effort. I attribute the root of the difference to opposite mother-infant relationships, The infant who enjoys a satisfying preverbal mutuality with its mother—a little Krishna as I call him—is more likely to grow up speaking freely and happily with others, while the infant whose relation with its mother is poor, distant, or absent is likely to grow up reticent in speech and pessimistic about the possibility of understanding others and being understood by them. I hope you are of the free, happy Krishna kind. * “The Bird with Bread in Its Beak” is a short essay consisting of remarks that opened a conference, held in December 2009, called “Confucianism and Inter-religious Dialogue.” Since it is impossible to guess the connection between the title of the essay and the name of the conference at which it was delivered, I’ll tell you at once why the bird deserves to have the title for itself. The bird is a real one, and the surprising deed it did was real, too. In November 2009, that bird dropped a piece of bread into an open substation of the the Large (in fact enormous) Hadron Collider in Geneva, put it out of operation, and for a while interrupted the quest of the scientists using the Collider to search for the Higgs particle, a boson, as it happens, in order “to solve the

26  Introduction

riddle of the universe,” or, in less universe-qualified terms, to complete the standard particle theory they held. The moral I drew was a simple one: See what can happen when an ordinary bird flying over a great astrophysical la­ boratory happens to have some bread in its beak. See how susceptible the best-planned human enterprises are to small accidents. The essay, which you can read quickly, is too short and too filled with names and analogies to summarize here: from two Muslim philosophers to magical practices of Papuan island dwellers, ancient Indian philosophical debates, Yaj­ navalkya and his wife (characters in a well-known Upanishad), and the Pla­ tonism of Plato’s Diotima. I will report only that I most enjoyed the moments when I recalled Indian mysticism and Plato’s comparison of material bodies to shadows projected on a wall. I then said that if, as mystics contend, everything material or plural is an illusion, “all dialogue, religious or not, is an illusion because [if all is one,] there is nobody else to talk to. Strictly speaking, we cannot even talk to ourselves because there is no real division in us between subject and object. So if we are dead serious, this conference has no real subject and therefore cannot say anything real about it.” The people in the audience listened silently to the news that they might not be real and might not have heard anything about anything. Neither politeness nor reality allowed them to answer. * The last essay in this book is “You, Me, and Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind.” Like the bird’s dropping of bread just over the collider, the presence of this review here is a sheer accident. I forgot that I had written it until one of the publisher’s readers—I call him Third Reader—remembered the review and suggested that it be reprinted in this book and that I react to it. He is therefore the godfather of this introduction. Referring to the review, he wrote: Its appreciation of Kaufmann’s life and thought perfectly exemplifies certain ideas discussed in Scharfstein’s The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought. Those ideas apply to Scharfstein himself and make—or can make—allusion to part of the book’s title: how is a review like and unlike a looking glass? Was it only Kaufmann to whom Scharfstein was referring here: “Like Kaufmann’s other writings, Discovering the Mind is sui generis, a highly individual combination of carefulness and boldness”? Further, what is text and subtext here: “He writes in an openly personal (self-referential) way, echoing his previous writings and not infrequently

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  27

repeating himself ”? And, finally, on behalf of whom is this written: “In everything he was humble-proud, an individual whose voice speaks (I hear it directly) from each page he wrote”? . . . How might he be found—through the looking glass—in his review of Kaufmann’s book, thirty years ago and today?

How might I be found in my review, thirty years ago and today? My memory isn’t retentive enough to distinguish between myself at such different ages, but I’m willing to hazard that I’m more aware of my potentialities now but less able to make large demands on them. I call Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind a highly individual combination of carefulness and boldness. I’m willing to accept that as accurate for my writing too. I say that Kaufmann writes in an openly personal, self-referential way, echoing his previous writings and not infrequently repeating himself. Anyone reading the present book can see that the sentence applies to me as well. However, this book, a retrospective glance over my career as a writer, makes self-reference and repetition inevitable. There was a time, which ended soon, when I wrote more impersonally, until I decided that, for many purposes, impersonality is a boring sham. In The Philosophers I showed that the great philosophers from Descartes to Wittgenstein could not be understood well if their philosophies were regarded as wholly impersonal constructions. I kept committing what was then often considered to be the fallacy of “psychologism,” that is, the fallacy of explaining philosophical arguments with the help of biographical information. And as for repetition, it should be remembered that nobody, writer or not, becomes wholly new every year, so everybody who writes often repeats himself (or herself ), so it’s more interesting to ask, is that all that he (or she) does, or is there always something new of interest that is added? I also write in my review that Kaufmann was humble-proud, an individual whose voice speaks from each page he wrote. I accept these words as applying to me as well. To be “humble-proud” may not be usual, but all self-expression reveals itself to be individual if looked at closely. There are so many resemblances that Kaufmann and I might be supposed to be the same person with different clothing and accents. Kaufmann and I looked different—there was no chance that one of us would be mistaken for the other—we had different cultural backgrounds—he, born in Germany, spoke German and English with equal fluency, and I, born in the United States, spoke English and Hebrew—and had different hobbies—his was photography, mine, painting—and he collected mostly East Asian art, and I, mostly books; we were good friends with a broadly similar outlook. We talked with one another

28  Introduction

eagerly, and I remember how often, when we talked, our faces would light up with pleasure. In his public lectures on Nietzsche, whom he had translated very well, Kaufmann spoke with magisterial authority. As I wrote The Philosophers, I turned to him to verify my accounts of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. He got the book on the verge of his unexpected death. Earlier, he had not understood its purpose, but after he got the book, I was told, he appreciated it. I would count among his virtues that after he studied with and learned to know Heidegger, he left him in dismay. My review also describes Kaufmann in a way I could never attribute to myself. In spite of all the similarities between us that Third Reader suggests and I accept, it seems strange to me that, even just as a writer, I can be considered a mirror image of so different an individual. I think there are two causes for this discrepancy between having many similar traits and, all the same, remaining a unique individual. One cause is projection: if I praise a writer, it is likely that I praise him in terms that, if I could, I would apply to myself. The second cause lies in the generalizing quality of language. For example, verbal descriptions of the appearance of someone’s face or of a landscape are much less accurate and informative than good photographs. The music a person composes is likely to be a much closer equivalent of the person’s intimate emotional life than an ordinary verbal description. Good poetry is more likely to capture the music of one’s emotions than good prose. The problem is obviously that discussed in the chapter on ineffability. Finally, why do I write, and why do I write essays of the sort that appear in this book? I write also because I have inherited two kinds of love from my father, the love of teaching and the love of writing. I’m a very different teacher and writer than my father was. I do not mean that the typewriter he pounded with two fingers was very noisy while my computer writes silently. I mean that although he wrote essays, in Hebrew, his literary language, on everyday life and a sociologically oriented autobiography of his life in Russia, Poland, and the United States, both his teaching and his writing were concentrated on the problems of Jewish education. For better and worse, my subjects are everything everywhere—this book shows how I am attracted to omniscience by an amalgam of curiosity and desire like that of a child who, big-eyed and avaricious, has just come through the door of an endlessly big toy store. Once, I made a small painting, the top of which was covered with blotches of as many colors as I could fit in. Standing under the blotches there is the indeterminate figure of a man, his enormous fingers clutching at the blotches. The caption of the picture is “All of It.” The man is me (but not only me), always (in the past)

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  29

wanting more books on more subjects and more records with more kinds of music. What I write reflects my natural and acquired moreness. As for teaching, because the chapter on ineffability spoke of gurus, I will take the guru as the incarnation of a relationship to which, as a teacher, I am utterly opposed. The disciple of a guru accepts without question the moral and intellectual superiority of his presumably infallible guide, whom he gratefully serves and wants not only to emulate but, by a natural miracle, to become identical with. My personal ideal as a teacher is the opposite. I do not want to convert anyone to my views or to imitate me in anything but the desire to be himself or herself as effectively, decently, and productively as possible. Such decency includes respect for the truth, respect for evidence, and the desire to help to free others rather than enslave them. It accepts only a minimum of preaching, which I hope I haven’t exceeded. Anyway, how a teacher acts has more moral influence on his students than what he says or writes. * These remarks lead me to the drawings, my drawings, in this book. They are, among other things, a testament to my belief that whoever writes seriously about art gains a deeper understanding of it by practicing it. They also serve as a memory of the time when I would sell my small wax-crayon India-ink paintings to help me make a living. The drawings in this book are not direct illustrations, and they were made long before this book was conceived. What makes them relevant to the book is that they were made by the same person and reflect something other than words, that is, allow nonverbal aspects of his thought or imagination to qualify and, I hope, enrich what he says in words. “Running” demonstrates how we can be all decisive action, in which our limbs and features take on a decisive feel of concentrated motility. How different this is from the innocently imaginative attempt, shown in the next sketch, of a child and a dog reaching upward to make contact with a low cloud. The sketchiness of this sketch emphasizes how innocent the imagination is in its desire to become impossibly close and grasp-not-grasp what it sees and wants to reach. “See You Soon” was drawn when I had to leave home for a time, and shows how our desire to rejoin one another can make the parting hopeful. I was, of course, thinking of how good it would be when I came home to my wife, the subject of the following sketch. In the sketch, her mouth is open in something

30  Introduction

like a smile, and I am struck by the depth of her eyes, which I read as my incomplete ability to fathom her (or anyone else) to more remote depths. But “Keep in Touch,” the picture that follows, shows how hard we try to depend on one another, so that a single person can keep his human balance on a willing pyramid of others, who support him at his (or her) unstable height. The picture that represents how I (the author) look to myself makes my face somewhat asymmetrical; my mouth is drawn down on one side, to imply, I suppose, that when I’m in repose, neither speaking in animation nor joking—I like puns and other verbal jokes—I’m apt to be withdrawn and sad looking, as my wife proved to me when she photographed me in such a mood, even though, as she reminds me, I was holding a balloon. The sketch of hands looking for one another is on next to the last page of my previous book, Art without Borders, and so it represents the continuity of the thought that characterizes them. The fantasy of hands that engage in independent actions as if they were complete humans arose in my mind for reasons I do not quite know but are related to what I had learned of the neurological closeness of the action of hands to the human ability to speak and therefore to our ability to be humanly sociable, both independent of and dependent upon one another—how we need to look for and sometimes succeed in finding one another. “Blind Rooster Attacking a Flower” stands for the sometimes hardly believable blindness of hostility against anything and everything, no matter how good or beautiful. It fits the article in this book on the incorrigible Machiavellism—the justification of any act, however cruel or deceptive—that increases the sense of one’s power and gets whatever the Machiavelli wants. I’ve made many variants of the sketch here called “Desire,” some with the man and the woman in different degrees of mutual desire, and others in mutual repulsion, or in ambivalence. It needs no explanation and represents the biology and psychology of our desires as it comes to different expression in inevitable likeness-in-difference, a theme represented in “Two Become One,” which shows two people grappling or dancing with one another too closely to be visually separated. I’ve never seen cats walking in a single-file procession, whether on level ground or up or down an incline. But I enjoyed the unlikely fantasy, a joke that may make you smile, as I do. As I’ve said at the beginning of this introduction, my writing strikes me as a conversation with my unknown readers. Leaving the book and leaving them and so leaving myself strikes me as sad. Hence the last picture, at the book’s

You, Me, Kant, and Carroll  31

end, on parting as a sorrow, but, though sad, a sweet one because of the plea­ sure it has given and because in imagination the pleasure can be renewed. The end is in the beginning just as the beginning is in the end. Now if you ask me to tell you what I think there is to like in this book of essays, I answer: I don’t pretend to be simply objective. I want to talk with you like one person to another. And I want this book to encapsulate my nature as a thinker and, by its variety, reasoning, humor, and persistence, entice you to participate in my not easily satiable desire to understand, to begin with, for myself, and, to end with, for you, May the two of us live together in an interesting amity at least forever. So far as I’m concerned, the eternity I hope for can begin right now. I’ve enjoyed writing and rewriting this introduction so much that I want to go on writing it even after the book that contains it is published. Oh, well!

chapter 1

The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll

This comparison began in our aesthetics seminar when we were discussing Kant’s theory of genius. Genius, says Kant, gives the rule to art, but since nonsense too can be original, the originality of genius must be such that it produces models, that is, standards or rules for others. This statement led to the question, what would Kant have made of the work of Lewis Carroll, surely a genius in the creation of nonsense, and so, for Kant, I suppose, an impossible, unreal, nonsensical genius. That question led to another, more personal one: If it had not been Alice but Kant who fell down the rabbit hole, how would Kant have reacted? Remember how afraid Alice was that she would fall right through the earth and find people reversed on the other side, with heads on the ground and feet in the air. The answer I gave to the questions was based on a distant memory of what I had written about Kant in The Philosophers. But was my memory of what I had written accurate, and was it based on good sources? To my relief, I found that my memory had not deceived me, that there was an adequate number of references, both to translations and to the German originals as well, and that, with one possible, not very important exception, everything was accurate. I then asked myself if the writings I cited were all from the period of Kant’s philosophical maturity—his Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781, when he was fifty-seven, and his Critique of Judgment in 1797. Between 1796 and 1798, he worked, as it seems, on his long, unfinished, repetitious, and yet original manuscript meant to explain the transcendental transition from metaphysics to physics. By 1800, his physical and intellectual powers were in obvious decline. He died in 1804.

The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll  33

It turns out that all Kant’s views I used to answer the questions on Carroll represent his mature thought. One of his books, the Anthropolog  y, was published in 1797, when he gave up teaching the course for which it had long been the manual. It is in the Anthropolog y that he says that we like to play with our imagination, but, as fantasy, it often plays with us. Dreaming, he says there, is essential to keep us alive, but dreaming while awake is pathological (paraphrased from Gregor’s translation, p. 51). “The offenses (vitia) of imagination consist of inventions that are merely unbridled or downright lawless (effrenis aut perversa)” (translation, p. 56). He explains, “Reading novels—he italicizes the two words—has the result, along with many other mental disorders, of making distraction habitual . . . and the course of our thought becomes fragmentary” (p. 79). The born poet, Kant says, “has a natural tendency to drive care away by playing companionably with his thoughts.—But as far as character is concerned, a peculiarity of the poet is that he has no character: he is capricious, moody, and unreliable (though without malice); he makes enemies wantonly, but without hating anyone, and ridicules his friend bitingly, but without wanting to hurt him. This peculiarity comes from a partly innate predisposition of his eccentric wit, which over-rules practical judgment” (p. 116). Kant’s little book on education (or, as he called it, pedagogy) was a compilation of his notes, of uncertain and possibly different dates, published by his student Rink in 1803. It insists that the child be allowed “perfect liberty,” though not to hurt itself (Churton’s translation, p. 28). It appears that, for Kant, children do hurt themselves by reading novels, that is, writing based on unbridled imagination. He says, “Novel-reading is the worst thing for children, since they can make no further use of it . . . All novels should be taken away from children because, burdening the memory uselessly, it weakens it, and, imprisoning their fancy in an inner romance of their own, there is no exercise of thought in it” (p. 73). (Would Kant have approved of Matilda Jane? the Matilda Jane to whom Carroll writes in a poem: “Matilda Jane, you never look/At any toy or picture book . . . I ask you riddles, tell you tales/But all our conversation fails.)” I can’t answer about Matilda, but I have two final questions to ask and answer: The first is, would Kant have laughed as we laugh at the thought of a serious, self-important philosopher falling into a rabbit hole and undergoing fantastic adventures after he got to its bottom? The second question is, what would he have felt if he imagined himself actually falling down the hole and undergoing the experiences that followed? To help answer these questions, we can turn to Kant’s discussion of play and humor in The Critique of Judgment (paragraph 54, pp. 197–202 in Meredith’s English translation).

34  Chapter One

In discussing play, Kant distinguishes between reason and feeling, that is, between the delight or aversion that depend upon reason and the pleasure and pain that depend, he says, upon the feeling of well-being or ill-being. He says, “The changing free play of sensations (which do not follow any preconceived plan) is always a source of gratification, because it promotes the feeling of health.” I’m sure that this play of sensations is not equivalent to what happens in a story or poem by Carroll. Kant is thinking of games of chance, and of music and humor. Games of chance, he tells us, arouse life in people by arousing all the variety of their emotions. Music and humor are different. These, he says, use the body to gratify the soul and the soul to gratify the body. In music, the play goes from bodily sensation to aesthetic ideas, and then from aesthetic ideas back, with gathered strength, to the body. In joking, the play begins in the understanding. As Kant explains, when the understanding misses what it expects, the sudden release of the tension of expectation frees all the organs of the body to react. Their freedom restores the body’s equilibrium and so benefits health. In non-Kantian terms, when surprised by an incongruity, we laugh and the laughter relaxes us. To show what he means Kant tells jokes. For example: An Englishman sits with an Indian (in India) and opens a bottle of ale, whose froth flows out, to the Indian’s exclamations of astonishment. When the Englishman asks, “What’s so wonderful about it?” the Indian answers, “I’m not surprised at the ale’s getting out, but at how did you manage to get it all in.” The answer is so different from what we have been expecting that the bubble of our expectation bursts and we laugh, and, as always, our laughter pleases us. Another example, which I put very briefly, is this: A person is struck by a misfortune so great that his wig turns grey. Kant explains that the joke momentarily deceives us, the expectation vanishes into nothing, the mind looks back to try to repeat the process of anticipation and deception, and so, “by a rapidly succeeding tension and relaxation, it is jerked to and fro and put in oscillation . . . The oscillation must bring about a mental movement and a sympathetic internal movement of the body,” which tires us but “also affords recreation (the effects of a motion conducive to health).” In this case, Kant’s physiology and psychology are primitive, yet what he explains is enough for us to assume that if he saw or imagined the sight of a, hyper-rationalistic, famous, and highly self-important philosopher he knew— say, Christian Woolf—falling into a rabbit hole or, for that matter, any hole, the vision of this sudden, incongruous loss of dignity would make Kant laugh, without restraint or (much) sense of guilt. Since Kant knew that his philosophy was supplanting that of Woolf and Woolf ’s immediate successors, Woolf ’s fall

The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll  35

into a physical hole would be a suitably symbolic parallel to his falling into a philosophical hole as well. The harder question is, how would Kant react to the thought that it was he, not Woolf, who fell into the hole and then underwent adventures and misadventures like those of Alice? In his memoir of the older Kant, his ex-student and helper Wasianski tells of Kant’s terrible nightmares, in which he felt himself surrounded by thieves and murderers and, on awakening, might mistake his servant coming to calm him for one of the murderers. I do not think we should assume this evidence from Kant’s old age is proof of the nature of his dreams as a younger man. Kant does suggest, as we know, that there can be entertaining dreams, and that dreaming is essential to life. But he would not see a story by Carroll as the equivalent of a dream—and Carroll would back him up. Carroll worked hard on Alice. In its introductory poem, he tells how “the quaint events of the tale of Wonderland” were “hammered out” slowly, “one by one.” In the poem that introduces Through the Looking Glass, Carroll calls the book a fairy tale: to the girl who reads it he writes, “Thy loving smile will surely hail/The love-gift of a fairy-tale.” The poem ends with the assurance that no sigh will “touch with breath of bale/The pleasure of our fairy-tale.” Carroll is referring to regret at the passage of time, but the “breath of bale” can also be attributed to Kant’s dislike, even abhorrence, of the effect of an unfettered imagination on literature. So I conclude that even the mature Kant, who understood the necessity of dreams, would simply refuse to imagine what we asked of him and do his best to deny or forget the reality of falling and of Wonderland adventures. Before I end, I should like to remind you of certain likenesses between Kant and Lewis Carroll, as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson called himself. One likeness is that both were capable, even pioneering scientists. Kant began his academic life with publications in what we now call astrophysics. By a process of still acceptable reasoning, he hypothesized the idea of galaxies as distant collections of stars. Dodgson was, in his time, a leading British mathematician. His specialties were geometry, matrix algebra, and mathematical logic, with which he plays informally in his nonsense writings. Like Kant, he was intellectually inventive—he had many small inventions to his credit, including an ancestor of the word game Scrabble. Kant and Dodgson were friendly persons, but they had a shyness of sexual life that, despite the tentative proposals they made or thought of making, kept them from marriage and family life. In Kant and Dodgson, I guess, this lack stimulated their respective kinds of creativity. As a photographer Dodgson made constant efforts to photograph young girls, as naked or nearly naked as

36  Chapter One

he was allowed. For unknown reasons he suddenly abandoned photography, of which he was a master. And both Kant and Dodgson suffered a good deal from ill health. Kant was sure that his inherited flat chest was the source of his ill health and extreme fear of illness. Disease gave Dodgson a chronically “weak chest,” and he suffered all his life from “hesitation,” as he called his stammer. Since I don’t want to end with a stammer, I will add that it is Carroll’s genius to be able to write nonsense stories and nonsense verse in full consciousness of what he is about (it is the Mad Hatter in Alice, not Carroll, who asks riddles that have no answers). As Carroll writes in The Gardener’s Song (part of Sylvie and Bruno), confusing answers cause the loss of hope: “He [the Gardener] thought he saw an Argument/That proved he was the Pope./He looked again and found it was/A bar of Mottled Soap./‘A fact so dread,’ he faintly said/‘Extinguishes all hope!’ ” Kant’s opposite genius, however, is to be able to insert passages of nonsense within his philosophy without knowing that he is doing so, and certainly without losing hope. True, he is quite capable of writing clearly, but as he acknowledges, his greatest masterpiece, the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, is quite badly written, so that he ventures a second edition, with a preface explaining, as directly and simply as he can, on what principles his philosophy is based and what it is about. Now, Kant like any other human philosopher is unable to be perfectly consistent in either the terms he uses or the unfolding of his thought. (Proclus tries to use the Euclidean method and fails. Spinoza, who gets an A for effort, gets an F for success—he makes many concealed assumptions.) Kant himself runs into difficulties in explaining his own, perhaps convoluted thought, and when he does so in the especially long, convoluted sentences that the German language encourages, the result can sometimes be undecipherable, or require great, uncertain, ambiguous efforts to make sense. Given time and space enough, it should be demonstrated rather than merely stated that Kant is sometimes probably unknowable, comprising an intelligible outer Kant inhabited by a Kant-in-himself. (I offer in partial evidence a book on the difficulties in translating Kant, M. S. Gram, Interpreting Kant, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1982). My conclusion is therefore that Kant’s effort to make the essentially obscure clear is so powerfully activated by his intellectual and verbal genius that he can at times direct scholars into mazes of sentences and paragraphs that have entrances but no exits, words but no clear verbal meanings. Without knowing it, he exercises the hypnotic magic of nonsensical philosophy. The incongruity between the ability of his interpreters and the genial opacity of his text is not laughable because it is revealed not all at once but very slowly if at all. So Kant’s genius has a force equal to Carroll’s but more difficult to elucidate—the ab-

The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll  37

surdity is too obscure and too difficult to codify. Kant is able to out-Kant himself. For a philosopher, the choice between Kant-nonsense and Alice-nonsense is too difficult. The intractable difficulties of the one and invitation to freedom of imagination of the other can both stimulate strong interest and a creative response. Luckily, the choice need not be made, though whose nonsense is more dreamlike, humorous, and relaxing is more than clear. The less than sober among us—though probably all of us are less than sober—are always ready for more nonsense. We are like the children in the poem that introduces Alice. Carroll is tired, the poem tells us, and the wells of his fancy are dry. In his own words: And ever, as the story drained The wells of fancy dry, And faintly strove that weary one To put the subject by, ‘The rest next time’—‘It is next time!’ The happy voices cry.

chapter 2

A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards

When asked what I do, I generally answer that I’m a teacher of philosophy, but when the question is professionally serious, I answer that I’m a cultural comparatist, meaning someone who no­t only thinks by way of comparison, but whose comparisons typically involve a number of cultures. My answer is intelligible but puzzling because there’s no such profession to belong to. Let the dictionary testify: The last edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictio­ nary (2002) has no entry for “comparatism.” It consigns the meaning of “comparatism” mainly to language and literature, and defines “comparativist” as “a student of comparative literature or Linguistics.” But although this authoritative dictionary is not aware of such a profession as cultural comparatist, I have discovered, simply by recalling what I have written over the now many years of my career, that that is what I am. My comparatism (I wish there were a better sounding word for it) reflects my nature, and, for better or worse, it’s my nature because I think that way. Naturally, I defend my way of thinking and want to draw your sympathetic attention to it by emphasizing the rewards that can be gained by defying the intellectual risks the comparatist must undergo. Here I can no more than mention that, apart from philosophy proper, my life as a comparatist has involved the subjects of mystical experience, the psychology of  Western philosophers, what I call the dilemma of context, amoral or Machiavellian politics, and world art. First, I have a word to say on the risks that any comparatist must take. These can be summarized economically because they are always the same. There is very often the same unsettling violation of disciplinary boundaries (which suggests superficiality), the same dependence on the cautious specialists that

A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards  39

the comparatist, who is naturally rash, hopes go beyond, the same need to play down individuality (so as to make comparisons easier), and the same tolerance for one’s own inadequate knowledge, the same hubris. After I spell out the inadequacy somewhat, I will stress the advantages of persisting in spite of it. I will do so in the name of a number of great scholars, of different origins—I will mention only one—who succeeded in creating new, insightfully complex works in which cultural comparison plays a major role. As one discovers by comparing different traditions, cultures, or civilizations, especially the three most influential, the Indian, the Chinese, and the European or Western, humanity as a whole is in every sense richer than any of the cultures or civilizations that constitute it. In any case, the first question I imagine directed at the comparatist is how anyone dares to assume that he or she knows enough to undertake comparisons of, say, Indian, Chinese, and European history, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy, or any such embracing subject. It is not hard to imagine a person who has become approximately tricultural as the result of a tricultural family life, or trilingual as the result of a peripatetic existence, but the problem is not so much the tripling of the need to know languages as the inability of a wouldbe knower to gain a direct, theoretically sufficient knowledge of any extensive subject matter. Once, when my eyes were fresh and my mind untrammeled and all I really wanted to know well was Western philosophy, I tried to work out, by simple arithmetic, how much I could learn if I read intensively for some eight hours a day for some five years. I reached a dismaying conclusion: it would be far from enough for even modern Western philosophy. And considering how many pages some modern philosophers wrote—how did they find the time?—it would be a great accomplishment to learn even a single philosopher really well. Not only did I begin to feel how hard it is to bend one’s understanding to fit that of someone else, someone who had written thousands of pages and made acknowledged and unacknowledged shifts of position and showed all the coherence and incoherence of which a thinker is capable. If a fully adequate knowledge of no more than the primary sources were required, it would be extremely unlikely that anyone could write an account of even modern European political theory, philosophy, or art, or, for that matter, any other broad, complicated subject. To say this is still to err on the side of caution. This is because, as most persons are ready to agree, to know anything well, we need to understand it in its context. This requirement, which I of course accept, can be led to devastatingly sceptical conclusions. The difficulty is that the inventory of

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contextual factors has no end. It always remains possible, and in some perspective true, that our understanding has so far been limited because we have not paid enough attention to context. The more of its contextual features are taken into account, the more distinctive or individual a phenomenon becomes, the closer it appears to approach the theoretical extreme of the process of refining contextual detail, the more nearly unique the phenomenon becomes and the more difficult to compare; at the (impossible) extreme it would be utterly unique, which is to say, utterly incomparable. But then, if it cannot be compared with something else in our experience, how can we possibly know it? The answer is less a matter of theory than of perception and desire. Our descriptions require comparisons, that is, at least, similes and metaphors; our perceptions are made possible by contrasts (without perceived contrasts we would be blind and deaf); our settled vocabulary depends on perceptions that have become prototypical. It is by means of them that I recognize that this is a house, this a person, and this a photograph (whatever the angle of view) of my wife. Besides, our empathies involve the reaction of our mirror neurons, which cause us to feel and react to what we perceive before our intellect has recognized what it is that we are feeling or reacting to—we smile, laugh, or cry immediately and instinctively in response to the smiling, laughing, or crying of someone else we see or hear. Faced with this situation, we generally reach a practical conclusion: We want comprehensive accounts of every field we are interested in, and we in practice know that such accounts can be written only because their authors are ready to cope with their relative ignorance by making use of the work of many other scholars. Unless they were willing to do so, we would be left with nothing but the work of specialists too narrow to see beyond their own specialties; we would be unable to see any subject in a wide, relatively informed perspective. To study the politics or philosophy or art of any tradition or period as a whole, we must be ready to omit a great deal, deliberately restrict context, take more than a little on the authority of others, and try to make clear to ourselves what is of greater and what of lesser importance. The total number of works that can possibly be studied by a scholar who deals with the three great traditions is no greater than the number that can be studied by a scholar of any one of them, so that the selectivity of the comparatist must be greater, as must surely be the dependence on other scholars—the mere linguistic competence needed to read the sources and the scholarly literature on them grows easily beyond any human’s capacity. Faced with impossible demands, comparatists, like the Chinese literati who compared themselves with bamboos, can weather such demands only by bending without breaking.

A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards  41

Let me put all this in a purely personal way by recalling what to all appearances was a critical discussion, which took place in 1939 or 1940. I was then studying for my MA at Harvard, where the teacher who impressed me most was Harry Wolfson (1887–1974). Nothing compels one to believe in the existence of such a scholar. This small, talkative man (who wrote in detail on Crescas, Spinoza, Philo, the Church Fathers, and the Kalaam) lived alone, most of the time, it seems, in his room at the Widener Library at Harvard. In Russia, where he was born, he had shown himself to be a precocious learner and attended several yeshivas. The method of study there was personal, meticulous, analytical, and filled with argument, counterargument, and countercounterargument. Although Wolfson later appeared to be quite secular, even defiantly so, he was sure that the Talmudic was the only method for training scholars to do his kind of meticulous work in the history of philosophy. He as much as said that only renegade Talmudists could be successful scholars of the history of philosophy, Unlike languages, which, he said, were easy to learn, the method was hard and had to be studied under someone who understood it well. To him, the history of thought was an unending struggle between orthodoxy and rationalism, a struggle in which ideas had been taken, stolen, distorted, and used and reused by people who had no idea where they came from. The thought of Spinoza, the philosophical hero who, according to Wolfson, restored philosophical rationalism to human thought, appeared to be original but could all be reconstructed, said Wolfson, from scraps of preceding thought. A master of detail and its place in the broad outlines of the history of Hebrew, Muslim, and Christian philosophy, Wolfson did not live to finish his demonstration of how Philo turned philosophy into theology and Spinoza restored it to philosophy. I had great respect for Wolfson’s mastery of detail in the service of sweeping generalization, and considerable respect for his rhetorical abilities. I took it as a great compliment when, one day in, I think, 1940, Wolfson engaged me in conversation for several hours in the attempt to persuade me to follow him into his own specialty. He argued that it was and would continue to be near impossible for Jews to get teaching positions in philosophy—it turned out that he was wrong—but that specialists of his sort would always be able to find jobs. I must also have felt that for him I might fill the role of a scholar-son. The apparently critical moment was when I refused his suggestion (I say “apparently” because the suggestion went contrary to my already established nature). I refused it because it was too confining; it did not fit my image of myself, who wanted to roam far out of the Hebrew-Greek-Latin-Arabic orbit. Unlike Wolfson, I did not have a gift for languages and felt that the attempt to

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learn the half dozen or so I would need would take too much of my energy and time, and, unlike him, it seemed to me that it was easy to invent “methods” suitable for any intellectual task at hand. By then there already was a large corpus of translations of the main works of Chinese and Indian (non-Buddhist and Buddhist) works of philosophy, and there were many commentaries to go with them. My view was that it would be absurd to try to do over what competent scholars had already done and, by doing so, missing the chance to explore cultural contexts more fully and, by means of perspectives that reflect sociology, anthropology, psychology, and art, arrive at a richer, more adequate understanding. In other words, to exercise my capacities to their utmost, I would have to agree to certain critical forms of ignorance and accept the danger that I would always be in some ways out of my depth. Considering the nature of who was doing it, I thought, my work could still reach a depth of its own. Even if I succeeded, there would always, of course, be a price; but who with any active ambition does not pay one price or another? No work can be completely adequate to the far-reaching ideals that may have given birth to it. I’ve spoken of my original, hardly tractable nature, which caused me to reject Wolfson’s suggestion and to persist in the course I had chosen. To the extent that I can explain this nature, it rests on my initial qualities of forgetfulness, curiosity, and, later, bookishness, and, of course, on my relations with my parents and on the subsequent course of my life, including the force of what must be seen as sheer accident. It was, for example, a sheer accident that my philosophy teacher kindled my interest in Chinese culture by lending me Laurence Binyon’s poetic little book, Flight of the Dragon. What I mean by forgetfulness is the exceptional character or, rather, deficiency of my long-term, autobiographical memory. I learned how deficient it was only later in life, when I could compare it with the often minutely detailed memories of other people. While my immediate memory is normal and my habit-memory lasts long, I forget my personal experience with a speed that would be alarming if I were not so used to it. The past simply turns blank. If I try to recall what happened to me in say, college, I have only very vague general memories, and the same is true of what happed to me last year or even three months ago. I believe that the memory persists but is for the most part unrecoverable, or recoverable only under very special conditions (though I do often remember the general content and physical appearance of books). So my life is perpetually renovated and, written materials excepted, is present­oriented. What may draw me to certain subjects rather than to others is the ease with which they translate into abstractions and do not depend on sharp, particularized memories.

A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards  43

Curiosity, which is endless, works in the opposite direction. Every interesting thought or observation, like every experiment, draws attention to its incompleteness and demands to be continued. So curiosity makes for continuity of thought and a generalized attentiveness. It is also guarantees dissatisfaction with superficial conclusions and evident untruths. Although it can be restricted to specialized studies, its initial effect is to cause observation to be restlessly active. In my case, it makes me disregard the borders between disciplines and cultures and makes it harder for me to play the expert, the person who knows just about everything that is known about a particular subject—the only time I attained something like such a condition was in my doctorate, on the originality of Henri Bergson. As I shift my attention from the writing of one book to that of another, I study only the subject of the current book. For example, having for over ten years concentrated on comparative art, I have tended to forget the hard-­earned information in comparative philosophy that was the subject of my previous book, on which I worked for just as many years. In my case, as in many others, curiosity leads to the predominance of books in one’s life. This began early in my life, thanks too to the influence of my parents. I remember that as a child I finished reading everything that interested me in the children’s wing of the local public library and then moved on to the adult section. I read on everything I could understand and, now and then, on what I could not. In college, I was interested in most of the subjects, and it was only a semi-accident, a recommendation by my teacher of philosophy, that led me to take my MA in philosophy. In terms of my natural interests, I could have taken it in literature, psychology, sociology, or anthropology just as willingly. If I become interested in a subject, I read widely about it and tend to be dissatisfied with any single view of a complex or controversial subject. The willful disregard of boundaries and lack of satisfaction with apparently definitive answers characterize my writing, as does my tendency to dismiss the finality of sharply dichotomous thinking, on the ground (as Chuang-tzu said) that it deprives us of the ability to perceive whatever it has a priori excluded from attention. And if I’d prefer to remain in a principled state of incomplete commitment to any particular doctrine, I’d argue (along with the sixth-century Jain, Siddhasena Divakara) that reality is non-one-sided and no particular view is ever totally wrong. This desire not to exclude from attention too much of human culture accounts for the indignant view I take of the refusal of so many philosophers and departments of philosophy to recognize the interest they ought to take in comparative philosophy. “Ought to take” implies an obligation disregarded, a blindness the practical reasons for which are socioeconomic. I don’t want to

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imply that this blindness is a basic reason for the misunderstandings between nations, because there are no plausible grounds for believing that if, by some miracle, all departments of philosophy would foster comparative philosophy, the peoples of the world would understand one another better and human amity would just as miraculously rule over all humans. Social life is not that simple. However, the lack of interest is a sin against curiosity, caused, I am sure, by intractable habits. The student who takes philosophy seriously is not obliged to study anything about Indian and Chinese philosophy, is not tested in his or her knowledge of it, and makes the natural assumption that teachers of philosophy, who must be ultimate authorities on the matter, regard only Western philosophy as genuinely philosophical. Then, after the graduate student writes a painstaking doctorate of an acceptable kind, how can anyone expect the now accomplished philosopher to disown the philosophical priority of the West that he or she learned to assume and become a beginner again, learning the ABCs of philosophy? Western philosophical habits, fashions, and jobs make comparative philosophy seem to be a merely peripheral specialty, something permissible to departments of religion, whose philosophizing is taken to be laxer, or departments of Asian studies, whose standards are geographical. If so, how can the shift to comparatism ever be made? It is possible that some day the nationalistic impulses of China or India will attach these nations again to their own native philosophies, which the world at large will be influenced to take more seriously. Or it is possible that individual philosophers, someone erudite on principle like Hegel, or mystical like Schopenhauer, or wideranging in interests like Jaspers, will affect philosophical fashion. But who can tell if this will ever take place? The true sin of this neglect is the sin against curiosity, the primal desire to learn more. It is the desire to learn, among other things, whether, or to what extent, the elementary terms “philosophy,” “philosopher,” “school of philosophy,” and “logic” and “logician” have equivalents in the intellectual traditions of the non-Western peoples. It may or may not impress a curiosity-struck Western philosopher that in Indian philosophy there are elaborate lists of fallacies and discussions of sound and unsound modes of argument, including analyses of the types and validity of evidence. Or that there is a branch of the Mimamsa “school” of  “philosophy” (the one headed by Prabhakara) that teaches a Kantlike morality, according to which religious precepts should be carried out not for possible reward or punishment, which are morally irrelevant, but for the sheer consciousness of duty performed. Or that in Indian and Islamic philosophy, time and space are atomized in ways familiar and unfamiliar to the West, while the Chinese are reputed to unify the world by quasi-field theories. Or

A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards  45

that the European problem of causality receives a notable Islamic, a hundred Indian, and a few Chinese forms, reminiscent, respectively, of the Epicurean, Stoic, Neoplatonic, Humean, Kantian, and Hegelian forms. Or that much of Kant’s critical philosophy and Derrida’s deconstruction (Shriharsha [fl. 1150 CE] was a great deconstructor) was anticipated. I will check myself here because the point is not so much analogies or anticipations such as these I have enumerated as the genius of Chinese thought for ethical and aesthetic sensitivity, and the Indian for psychological and epistemological analysis. These, at their best, are so impressive that I find it impossible to believe that a philosopher with the necessary preparation—teaching that appeals equally to the imagination and the intellect—can wander among the non-Western ideas without being exhilarated by the possibilities they open for both constructive and destructive thought. It is also impossible to believe that the positions, arguments, elaborations, and attitudes experienced will not by their varieties and contrasts increase the philosopher’s ability to distinguish and modulate philosophical positions and explore the possibility to discern arguments that lead in the direction of panhuman philosophical understanding. This possibility is one I have been exploring for years in the effort to create an aesthetics open enough to apply without prejudice to the art of all the human traditions. When I ask myself why art has existed everywhere among humans, I have a short and a long answer. The short answer, the only one I can give here, is that art has existed everywhere because it “satisfies the inescapable human hunger for imagined experience in all of its imaginable variations . . . Art is the instrument we use in order to give virtual presence to everything that interests us but is not effectively present enough to overcome the restlessness of an imagination too idle for its own comfort.” Having hinted at the comparatist’s rewards, which I hope the reader already shares or will share, I return to a humbler subject, my personal life. About my parents and my professional experience, I have to be quite elliptical. The life of my parents, especially my father—the sharp clack of whose typewriter, worked by two fingers, always sounded from his room upstairs—made it clear to me that there were only two natural professions, teaching and writing. Both my father and my mother were tolerant of different views. My father, who had been one of a group of young persons in the Ukrainian town of Dunayevtse who, in pursuit of the ideal of a renewed Hebraic culture, came to speak Hebrew to one another even in the streets. Having immigrated to the United States, he continued his practice of teaching Hebrew not by rote but in the same way as children everywhere learn their mother tongues, that is, in Hebrew. Though born

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Running

in the United States (in 1919), I learned Hebrew before I knew English and remember being puzzled that the small children outside would not respond to my “shalom.” In a linguistic and cultural sense, I’ve always felt myself to be somewhat the non-belonger, the between-person, who lives less in a universe than in a social multiverse. While Hebrew and English are equally natural to me, I write in English alone; even the texts of the speeches I deliver in Hebrew, by way of immediate if free translation. I respect the enormous energy that has gone into the creation of religion and philosophy but find that very little of it fits my personal needs; I have to construct my own views. My father’s nationalistic love and religious agnosticism have become a knowledge collector’s passion to gather and master all I can by means of comprehensive, many-sided understanding and whatever empathy comes naturally to me. By nature, desire, habit, and, in the end, necessity, I became a scholar, sunk in a variety of books studied simultaneously in Jewish and secular schools. I got BAs from both Jewish and secular institutions, an MA in philosophy from Harvard, where I met Harry Wolfson, in 1940, and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia in 1942. In 1955, at the invitation of an institute for higher learning then attached to the municipality of  Tel-Aviv but destined to become the University of  Tel-Aviv, my wife and I migrated to Israel (her father, the philosopher and poet Israel Efros, was its head). At first the only teacher of philosophy at the future university, I became the founder and, for many years, the chairman of its department of philosophy. I also served briefly as the university’s vice­rector. Since 1988, I have been a professor emeritus. Although I retired many years ago and most of the younger teachers hardly know me, the department of philosophy bears the clear impress of my personality. This is because it is

A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards  47

Child and dog trying to touch a low cloud, 1990

ruled by no dogma, because the students’ interests are kept sympathetically in mind, and because the range of subjects is unusually wide. Indian and Chinese philosophy are recognized as specialties and taught in both elementary and advanced classes; the elementary ones have had hundreds of students. I continue to teach a single seminar, always in the subject about which I am at the time writing. This year, 2008, a wide-ranging book called Art without Borders: A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity will be published by the University of Chicago Press. In a schematic self-characterization that appears toward the end of A Comparative History of World Philosophy (1985) I sum up my relevant weaknesses as “inadequate command of languages and mathematical logic” and a

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“tendency to disregard cultural and disciplinary boundaries (attempts at rash comparisons and syntheses), relative lack of fear of error, incomplete freedom from biases.” I then sum up what I take to be my relative strengths. These, which turn out to be mostly identical with the weaknesses, are “broad interests (art, music, literature, psychology, and the exact and social sciences), tendency to disregard cultural and disciplinary boundaries (attempts at far-reaching comparisons and syntheses), relative lack of fear of error, relative freedom from cultural and disciplinary biases.” I should add, I suppose, that I continue to live in a perpetual wonderland of ideas whose interest I point out in writing and teaching to the best of my ability.

chapter 3

A Handful of Rules against Philosophical Self-Isolation

For a long time, philosophers were free to include anything that interested them in their philosophies. What in the world did not interest Plato and Aris­ totle? In spite of problems with censorship, a wide freedom to choose subject matter remained usual in modern philosophy. Descartes wrote on music, the psychology of emotions, mathematics, and medicine. Early in his career, Kant published a treatise on the evolutionary development of the universe. Hegel tried to formulate the hierarchical interrelationships of everything with every­ thing. But when the universities came to demarcate each discipline in relation to the others, philosophy developed into a relatively detached, self-sufficient, often highly specialized discipline that could be mistaken for no other. But the human impulse to philosophize suffers when philosophy forgets its origins in undemarcated thought and limits its curiosity to what academic philosophers are arguing about. I have therefore written this polemic against the exclusion from philosophy of nonphilosophical subject matter, against the exclusion of non-European philosophy, and against the hubris that sets a favored philoso­ phy above all the others, on a Parnassus of its own. My polemic is organized in the form of a handful of categorical rules, five in number. The rules are these: 1. Do not cut off philosophical problems from their historical context, their contemporary context, or their context in your own life. 2. Do not be taken in by the claim of any tradition that its philosophical or theological thought is generally superior to that of all other traditions.

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3. Reject the conviction that any particular person or school has arrived at the one true philosophy. 4. Avoid a harshly exclusive sense of what is relevant to philosophy. Do not isolate philosophy from other disciplines or sciences. 5. Suspect words. Remain aware of the danger of thinking in abstractions and antitheses. Keep actual persons and inconvenient examples in mind. Now that I’ve begun, let me look at you for a moment. You replace the au­ dience of students to whom I lectured for many years when I taught the in­ troduction to philosophy in this very room, Gilman 144. You’re older on the whole than they were, and you’re different. It also strikes me that both you and I are experiencing a speech given by someone of ninety, which is old even for a philosopher. I once heard such a speech, delivered by the philosopher Charles Hartshorne, a devoted lover of birds. His slight, quick body was birdlike, and his thin voice seemed almost to be chirping. Like him, I’m interested in bird­ song as art, but instead of a bird lover, I’m a comparatist, someone devoted to comparative culture, especially in the form of comparative philosophy and comparative art. Having introduced myself in my own way, I turn to the rules against philo­ sophical isolation. The first rule insists on the importance of contexts, histori­ cal, contemporary, and personal. Of course contexts are essential to anyone who wants to know what the original meaning of a text may be or the point of some elusive controversy. One needs to learn to enter into the thought of philosophers very different from oneself and one another. How, unless you had studied his life and read his letters, could you know why Nietzsche attacked Christianity with such fervor, even though his father, whom he adored, had been a devout pastor? The answer, one learns, is that his father had died of a brain disease when Nietzsche was six. This made Nietzsche fear that he had inherited an early death from his father, who had given him everything of value, he said, except life. The second rule is not to be taken in by the claim of any tradition that its thought is generally superior to that of all others. Each of the great living tradi­ tions has developed the view that, having the best of all possible origins and speaking to the best of all possible purposes in the best of all languages, it is the bearer of the greatest of all truths. This exaggeration is common to India, China, Japan, and Greece and Rome and their Western sequel, European phi­ losophy. Naturally, each of the three monotheistic faiths has developed both philosophical and antiphilosophical views.

A Handful of Rules against Philosophical Self-Isolation  51

It is the faith of the West in its philosophical superiority that explains why comparative philosophy has remained a peripheral specialty, relegated to de­ partments of religion, whose philosophical standards are taken to be laxer, or to departments of Asian studies, whose standards are geographical. Unlike India just now, China, which has a growing pride in its intellectual heritage, is teach­ ing itself its native philosophy in its universities. The idea often expressed in the West, even by eminent thinkers, that the only truly philosophical tradition is the Western, is no more than an absurd error. The genius of Chinese thought for ethics and aesthetics and of Indian thought for psychological and epistemo­ logical analysis are so impressive that I find it impossible to believe that a phi­ losopher who had studied them with good teachers could wander among these non-Western ideas without being exhilarated by the possibilities they opened for both constructive and destructive (skeptical) thought, and, most of all, by the prospect of beginning to create a panhuman philosophical tradition. The third rule, related to the second, is to reject the idea that any particular person or school has arrived at the one true philosophy. This rule goes well beyond the complacent acceptance of whatever philosophy is fashionable at the moment. It runs counter to the assertiveness that expresses a thinker’s pride in his or her creative ability. Yet if the history of philosophy teaches anything, it teaches that there is not, never has been, and cannot be any uniquely true philosophy—a statement harder to make of an exact science, such as math­ ematics. The procession of philosophers who have proclaimed that in their thought humanity has at last attained the correct basis or fundamental method for philosophy is as sad as it is comical. Heidegger as much as says that, except for himself (and Hölderlin, the poet from whom he wants to learn to go beyond philosophy), there has been no philosopher after the Presocratics who has had any truly penetrating insight. In one of Heidegger’s expressions, no later phi­ losopher has arrived at “a thinking that instead of furnishing representations and concepts, experiences and tests itself as a transformation of its relatedness to Being.”1 Heidegger’s implied self-praise is only a culminating instance of the narcissistic aggrandizement that blinds those who proclaim or accept it. This holds even for the great Kant, the great Hegel, and the great Wittgenstein. Plato was wiser in his dialogues in making a different drama out of each of them and, in the Parmenides, in turning the self-righteous Socrates into a callow beginner. Aristotle was wiser too, in always varying and improving his views and searching, like a scientist, for empirical evidence. Montaigne, who knew everything about human pride and mutability, was much wiser. And if I were to classify some scientists as philosophers as well, I’d add Darwin.

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Aristotle’s search for empirical evidence and the example of Darwin lead me to the fourth rule: Avoid a harshly exclusive sense of what is relevant to philosophy. Do not isolate philosophy from other disciplines or sciences. At this point I raise my eyes from my text and take another look at you. I want to make out if you are smiling or frowning. Against the spirit of my own rules, I’ve made sweeping generalizations practically devoid of evidence, as if, like the god Shiva, I could by will alone destroy and recreate philosophy. With the help of examples, I will now make what amends I can in discussing the fourth and fifth rules. Back, then, to the fourth rule: Avoid a harshly exclusive sense of what is relevant to philosophy. Do not isolate philosophy from disciplines or sciences, social, physical, or mathematical, that might cast light on its problems. Follow the audacious claims of cosmologists and the advances of brain researchers. I mention brain researchers because they have given insights into aesthetics, a subject that interests me in particular. My main mentor among them has been Semir Zeki, who, along with Chuang-tzu (Zhuangzi), is one of the two prin­ cipal heroes of this speech. An expert in the visual areas of the brain, Zeki works at the neurobiological laboratory of University College, London. He is the best-known exponent of neuroaesthetics, which studies creativity as a manifestation of the workings of the brain. Zeki’s experiment that I am about to describe uses functional MRI (f MRI), which requires the person being tested to lie in a narrow, claustrophobic tube penetrated by the loud, intermittent noise of its electromagnets. f MRI mea­ sures the changes in the flow of blood that supplies active nerves with the oxy­ gen carried in hemoglobin. The experiment’s aim is to clarify how the brain is involved in choosing between visual beauty and ugliness.2 The experimenters begin by asking the same questions, they say, as Kant asks in his Critique of Aes­ thetic Judgment. In their words, “What are the conditions implied by the exis­ tence of the phenomenon of  beauty (or its absence) and of consciousness (or its absence) and what are the presuppositions that give validity to our esthetic judgments?” They add their own assumption that the answers “must be an activation of the brain’s reward system with a certain intensity.” What they discovered was that when their subjects (university students with no special experience in painting or art theory) viewed paintings they felt were beautiful, ugly, or neutral, their choices were consistently reflected in the placement and intensity of reaction in a particular area of the brain. Each of the students was shown paintings of various kinds briefly on a computer monitor. Each then watched the same paintings, their order now randomly different, in the f MRI scanner and pressed one of three buttons to

A Handful of Rules against Philosophical Self-Isolation  53

indicate whether the picture was beautiful, ugly, or neutral. Whether judged beautiful or ugly, the portraits and landscapes showed up especially clearly in the brain regions specialized, respectively, for faces and places. Pictures judged to be beautiful produced the highest degree of activity in an area (the orbitofrontal cortex) known to be activated by rewarding stimuli, and produced the lowest degree in another area (the motor cortex). Ugly pictures had the op­ posite effects in both areas. The beauty and ugliness of pictures were therefore proved to involve the same areas and show a visual beauty-ugliness judgment continuum. But other areas or regions were also activated by looking at pic­ tures. One of the regions (the anterior cingulate) that reacted to differences between beautiful and neutral has been associated with the emotional states of romantic love, of the viewing of sexually arousing pictures, and of the pleasure of listening to music. The motor cortex, which is most sensitive to ugliness, is also activated by the conscious transgression of social norms, by fearful voices and faces, and by anger. The experimenters conclude that there is a clear link­ age between the aesthetic sense and the emotions. They are, however, puzzled why the beautiful does not activate the motor system as much as does the ugly. Zeki points out that hardly anything is known about how and where the aesthetic experience arises or about the neurology that underlies the emotional experience that it arouses.3 As for consciousness, he points out that it is so di­ vided and subdivided in space, time, and function that its unity in the perceiv­ ing person seems utterly remarkable. All the various consciousnesses need to be bound to one another not only because of their different sources—different micro­consciousnesses—but also because these sources, each of which has a partial autonomy, perceives at a different speed—color is perceived first, form second, and motion third.4 The unified consciousness, the “I” of the perceiving person, is at the apex of a whole hierarchy of consciousnesses.5 Semir Zeki sees the whole tribe of artists as, in practice, students of neurol­ ogy. In his words, “Artists are neurologists, studying the organization of the visual brain with techniques unique to them.” Zeki is especially happy with Mondrian’s art. In his eyes, Mondrian’s intersecting vertical and horizontal lines create objective, universal beauty by reducing all forms to their constant elements, lines “that exist everywhere and dominate everything.” He is still fas­ cinated by watching the cells in the visual cortex as they respond, time after time, with their sensitivity to horizontal stimuli alone or vertical stimuli alone. To him, Mondrian’s insistence on vertical and horizontal is analogous to the orientation-selective cells that “are the physiological building blocks for the neural elaboration of forms” and allow the nervous system to represent more complex forms. His experiments, he says, are “an important neurological

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vindication of the efforts of Mondrian and others to put on canvas the constant elements of all forms and colors.”6 Many of the experiments on aesthetic preference use relatively simple means and at times reach conclusions that seem immediately plausible. Though en­ couraging, this plausibility may be deceptive, because later experimenters usu­ ally (or is it always?) find flaws in their predecessors’ work, propose alternative research strategies, and reach different conclusions. It is only by fault finding and slowly cumulative approximations that the experiments can become really convincing. I go on now to experiments that distinguish between the reactions to art of right-handed persons—about 90 percent of all humans—and those of lefthanded persons. All but 3 percent of the right-handers have their basic lan­ guage and speech centers in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the areas for skilled hand movement and for the articulation of speech adjoin one another. For these people, the left hemisphere is that of grammar, semantics, and lexi­ cography, which it uses to help fix the sequential logic of speech and thought. It uses this logic to solve problems, explain, and make excuses. Along with the logic of speech, it controls the right hand and fingers. It also processes the in­ formation of the right visual field of both eyes (the right visual field because each hemisphere processes half of the visual field of both the right eye and the left eye). Left-handers are much more variable than right-handers. Most often their speech center, like that of the right-handers, is in the left hemisphere of the brain; only about 25 percent have it in the right. The right hemisphere is more concerned with orientation in space, with emotions and music, and with the recognition of objects, notably, of faces. It is often thought to be the more holis­ tic or global of the hemispheres. Also, it governs the left hand and fingers, and it processes data from the left visual field. I regret that this too-brief summary of right and left does not reflect the still bewildering complexity of the brain.7 From the standpoint of both artists and spectators, what follows from the great preponderance of right-handed people is that the right side of pictures draws more attention than the left and is favored over it. For many left-handed people, the reverse is true. A survey of 2,124 paintings made from the four­ teenth to the twentieth century shows the main subject matter mostly on the right, the source of light mostly on the left, and other directional cues that go from left to right. Left-handed painters, Leonardo da Vinci and Hans Holbein among them, preferred the main subject matter on the opposite, left, side, and the source of light and other directional cues that go from right to left.8

A Handful of Rules against Philosophical Self-Isolation  55

Among the experiments on the differing reactions of the hemispheres, there is one that, in spite of (inevitable) incompleteness, leads to a conclusion that, if correct, dramatically simplifies our understanding of the difference between reactions to realistic and unrealistic art.9 This experiment relies on the now standard method of projecting pictures separately to the right and left visual fields, A student engaged in the experiment begins by fixing his or her eyes on a small white cross in the center of a screen. Each of the pictures is then projected either to the right or left of the screen for a moment so brief that the viewer’s eyes cannot move significantly and involve the opposite visual field. In the experiment in question, forty well-known works of art were projected from the “schools,” as the experimenters call them, Renaissance, Baroque, Im­ pressionism, Modernism (a vague category), Expressionism, Cubism, Abstract, and Pop. The viewer then pressed one of five keys, graduated from “do not like” to “like very much.” As it turned out, the older, more realistic group of pictures was almost equally preferred by both visual fields (and hemispheres). How­ ever, the newer pictures, often with figures expressively distorted, colors more pure and intense, and shapes fully abstract, were preferred when viewed with the right visual field (and left hemisphere). The contrast may be explained by other research that shows that the left hemisphere tends to react more posi­ tively than the right—when one’s gaze is directed to the right, photographs are judged more favorably than when it is directed to the left. Furthermore, the two hemispheres react differently to color. While both hemispheres react similarly to the older, more realistic group of pictures, the right field of vision favors the modern, unrealistic, or abstract group because (it is supposed) it is more sur­ prising, starker, and brighter. The fifth, last rule is this: Suspect words. Remain aware of the danger of thinking in abstractions and antitheses. Always keep actual persons and incon­ venient examples in mind. The Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu points out that in our minds words are like the members of a picturesquely varied crowd we’re lucky to have to enjoy, but there is no good reason to make choices between the alternatives put into words—to divide by posing alternatives is to lose everything that is neither of them. Words, says Chuang-tzu, do not express anything real. As labels, they limit us because, like badly fitting clothes (this is my image), they are apt to misshape and misidentify what is clothed in them. Humans do not fit into the abstract categories that are invented to keep them orderly in action and thought. To take aesthetic or moral categories as universal or absolute is to falsify and impoverish nature, especially human nature. And dichotomous concepts are

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See you soon, 1990

as dependent on one another’s meanings as are the words “left” and “right,” or “up” and “down,” or, to use a usual philosophical example, as “relative” and “absolute.” The relative and the absolute conjoin in the sense that each of them alone is an empty concept and, to be thought about usefully, need always to be understood together. Take ordinary optical perspective as an example. By a fixed geometrical law, we see everything we look at in a geometrical perspective that shifts as we shift our positions. Shift as we may, it’s impossible to see a building (or anything) except from a particular perspective. Yet we accept its architect’s plan as or­ dinarily an objective representation of the building’s objective geometrical structure. We also concede that the appearance of the building, while always relative to the position of its viewer, is relative in just the same way to all equally tall persons who stand in the same position. But complications arise when we discover that everyone’s eyes are in fact different, that three-dimensional vision does not really follow the rules of Euclidean geometry, that physics regards the

A Handful of Rules against Philosophical Self-Isolation  57

My wife, Ghela, 2013

Euclidean geometry of relatively small objects as only a close approximation under familiar conditions of their true, non-Euclidean shapes, and that Ein­ stein’s relativity theory (itself not relative) tells us that shapes and angles de­ pend on the observer’s frame of reference. And what current physics takes to be the shapes and angles of objects is subject to doubts and possible corrections,

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Keep in touch, 1990

which entangle relative and absolute considerations inextricably. Therefore the truth as a comprehensive but humanly accessible ideal can be neither rela­ tive nor absolute alone, but only both at once. My five rules with their explanations and examples are now finished. I can only hope that Semir Zeki, Chuang-tzu, and I have succeeded in exemplifying the kind of philosophy we have recommended. I want to add that my wife— she’s here, and you can identify her by her green shoes—said to me that she likes the speech, but I said, “No, it’s the audience,” you, “that has to decide.” I’d like it if it really changed the mind of even a single person.

chapter 4

What Death Makes of Philosophy

I’ve heard that it’s hard to evade death. To judge by the energy that philosophers have put into denying that death is final or affirming that it is unimportant, they have taken the possibility of dying seriously. Our individual experience with dying, of others and implicitly of ourselves, is of course quite varied. I was lucky not even to have seen a corpse until I was in my early teens. My reaction was strong. I felt for a while that I would never be happy again. This mood was coupled with the terror (I know now to be usual) of a state the experience of which is incomprehensible because totally opaque to consciousness. My father, tired of a life that had become too painful, died with resignation. His last words were “This is surely the end.” In contrast, my father-in-law, a poet and philosopher, whom I saw for the last time the day before his death, kept repeating “Save me! Save me!” This meant, as I understood it, that he felt his life unfinished as long as he still had poetry to write—the experience of its creation was reason enough for him to insist on continuing to live. If my meager experience is not misleading, it seems that the process of dying, though universal, is reacted to in individual ways. That leads me to a word on individuality. I have to say it, because by aiming to make plausible generalizations I incur the danger of forgetting how individual philosophers are. Later on, when I discuss Hume and Kant, I will use context and empathy to come closer to the individual. This prospect releases me to make my first generalization, a mere truism: Every philosopher and philosophy is individual. Since I do not know of any individual person or creation that is exempted from affect, that is, emotion or mood, I hazard my second generalization: There is no philosophy devoid of affect.

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The differing tone, tempo, structure, analytic style, turns of thought, illustrative examples, and similes and metaphors that characterize different philosophies are evidence of the many different ways in which the affect can come to expression. What is it that most obviously leads to the differences in the forms that philosophies take? The answer is, of course, the philosophers’ different natures, from birth itself, and, of course, the difference in their surroundings and development from childhood on, including the effect on them of their teachers. A philosopher-to-be may even inherit philosophy from a philosopher-parent, for example, John Stuart Mill from James Mill, and William James from his father, Henry. But a philosopher’s inheritance is surely not of philosophical abstractions alone. Since death is my subject, I recall the effect of illness and death. Descartes feared he had inherited pallor, weak lungs, and a probably early death from his mother. Kant assumed he had inherited a narrow chest and consequent weakness and hypochondria from his mother. William James may have felt his breakdown to be a repetition of his father’s. Bertrand Russell tried to imagine the presence of his hardly remembered parents, but he lived parentless, deeply lonely, and thinking often of suicide, from which he was saved, he says, by his interest in mathematics. Such heritages of fear and absence result in an underlying fear or resentment because the parent, the source and support of life, is felt to be also the source of loneliness, weakness, or death. Nietzsche’s life and thought give dramatic evidence. As a little child, he would watch his father at work. When he cried, his father would play the piano for him, and he would sit still and upright in his carriage, his eyes fixed on his beloved father. Unfortunately, the father, a pastor, died of a brain disease when Nietzsche was only four. Later, in elementary school, Nietzsche became known as “The Little Pastor,” no doubt because of his solemnity and his expressive recitation from the Bible. His love for music grew and, like his father, he would improvise movingly on the piano. Once when sick, he wrote to his mother, “When I don’t hear music, everything seems dead to me.” In the many autobiographical sketches he wrote during his youth, he commemorates his father’s virtues and mourns the sudden, bitter catastrophe of his death. For a long time Nietzsche remained afraid that he would die at the same age as his father, thirty-six. His early desire to become a pastor, like his father, changed radically, and he bitterly denounced the Christianity his father had taught. When, for example, in The Antichrist he said (1.5) that Christianity has waged deadly war against the higher type of man, “sided with all that is weak and base,” and has “made an ideal of whatever con-

What Death Makes of Philosophy  61

tradicts the instinct of the strong to preserve itself,” he was preparing himself psychologically to make an open criticism of his father.1 In Ecce Homo (“Why I Am So Wise,” sect. 3) he again praises his father, attributes to him whatever he, Nietzsche, has of “privileges,” but adds—this is his open criticism—“not including life, the great Yes to life.”2 (I owe it to my readers to recall that, years ago, when I put this explanation of Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity before a small group of Nietzsche experts, they all, spontaneously—without argument—rejected it. Because I thought and continue to think that the evidence I gave shows that I was right, I attribute the experts’ opposition to their disinclination to change their hard-won images of Nietzsche. The curious reader will find my full argument in the chapter on Nietzsche in The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought.) Like Descartes and the others I’ve mentioned, every philosopher was once a child whose deeper questions were exacerbated by some fear or loneliness, most profound when caused by the absence or early death of parents. Remember that a mother’s moods, the rhythm of  her heart, and the modulation of  her voice may influence even an unborn child. Remember, too, how the sensitive interchange of information between mother and infant makes each become the other’s echo and frame of reference. A helpful, responsive relation with parents breeds trust, a poor, unresponsive one, distrust. Such trust or distrust is expressed in adult life as the willingness or unwillingness to believe in others and, generally, in the world. Because we philosophers often make far-reaching assumptions, maybe you will not disallow the possibility that a mother’s insecure arms may be later translated into a world that is insecure, in which the person, like Alice in her hole, falls deeper and deeper. My third generalization is therefore: A child is affected for life by the nature of its parents’ presence or absence. I have committed myself to give relatively developed examples of how affective states color a philosopher’s thought. The first example is that of Immanuel Kant’s hypochondria; the second is that of David Hume’s long depression. The first example leads to another, fourth generalization (restricted to Kant’s writings): Kant’s hypochondria, considered along with its causes, was a major, perhaps indispensable influence on his theory of the co-presence of universal causation with freedom. The second example, of Hume, leads me to my fifth generalization (restricted to Hume’s writings): Hume’s depressive period, along with its causes, was a major, perhaps indispensable influence on his belief that there is no necessary connection between causes and effects or between perceptions. Yet Hume believes that human choices and actions, like external events, always have causes. We do experience volitions, he says, but

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there are always reasons for them. Hume holds, to put it as an anti-Kantian maxim, that no act is done from a sense of duty alone. His moral theory stresses the role of “sympathy,” his term for what is now called empathy, the ability to participate in the pains and pleasures of others. The evidence justifying my generalization on Kant begins with the effect on him of his parents. They were exceptionally decent, peace-loving, and proper. His father, who taught him above all to avoid lies, died when Kant was twentyone. Kant loved him, but he adored his pious mother, who had died when he was only thirteen. She had taught him to identify plants, told him what she knew of the structure of the heavens, and impressed on his mind a reverence for the Creator, opening his heart, as Kant says, to the impressions of nature and exerting a lastingly wholesome influence on his life. He could never forget that it had been her kindness that had literally killed her. This happened when, to persuade a seriously ill neighbor woman to take some medicine, she tasted it first, using a spoon that had been in the ill woman’s mouth. What Kant tells about his parents, especially his mother, is easy to associate with the well-known passage in the Critique of Practical Reason (at the start of its conclusion): Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe . . . the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me . . . I see them before me and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence . . . The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense . . . The latter, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as that of an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals a life independent of all animality and of the whole world of sense.3

Despite Kant’s view of his parents, he does not see childhood as happy. In his lectures on education he says that our youthful years are the most troublesome because we are under strict discipline, can rarely choose our friends, and still more rarely can we have our freedom. Yet he does not seem eager to make children’s lives any happier. He wants them strictly (though not “slavishly”) disciplined and complains that playing with them “like monkeys, singing to them, caressing, kissing, and dancing with them” make them self-willed and deceitful and shames their parents. It is clear that Kant distrusts unstructured thought. In the lectures published as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, he states that it is useful to observe in ourselves reflections of the kind that are necessary for logic and metaphysics. He goes on:

What Death Makes of Philosophy  63

But to try to eavesdrop on ourselves when they occur in our mind unbidden and spontaneously . . . is to overturn the natural order of the cognitive powers, because then the principles of thinking do not come first. . . . If it is not already a form of mental illness (hypochondria), it leads to this and to the lunatic asylum.4

According to Kant, for a scholar, orderly abstract thinking “is a means of nourishment, without which, when he is awake and alone, he cannot live.” Philosophical thinking fully interested in the absolute unity that is ultimate goal of reason bears with it a feeling of power that compensates in part “for the bodily weakness of old age by means of the rational appreciation of the value of life.”5 Sadly for Kant, in spite of all the effort he put into orderly abstract thinking, he was always, as he says, a natural hypochondriac, a condition he describes in vigorously emotional detail. He tried to master this predisposition by turning his thoughts and actions away from it and ordering his life so rigorously that his health came to be, he thought, a work of art created by himself. But in time, his full fear of death became more and more evident. He talked with great interest about hygiene, diet, and the prolongation of life, and he shared every change of his condition with his friends. He would get the latest mortality statistics from the chief of the Königsberg police and each time recalculate his own life expectancy, and he memorized and was ready to recite a list of men who had enjoyed a long life. Concerned at the effect of the direction of the wind on his health, he would often take a look at the weathervane and, for caution’s sake, would often check the thermometer, barometer, and hygrometer and open a window for brief moments to test the exact quality of the air. Sweating alarmed him. When he walked outside and felt that he was on the verge of sweating, he would linger in a shadow until the danger had passed. For the sake of his health, he trained himself to breathe through the nose alone. And at night, to avoid what he thought the danger of getting up when thirsty, he would expand his chest to drink in the air instead. When I describe these ritualistic defenses against death, I wonder if you feel, as I do, a philosopher’s sense of insult that so great and so resourceful a philosopher became so imprisoned in his web of irrational beliefs and expedients. How much of the energy that went into the construction of his conceptual edifices may have been derived from his struggle against death? Was there a possible relation between the extreme demands his philosophy sometimes makes, most evident in his ethics, and his growing alienation from others and perhaps himself ? Is there a relationship between his compulsions

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and his unrelenting insistence on the correctness and completeness of  his table of categories? Of all the questions of this sort, I will take up only two, which I join and make an attempt to answer. The first question is on the effect of his parents’ views on his doctrines, especially his moral rigorism. The other is on the unpersuasiveness, as I take it to be, of his doctrine of the thing in itself, which is, affectively, as I believe, a defense of this rigorism, that is, of his parents. Before I take up this defense, I should recall that (as I suppose you may know) Kant in his old age became an embittered misanthrope troubled by dreams in which he was surrounded by thieves and murderers. If it were not immoral, he might take his life, he said (though he still looked forward to the return of the bird that sang near his window and still anticipated his eightieth birthday, which he did not live to celebrate). The contrast of his end with that of David Hume, whose philosophy awakened Kant’s, could not be greater. Kant believed in the unknown, unknowable thing in itself because, he declared, it would be absurd for appearances not to be the appearances of something. Disputes in his own time and later show that Kant might have adopted a more easily defensible view, like that of the Neo-Kantians who held that we can approach more and more closely to the absolute truth that we can never quite attain. Kant, however, needed to keep appearances in diametrical opposition to reality. To do this he fell back on his “principle of the transcendental analytic,” by which all occurrences in the world of sense accord with invariable natural law. If freedom is possible, he asks, does every effect in the world arise either from nature or freedom, or simultaneously from both, each in a different relation? But to presuppose the absolute reality of appearances, he says, confuses reason. For if appearances are things in themselves, then freedom cannot be saved . . . If, on the other hand, appearances do not count for any more than they are in fact, namely . . . only for mere representations connected in accordance with empirical laws, then they themselves must have grounds that are not appearances. Such an intelligible cause, with its causality, is outside the series; its effects, on the contrary, are encountered in the series of empirical conditions. The effect can therefore be regarded as free in regard to its intelligible cause, and yet simultaneously, in regard to appearances, as their result according to the necessity of nature.6

Of the need, his need, to believe in an unprovable God and an unprovable immortality, Kant says: “Our belief in a God and another world is so interwoven

What Death Makes of Philosophy  65

with my moral disposition that I am in as little danger of ever surrendering the former as I am worried that the latter can ever be torn away from me.”7 Such defenses of the thing in itself and of  belief in God are not in themselves highly convincing. But they convince Kant because they make it possible for him to pair the phenomena of the world in fact with the hopes conceived by “reason,” which make his own ideals plausible and give the memory of  his parents, the first source of these ideals, a halo of optimism. Put it this way: If appearances are things in themselves and there is no freedom, then the world in which his mother died because of helping a friend and in which her goodness and his father’s decency and truthfulness are unrewarded and his own endless thought and endless self-rule consists of no more than brute, intolerable facts. Kant knew that his parents’ dignity, which he cherished as his inheritance from them, depended on their freedom to think and act as they thought morally right. From the affective standpoint I have been expressing, Kant was misled by his need to defend his own hopes and his parents’ honor. In contrast, Hume’s psychophysical struggle did not lead him to philosophical extravagance but to a view of the human mind as a republic made up of different, possibly changing members and rules—a conception that fits contemporary neurobiology relatively well. Furthermore, Hume believed, as Kant could not, that everything in his philosophy was subject to empirical correction. Who was this Hume, and what do I mean by speaking of his freedom from philosophical extravagance? He suffered the death of his father when he was two. He remembered his mother, who survived until he was thirty-four, as a “woman of singular Merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educating of her children.” When she grew ill, he refused for a time to leave her. Her death affected him very deeply. Hume’s life shows how strongly a depressive mood may color the nature of an entire book of philosophy. The book I mean is A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume’s first and most famous work. Hume formed it during a period that included some nine months when he was in the grip of a severe depression. He thought about what was to become the treatise, he says, before he was fifteen, planned it before he was twenty-one, and wrote it before he was twenty-five. In a letter he wrote in 1734, when he was twenty-three, to an anonymous physician, he tells of the depression he had fallen into for nine months, when he was collecting basic materials for many books. He had been “infinitely happy” over his earlier decision to give up law in favor of scholarship and philosophy. “However, about the beginning of September 1729,” he goes on, “all my Ardor seemed in a moment to be extinguisht, & I cou’d no longer raise my Mind to that pitch, which formerly gave me such excessive pleasure.” He attributes

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this long “distemper,” as he calls it, to the reading of books by writers such as Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, filled with moral exhortations. “I was continually fortifying myself,” he writes “with Reflections against Death, & Poverty, & Shame, & Pain, & all the other Calamities of Life.” He explains that his condition, which resembles that described in the writings of French mystics and some English “fanatics,” is “a Coldness & Desertion of the Spirit, which frequently returns.” He writes: My Disease was a crule Incumbrance on me. I found that I was not able to follow any Train of Thought, by one continued Stretch of View, but by repeated interruptions, & by Refreshing my Eye from Time to Time upon other Objects. Yet with this Inconvenience I have collected the rude Material for many Volumes; but in reducing these to Words, when one must bring the Idea he comprehended in gross, nearer to him . . . I found impracticable for me, nor were my Spirits equal to so severe an Employment.8

It is not psychologically surprising that the breaks in Hume’s thought, that is, his inability to follow any train of thought for long without distraction, and his repeated feeling of “Desertion of the Spirit” (in clinical language, depersonalization) were the background of his doctrine that the mind is not a substance but a series of perceptions whose sequences were often wearying, discouraging, or frightening. It was his sense that his cohesiveness and even reality could be almost extinguished that allowed him to dare to adopt the extreme view that the mind has no uniting principle but “is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity” (1.4.6). Projected on the world outside him, the breaks, the need to “refresh the eye upon other objects” in order to renew his interest in the subject and in life were the background of his enthusiasm for the similar doctrine (which he found in Malebranche) that it is not inherent necessity but mere habit that links causes with effects. That is, his experience of a world the cohesiveness of which is not constant in perception or emotion encouraged him to accept the view that there is no real, necessary connection between cause and effect, so that the world is not the product of any purpose and is seen and felt as if it had been, so to speak, derealized, deprived of its powers. To Hume, these observations are the result of careful observation, and his letter comes to the conclusion, to which he always remained faithful, that science and morality must be based on an experientially validated science of psychology. In his own words: “There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man. . . . And as the science of man

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is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give to this science must be laid on experience and observation.”9 Readers of the Treatise of Human Nature may be taken aback by passages in which Hume recalls his fear of the depressive condition of which the book is, at least in part, the hard-won result. He really means it when he says in his conclusion: My memory of past errors and perplexities, makes me diffident for the future. The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehensions . . . This . . . view of my danger strikes me with melancholy; and as ’tis usual for that passion, above all others, to indulge itself; I cannot forbear feeding my despair, with all those desponding reflections, which the present subject furnishes me with in such abundance . . . I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy . . . I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me.10

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, a revised, more urbane version of The Treatise, was more appropriate to Hume’s later, happier self. His final affectionate, even-tempered disposition turned him into an exemplary philosopher in actions no less than in words. If I were to choose a hero for this essay, it would be Hume. This is because of his enthusiasm for the progress of thought, his insistence on empirical verification, and, as this essay emphasizes, his ability to turn depression into bold, intelligent philosophy. As for death, he wrote in 1776 to a friend, “Death appears to me so little horrible in his Approaches, that I scorn to quote Heroes and Philosophers as Example of Fortitude. . . . I embrace you, Dear Sir, and probably for the last time.”11 I’ve finished, except to recall a succession of generalizations: that philosophers and philosophies are always individual; that the abstraction native to philosophy is always inseparable from affect; that the character of parents’ presence and absence always influences philosophy; and that the philosophies of Kant and of Hume, both of them extraordinarily ambitious and creative, are more fully understood if studied in relation to their different, almost opposite affective lives, ending, in the one case, in misanthropic misery and, in the other, in a relaxed humanism. One sees that, when grasped as complementary angles of vision, philosophy and psychology make our understanding more subtle and realistic. The effect of  joining them cannot be predicted, but it can as easily increase as decrease our admiration of a great philosopher. I’ve finished, except to say that insight comes from many directions.

chapter 5

Keeping the World Together

What’s a world? Just now, the most direct example is ourselves, me and you, you in the singular and the plural, all together in this book. We are a world because as ­­writer and readers we’re related to one another by a common immediate interest and are either present in or reading the pages of the same book. Outside of this one book-world on the subject of world art, there are other book-worlds on roughly the same subject, adjacent book-worlds, dealing with the art of one or another culture, or, more broadly, world culture, and on to I don’t know how many kinds of books. Each book is of course contained within a home, library, or bookstore, each of which is located in some defined geographical area we for the moment call a world and is set on the surface of the world of all these worlds, that is, the earth, which is in turn inside the “world” of the solar system, which is on an outer arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which is in a certain defined region of the universe, and so on I don’t know how many containing places or how far. To make this notion of a world—a bounded complex whole whose elements are related to one another—even more starkly obvious, let me offer ourselves as examples. Each of us constitutes a world in himself or herself, and, though a unity, contains very many other, different worlds, among them a brain, which, seen with the appropriate imaging devices, would now be visibly active in its left, linguistically attentive area, in its right, melodically attentive area, and in a number of visual areas. I will not press the point by going down to our individual cells, genetic filaments, and so on successively I don’t know how many or how small. But I will add as an example of a small verbal world, a poem, any poem, and the even smaller world of a monorheme, a single sentence-word

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such as the “mommy” spoken with a particular intonation by a small child, which has all the content of a full sentence. To come closer to my main subject, visual art, each picture or sculpture is a world, and so is each artist, each more or less coherent group of artists, each coherent fraction of an art tradition, the art tradition or the culture as a whole, and, to speak of the world that concerns me most, the visual art of all the human cultures regarded as a single human-art-world. But the unity of each of these worlds, small or large, is deceptive and may threaten to break up into discordant parts. Take as an example a single versatile artist. Picasso continued to create in several quite different styles, from the simple or romantic realism that might, for instance, signal the entry of a new woman into his life, to the expressionistic that signaled her exit, to a modernized kind of neo-classical, and a cubistic, and a surrealistic style. Given no more evidence than the pictures, minus his signature, it would be easy to divide his work into that of several different artists. Picasso was an exception, but if I look no further than the incomparably lesser art that I myself practice—I use this example only because I am so familiar with it—I see that over the years I have become quite different from what I used to be and I am surprised that the pictures I made were all my work. Can this violently red sunset reflected in the water, painted in 1972, be by the same artist who made the soft pastel view of Toledo in 1978, or the dark blue sky cut by sharp white triangles of sailboats on top of a stylized green wave, painted in 1982, or the sad, passive, washed-out face in a watercolor self-portrait of 1996? Or could any of these pictures have been by the person who, in 2002, painted a sketchy blind white rooster against a flat black background, his sharp beak open and his sharp claws extended to attack the flower in front of them, as the caption says, to symbolize blind aggression? I suppose that it is plain information that is often necessary to keep the work of an artist attributed to him or her with certainty, and the absence of information that creates sometimes-painful doubts. But supposing that a variety of works is all by the same artist allows one to sharpen one’s perceptions by noticing the possible changes in the nature of the curves used, the quality and angles of the lines, the centers of gravity, and so on, and correlate all these particulars with one another and by doing so enable the visual, historical, and conceptual understanding of the artist as a more complicated, more interesting whole. But to grasp the visual unity of a particular artist is, if I may hazard the adverb, infinitely easier than to grasp the unity of a whole art tradition or culture. The art cultures of the West, of India, and of China each encompass varying, unclearly delimited areas, show in different places the effects of different external influences, including the influences they have exerted on one another.

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How I (the author) look to myself, 1996

They have also had different conceptions of high and low in art, different basic aesthetic conceptions of art, and considerable internal conflict. What does an ancient Greek potter or painter on pottery have to do with a Byzantine painter of icons, a Baroque sculptor or painter, a French Impressionist, a German Expressionist, or, to name names, a Jackson Pollock, or a Duchamp; or, for that

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matter, what have any of these to do with any of the others? In India, what does the guild craftsman, with his prescribed procedures and low social status, have to do with the Sanskrit poets and dramatists who both reflected and created the aesthetic doctrines of upper-class appreciation of art, or what have any of these to do with the Mogul miniaturists, who worked at the pleasure of their Muslim employers? In China, the literati, who wrote poetry and practiced calligraphy and painting, learned to look down not only on the potter, however expert, but also on the professional painter, who committed the great spiritual sin of painting for the sake of money and the lesser but still considerable sin of excessive decorativeness and virtuosity. I have excluded the sometimes-sharp differences among the literati, but must ask, again, what has all of this to do until recently with the art and artists of Europe and India? Each of the worlds I have mentioned, one sees, is as easy to conceive as many as it is as one, and it is easy to contend that it can only confuse matters if we try to make a really single world of each art tradition, and all the greater confusion if we try to make a single world of all the art traditions together. Yet to show that they are one, or to keep them together as a world, is exactly my ambition. This ambition leads to a clash not only with the relativists, who in the present generation are called “postmodernists,” but with those experts who are so aware of local details and so convinced of the need for further research that they are by nature skeptical of any summary of great bodies of what they take to be unreliable observations and of the assumption that enough is known to make a plausible attempt to see all human art together, as a world. But although I believe that specialization can be the enemy of worldperception, I concede that their specialization is essential to perceiving the artworld reasonably as one. I do not want to deny the specialists their superior grasp of detail but to unite the fragments into which they have broken each artworld, show the limitations of their reluctance to go beyond detail and beyond the view that each artist, each fragment of each tradition, and each tradition is incommensurable with any other. Instead, the specialists’ knowledge should be used to show how and why the world can be rebuilt, and how much we can gain by rebuilding it. Yes, knowledge is and always will be incomplete, doubts do and always will remain, but to allow the doubts to keep the world fragmented is like being afraid to go anywhere far from home, or afraid to climb to a point at which much of the scenery becomes visible at once because an accident can happen on the way. There are contemporaries, though still not many, who share the ambition I have expressed, and there have been like ambitions in neighboring fields of study, such as history, anthropology, and philosophy. The usual response of

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scholars who would like to fulfill such an ambition is to share it among themselves by composing anthologies of their essays, each dealing with a subject narrowed to fit their individual fields of research. But the result is unlikely to be satisfying because then no one of them is willing to attempt a serious synoptic view of the whole that is the collective object of the anthology. Each of them who tries to view and explain some limited example of, say, the relations between the art of one culture and another acts as a thinking mirror; but each mirror has its personal, sometimes great aberrations; and no one reader can easily join all the individual views because the scholars’ varying individualities—their singular aberrations—do not sum up into any clear full view. I use this conclusion to strengthen my resolve not to go into bibliographical detail here or slow the free progress of this essay with the ball and chain of footnotes and endnotes. I will mention, but only mention, a few of the relatively recent thinkers whose creative boldness influenced me personally, even though I disagreed strongly with most of them. In history, I would mention only Arnold Toynbee, who wrote of the rise and fall of whole civilizations in accord with their responses to the challenge of their environments, and of the religions that provided the soil for civilizations and transcended them. In philosophy, the great integrator was the learned Hegel, whose history of philosophy suffers from sad prejudices (though he had the integrity to retract his very negative opinion of Indian philosophy) and a megalomaniacal-appearing hierarchy of philosophies that culminated in his own. In anthropology, I will not single out any individual anthropologist, but rather the collective fostering of the ability to see strange cultures in the light of their own perceptions no less than (or perhaps more than) our perceptions of them. In aesthetics and the history of art, I remember Élie Faure’s History of Art, which related art to civilizations, especially in its last, poetically sensitive volume; René Grousset, who helped to open Indian, Chinese, and Japanese art for me; and André Malraux, whose latest biographers have shown him up as a tireless poseur but whose dramatically illustrated art books and grand or grandiose generalizations on world art impressed me. Among present thinkers, I’m also tempted to add Grazia Marchiano, for her profound, quasi-mystical attachment to the whole of human culture, and Wilfried van Damme, for his cross-disciplinary approach, his careful, well-structured reasoning, and his insistence on keeping things together. These preliminaries bring me to the central issues I want to discuss, which are possibilities of merging the various art traditions into something like a single one; the distinction, from our present-day standpoint, of the more nearly local from the more nearly universal in the art traditions of the world; and the

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ability to react to the various traditions of art in a spirit of empathic decency that might help to keep the world together. All along, I have been for pluralism, but have been trying to get beyond simple pluralism by pointing out the similar human tendencies and aims that come to light in all the art traditions. Although I stress the degree to which human traits and abilities are universal, I see no contradiction between this universality and the endless variety of ways in which it is expressed. The endless variety, which overlies and often conceals the unity, is essential to the sensuous experience of art; but for understanding in the abstract sense, it is more helpful to become aware of how the endless variety makes up endlessly rich sets of variations on common human themes. However, I want to go a difficult, questionable step beyond the truism, as it seems to me, that the universality and particularity of art are interdependent. I want to ask if, given the plural standards that we now accept, we do not in fact often judge as if there were also other, more general standards. As I see it, the answer to this question has two components. The first is that the pluralism is indispensable because it alone can do approximate justice to the differences between and, no less, within the different traditions. Ideally, then, all art is appreciated in as close and natural a context as possible. But the full and exact context cannot be restored, if only because what we consider to be a full and exact context is hardly more than a doubtful retrospective construction. To the extent to which we succeed in restoring a plausible context, we necessarily do so within the context of our own, present lives, in which we are in principle bound to the doing of justice to the many works of art and contexts of which we are in any degree aware. This unavoidable setting of the many contexts within a single one brings me to the second component of my answer: Aesthetic pluralism, with its multiple contexts and standards, is in practice complemented or displaced by a more general context and set of standards, which I will call, with some exaggeration, I am sure, universal. I (or, rather, our present lives) make this complementarity or displacement an issue. I suggest what seems to me to be a simple, consistent way of seeing beyond it, but it is by nature vague and can never be comfortable because it emphasizes the incompleteness of our ability to grasp the intimate values of traditions other than our own, with which our intimacy is also probably limited. I begin with the assumption that the art of all human cultures have some basic characteristics in common. These common characteristics make it possible to ask if, despite appearances, there are common modes of appreciation

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and judgment, that is, common general standards, for all art. If there are such standards, it may be possible to use them to judge works of art fairly, that is, to find persons who are informed, perceptive, open, and just or unprejudiced enough to judge the works of art in a way that other well-informed, perceptive, open persons would concede to be relatively fair. I put aside the question of who would judge the judges of the judges—Chuang-tzu (Zhuangzi) (chap. 2, ll. 273–79) has a more pessimistic answer than the one I will give here; but even he appears to say that it is possible to put oneself in others’ positions and lend words the weight of experience. The possibility of common standards and fair (well-informed, perceptive, open, unprejudiced) judgments is especially challenging because of the pluralism of contemporary art and because of the variety of the world’s cultures. The ideal of fairness in judging art can be elaborated, but it is hard to imagine any human being who could fulfill all its demands. Yet though the ideal is distant, it can be approached in various ways. I mean that it is impossible to be as fair in practice as one can demand in theory, and yet there are many possible ways of being more fair in practice and less fair. I think that a plausible test of fairness is the agreement of a large majority of those who are judged that the standard or method of judgment used is fair. But how can such agreement be reached if there is no clear public standard that rests on what is internal to the quality of art and not alone on its fame or its price? For fame is a standard that depends on the vagaries of publicity, and price is a standard that depends on the strength of the craving of those with money enough to pay. By itself, neither fame nor price is necessarily the outcome of a considered, fair judgment of the aesthetic qualities of art. My answer to the question is that the absence of a clear public standard and of an ideal judge need not be fatal to the hope for fairness. It need not, because there are ways that although unable in themselves to achieve complete fairness surely bring one closer to it. They arrive not at correct judgments but at judgments that, all the circumstances considered, are relatively just because arrived at in relatively careful, reasonable ways. One of these ways or methods—“method” is an uncomfortably formal name—is inherently subjective. I call this way the way of empathy or sympathy. Its subjectivity is dependent on, and can now be assumed to have a physiological basis in, so-called mirror neurons. Such neurons, which trigger actions, can also when aroused, without triggering them, cause us to feel—mirror—what we see, as when the sight alone of someone else laughing or crying makes us too feel like laughing or crying. What is only seen is transformed into empathic understanding. In other words, the reactions of other persons become messages that are grasped, that is, felt,

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before we think to ourselves that whoever we are looking at is happy, sad, or undergoing any similarly contagious experience. Apart from empathy, the methods depend on the gathering of information and are therefore more nearly objective. They are what I call the ways or methods of fairness by understanding of context, fairness by historical ordering, and fairness by ecological ordering. I have added, as an inclusive way, in which the subjective and objective meet, the way of prolonged acquaintance. Empathy was originally the projecting of one’s emotions onto some object or person, but it is now most often understood as the internalizing of someone else’s act, emotion, or state of mind as if they were one’s own. As far as I know, the most fully developed empathy in art—in the sense at least of feeling exactly how its expressive movements go—is that of a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean connoisseur reading valued calligraphy, or of a Chinese or other artist “reading” a picture for an hour or more so closely that the artist can reproduce it from memory alone. To “read” and try to repeat an artist’s motions just as the artist made them is surely to try in a way to be in with the artist, whose changing motions suggest changes in mood and active, individual mind-hand collaboration. To see, feel, and repeat the varying tensions of these motions and be conscious of this collaboration is to internalize and become identified with the artist’s acts of writing (or painting). If the imitated calligraphy is close to that of the original, one in this sense understands it rightly (though one is reacting by identification rather than by a judicious weighing of possibilities). A more intellectual method of fairness is to learn to explain an artist by studying the artist’s life and environment. This is the method of the careful biographer, who has an old, honorable place in Chinese, Japanese, Western, and, at certain times and places, Islamic culture. More broadly, the study of context can be of the art of a school or a social group or, most broadly, of a whole art culture. Such a method reduces the misunderstandings that may estrange us from artists and allows us to respect art that we may not feel emotionally close to or intuitively admire. The appreciation of art is always enriched by the web of associations in which we set it. A rich web of associations makes it possible to see works of art from many points of view, ask and answer many questions about them, discover in them characteristics that are otherwise hidden, remember them more easily, and, altogether, grasp them more fully and subtly. Fairness by historical ordering creates a narrative that in its way explains how and in a sense why art developed as it did. The creation of order can be equally helpful if it is sociological or anthropological. In the case of history, as

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of the other ways of establishing context, I speak of fairness on the conventional but often unjustified assumption that the biographer, historian, sociologist, or anthropologist is trying, within reason, to be objective. All things said, for the sake of fairness I am for the use of multiple standards of judgment; for recognizing the relevance of explicitly universal standards along with explicitly local ones; and for fairness by the inclusive means of prolonged, intensive acquaintance. As polar opposites, “universal” and “local” are purely theoretical. Actual art always falls somewhere, often uncertainly, between them. For the sake of fairness and the enlargement of the community of human beings, general or universal standards should to be regarded as always relevant alongside the different nonuniversal or local ones, and sometimes even in spite of the local ones. Since there is no recognized body of universal standards, what I mean when I refer to them must remain vague. I go back to what I am most certain of: symmetry, balance, shape, rhythm, line, texture, dimensionality, and (with some hesitation) color. My sense of these rests on the analytic stereotypes of the two most aesthetically self-conscious and well-documented traditions of art, the Chinese (along with the Japanese and Korean) and the European. In basic principles, I find the two traditions to be mutually compatible and enriching. It is true that Western art markets now tend to dominate the world of art. But Western art has for long tended to assimilate other traditions. Or, in reciprocal words, non-Western traditions or forms of art tend to assimilate or become less resistant to Western art. In the world’s practice, non-Western traditions have their place and value determined by their degree of assimilation into or acceptance by the one dominant, worldwide tradition. It is in view of this fact that some standards or fashions of even the great art cultures, Western and non-Western, may be considered to be relatively “local.” Though substantial efforts and endless lip service have been devoted to making non-Western art understandable to Westerners and vice versa, the effect of these efforts should not be exaggerated. Little of the reverence of an image’s worshipper can be transferred to someone who has no reason to share it. Nor is this reverence of much effect in the life of someone who shares the worshipper’s world but with a questionable faith or irreligious attitude. The explanations on a museum wall or in the pages of a book that describe the worship of the image are accepted as facts that help one to understand the image but cannot in themselves inspire deep devotion. All the devotion of an Aboriginal to the landscape of which he or she is or was a part, and the fear, awe, and dependence on the ancestral force that sculptured it, lives within, and

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continues to give life to the landscape, whose meaning is conveyed and participated in by more or less traditional paintings, cannot be transferred by simple verbal explanation to a non-Aboriginal. And the non-Aboriginal is not allowed to participate in the secret aspects the painting may convey to those authorized to know them. Besides, Aboriginals have many different local traditions and they differ among themselves in their sensitivity to their own tradition and the depth to which they grasp or are allowed to grasp the particular variant of it that they have learned. The situation is different for those who try to fuse one art tradition, local or not, with another, or fuse it with some aspect of the near universal Western tradition. It is also different for those who become converted to another tradition (Roman Catholicism, Shiite or Sunni Islam, Sufism, Neo-Vedantic Hinduism, Tantric Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and so on). In art, the resulting fusions or conversions tend to be self-consciously syncretic variants of the multicolored, omnivorous, near-universal tradition. The aesthetic characteristics of the art that exert a powerful, unmistakably aesthetic effect on cultural strangers are most likely to be those that are universal, or, to broaden the possibilities, that can be convincingly shown to be variants of the universal characteristics. Images of the Buddha can be appreciated universally because of the universal human sensitivity to the human face and figure they as a rule embody, because of the technical skill their sculptors often show, because of the particular style of imagination that the Buddhist tradition and subtraditions have invested in this Buddha, and because of the human appeal of the image of a person so visibly and calmly benign. A dancing Shiva can be universally appreciated because it is the evocative image of a many-armed, flame-ringed primal dancer. Even apart from the possible mastery of its portrayal, the image of the Madonna holding the infant Jesus can be appreciated universally because it is the image of a mother holding her infant. The twisted lonely junipers of Wen Cheng‑ming (Wen Zhengming) are equally somber, skillful, graphically daring, and emotional by Chinese, Western, and (I speculate) other standards. The pages of a Koran can fill any eye and imagination with the patiently made, reverent beauty of their writing, decoration, and gilding. The catalogue of universally appreciable art is long and very rich. In contrast to universally appreciable art, there is almost purely local art, art that is at all appreciable almost only in its full local environment. The diagram an Inuit woman may make in snow or mud to illustrate a story is only an evanescent precursor to a work of art, and is, in any case, incomplete without the words and singing that the diagram illustrates. The painting an Aboriginal may make to embody a story is only a facet of the more complex and basically

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sacred art expressed along with song and dance, each element lending the others mutual support and depth. A non-Aboriginal is able to feel something of this depth provided that it is explained in patient detail. Yet a diagrammatic bark-painting, with its groups of symbols made up of polyvalent dots, diamond shapes, parallel lines, differently colored areas of cross-hatching, and so on, conveys a meaning that is clear only to those who know the area and creation myth it maps, and is fully clear only to those privileged to know the full meaning. Such a painting is too deeply local, too dependent on unobvious coded references, to be considered to be high on the vague universal scale. The “design” of the painting is meant to be a renewal of a life one can know only by having shared it. How, otherwise, could the cross-hatching on a painting convey to a Yolngu, along with its “brilliance” or “scintillation” (bir’yun), the more-than-iconographical joy of  life within the ancestral past and power? It is true that if the painting’s design is visually interesting, it may have a life apart from the traditional meaning for the sake of which it was created and valued. However, to the extent that the painting becomes universal, it loses its symbolic references and therefore its depth. To appreciate it as an abstraction is, by Aboriginal standards, to trivialize it. The evaluative contrast I have made is not the same as that made in traditional Inuit or Aboriginal life. In these two traditions, as in others, some modes of expression were always recognized as deeper, that is, more fundamental, than others, but there was no conscious conception of fine art and no reason to compare their story- or myth-history diagrams with images of Buddha, the Madonna, or Shiva. The temptation to take such comparisons seriously is new. It comes with the assimilation of all art of all kinds into one vague, encompassing scheme, which has the two usual but contrary aims I have been discussing. One aim is to regard the art of every tradition as equal, even if the art has been recognized as such only recently. This aim reflects the now widespread tendency to show different traditions equal respect. Equality of respect tends to make the art of all the traditions fully relative to the others and does not allow the art of any one of them to be regarded as superior to any other. The ability of art to be really experienced as great by people of different traditions, that is, experienced universally as great, rests mainly on the qualities that make it universally appreciable. Art, including ancient, modern, or contemporary Western art, that cannot be appreciated at all without long explanations of local traditions or personal histories or aesthetic or social theories should be considered local rather than universal. If and when such long “local” explanations are so widely shared and deeply internalized that they become a natural part of the universal cultural heritage,

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which is the universal memory, the explanation can be cut short or avoided and the previously local art regarded as universal. The suggested distinction between universally appreciable art and art that is local implies that the pleasure taken in local art is less dependent on its visible qualities and more on qualities hidden from even the sensitive eye and mind of an outsider, to whom the art’s symbolic or personal qualities cannot easily be made evident. The question “Can art be judged fairly?” can be fairly translated into another, less abstract one, “Is there a judge of art who is fair?” Two other questions that follow naturally are “Fair in what sense?” and “Fair to what extent?” These questions stimulate the counterquestions “What is unfair in judging art?” and “What extent of fairness is at all possible?” The counterquestion “What is unfair?” is fairly easy to answer. It is unfair to judge very quickly, or judge when one is impatient, ill, preoccupied with something else, or, obviously, when one is deficient in some relevant perceptual or emotional ability. Poor hearing or even the loss of the ability to hear high notes lessens the ability to appreciate the sounds of music and the nuances of speech. Colorblindness lessens or, if severe, destroys a person’s ability to appreciate the color anywhere. And while motion blindness is rare, the perception of motion and stillness is more acute or less acute among different persons. Furthermore, just as there is colorblindness, there is what might be called emotionblindness, found in varying degrees among the selfish, the narcissistic, and the autistic. The ability to empathize, that is, to feel with others, that is, to react to observed, pictured, or described actions as if they were one’s own, is highly variable and sometimes, as in autism, deficient or absent. Fairness, however, demands giving one’s full, exclusive, nondeficient, repeated attention to the art to be judged, that is, appreciated to the full, if possible for a time long enough to learn whether one’s perception of the art has been fully developed. It is unfair to make judgments of art that have serious consequences for anyone, such as the artist or owner, if the judgment may require crucial knowledge of which one is ignorant or experience that one lacks. I stress the word “may” because the responsibility falls on the person who wants to be the judge, or on the person who chooses the judge for some serious act of judgment. What kind of knowledge may be needed? If symbolism is important to a work of art, then the knowledge includes an understanding of the symbolism. It is easy to see that knowledge of a medium, a style, a school, or a period of art is relevant, in the sense that the ability displayed in a work of art is most fairly judged in relation to others of the same style, school, or period—the most easily acceptable judge is the one who, like the judge of a running race, judges activities or objects that are as alike as possible in every relevant way.

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Hands looking for each other

That is why it is relatively unfair to judge between the aesthetic worth of a Byzantine icon and an Impressionist painting. Not only are the conventions quite different, but the one is meant as a holy object painted and gilded for the sake of devout worship and the other is meant as a breath of fresh air, painted for the sake of one’s pleasure in nature. It is true, however, that if one has a

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limited amount of money and wants to buy one of the two pictures, then one has to judge in the sense of having to make the choice, but what is then in question is not at all fair judgment but intuitive preference, or possibly resale value, or the desire to get something of a kind of which one has little. Other things being equal, the fairest judge would unite the greatest patience, the most even temper, the greatest tolerance, the greatest willingness to learn, the greatest relevant knowledge and experience, and the greatest willingness to take a particular act of judging seriously. But while the idea of more fairness and less fairness is clear, the idea of a completely fair judge, or of a judge fair in every respect, is an illusion because it makes impossible demands. A person’s intuitive preferences alone must make full fairness impossible, and these preferences reveal themselves in fields in which the person is experienced just as much as in other fields. Knowledge and experience breed biases just as easily as they do tolerance. It is not to be supposed that even the best judges, in the sense described here, can succeed in predicting which artists will achieve relatively lasting greatness. Prediction in art, like that in politics or economics, is unable to cope with the complication of history in fact and the influence of chance, so that success in long-term prediction is hard or impossible to distinguish from accidental success. The conclusion is that it is easy to rule out certain judges as not fair, and easy to rule in others as well-prepared and, within the limits of their personalities, good or excellent, even though in certain respects (as judged by a judge of  judges) unfair. To hope for something more or better is to hope for the impossible. It’s possible to try to be impossibly fair, better to try to be as fair as possible, and most realistic to hope for judges who are unusually fair in spite of their unfairness. The conception of complete fairness is natural and necessary as an ideal but impossible for merely human judges to exemplify. Everything I have been saying about local and universal art, about fairness in judging art, and about the human limitations to which fair judgment is subject has been meant to lend plausibility to my hope to keep the art-world together. Empathic, sensitive, knowledgeable, fair judges are those with the greatest ability to keep the world together without distorting it beyond reason. It is not alien to us and we ought not be alienated from its possibility. It may not be easy to keep it together, but the act becomes natural after a while, inescapable, and, hard or easy, it is always its own reward. I say this not simply to prove that nothing human is alien to me or to you, but to learn to live in the art of humans from many cultures and, by sharing their eyes, share their lines, colors, compositions, interests, minds, imaginations, and memories. You can excuse this

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ambition by saying that it is close to the moral aim of universal understanding, or regard it, less flatteringly, as an expression of aesthetic vanity or hedonism, an indulgence in the temptation of aesthetic omniscience. I find none of these excuses satisfactory, but stand on my right to teach what has filled my life with interest and pleasure.

chapter 6

The Common Universe of Aesthetics

To persuade you, I have about forty-five minutes or, as measured in the pages I myself am holding, fifteen pages, excluding footnotes, of fourteen-point type. I’ll begin by asking what I want to persuade you of, I’ll answer my question, I’ll describe, quite parsimoniously, three great aesthetic traditions, the Western, the Indian, and the Chinese, I’ll compare the three, and then I’ll conclude by estimating the degree of my success. What do I want to persuade you of ? That, like all human beings, we are alike enough to be able to understand one another’s reactions to life, and to understand or intuit the kind of reactions to our reactions that make up what we call art. “Alike enough” is a phrase that’s flexible enough to include the fact, which I don’t deny, that, like all human beings, we’re all different from one another. It’s not hard to go further and say that each of us is different now from what he or she was yesterday, or even an hour ago, or even to say, along with many Buddhists, that there’s nothing so fixed in us to be the same as from one moment to the next. Yet we are all alike in consciously sensing our individual continuity, that is, in sensing that I and, separately, each of you is a thread of memories and experiences unlike any other, with his or her private/public identity. So I will not be exaggerating if I say, as I need to for my argument, that we, like all humans, are analogous biological structures with analogous emotions and organs of perception and expression. We are all more or less symmetrical, and each of us has to maintain his or her balance, even in the i. This chapter is based on Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Art without Borders: An Exploration of Art and Humanity, published by the University of Chicago Press.

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necessary act of walking. So all human beings perceive, make use of, and respond to, symmetry and balance. All so much so that, whatever the differences among them, they can all be studied by similar principles of biology, psychology, sociology, and medicine. All are born of mothers and all die before about their hundred and twentieth year. Since our subject is aesthetics, it is significant that humans all respond to the same directional clues, and all perceive and use lines, planes, and volumes in similar ways. They all distinguish between things that are square, oblong, triangular, circular, oval, and spiral, or straight, curved, crooked, sharp, or jagged. Humans all also perceive, respond to, and make use of rhythms, whether seen, heard, or felt. Rhythms, too, exemplify symmetry and balance, motion and stillness, and contrast and sameness. Since I am most interested in visual art, I find a particular interest in the ability of the brain to construct three-dimensional objects from the two-dimensional forms on the retina and to recognize these forms for the objects they are. This ability is universal among humans and is of course based on the nature of their visual system.1 The experience of color is another complex ability of great importance to visual art. The neurology of vision gives almost all humans the ability to see and react to different colors and color combinations, including the differences between dark and light colors, saturated and unsaturated colors, colors that are graduated (as from light to dark) or ungraduated, that are graded into other colors, and complementary or not. The constancy of color—its tendency to be perceived as the same in different light—is universal among humans. Furthermore, although the colors recognized in different cultures may be different, the colors are chosen from a small group in a way that can be explained by a (controversial) “evolutionary” scheme.2 Favored colors and color combinations vary from one cultural area to another, but in ways that can be more or less systematically understood (see below).3 Emotional qualities are equated with colors, though in different ways. What is universal is not the relation between a particular emotion and a particular color but the felt closeness between color as such and emotion as such.4 Furthermore, the association of blue with the sky, of brown with the earth, of green with plants, and of red with fire and blood, seems unavoidable.5 White can be an indication of purity and innocence, or of mourning, but the opposition of black and white (and the contrast of both with red) seems unavoidable and must often have stimulated a symbolic polar response for the same perceptual reasons.ii6 ii. It is said, however, that there are non-European languages in which “black is assimilated to white.” In his book Blue: The History of a Color, Michel Pastoureau goes so far as to say, “Color is

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Development of art tends everywhere to oscillate between extremes of (relative) simplicity and complexity, seriousness and playfulness, realism and abstraction, literalness and symbolism, and tradition and revolt against tradition. The sensory or perceptual responses I have called universal are only roughly the same; every individual senses and perceives somewhat differently from every other. But even so, the associations that accumulate, however different in detail, are often variants of the universal, primary responses! And the differences, I argue, are not simply random. As for emotions, in the absence of which we would not be human and art would not exist, it is significant that the basic emotions are universally felt and are expressed everywhere in similar ways.7 This is most likely true of fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise, of their combinations, and of their representations in artsiii 8. And it is a matter, I assume, of common emotion and genetics that there is everywhere a strong natural tendency to be attracted to young, symmetrical, unblemished faces, and young, strong, graceful, symmetrical bodies. first and foremost a social phenomenon. There is no transcultural truth to color perception.” He stresses the danger, especially to the historian, of anachronism. “For centuries,” he says, “black and white were considered to be completely separate from the other colors; the spectrum with its natural order of colors was unknown before the seventeenth century . . . and the contrast between warm and cool colors is a matter of convention and functions differently according to the period and society in question (in the Middle Ages, for example, blue was a warm color).” But while it is true that color symbolism has varied greatly, I am sure that Pastoureau goes too far and himself oversimplifies when he says that “human biology, and even nature are ultimately irrelevant to this process of ascribing meaning to color.” A different emphasis on the evidence, much of it literary, can leave a rather different impression (see the attached endnote). iii. In Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory, Catherine Lutz makes the claim, not uncommon now in anthropology, that “emotional meaning is fundamentally structured by particular cultural systems and particular social and material environments.” Her fieldwork taught her, she says, that “emotional experience is not precultural but preeminently cultural.” To assume “that emotion is simply a biophysical event and that each emotion is universal and linked neatly to a facial expression (of which even careful and intentional masking leaves unmistakable cues)” is to refuse to see that emotion is “woven in complex ways into cultural meaning systems and social interaction.” Yes, but the study of the social complexity of emotional expression and its weaving into cultural meaning systems should not cause us to forget the common psychophysical basis. Diseases and the reactions to them are also woven into cultural meaning systems, but this is not good enough reason to neglect them as the objects of study by contemporary medicine. It is not insignificant that people born blind smile for the same reasons that sighted people do.

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The last of the generally human abilities I mean to recall in this list is memory. I mean that art everywhere has served as an instrument of memories, memories of the celebrations, rituals, and memorials that are needed to establish social identity. Art also serves the memories of individuals, which tend to be similar in that they are memories of one’s family and friends, of the stages of one’s life, of one’s work, travels, adventures, and so on. I don’t know if I have so far persuaded you or not, but if the preceding contentions are reasonable, it follows that there must be a perceptual, emotional, and social overlap among cultures, an overlap reflected in their art and in their implicit and explicit aesthetic doctrines. With this result, I have finished the first part of my persuasive effort. The second part is to give a description, in principle objective, of the aesthetic doctrines of cultures different enough and important enough to suggest that it serves to hint at the nature of the whole universe of human art. Given the time I have left, I will reduce the number of cultures to three, namely, the European or Western tradition, the Indian tradition, and the Chinese tradition. I have to forget African aesthetics, even the great African performances of danced and chanted ritual, designed to strengthen the reciprocity between human beings and the capricious forces that inhabit and surround them. I also have to forget  Japanese art, with its aristocratic regrets at the blooming and withering of flowers and the rich vigor of popular  Japanese art. I begin, then, with Western aesthetics. In spite of its uncountable nuances, its dominant impulse until recent times has been the one that comes from Plato and Plotinus and can be called, not too misleadingly, Neoplatonic aesthetics. In the case of Plotinus himself, this entails the belief that the artist can grasp the archetypes, “the logoi from which nature derives.” When Phidias made Zeus, says Plotinus, it was not from a model perceived by the senses, but from understanding “what Zeus would look like if he wanted to make himself visible.”9 Medieval aesthetics was always closely related to the Neoplatonic themes.10 Theorists of the early Renaissance might content themselves with an emphasis on perspective, anatomy, proportion, harmony, and the idealizing of merely human beauty, but Marsilio Ficino, their contemporary, defined beauty as a “victory of divine reason over matter.”11 Neoplatonic theories like Ficino’s became prominent in art theory from the second half of the sixteenth century. According to these theories, the artist is the person who gives nature a more than natural perfection.12 Michelangelo accepts Plotinus’s view that the sculptor reveals the beauty already inherent in the stone.13 The earlier comparison of the artist with God is extended and allows the artist to pride himself (or, more rarely, herself ) on some measure of godliness.

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I cannot list the many later artists, writers, and musicians who have accepted or resisted the influence of Neoplatonism or its analogues.14 The secularism induced by science was often tinged with nature mysticism. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Neoplatonic ideas were varied and both reinforced and contradicted by those imported from India by Schopenhauer and others, while Buddhism, at first in its more simple forms and later in Zen or in the more florid, magical forms of Buddhism, played its skeptical-believing role.15 Physics stimulated the imaginations of the mystical-minded no less than the secular-minded. Among the creators of twentieth-century physics: Einstein identified himself Spinozistically with the universe; Planck adopted a Kantlike thing in itself; Bohr favored contradictories in a way reminiscent of Kier­ kegaard; Schrödinger was an open Vedantist; and Dirac made a Neoplatonic equation of truth with beauty. Mysticism certainly remained common among artists.16 The German Expressionists often voiced mystical opinions, and so, in their distinctive vocabularies, did the Surrealists.17 Of the pioneering abstract artists, Kupka was mystical in the name of Orphism, Malevich in that of Suprematism, Kandinisky in that at first of the Blue Riders, Mondrian in that of DeStijl or Neo-Plasticism, Ozenfant and Jeanneret in the name of Purism, and so on.18 Kandinsky, like some religious Russians, and like Rosicrucians and Theosophists, all of whom influenced him, believed that mankind, about to awaken from the nightmare of materialism, was approaching a utopian era. In a letter he even suggested that brush and canvas could be given up and paintings created by spiritual irradiation alone.19 Mondrian “accepted the Theosophical notion of matter as a denser variant of the spirit.” According to him, we gradually “leave material forms behind” and “the representation of matter becomes redundant.”20 He said that “plastic art discloses what science has discovered: that time and subjective vision veil the true reality.”21 Many more recent artists have held mystical or semimystical views. Among the members of the New York School, at least Reinhardt, Pollock, Rothko, Still, and Newman, had mystical inclinations. Newman wanted to “catch the basic truth of life . . . to wrest truth from the void.”22 My account of Western art has preserved little if anything of the local color of European aesthetics. The account should be corrected by recalling the secular thought I have neglected, too often supported by brutal governments. Yet my conclusion is that the thought of European aestheticians and artists has been more than tinged with Neoplatonic or other mysticism. What of India? There, craftsmen’s manuals had a religious background, but although they invoked their patron god, they were mostly compressed

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matter-of-fact directions, without philosophical justification or expansion.23 Yet the art of these craftsmen was nourished by the ancient Indian feeling that the energy of the universe is a breath or a breathing, prana, evident in any instance of motion, change, transmutation, or life.24 India’s sculpture and the remnants of its early paintings have a sense of inherent energy. The sculptured figures, flexible, round-limbed, and sensuous, are often set among twining creepers and touch or lean on trees, as if to take in their own life from the trees’ life. This energy expresses the fertility of nature, the sculptured forms of which include invitingly beautiful women, amorous couples, copulating couples, and phallus-shaped gods. No doubt, the figures are so often fixed in the attitudes of Indian dance because they reflect danced ceremonial. This relation of sculpture to dance and therefore to music makes it easier to generalize about Indian aesthetics. There is in fact an old text that says that to understand the rules of painting one must understand those of dancing, and to understand those of dancing one must know music, which is based on singing, and therefore, climactically, “he who knows the art of singing is the best of men and knows everything.”25 Aesthetics of a more articulated, philosophical kind began to develop in India about the fourth or fifth century CE and remained creative until about the eleventh or twelfth. To begin with, it was a poetics of the drama, whose adherents were writers using a Sanskrit already known only to the learned.26 They were at first mainly interested in the ornamental effects of Sanskrit, to which we are unfortunately deaf. Their view was that poetic ornamentation arouses poetic moods or particular kinds of aesthetic emotion, as we may freely translate the Indian term rasa.27 The primary meanings of rasa are juice, flavor, essence. In poetics, its meaning is extended to poetic moods or emotions, the essences or flavors of life. The resulting theory had a living relationship to art in the sense that great poet-dramatists such as Kalidasa, Bana, and Bhavbhuti were familiar with it.28 It was a great step forward in Indian aesthetics when the idea of aesthetic emotion, rasa, was connected with that of the power of illuminating or of suggesting a possibility that could not otherwise have been anticipated. In its pure form, called dhvani (usually translated suggestion), this power lights up the sentence in which it appears and reveals something above and beyond its literal meaning.29 The most notable theorist of dhvani was the Kashmiri named Anandavardhana (Ananda for short), who lived in the ninth century CE.30 Given suggestion, he says, even the oldest, most familiar language acquires fresh color and elicits an aesthetic reaction in those who are sensitive to it by

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nature and the study and practice of poetry.31 Ananda adopts the view, which he attributes to “wise men,” that suggestion, dhvani, is the soul or essence of poetry.32 “Anything,” he says, “is beautiful if a person’s mind rises at it, realizing that something special has suddenly flashed before him.”33 Although created to explain drama and poetry, Ananda’s illustrations are drawn from music, to which dance, sculpture, and painting were related. The theorists of suggestion begin with a conventional list of basic emotions or emotional tendencies, namely, love, humor, pathos, violence, heroism, fear, loathsomeness, and wonder. To these eight basic emotions they add a ninth, peace or tranquility.34 Together, the eight or nine emotions are assumed to constitute the substratum of human experience. (In Europe, Baroque musicians and musical theorists held an analogous theory of “affections,” which included anger, excitement, grandeur, heroism, contemplation, and mystical exaltation.)35 Each basic emotion, the Indian theorists say, has a parallel aesthetic emotion or rasa, which predominates in any given poem or play. The difference between basic and aesthetic emotion is that basic emotion arises out of and is expressed in real bodily life, while aesthetic emotion, though depending for its existence on basic emotion, is detached from the circumstances of real life and from the direct influence of biological and psychological impulses. For this reason, the aesthetic emotion or rasa may be said to be depersonalized or delocalized, or, to put it in positive terms, to be universalized. To the extent that this is so, the whole state of mind of the reader of a poem or spectator of a play has been depersonalized, delocalized, or universalized. A play or poem is therefore an autonomous creation, to be appreciated in a timeless, impersonal spirit to which truth and falsity, the criteria of ordinary life, are irrelevant.36 After Anadavardhana, the most distinguished aesthetician of suggestion was the great tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta (Abhinava for short), who “alone turned poetics into a science.”37 I concentrate on what I take is for him the main point, the ability of poetic technique and knowledge to achieve universalization. It is universalization that distinguishes aesthetic from ordinary experience. The ordinary experience of people is saturated with the pain of  illness, the tiredness of  long  journeys, the death of relatives, and the weakness caused by ascetic practices. Drama, by the pleasure it gives, can neutralize these negative emotions, calm the sad, distract the ill, and give the weary happiness. At the least it teaches its spectators the ways of the world and, in this way, makes them happy and gives them the wisdom to grow.38 Drama and, with it, poetry have this effect because the experiences they

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yield are deeply different from those in ordinary life that they resemble. The sights one sees and sounds one hears in drama and poetry lead to a strange longing that comes from memories that are not fully conscious and are too vague to have an identifiable object. These memories are latent impressions of pleasure or pain, the residues of experiences of an earlier life. In a drama, a character’s grief—marked by conventional signs of grief, expressed in metrical poetically grieving words, and surrounded by the reality-neutralizing decor of a theater—arouses the spectator’s own latent memories of grief. This grief by revival of old, vague grief-memories is not grief itself but, by the melting together of all one’s thoughts, the taste or rasa of compassion. Purified of all direct pain, it is superior to the emotion it is related to.39 Like any aesthetic emotion or rasa, it cannot be directly perceived because an aesthetic experience, that is, a rasa-experience (rasapratiti ) is possible only when the stimuli that arouse it have been generalized or universalized. The clarity, softness, and vigor of the rasa-stimulating words are such that the experience they convey is transcendental.40 Summing all this up in a metaphor, Abhinava says that aesthetic experience “opens like a flower born of magic,” without any relation with anything in time or space, or relation with the practical life that precedes and follows it.41 Aesthetic detachment is possible because our response in art, basically our identification with the hero of the drama, is sympathetic rather than selfish. Our identification fails to become aesthetic if it is too personal, in a modern term, too narcissistic, or if it is too concentrated within the individual self. By this aesthetics, art requires one to be as much out of oneself as in oneself and as much in as out, and, for this reason, it requires nothing less than inspiration, poetic genius (  pratibha), “which has its seat in the poet’s heart, and which is eternally in creative motion.”42 So great is the true poet’s accomplishment, says Abhinava, that he can be compared to the God whose will creates the world. “In the shoreless world of poetry,” he says, “the poet is the unique creator. Everything becomes transformed into the way he envisions it.”43 By means of the poet’s genius, the pleasure of the spectator or reader grows so great, so far beyond that of ordinary experience, that the ego is temporarily transcended and the person enters into the unique state of emotion, the higher, undifferentiated pleasure of the peace in which all sensual desire dies, the rasa of peace, shantarasa (santarasa). The sensitive spectator of a drama, like the mystic, forgets the self, forgets material gain, transcends the subject-object difference, is unconscious of space and time, and at the height of aesthetic experience attains the goal of peace. While it does not arrive at the goal of mystical experi-

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ence, it verges on and draws toward it. This is because in aesthetic tranquility we come into contact with the memory of the primeval unity of man and universe, that is, with the primeval spontaneous expression of overflowing bliss that is the creative source of the universe.44 Although profoundly mystical, Abhinava accepts the world and the pleasures that humans find in it as real and not, as most often among Vedantic phi­ losophers, as unreal.45 As an expert in Tantric ritual and a lover of literary drama, it is easy for him to compare human life with a drama or compare the poet with Shiva, who out of purposeless, spontaneous ecstasy, dances world creation, destruction, incarnation, and salvation. Like Shiva, out of the spontaneous pleasure of creation, the poet imagines, creates, destroys, and illusively veils the worlds that are plays and poems, though, as no more than a poet, he cannot create the full semblance of salvation.46 Having finished my account of Abhinavagupta, I must caution the reader that Indian aestheticians were as contentious as any other. Yet there is no doubt of the commanding stature and lasting effect of Abhinava on Indian aesthetic thought. The extent of his influence in India is like that I have attributed to Plato and Plotinus in the West. To approach Chinese aesthetic thought in its own terms, I begin with the all-important concept of ch’i (qi ).47 Its early meanings include vapor, breath, exhalation, and life-spirit. Ch’i is not at all abstract because, among other things, it is the very air we breathe. The source of our life, it increases as we swell in anger, diminishes as we shrink in old age, and disperses as we die. Considered to be the universal energy, present everywhere in different concentrations, the concept of ch’i plays an important role in the theory of every Chinese art. In literature, it is the rhythmic force that impels, changes speed, connects, and gives a literary composition its unity.48 Elusive though it is, it can be captured if one shares the tension-creating twists and turns by which words are related to one another. A literary composition is considered, as by Herder and other Europeans, to resemble a living organism, and, beyond the European organism-metaphor, as perhaps literally alive. For calligraphy and painting, the concept of ch’i is most used in combination with yun (yun), meaning “reverberation” or “resonance.” Ch’i-yun (qiyun) is therefore often translated “reverberation of the life-breath.” In the first of the famous canons of Chinese art, enunciated by Hsieh Ho (Xie Ho) in the late fifth century CE, this phrase is coupled with another, sheng-tung (shengdong).49 Its translations are of two kinds. Leaving aside relatively unimportant variations, if one takes the whole to be made up of two parallel phrases, its

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translation is “the reverberation of life-breath, that is, the creation of movement”; but if one takes the second phrase to qualify the first, the translation is “the reverberation of the life-breath creates life-movement.”iv It seems that in the early development of Chinese art theory, ch’i-yun was used to mean the life-force of the objects that were depicted, which is the force that the painter aims to capture. The force might be supposed quite real. A fourteenth-century critic believes that success in infusing it into a painting ensures, for instance, that “a painted cat hung on a wall may stop the rats” and a painted “venerable sage or war-god can be prayed to and its voice will answer.”50 As the term widened its meaning, it took on cosmic and moral overtones and came to express the creative force of the universe, in which everything takes part.51 The presence of ch’i in a work of art was then equivalent to the presence in it of the vital spirit of the universe, the tao.52 Based on this idea of the unifying vital spirit, Chinese aesthetics tended to specify its subprinciples as polar opposites. Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636) emphasizes such compositional principles as “opening and closing” or “openjoin” (k’ai-ho) (kai-ho), “void and solidity” (hsü-shih) (xu-shi ), and “frontality and reverse” (hsiang-pei ) (xiang-bei ).53 Ideas like these, clarifications or expan­ sions of earlier ones, continued to be elaborated. For example, to bring out the omnipresent activity of k’ai-ho, that is, of ch’i as the rhythmically differentiated expansion and contraction of everything within everything, the eighteenthcentury critic Shen Tsung-ch’ien (Shen Zong-jian) writes the following: From the revolution of the world to our own breathing there is nothing that is not k’ai-ho. . . Even down to one tree and one rock, there is nothing that does not have both expanding and winding up. Where things grow and expand that is k’ai, where things are gathered up, that is ho . . . In using brush and in laying out the composition, there is not one moment when you can depart from k’ai-ho.54

iv. The passage in Hsieh Ho, in which the famous canons first appear, says that from ancient times to the present, individual painters have excelled in one or another branch of painting and few are able to combine them. To the question, “What are these six elements?,” the text answers: “First, Spirit Resonance, which means vitality; second, Bone Method, which is (a way of   ) using the brush: third, Correspondence to the Object, which means the depicting of forms; fourth, Suitability to Type, which has to do with the laying on of colors; fifth, Division and Planning, i.e., placing and arrangement; and sixth, Transmission by Copying, that is to say the copying of models.”

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As this passage shows, in China, too, the work of art is always regarded as an organism the parts of which have an always changing, always self-restoring balance with one another. Always there is the sense of forces that give life by their harmonized opposition within and between the parts and parts of parts that make up the whole. Always there are expansion and contraction, the alternation of dense and rare, of closed and open, of excessiveness restrained and want supplied, and, if one sees sharply enough, of individual and universe containing and contained within one another. To end this series of references to Chinese aesthetic principles, I should like to cite the seventeenth-century critic Wang Fu-chih (Wang Fu-zhi), who does not believe in the impossible effort to hold everything poetic under conscious control.55 Poetry, he insists, is more concerned with life than with literature as such because it is a continuation of the processes of the universe as human consciousness interacts with it, so that poetry helps to recreate the humanuniversal bond that too many persons have broken. Wang is surely referring to two doctrines of the Neo-Confucians: the one that the human mind and nature are identical, and the other that the virtue of “humanity” should be widened to fit this identity. In a famous essay of 1527, the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang-ming wrote, in a traditional but newly elaborated vein, that when a person sees a child about to fall into a well, he cannot avoid alarm and sympathy; and much the same happens when he hears and sees birds and beasts about to be slaughtered; and he cannot help feeling pity when he sees plants broken and destroyed. Evidently, the same humanity that joins him with the child joins him with the birds, beasts, and plants. True, even plants are living things and so they are open to fellow-feeling, but the shattering of tiles and a stone also gives him a feeling of regret, which shows that his humanity unites him with tiles and stones as well. “This means that even the head of the small (unlearned) man must have this humanity which unites him (potentially) to all things.”56 And so, transcending itself, the human head becomes one with anything and everything, and thereby shows itself to be essentially its innate consciousness of the good (liang-chih) (liang-zhi ) that is the very force of goodness that unites the cosmos—in Neo-Confucianism, as in Neoplatonism, oneness and goodness are identical.57 What not excessively obvious or questionable generalizations can be drawn from my summaries of the aesthetic attitudes of the West, India, and China? First, the idea of art and, with it, of beauty is variable and may be only implicit; or the phrase “well made” may be used approximately as we use “beautiful,” but with an aura, quite different from that of inspiration, of honesty or authenticity.

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Second, there is a general though not invariable habit of thought, like that of ancient Greece, that sets the literary arts above the others and models all aesthetics on that of literature or, in China, of calligraphy. Initially, Chinese calligraphy owes its importance to the reverence of the sources it transcribed and the magic of the impulse that moved the hand of the author-transcriber. Chinese scholar-painting at first derived its prestige from that of calligraphy. When, as in ancient Greece, India, and China, sculpture is regarded as the work of a professional who works in accord with traditional knowledge, the sculptor may be regarded as an estimable, even important person, but his status as an artist is denied or put into question. In Europe, we know, the view that the sculptor or painter is no better than any other craftsman tends to give way to the extent that the sculptor or painter shows evidence of liberal learning, exceptional ability, or inspiration. Third, at least locally, the style and personality of an artist is recognized as his or hers. The Chinese insisted without end on the individual personality and style of the writer, calligrapher, or painter, while classical Indian writers and Indian connoisseurs of painting were well aware of it. In Europe, from the time of Da Vinci and Michelangelo, an artist might be regarded as a unique inspired personage. In India, artistic fame may seem to us now to have been possible only to the poet or playwright, but there is literary evidence to the contrary. In China, artistic fame could be gained by writers, calligraphers, and painters, but not usually by craftsmen, such as potters. And Chinese scholarpainters were likely to look down on professionals, with their ostentatious skill, showy colors, subservience to patrons, and love of gain rather than art. Fourth, each of the three cultures standardizes its conceptions of the temporal and spatial structures of art, that is, supplies for each form of art a recommended, expectable structure. Both artisans and artists of course vary the forms to add interest to them. The Indian theory of inspired suggestion depends on the relatively conventional character of the text that is made fresh again by the poet’s originality. Chinese art, although in fact often imitative, encourages spontaneous variation by its doctrine of life-movement and opposed forces that should be kept in rhythmical balance—legends in all three traditions tell of works of art so life-infused that they came alive. In witness of their greatness, works of art in China and the West were collected and catalogued, damaged works were carefully restored, and mere scraps of great works were cherished. Fifth, the West, India, and China all cultivated theories of psychic distance or artistic detachment. In Europe, the idea of psychic distance goes back to at least the seventeenth century. A principle of Kantian aesthetics, it was cul-

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tivated by Romantics along with that of the sacredness of art as such and of art for art’s sake. Later, abstract painters found all sorts of quasi-mystical doctrines in this emotive distance, to which the idea of empathy is a modest secular equivalent. In India, as I have earlier described, there was the theory of rasas, which contrast real and, for art, virtual emotions, the virtual ones culminating in the rasa of peace, shantadhvani. In China, the initial reason for the psychic distancing of art seems to have been the recognition that the aesthetic qualities of calligraphy are independent of its subject matter. This recognition could then be transferred to painting.58 Sixth, art in any of the three traditions is often regarded as in the end dependent on a mysterious force and the subforces that can in some way or other be summoned up or blocked. This is of course true if the art (like the great classical Greek sculpture of Zeus, or like medieval paintings, or like Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes, or like the great images of the Buddha or Shiva) is itself sacred or the sacred representation of something even more sacred, whose life and power depend on the indwelling life and power of Zeus, Christ, the Buddha, or Shiva. This force and its power, like the creative power of any maker, are later assimilated to the idea of the inspiration that an artist needs to attain exceptional success. Also, it has been natural to assimilate sacred art everywhere to prayer and to hope that art, alone or in ritual performance, will guard the well-being of the people it represents. In the discussion I have just ended, I have neither tried nor by accident succeeded in reducing the different aesthetic views to a few easily assimilated generalizations. My generalizing passion has not overcome the specificity of the different cultures. But I have shown that all this specificity is best appreciated as belonging to a common universe of discourse. In this common universe, the humanity of the art is never quite eclipsed by its locality. The reason is that the locality of the art and its modes of appreciation are best understood by their position beside or within other, contrasted localities and modes, all of which make up a recognizably common world. That’s one conclusion, cautious enough to cope with objections. Yet I admit that I am tempted to go further than I have so far dared. If I give in, I find that the three kinds of aesthetic thought, Western, Indian, and Chinese, do have something central in common. While the West has had no single aesthetics of its own, its artists have tended to believe that art at its highest reflects and leads to the experience of transcendence. In India, the most developed aesthetics teaches that art at its best gives the pleasure of undifferentiated experience, the great peace in which the spectator’s sensual desires and ego are temporarily transcended. In China, given wine, luck, and inspiration, the artist’s arm and

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brush are moved by the life-force with a creative dynamism that transcends the artist’s ordinary self and ability. Surely, the role played by transcendence is central to all three traditions. If so, we can arrive at a definition of art that, though partial, is valid for all three: Art at its best is the aesthetic engenderer and embodier of the sense of transcendence. I’ve asked, answered, described, compared, and concluded, even twice, once cautiously and once boldly. I now rest my case.

chapter 7

Are the Deaf and Blind Epistemologically Isolated?

We often conduct epistemological discussions in abstraction from empirical data that are relevant to them. I want to give the example of the deaf and the blind to show to what a degree the abilities of human beings can neutralize a gross void in their experience of the world. If I am right, whenever we say something like “such a person can no more understand what he is talking about than a blind man can understand anything about color,” we are, in fact, saying something quite misleading. The reason is that the ability of the blind and the deaf to overcome their perceptual limitations is analogous to that of scientists to grasp what is beyond any possible direct human perception. And the respective feelings of the deaf and the blind that they are each a socially isolated group is analogous to that of any group isolated from another by its unshared and perhaps unshareable experience. Just as the hearing and the sighted are apt to think of the experience of the deaf and blind as abnormal, so may the deaf and blind think of the experience of the hearing and sighted as abnormal. Deaf or blind children whose parents are, respectively, deaf or blind, or who live among children of their own kind are likely at first to react with surprise at the oddity of the people who, they are told, hear or see. Deaf children who live together and communicate in sign language may come to wonder what is wrong with adults who, instead of making the usual gestures, face one another and constantly move their lips. Similarly, a deaf child immersed in the life of his deaf family, may take his hearing neighbors to lack the ability to communicate. In Europe, a strong interest in deafness goes hack to at least the eighteenth century. Denis Diderot, whose works include a remarkable “letter” on the blind

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and an equally remarkable one on the deaf, wrote that a society consisting of five persons, each having one of the five senses, would be amusing because each of the persons would have a worldview based on the sense he possessed and would look on all of the others as senseless. Likewise, according to Diderot: If a man who possessed the gift of sight for only one or two days were to find himself among a people who were blind, he would either have to make up his mind to remain silent or else resign himself to be taken for a madman. Every day he would reveal some new mystery to them, a mystery that would be such only to them and that the skeptics would congratulate themselves on not believing. Speaking critically and, no doubt, satirically, Diderot put into the mouth the blind scientist Saunderson (of whom more later on) the argument that if he were to be convinced of the existence of God he would have to touch him. In a similar vein, Diderot reported that when he asked a blind man if he would be glad to have eyes, the blind man answered that if it were not for his curiosity, he would prefer to have long arms because he thought that what he learned by means of his hands was more instructive than what other people had learned by the use of their eyes. Diderot added that to a philosopher blind from birth, the mold of his thought would be, so to speak, his sensations of touch. He, Diderot, would therefore not be surprised if deep thinking tired such a philosopher’s fingers as much as it tires our heads. Because deaf children learn to speak slowly and hesitantly, and because we are likely to assume that speech is necessary for thought, or at least for clear conscious thought, it is easy to make the additional assumption that deaf children have a slow intellectual development. The fact is that deaf children are often backward in grasping the normal world of symbols and may have difficulty even during adolescence with rather common abstract concepts—positive and negative are cited as instances. One sad conclusion is that “the concept-world of deaf students is global, restricted, and often presented in polar types.” Most deaf children are born to families that hear, and so they usually learn to speak, read, and often to sign, not at home, but in special classes and schools. These children learn to communicate by means of lip reading (a quite difficult skill) and speech (often not very intelligible); by finger spelling; by gestural translation of the ordinary spoken language; or by independent gestural languages such as such as the American Sign Language. These means are combined, as when finger spelling is used to make clear something, such as a name,

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for which the gestural language is insufficient. (Such finger spelling resembles the way in which Chinese and Japanese write a character in the air or on paper to distinguish it from another that sounds the same.) It often happens that the conversations of the deaf in their own families are limited and that they feel freer and happier with the other deaf—and not for linguistic reasons alone. And when the deaf talk with the deaf, sign language, it has been discovered, is their most nuanced and efficient means. The American Sign Language is one a group of similar true gestural languages. It has its individual character as such, resembling now one natural language and now another. The forms of its signs often bear some resemblance to the forms of the things to which they refer, but analysis has shown that these signs are genuine grammatical units put together into grammatical structures. The vocabulary of the language is relatively small, it is true, but (like, notably, German and Chinese) it can be enlarged by old words that are combined to make new ones. Unlike English, its verbs are fully inflected. Like Navaho and Chinese, it uses classifiers, which specify the category to which a word belongs (such as vehicle or person). Unlike all spoken languages (but like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese characters) more than one meaning unit can he presented simultaneously—one by each hand (for example little/boy). To understand something of the capacity of the American Sign Language and similar gestural languages, one must grasp not only the number and morphology of its hand gestures, but of its expressive, more or less standardized use of other parts of the body. Hand signs change meaning in relation to five points on the face, one for the neck, and one for the trunk. The head moves as part of certain signs, the shoulders and elbows may move alone, the cheeks and mouth sign (for balloon the checks are puffed out), and the eyes and eyebrows and mouth are used. And there is also, of course, facial expression. Clearly, as Diderot saw, a whole true language can he gestured rather than spoken; and if a language of gestures has deficiencies in comparison with a spoken one, the gesture language may well have the resources to overcome them. It is often assumed that children clarify and enrich their thinking by internalizing their language, that is, by conducting an internal conversation with themselves—a possible counterexample is that of a boy who could hear but not speak, but who could nevertheless understand. The ordinary reader is usually thought to go from printed word to word-sound to word-meaning. (But PET scans of the flow of blood in the brain show distinctly different centers for word-meaning, that is, for thinking words; for the speaking out or articulation of words; for the hearing or phonological coding of words; and for the seeing of words.)

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Surprising as it may seem, a signed language is likely to have certain advantages over a spoken one. At first, we have remarked, communication between infant and mother is by way of all senses, motions, and emotions. Since manual dexterity develops earlier in an infant than control over articulation, signing should have an initial advantage over words. However that may be, it is easy to assume that a practiced signer has a more diversified and subtle control over the expression of the spatial component of experience, that is, of shapes and shape-relationships, as well as greater accuracy in expressing much that has to do with movement. Imagine how much more expressively and accurately a signer could describe the gestural aspect of any human encounter, whether an ordinary conversation, an argument, a fight, a parade, or a dance. For Sign is not, as might be supposed, a mere succession of one gestured word after another, but is modulated like speech and music; and because it cuts back and forth between times and distances, it may be experienced, in this respect, like a movie that cuts back and forth so. And the performance of a poem created by a deaf poet for a deaf audience gives the poem the expressive quality of danced words. What can the deaf make of the sounds they never hear? Because they live in a world in which sound is of such importance, their interest in sound is not a matter of simple curiosity. They are taught to control sounds that hearing people might find unpleasant, to modulate their voices, and to laugh like “ ‘normal” people. (The double quotation marks express the feeling of the deaf that think of themselves as normal and of the people who hear as abnormal.) The trick for Deaf people (“Deaf ” meaning the deaf who live in a signing culture) is to figure out the complicated meaning attached to various sounds. Deaf people develop good theories about these sounds, but at other times the meanings of sound are much too elusive. What expedients can the deaf use to learn about sound? They can learn directly about its loudness and softness, especially of the low frequencies, from the vibrations that sounds create, so that the deaf in effect learn how sound resonates and carries. A profoundly deaf person may, so to speak, perceive (though not hear) a piano chord by placing her hand on the piano, or recognize a highly amplified voice. From the standpoint of hearing persons, this sensitivity to vibration may become extraordinarily developed. Different as the blind are from the deaf, they too start life with a deficit that affects their development, their language, and their thought. A careful observer has said, quite plausibly, that a blind infant five months old has no equivalent to other infants’ reaching out towards a visible object. Some blind babies have

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“ ‘blind hands,’ hands that do not explore objects.” Because blind children have no visual stimulation, it has been concluded that their language is necessarily fragmented and distorted. Perhaps the blind child’s early synesthesia makes things easier than they might be otherwise. For more fortunate or able blind children, the possibly delayed and to some degree confused beginnings of language do not hinder a usual development of linguistic skills. The reason is, as it must be, that the context of the child’s life gives cues that can converge into a more abstract nonvisual understanding that includes a sufficient equivalent of the missing information. The blind learn to use what sensory clues they have with an attentiveness that astonishes others. Helen Keller, both blind and deaf, could recall particular persons by the grasp of their fingers and the characteristic tightening of their handshakes. Diderot knew and quizzed a certain blind man of Puiseaux. What he learned of him was that he could judge “his proximity to a fire by the intensity of the heat, the fullness of a vessel by the sound of the liquid he pours into it, and the nearness of bodies by the movements of the air against his face. He is so sensitive to the least changes in atmosphere that he can tell a street from a dead end . . . He can also judge duration of time much more accurate than we, by the succession of his actions and thoughts.” Granted, then, that a blind person can somehow learn a great deal for which we think vision essential, is there anything in language and understanding that the blind person cannot help missing? What of all the phenomena and the words having to do directly with light? Can a blind person distinguish between to look and to see; or define and understand color names or such verbs based on sight as to notice and to dazzle? Let me begin my answer by repeating what Diderot reported of the mathematician Nicholas Saunderson, who lost his sight before he was a year old. “Saunderson,” wrote Diderot, “professed mathematics at the University of Cambridge with astonishing success. He gave lessons in optics; he lectured on the nature of light and of colors; he explained the theory of vision; he dealt with the effects of lenses, of the phenomena of the rainbow, and of many other things relative to sight and its organ.” Clearly, Saunderson, though he “saw with his skin,” had translated optics into the abstractions of mathematics and understood light as a scientist rather than as someone who had experienced it directly. Yet such a process of abstraction is not all that a blind person can draw on, for our direct experience of light is influenced by many associations, by which our sight becomes deeply colored. Associations? Red is associated with red-hot, fiery red, and blood red;

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and we redden with shame and anger. We say white as snow, white as chalk, and white as milk; and we associate whiteness with purity and cleanliness, and much else. And to be colorless is to be faded, pallid, dull, and much else. Although the blind person lacks the basic sensations that unite a curtain tangle of associations with a certain color and with colors in general, he learns each of the tangles and somehow intuits, creates, or codes its unity and its connection with color in general. In one sense this unity he creates is quite bereft of color; in another, it is very largely the color itself, closer, perhaps, to the seeing man’s experience of color than to the scientist’s of a particle he can never sense directly but only come into contact with by means of the combination of elaborate theories and elaborate instruments. And so a blind child of six can use the words see and look in ways normal to children of her age. She says, thinking of a direction, “I am looking out the window.” She holds up a bag of beads and says, “Look what I have.” She can understand that her mother might look, in the sense of explore visually, and might listen, in the sense of trying actively to hear, and yet neither see nor hear, in the sense of apprehend by sight or hearing. If she wants to know if you are seeing something she asks See? and not Look?, because she distinguishes between the passivity of seeing and the activity of looking; and, for the same reason, she uses the imperative Look! rather than See! The evidence simply is that a blind child can learn to distinguish meanings of look and see. Defining and distinguishing these terms, a blind adult says that to see is “to use your eyes to perceive something to get an image of it to know it’s there. You look with your eyes, and how you see is how you interpret it.” Further, to notice is “to see something that comes into your view. But not only to see but to perceive it and understand it. You could sit on this rocking chair and not notice the color of it at all. Might have to be looking at something specifically to notice it.” Blind children of twelve, having heard about colors, may have learned, for example, to distinguish the names of the warm colors from the cold. The little girl mentioned above learned ten different color names, which, like other quite young children, she used freely and incorrectly. When she was about four, an age when children can match color words with colors, she showed that she had learned what she could not know and asked for help in answering color questions. Yet the girl learned what kinds of things could and could not be colored. Of abstractions, she came to know that “you only think about them in your head,” and that, by nature, color was irrelevant to their being. And she learned the characteristic colors for various objects—she knew, for example, that dogs were sometimes gold or brown but never blue.

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If we want to understand how certain experiences are difficult or impossible to express in words, the example of the deaf and the blind is particularly instructive. It teaches us to what an extent the perceptive and intellectual abilities of human beings can neutralize a gross void in their experience of the world, and to what an extent what seems beyond their ability to grasp in any way and to express in words can be made intelligible and almost fully speakable. It is true that the void we have been thinking of, the absence of the sensory modality of sight or hearing, cannot simply be filled, and that the void is bridged, as far as possible, by means of associations and abstractions; yet the bridge is to some extent also sensory and perceptive because it is also created by the sharpening of the remaining senses and by the perceptual abilities (such as the vibratory “hearing” of the deaf and the facial “vision” of the blind) practically absent in those that hear and see because so neglected by them. I must add that there are other, to us still mysterious, abilities to perceive vaguely, without the usual gross sensory awareness, and sometimes without even the sensory apparatus we consider essential. One example is “blindtouch,” the ability to locate a touch on one’s skin although one is unaware of being touched. Another example is “blindsight,” the better-than-average guessing of the presence of something one cannot, in the normal sense, see because of brain injury—though often, when the visual contrasts are strong, the blinded person, especially after practice, has a kind of “feeling” of what is there or reports “dark shadows.” Yet though they can overcome so much of their lack, the blind and the deaf find us, the seeing and hearing, to be in some way beyond their understanding, just as we find that they are beyond ours—to which must be added that the blind as a group and the deaf as a group are also to a degree unknowable to one another; and those that are both blind and deaf, though fortunately few in number, are also to a degree unknowable to those who suffer from blindness or deafness alone—even though a blind and deaf person has been known, surprisingly, to learn language by means of the signing of the deaf. For that matter, the South African poet and novelist David Wright, who became deaf at the age of seven, says that he is unable to imagine the condition of those who were born deaf. Each group is isolated from the others by its lack, is both isolated from and joined with them by its sharpened use of its remaining perceptual abilities, and is joined with them by its common humanity and its ability to understand (or almost understand) and explain (or almost explain) what it is that isolates and what it is that joins it.

chapter 8

Pain, Cruelty, and Pathology in Art

Having lost the inhibitions inculcated by tradition, the art of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century has expressed itself in works that often demonstrate a cruel, perverse, or pathological imagination. This cruelty is different in spirit from the cruelty portrayed in ancient myths, or in literature, or in visual art, like that of Goya, that reflects the horrors of war. Instead, it seems to glory in pain or cruelty in and for itself. It is raw, exacts suffering, and too often fails to transcend the pain or cruelty it calls up, and so it creates problems for art, of the difficult kind this essay is concerned with. Most of what I say applies to the period from the 1960s and on, when conceptual art, performance art, and body art flourished together. Artists who practiced body art inflicted sometimes ordinary and sometimes imaginative pain on themselves. The justifications they gave make the impression of having been invented to clothe their acts in a mantle of intellectual and perhaps mystical respectability. Gina Pane, for example, contended that she purified herself and society by such experiments on herself as pushing a row of tacks into her forearm. She did this, she said, to demystify “the common image of the body experienced as a bastion of our individuality to project it into its essential reality, with the function of social mediation.” Chris Burden had himself photographed in a museum being shot in the arm, and, in another performance, was crucified to the roof of his automobile. When Herman Nitsch staged bloody sacrifices, it was, in his words, to “gain access to the most profound and holy symbols through blasphemy and desecration,” because “the blasphemous challenge is a comprehension of  being” and by “shameless analytical exhibitionism . . . expresses all the guilt and lust of the world” that enabled him

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to recognize in himself “the joy of resurrection.” Marina Abramovic sat in a ring of ice for an hour with five pythons and boa constrictors, recapitulating in her own way the ancient worship of serpents—any trace of tension would, she said, have liberated their strangling instincts. Her justification is that what we now regard only as sources of danger can be, as they once were, sources of energy. She wants to enter into forms of consciousness that are forbidden but necessary, all the more so to prepare us for the death of our planet, for dying in unison, and, for once, to experience the higher states of consciousness and grasp reality as such. However we classify them, many other recent artists have created art that is painful, cruel, or repulsive. By accident, I found on the Internet, under the title of “Censorship\Art,” an extensive anonymous descriptive list of such artists. The following is an excerpt, slightly modified: “Cornelius Kolig, Mike Kelley, and Stuart Brisley have painted and sculpted with shit . . . Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1999) was a full-scale recreation of her bedroom, complete with urinestained sheets, used condoms, and blood-stained knickers . . . Helen Chadwick has used her urine to create sculptures (the twelve Piss Flowers, 1991), though she more frequently uses raw meat and animal carcasses in her work . . . Keith Boadwee gives himself paint enemas, then squats over his canvas and splatters paint over it . . . Mark Quinn’s sculpture Self (1991) was a cast of his own head made from nine pints of his blood . . . Danish artist Marco Evaristti displayed ten blenders, each containing a live goldfish, at the Trapholt Art Museum, Denmark (11th February 2000). The buttons which activated the blenders were placed within reach of gallery visitors. Two fish were blended on the first day of the exhibition, and a further five were killed over the next two days . . . Turner Prize-winning conceptual artist Damien Hirst’s installations are notorious for their use of animal carcasses . . .” Many names and dates of exhibitions follow. “Perhaps the world’s most provocative artist is Rick Gibson, from Canada, whose exhibition Dead Animals was shown at the Cuts Gallery, London (November 1984). The exhibition included a human uterus hanging from a wall and Kitten A La Carte, a dead pregnant cat, bisected, with its kitten impaled on a fork. Gibson is most infamous for his ‘sculpture’ show at the Animal exhibition, Young Unknowns Gallery (London, December 1987: Human Ear-Rings consists of two twelve-week-old human fetuses with hooks in their heads. The fetuses were worn as earrings (via the hooks) by both a plastic mannequin and a live model. On February 9th, 1989, Gibson was found guilty of outraging public decency.” Such conversions of self-inflicted pain, fear, shame, anger, or disgust into sources of exhibitionistic pride in the violation of the usual norms of conduct

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seem to have existed everywhere, as is testified by history, by anthropology, and by legends of the exploits of trickster demi-gods. In Africa, such a demigod is often called Spider, and among the Native Americans, Coyote. These demi-gods, who are vain, greedy, and treacherous, are endowed with great and, at critical moments, essential creative powers. Needless to say, their disconcerting feats easily eclipse those of the body artists. Whereas Orlan (of whom more later) has had her face operated on to transform it, the Tricky One of the Winnebago Indians turns himself into an extremely pretty women with the help of a vulva he makes from an elk’s liver and breasts from its kidneys and then gets himself pregnant by the fox, the jaybird, and the nit. Coyote eats the children he is meant to take care of and even cooks and eats his own daughter (whose ghost takes revenge on him). Yet among the Navajo, for instance, he is one of the First People, those who decide how humans should live. Although he survives being killed, he arranges that humans should die, in order, he says, to make them take life more seriously, enable them to know love and the joy of having children, and also to prevent them from overpopulating the earth. He is insatiable, and his life-force is incredibly powerful; for he represents the whole range of the possibilities, positive and negative, of life. Embodying, as he does, the creativity generated by the positive and negative qualities of the life-force, he is what the more positive Dadaists and some of the body artists fantasized they might be. Orlan distinguishes herself from them the body artists by calling herself a carnal artist. Her art consists of submission to plastic surgery that, in her terms, has been designed to let her be reborn, without a mother, from woman to woman, bearing the features of a mythological goddess or some other extraordinary woman as she appears in traditional European art. Her art, in her eyes, is the active aspiration as expressed in the operation. The operation is meant to create a desired “soul and body.” In her words, she transmutes plastic surgery into revelations. She is a saint—a blasphemous one, she says—because she gainsays the destiny that was assigned her. She is glad, she says, that her body has become the site of essential public debate. Obviously intelligent, she is versed in psychoanalysis, which she has undergone, and accepts psychoanalytic explanations of her self-dislike, narcissism, and exhibitionism. And she has been successful in the practice of her art, and, in her narcissistic fashion, can be eloquent. What I have to say about her is largely drawn from my report, written in 2005, on the unpublished doctoral thesis of Lea Klein, Patholog  y and Aesthetics: The Body Art of Orlan. Orlan’s best-known works are the series of nine plastic operations on her face, to match it to some characteristic of a well-known painting, for example,

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in two different instances, features of the faces of the Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s Venus. The series began on her forty-third birthday and continued for some three and a half years. The last, still unperformed tenth operation, which seems extravagant even for Orlan, is to transform her by giving herself a larger nose than any human has ever had. Orlan takes care to remain conscious throughout her operations because the essence of the art, she says, is her experience of the change she undergoes. The operating room is transformed into a theater. The doctors and Orlan wear gowns designed by well-known couturiers, music is played, composed in one instance by the pop star David Bowie. The event is photographed by well-known photographers, videotaped, and broadcast—the seventh operation was transmitted by satellite to the Pompidou Center and elsewhere. Blood from the operation is stored in bottles, the bits of skin are framed, to be exhibited, catalogued, and sold in galleries as objects of art—and as relics of her sainthood. Orlan considers these operations to be creative, lifegiving works of art. Her opinion sets the problems that Lea Klein’s thesis is meant to solve: Can such sadomasochistic acts be art in the full sense of the word? Are they at all rational? Are the surgeons who operate on her for the sake of her exhibitionistic self-transformations acting in keeping with the ethics of their profession? Are the prestigious museums that exhibit her transformations simply taking advantage of the scandalized attention she always provokes? All told, how can we grasp and evaluate her disturbing acts and no less disturbing pretensions? Klein’s thesis has four chapters. The first takes up the antibourgeois background to Orlan’s works and her history as an artist, beginning with her appearance in school plays. The second chapter gives a psychoanalytic explanation of her change of name to Orlan, a name with magical significance to her. It tells of her early death wish, which resulted from her difficult relationship with her mother (Orlan says that when in her youth she decided to change her name, she suffered panic attacks of fear of death and suicidal impulses). Her facial surgery project is interpreted as a reaction to her feeling that her self has been of shattered. Her handling of sexuality shows that her sexuality fills her with dread, disgust, and repulsion, which she transmits to viewers in, for example, enlarged photographs of her bleeding vagina. Her frequent use of her body in photographs as a kind of measuring device for streets and buildings is interpreted as in part Orlan’s disconnection from her own body. Still another of her motifs, which requires the use of a computer, is to graft her face onto that of an African or Native American. Then, as in the surgery she undergoes, she is playing God and trying to recreate herself and so to escape death. In the last section of the second chapter, Klein uses the philosophy of Michel Foucault

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to interpret Orlan’s art as an unending attempt to change herself by exceeding all natural and societal limitations—a conscious, brave attempt to realize her personal freedom. The third chapter is a detailed review, with many illustrations, of Orlan’s operations, every one of which risked permanent mutilation. Then comes a discussion of the moral foundation of the surgeon’s work, not for the sake of health but to fulfill an exhibitionistic need. The last chapter enlists a number of psychoanalysts to solve the question whether or not Orlan’s work should be considered art, or an expression of perverse pathology. Klein’s answer is that much in Orlan’s work is compatible with the basic assumptions of Western art since the Renaissance, but that there are aspects of the work that cross the line between art and pathology. Now since the works of so-called “outsiders,” many of them insane, have been widely accepted as art in the full sense, there is no sufficient reason to assume an essential gap between creative art and the symptoms of pathology. And art, including Orlan’s art, can certainly express rebellious reactions. Orlan says that her art, carnal art, unlike body art, “does not conceive of pain as redemptive or as a source of purification” and “is not interested in the plastic-surgery result but in the process of surgery, the spectacle and discourse of the modified body which has become the place of public debate . . . Carnal Art asserts the individual independence of the artist. In that sense it resists and dictates. That is why it has engaged the social, the media, where it disrupts received ideas and causes scandal, and will even reach as far as the judiciary” (p. 229 of Lea Klein’s dissertation). Not only may art and pathology be compatible, but pathological impulses may accentuate or even reveal the existence of creative power. However, speaking for myself, the solution cannot be so simply theoretical. There can easily be cases in which the cruelty, inhumanity, or arousal of disgust exhibited by a work of art overcomes our ability to take pleasure in whatever creative impulse it exhibits. The Romans put on plays in which slave-actors were killed because the plot of the play had the character represented killed. The slave about to be killed might have played his part with unforgettable emotion, but even if the result could be accounted art, I think none of us should want to watch or encourage it. As for Orlan, my own verdict, like Klein’s, is ambivalent, though perhaps more deeply so. I accept much of her art (of her photographs, for example) without question, but however life-giving her art-operations may be to her, and however reasonable her defense of them, I feel them to be too morbid to want to bear them as a spectator. Perhaps, therefore, I judge that her plausible-sounding defenses are, in context, predominantly rationalizations of her pathological drives. Orlan herself would accept most of this verdict, and object, I assume, only to the word “predominantly.” I feel repelled rather than

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gratified or enlightened by the spectacle she makes of her self-inflicted pain, although, I own, I am interested in it as a case history for the sake of both psychology and twentieth-century art. My justification for my attitude does not rest on my aversion alone. The biological and social need for art expresses our need to make our lives more interesting, but to make them more interesting in what makes the lives inwardly more worth living. It is Orlan’s accomplishment to have made her life more interesting and attractive for herself in the ways I have described. But what is medicine for one person may be poison for another. Sadistic and masochistic acts not confined, as usual in art, to the imagination but expressed in actual practice cause psychological pain to most of those who experience them, or increase the temptation to accept or give vent to practices that induce suffering. Even when confined to the imagination, the art that expresses pain and cruelty may not have enough aesthetic vitality to transcend them in an aesthetic sense. Art, fed by an imagination that by nature has no bounds, cannot avoid even the most painful extremes, but it is ethically and psychologically best for us if it does not put sadism or masochism into actual practice. What keeps Orlan’s carnal art from being unambiguously art is neither more nor less than the surgeon’s knife: the infliction of the pain is too real.

chapter 9

On the Transparency and Opacity of Philosophers

Sometimes our thought is transparently clear. It is as if we were looking through a window whose clarity was an invitation for the world to come in. The pleasure we take in thinking transparent thoughts is like that which we take in the unimpeded use of any ability; but such transparency is unique in that it suggests easy communication with oneself and others, the ability to nullify problems by seeing through them, and a clean, physically effortless mastery of life. Transparency of thought is at its most impressive in mathematics. However, even mathematics does not consistently achieve its ideal of clarity. At times, while still in the process of development, it is likely to be rough and to show gaps like those in a ladder with missing rungs, or, to return to the first image. to resemble a window with areas difficult to see through clearly. It is true, furthermore, that what seems completely clear to one generation may seem unclear to another—Euclidean geometry, the best old model of clarity, has had to be clarified in recent times. To this suggestion that mathematical clarity is sometimes only relative, we can add the uncer­tainty introduced by philosophical disputes on the nature of mathematics and mathematical proof, the incompleteness of mathematics, as shown by Gödel, and the partial randomness of number theory. There is also a further restriction of the clarity of mathematics. I am not sure exactly how to characterize it because it breaks the tie between clarity and correctness: a line of mathematical reasoning that begins as usual but ends in a contradic­tion shows that its initial clarity was misleading and therefore perhaps only apparent. Nonetheless, the clarity of mathematics is great enough to foster the ideal of an absolute transparency of thought.

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Outside of mathematics, even the most exact sciences are at best no more than translucent. I mean that scientific theory is never in a completely satisfactory state, but always, at least here and there, in a state of temporary repair or merely empirical salvage. The nonmathematical sciences are also opaque and dense, in that they require observation and experiment to decide what theory alone cannot, and in being subject to different interpretations. In science there is always a margin of error, correction, addition, and deepening, and though the scientist has clarifying insights, experience has so far shown that every area of science can be investigated further and refor­mulated, for its density, which is its ability to yield information and theory, appears to be inexhaustible. I must also add the obvious: in every science the individual tends to favor his own hypotheses. Consciously or not, he sets up experiments, gathers and discards observations, and makes statistical or other summaries, all (as research has shown) with a more or less quantifiable bias in his own favor. Apart from such bias, every scientist is an instrument of observation and analysis with its own individual characteristics. To take a persuasive example, nineteenth-century astronomers discovered that their timing of star transits was subject to surprising individual variations. Regardless of the care he took, each astronomer turned out to have his per­sonal tendency or “error,” which could be compared with the “errors” of other astronomers or with the average of the observations of all of them, but which was not subject to any conclusive correction. Beginning about 1838, each astronomical observer was therefore provided with a “personal equation” to compensate for his individual difference. When transit times began to be recorded automatically, about a decade later, the practice was discontinued. Interestingly, experiments showed that the differences in recording time could not be accounted for by differences in speed of nerve transmission. I have been contrasting transparency with opacity and density, opacity being the condition in which things cannot be made out clearly, and density that, much more often opaque than transparent, in which the process of ex­plaining must go on because it has shown itself to be inadequate. In the more exact sciences there are socially agreed-on ways, comparable almost to courts-oflaw, for clarifying things and going ahead collectively. In philosophy, there is a reaction of professional public opinion, but its verdict is much vaguer than that of a court-of-law with its formalized standards of judgment or the verdict rendered by groups of experimenters that make direct and indirect tests of the work and ideas of other groups. Philosophy, then, resembles science in its translucency, opacity, and density, but the ways in which it is clarified are themselves less clear and less widely ac­cepted. The result is that social and

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personal influences play a relatively un­checked role in philosophy, and the influences add to its density. I do not want to proceed by defining philosophy, but it is generally agreed that it is distinguished from other kinds of nonscientific writing by its intellectual strenuousness. That is, philosophy consists to a large extent of intellectually formulated problems and answers. Among its densifying components it includes: 1. an irreducible component of reasoning, likely to be modeled on the kind of reasoning acceptable to the philosophers of the period 2. an irreducible social component, which is the influence of time, place, and human company 3. an irreducible personal component, likely to be more evident or less effectively neutralized than in the exact sciences 4. an irreducible emotional component, which can be thought of as a subcomponent of both the social and personal, but which can be characterized separately. The density of philosophy of course also reflects the difficulty of the problems it deals with. Summarily, then, compared to mathematics philosophy is opaque and dense, and compared to the more exact sciences it is less corrigibly subject to social, personal, and emotional influences. The solutions of philosophical problems are likely to appear either more difficult than those of science or simply impossible. By “more difficult” and “impossible” I do not mean more difficult in the eyes of a particular philosopher, or impossi­ble to him as an individual, but difficult or impossible to solve in a way ac­ceptable to most of the others of his profession. In this sense it is fair to say that philosophy is not only at least as opaque and dense as the exact sciences, but is also vaguer than they. I want to emphasize that I am not interested in the reduction of a philosopher’s thought to something merely involved in it, such as emotion, but in understanding it as it actually works, that is, in its actual density. The aim is not to reduce but to densify. This emphasis is useful because we usually prefer to react to philosophy as if it were, in the term I have used, transparent; or perhaps we acknowledge its density when we deal with its past, but not with its present. Such a distinction between a denser past and a more clearly intellectual, more transparent present is natural and for the most part necessary because most of us take up philosophy in order to deal directly with its problems by its own

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methods, the relative transparency or stringency of which distinguishes philosophy from other literature and philosophers from writers of other sorts. When I reverse the philosopher’s usual emphasis and insist not on the desired transparency of philosophy but on its actual social and personal density, I make the nature of this density my own philosophical problem, to be dealt with as transparently as I can; and while, by the standards I sug­gest, I must acknowledge the nonphilosophical factors that affect my thought, to devote too much attention to them might make the attempt to understand density too clumsy in practice and too involved with infinite regress in theory. Although the historical evidence is confusingly rich, my own position on the problem of agreement is moderate. I take exception to two extreme views, which are: 1. It is possible for us to reach detailed agreement on most matters of philosophical importance 2. It is never possible for us to agree even roughly on any matters of philosophical importance. The truth, to my mind, is indeterminately between these two extremes. Now let me try to go slightly further. Even scientists and philosophers may not have a clear understanding of the methods by which they try to solve their intellectual problems. This judgment is based in part on the ex­perience of “knowledge engineers,” those who develop the so-called “ex­pert programs” by which computers make differential diagnoses in internal medicine, determine molecular weights, and the like. When a knowledge engineer tries to follow the actual reasoning of an expert, he often discovers that the method the expert claims to use is no more than a textbook-fiction. The attempt to formalize the method for computer use has been described as an elaborate pas de deux between the engineer or programmer and the ex­pert. Our frequent ignorance of how we think is accompanied by a partial ignorance of what we think, this ignorance being a certain incommensurability resulting from the fact that, thinking with our whole person, we generate our ideas from a dense, unknown substratum. We do have a grasp of what we mean in the sense that when anyone else tries to interpret our statements we immediately feel what is foreign in the interpretation and are able to correct it. Yet we cannot predict how we will modify our reasoning in response to changes in its context or changed partners in discussion. Therefore we cannot make an exhaustive statement of what we mean, but discover our meaning over the course of time; but though we become in­creasingly familiar with ourselves, we are

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never familiar enough to say our meaning all out. I say this on the assumption that the meaning, so far as we know, has not been changed. The more careful the discussion, the more likely we are to qualify the ideas that are attributed to us with a “Yes, but I meant” or “No, that is not how I would put it.” It appears that no one is able to think identically with anyone else for long. Even when we are briefly able to express another person’s view to his or her own satisfaction, we are most probably unable to agree to it, and in this sense, the sense of separation from the reasoning we are reproducing, we are not expressing it fully—its rightness is not self-evident to us. Now to philosophical reasoning. We ordinarily conceive of a phil­osopher as having asked a series of abstract questions and having given them a series of abstract answers, the questions and answers interlocking to form a more or less coherent whole. When this whole has an embracing, well-developed structure, we speak of it as a system. The reasoning of which it is constructed is assumed to be all of a philosophical piece. However, when it is examined really closely, it is discovered to be uncoercive, that is to say, insufficient to prove anything. It is not simply a matter of unproved assumptions in any formal sense, because even when we agree to the philosopher’s assumptions, his or her reasoning remains uncoercive. If we want to try to stand in the philosopher’s place and grasp the problems as the philosopher did, we begin to see the philosophy in question as the result of the convergence of various forces. By a kind of retrospective illusion the philosophy may then appear to be overdetermined. I use the words “retrospective illusion” because we cannot stage experiments to decide which factors in the philosopher’s development were or were not essential, and once the philosophy has been fixed historically, almost anything in its vicinity may be counted as a reason or cause, as if everything at the time and place had conspired to the same end. When faced by such apparent conspiracies, all we can do is to think like a detective and make plausible reconstructions of what might actually have taken place. If we lay out a philosopher’s line of reasoning as if on a map. and if we think of what was sayable in the philosopher’s philosophical context, we discover that at every point at which the philosopher decided to go in one direction rather than another, a different direction might have been chosen. In the absence of weighty counterevidence, we are bound to accept the philosopher’s reasons for tak­ing the path in fact taken, but the density of explanation is apt to be low and the philosopher’s reasons for choosing one direction rather than another apt to appear not sufficient or weighty enough in their own right. The evidence for this conclusion is found in the works of his opponents, but, more strikingly, in those of his students and commentators.

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It would be helpful if we regarded philosophers more in the light of art. We praise artists for being individual, but appear to assume that philosophers, though in fact different from one another, ought ideally to be the same, that is, reach the same conclusions and, in this respect, to be the same as scientists. All the evidence is, however, that every uncoerced philosopher is persuaded by a unique set of reasons and reaches conclusions that, closely observed, are unique. Some artists claim to express the truth, but they do so as artists, indirectly, by means of allusion, distortion, exaggeration, metaphor, and expressive self-contradiction. These are all tactics that philosophers, with their passion for explicitness and transparency, most often prefer to avoid, and so, in a way, the uniqueness of philosophers is more interesting than that of artists. In any prolonged reading, even of a text that avoids conscious subjectivity, one is likely to sense the personality of the writer and to react to the text rather as to the person. To speak in psychological terms, we are likely to feel underlying moods or concerns such as curiosity, ambition, anger, bitterness, doubt, or its variant, obsessive attention to detail, ambivalence, sadness, self-concern, flight from life, or general compassion. Ambivalence, the simultaneous expression of conflicting desires or views, makes especially interesting appearances in philosophy. A poet is able to express his ambivalence openly, but a philosopher, who usually prides himself on his logical consistency, as a rule conceals his ambivalence. If a philosopher such as Nietzsche or a theologian such as Kierkegaard preaches disregard for consistency, the chances are that he does so because his need to display ambivalence is so great. The chances are also that such openly ambivalent thought will be denounced by the more conventional philosopher and regarded by him as not genuinely philosophical. The life and thought of Nietzsche are extraordinarily rich in pain, anger, ambition, and ambivalence. Of all his philosophical positions, perhaps the most general and striking was his affirmation of life, his yes-­saying as much to its difficulties as to its opportunities. The more painful the difficulties, the more eagerly Nietzsche claimed to embrace them. I can­not go into the evidence, but it is clear that Nietzsche’s affirmation of life was a reaction to physical and psychological pain, especially the pain, from which he never recovered, of his father’s death. More exactly, his affirma­tion answered his fear that he might have inherited insanity or an early death from his father. The affirmation was his protest against his father’s fate and against the threat that it might be repeated in his own. As I have said elsewhere, his revul­sion against Christianity and probably against nationalism was the ven­geance he took on his father, the pastor and nationalist, who in dying early had abandoned him.

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Nietzsche’s powerful aesthetic interests and his tendency to see ev­erything worthwhile in life as a form of artistic creation were also related to his father. His love for music and his eloquent improvisation on the piano were his way of continuing to be related to his dead father, of assimilating his father’s presence and, with it, the emotional sustenance he needed. To Nietzsche, every accomplishment was a profoundly artistic im­provisation that created life out of the threat of death. His horror of everything merely conventional was a reflex of his desire for artistic crea­tion; but it was also in part the result of his profound dependence on his mother and the conventions she respected. Nietzsche’s relationship with his father, mother, and sister, which gave him both strength and pain, made him strongly ambivalent. So did his struggle against physical pain and loneliness. The struggle is mirrored in the hyperbole, the intensity, and the fighting quality of his thought. Likewise, the psychological ambivalence is mirrored in philosophical ambivalence. This ambivalence led him to praise conflict, self-conflict, and self-conquest. On the level of philosophical abstraction, it led him to deny the laws of identity and contradiction, because these threatened to reduce his am­bivalence to nothing more than his private experience. The laws of logic also appeared to him to limit possibilities and so to dampen his hopes or fan­tasies, which were sometimes extreme. His belief in a minutely exact and eternal recurrence, which would be easy to translate into fatalism and depression, merely led him to affirm artistic creation the more vigorously and, with it, the profoundness of his ambivalence. Although Nietzsche, like many philosophers, often made excessive claims and was often blind to himself, nothing of what I have said of him is intended to devalue either him or his thought—apart from the excessiveness of his claims and his blindness. Part of the difficulty that he had and that we share with him is that creation in philosophy demands great effort and therefore great ambition, while the effort to reach the truth demands great self-­abnegation and therefore great modesty; and ambition and modesty, as Nietzsche and many others show, do not go together very easily. As I have said, a thinker like Nietzsche is likely to be regarded by the more analytically inclined as only marginally a philosopher. For this reason I take as my second philosopher-example Bertrand Russell, whom the analytically inclined regard with affectionate respect, I think, even though he belittled the later Wittgenstein. I concentrate on two of Russell’s philosophical views, his mathematical Platonism and his logical atomism, both of which he in time abandoned, but which are characteristic of him as a philosopher. It is Russell himself who tells us that his mathematical Platonism was not based to begin with on the philosophical reasons, in any case in­conclusive,

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that could be given for it, but on his psychological needs. He fell in love with mathematics, he says, because in studying Euclid under his brother’s guidance, he discovered that he was not, as he had thought, a fool. He also says more than once that he was so miserable as an adolescent and young man that he was happy to find a refuge in the distant, perfect world of mathematics. He eventually discovered that his attempt to base mathematics on logic ran into difficulties he could not master to his satisfaction, and his reason helped to undo the knot that his reason and emotion had once tied. Russell also tells us that he was split between a logical and a mystical self. Towards the end of his life, the split showed signs of healing and he came to believe that science and morality were related and the rational and psychological fundamentally the same. But by the time he was better unified as a person and more prepared to agree that fact and value were interdepen­dent, he was no longer willing or able to go into philosophical detail, so that his final conclusions seem to be almost external to his philosophy. Yet it is interesting to see how, both early and late, philosophical reasons and psychological causes converged and supported one another. Neither, I suspect, could have survived alone. Russell’s logical atomism expresses his desire to analyze experience down to its basic constituents in order to distinguish between well- and ill-­founded philosophical views. There is something in this of Leibniz’s ambi­tions for logic and a good deal of Hume’ s dissolving analysis of the world. It creates a parallel between epistemology and physics and rests on the hope that epistemological analysis rivals the success of physical analysis. But although Russell argues that proper names are no more than relatively coherent collections of “simples,” the extension of this doctrine, following Hume, to persons, the argument, that is, that they too are only collections, without fundamental unity, was certainly counterintuitive to most people and made without any consideration of the biological and psychological evidence of human unity. This is surely an instance of an attempt to settle a complex, unfathomed matter as if it were transparently logical. Because most people, I assume, including philosophers, would reject Russell’s doctrine, the support for which seems mostly a matter of ter­minology, wishful reduction, and the hope for philosophical transparency, the question arises whether there might not have been an additional, nonphilosophical cause for Russell’s adoption of the doctrine. There was, to begin with, the precedent of Hume, though Hume himself was unable to give in psychologically to that which he asserted philosophically. It appears that Russell was in fact moved by a psychological cause, which lent such support to his

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linguistic-logical reason that he failed to explore the problem further and simply asserted that persons could be no more than collections (or might be more but could not be known to be such). The psychological cause, bared by himself. was that he felt a terrible void at the very center of his being. Psychology makes it plausible that this feeling of voidness was caused by the death of both of his parents when he was very young. After one hears what he said about himself, it becomes easy to assume that his idea that persons were only collections was intuitively more plausible to him than to others. His depersonalization, to use the psychological term, was not unlike that of Hume, who suffered a long, serious depression just at the time that he was composing the Treatise of Human Nature. In both Russell and Hume, intellectual arguments and psychological states supported and lent each other plausibility. As the inhabitants of an imaginary flatland must have difficulty in grasping what is meant by the third dimension, depersonalized, fragmentary-feeling individuals must have difficulty in grasping that other individuals feel and believe themselves to be wholes. Lacking an automatic method of recording star transits, an astronomer had to be provided with his “personal equation,” the measure of his individual difference as a recording instrument. Just so, an observer of the self, who is his own epistemological instrument, has to record in his personal way, which is not necessarily decisive for others. The use of psychology raises questions about the psychological principles that are assumed. Little can be taken for granted, for psychologists resemble philosophers in disagreeing a great deal even about fundamentals. Psychoanalysis, a free version of which I myself favor, is often harshly judged, not least by psychologists. In recent years, Adolf Grünbaum has contended that it has failed, in fact and principle, to gather objective evidence in its favor; but his scholarship and analytical ability have been marred by a bias that has allowed him to accept without question ex­periments that support his views while subjecting the others to an unsym­pathetic, even withering analysis. Much of the difficulty he points out also affects the observations of anthropologists and the case histories of doctors, not to say almost everything interesting in the social sciences. I cannot analyze the problem here, but I think that Grünbaum is too pessimistic (or antagonistic) and that there has been and will be helpful interaction between psychoanalytic treatment and experimental research. In principle, therapeutic aims and case-history evidence make the relationship of psycho­analysis to experimental psychology not unlike that of medicine to the rele­vant branches of science. In commenting on philosophers, I have used what might be called a minimal psychology. That is, I have confined myself to assumptions that are in

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practice accepted by the great majority of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. This acceptance does not free the assumptions of doubt, but if we want to think psychologically we have little choice but to use them, with whatever care and sensitivity we are capable of. My most obvious assumption, that early relations with parents have a deep and enduring effect on our reaction to life, is subject to all sorts of qualifications, but it is unusually well supported by case histories, statistics, and experimental research. A psychological characteristic central to the understanding of philosophers is the strenuousness of their attempts to persuade. These attempts are common to scientists and others, but philosophers choose prob­lems on which decisive arguments can rarely if ever be brought to bear. Like scientists, philosophers often want to be recognized as winners of a difficult intellectual competition. Sometimes, at least, the desire to persuade others expresses the need to persuade oneself by persuading them. A part may also be played by the desire to carry out the psychologically rooted behest of someone else, a parent or ­parent-like figure. To my mind, however, the most usual reason for the desire to persuade is the hope to create a rational mutuality that will allow the persuader to come into close enough (but not too close) emotional contact with persons of a compatible intellectual and emotional kind. In keeping with what I have said, I admit that the tactics of persuasion that I use reflect the kind of person I am. These tactics, with their reliance on the empirical, may not be well suited to most philosophers. I suppose that most of them prefer abstractions that are related to one another systematically, deductively if possible, and developed in abstract detail, with constant refutation of possible abstract objections. To relate abstrac­tions in this way often seems to me too much a game, marvelously stimulating when played by a genius but tending to be empty, of no serious consequence, when played by more ordinary philosophers. The mode of persuasion that I think preferable is as often the or­ der of self-discovery as that of ordinary philosophical argument. My dependence on examples is so heavy that my whole argument has an inductive rather than analytical or deductive air. Prolonged empirical arguments are likely when serious to re­quire hesitation, and hesitation makes the arguments less elegant, less transparent, and, to philosophers perhaps, less provocative. I believe, however, that experience is often more persuasive than argument as such, and that making up one’s mind even in philosophy is a far more opaque and dense affair than philosophers like to acknowledge. My hope is that my semi-empirical argument, though not transparent or much drawn out philosophically, will nevertheless strike deep, so that something of what is contended will remain lodged in others’ minds. In my imagination, there are two rewards between

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which it is less easy to distinguish than may at first ap­pear—coming closer to the truth and lodging in the minds of others. Philosophers have preferred to think that it is the first reward that has most attracted them, but I doubt that they have understood themselves sufficient­ly. Kant was right when he said that, though we are social, we are so egotistically and rebelliously. In our imaginations, each of us needs to be social, if only to imagine himself elected, righ­ teous, and triumphant. Our philosophies are traps by which we try to entice others to recognize us and become intellectually or otherwise assimilated to us; they are searches for truth that are also invitations to company. I am probably exaggerating, but the exaggeration is an attempt to suggest how elusively dense reasoning and reasoners really are. To suggest this density clearly is difficult. Sometimes I feel as if I were trying to carve ghosts, which are by nature at least transparent, out of blocks of wood. Well, if I have carved the ghosts, can you see through them; and if you can, are they only ghosts?

bibliography Chaitin, G. J. “Randomness in Arithmetic.” Scientific American 259, 1988: 52–57. Clark, P., and Wright, C., eds. Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science. Blackwell, Oxford, 1988. Edelson, M. Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984. Feigenbaum, E. A., and McCorduck, P. The Fifth Generation, rev. ed. Pan Books, London, 1984 (on expert programs). Gregory, R. L. Mind in Science. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984 (for astronomers’ “personal equations”). Grünbaum, A. “Epistemological Liabilities of the Clinical Appraisal of Psy­choanalytic Theory.” Nous 14, 1980: 307–85. Rosenthal, R., and Rosnow, R. L. Artifact in Behavioral Research. Aca­demic Press, New York, 1960. Scharfstein, B.-A. The Philosophers. Blackwell/Oxford (U.S.A.), Oxford/New York, 1980. Shanon, B. (Department of Psychology, Hebrew University). “The Myth of the Box and the Package” (unpublished paper). ———. – – “Thought Sequences” (unpublished paper).

chapter 10

The Three Philosophical Traditions

w h a t , i n t h i s h i s t o r y, i s c o n s i d e r e d t o b e philosophical? There are three great philosophical traditions, the Indian, the Chinese, and the European. Before I describe them, I want to ask and answer, very briefly, what a philosophical tradition is, why I say that there are only three such traditions, and why it is best to study them together, as they are studied here, rather than separately or successively. What is a philosophical tradition? A chain of persons who relate their thought to that of their predecessors and in this way form a continuous transmission from one generation to the next, from teacher to disciple to disciple’s disciple. Or rather, because a whole tradition is made up of many subtraditions, it is one and the same tradition because all of its subtraditions share common sources and modes of thought and develop by reaction to one another. A tradition is by nature cumulative, and it progresses in the sense that it defines itself with increasing detail and density. I define the tradition as philosophical to the extent that its members articulate it in the form of principles—if only principles of interpretation—and of conclusions reasonably drawn from them; and I define it as philosophical to the extent that its adherents defend and attack by means of reasonable arguments—even those that deny reason—and understand and explain how they try to be reasonable. As history demonstrates again and again­, no philosophy is purely rational, pure rationality being an unreasonable, impossible ideal. Matters of religion, communal loyalty, reverence for teachers, and cultural habits, not to mention individual psychology, have always limited rationality, so that philosophical subtraditions or schools are rational by tendency rather than in any absolute way.1

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I go on to my second question: Why say that there are only three great philosophical traditions? To claim this, one must put aside the correct but, for our purpose, insufficient definitions of philosophy as wisdom or as the group of principles, either stated or implied, by which any person or community views life. In keeping with the original meaning of the term philosophy, love of wisdom, philosophers, one supposes, have wanted to be wise, yet experience has taught that there is no good reason to think that they are necessarily so except, circularly, by their own definitions, and no good reason to think that nonphilosophers cannot be equally wise, that is, perceptive, farsighted, and sagacious, in the ways that their particular lives have taught them. Nor is there any good reason to suppose that traditions that are not philosophi­cal by the definition I have adopted have not had their own depth of sophistication and practical intelligence (which is implicitly also theoretical). Let me pause briefly to give a few examples of what I mean by this last statement. The definition of philosophy that is adopted here implies that ancient Mesopota­mia and Egypt had no philosophical ­tradition. This implication holds true even though the Mesopota­mians’ religious texts show that they were trying to grasp universal and permanent principles that lie below the surface of things. On the basis of these principles they erected often fantastic hypotheses from which they could extrapolate what could or should happen. A different, more modest kind of understanding can be extrapolated from the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Like Greek drama, the epic warns against the attempt to overcome the nature of things. In the end, the hero gets, though maybe refuses, the advice (accepted by Voltaire’s Candide) to relax his heroics, accept the unheroic pleasures of life, and submit to the fate of all humans. The quite dissimilar Dialogue of Pessimism is a debate of a man with himself in which he makes contrary judgments on how he should act. It ends, it seems, with a skeptical, gloomy, yet humorous accep­tance of all the contradic­tory positions—what is good is bad and what is useful is harmful. As in Ecclesias­tes, the reason appears to be that a human being under­stands too little to know what it is best to do. Like the wisdom literature of the Egyptians and Hebrews, that of the Mesopotamians teaches the lesson of a temperate acceptance of life and life’s duties.2 All this suggests the intellectual accomplish­ment of the Mesopota­mians, which is matched by that of the other great, equally ancient civilization, the Egyptian. To give one of many examples, the Egyptians explain the world with the help of the cosmic goddess Maat, who unites in her person the values of order, equilibri­um, truth, and wisdom, and so keeps the world tolerable to the human beings who tenant it. Yet god as conceived by the Egyptians remains

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ambigu­ous in number: except for the twenty years during which the pharaoh Akhenaten tried to force monothe­ism on the Egyptians, god for them remained both one and many, always being discovered in new manifestations. By their refusal to regard monotheism and polytheism as exclusive of one another, the Egyptians expressed their tacit conviction that nature has a certain unity but cannot be summed up in a fixed number of gods or forces.3 All this, I repeat, is not philosophy as I mean it here. If we accept a more general definition and think of philoso­phy as wisdom in the face of the difficulties of life, we discover that “primitives,” as we have miscalled them, can be our equals. Let me justify this judgment with the example of the answer given by an Eskimo shaman to the explorer Knud Rasmussen when Rasmussen pressed him to justify his religion. Taking Rasmussen outside, the Eskimo first asked him why the blizzard was so cruel and then showed him a sick woman and asked why the innocent must suffer. When Rasmussen hesitated, the Eskimo said: You see, you are equally unable to give any reason why we ask why life is as it is. All our customs come from life and turn towards life; we explain nothing, we believe in nothing, but in what I have shown you lies our answer to all you ask.4

This answer shows that a cold climate and apparently simple life can produce wisdom; but so can a hot climate, as is proved by African proverbial thought, at times as pointed as anything in La Rochefoucauld or Nietzsche. “Those who are absent are always wrong,” says an African proverb; and “Wisdom is like mushrooms that come after you have finished eating (too late!)”; and “A healthy ear can stand hearing sick words.”5 Such proverbs are akin to African dilemma tales, which put arguable, humorous problems to a group of listeners. Take the example of the Nigerian tale in which a blind man, accompa­nied by his blind wife, blind mother, and blind mother-in-law, finds seven eyes. Two he gives to his wife, two he takes for himself, one he gives to his mother, and one to his mother-in-law. He is left with a single eye in his hand. If he gives the remaining eye to his own mother, his wife—who is there looking at him—will make him feel ashamed, but if he gives it to his wife’s mother, he will be afraid, because one’s mother is not to be trifled with. The teller of the tale challenges the audience to make and justify the choice, which is not unlike the choices we try to work out in philosophical ethics or, more practically, in the medical dilemmas now discussed by philoso­ phers and hospital committees.6

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Why are such profound myths, clever proverbs, and dilemma tales not philosophy in the sense intended here? The myths are not because, relying on traditional narratives and on imagination, they do not usually make their meaning explicit and never justify it by careful reasoning—the meaning remains basically implicit. The Dialogue of Pessimism is not philosophy as meant here because the speaker does no more than state the opposing views between which he is caught, the Eskimo’s insight is not because it is not developed, and the African proverbs and dilemma tales are not, for the same reason, and also because they are not related with enough care to explicit principles—at least to principles by which situations may be analyzed. . In a book that influenced many African intellectuals, the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels argued that the thought of the Bantus (of central and southern Africa) is a consistent, rational, and therefore “philosophical” vitalism based on the principle that all being is hierarchically organized force. Another influential figure, the Rwandan priest Alexis Kagame, argued that the Rwandan language shows an implicit, particularly dynamic notion of structure. Furthermore, the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule attributed to the Dogon of central Mali a rich cosmology and a “metaphysics” expressed in rites and action (Conversations with Ogotemmeli, p. 30). In essential agreement with the restrictive definition of philosophy I have given here, Kwasi Wiredu, an Oxford-educated philosopher from Ghana, considers traditional African thought, however humanistic, to be only a “folk philosophy.” An African philosophy distinct from traditional worldviews is still to be created, he says (Philosophy and an African Culture, pp. 6–8, 33–36). And the French-educated philosopher Paulin Hountondji denounces “ethnophilosophies,” such as those attributed to the Bantu, Rwandans, or Dogon, as European constructs unknown to the Africans to which they have been attributed. He insists that the theoretical creativity of the African peoples, arrested by colonialism, is yet to be liberated (African Philosophy, pp. 45, 54, 101, 164). In contrast especially to Hountondji, Kwame Gyekye, of the University of Ghana, argues that there are cultural ideas common to the African peoples, so that it is justifiable to speak of African philosophy. African philosophers should therefore “turn their gaze on the intellectual foundations of African culture and experience” (An Essay on African Thought, pp. 189–90, 212 (quoted). It has also been argued that the distinction between folk philosophy and formal philosophy rests on a parochial ideal that “captures only the contemporary analytic tradition” (P. Ikunobe, “The Parochial Universalist Conception of ‘Philosophy’ and ‘African Philosophy,’ ” pp. 194–95, 207). H. O. Oruka, whose philosophical training is American, has conducted research in Kenya on what he calls “sage philosophy,” which he regards as a logical, critical, didactic form of wisdom distinct from that taught by folk sages, who are uncritical. He protests that it is only prejudice that grants a Greek sage such as Heraclitus the name philosopher but denies it to a contemporary African sage such as Mbuya Akoko (Oruka, Sage Philosophy, p. xxv). Oruka’s book contains brief life histories of seven Kenyan sages and interviews designed to exhibit the critical quality of their reasoning. Bibliographical data for this footnote are given in endnote 6 above.

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Yet mythology, debate against oneself, existential emotion, proverbial sharpness, and exercise in hard choices all join philosophy in the sense used here when, in keeping with the definition that has been adopted, they are argued out reasonably; or when the principles on which they rest are distin­guished from the conclusions built on them or it is reasonably argued that there are no such principles; or when the methods of argument are themselves justified; or when the story, emotion, cleverness, or confrontation with oneself or others is put in a relatively unbroken sequence of reasonings. This spelling out of reasons is not necessarily to the good, or all to the good: The tendency of reason to devalue what it has not succeeded in making verbally explicit and logically consistent makes it apt to miss a great deal to which imagina­tion has given the form of mythology, religion, and art. Where abstraction displays clearly defined but skeletally bare principles—one logical lever openly moving another—imagination, as tradition develops it, displays complex images and ambiguous relations that are less easy to analyze or enchain deductively but are far more suggestive.

w h y a r e t h e r e o n ly t h r e e philosophical traditions? I have still not explained why I have said that there are only three philosophical traditions, the Indian, the Chinese, and the European. What about such others as the Jewish, Muslim, Japanese, and Tibetan? Well, yes and no, as philosophers say, these are and are not separate traditions. The matter is more complicated than it seems at first. To begin with, it is possible to argue that even the Indians, Chinese, and Europeans never arrived at points of view unified enough to justify classifying them as distinct traditions. In all three, there are obvious and unobvious points of cleavage. To mention only the most obvious, in India, the Indians who regarded themselves as orthodox tried to delegitimize, that is, read out of their tradition, the philoso­phies they classified as unorthodox; in China, the Taoists mocked the tradition that Confucians revered, and during the China’s later history, orthodox Confucians saw Buddhism as deeply foreign to Chinese tradition; and in Europe, it is not hard to distinguish the different national traditions—philosophy that is in a French, English, German, Italian, or other tradition. To justify classifying each of the three great traditions as distinct, one therefore has to show that it has a unity that prevails over all the internal differences it exhibits. Or if the attempt to show that unity prevails seems tenuous or subjective, one has to show that each of the three has pervasive habits of thought

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and a history of self-reference—of person to person, of intellectual group to group, of intellectual group to authoritative person, tradition, or text, and so on. This would demonstrate unity in two separable senses, that of continuity and that of self-reference. Continuity is the relationship that makes everything subsequent in the tradition lead back to the same beginnings in time, place, or attitude—the Vedas, say, in India, the godlike culture heroes in China, and the Greek philosophers in Europe. Self-reference, in contrast, is the quality that makes any isolated statement or philosophy difficult to understand without setting it in the contextual web that determines what is internal to the tradition and what is external to it, belongs to another world of thought and, no doubt, action. What obscures and what strengthens the unity of each of the three traditions? Even China, which alone of the three traditions has had a single govern­ ment for much of its history, has undergone dramatic changes of dynasty and probably of the character we identify as Chinese; and, like India and Europe, it has always contained a great variety of territories, people, languages, and cultural traditions. All the same, most Chinese thinkers have shared the same classical language, same historical reference points, and (in imperial China) same education, which was essential to their prestige and to their usual competi­tion for government office. The unity of India and Europe has been more tenuous. However, the great old classics of the one were Sanskrit and of the other were Greek and Latin, and just as classical Chinese was the learned language of educated Chinese, Sanskrit remained that of learned Indians and Latin of learned Europeans, so that, in each tradition, reference to the past would normally be to the same classical literature. As for Japanese thought, philosophically it depends mainly on the Chinese, as the Tibetan depends mainly on the Indian, that is, Buddhist, while Jewish and Muslim thought, though each has its own history and dogmas, draw their philosophy proper from the same Greek and Roman sources and, in this limited but real sense, are part of the European tradition.ii ii. No doubt, pride in one’s Jewish or Muslim heritage may prompt one to minimize this dependence on European, that is, Greek and Roman thought. Each of Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Maimonides has his own sometimes considerable degree of philosophical independence, but the thought of no one of them can be conceived without the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic principles that underlie it. The Muslims themselves reserve the term philosophy for thought based on these Aristotelian-Neoplatonic principles. The often philosophical theology that departs from the principles is called kalam, which may be translated dialectical theology. For its logic, kalam depends on Hellenistic, especially Stoic logic, and for its practices of de-

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Philosophy, it turns out, had just three territorial origins, three beginning languages, three historical pasts, and three webs of self-reference. That there have been just three major philosophical traditions is, therefore, a fact, a brute fact, I would say. Whoever is so minded can emphasize the breaks in each and the vagueness at times of the borders between them, borders like those of diffuse clouds; but the notions themselves of breaks and borders imply something that is single enough to be broken and separate enough to have borders of some kind.7

t h e t h r e e t r a d i­ t i o n s i n t h e m s e lv e s : s p i r i t u a l t r a n s c e n­ d e n c e a g a i n s t p o s i t i v i s t i c c u r i o s i t y ? The distinctions I have just made between the three traditions are of great importance to both religion and philosophy. I feel it necessary to supplement them with a warning, a warning against the most common distinction made between India or China, on the one hand, and Europe, on the other, or, more comprehensively, between East and West. As mentioned in relation to India, the distinction is as follows: Eastern philosophy is spiritual and inte­gral with life, while Western philosophy is ab­stract, material­istic or positivistic, and split off from life. In one exposition of this view, it is said that Greek philoso­phy studies society and man, which are the outer reality of human life, while Indian philosophy denies outer things in favor of an undeniable, ultimate, inner reality. Modern Western philosophy, it is said, represents the triumph of the objective or outward attitude, which, however helpful morally and politically, must be balanced by truly religious consciousness, which is the deeper, inward, Indian one.8 Such a view is seriously misleading. To see this, recall that in all three traditions, especially in the Indi­an and European, philoso­phy in the more technical sense came to be the province of spe­cialists whose doc­trines were usually unin­telligible or pointless to most people, just as they are today. In each of the tra­ditions, the tie between philosophy and reli­gion remained strong—although even in the medieval universi­ties of Europe there was a clear distinc­tion, often accompa­nied by a struggle for influence, be­tween the facul­ties of theology and phi­loso­phy. Typically, philosophers in all three traditions have claimed that their doctrines give those who stud­y them a better understanding of what is true and worthwhile and how this desired goal can be at­tained. This holds bate and its dissociative kind of atomism—which denies natural causality—perhaps on Indian philosophy.

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true even of the positivists or materialists, well-known exponents of which are found in each of the traditions, and even of the philosoph­ical skep­tics in each of them, though not neces­sar­ily of the com­bative or playful reasoners we name soph­ists. The opinion that they are concerned mostly with outward matters, meaning material, social, and political ones, can be plausibly held of only a few of the most important Western philosophers, most unambiguously of two Greeks, Democritus and Epicurus, one Roman, Lucretius, and one Scotsman, Hume, to whom Russell may possibly be added; and it can be made of the various kinds of positivism that were widely though far from exclusively accepted by Western intellectuals from about the time of the French Revolution. But it cannot ever be made of Western philosophy as a whole. This is the fact. The fact is also that, East and West, most philosophy has been concerned with salvation, whether this-worldly or other-worldly. However, the interest of Hindu and Buddhist philosophers in salvation is different because it is so often tied up with the belief that to live is basically to suffer (“to suffer” may often be too strong a term). This attitude is not character­istic of Indian philoso­ phy at the start but begins at about the time of the origin of Buddhism—did conditions then make it especially easy to draw attention to suffering?—and re­mains prominent in most of the classical philos­ophies of India, to which reason appears valuable mostly because it helps humans to es­cape suffering. Take, for example, the basic text of the classical school of Samkhya (samkhya means, roughly, enumeration of the categories of existence and—extended to refer to a school—the school that analyzes by means of enumeration of these categories). A characteristic text begins by stating that because human beings are tormented by the three kinds of suffering, they want to know how to get rid of it, something that can be permanently accomplished not by material or by revealed, Scriptural means, but only by a discrimi­nating understanding. Each Indian school having adopted different means for such a purpose, Indian philosophy can be understood, almost as a whole, as a kind of transcen­ dent utilitari­an­ism, one that does not exhibit curiosity for its own sake and seeks tran­scen­dent experi­ence. Yet transcendent experience and intellectual conviction are not really separated by the Indians but (very often) supposed to support one another and, finally, to be in effect the same—Spinoza uses a different machinery of thought, but is he so different in this particular conviction? European philosophy does not ordinarily lay so great an emphasis on suffering—the Stoics, the Neoplatonists, and thinkers like Pascal and Schopenhauer are among the not infrequent exceptions—but Euro­pean philosophi­

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cal thought, like the Indian, has usually expressed the hope for transcendence. And in thinking of the emphasis of Indian philoso­phy on suffering, we should remember that the suffering or, better, the nega­tive quality it at­tributes to life is not suffering in its merely ordinary sense but in that meant by Spinoza, having to do with the objective nature of the universe and the philosopher’s ability to distinguish between the transient on the one hand and the eter­nal on the other. This need to be objective and renounce the suffering that results from the painful impermanence of everything worldly is the moral of the Buddhist parable about Kisa Gotami. When her young son died, she took his body on her hip and went from door to door asking for medicine to cure him but was met only with derision. When she asked the Buddha for the medicine, he in compassion told her to make a round of the whole city and bring him mustard seeds from any house in which no one had ever died. When she failed to find even one such house, she understood that her boy was not the only person who had been overtaken by death, but that all things are imperma­nent and that death is a law common to all mankind. Seeing this, she became reconciled to death and cast her boy into the burning-ground.9 It is doubly deceiving to make the distinction be­tween philosophy as pure inquiry for the Europeans and as the science of liber­ation for the Indians or, for the Chi­nese, of morally differentiated action, moral merger with humanity, or intuitive unity with nature. Consider again the view that Chinese philosophy is interested in “erecting, initiating, motivating, and insinuating actions and action-oriented attitudes, not in describing a transcendent world independent of actions and consciousness.”10 Even if we take this description to be accurate, it remains true that the Chinese philosopher is at times motivated by curiosity and always by the desire to express himself and to create a body of interesting thought. It also remains true, I am sure, that the philosophers of India and Europe use their descriptions of transcendent worlds and so forth to insinuate actions and action-oriented attitudes. No philosophy is without its social dimension and effect. I say this not because I suppose that Indian or Chinese thinkers agree with the Europeans who agree with Aristotle that the contemplation of the truth, the theoretical life, is the best of all lives. But In­dian philoso­phy exhibits ­structures and refinements that,­ inspired or not by the need for lib­eration or de­ fense against rival schools, lead to an analytical sharpness the exercise of which is its own reward; and the public victories it may bring have an additional, thisworldly sweetness. Sharp and detailed as contemporary philosophers may be,

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it does not take much reading in the sources to learn that many of their Indian (and medieval European) predecessors were their matches. This equality cannot be tested by resurrecting medieval Europeans, but it is still possible to question traditional Indian philosophers. Accordingly, not long ago, an experimental five-day dialogue was held, in Sanskrit and English, between a group of Indian pandits of the Navya-Nyaya school and a group of contemporary, Western-oriented Indian philosophers. The participants were at first disconcerted to discover that “there were so to speak, no philosophically uncommitted or neutral words in Sanskrit which could serve as even rough equivalents of what was sought to be conveyed through the English terms.”11 For the subject of the dialogue, the experimenters chose Russell’s doctrine of propositions as expounded in the Principles of Mathematics (in a technical sense, propositions are ignored in Indian philosophy). Russell’s main points were summarized, a Sanskrit translation was made for the pandits who knew no English, and translators into and from Sanskrit were provided. Challenged to depart from the mere defense and exegesis of their traditional positions, some of the pandits suggested how Nyaya might be developed in new directions. Some of the pandits were later introduced to modern Western logic and some of the Western-oriented philosophers studied Navya-Nyaya logic. Each side is said to have developed a profound respect for the other and to have discovered philosophically exhilarating differences.iii The moral drawn is that a contrasting analysis that leads in a different direction and that over millennia gradually builds an imposing philosophical structure is something whose possibility one cannot even conceive if one is confined to a single philosophical tradition. One inevitably treats the only known tradition as the only possible one and hence as universally paradigmatic in character.12 I am convinced that the analytical sharpness and constructive complexities of Indian philosophy show the operation of curiosi­ty working for its own noniii. But given the pandits’ habitual defense of their philosophy, it is not surprising that (with the exception I note below) there was no obvious change in their position—changes in the positions of the modern philosophers are not recorded. But each side in the dialogue appears to have arrived at an at least fairly clear understanding of the other, and the discussion is detailed, analytical, and pertinent. The pandit who at the end summarizes the Nyaya response holds that “the postulation of a separate kind of entity called ‘proposition’ is groundless” and adds that, if he understands Russell correctly, “such a theory does not deserve to go unattacked.” Russell’s temperament was such that, had he been available, he would not have forgone an answer, supplemented, no doubt, with a cutting witticism. (The quotations are from Krishna et al., eds., Samvada (see endnote 11), pp. 212–13.)

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doctrinal, nonsalvational reasons, trying to build reality as it can and solving the intellectu­al difficul­ties it has revealed in the process. The need for salvation stimulates philosophical thought but is also the opportunity and excuse for immersing oneself in the pleasure of exercising one’s mind: When intense, philosophy is a habit of thought, a calling, and a passion, the stubborn search for either a detailed rational objectivity or a philosophical escape from it. Not surprisingly, therefore, a sharp distinction between Indian salvational and Western nonsalvational philosophy is deceptive. Even recent European phi­loso­phy, whether of the Existentialist or Wittgensteinian kind, has searched for escape from un­necessary pain (for Wittgenstein himself, the pain that results from philo­sophical bewitch­ment by words). Or it has searched for salvation of a sort by means of the acceptance of one’s own finite­ness and death, or by means of the re­newed illumi­nation of Being in a world darkened by objec­ tivity, utility, and science (the first aim is that of the early Heidegger, the second, of the late one).

t h e t h r e e t r a d i­ t i o n s i n t h e m s e lv e s : their uniqueness of style Is it possible to grasp the differences between the three philosophical traditions in a summary way? I’m not sure that anyone in the position to accept the challenge ever resists it, but it’s a mistake to put much trust in a formula designed to sum up any one of the three. To venture such a for­mula is to undertake an exercise in the disclosure of a nonexistent essence, to confuse the intricate variations within variations of intellectual history with the formulaic brevity possible to mathematics or the magical compactness ascribed to mantras. How could an aphoristic sentence or two capture any tradition that has grown over thousands of years and has engaged persons of so many de­grees of philosophical creativity and so many types—wise, sharp, scholarly, biblio­ maniacal, con­fronta­tional, concil­iatory, narcissis­tic, rebellious, compul­sive, and just plain weird? True, many of these philoso­phers were in the service of teach­ers the contradiction of whom was a sin against reverence and loyal­ty. But the human lust to think as an individual is not easily denied, and so what one could not say against tradition or in one’s own name was at­tributed to an old sage or put down as a mere elu­cida­tion of the ac­cepted text, until subterranean change af­ter change made the tradition something it had never been before. Yet in spite of the failure of the formulas, whose inescapable shallowness I have stressed, only a coward of a comparatist would evade the attempt to

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character­ize the different traditions, to see them summarily, if only as a beginning on which to elaborate. After all, each of the three has its in­dividuality, which can be recognized though not put into quite satisfactory words. One recogniz­es a fragment of In­dian, Chinese, or European philoso­phy as one recogniz­es a voice in a babble of voices or a face in a crowd, without any hesita­ tion. The identifying characteristic may be the particular ab­stract message, but I think it is less usual­ly the abstraction in itself, which is like­ly to have coun­terparts in the other traditions, than its style, which is in part made up of its manner of ap­proach to the sub­ject, of the rhythm, emphasis, and style of compression or expansion in which it progresses from idea to idea to conclusion (how does one give a description of a voice or a face good enough for it to be recognized?). Yet for the same rea­son that mathemati­cians recognize one another’s styles in mathemat­ics, there must also be some­thing in the nature— the principles and the organization—of the logic per se by which to identify the philosophical tradition, per­haps the subtradition, and even the individ­ual philosopher. All that is quite vague. Can I describe, briefly and simply, some of the indi­vidual characteristics of the In­dian, Chinese, and Europe­an styles of philosophiz­ing? To make an answer more nearly possi­ble, I confine myself to the standard or classical doctrines. Well, then, very in­adequately, an In­dian philosophical sys­tem is likely to de­pend on a source (which opens and closes with an invocation to the patron sage or god) that is so abbre­viated that, taken by itself, it is near impen­etrable. It is so brief probably be­cause it is meant ­for memo­rizing in a predomi­nantly oral culture and certainly because it is meant for elucidation by a teacher and a com­mentary. In a typical Indian discussion of a philosophical problem there is a systematic, if only formal fairness in that the text repeats and responds to the views of all the rival schools. The frequent compression of the text is likely to face the interpreter with the problem of deciding whether a state­ment represents the opin­ion of the writ­er or of the view the writer means to refute—a mistake in identification is as serious as confusing  yes with no. The to and fro of argument is signaled by an armature of phrases such as: But what is the proof ?; but in this case; well, then (how would you respond) if (we say)?; if it were so, exactly this should also be the case; this is not right, because; but would this not be similar?; no (this is not so) because; others, however, say; this is also incorrect; well, then (how do you respond) if ?; but how can there be?; this is not so; well then, let us admit that; that (dilemma); and it is not so; but then, if; and one should not say; if one assumes that;

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well, then (let us say that); with this (argumentation); well, then (let us say that); that may be enough.13

It is Indian style, as well, for the philosopher to put arguments in verse, accompanied by a commentary written either by himself, a follower, or, sometimes, a member of a rival school. The com­mentaries and subcommentaries are tech­ni­cal and often ambiguous because they are meant for teachers and stu­dents who are used to the issues and the style in which they have traditionally been put. Like the Indian philosophical treatises, they are, at their best, dry, direct, sharply reasoned, pious, and acidu­lous—a laborious pleasure to those who have ac­quired the Indian taste. In accord with the Indian taste, philosophical texts are given an imaginative punctuation by means of stock analogies such as the rope mistaken for a snake, the shell mistaken for silver, the mirage of water, the hare’s (nonexistent) horns, and the (impossible) son of the barren woman. Because I can­not do so briefly enough, I refrain from reviewing the characteristic assumptions and modes of analysis of Indian philoso­phers, who, not unlike the Chinese, love to work with num­bered categories.14 But they have shown an ability far beyond any of the Chinese (except, maybe, the Buddhists) or Europeans to go explicitly inward and distinguish, often with perceptive care, between the objects, con­ditions, and func­tions of percep­tion and conception. The kinds of perception between which they distinguish include those that are preverbal, postverbal, normal, ab­normal, illusory, supernor­mal, and divine, and of each separate sense and all the senses together; and include selfperceptions and perceptions of space, time, universals. The kinds of cognition between which they distinguish include those of dreams, mem­ories, recollections, recognitions, imagi­na­tions, ­­­reveries, and trances. They also distinguish between different desires, aversions, and emo­tions—emotions of attachment, clinging, yearning, lust, detachment, love, joy, anger, resentment, dejection, fear, greed, longing, conceit, hatred, forbearance, contentment, equanimity, tranquility, endurance, wonder, and rasa. And among kinds of consciousness, they distinguish between the subliminal, the supraliminal, the supernormal, and the transcendental.15 There is much that is arti­ficial in this ­inward analysis, yet, all told, it shows how intensely the Indi­ans are able to concentrate on these very elusive processes. It is not surprising that the Indians’ fascination with inward life is related to their interest in transcen­dence and the yogic methods for arriving at it. Their earliest philosophy already shows intense appreciation of the ability to dream whole rich worlds, a sign to them that the ego can, by itself, both

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create and identify itself with every­thing it experiences, which is to say, with all perceptible reality, which is (often) to say, with a cosmic ego in nature identical with the personal one. When a person is asleep, Indians explain, he is like a king, who moves every­where as he likes—the dreamer is everything that his self invents. This view of the power of the dreaming self makes it natural for the mystical Indians to believe that deep, dreamless sleep, which they take to be the highest level, is a way of attaining certainty and peace by going beyond the lower, dreaming consciousness—which still differentiates things—and by leaving the individual unlimited by anything or anyone else, his borders having vanished in the undifferentiated common reality. What of the style of classical Chi­nese thought? It is equally if not more compressed than the Indian, besides which it lacks many of the gram­matical indications that are considered essential for clarity in Sanskrit or in Greek, Latin, and other European lan­guages. Let me give as an example a short passage in which Hsün Tzu, in the course of his attack on the view that human beings are by nature good, defines what is meant by good and evil: All men in the world, past and present, agree in defining goodness as that which is upright, reasonable, and orderly, and evil as that which is prejudiced, irresponsible, and chaotic.

This passage is, on its face, fully intelligible; but try to understand the following approximately literal substitution of English words for Chinese characters. Needless to say, the Chinese is more compact and, in the original, unedited text lacks punctuation. Everybody past-present Heaven-below’s that-which called good-ones: alignment pattern equableness good-order are; that-which called evil-ones: One-sidedness irregularity turbulence disorder are.16

Such clarity as is inherent in the Chinese language co­mes largely, as I have said, from the way the characters are organized. The characters march across the page in their fixed and parallel order and unchanging (uninflected) shape, like so many logical/aesthetic symbols—each symbol’s meaning to be chosen from among a variety of possibilities in accord with the immediate context, the general context of which is the whole of classical Chinese literature.­­­ The

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reader sees the phrases echo and enchain one another into rhythms and meanings such as these taken from Lao-tzu: The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly; the whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad. Thus Something and Nothing produce each other; The difficult and the easy complement each other; The long and the short off-set each other; The high and the low incline towards each other; Before and after follow each other. Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practices the teaching that uses no words.17

To those who have not learned a classi­cal text in the classical way, the text con­tains a set of riddles to be solved by finding the most probable combina­tion of meanings and in­tended associ­ations. The pro­cess is not unlike solving subtle crossword puzzles, because the texts, compiled by think­ers each of whose memories retained a great part of the classical literature, are quite certain to quote, paraphrase, or hint at other, unnamed texts the read­er is assumed to know; if the assump­tion proves false, the thinker—the thinker’s text—abandons the reader as unwor­thy of any subtle understanding.18 But there are also comparisons, stories, conversa­tions, and historical instances to lighten the way. As shown by the passage from Lao-tzu, the correlative style of Chinese writing and thought, with one thing or idea set alongside or against an­other, creates a rhythm like that of the changing corre­spondences by which, the Chinese believe, the uni­verse functions. Subtlety rules even their frequent stereotypes. Take as an example the Confucian no­tion that hu­man nature is good but requires consid­er­able education, and that a family-like harmony, achieved by unequal but faithful reci­procity, is the social and universal ideal. But the Chinese are very sensitive to the nuances of these deceptively modifi­able stereo­types. The obtuse will miss the subtlety concealed within the platitude that allows it to enter another’s mind without jar­ring it. As classical Chi­nese philoso­phers say, the correct applica­tion of language is the key to ethical behavior, because

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the mind—the heart—acts according to the distinc­tions of the words it uses. Is this a hypersimple or hypersubtle view? Something of both, maybe. Taken as a whole and at its best, the Chinese view expresses an ideal of actively per­ sonal and imperson­al harmonizing like that achieved by the calligra­pher who in­fuses the poem he writes, sometimes on the painting he himself has made, with the forces whose en­tangled contrariety catches and inspires an in­tensive qual­ity of life. I’ve forgotten Chinese queerness, crudeness, heart­break, hatred, and other traits, which come to expres­sion in philosophy as in other media; but I cannot say it all. Nor can I show in adequate detail that most of the indigenous Chinese philosophy was written not in a special philosophical language, but in the usual literary style, as essays, letters, conversations, and expansions of a master’s words. I mention this, as I earlier mentioned the Indian style of commentaries and of treatises, intended for technical precision, because European philosophy seems to me to have been extraordinarily varied—often, like the Chinese, merging indistinguishably with literature in general, but often written, like the Indian, in learned styles impenetrable to laymen. Given the brevity I must observe, ­I can only hint at the great variety of European styles. The main point I want to make is that, the Middle Ages excepted, the philosopher’s pride is more in his individual position than in his school, if he is at all willing to recognize himself as belonging to one. There is such a great variety of styles of philosophizing that it is much harder than for India or China to point out what is common to them. To say this in the form of a brief reminder: At the very beginning there is the style of epic poetry chosen by Parmenides and, later and differently, by Lucretius. Also at the beginning, there is the contrary, aphoristic style of Heraclitus, and later there are the aphoristic styles of Francis Bacon—an aphorism, he said, is a seed of thought—and of Pascal, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Toward the beginning, there are the drama-style of Plato and the contrary style of (the surviving) Aristotle, who is always analyzing and always discovering systematic connections but always correcting himself, so that he never gets to a finished system. There are the dialogue-treatises of Cicero, the discourses of Epictetus, and the meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and the style of free, imaginative, often eloquent composition of Plotinus and the copious commentary style of Proclus, carried over into the commentary style of the Middle Ages. But Proclus also has a Euclidean style, which Descartes uses for a sketch and Spinoza elaborates in his Ethics. This Euclidean style is paralleled in later philosophers who, like Wolff, Hegel, and, in one book, Wittgenstein, stress formal structure. Then there is the style of the free essay, which we find in Plutarch, in the quotation-patchwork intimacy

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of Montaigne, and in many others. The detailed treatise cannot, of course, be forgotten. In Kant and those who follow him, it is often made up of convoluted­ sentences, furnished with special technical terms, that go from one deep difficulty to another. And now, to make the barest mention of the present, many write and think like the academic profes­sionals they are, whether in the style of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, or some other philosophi­cal mentor; but they nearly all aspire to the clear victory by argument that none of them ever wins. Everything I have said up until now is by way of introduction, by way, that is, of reflection on the kind of work to be done, but it is not the work itself. If, as a result of the work, we will come to see that the philosophy of the other traditions shares a good deal with ours, this will teach us something we surely ought to know. But the discovery of what has been common to philosophically thinking humans is unlikely to invigorate philosophy as such. This is because the contemporary philosopher is far less interested in recovering variations of old thoughts than in thinking ahead, as far and as exactly as possible, into unknown territory. What can push thought ahead in comparative philosophy is not the similarity one finds or misses but the strain one undergoes in the finding or missing, and, when a similarity is found, the strain in showing it for what it is and marking out its limits. It is possible for us to think ahead in the forms that we have inherited and, no less, in those that others have inherited, with our kinds of insight and theirs, so that the friction between them makes them sharper, more subtle instruments of understanding than philosophers have had before. Will this possibility ever really tempt many of them?

chapter 11

Does Philosophy Progress?

I start this page with a feeling almost of nostalgia for the years of work that I am about to end with the words I set down now. It takes an effort to dismiss the idea that now that I have finished I know enough to begin again. I also dismiss the idea that I should end with suggestions for research. These I have left implicit in the first, introductory chapter. What I most want to do here is to learn how the writing of this history has affected the way in which I think of philosophy. What follows is therefore a coda meant to make clear—to myself, too—the attitudes that I have either developed or reaffirmed as I worked. The first of these attitudes is that comparative philosophy ought to set an example of fairness of exposition and decency of appraisal. Unfortunately, as I have come to see, such fairness and decency are not entirely helpful to the effort to philosophize. Why say this? Because such qualities can easily discourage creative thought by the limits they impose on its freedom. Creative thought struggles loose of scruples. It nourishes itself by begging, borrowing, stealing, distorting, and reworking others’ ideas, and by encouraging the vain but invigorating hope that the result will prove itself forever superior to the thought of all rivals. (If I know myself, I will quote more than once from that very human skeptic, Montaigne, who says in his unfairly but eloquently dismissive vein, “Trust in your philosophy now! Boast that you are the one who has found the lucky bean in your festive pudding!”)1 The ideal of fairness makes the amoral intensity of creative thought more difficult to sustain. In any case, the ideal is put into play for a purpose that is rather different from philosophizing per se. Given the ideal, whoever studies the history of philosophy gets to play the role of what anthropologists and soci-

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ologists call a participant observer, someone who studies a group by participating in its activities but who remains in the end detached from it. In the case of philosophy, the historian’s effort to understand, which is to place, define, explicate, compare, and react, is in temper detached from the philosophical issues under discussion. This is because, ideally, the historian should understand a philosophy as it was understood by its partisans, its opponents, its successors, and its successors’ opponents. So to be fair, the historian first has to show how a philosophical position can once have been and may even remain persuasive. This the historian can do only by withdrawing for the while from every other position and acting as a temporary partisan. It is only after this partisanship has displayed the position to its best advantage that the historian’s critical remarks are allowable—they are, after all, only natural, they bring the historian’s own views to light, and they make it easier to judge his work. But they are allowable only on condition that they are identified as criticisms, do not (at least, not consciously) contaminate the exposition itself, and do obey the rules of fair play. Put negatively, the historian who, for the sake of fairness, identifies with a position while it is being expounded is unable to identify with it fully or for long, and therefore unable to identify fully with any position at all. How else can the historian be equally fair to its opponents and successors? One result is that such a participant observer, whose attitude is by nature unstable, may arouse misgivings among philosophers, a feeling shaded with disrespect for the outsider, who, unable to experience philosophizing in its full intensity, is not able to understand it from within. This historian, the philosophers are apt to think, is to the true philosopher as the actor is to the historical figure whose role he takes. How can the historian pretend to stand impossibly above the fray and judge the philosopher, who takes philosophical risks, is engaged in difficult, deeply felt argument, and is truly creative? The conclusion may be that the history of philosophy is secondary to the creation of philosophy and parasitic on it. The response may be that the life of these parasites and these hosts has come to be symbiotic and, when perspectives are exchanged, it can be difficult to decide which is the parasite and which the host. This is not to say that the historians of philosophy are all subject to the reproach that they take the easy way out by remaining fundamentally detached from philosophical problems. The Tibetan historians of Buddhism, Buston in the fourteenth century and Taranatha in the sixteenth, are both exultantly partisan. What of Indian and Chinese historians? Unlike the Tibetans, the . There was a special genre of historical writing in Tibet called “Origin of Buddhism” (chos ‘byung). “It is possible that with the proliferation of various doctrinal cycles a need was felt to

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Indians have an only rudimentary interest in history, including the history of philosophy. Their histories of philosophy are confined to genealogical lists of teachers and disciples, legends of heroic thinkers, and doxographies, that is, simple collections of opinions or doctrines. All the Indian schools wanted, of course, to understand their rivals. The Buddhists are prominent among the earlier Indian doxographers, but the doxographic literature as a whole seems dominated by the Jains and Advaita Vedantins. For the Jains, the reason for compiling such a record is that they believe that all points of view have some truth, all the truths being joined in their own philosophy of perspectives. Like the Jains, the Advaita Vedantins are drawn to doxography in order to show that their position includes and transcends all the others, which are presented in the order of their increasing likeness to their own doctrine. Yet though the ancient Indians have little interest in history, they have their own way of remaining aware of the philosophical context of their thought. This is the eminently technical care they have learned to exercise in repeating and answering their rivals’ questions. By means of such care, they remain integrated into their tradition as a whole: the systematic asking and answering creates a web of argument that imposes a coherence on the classical philosophy of India probably more complex than that of medieval Europe and certainly more careful than that of modern Europe (I am referring to the philosophers’ arguments with one another, not to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical scholarship).2 In contrast, early Chinese thought is by nature historical, but it tends to merge philosophy, as the West distinguishes it, with culture in general. Chinese literature, including the literature we count as philosophical, is preserved in anthologies. The most extensive of these, meant for official use, are considered to be encyclopedias. Their extracts from past literature are examples of literary or moral excellence and deal, among the rest, with “human affairs,” broadly interpreted.3 The earliest historical picture of Chinese philosophy, that which ends the Chuang-tzu book, is an exception. Relatively comprehensive, it shows its partisanship in the sadness it expresses over the departure of most thinkers place these in historical perspective and thereby legitimate them. In any case, we find, starting with the twelfth century, an enormous upsurge of interest in Indo-Tibetan religious history in particular. Unfortunately, only a fraction of the potentially available literary corpus of such texts has been located and published to date . . .The thirteenth century, too, knew of a considerable number of such treatises, the sole information concerning which is owed to a very brief remark by Bu ston as well as potentially to a number of quotations in his own chos ‘byung.” L. W. J. Van der Kuijp, “Tibetan Historiography,” in J. I. Cabezon and R. R. Jackson, eds., Tibetan Literature, Ithaca, 1996, p. 46.

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from the true Way and in the words in which it ends, with a lament for Hui Shih: How sad, it says, that the logician Hui Shih dissipated his talents in distinctions and analyses that kept him from achieving anything a Taoist valued. The greatest of Chinese historians, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, narrates history in political terms, but he also composes biographies, grouped by categories that include philosophers. His biographies of Confucius and Chuang-tzu, both of which have been cited here, are the earliest we have. Ssu-ma means both to be objective and, like Plutarch, to draw moral lessons from the biographies. He shows his interest in morality and his historian’s nature in his attitude, for example, to the “seventy disciples” of Confucius. He refuses, he says, to praise or to disparage too much, as did those who never knew the persons they were talking about. The words that follow express his usual desire to be objective: There is a register of the disciples preserved by the K’ung family and written in archaic characters which I believe to be generally accurate. I have used this list of names and surnames of the disciples, combining it with the questions and answers of these men found in the Analects, and arranged the material in this chapter. Material that seemed doubtful I have omitted.4

Greek philosophy first takes on a self-consciously historical aspect in Aristotle. His Metaphysics opens with the often-cited words “All men by nature desire to know,” and goes on to the sequence of speculative philosophers from Thales to Plato. How accurate Aristotle may be, even in relation to Plato, is a matter for dispute. As a creator of philosophy, not the participant observer I earlier identified with the historian, his interest in the history of philosophy is mainly to improve and exploit previous thought.5 Not surprisingly, the most important of the early Greek doxographers is Aristotle’s student and successor, Theophrastus; but most of his topical summaries of the opinions of the pre-Socratic “physicists” have been lost. The only complete surviving doxography, Diogenes Laertius’ Doctrines of Eminent Philosophers, long remained the most influential model for the history of philosophy.6 Diogenes has no purpose beyond an orderly, entertaining, and impartial record—Pyrrhonists and Epicureans meet with equal treatment and sympathy. The history—historiography—of European philosophy turns modern when it turns self-reflective, not unlike Aristotle in the distant past. It has two outstanding early representatives, one toward the middle of the eighteenth century, and another toward its end. The earlier of the two is Johann Jacob Brucker, whose massive five-volume Critical History of Philosophy was studied

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by Diderot, Goethe, and Kant, and was still referred to by Hegel and Schopenhauer.7 Brucker attempts to be exhaustive and to capture doctrines in exact numbered propositions (of which Aristotle, according to Brucker, professes 210). Brucker insists that a philosophy remains obscure if one does not take account of its author’s life, temperament, and human and philosophical surroundings. As a self-conscious historian, he holds that “one must avoid substituting one’s own opinions for those of the philosophers” and that “ancient philosophy should not be reduced to ours.”8 He is confident that the history of philosophy is that of the errors, discoveries, and still unful­filled needs of the human understanding as a whole. The other outstanding historian of philosophy is Dietrich Tiedemann, whose six volumes of the Spirit of Speculative Philosophy were published between 1791 and 1797.9 What is most striking in Tiedemann is his conviction that the history of philosophy shows that reason advances endlessly. The historian of philosophy therefore “ought to examine with care what each philosophy has brought that is proper to itself and new” and “in what measure each philosopher has given science new concepts or clarified or improved the definition of old ones.” To demonstrate the progress of reason, Tiedemann begins with Thales and goes on to his own times, finding progress in each phase, and refusing to see an end to the progress, because, he says, there is no one criterion for truth nor any final definition of philosophy.10 Much in Tiedemann anticipates Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, first published in 1833, after Hegel’s death. Hegel believes that “the history of philosophy is not a collection of arbitrary opinions, but a necessary interconnec­tion from its first beginning to its rich development.”11 But quite unlike Tiedemann, Hegel is sure that the progress is toward an absolute goal. In spite of “perverse” instances, he claims, the history of philosophy is a series of increasing approximations of his own “philosophy of the present.” Hegel’s is the highest of all philosophies, he claims, because, in annulling the earlier ones, it preserves what is of value in them and is able to reflect both on them and on itself—this is the kind of claim made, mutatis mutandis, by Jainism, Advaita Vedanta, and Hua-yen (the Flower Garland school of Chinese Buddhism), each of which assimilates other philosophies as partial or lower truths into its own supposedly complete, final truth. In Hegel’s scheme, it should be recalled, Chinese and Indian religion and philosophy occupy a low place: There is no self-consciously free individual in the Orient, which has been “superseded” by the Occident, Hegel is sure. Yet he holds that Indian thought is able to correct the subjectivism and anthropocentrism of modern Western

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thought, and in time he corrects himself and concludes that India did have “real philosophy,” philosophy distinct from religion. But he seems to have held fast to his view that “no inherent morality is bound up with the Chinese religion, no immanent rationality through which human beings might have internal value and dignity.”12 * Having allowed these historians to pose the question of progress, I find myself reluctant to take it up. In one way, the answer to it is self-evident and in another, acutely subjective. What is self-evident is that every tradition of philosophy has progressed in its own terms, for its own ends. Its progress depends, as I have said, on its necessary elaboration. This in turn depends on the answers given in the course of debate within the tradition itself and debate with external opponents, not to speak of the assimilation of useful fragments of other philosophies. If its historical continuity is unbroken, each philosophy is provided with successively better answers to its rivals and goes on building its structure higher, more firmly, and more elaborately. Given time, philosophical structures become fully elaborated, that is, worked out in the full detail that enriches and individualizes their culture. They then become summary expressions of these cultures, like the great Christian cathedrals, or the great Muslim mosques, or the great Hindu or Chinese temples or Buddhist stupas. Although modern Western philosophy has had a relatively short unbroken history, it too has progressed, not only in the elaboration of which I have been speaking but in a clear special sense. I am referring to Western philosophy’s recent assimilation of much of the evidence given by the sciences, whether more or less exact—in either case generally superior to whatever existed before—and by the broader, exacter knowledge that has become available to everyone. In the West, even the Heideggerian or other opponent of modern thought can feel (sad) progress in that philosophical evil has now shown its reductive, mathematical, technocratic face so much more clearly and can be the more persuasively exposed and confuted. The real or purported victims of this reductive technocracy, imprisoned (its opponents say) by mechanization and by concepts that by their nature as concepts always miss what is really real or really valuable, can turn its weapons against it and grow famous by virtue of the lectures, books, broadcasts, and sundry honors that technocratic evil, as they see it, has put at their disposal. Each philosophy or philosophical school and each tradition has therefore

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progressed. But this progress has been limited in two not unimportant ways: First, although it has progressed, it appears no closer to victory over its rivals, which have also progressed; and, second, its fundamental attitudes may not be superior to what they were to begin with. There is much still to doubt and not a little to hope for. While continued argument leads to a philosophy’s greater and greater elaboration, why regard elaboration in itself as the final measure of philosophical success? Why not, instead, self-doubt or self-restraint, the ability to be philosophically modest and to say, along with Montaigne, that even on stilts, we can walk only on our legs? Montaigne would surely extend to philosophers and their subtleties the skeptical admiration with which he views lawyers and legal subtleties (so I take the liberty of substituting the word philosophers for his lawyers in the quotation that follows). Montaigne begins with the question, Have you ever seen children making attempts to arrange a pile of quicksilver into a set number of segments? The more they press and knead it and try to make it do what they want the more they exasperate the taste for liberty in that noble metal: it resists their art and proceeds to scatter and break into innumerable parts. It is just the same here: for by subdividing those subtle statements philosophers teach people to increase matters of doubt; they start us off extending and varying our difficulties, stretching them out and spreading them about. By sowing doubts and then pruning them back they make the world produce abundant crops of uncertainties and quarrels, just as the soil is made more fertile when it is broken up and dug deep: “it is learning which creates the difficulty.” (Montaigne, On Experience)13

When he says this, how distant is Montaigne from Wittgenstein’s disabused statement that “a philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the nothings of common sense”? Or from Montaigne’s minimalizing directness that says “When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep”?14 To go on, why value philosophical elaboration as such over openness of imagination or sympathy, or fantastic humor, like that of Chuang-tzu, or even the uncommon quality that is called common sense?—don’t Confucius and the equable older Hume have it? When Chuang-tzu, like Montaigne, wants to teach the absurdity of acting against nature, he does so in many ways, some of them explicitly philosophical by the characterization we have adopted, but also by fantastically humorous stories such as one that is based on the myth of Hun Tun, a god whose face has no features, that is, no apertures:

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The god of the south sea was Shu [Brief ], the god of the north sea was Hu [Sudden], and the god of the center was Hun Tun [Formless]. Shu and Hu occasionally used to go together to Hun Tun’s land, and Hun Tun received them very cordially. Shu and Hu planned how to replay his generosity. They said, “All humans have seven openings with which to see, hear, eat, and breathe. Only this one has not yet got any.” So they tried chiseling him. Each day they chiseled one opening. On the seventh day, Hun Tun died. (Chuang-tzu 7.7)15

Nor, to go on, has there surely been progress if one judges philosophy from an aesthetic standpoint, as a creative effort the value of which lies in the transforming, individualizing power of the effort itself: each of us starts as the raw material that, by accident and prolonged effort, can transform itself into an intellectually more complex, more deeply understanding creature. Like ancient Indian gods, we can be born intellectually out of our longing to be born so (desire, the Rigveda says, evolved in the beginning, which was the first seed of thought—desire then gave birth to thought, or thought to desire, or maybe, Indian fashion, each gave birth to the other).16 Maybe the transformation that a person undergoes in creating or assimilating a philosophy is more important than the abstract truth that is attributed to it. One makes oneself by making one’s philosophy that fits oneself, and, considered in detail, no one else. Witness, again, Montaigne, who says, “Since philosophy has not been able to discover any good general method for tranquillity, everyone should search for it as an individual”; and witness again Wittgenstein, who says, “No one can think a thought for me in the way no one can don my hat for me.”17 I hear you, maybe, but only I can philosophize for me. The remark about the transforming power of philosophy leads to the view, which I favor, that philosophers should be seen also (I mean, not exclusively) as artists whose medium is abstract thought. From this standpoint, philosophy is the art of telling the abstract truth as fully, exactly, and affectingly as possible, or, alternatively, of drawing, with affecting exactness or convincingly rational rhetoric, the exact limits to the ability to tell the abstract truth. Philosophy can then be characterized as the art by which the individual philosopher tries—never, of course, with more than relative success—to surpass the limits of time, place, and individuality, but perhaps gives this relative failure an aura of success by hinting at what has evaded the effort and so helping others to go further. We praise artists for their originality or individuality, but if we are not skeptics or relativists, we seem to assume that philosophers should all ideally reach

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the same general conclusions and be in this respect like exact scientists. Yet the evidence is that every uncoerced philosopher is persuaded by an at least subtly unique set of reasons and reaches conclusions that, closely observed, are unique as well. My reasons are as generally human as my person, but they are spoken in what can be only my own unmistakably individual voice and are, perceived from close by, as individual as my face. As the history of philosophy makes clear, such an individualistic view of philosophy does not fit traditional views and is not very usual, but I take it to be accurate at a fundamental level. Some artists claim to express the truth, but they do so, judged from an ordinary philosophical standpoint, indirectly, by the equivalence of their perceptual means and expressive structures to the more purely intellectual means that philosophers use. Philosophers, like other writers, rely on all the means that rhetoric gives them, but granted their usual passion for verbal exactness and logical consistency and transparency, they cannot rely too openly on the means that other kinds of artists use. In a way, therefore, the uniqueness of the philosophical art is the more focused, narrow, and striking—it is, or seems to be, exclusively about some philosophical end, most often, the philosophers say, about truth. That they generally aim at truth has made them at times hardly if at all distinguishable from scientists. But we have learned by now to separate between science, especially when exact, and philosophy. We have or should have come to agree that when philosophy contradicts exact science or what we seriously believe to be fact, we have little choice except to consider philosophy to be mistaken. However, even when mistaken, its mistakes and the intellectual effort they represent can lead to interesting and possibly fruitful ideas. And in what philosophy is not mistaken, it can persuade us of what it cannot prove. Its persuasiveness does not answer to the strict standards of evidence that the exact sciences require, and what it persuades us of therefore remains vague, that is, not capable of being declared either right or wrong by such strict standards. The failure of philosophy to be provably right or wrong has turned out to be a reason that it does not become superfluous. That is, the prescientific, parascientific, nonscientific, or extrascientific nature of philosophy remains necessary, even for the sake of science, for the ambiance in which science can flourish. The reason is that the more exact a science becomes or the more exactly it is interpreted, the more it is limited to ideal, sheerly abstract circumstances and to conditions so exactly defined that they, too, are ideal and not, very strictly speaking, repeatable. An exact science or an exact fraction of a less exact one is therefore incomplete and not exactly coherent with any other exact science or fraction of science and—as we at present know the sciences—

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cannot be a coherently fitting part of an encompassing exact science.18 Then who but the philosopher, together with the scientist in a philosophical role, is to determine by what exact standards a science may be considered exact? What, if anything, the philosopher asks, is the scientific notion of a scientific method? What general conclusions, if any, can be drawn from exact science? None of this discussion is itself exactly exact. So philosophy helps to provide an indispensable intellectual context for clarifying the nature and limits of science, and in doing so it enlarges, deepens, and helps to complete our intellectual grasp of the world. Without it, we cannot attempt to think carefully beyond and between the more or less exact sciences. So, in our own times, philosophy and science make a dissimilar but complementary pair; and they pair as well with other creative activities, literature in particular and art in general. To the extent that these activities are distinguishable from one another, they flow in and out of one another like streams that join, mingle their waters for a time, then diverge, and then mingle again. In human thought and in the real—not analytically divided—world, their stringent separation is artificial. * I have said that philosophy is like art because philosophers aim not only at the truth but are concerned, like artists (and maybe more openly than scientists) with having an effect on others. They want to lodge in the minds of as many persons as they can. This view of philosophers influences the relative skepticism and the strong social emphasis with which I have learned to judge the possibilities of comparative philosophy, along with philosophy in general, and the answers I give to the questions that follow. There are two questions that I cannot escape. The first is this: Does the comparative history of philosophy that has just been concluded lead to any final reckoning? The history has been constructed as a series of variations on common themes. Whoever continues it in a similar spirit may change the themes or variations or increase their number, and should, in any case, make them more exact, the degree of their exactness having no clear limit. But none of this more varied or exact research will in itself answer the question. It should by now be self-evident that my answer is that this history cannot lead to a final reckoning—not unless one counts as final the evidence that philosophers, regardless of their convictions, have always been remote from anything that can plausibly be called a final reckoning. What history does that is so valuable is to extend our memories. The decisions that our judgment reaches with the help of these memories remain most usually subjective. Yet the similarities between

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the basic concerns of philosophers and the limited number of basic answers they give can be documented, and so can the small and large reasons for their disagreements. If perceptively gathered and analyzed, such documentation is certainly illuminating. But the very proliferation of the philosophers’ points of view justifies the verdict that they have all been subjective, by which I mean unable to prove anything of importance in an unmistakably compelling way. This inability of philosophers to achieve an unquestionable position—and of the skeptics among them to achieve an unquestionable array of doubts—characterizes both the traditions that the philosophers express and the doctrines they invent or adapt to their individual purposes. As a second, final question I ask, Does this inescapable doubtfulness show that philosophies have all been invented in vain? Surely not, I answer. This is because traditions, or, rather, many of the individuals who make up each tradition, need philosophy to give their lives an overriding intellectual pattern. It is impossible to live a merely nebulous life, with nothing in particular to do and nowhere exactly to go. Everybody needs a structure of habits and goals. These develop as if by themselves, but the structure has its architects, some well known, some obscure. In the sense of implicit philosophy, there always is an underlying architecture. For a tradition must embody a view of life, a view that is more various, tangled, deep, and subtle, I suppose, than reasoning can fully articulate. Yet the ability to put a prolonged succession of thoughts in explicitly rational ways—to give their structure an explicitly rational defense and subject them to explicitly rational analyses—is a great historical accomplishment. In any case, everybody has to live in some definite intellectual neighborhood, to which philosophy of the explicit kind I mean helps to give a structure with openly exhibited abstract girders. Human beings are everywhere domiciled in locally made houses, local communities, and localized traditions with localized philosophical modes of expression. They have had little choice except to live according to the meanings that they perceive in their own vicinity and (as Dignaga, Dharmakirti, and Kant would say) the perceptions they create by their humanity and—we have to add—their acquired habits of thought. The result is that philosophy is the abstract yet always local shape that those who need it give to their thought. But the local shape cannot be merely local. Just because there is no philosophy divorced from a location, none that is nothing but general, it always turns out to be a variant of what tradition has given the susceptible individuals. For a more than primitive philosophy, one has only the materials—the terms, concepts, beliefs, and intentions—that tradition has already provided, and one is able to build the whole structure only by varying the plans that tradition has already drawn. Even when conservative,

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the early philosophers we know in each tradition are (or appear to us to be) strikingly individual, while those who follow them, whether in India, China, or Greece, become associated with subtraditions or schools, which they defend, with sometimes subversive methods. To put it somewhat differently: Philosophy is an initially optional sublanguage or jargon, growing, in time, increasingly technical, that is practiced so that its vocabulary and syntactic structure help one to express oneself in certain modes of generalizing, self-justifying thought. For anyone who has learned such a language, the importance of a philosophic tradition or subtradition is that it defines the group of those who understand the individual philosopher’s generalizing talk more exactly and, the philosopher must hope, more sympathetically. In India and China, we know, there have been many philosophical languages and dialects. So, too, in the West, the philosopher has talked the necessary local dialect of one or more of the philosophical languages, ranging from the Platonic, Aristotelic, Epicuric, and Stoic languages, in the distant Greek past, up to Heideggeric and Wittgensteinic in the present. A language identifies the philosopher who speaks it as the member of a certain community of thought and perhaps of action and style of life. Having learned the language, a philosopher continues to take part in the engrossing pursuit of “truth,” “higher life,” “authenticity,” “clarification,” or some other goal, mostly within the community and mostly, of course, by the rules it sets. Of course, the history of philosophy, especially if comparative, tends to go beyond the local community’s bounds, break the authority of its rules, and maybe create broader though vaguer communities of its own. As we have witnessed, philosophical reasoning varies greatly; but within the variety of the reasons that philosophers give, there remain, we have also witnessed, many immediate and potential similarities. A philosopher cannot be merely individual, and Indian, Chinese, Greek, or other traditions or subtraditions cannot belong solely to their own geographical, temporal, or human limits. Even though every individual human being, philosophy, and philosophical subtradition and tradition is bound to a particular local context, every individual, philosophy, subtradition, and tradition is also bound to humanity at large. This is obviously because human thought everywhere, like human perception, exhibits similar capacities and is responsive to similar needs. Since we are creatures that are built alike and breathe, eat, excrete, talk, love, generate, fight, and socialize, we cannot avoid many similarities in the ways we think. To be similar, it must be repeated, is never to be just the same. Every philosopher is an unrepeatable individual who reasons within a unique subtradition at a distinct moment of its historical development. Yet ideas presented in

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a philosophical, that is, abstract form are relatively easy—easier than works of art—to divest of their conspicuous local traits and put in a different or more general language. When ideas are presented so, it becomes natural to ask how many general reasons can be given for being, for instance, a skeptic, an atomist, or a mystic? And how many for trusting or distrusting perception, reason, testimony, or sacred texts? Or for complying or not with social demands? Or for accepting or disowning a tradition or subtradition of thought? In every case, the answer is “not many.” If to be similar is never to be quite the same but never quite different, one needs careful eyes to see the nuances of similarity and difference, which are the analogies and failures of analogy by means of which we create so much of our thought. If it lacked the power to make analogies, our thought would become helpless. No one event could teach us how to anticipate that another event would, in practical or theoretical effect, repeat it. Even the same words and even the anonymous x of abstract thought could not stand for effectively identical instances (Nietzsche, who wants to discredit all language because it assumes identity, does not take into account—as Chuang-tzu does—that the general failure of language would invalidate the antilinguistic argument he uses language to make). As I have said earlier, China has had enormous internal variety of every kind, has had variable boundaries, and has not always been politically united. That we take it be one rather than many Chinas is so by virtue of a succession of analogies that show us what is internal to it, and failures of analogy that show us what is external. In the same way, India is one and Europe is one by virtue of analogical and disanalogical acts of classification. Unless we take great care in viewing others’ ideas, we see in them only reflections of ourselves: a self-indulgent choice of texts, a twist of meaning here, the shift of a word there, the minimizing of an inconvenient belief, and we once more experience the thought—our own—on which we set so high a value. Among the archetypes of the philosopher there are both Narcissus, unknowingly in love with his own reflection, and Echo, able only to repeat the words in which Narcissus expresses his self-love and frustration. We may want to decide what is particular to Chinese, Indian, or European thought, or, at the usually unhelpful limit of abstraction, to Eastern as compared with Western thought. The decision may come intuitively, as if by itself. But it shows us only our own faces, unless we make it with care, revise it as often as we learn more, and grant it a full spectrum of possibilities. Implicitly, so I think, we have learned that each human being needs the emotional closeness given by a particular community, language, poetry, pictorial expression, and—in what concerns us most in this history—a set of ab-

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stract reasons. Abstract reasons, too, articulate and strengthen or weaken our emotional affinities. Philosophy spends itself in elaborating these reasons. In a sense that is sometimes personal and always social, when our intellectual surroundings stimulate us to reason with sustained explicitness, the elaboration of the reasoning is simply necessary, in the long run almost as necessary as food, shelter, and companionship. In the end, we see: All the world’s a forum, and all the thinkers who appear in it are full of strange ideas, jealous in honor, seeking a fragile reputation in exchange for the gift of their thought. Do you have any philosophy in you? they ask, and, usually without waiting for an answer, go on, “We do (or, I do) and you have to listen to us (or, to me).” In spite of their narcissism, their gift is valuable. Whoever learns to take in what the philosophers have reasoned is so much the richer and sometimes even the wiser. Their voices are invigorating because they are, after all, intermittently persuasive, but also because they so persistently argue with one another. To testify for myself, I am happy to have lived in their demanding, discordant company. Their discord is part of the evidence that no philosophy they have ever invented is simply right or grasps human experience fully—remember Montaigne’s image of the children trying to divide a lump of quicksilver into equal parts. Yet when I think of how I myself try to philosophize, I sense that many of the philosophers have been more or less unconsciously assimilated into my thought. They live in the study that I and you make of them, and their presence within us makes it possible for us to be more generally human in a more individual way. Such a cacophony of fathers, to depend on and measure oneself against! Such a great, creative turmoil and babble of thought! This history ought to end so, with an exclamation of gratitude. When I make the exclamation, I of course feel the impulse to elaborate; but why add to the surfeit of words and reasons? Philosophy will not be concluded by any reasons I can add to those that have already been given. I therefore refuse to allow my own explicit philosophy the victory that, as the author, I could give it here, at least verbally—I cannot play the master in the forum where so many others have to have their say.

chapter 12

Nonutopian Observations on Machiavellism

The theory and practice dealt with in this essay are all related to what I call Machiavellism, by which I mean the disregard of moral scruples in politics, that is, ­the political use, limited only by expediency, of every kind of deception and force. A Machiavelli, in my terminology, is an active exponent of Machiavellism. These terms apply to a a group of characteristics that are fundamental to human life and take inexhaustibly different forms, each with its own consequences. The present essay depends on a book, Amoral Politics: The Persistent Truth of Machiavellism, that elaborates and documents the nature of Machiavellism; but while the book ranges widely, its basic argument does not go beyond what follows from our everyday experience. In the end, I ask and answer certain difficult questions. I begin with a direct question: Does an established moral tradition make it difficult for a Machiavelli to succeed? The answer is usually yes, because every tradition is an evolutionary device to maintain a long-developed social and moral equilibrium. However, in the course of its development, a tradition learns ways of justifying the use of deception and force even when these contradict its old, literally understood ideals. Given the need and opportunity, traditions police themselves by the aggressive maintenance of the conformism they teach. A Machiavelli can therefore work within a tradition and by means of its institutions. Let me spell out these statements. Societies of every kind create instruments to protect themselves against social chaos and unbridled Machiavellism. The Western democracies, whose principle it is to allow the expression of almost all views, defend their democratic character by freedom of information and

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choice, judicial protection of their citizens’ rights, and the election of their leaders for limited periods of tenure. But internal political deception and violence have to be curbed not only in democratic but in traditional nondemocratic societies, those that have in principle accepted the values of a particular tradition and have regarded their rulers as its executants. Since the past cannot be exactly main­tained and is taught in an idealizing light, the advocates of tradition may in fact be reformers who, in the name of a past that never existed, urge an end to social ambiguity and the ills that stem from it, they believe. It must however be said that it can be hard to distinguish a principled devotion to the past from its use to gain one’s not necessarily traditional ends. Like the exponents of other social attitudes, traditionalists argue their case by giving reasons and by making promises and threats. The reasons are experien­tial, theological, and philosophical; the promises and threats relate to one’s welfare in the present life and, to make things as sure as possible, to one’s future life as well. In the West, this extra assurance comes in doctrines of paradise, purgatory, and hell, and in the East, in those of heaven, hell, and karmic reexistence, or—as the highest of rewards—entry into nirvana or transforma­ tion into one’s true, inexpressibly spiritual being. Where, as in China, intellectual tradition can have naturalis­tic resonances, the future life is considered to be that, perhaps alone, of one’s descendants and reputation. Whatever the beliefs it teaches, tradition always objectivi­zes, that is, makes the claim that what it teaches is the fundamen­tal nature of things. Traditional thought is therefore also cosmologi­cal: The universe is such that only if one acts in accord with its nature does one gain the rewards it offers. This is taken for granted from the beginning of the particular tradition; the religious thought or philosophy that follows works out the details. In this context, openly egoistic Machiavellism—action unconcerned with either the intuitive or the formalized rules of decency—is simply outlawed. It is outlawed because, to the complete Machiavelli nothing is sacred and the past is useful only for the lessons in expediency that it teaches. It is necessary to make two qualifications to this judgment. The first is that every tradition has rules for sacrificing what is unimportant to it in favor of what is important. And so, by transforming certain natural human ends into means, tradition arrives at a criterion by which desires or principles of one sort are to be sacrificed for those of another. In Hinduism, social, even family life is to be sacrificed in the end for the sake of one’s higher self (but for most people in India, the qualifica­tion in the end is enough to reconcile the demands of practical with ideal life). In Buddhism, everything is to be ultimately sacrificed for the sake of escape from suffering (but ultimately gives time and space

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enough to pursue an ordinary social life). In Rabbinic Judaism, for which every individual’s life is a world with its own quasi-absolute value, life is nevertheless to be sacrificed to prevent the denial of the one true God (but this demand has, in practice, been rare); and in Confucianism it is taught that persons lower in the hierarchy should, if necessary, be sacrificed for the sake of those above—in the family, children should sacrifice themselves for their parents, the wife for her husband, and so on; and much the same is true of Hinduism (but in practice the relations are more complex and in some ways reversed). In Confu­cian­ life, too, self-sacrificing officials, among them historians, have demonstr­ated the priority of truth, in an especially Confucian sense, to life itself (but such sacrifices have been rare acts of heroism). To put it in other words, every tradition has a hierarchy of offices and values that determines its hierarchy of sacrifices. In this sense, every tradition has an equivalent of the Machia­vellian raison d’état (but like a cautious kind of Machiavellism tends to subordinate such sacrifices to moderate customary practices). The second qualification of the anti-Machiavellian temper of tradition is an obvious one: By Machiavellian tactics, tradition is maintained to the advantage of one or another person or group. When such an advantage is given formal sanction, tradition provides the casuistic rationale. Such is the justification given by Buddhists and Jains for traditionally approved killing or war: as the casuist reasons, these are meant to save villains from accumu­lat­ing still more evil karma and suffering in future lives. It would extend my argument too far if I tried to apply it carefully to more than one religion. In any case, I prefer to avoid using as an example any of the religions of the most probable readers of this book, so I will represent all religions by the example of Buddhism. I choose Buddhism not only for its probable distance but also because, of all the world religions, it is the most insistently and universally kind. Buddhism is also a good choice because it depends in principle on the combination of experience and reason and not on divine, to humans, often inexplicable com­mands. Why do I say that Buddhism is in principle the kindest of the great religions? Buddhist morality can be summed up in the five abstentions, three holy states, and ten good deeds it teaches. Its abstentions are from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and intoxication; its holy states are loving-kindness, compas­sion, and sympathetic joy; and its ten good deeds, which I will not enumerate, include respect for others and joy in their merit. Such moral recommendations are dwelt on and amplified in Buddhist scriptures. For example, the old, eloquent verses of the Sutta Nipata wish all living beings whatever— weak, strong, small, large, far, near, born and unborn—to be happy and safe,

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and to gain inner joy. These verses also claim that a person’s mind should be as all-embracingly friendly to the whole world as a mother is to her only son. The Dhammapada (Verses on Doctrine), a work much beloved by Buddhist laymen of the Theravada countries, tells the Buddhist that hatred is never appeased by hatred but only by love; that victory breeds hatred because the defeated live in pain, so that the truly peaceful give up both victory and defeat; and that one should conquer anger by love, evil by good, the stingy person by giving, and the liar by telling the truth (verses 5, 201, 223). Buddhist morality does not end at even this humanitarian level. The more expansive tradition of Mahayana Buddhism dwells on enlight­enment beings or Bodhisatt­vas, who are superlatively compas­sionate. In a memorable description of the seventh century CE, a Bodhisattva resolves not to be affected by the malice, sins, heresies, anxieties, corruption, or quarrels of human beings, but to save them; and because one form of life transmigrates into another, the Bodhisattva’s resolve is to save all living creatures, so he takes on himself the burden of all their pain and evil karma. “I have re­solved,” he says to himself, “to save them all . . . from the forest of birth, old age, disease, and rebirth, from misfortune and sin, from the round of birth and death, from the toils of heresy . . . I must free them from all misfortune, ferry them over the stream of rebirth. For I have taken upon myself, by my own will, the whole of the pain of all things living . . . I must be their guide to safe­ty . . . And I must not be satisfied with small successes.” It seems likely enough that the real Buddha, like the mythical one, had great respect for the truth. To drive this home, one of the Jataka tales (tales about Buddha in his many previous existences) says that there are cases in which a Bodhisattva may, for a good enough purpose, commit deeds—theft, adultery, or murder—that in others would be considered crimes, but that he may not tell a lie, for this would violate “the reality of things.” Another Jataka tale tells that the evil Devadatta, the archenemy of Buddha in innumerable life-cycles, told the very first lie. On hearing of it, the people, who still had no conception of what a lie might be, could only ask, “What kind of thing is a lie? Is it blue, yellow, or some other color?” It would be easy to continue with Buddhist teachings, but my point is not that Buddhism recommended many humane virtues, but that social reality was able to give Buddhism, the religious epitome of humane behavior, a Machiavellian face. I say this neither as a criticism of Buddhism nor indirectly of any other religion, but only because human social life is such that any of its institutions, even a religion like Buddhism, takes on Machiavellian character­ istics. To the Buddhists themselves, this was no surprise, and they attributed

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it, conven­tionally and easily, to the cosmic cycle, which had by their reckoning reached a stage of great degeneracy, although they believed that when it would finally change again for the good, it would culminate in the reign of a universal monarch and the appearance of the Buddha Maitreya (Matteyya). Signs of deception and amorally used force appear in the traditional accounts even of the Buddha’s life. We have already heard of their villain, Devadatta, who is Buddha’s cross-cousin and the first schismatic among Buddhist monks. We find accounts that tell that when the Buddha had grown old, he often deputed his favorite disciples to speak in his place. This practice aroused Devadatta’s hopes and once, when the Buddha was preaching before a large audience that included the king, Devadatta said out loud that the Buddha was now too old and should hand the Order over to him. Buddha refused, and when Devadatta persisted a second and third time, Buddha grew angry and said that he was unwilling to turn the Order over to his favorite disciples, so why should he turn it over to him, the despicable Devadatta. The Buddha then had a formal announcement issued that Devadatta was no longer a member of the Order. According to the canonical story, Devadatta went on to suggest to the prince of the realm, who favored him, to kill the king, his father, who favored the Buddha. Although the plot was discovered, the king pardoned his son and abdicated in his favor. Having become king, the son had the father imprisoned and starved to death. Devadatta then got the new king to send soldiers to kill the Buddha. However, the first soldier to encounter him was afraid, and the devious plot (whose Machiavellian details­ I omit) failed. So did two further attempts: One was to kill the Buddha by hurling a huge stone down the peak of the mountain in the shade of which the Buddha was pacing. The other attempt was by means of a vicious bull-elephant, a man-slayer, who was so overcome by the loving-kindness radiating from the Buddha that he bowed and became instanta­neously tame. Devadatta then proposed to the Buddha that five of the disciplin­ary rules for monks be made more strict and compliance with them made compulsory. As the wily Devadatta anticipated, the Buddha refused, and people of little faith thought that Devadatta was conscientious while the Buddha had become fond of a luxurious life. The king, Devadatta’s old ally, established and supported a monastery for him and his disciples. We see that according to tradition, Devadatta used both force and guile. Told from his point of view, the story would certainly have been different; but it is significant that the Buddha himself seems to have shown un-Buddhistic

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anger and made un-Buddhistic insults and threats of punishment. Anyone who has read Buddhist exegesis knows that it will be denied that Buddha was really angry or insulting. The exegete is forced to assume that what the Buddha said was not said in order to relieve his feelings but for the good of the person at fault. Such, too, is the message of the Discourse to Prince Abhyaha, where it is suggested that the Buddha be asked about his apparently un-Buddhistic talk. “How is it, revered sir,” the suggested question goes, that the Buddha caused Devadatta anger and displeasure by saying “Devadatta is doomed to a sorrowful way after death, Devadatta is doomed to Niraya Hell. . . . Devadatta is incurable.” When the Buddha is actually approached and asked if it is ever right to utter anything disagreeable to others, his answer is that if what is said is true, relevant to the great goal, and said at the right time, the remark is justified, in the same way as it is justified to pain a baby by pulling a stick or stone out of its throat: Whatever speech the Tathagata knows to be fact, true, connected with the goal, but not liked by others, disagree­able to them, the Tathagata is aware of the right time for explain­ing that speech . . . The Tathagata has compassion for crea­tures.

If this were not the omniscient Buddha speaking, he might be suspected of rationalizing an act that is not permitted to less percipient beings. The same would have to be said of Buddha’s words to Devadatta when the latter asked him a third time to give up his leadership and was called by Buddha (in the words of an uncompro­mising translator) “vile one, to be vomited like spittle.” Compassion demonstrated in such ways leads to conclu­sions that make Buddhism seem paradoxical. The Mahavamsa, the old chronicle of Sinhalese (Sri Lankan) history, tells approvingly how the heroic King Dutugam­unu, when told that killing non-Buddhists is not really killing, supports Buddhism by making war against the Tamils. When one day the king recalls his victory, he does so without joy because it caused the deaths of millions of people. But a group of arahats (worthy ones, with insight into the nature of things) reads his thoughts from the distance and sends eight representatives who inform him that he really killed only one and a half persons, the rest being only “unbelievers and men of evil” not worthy of more esteem than beasts. A later chronicle says that they told the king that the Tamils he had killed “were not only barbarians and heretics but their deaths were like those of cattle, dogs, and mice.” A psychologically minded anthropologist whose account I am using says

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that although the king violated the axiomatic basis of Buddhism as a religion of nonvio­lence, the king’s guilt—like that of other Buddhist kings—had the virtue that it drove him to support religion and act for the people’s welfare. It should therefore not be surprising “if monks justify all sorts of violent acts such as regicides, mass killings, sexual violation by kings—all except the act of parricide” (which some of those excused committed symbolically). Out of such justifications of explicitly forbidden acts, Mahayana Buddhism created the doctrine of skilful means, ingenuity, or expediency, as the term upaya may be variously translated. This doctrine, according to which Buddha uses the means most appropriate to teaching or acting, allows his wholly insightful, compassion­ate aim to take prece­dence over an act’s prohibition to lesser beings. A Bodhisattva (one who has achieved “the wisdom-seed of emptiness, signlessness, nonaction, and nonself ”) will not fall to “the miserable planes of existence” even though he indulges in what in others would be sinful lust and desire. To drive the point home, Buddha is represented as telling how in a previous life, out of purity and compassion, not lust, he married and had sexual inter­course with a woman in order to save her from committing suicide for love of him. He also tells how in order to influence others to avoid sinning, he pretended to be punished for sins that, in him, were no sins at all. And he tells how, out of compassion, he speared to death a man who wanted to rob and kill five hundred traders. The Buddha’s means were skilful because by this act he not only saved the lives of the five hundred (Bodhisattvas, he says), but also saved them from the sin of hating and killing their would-be murderer if, as otherwise obliged, he would have told them of the threat to their lives. Lastly, by his compassionately economical act of killing he allowed the murderer to be reborn in heaven and not in the hells to which he would otherwise have fallen. To the above stories and their accompanying doctrine, I should add something about the relation of Buddhism to politics. For practical reasons, I will limit myself to China, Tibet, and Japan. In the case of China, I can make the point briefly by recalling the career of the Empress Wu, who turned to Buddhism because Confucianism ­made it difficult to legitimize a woman ruler. Toward the end of the 680s CE, a group of ten Buddhist monks was enabled or ordered to find a scripture, a sutra, in which a female deity and appropriate oracles identified the empress as the Buddha-to-come (Maitreya Buddha) to whom the traditional Mandate of Heaven had now passed. The empress reciprocat­ed the discovery of the document by giving the Buddhist clergy prece­dence and by sponsoring translations of Buddhist scriptures. She also supported two new Buddhist schools, the antiphilosophical Ch’an (Zen) sect,

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and the highly philosophi­cal Hua-yen (Flower Garland). A title she assumed hinted clearly at her likeness to the Buddhist Universal Monarch. The Tibetan history of the official institution of Buddhism tells of the contest between Indian and Chinese Buddhists in which the Indians succeeded in driving out the Chinese, who were of the Ch’an persuasion. But the Chinese succeeded in murdering the leading Indian master and causing his Tibetan supporter to commit suicide. There followed severe persecutions of Buddhism, which put a temporary end to the community of foreign scholars, Tibetan translators, and monks. In time, however, the power of the Buddhist monasteries of Tibet came to supple­ment or replace that of the hereditary feudal nobility. These monasteries were not simply religious, but also political and economic organizations that cooperated or conflicted with one another as their interests dictated. The Dalai Lama became the theocratic but fairly tolerant ruler. The doctrine of skillful means is prominent in the Lotus Sutra, which was the main inspira­tion of the influential Japanese Buddhist monk Nichiren (1222–82 CE). Nichiren somehow became convinced that the truth and power of this sutra were concentrated in its title, so that the chanting of “Hail to the Lotus of the Perfect Truth” could ensure salvation. He also convinced himself that he was a prophet, the reincarnation of the Bodhisattva meant to protect Japan and realize the sutra’s ideal in a world suffering from many calamities. According to Nichiren’s list of successive Japanese calami­ties, in 1257 there was an unprecedent­ed earthquake, in 1258 a great wind, in 1259 a major famine, in 1259 rampant disease, which continued to rage during 1260, when more than half of the ordinary citizens of Japan died. The prayers ordered by the alarmed rulers of the country proved useless. This was evidence to Nichiren that the age was such that Buddhist truth was no longer effective and the world was now ruled not by gods but demons. Then, in 1264, on the fifth day of the seventh month, all Japan saw the light of a comet, “an evil portent such as has never been seen before since the beginning of histo­ry.” Such disasters and such an omen, wrote Nichiren, were the result of the prevalence of false forms of Buddhism, which the govern­ment was obliged to suppress. In support of his version of Buddhism, Nichiren leveled an extraordi­narily un-Budd­histically harsh attack on the Buddhist sects that did not teach the priority of the Lotus Sutra, which every person was obliged to acknowledge, Nichiren believed, in order to rescue Japan from its difficulties. The ethics that Nichiren preached were this-worldly and populistic and justified violence. Under questioning, he admitted that he had named five temples he wanted burned and two high priests he wanted beheaded. A further problem for the

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government was that his attack on Zen was an implicit attack on the regent himself. Convicted of treason, Nichiren was arrested in 1271 and con­demned, officially to exile but in fact to death. As he describes it, when he was arrested, he was struck with a scroll of the Lotus Sutra, the other scrolls of which were unrolled, trampled on, and strewn about the floor. Nichiren then said loudly, “You gentlemen have just toppled the pillar of  Japan!” Taken to his execution, Nichiren continued his defiance, and (as he tells it) was saved by the miraculous appearance of an orb as bright as the moon that shot across the sky from southeast to northwest. Blinded, the executioner fell on his face and the soldiers panicked. That very evening, a letter of reprieve arrived from the regent. Despite further dramatic signs and portents that Nichiren describes, he was exiled, this (second) time for three years, after which he was pardoned. As he had predicted, the Mongols invaded. Their double defeat, primarily by the elements, was attributed by the Buddhist enemies of Nichiren to the efficacy of their prayers. Nichiren’s denunciation of the other sects of Buddhism shows him to have been almost completely intolerant. He repeats that the Lotus Sutra predicted that in the evil age there would be monks who were perverse, fawning, crooked, and boastful, and there would be, as well, forest-dwelling monks who wore clothing of patched rags but were greedy for power and honor and would spread lies about true Buddhism, which they would call heretical. To justify violence against these sham Buddhists, Nichiren points out that the Nirvana Sutra quotes Buddha as saying, “Men of devout faith, defenders of the True Law need not observe the five precepts or practice the rules of proper behavior. Rather they should carry knives and swords, bows and arrows, prongs and lances.” Nichiren continues that the Nirvana Sutra says that one may give alms to an ordinary sinner but never to anyone who has slandered the Law. Whoever kills even an ant will suffer for it, “but he who helps to eradicate slander of the Law will ascend to the state from which there can be no retrogres­sion.” According to Nichiren, the Lotus Sutra can be taught either by gentle arguments or by means of strict (severe) refutation. Japan, he says, requires the strict kind because its sins are not the result of ignorance but of deliberate defiance. The leaders of the perverse sects teach by means of twisted opinions and private opinions. They enter the service of the ruler and military leaders and preach so as to destroy the Buddhist Law and the country. Zen, in particular, is a false doctrine that appeals to the children abandoned by their parents because they are unfilial, to retainers dismissed for outrageous conduct, to priests too lax to study, and to prostitutes.

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Even though its follow­ers have all embraced the precepts, they are no more than swarming locusts feeding upon the people of the nation. That is why Heaven glares down in anger and the gods of the earth shudder.

In criticism of the Shingon sect, with its sensuous brilliance and esoteric ritual, Nichiren says that although widely respected and patronized by the government, it is delusive and fraudulent, and its prayers and curses proved useless in helping Japan against the Mongols—as long as the shogun and his intimates use the services “of priests who invite grave disaster by ignoring the Lotus Sutra, the nation will in fact face certain destruction.” In the heat of his enthusiasm, Nichiren makes a great vow: Though I might be told that my father and mother will have their heads cut off if I do not recite the Nembutsu—whatever obstacles I encounter, as long as men of wisdom do not prove my teachings to be false, I will never yield! All other troubles are no more to me than dust before the wind. I will be the Pillar of  Japan. I will be the Eyes of  Japan. I will be the Great Ship of  Japan. This is my vow, and I will never forsake it!

Nichiren was sincere and, in this sense, Machiavellian only in justifying the use of force to gain his ends. But like the other Buddhist sects of Japan, Nichiren underwent a process of institutional development and division into branches, and this process was inevitably accompanied by Machiavellian tactics. Organizers competed for power within the sect by trying to become the administrators of temples that had close connections with Nichiren. “Ordinary adherents had little to say in the organization’s administra­tion . . . Powerful supporters also began to place members of their own families in positions of influence as religious leaders and organizers in the temples.” The major supporters of the Nichiren school were mostly samurai, and much of the financing of Nichiren’s movement came, it seems, from local warlords. These warlords established what in effect were clan temples, in which the sons of the patrons were often the priests. Nichiren’s disciples divided into different schools, sometimes with all his dogmatism but little of his spiritual forcefulness. Some Nichiren sects were inclined to peaceful relations with other Buddhist sects and avoided the severe methods of confronta­tion sometimes used to spread the faith (as in the conver­sion of wives, employees, or retainers). By the sixteenth century, there were twenty-one Nichiren sects in Kyoto, many of whose temples were armed

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fortresses with standing armies that could be used to force the solution of doctrinal debates. For whatever reasons, a war broke out in 1536 with the Pure Land monks of Mt. He, whose army attacked Nichiren temples in Kyoto, burned twenty-one of them, and killed perhaps tens of thousands of Nichirenites; but this defeat affected the Nichirenites only temporarily. The history of Zen is just as edifying and unedifying. The larger Zen monaster­ies, with their thousands of monks and their meditative practices and artistic interests, were allied with the warrior elite and the imperial court. Hungry for land and donations, the monasteries were the sites of competition for high offices, which might be sold to anyone who could pay the price. Sometimes, too, the monasteries were the sites of armed conflict among groups of monks. The monks of Soto Zen, who were often farmers and local warriors, worked their land with conviction, built bridges, dug wells, served the local popula­tion, and were concerned with the interests of ordinary laymen. But as Nichiren’s not very balanced attack might lead one to expect, there was much criticism of Zen, internal and external, much sectarian strife within it, and tales that showed the Zen monks in a less than favorable light. It is, no doubt, the presence of many warriors among the patrons and practitioners of Zen that created the relationship, so strange in the abstract, between Zen Buddhism and the military arts, especially swordsmanship and archery. The relationship was always loose and as much with Confucianism as with Zen. Zen, in particular, was useful to warriors because it taught them to take spontaneous advantage of every opportunity to kill an opponent while themselves losing all consciousness of ego and fear of death. The swords­man Takuan Soho (1573–1645) argues that the swordfighter does not fight for victory nor defeat, nor to kill his opponent. Conscious striving purpose makes the accomplishment more remote and destroys one’s spiritual accomplish­ment, for which reason he advocates the Zen paradox of the identity of stillness and dynamism, of “original mind,” which is “to melt the mind and to let it work, like flowing water, in every part of the body—that is what is meant by “original mind.” I have summarized the complicated facts incompletely but in enough detail to lend substance to my generalization about the religious use of violence and deception. The point having been made, I feel absolved from going into the history of the Hinayana countries and I return to the generalization itself. It is beyond doubt that the religious precepts of even so humanitarian a religion are spelled into human existence in ways that are also inevitably Machia­vellian. This Machiavellism begins with the traditional story of the Buddha (as it probably began with the real one), continues with Buddhist rivalries and schisms, and comes to explicit expression in the principle of skillful means. This prin-

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ciple is regarded as essential to preserve the interests of the apparent victim but also assumes the appearance and, I take it, the substance of the Machiavellian raison d’état. Nichiren gives an impressive historic lesson. Although he is an idealist rather than than a conscious Machiavel­lian, to the outsider, his argument that in this degenerate age, every version of Buddhism except his must be sup­pressed by force is an expression of his struggle for existence against other Buddhist leaders, a struggle main­tained in an openly Machiavellian temper by his inheritors. Buddhism begins as limitless mercy but transforms itself into a political instru­ment, learns to justify lying, adultery, coercion, murder, and war, learns to become the official religion of warring bands of monks, and learns to be used as the psycho­logical prelude to the efficient practice of swordsman­ ship and archery. Because religions are historical amalgams of everything human, they cannot be summed up in merely moral, rational, dogmatic, or symbolic forms. All a religion’s preachings, reasonings, dogmas, ceremonies, and ardent ideals cannot prevent it from being lived in a reality that dictates Machiavellian practices. Machiavellism is not only compatible with religion but indispens­able to it, for the single but sufficient reason that no religion can dispense with human beings. Given time, these indispensable persons explore the variations of which their life is capable and learn to regenerate their perception of themselves by means of fantasies that include force, destruction, and re-creation. Given time, therefore, Buddhism, the reasonable, totally compassionate religion, is able to turn into paradoxical variants of itself in tantric (magical-rite) theories that teach the ambiguously symbolic and literal practice (confined to accom­plished yogins) of killing, lying, stealing, and adultery, each of which is specifical­ly forbidden in authoritative old texts, but each of which is compatible with the tantric Buddhist’s love for the identity of oppo­sites and his ambition to become totally, omnipotently, really (because unreally) real. * I now add a second question to my first: Does history teach whether or not Machiavellism has been successful? The answer is that history teaches no lessons or predictions of interest that are at all certain. However, it is able to make plausible analyses of fragments of the past and show, among other results, that largescale Machiavellian policies can be relatively successful for a relatively long time. Not to appear arbitrary, I have to explain in some detail. To begin with, if what I have said about Buddhism is accurate, it teaches an important though

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general historical probability. Would Guicciardini, the sixteenth-century Florentine, who once claimed that history teaches nothing except that it teaches nothing, deny ­the possibility of learning a general lesson of the kind exemplified by Buddhist history? I think he would not. But whatever his answer, in claiming that history teaches nothing he is right in the sense that history teaches nothing that can be applied exactly. The situation we face at any given moment is invariably different enough from any preceding one to make a prediction no better than a guess. Arising and subsiding in unpredictable variations within unpredictably varying contexts, the events we isolate out of the historical flux are most sensibly viewed as having not causes but constellations of causes. We have the chance to learn which, if any, of the component-causes were critical, what shifted how and where to give just these results—maybe defeat or victory in a war—only after the event. Among the component-causes that make historical prediction so difficult there are, of course, the human purposes involved. To take only the simplest case, of two opposed political leaders, how can the outcome be predicted when the intelligence that inspires one leader’s act is countered by the equal intelligence of the other, opposed leader? And the acts may not be, as assumed, equal in intelligence and opposite in purpose, but incommensurable, that is, not measurable on the same scale of purpose. How, I ask, can the outcome be predicted when an intelligent act is met with one too irrational (too far off the scale by which intelligence is being measured) to be predicted by anyone who expects only an intelligent (intelligently self-serving) response? Further, how can it be known in advance that a devious act for which a devious response is anticipated will in fact get an undevious one or that a violent act will get a peaceable rather than violent one? And how can anything useful be predicted when the situations involved are so complicated or fluid that, to be clear, an analysis must be very greatly oversimplified? Of course, we counter such difficulties by the systematic gathering of information, which we analyze by advanced statistical methods and models as sophisticated as we can construct. But the information itself is often inaccurate and, if much is at stake, may be intention­ally misleading. As for statistics, even assuming they are roughly accurate—for politics and history can they ever be more?—they cannot be counted on to yield good advice on particular acts meant to deal with complicat­ed real issues. This is so if only because statistics smooth out the deviations of which they are com­posed while many and maybe most individual events are deviant events, and because even a small deviation can cause them to have decisively different results. Nor is a formalis­tic, logical procedure, such as game theory, very promising for actual life because, as we

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discover, the real analogues of theoretical games do not often develop as the games predict. The difficulty in prediction is repeated on another level when sophisticated real-life gamesters competing against one another, in the stock market, for instance, or, as may one day happen, in a war, make use of the same theories and compete in the invention of better ones. Besides, in political life, the basic facts themselves are usually in dispute—each group or state has its own version of the past and present. Formal models, highly suggestive as they may be, are possible only because they leave out the essentially incalculable complications that occur in fact. Yet the discovery of the importance of what they must leave out is itself enlightening: not only are the models improved, but those who use them in full awareness of their nature may improve their intuition by assimilating what makes even the better ones imperfect. Psychology, though also very uncertain in practice, sometimes offers more retrospective enlightenment than analysis by formal theory. Let me give an example from recent history. It has been said that Lenin was very mistrustful from childhood on. In later life, his mistrust made it difficult for others to betray him; but, for better and worse, his mistrust was allied with a good deal of pessimism. This pessimism was for the worse (it is claimed) when the failure of the July 1717 Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd sent him into hiding in Finland and weakened his effective­ness until power had already been taken over. But his pessimism proved right when it led him to suspect the Germans at BrestLitovsk and to conclude that the Russians would be unable to resist them. Mistrustful and pessimis­tic by nature, Lenin was relatively little bound to others by feelings of personal loyalty or the need to cooperate. This personal ability to isolate himself was often politically helpful to him. Trotsky, however, was more optimistic and trusting than Lenin, always surprised by the antagonistic responses of others to himself and unable to see the world in the harsh, decisive manner of Lenin. His vitality and optimism gave him great successes in organizing the Red Army. However, at Brest-Litovsk his optimism led him astray, and his indecision, which qualified his optimism, often made him vulnerable. So did his pride. One moral is sound if also in practice difficult: As Kautilya and Machiavelli say, it is enlightening to grasp the character of enemy leaders, on the assumption that they may be different from oneself. Think of the dilemma on both sides when a person sensitive to individuals and their emotions it pitted against a Machiavelli who is sensitive to neither because, like Lenin, he is interested only in practical goals. Hard as it is to fathom the character of opponents quite different from oneself, it is harder still to fathom one’s own because this requires getting outside of one’s skin and looking at oneself from the outside

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in. Such looking is foreign to the leader who loves himself too much to be able to see his own weaknesses clearly. How many ambitious leaders are realistic about their abilities, and how can they be realistic about them until they have taken the chances that demonstrate their own limita­tions? And if, like Napoleon after his first exile, they continue to be ambitious after failure, what leads them to suppose that the one failure will not be succeeded by another? Perhaps the conclusion should be that, when joined, history and psychology can help us to understand better than either alone; but it is unfortunately true that the most convincing analyses of history and character are retrospec­tive. Wisdom is much easier to achieve in relation to the past, when we already know that Napoleon’s second try was a failure. A more convincing conclusion might be that what history shows is that pretensions to (nonretrospec­tive) political understanding must be exaggerated and that there cannot be a true science of politics. Historical reflection is not a constant beacon and does not mark a stage on the route taken by humanity. The road twists and turns. The truth does not direct it toward the horizon. Nor are its vagaries molded on the powerful contours of an infrastruc­ture. The road winds haphazardly. Most of the time the travelers do not care. Each one believes that his road is the true one, and the turns that he sees others take scarcely disturb him. Vividly expressed though it is, this conclusion seems to me too complacent. Guicciardini and Paul Veyne (whom I have just quoted) are right only in a narrow sense. In a wider sense, they are wrong because we in fact think less in terms of exact repetitions than of analogies that experi­ence helps us to adapt as events prove necessary. More or less exact repetitions hold true only of the mechanical activities that demand them. Intelligence (even, often, what is considered animal instinct ) gives the ability to make intuitive reassess­ments of what has already been learned (or, for instinct, apparently fixed). This ability is the equivalent of a conscious reanalysis of our previous experienc­es into their newly relevant and irrelevant compo­nents. Guicciardini and Veyne are also wrong because history gives us the chance to assimilate experience—thin yet intellectually helpful experience—we can never otherwise have and, in this way, to be exposed to thousands of eventful years and innumera­ble kinds of lives. The importance of this exposure is not contra­dicted by the frequent failures to learn from history: No experi­ence, direct or historical, can open the eyes of a person with too limited an imagination or intelligence. Lack of experience, however, can be fatal even to those with a receptive imagination—they too can be blind to dangers they have never known—and limit the intelligence even of the natively intelligent. Intelligence needs experi­ence to feed on, to quicken it, and to transform it into understand­

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Blind rooster attacking flower, 2002

ing. I do not mean that the study of history can guarantee wisdom, but by supplying many more or less analogous experi­ences and by encouraging their compari­son, analysis, and imaginative reassembly, it teaches one how to examine events closely and how to react to them discerningly. The discerning reaction I mean is an informed intuitive adaptation by way of analogy—intuition is needed because the number of possibilities is far too great for anyone to take into conscious account. All careful history can nourish the ability to discern in this sense. The historians’ passion to record accurately and understand deeply, which animates persons as distant from one another as Ssu-ma Ch’ien and Thucydides, is a

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craving for honest discernment and the ability to live not only in the memories they record of the past but in the discernment of those who will someday study the memories. Consider the very instructive case of China. This is because the records the Chinese kept make it possible to think in coherent detail about the history of large numbers of people over long periods of time. Non-Chinese sources for (written) history apply to smaller territories or briefer stretches of time, or, if not, lack essential detail and credibility. The archives of the old Italian cities, for example, have provided material for interesting historical and socioeco­ nomic analysis; but the history of these individual city-states is not as useful for wide-ranging study as that of a great, long-lived empire like China, which by its size, age, and complexity allows the vagaries of its constituent territories to be be averaged out, if desired, or, if not, retained for themselves; and it gives time, place, and detail enough for the creation and testing of general hypothe­ses. I cannot persuade the reader that this is so unless I explain how and why Chinese history was composed. Its relative coherence is mostly the work of the bureaucra­cy that ruled over China for some two thousand years, kept meticulous records of everything that seemed important to it, and wrote factually (mostly) faithful although heavily stylized accounts of the lives and deaths of the successive dynas­ties. A learned translator of Ssu-ma Ch’ien (2nd century BCE), writing at a time when it was easier to believe in the objectivity of history, compares him, in part very favorably, with the Greek and Roman historians for saving so much of the old documents invaluable for later reconstruction of Chinese history. The Chinese themselves were sure they could learn from history, though the main lesson they got from it was usually the one they had formulated in advance, so that only the many details of its applica­tion remained in question. Out of respect for this preestablished lesson, most of the official Chinese historians gave up the effort to think independent­ly; but they showed their historians’ connoisseurship by selecting just those phrases and passages that would most faithfully transmit what appeared essential to them. They saw their function as that of preservation and transmission—in annals, biographies, tables, and mono­graphs—to enable future genera­tions to judge the preceding ones. As defined in 819 CE by a historian writing to the emperor to protest against the corrup­tion of historiography, The duties of the historian are to encourage good and reprove evil, to express opinions in just speech with a straight brush, to record the merit and virtue of our divine dynastic house, to write down the deeds and accomplish­

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ments of the loyal and sage [ministers], to make a record of the shameful conduct of evildoers and sycophants, that may be handed down for ever.

Is it possible to become somewhat the wiser about Machiavellism by studying history written by men with such ideals? In answering, we should note that all of civilization seemed to these historians to depend on China’s bureau­crats­, among whom they too were numbered. In spite of galling favoritism, many of the bureaucrats were chosen not for their social standing or the eminence of their patrons but for their ability. The way in which their ability was tested appears odd to us. It was by the mastery of certain conven­tion­al essay forms, which gave them the chance to exhibit their erudition in allusions and prove the depth to which they had assimilat­ed the official culture. Because the ideological interests of the recording bureaucrats remain fairly transparent, their stereotyped verdicts on history can be neutral­ized. However, information of a sort they were not interested in recording is difficult or impossible to recover, at least from the official histories, which underwent an elaborate process of editing and condensa­tion. The official account represents China from the standpoint of someone who is either within or reporting to the bureaucrat­ic center, from which China appears far more uniform than from peripheral points of view. These must be reconstructed from local records. The focusing of interest on the center is the price paid for the unity of the bureaucrats’ history. The Chinese belief in history was such that the past and future verdicts of the historians were of surpassing interest to bureau­crats and rulers. A Chinese official who thought he had paid a heavy price (loss of office or punishment) for his loyalty to ideals might justify himself by writing an autobiography. By the fourteenth century, it had become fairly usual among officials to preempt the necrologist’s verdict by writing death notices for themselves. To give an eminent example, when the first Ming emperor, Chu Yüan-chang (reigned 1368–98) saw in a mirror how time had affected him—his face had grown pale and his hair white—he decided to put down the truth about himself as only he knew it. Instead of waiting for “the embellishing literary officials,” he wrote, he would take the occasion to narrate his “own hardships and difficulties and clarify the imperial fortunes so that successive generations can see for themselves.” Consider­ing the moral pressure that Confucian tradition exerted on the individual, it is not surprising that during the Ming period (1368–1644) there were many scholar-officials who, like so many Benjamin Franklins, kept diaries in which they did moral bookkeeping, a practice others rejected as too mechanical and utilitarian, or simply recorded their faults (“I frequently lose

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my temper over small matters . . . In my moral indignation, I ignore consequences”) or castigated themselves in a temper that now and then recalls Saint Augus­tine. Although such guilt reflects a particularly difficult period for officials, it is also reflects a deepened moral tradition, whose influence on individual officials should keep us from judging their whole group too cynically. The morally serious among them were sincere in judging themselves and their times by the precedent of the ideally familial, ceremoni­al, hierarchi­cal, responsi­ble, inspiring past that Confucius had found in the Chou dynasty. Ironically, this Confucian ideal of govern­ment was supported by political methods inherited from the Ch’in dynasty. Whether this adoption reflected the warnings of the philosopher, Hsün Tzu (3rd century BCE), the ideas of the hated Legalists, practical necessity, or—as is most most plausible—all of these together, the govern­ment of China ruled in fact by Legalistic attitudes and expedients. Yet it was impossible for the govern­ment to give up the Confucian declaration that human beings are by nature kind and decent; a moral rather than merely utilitarian ideology was essential to keep the sense of fairness alive—the sense that the government was not an opportunistic system designed only to further the interests of the elite. The values taught a Confucian official were better fitted to make him conscientious and lend his work dignity than were rewards and punishments alone. Maybe, as a scholar argues, the Confucians’ practical weakness lay not in what they advocated but in their lack of desire or ability to establish their own base of political power. But this explanation may be just another way of saying that the true Confucian could not be a true Machiavel­lian or the true Machia­vellian a genuinely moral Confucian. As might be expected, there were well-defined limits to the authority of each Chinese official. His work was periodically reported on, he was interviewed by his superiors, he was rewarded for efficiency and punished for failure by fines, transfers, dismissals, and sometimes worse. Such measures enabled the central government to govern­ by means of its officials and yet guard its power from them by putting them under one another’s supervision and so dividing them against them­selves. The relations between the emperor, the central bureaucra­cy, the many local bureau­cracies, and the populations they all ruled together became very complex. Each bureaucratic level, type, and region developed interests of its own and methods of resisting unwel­come commands from above. The resistance was expressed in the ways in which the officials interpreted the com­mands, transferred them to one another, and reported their results. In other words, the bureaucratic machine that put the emperor’s power into effect also limited him. Despite the Legalism in Chinese practice, the con-

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trol over the apparatus of government exercised by the quasi-divine person at the center, the very emperor, was more than routinely effective only if he were a very forceful person served by an efficient, not too obstructive bureaucra­cy, one that could identify itself with his aims. The Chinese experience shows that emperors, although so near to divine, made their lives more difficult by any desire they had to improve society. Theoretically supreme, the emperor ­was likely to become trapped in a hard-working career made up of ceremo­nies from which, as the emperors sometimes com­ plained, they could find no rest; and all an emperor’s protests and attempts to break out of his ceremonial confines and make effective changes might come to very little. He could too easily be defeated by the passivity, prudence, routine, favoritism, and conceal­ment practiced by the officials he ruled—they also had the choice of making self-interested or truly virtuous appeals to their tradition. With its many small, persistent Machiavellisms, Chinese tradition made unimpeded tyranny very difficult, as the following contem­porary reaction, written in acid, makes clear: Nobody mourns the old Chinese bureaucracy. The social harm it did, even by the standards of its day, went well beyond the crushed ankles of helpless vagrants. Yet its nature impeded zealotry of any sort, whether for good or for ill. Without that great sheet-anchor, China yaws wildly in the storm. Without a workable alternative, leaders can manipu­late mass fears and turn them with terrible force against the deviants and scapegoats of our own day—anyone vulnerable to labeling, either for his social origins or his exotic beliefs—with none to stand between.

The records kept by the bureaucracy, which culminated in the last two dynasties in enormous collections of statutes and regulations, show a “cumbrous, gigantic machinery of government” with snags and quantities of red tape, that, all the same, functions efficient­ly. If used critically and compared with other evidence, the records allow empirical tests of Machiavellian (and other) theories on subjects such as the effectiveness of the government’s rule and the success of its attempts to maintain social peace. The example of such testing I especially want to refer to is a research on the rule of the Ming dynasty, whose records provide informa­tion on local problems and disturbances of all kinds. As usual with complex historical testimony, the answers arrived at are not always clear-cut. Yet they come as close as such evidence (and research methods) allow to verifying the Chinese Legalistic,

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Machiavellian view that the social fabric can be preserved by a government that is intelli­gently repressive and maintains its army, keeps its taxes tolerable, and relieves famine effective­ly. What grounds are there for this conclusion? Autocracy was not rare in China’s previous history, but the early Ming dynasty was the most autocratic it had ever known. Quite aware of the temptations of power, this autocracy was careful to spread it so as to prevent any official body, bureaucrat, general, or eunuch or other inhabitant of the palace from accumulat­ing enough to become a serious chal­lenge to the emperor. This preventive policy begins with the reign, from 1368 to 1398, of the first of the Mings (Chu Yüan-chang, officially titled Huang-wu), the emperor whose obituary of himself I mentioned earlier. The only surviving son of a peasant family of a starving, plague-ridden village, this emperor was proud of his origin and compas­sionate to ordinary farmers. His compas­sion led to him to reassure village elders, restrain soldiers from looting and help areas ravaged by war. But though he identified himself with the peasants, he was soon persuaded that he needed the help of the literati and of a bureaucracy adapted from that of the preceding dynasty. “Rites and laws (li fa),” he said, “are the network sustaining the state. . . . When a state is being newly estab­lished they constitute the first order of priority.” Because he hated the abuses of the preceding regime’s bureau­crats, the emperor did his cruel best to terrorize his own bureaucrats into compliance and decency. The frankness he solicited from them was rewarded, to speak ironically, by ruthless punishment—in the first two prominent instances, by death and hard labor. Public beatings were prescribed to humiliate erring officials, and harsh regula­tions were adopted to keep all officials under surveillance and overcome their laziness, overstaffing, and corruption. Nepotism was attacked by forbidding officials to appoint their own subordinates and by forbidding relatives to enter government service without imperial permis­sion. An official who took a bribe above a certain sum “was decapitated, his head was spiked on a pole, and his corpse was skinned and stuffed with straw.” Information was collected by spies officials of all the high ranks. Organized spying was carried out by a special secret agency, the Embroidered Guards [accountable to the emperor alone], who were empow­ered to investi­gate, arrest, and try special cases of corruption and organized opposition to the throne, especially conspiracy cases among the bureau­cracy and rebellious sects. From 1382 to 1393, the Embroidered Guards handled at least three major purges of the bureaucracy, each of which resulted in some 10,000 executions.

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For fairness’s sake, I should add that the emperor I have been describing would repeat, “If I am too lenient, people say I am muddle-headed, the law ruined and discipline lax; and if I am harsh, people call me a tyrant.” But freedom in the sense we are familiar with was not allowed, and it was in vain that a critic called on the emperor to abolish collective responsibility for crimes. The Ming Code did whatev­er its authors could imagine to ensure order: It prescribed that professions should be hereditary, that all commoners who entered or left a village notify the authorities, and that no one without an official pass could travel a certain distance beyond a registered place of residence. The activities of monks were regulated and it was allowed to execute or banish the members of sects who, by divination, prophecy, or other means, might cast doubt on the legitimacy of the regime. Merchants needed licenses to pursue their trades and innkeepers had to report monthly on their merchant-guests. In schools and civil service examina­tions, only the Confucian classics could be used. Families virtuous by Confucian standards were rewarded and their deeds set down in local gazetteers. The research I have been summarizing shows that this repressiveness served its purpose well, that is, was successful in controlling the number and the danger of armed disturbances. The research teaches that banditry and rebellion increased under two conditions. One was when times were bad and the government was not helpful enough with food or local construc­tion. The other was when punishment became uncertain because govern­ment troops were far away, mutinous, or otherwise ineffec­tive. The statistics show that revolts of tenants or bondservants, taken taken to be expressions of class conflict, were relatively infre­quent. Just as a Legalist would have predicted, the combination of govern­ment aid when really necessary, vigorous social control, and quick, severe punish­ment made rebellion difficult and infrequent. Control of travelers and the distancing of heterodox sects must also have helped to maintain social stability. The same desire to keep life stable made indoctrination with Confucian precepts impor­tant to the government. For the sake of this indoctrination, regular village assemblies were held at which moral lectures were given and imperial decrees read exhorting the people to obey their parents, respect their superiors, live in harmony with their neighbors, educate their sons and brothers, rest content with what they had, and refrain from evil. The historical evidence is that the central­ized, rigorous, paternal­istic Ming autocracy was by and large effective for a long time. It underwent many threats. Under the less vigorous Ming governments, traditional bureaucratic evils multiplied: Officials took bribes, bribed their superiors to maintain or better their appoint­ments, squeezed the peasants unconscionably, appropriated

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govern­ment relief funds, and sentenced innocent people for the sake of the fines they paid. The army was troubled by absenteeism and desertion or used by its commanders for their private purposes. Army training was often neglected and morale was often low—in 1550, when the Mongols raided the outskirts of Peking (Beijing), the members of the elite Imperial Guards, who had a proud past, are said to have been so frightened that they broke into tears. Military spending on fortifica­tions and mercenar­ies grew very high; and court extrava­gance joined with laxness and corruption led to a fiscal crisis, which led to new, more burden­some taxes, tax rebellions, and reduced sums for famine relief. Of course, no ideology or set of tactics is successful forever. The whole Ming system broke down when, as the Chinese would say, the dynasty lost its virtue. The loss became decisive under the Wan-li emperor, who reigned from 1573 to 1620. Becoming aware that his Confucian officials preached the virtues more earnestly than they practiced them, he turned cynical. His officials took to criticizing him and he began to resist them, although uncertainly, and ended by growing quite alienated from them. In the effort to keep his distance from them, he began to conduct most of his business on paper rather than in person and left important posts without incumbents; but though unwilling to cooperate with the bureaucracy, he was unable to reform the system. Yet he remained the official fount of the moral responsibili­ty that he refused to assume. He still had too many papers to attend to, he complained, famine relief was still handed out, and rebellions were still crushed; but he ignored the day-to-day work of the court functionar­ies, did not answer memorials submitted to him, and ignored the need to fill vacancies in government posts, with the exception of those needed to replenish his funds. The civil service lost its sense of direction and became skeptical and impossible to manage. Individual magistrates, whose integrity could protect the population from being exploited, usually worked alone, and now their merit went mostly unrecognized. The demoral­ izing effect of partisan politics conse­quently reached to every level of the imperial administra­tion. * It should not be surprising that the study of history had had such a deep influence on the Chinese imagination. Even the most radical attempts to transform China have been influenced by the style of its historical record. Radical attempts? I am referring in particular to Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong). He began

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as the rebellious son of a farmer and then became a kind of anarchist and student of Mill, Spencer, and Rousseau. Then he changed to the dynamic Marxist revolu­tionary who gave Marxism its Chinese form both in fact and theory. In the last stages of his life, he turned into an embattled, finally paranoid sort of emperor, who spent much of his now malign activity in persecut­ing intellectuals, whom he was unable not to suspect of treason. Yet this rebel, Marxist, and irregular emperor turns out to have been a diligent student of Chinese history. Even during his army’s Long Retreat, he kept reading, studying, and discussing it. Later he studied the official dynastic histories—printed for him during his last years in large type—especially the parts that deal with the winning and losing of thrones and, most especially, the change from the native Ming to the alien Ch’ing dynasty. Among emperors, he singled out for praise Shih Huang-ti, founder of the Ch’in dynasty. During the last year of Mao’s life, when he was as isolated from action by his growing senility and secretiveness as Han Fei’s ideal emperor, he undertook, by someone’s count, his eighteenth reading of a work famous in Chinese historiog­ ra­phy (he hardly could have paid equal attention to all its 9,612 pages). This work, the Compre­hensive Mirror for Aid in Govern­ment, was a chrono­logical history from 403 BCE to 959 CE. Compiled in the eleventh century by the great historian Ssu-ma Kuang and four assis­tants, it took in “all that a prince ought to know” by way of good and bad historical examples. Ssu-ma Kuang, whom Mao had also studied during the Long Retreat, explains how dynasties fall because they contra­vene the timeless principles of order. In practice, this means that rulers must maintain an unambiguous structure of authority that works by means of virtue—the ability to see and support the right—and is supported by appropri­ate rewards and punishments. Ssu-ma Kuang also explains (as Mao must have had the chance to ponder) that because the ruler is responsi­ble for choosing his advisers, it is his fault if their advice leads him to fail­ure. Teng Hsiao-p’ing (Deng Xiaoping), Mao’s successor, is also known to have studied Ssu-ma Kuang’s book with the same interest in the shift of power from one to another emperor. It is not incidental that Mao’s most influential adviser in the later, imperial part of his career was the highly Machiavellian Kang Sheng. He was more successful personally than Li Ssu in that he died a natural death. His interest in tradition­al Chinese art, including the theater, and his ability as a calligrapher (with either hand) put an aesthetic face on acts that stand comparison for ruthlessness with those of the other great tyrants of our time. It is said that it was he who incited Mao to commit the Cultural Revolution against the elite, the

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educated, and other privileged persons; and he did all he could to earn his informal title, The King of Hell. The number of actual executions during this revolution has been estimated, by extrapola­tion from statistics in several Chinese counties, as 2,200,000. The number of deaths that resulted from it must have been much larger. * A third question: How adequate is the Machiavellian description of political life? The answer is that, at critical points, Machiavellian description is often more realistic than any other; but its realism is limited by its inability to grasp the depth of the human need for trust and intimacy and by its tendency to fall into a self-defeating suspiciousness. That is, if we think of Machiavellism not as the doctrine of a particular thinker with an individual cast of mind, but as a general doctrine of raison d’état, it suffers not from being objective, but from not being objective enough. I will be brief in explaining this answer. Machiavellism penetrates the facade behind which politics is so often concealed; it refuses to engage in the futile scolding with which moralists confront actual politics; and it emphasiz­es the contingen­cy of human affairs. These are strengths, but it is a weakness of Machiavellism that it relegates all optimistic possibilities to an ancient, now impossible past. Machiavellism speaks like a psychologist who under­stands human beings only in terms of their psychological patholo­gies, or like a criminologist who runs an organiza­tion with nothing in mind but the potential criminality of its members. There is no disputing the Machiavel­lian conclusion that whoever uses deception and force effectively has the political advantage. But the qualifying word “effectively” makes the conclusion circular because it says no more than that whoever succeeds is successful. The conclusion is circular because the use of deception and force often fails, and what may cause them to fail may be the opponent’s qualities of truthful­ness, faithfulness, resourcefulness, and basically un-Machia­vel­lian intelligence. Therefore, if the Machiavelli is taken to say that deception and force are most successful when used with the fewest scruples, he will often be wrong: scruples, too, can be politically effective. And if the Machia­velli says or is taken to say that the pursuit of glory—in the sense of political might and territorial conquest—is the only worthwhile political aim, he is revealing no more than a subjective preference; and his belief that a country can flourish only if its people engage in frequent wars is unproved and can be extraordinarily costly.

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Let me put my criticism in another way. As we know very well, it is characteris­tic of Machiavel­lian thinkers to say that human nature is bad, and of their opponents to say the opposite, that human nature is good; and it is not uncharacteristic of people with a Machiavellian attitude toward politics, to say that all politicians (or rulers, or governments) are corrupt. All such statements and counterstatements, we have concluded, are gross oversimplifica­tions that make it harder, not easier, to understand what really goes on. Those who accept the statements do not take into account the attitudes and purposes of those who make them and do not undertake a searching enough examination of the evidence by which the statements are supported. The statements rest on the absurd assump­tion that our under­standing can be furthered by giving a categorical answer to the question “Is human nature good or bad?” or by responding with a simple “yes” or “no” to the conclusion that human nature is such that it must always be curbed by strict laws and heavy punish­ments, the stricter and heavier the better. If the Machiavellians, speaking honestly, avoid or qualify some of their characteristic assertions, they are harder to criticize; but the more they qualify, the less Machiavellian they become. It is, has been, and will be true that, given the more or less instinctive utilitarianism of human beings, the plea of political necessity will continue to excuse any and every political act. This situation is so usual in fact, so resistant to moral responses, and so awkward for moral analysis, that we often stop moralizing and accept it as necessary. To stop moralizing about it is natural because, to recapitulate, Machia­vellian tactics are incorpo­rated into the intrinsic life of every human group, beginning with the family and going on to the nonfamilial assembly of all nations. But though the tactics are the nature and need of the social, human animals we are, they are limited by many factors, including tradition and the habits of decency. We are subtly complex creatures that change in more directions than the Machiavel­lis allow. They are not right enough to allow us to neglect alternatives to the politics they describe (with the pleasure of disenchant­ment). Their Machiavellism would be more convinc­ing if it could open itself to the unideal but optimistic possibili­ties from which it habitually turns away. * I now ask a fourth question: Have philosophers raised any decisive arguments against Machiavellism? The answer is that philosophical arguments cannot in themselves be decisive. If we set aside those based on religious dogma or doubtful metaphysics, the most cogent of the classical ones are those of Kant.

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It appears to me to serve history, clarity, and brevity best if we refer to the arguments as Kant himself put them rather than to the quite varied forms they take among the political philosophers now influenced by him. As I have noted before, Kant has a Machiavellian eye for human nature, but he argues that a good future is likely to emerge out of the evil present and that this good future, if it comes, will be the outcome of human selfishness. Kant’s unsentimental judgment of humans combined with his passion for truth and justice make him the most consider­able anti-Machia­vellian philosopher of whom I know. I represent his thought primarily as it appears in his essay “Perpetual Peace.” “Perpetual Peace” suggests a compact between states that rules out all present reasons for future wars and all acquisi­tions of an independent­ state by another. A radically anti-Machiavellian provision of the treaty rules out the use in wartime of any means that would make mutual confidence impossible in the peacetime that follows. Such means, Kant specifies, include the use of assassins or poisoners, the breach of agree­ments, or the instigation of treason within the enemy state. He argues that these means should be outlawed even in wartime because if all trust in the enemy is destroyed during the war, it will be impossi­ ble to conclude a peace and the war will turn into one of extermina­tion. Such means as assassination, poisoning, and the encour­age­ment of treason are not only despicable in themselves, Kant says, but, once used in times of war, can no longer be confined to them. A practice such as spying, which exploits others’ dishonesty, will survive into peacetime and therefore nullify its purpose. “After all,” Kant says, “war is only a regrettable expedient for asserting one’s rights by force within a state of nature, where no court of justice is available to judge with legal authority.” When a judge is lacking, there can be no formally unjust action nor any war of punish­ment for unjust actions. Lacking the possibility of true legal adjudication or just punishment, wars easily turn into nothing but opportuni­ties to exterminate the enemy. In a war of extermination, the victims are likely to be both of the combatting sides; along with them, the right itself falls victim. Such simultaneous annihilation “would allow perpetual peace only on the vast graveyard of the human race.” Therefore, “a war of this kind and the employment of all means which might bring it about must be absolutely prohibited.” In agreement with Hobbes (whom he ordinarily opposes), Kant declares that a state of nature is a state of war because even when there are no hostilities, there is the constant threat that they will break out. “Thus the state of peace must be formally instituted, for a suspen­sion of  hostilities is not itself a guarantee of  peace.” Kant’s conviction is that an effective agreement to keep the peace

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forever requires every state that is party to the agreement to be republi­can, that is, a state all of whose members are recognized to be genuinely human and therefore free. The members of such a state are are subject to legislation that applies to all of them and, as citizens, they are all legally equal to one another. The republican constitu­tion, says Kant, is the only one that can be derived from the idea of an original contract. With respect to the right, it is “the original basis of every kind of civil constitu­tion.” In a republic, Kant goes on, the consent of the citizens is required to decide on a declaration of war, and because this commits them to great misery, they give their consent only with great hesitation. In contrast, under a constitu­tion that is not republican, the head of the state, who is the state’s owner, finds it very simple to go to war—the decision, says Kant (who cites no historical evidence), will not force the head of state to make the slightest sacrifice. Kant is adamant that a republican form of the state is not a democra­cy, which he understands, in the Greek sense, as a state that allows all its citizens to make decisions concerning the single individual without his consent. Unlike the so-called republics of antiquity, he insists, the government that accords with the concept of right must be based on the representative system. It is for its own security that each nation must demand that the others accept a constitution that secures the rights of each. The demand would require the establishment of a federation of equal states, which is essentially different from an international state, in which the superior, the legislator, rules over an inferior, the people who obey the laws. Although he does not mention Machiavelli, Kant spends much of his essay denouncing Machiavel­lism as it has been described here. As stated earlier, his denunciation does not imply a favorable view of human nature, which he considers to be highly though not totally depraved. The constraints in a society governed by law conceal much of the depravity, he says, but it continues to be displayed in the unrestrict­ed relations between indepen­dent nations. In his characteristic way, he explains that every state justifies its military aggres­sions by appealing to principles that show that the state pays an at least verbal homage to the concept of right. To him, this homage is one of the proofs that man has the (still dormant) moral capacity to overcome the principle of evil within him and to hope that others will do the same. How else could it be explained that states that intend to go to war against one another speak in the name of the right? Kant’s view of the relation of human nature to politics is not unlike Machiavelli’s and, except for his preference for a republican state, not unlike that of Hsün Tzu. His belief that humans are evil by nature means to him that they are

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not merely weak, but contain within themselves a deep, radical, inextin­guish­ able principle of evil, the source of which he does not pretend to understand. However, he adds, humans also have a moral instinct that, despite everything, will win by virtue of the principles that universal reason suggests and that the state, armed with severe but reasonable punishments, will apply without partiality. Kant’s world resembles Hsün Tzu’s in that it embodies the equivalent of Hsün Tzu’s (usually) impartial moral Heaven. That is, Kant believes that nature takes on for us the appearance of a wise higher cause and shows the way to the objective goal of human beings, so that providence, as we name it, fosters the economic and social conditions that in the long run tend to create a perpetual peace. Likewise, as Kant puts it in his essay, although linguistic and religious differences separate nations and at times create mutual hatred and provide pretexts for war, as culture develops, human beings are led to greater mutual under­standing and peace: Hard as it may sound, the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess understand­ing) . . . For such a task does not involve the moral improve­ment of man; it only means finding out how the mechanism of nature can be applied to men in such a manner that the antagonism of their hostile attitudes will compel one another to submit to coercive laws, thereby producing a condition of peace within which the laws can be en­forced.

Sooner or later, in Kant’s view, the spirit of commerce, which cannot coexist with war, takes hold of people, and states feel compelled, out of quite nonmoral motives, to promote the peace. When this happens, wherever in the world there is a threat of war breaking out, they will try to prevent it by mediation, just as if they had entered into a permanent league for this purpose . . . In this way, nature guaran­tees perpetual peace by the actual mechanism of human inclina­tions. This response, according to Kant, is by no means certain; but its likelihood is enough to make it the duty of human beings to work toward it. He continues his explana­tion in an appendix on the “the disagreement between morals and politics in relation to perpetual peace.” Experience, he there says, does not show that honesty is the best policy. Nonetheless, “honesty is better than any policy” because honesty “is an indispens­able condition of any policy whatsoever.” Careless of this truth, “worldly-wise politicians resort to despicable tricks, for they are out only to exploit the people (and if possible, the whole

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world) by influencing the current ruling power in such a way as to ensure their own private advantage.” They resemble the lawyers who enter politics and think and act as they do because, they claim, they know men; but “they do not know man and his potentiali­ties, for this requires a higher anthropological vantage-point.” They and their like have learned to expropriate for themselves the rights of a state over its own or a neighboring people. If, for instance, they commit a crime in leading their people to desperation and rebellion, they deny any guilt and attribute it to others, or they blame the nature of man because this nature leads them to anticipate that if they do not preempt the violence of others by means of their own violence, they will themselves be overpowered by it. In a subjective sense, Kant continues, that is, in relation to the selfish disposition of human beings, the conflict between morality and politics “will and ought to remain active, since it serves as a whetstone of virtue.” Yet it is our duty to confront the evil within ourselves and make whatever sacrifices are necessary to overcome its wiles. This is possible because there is no objective or theoretical conflict between morality and politics . . . And although politics in itself is a difficult art, no art is required to combine it with morality. For as soon as the two come into conflict, morality can cut through the knot which politics cannot untie. Kant combines this argument with another according to which, whatever the reason, it is in the highest degree wrong for people to rebel. They do have inalienable rights against the head of state, as he says elsewhere, contradic­ting Hobbes, but not the right to use force to claim them. This is because the right to rebellion would defeat the very purpose for the state’s existence, as would be evident if the people proclaimed their rightful authority over the ruler whose authority over them made the state possible. Yet if they rebel successfully, the former head of state, now a subject, would have no right to rebel in order to restore his former position. In the later Metaphysics of Morals, Kant puts the emphasis differently: “The head of state has only rights against his subjects and no duties (that he can be coerced to fulfill).” Anyone who rebels and, above all, attacks the person or life of the head of a state “must be punished by nothing less than death for attempting to destroy his fatherland (parricida).” The formal execution of the head of state, such as that of Charles I or Louis XVI, is a formally evil crime inexpia­ble in both this world and the next. Despite this argument against the right to rebel and the severity he thought justified against it, in a somewhat later publica­tion, Kant shows himself to be partial to the French Revolution—the revolu­tion, as he calls it, “of a gifted

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people”—and says that the sympathy it aroused in the hearts of its spectators was evidence that its cause could be only “a moral predisposi­tion in the human race.” Though evidently not exempt from ambivalence, Kant is ready to say without qualification, “The rights of man must be held sacred, however great a sacrifice the ruling power may have to make . . . For all politics must bend the knee before right.” What makes Kant’s thought most valuable to us at this point is his insistence on the possibility of universal­ism by means of selfishness guided by reason and inspired, as if from another, nonselfish world, by the inner voice of conscience. To him, there is no escape from the constant struggle for primacy between good and evil, between ought to, on the one hand, and like to or take pleasure in, on the other, which is to say, between universal principle and subjective preference. Since he takes the coordina­tion of these two opposites to be impossible, Kant preaches the supremacy, through struggle, of principle, which by free decisions is able to overcome contingent, subjective preference. The autonomy of the human will depends on this inner conflict and its leavening by hope. What we discover is that universal reason and the moral law it teaches always demand more than is possible either to fulfill or explain—ordinary human reason is confined by Kant (as it is by Buddhists) to the world of phenomena. To deal with this limitation of reason to the world of phenomena, Kant says, three things must be postulat­ed, none of which can be proved. The first is God, by the idea of which the moral person is enabled to judge. The second is immortality, belief in which is necessary for a plausible relation between one’s conduct and one’s well-being. The third is freedom, the idea of which is the condition by virtue of which we make choices and demonstrate our moral worth. These three postu­lates are the modes in which reason comple­ments itself and allows itself to have faith in universal reason. This is not the place to go further into Kant’s reasoning or to react seriously to his opinion—to me an almost excruciating combina­tion of faith and doubt—that we are compelled to believe in God, immortali­ty, and freedom even though they are beyond proof. More disturbingly still, we are told by Kant that we must believe in freedom even though it is in direct contradiction to the laws of causality that express the very structure of our thought. How the Machiavellians would answer his political views it is by now unnecessary to repeat. However, I feel compelled to respond in their name to Kant’s argument that, even in wartime, the breaking of agreements and the use of spies and assassins makes peace impossible and turns the war into a war of extermination. He is right in saying that these Machiavellian methods turn war into an arena

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of cruel decep­tions; besides, we now have stronger reasons than Kant’s to fear that the peace we finally inherit will be, in his phrase, the peace of the grave­ yard. Yet almost nothing of what Kant argues about deception is historically plausible. What can be counted as true in Kant’s argument is expressed in the fear of leaders, even in wartime, to encourage the practice of assassination. They obviously prefer the principle of an eye for an eye to that of a leader for a leader. But Kant’s fear that the use of spies will be carried over from war to peace ignores the fact that peacetime spying was already widespread in his time. If his statement that such spying will vitiate its purpose means that it rewards lying, teaches errors as often as truths, and creates double agents, he is right. Yet to require leaders, especially in wartime, to give up spies is like requiring them to stop lighting their way on dangerously dark nights. Kant’s argument that the destruction of trust will make the conclusion of peace impossible is unconvincing because a treaty of peace may be concluded with leaders other than those who conducted the war, because the guarantee is not the trustworthiness of those who sign it, who will probably soon be displaced, but the military superiority of the victors and, even more, the situation that makes the keeping of the treaty advanta­geous to both winner and loser. When the situation no longer remains so, in the absence of a body to enforce it, the treaty’s validity in practice comes to an end. What I should most like to retain of Kant is his preference for republicanism—what we call democracy—and his stress on the endless, inevitable battle within humans of good and evil. The inherent dignity of persons and their equality before the law seem the only principles on which human beings may possibly agree. The evidence is good, for reasons that Kant foresaw, that stable democracies, unlike authoritarian states, are reluctant to take up arms against one another—where other democracies are concerned, the Kantian pact, though not formalized, guards the peace. As to the battle of good with evil, Kant accepts that political life runs largely as the Machia­vel­lians have described it, and that it is the pressure that selfish­ ness exerts that makes it necessary to devise laws to force people to avoid strife by limiting their selfishness. He is plausible, on the whole, in arguing that it is the pressure of selfishness guided by reason that legislates the moral laws that bring subjective desire into a slowly increasing conformi­ty with what Kant calls the general will. As we can sense from this argument, to Kant the premise and desideratum of morality is the unity that is created by free, if selfish choice, while the lack of unity in the world as a whole is the source of all its evils. The end, the endlessly distant end, is wholly good: Everything that contro­verts

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itself—whether dogmatic metaphysics, politics as the history of wars, or faith as a war to exterminate others faiths—is an evil that destroys itself. I find Kant’s reasoning satisfying and yet deeply inade­quate—in overcoming its inadequacy, Schiller denatures it. Kant is so committed to human intractability that he is ready to say, without qualification, that human selfishness, antagonism, and competi­tiveness are permanent human characteris­tics, immune to all attempts to eradicate them. He should be applauded for his courage in saying so, and for his courage in trying to see beyond this ineradicable evil, as he calls it. But his extreme polariza­tion of human impulses into good and bad and his refusal to see the good except as it comes to expression in an absolute, unrealizable, purely formal principle makes his philosophy too remote from the psychodramatic human reality. Kant believes in pure selfishness, desire, and feeling as against purely objective reason and—beyond objective reason—the intellectu­ally inaccessible, ideal God. Bound strictly to his logic, Kant, though sometimes tempted by such a union, is in the end too formalistic to allow it. Yet when the union is accepted, as his quasi-disciple Schiller wants, the human being no longer appears irredeemably selfish, which is to say, (also) radically evil. By his rigid polariza­tion, Kant abandons the middle area in which human beings in practice mostly live and have their being. For all the extensive knowledge he has of what he calls, in the terminology of his time, anthropology, his dualism makes the therapeu­tic middle (as I see it) much more difficult to inhabit. But though Kant’s meliorism and his absolutism continue to be at odds, as a philosopher he is honorable, by which I mean, too honestly observant and wise to be utopian. * Now another not very easy question: Does the prevalence of Machiavellism rule out the likelihood of a better political future? The answer is that there can be no answer in the shape of a prediction, but that the fear of disaster is so widespread that, as Kant foresaw, the fear itself makes hope more reasonable. In trying to think realistically without giving in too much to Machiavellism, I would start with its sensitivity to change. I would agree that with them that circum­stanc­es and people are variable but that, as they might accept, that people’s reactions oscillate around certain formulable but uncertain states, maybe to be considered attractors in the sense of the mathemat­ics of chaos. I would emphasize (is it with Guicciardini?) that people pay only moderate attention to moral rules and political general­iza­tions and react more in keeping with the local situation at a particu­lar time, a situation too composed of nuances to be understood by

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the bare abstrac­tions of ordinary intellectual analysis. People, including politicians and rulers, under­stand or feel—as theorists may not—that because of the contin­gency in life, it may be as harmful as it is helpful to guide oneself by strict principles, even those of Machiavellism. The role that principles play in relation to circum­stance, character, and social pressure, is not a clearly dominant one. This is so partly because principles clash with one another in ways that cannot often be solved by turning to still another principle. To be effective, principles must in any case be embedded in character; and, as I have repeated, we cannot get much insight into character by assigning it any constant nature. Though pessimistic about human nature, Machiavelli knew that habits of mind and action—the humans’ varieties of ethos—are changeable. He finds a stably decent people only in the past, and other Machiavellians concur; but in idealizing the distant or mythological, as they could not the present, the Machiavellians (often) denied that the present human nature could change much for the better. But human nature remains as changeable as it has always been. Very much depends on habits that are a sometimes prolonged inheritance of families, neighborhoods, or any relatively cohesive, stable group of people. Civic responsibility is less a set of conscious ethical conclusions than of social attitudes that are main­tained or destroyed by local approval and disapprov­al. As Tocqueville observed, feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart is enlarged, and the understand­ing is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another. There are the areas in which participation in political life is not decided by collective needs but by personal dependen­cy or by greed. Greed is a key. Corruption is widely regarded as the norm, even by politi­ cians themselves, and they are cynical about demo­cratic purposes. Often, compromise has only negative over­tones. Laws (almost everyone agrees) are made to be broken, but fearing others’ lawlessness, people demand sterner discipline . . . Nearly everyone feels powerless, exploited, and unhappy. In the end, chance, social pressure, and character determ­ine the degree to which each of us uses Machiavellian tactics and the degree to which amoralism or amoral familism proves itself to be a reasonable strategy for survival. Impossible to avoid in private life, Machiavel­lian tactics on a large scale pervade politics, sacred and profane. But speaking in general—not of particular painful situations—none of this ought to cause the (relative) non-Machiavel­lian to despair or adopt a merely cynical attitude toward society. That is, a moderate Machiavellism, human in scale and sociability, is attractive even to most ambitious persons; and the minimal Machia­vellism—which might just as well be called anti-Machiavell­ism—of most of us is just as compatible with a satisfacto­ry life

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as its more drastic varieties. All the possibili­ties are open: Machia­vel­lians can fail, the extreme ones as easily as the moderate, and basically non-­ Machiavel­lians can succeed; and Machia­vel­lians, too, remain with unsatisfied ambitions and unmassaged suspicions, so that there is no good reason to envy them very much. Even people with the idealistic desire for an equitable life may be lucky or effective enough to witness its partial fulfillment, with the help of persons whose Machiavellism is tempered by a still active conscience. The wicked have as much trouble inheriting the earth as do the rest of us. Whoever does not try to escape the human condition excessively in any particular direction can enjoy it, luck permitting, as well as can reasonably be hoped. This near-optimism is the more persuasive if one is occupied to one’s limit with something greater than oneself, some enterprise, craft, art, or science, to which Machiavellism, in any strong, consistent sense, is likely to be more destructive than helpful. The truth can still attract and help: Truth in its sense of discovery and communi­ca­tion can make the need to lie socially more transparent and innocuous and can expose political lying and ruthlessness for exactly what it is. The fantasy of the discovery of truth can be directed against the fantasy of political power. Does religion have a reasonable place in such hopes? The moral standards that religions preach may some­times lead them some way beyond dogma­tism. Ecumenical passions seem almost natural to some religions. Considered in the abstract—abstracted from history—at least two of the great religions, Buddhism and Neo-Confu­cian­ism, are often relatively close to an undogmatic humanitarianism. Buddhism in some of its forms and Confucianism in perhaps all are so clearly oriented toward a rational ethics that it has been questioned whether they should be considered religions at all; but, in the end, this questioning is a rather idle one of definition that cannot survive a close look at what actual Buddhists and Confucians believe and how, in relation to their belief, they act. Of Buddhism I have already spoken. Neo-Confucianism is Confu­cian­ism sensitized by Buddhism to become, out of its own resources, more systematic, metaphysical, and humane (or systematically humane) than before. Both religions can be interpret­ed as ethical stand­points able to dispense with magical dogmas. In principle, we know, Buddhism requires the utmost kindness to any living being in any condition, and Neo-Confu­cian­ism teaches innate sympathy with all human beings, with living beings of any kind, and with everything in nature, of which, it teaches, we are an integral part. It seems that ethical positions such as these­, though affected and sometimes dominated by Machiavel­lian impulses, are naturally favorable begin­nings for

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identifica­tion with humanity at large. I believe this to be so in spite of earlier tragicom­ic attempts to create a frame­work common to all forms of Buddhism and in spite of the unique connection between Confucianism and Chinese civilization. This belief can be transferred to other religions; but the briefly encouraging episodes that history records do not justify any general hope that is more than modest. Seeing beyond one’s dogma and one’s birthplace is no longer as unnatural as it was. It is no longer difficult to understand and to feel that the world is an interdependent economic unit, that it is a geographic­al and ethological unit, that it is nearly one in art and literature, or that it is morally and even selfishly united by the demand that those who are better off help the others. Philoso­phy, which has up to now only pretended to be universally human, can become so by the awareness of its different traditions. And science, by its very concep­tion, goes beyond all national, religious, and linguistic bounds. * Suppose that, holding in mind everything that has been said here, we recall all the arguments—of the Legalists and their like, the Confu­cians and other traditionalists, of the philosophers, most notably Kant, who believe in an absolute rational ethics, and of the anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists on whom I have often depended. Should we conclude that, all things considered, what we need in order to minimize our Machiavellian tendencies is a morality that is impartial as the Legalists recommend, is taught by reason, precept, and practice, as the Confucians recommend, and is developed by compromise out of clashing interests, as Machiavelli and Kant recommend? Should the constructive selfishness of Kantian universality be instilled into the individual by the psychologists’ means and into the prevailing ethos by the means the anthropologists and sociologists know best? The laughable confusion that would follow any willful attempt to create such a composite tells us how resistant human life is to full analysis or to synthesis by theory. Life is simple in the sense that it has such an obvious animal basis. But life is infinitely complicat­ed in the sense that we are intellectually unable to mimic the subtle variability of our natural responses—instinct and intuition are often superior to intellect alone—so our doctrines are too gross to describe what happens and, above all, to predict will happen if we follow one course rather than another. We can be sure that, like crime, Machiavellism will never disappear because it exists in the complex entanglements of social life: of the legal with the illegal,

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the moral with the immoral, the kind with the cruel, and the truthful with the deceptive. But though Machiavellism is immortal, circumstan­ces, which have so often pushed us in its direction, are now also pushing us in the direction of the universal­ism that Kant foresaw. Given the utilitarianism more or less natural to human beings, the plea of necessity will continue to be made to excuse any and every act; but the plea of necessity is now turned against Machivellism’s worst excesses. The world is now so interde­pendent, its tensions so many, and its armaments so effective, that it seems to be heading toward disasters beyond any that human beings have ever caused themselves. It has therefore become more reasonable­ than before to transfer one’s deepest loyalty from a nation to humanity, or, in more practical terms, to an effective union of nations or, at the extreme, a world government. Neither sentiment nor reason can decide how good the prospects are for such a union or govern­ment and whether or not it will be of a kind more to be loved than feared or hated. It is possible to escape an oppres­sive tribe, village, or state, but there may be no place to escape from an oppressive universal govern­ment. So while the smaller loyalties no longer answer our interdepen­dence, there is no way of being sure that the larger ones will prove more satisfying. Because there is no way to make very plausible guesses about the future, it is everyone’s tempera­ment that takes over and gives the answers for which reason is inade­quate. The optimist, born or made, will imagine success, while the pessimist, with more visible evidence to command, will be convinced beforehand of failure. As should be apparent, I myself am of the intermedi­ate sort, hopeful but doubtful, deeply convinced of the need, but not of what will actually answer it. While history does not encourage utopianism, it does not exclude the hope to limit Machiavellian deception and violence. The hope is supported by testimony that there have been societies and times in which Machiavellism has been muted. The ability to identify ourselves with a broader human culture, although still much less natural than cultural nationalism, is already at least feasible. Human beings have proved so fantastical­ly inventive that they may even find ways to invent a humane political future for themselves.

conclusion At the end, as pointedly and clearly as I can, I repeat my main thesis and follow it with eleven subtheses, which summarize the answers I have given to questions I’ve asked earlier. As I have said in somewhat different words, the main thesis is that Machia­vellism has been integral to the political life of every

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civilization and of many smaller societies. Whoever ignores the persistence of Machiavellism gives up the chance to understand either politics or morality. The subtheses are as follows: 1. Machiavellian behavior is normal. Indignant as we may be at its excesses, they ought not to surprise us. Machiavellism, political amorality, is not a special problem to which a special solution can be given but behavior inseparable from being human. 2. The virtues of truthfulness and fairness contradict Machiavellism, but they are not an adequate defense against it. Truth, as we learn in practice, plays different roles, each subject to its own social imperatives. Because it does social harm to be consistently truthful in everyday life, the measure of the truth and untruth by which humans relate to one another is fitted to occasion, mood, and individual. We also learn in practice that fairness is an ambiguous, often impractical ideal, that the conscience is selective, and that conspicuous virtuousness attracts resentment and may be socially isolating. 3. The desire to discover and communicate the truth can be very strong and affect Machiavellis no less than others. A Machiavelli who teaches the truth that the truth must be sacrificed for the good of the state is willing to be caught in an existential dilemma: the explanation limits the Machiavelli’s ability to practice what Machiavellism preaches. 4. Most of us need to follow a leader and all of us to belong to a group. The need is so powerful that leaders and groups not only fix what is publicly allowed and forbidden but often what individuals themselves prefer to do, avoid, and even be. As a result, the impulse to act morally is often equated with the impulse to conform and be accepted. An individual’s willingness to regard Machiavellian tactics as desirable or moral depends on the strength of that individual’s identification with the group on whose behalf the tactics are exercised. Moral scruples are widespread enough to create a constant struggle at each social level between the desire to escape Machiavellian tactics and to profit by them either as a group or an individual. 5. Leaders, who are by nature ambitious, find it difficult to distinguish their private ambitions from their public goals. This conjunction or con­ fusion of private with public welfare, of egoism with altruism, is characteristic of the leaders of groups of every size. The egoism of an imperviously ambitious leader may increase rather than diminish the devotion of fol­ lowers. Their readiness to accept the Machiavellian plea of necessity is

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proportionate to their devotion to the leader and to the size and organic unity of the group on whose behalf they accept the plea. 6. We cannot understand the great Machiavellian leaders unless we grasp that they are adventurers of a ruthless sort, who, like all adventurers, are exhilarated by the risks they take. When the risks are in the name of a professed ideal, all those who are drawn to the ideal share the leader’s exhilaration (at least as long as the adventure, having become theirs, does not cause them too much suffering). 7. Moral tradition is constructed over a long period of time so as to maintain a social equilibrium. It therefore tends to oppose any leader whose ambitions or acts threaten the equilib­rium, which is the social consensus. But moral tradition, as embodied in its institutions and titular leaders, develops the casuistic ability to justify Machiavellian tactics that, on their face, contradict the explicit ideals the tradition professes. Conformism, too, can be violent and devious. 8. History allows no accurate predictions and teaches no lessons that changing circumstances will not sooner or later modify. But history is a reservoir of experiences some of which were recorded accurately enough for us to try to judge, by any standard we care to adopt, to what degree political tactics were or were not successful. Chinese history, which was documented in extensive detail, provides an example of the relatively prolonged, largescale success of Machiavellian tactics. 9. Machiavellis often describe political life accurately—they go to its actual heart. They are right to emphasize that humans are less moral than they usually perceive themselves to be, and right to assume that necessity, the raison d’état, governs the harsher aspects of politics. Yet the Machiavellis are often one-sided in argument and have always undervalued the human need for trust and intimacy, which they undermine by theory as by practice. Their uncompromising realism turns easily into a caricature of social or political reality. And by using suspicion as an instrument with which to dominate others, they themselves fall repeated victim to its excesses. 10.  Philosophical arguments cannot in themselves be decisive. If we rule out such as are based on religious dogmas or doubtful metaphysics, we find that of the great classical philosophers it is Kant who has provided the most cogent group of arguments. His position is centered on the argument that although selfishness is innate to human beings, their very selfishness is likely to force the world’s governments to respect human rights and renounce war.

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11. It is idle to believe that violence and deception can be eliminated from political life. However, as Kant foresaw, human beings have become so afraid that they will destroy themselves that they may yet be driven to invent effective ways of limiting the most Machiavellian extremes of politics, especially of war. The human condition is still open to exploration and improve­ment. My theses stated, I rest my case.

chapter 13

On the Nature and Limits of  Ineffability Ineffabilities Are the Demons and Angels of  Incompleteness and Incompletability What Can and Cannot Words Express? Each of the three titles above casts a somewhat different light on what follows. Because I accept each of the three varieties as a helpful way of focusing attention on this essay’s content, I leave it to the reader who prefers any of them to make a personal choice. Have the title as you like it. I suggest that we begin by (for the moment) forgetting the differing aptness of the titles and forgetting philosophical arguments and reread—as disbelieving philosophers may not—the old, affecting descrip­tions of the bliss of unity, the loss of smallness, fear, mortality, and other human imperfections, in the light of ordinary human psychology. After all, the experiences described as ineffable resemble in their ineffability other ordinary, equally ineffable ones, and their greater intensity may not make them more resistant to psychological understanding. Why not ask about the very usual defense that stimulates the identification of oneself with something overwhelmingly powerful? Positive or negative, the descriptions may suggest a depressive turning of world or self into something unreal and the effort to turn this unreality into a shield against the self-diminution it reflects. Or the descrip­tions may suggest a manic or manic-depressive temperament. I go back then, for a time in the context of psychological explanation, to the superlative (mystical) states of power, joy, merger with the essence of things, vanishing of all distinctions, immutability, longing, passion, loss of identity in

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Desire, 1990

sexual union, prolonged erotic tension, contemplation of self as penetrated by beauty, and transformation into the true one, the apparent two, and the true one recognized again. There is so tremendous a sense of reality in which to be consumed! Speaking psychologically, superlative states or beings are fantasies of the sort that appear in myths and legends, which everyone enjoys for what they are. However, at their subjectively convincing extreme these fantasies suggest states of even mania or paranoia. It is usual and, within limits, normal that fantasies like these characterize wholehearted identification with anything or anyone thought great—a great artist, leader, or prophet; or a revered language, tradition, nation, religion, or god. Such an identifica­tion and the feeling of perfection and power that go with it have been called narcissistic and considered (by the psychoanalyst Kohut) to be the adult’s translation of the child’s feeling of identity with an idealized parent, whose greatness the child takes over and exults in. Speaking psychologically, the feeling of merger with the essence of things or of oneness with something totally protective appears to go back to the early relation between child and mother and the experience for which Freud

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Two become one, 1990

borrowed the name “oceanic.” This name has been applied by J. Moussaieff Masson (a Sanskrit scholar who, before he repented completely of therapy, became an orthodox and then rebellious psychoanalyst) to the superlative experiences of Indian religious literature.1 In the adult, says Freud, seriously and humorously at once, it is this overwhelming experience that causes a man in love, against all the evidence of his senses, to declare that he and his beloved are one, and to be prepared to behave as if this were a fact.2 The intense early closeness of child and mother is an early intense symbiosis. Just what happens subjectively in early infancy is impossible to make out because it is unreasonable to assume that an infant’s feelings and thoughts can be compared easily with those of an adult. Infants are not simply human beings still too stupid to talk and too uncoordinated to walk; and most adults are not just large, strong, children who have learned how to walk, talk, and think. Although research often exhibits unexpected resourcefulness, it is improbable that any of the theories of child development is exactly right, or, if right, can be proved to be so. One great difficulty in verifying the theories is the fact that the child forgets everything experienced in early life. That is, the child consciously forgets, be-

On the Nature and Limits of Ineffability  195

cause it is obvious that what it learns at first remains the basis for what it learns after­wards. The forgetting, though universal for the earliest time, is less than complete, and the forgotten experience, it may be assumed, is “remembered” in characteristic responses and in character itself. For there is evidence enough that the closeness or distance of young children to their parents has a deep influence on their adult emotions and on the way they regard themselves and others. A good mother and father are sources of self-assurance throughout the whole of life, and poor ones, of weakness and ambivalence. Some degree of ambivalence is inevitable because every child undergoes the double pull—the pull back to the protective parent and the pull away, toward independence. There is a never-ending tension between the I that wants to diffuse itself back into the warm strength of mother and father and the I that asserts itself against them; and an endless tension between these I ’s and the I that has almost really separated itself. How can one make a clear separation between the little child half-asleep and warm in his mother’s protective arms and the mother that holds him (I say “him” because I turn immediately to Plotinus and Krishna)? The selves of child and mother in this state diffuse into one another almost as their heat diffuses in both directions. The child, who separates himself in order to become a more fully distinguishable member of the duo, knows that it is possible to run back and become one again. He returns because, for some fleeting reason, he simply wants to, or because he longs to be reunited, or because a sudden threat, real or imaginary, arouses his need for protection. And then, lying in mother’s arms, warm and erotically aroused, the child sees himself mirrored in mother’s smile, soft words, and caresses. Lying there, the child is, if lucky, a still wordless, small Plotinus; and when, in later life, there are words to use, the child continues to feel that they are not enough because they neither are nor bring about the state of warm, joyous unity, and because the experience—which comes before speech and vanishes from explicit memory—does not go easily into words, which standardize adult experience and make it speakable. And the child lying there is Krishna, too, because he can remain in prolonged erotic tension while enfolded in his mother’s arms and lovingly fondled by her; and the warm tension, the fondling, which repeats itself in endless variations, and stimulates, teases with anticipation, and then satisfies without ever being all discharged, seems to be able to go on forever. The child Krishna is his mother’s lover and king, and she his endless primal consort, not really quite himself and yet really as much within as outside him, possessing and surely being possessed, essentially just as will happen, by the god’s prerogative, when he grows up to become an adult lover.

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Here, in the case of  Krishna, our descriptive language seems explicit enough; but explicitness is not the same as adequacy. Everything individual is hard or impossible to put exactly into words; so why is it surprising that, whether as Plotinus, Krishna, or simply ourselves, we cannot get the enveloping experience of a prelinguistic infant exactly into words? I qualify with “exactly” because something does go into words, of the sort I have used; but they are fairly distant and not warm or diffuse enough; and they are the medium of an adult, linguistic human who lives in keeping with verbalized generalities. Words penetrate us and become our conventional substance, though their forms dissolve in unremembered memories and experiences too strong for verbal bonds.3 Now leave the experience of infant and mother and consider the ability of music and poetry to convey experience in some ways more completely than speech. Poetry has often been understood as the union of music with language, and as such a union, to resist prosaic explanation. This resistance poses a challenge I exemplify by the attempt of Marshall Edelson, a psychoanalyst, to grasp the total sense of  Wallace Stevens’ poem The Snow Man. Edelson tries to show that the syntactic order of the poem’s language resembles both the order of the poet’s act of meditation and the order of the reality he meditates on. As the analyst reads the poem, he has a feeling of listening to some elusive, subsurface music, of timbres too deep for expression in words. But sharing his profession’s passion for understanding, he strains to analyze this music in detail, and as he does so, he follows the analyst’s precept according to which he should remain conscious of what is going on in himself at the same time. He discovers that his act of interpretation “arises from a subtle interaction of between anticipations and retrospections, the anticipations aroused by the phonemes, words, and phrases that occur as the surface form reveals itself in remembering past events and anticipating future ones. By reading the poem aloud its reader hopes that the role of the poetic words will be changed and the reader will find its accents and sonorities in himself and recreate its music of mean­ing. Valéry recalls that he would leave concerts filled with sublime jealousy and would try desperately to find the means to recover for poetry what music had taken from it. Valéry himself wants to explore the possibili­ties of music as a spiritual experi­ence, an emotional liberation, an intensifica­tion of hidden feelings—unreligiously religious feelings—in community with every other hearer.4 Characteristically, Valéry is unwilling to surrender his intellectual control, so rather than abandon himself to the effects of music, he (like the psychoanalyst) observes himself responding to it and comments on what he feels. He says that the unconscious, although essential to the poetry, gives birth to incoherent,

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formless material, which only the conscious, self-critical mind can transform into art. “Restric­tion,” he says, “has been inventive at least as often as a superabundance of freedom.”5 Pursuing the analogy with music, he considers orga­ nizing passages of poetry, like those of a musical composi­tion, in an andante, largo, presto, scherzo, and the like. To help himself achieve music with poetry, he puts down groups of words the sounds or contrasts of which suggested one another. Sometimes he turns to etymology for old meanings, or shifts to synonyms or derived words; and sometimes he groups words by alliteration, rhyme, or homonymy. And he writes words to form transitions between passages, uses images to relieve his language of excessive abstraction, and experiments to see how different rhymes change the effect of similar ideas. To make the musical characteristics of poetry more evident and precise, Valéry would like a special kind of notation. Although, he observes, the strictly musical resources of poetry are limited, the ideal remains the clear marking of “the enchain­ment of sounds” and the musical continuity of the poem. This recognizable whole is “a sort of verbal body that has the solidity, and also the ambiguity, of an object. Experience shows that a poem that is too simple (e.g., abstract) is insuffi­cient. It is not even a poem.”6 Valéry often plays with the idea of allowing sound itself to take over the composing of his poetry, but his dominant ideal remains the poem in which sound and sense are indivisible. In one of his images, “the balance between sound and sense is equilibrium by counterbalance like that of a tightrope walker.” In another image, “the effect of a fine verse is like a pendulum. It puts ‘the soul’ in a state of oscillation between its form and its meaning.” Therefore, “a comprehensible but ‘beautiful’ line of poetry is beautiful by what is incomprehensible in it.” Seen in this way, poetry “aims to express by means of language precisely that which language is powerless to express.”7 Always, to Valéry, the voice must be called to mind. “The qualities that can be enunciated in a human voice are those that must be studied and communicated in poetry. And the ‘magnetism’ of the voice must be transposed into a mysterious and ultra-fine alliance of ideas and words.” This voice is individual. “The poet searches for the verse that suits his voice.”8 The yearning to undergo full experience and to return to primordial superlative states prompts me to recall the synesthesia not of neurology but of imaginative experience and, I should say, of the hunger for completeness. An example or two will help make clear what I mean. First, remember Valéry’s ambition to unite the two apparent opposites, music and abstract thought, and create a verbal body as solid and ambiguous as an object. He wants to succeed in creating what Heidegger calls the “poetry that thinks” and attributes to

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Hölderlin.9 In creating poetry that thinks, the poet joins imagined appearances with real desires and with pliant abstrac­tions, and runs together the most different modalities of perception and the most different species of thought. What Valéry, Heidegger, and Stevens value is the old ideal of total connectedness.Ordinary words give too little of this; poetry and music give much more. Poetry and music because they are able to give a heightened feeling of connection of the sort that has been said to correspond to our lived sense of being continuous selves in a continuous world. Our impulse seems to be to flood the channels of passing time with a sense of the relationships that constitute us, so that they can there acquire a sense of tangible presence. Such a Tantric dissolver and recreator of the universe, who contains everything that appears external to him, reminds me of Mahler because of the boundless desire it exhibits to be everything, create everything, connect with everything. The Tantric adept, unless a very stubborn individualist, is him­self subordinate to his guru and his punctilious tradition, while the Western artist, the Whitman or Mahler, is the stubborn individualist—although he needs the help of patrons whom he obviously cannot himself create any more than the Tantrist can escape the obligation to serve, mediate on, and worship the guru. When Nietzsche still loved Wagner—his love was by then already troubled—he wrote of him that his art always conducted him along a twofold path, from a world as an audible spectacle into a world as a visible spectacle enigmatically related to it, and the reverse. He is continually compelled—and the beholder is compelled with him—to translate visible movement back into the soul and primordial life, and conversely to see the most deeply concealed inner activity as a visible phenomenon and to clothe it with the appear­ance of a body. We no doubt hear Schopenhauer in these words, hear Nietzsche himself, and hear Wagner, with whom Nietzsche was then intimate. We also hear the Tantrist’s cosmic ambition. It is said that the older Wagner, influenced by Schopenhauer, came to regard the music of  his operas as more important than the words—what took place on the stage was, he said, an “act of music made visible.”10 But for an ambition as embracing as his, a synthesis of the musical, erotic, poetic, dramatic, mythic-religio-philosophi­cal (Schopenhauerian, old Germanic, Christian, Buddhist), no expressive medium could be sacrificed, certainly not that of words. Mahler, too, allied music with poetry. He conceived many of his compositions as cosmic dramas. Sunset was not only itself but also a symbol of the end of life and of evil overpowering the light, as his orchestra had to suggest. To him, everything suggested everything.

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To realize his ghostly vision—the dread of disaster, the dream of earthly bliss—Mahler constantly experimented with the inclusion of new instruments to satisfy his need for special sounds: The somber tenor horn in his introduction to the Seventh Symphony, the delicate cowbells in the Sixth Symphony, the guitar and mandolin in the Nachtmusik 2 of the Seventh Symphony. Vaster vistas for the musical eye were also sought by the use of offstage orches­tra. For his music, Mahler used, that is, needed, both the classic and the romantic composers; and he needed military marches, bird cries, scenery, and much else. Despite his ambivalence on the matter, he also needed programs for himself, and, of course, words to be sung—altogether, everything that had or had not been put into music before. In his three last compositions, Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony, and the Tenth Symphony, there was a collision between his avidity for life and his fear of death. After studying Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Alban Berg said: The first movement is the most heavenly thing Mahler ever wrote; it is the expression of an exceptional fondness for this earth, the longing to live in peace on it, to enjoy nature in its depths—before death comes. For he comes irresistibly. The entire movement is permeated by premonitions of death . . . most potently, of course, in the colossal passage where this premonition becomes certainty, where in the midst of greatest strength, of almost painful joy of life, Death itself is announced with greatest force.11

In his last as in his earlier compositions, Mahler runs through very many moods, of the kinds that words can and cannot describe. Perhaps he tries both to say his farewells and to assimilate death, as he has tried to assimilate everything else, and make it part of himself, who is the cosmos he lives in but also creates. Before I go on, I should like to round out the discussion by classifying the various devaluers of words. The remarks that follow will lead into a psychological explanation of why exalters and devaluers both require an ineffable source but make opposite evaluations of language, which, according to the one view, reflects the ineffable source, but, according to the other, creates an illusory veil over it. 1. There are the devaluers—such as Gorgias and Nagarjuna—who say that language is meaningless by the very standards professed by the philosophers who prize it.

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2. There are the devaluers—such as Nagarjuna, Dignaga, Nietzsche, and, in a sense, Kant—who say that language teaches us nothing about reality in itself because it imposes its own arbitrary forms on experience. 3. There are also those—such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the Zen Buddhists (influenced by Nagarjuna)—who say that language is by nature superficial and can stimulate deeper penetration only by means of its technical failure in self-contra­diction. 4. There is at least one philosopher, Chuang-tzu, who belongs to all the three groups mentioned, in a perhaps inconsistent way consis­tent with his defense of inconsistency and naturalness. All these language devaluers appear to me to be faced, in different degrees, by a variant of the difficulty that has often been raised: They argue their negative positions in ordinary language, which they must regard as to some degree accurate or at least helpful. Further­more, they usually admit that while language has no access whatsoever to the ultimate reality—“emptiness,” “tao,” “noumenon,” “truth”—it does have practical usefulness and is to be distinguished from illusion and error in the usual sense. But as I have asked, how can they account for this usefulness if language is not at least partially in keeping with the noumenon? This is no more than a commonsense kind of objection, but I find it to be powerful. Let me put the objection in the form of an often-used metaphor. Suppose the truth you are searching for is high up in a tree and can be reached only with the help of a ladder, which you get rid of as soon as the truth is in your hands. Has the ladder helped because it truly got you up to the truth or for some other, unexpressed reason that makes it right to discard it once the aim, the truth, has been reached? What better evidence is there of the truth of the way to the truth than helpfulness of this ladder-kind? Is the true way to the truth not itself also true? On what more persuasive ground than the ability to attain the truth can the truthfulness of the ladder or anything else be based? My question and my implied answer have a pragmatic air, but why should this disqualify them? My division of philosophers of language into two basic groups, the one of exalters and the other of devaluers of words or concepts, is no doubt too neat. The first group, of exalters, tries painstakingly to rid words of everything adventitious, in order to reach the pure force of their conceptuality or, alternatively, magic. The exalters’ aim is to get experientially beyond words to their source. The second group, of devaluers, uses painstaking techniques painfully pursued to exclude concepts from true consciousness, or to weaken the hold of

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concepts, with the same aim of getting experientially beyond them. (Nietzsche neither quite fits nor quite evades this description.) The first group of thinkers tries to purify and concentrate conscious­ness, which they regard as identical with selfhood. The Buddhist members of the second group try the opposite tactic: to break up consciousness into its constituents and destroy the delusion of selfhood and get experientially beyond it, or to deny the reality even of the constituents of consciousness in order to arrive at emptiness. Yet the stages described by the Buddhists—stages in which consciousness rises beyond conceptualiza­tion—belong to the same kind of yogic purification as adopted by the Indian exalters of words. Historically speaking, it is not clear what methods of going up the experiential ladder these Buddhists could have arrived at if they had not had their Hindu opponents to borrow from (and also often teach). For the most part, the positions of the two groups, those I have called exalters and those I have called devaluers, appear to be in polar opposition. But both make compromises, by means of which the concept exalters see ordinary concepts as illusory, while the concept devaluers distinguish between complete illusion and the illusory but pragmatically useful concepts necessary for everyday life. My suspicion is that the experiential results of both positions are not very different, and the superiority of the one or the other cannot really be proved— the testimony of the few serious persons who have gone from one position to the other is not at all conclusive. In practice, the most conscientious pursuit of such ends was undertaken by monks in individual seclusion or in monasteries. The testimony given by monks suggests that there is a good deal of personal variation within the same religious position, by which I mean the position that depends upon the same authoritative texts and techniques of liberation. And both of the polar extremes rest upon a doctrine of the indescribable, often as the superlative of a hierarchical order. One may, of course, accept the arguments of one or another side. Although the arguments became elaborate, neither the positive ones of the word-exalting side—ending in a faith vaguely specified by negations—nor the negative ones of the word-devaluing side—also ending in a faith so specified—are coercive. The evidence for this conclusion lies in the persistent inability of either side to convince the other and, more immediately, in the detectible weaknesses of the arguments used. As a result, it was recognized on both sides that arguments had to be accompanied and finally displaced by experience, which alone could be entirely convincing.

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The disputants were therefore offering not only competing arguments but competing teachers and ways of life. Yet experience, too, is a judge whose verdicts can be ambiguous. What can be proved by the agreement between those persuaded by a certain guru and scripture (its text sometimes discovered or intuited by him)? The agreement can easily be attributed to psychologi­cal and sociological causes like those that persuade the disciples of other gurus and scriptures. The fact that certain exercises in concentra­tion lead to certain states of mind does not necessarily validate the metaphysical claims, in any case many and varied, by which they are explained. And while gurus talk high-flown metaphysics, neurologists talk brain chemicals with increasing plausibility. Exercises that cause a kind of sensory deprivation can lead to a feeling of exaltation; but that is not proof enough that one has come closer to reality-in-itself or whatever exalted state one may choose to call or avoid calling what one is aiming at. When investigated, normal perception proves to be extremely complex—still well beyond technological imitation—and extraordinarily sensitive to the changes it reports and often, for good practical reasons, conceals. What is proved by subjecting our perceptual mechanisms to such unusual conditions is that they give reports that fit certain metaphysical preconceptions, which themselves may have been derived from psychological states severe enough to lead to perceptual changes of a sort a disbeliever is tempted to call malfunction. I think it is possible to explain at least some of the difference between the two attitudes—word exaltation and word devaluation—by returning to early life, this time with emphasis on the ways in which a very young child learns to feel the feelings of other people, or, more exactly, learns how feelings and feeling-tinged perceptions are interchanged and teach one sensitized person to respond to another. It is important for us to understand the nature of this at first quite wordless dialogue and to see how it is prolonged, changed, and to some extent negated in the simply linguistic dialogue that begins later.12 Communicative confidence and suspicion begin in this long, fateful dialogue. Modern Western philosophers have spent a good deal of effort in thinking about solipsism; but what, to my mind, can be really troubling is not the difficulty in proving abstractly that solipsism is false, but the loneliness and misunderstanding that many people really face, to the point that they feel themselves a world apart and feel sometimes that they are not quite real, or that the others and the world the others inhabit is not quite real. This tendency to solipsism in fact, like the relative immunity to such solipsism, is likely to have its origin in the complex emotional and linguistic dialogue to which I am referring.

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Think once again of an infant and a mother, or an infant and any other person who comes into close and frequent contact with it. How, at first, do the two persons learn to communicate when the one is still unable to speak and for a while even to point? How does a mother learn to know what the child feels and wants, and how does the child learn to know the mother? To understand the answer we have to begin with the ability of child and mother to mirror and empathize with one another, to feel as the other feels, to feel so closely with one another as to be each almost situated within the other, to know the other rather accurately almost in the same way as one knows oneself. Lacking a more basic explanation, we have to begin by assuming that the ability is native to every human from the start. If we watch the child and mother, as investigators have watched them with great care, we see an increasingly effective interchange of movements, facial expressions, and sounds. The mother uses words, which the child cannot at all recognize as such. Their interchange has a notable parallelism: movement is answered with move­ment, facial expression with facial expression, and sound with sound, in each case with a comparable quality and degree of intensity; and if movement, facial expression, or sound is answered in another modality— sound, for example, by facial expression—then the parallelism is preserved by the quality and intensity of the response. That is, the hand of one person moves in emotional and rhythmic response to that of the other, the head of the one moves in similar response to the head of the other, and the voice of the one accompanies the hand or head of the other as it moves. In each instance, rhythm and duration match rhythm and duration, quality matches quality—in the ways that one modality can suggest or match the other, as the amplitude, vigor, and timing of a gesture match those of a sound, and vice versa.13 This process, by which one person’s state is matched by the state of the other, reminds me of the dialogue in an opera by Mozart, in which the responses are also by gesture and music, and therefore fuller than it could be if the two were exchanging only words. The sharing of states between to mothers and children is distinguished by such names as interaffectivity, interintentionality, and empathy—interaffectivity for the sharing of feelings, interintentionality for the sharing of intentions, and empathy for the shared interaction of cognitive and muscular or emotional responses.14 Whatever the descriptive word used, the result is that each of the two persons learns to “be with” the other. All this holds true to the extent that there is genuine closeness and, with it, genuine sharing. But if experience is not successfully shared toward the beginning of life, the child learns to feel that its inward states are unshareable

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and, by virtue of this feeling, may actually make them unshareable. The early success or failure of the sharing helps determine how well one can be attuned to the inward life of another person and how accurately and with what sense of conviction one can translate externals—tones, gestures, and facial expressions—into what is felt internally.15 As the child learns to speak, the sense of mutuality is furthered and complicated, and in some ways probably injured. Speaking gives the child the ability to express much that could not be expressed at all before, or expressed only much more vaguely. But words, for all the emotion they may convey by the manner or vocal quality of their expression, grow so powerful that they interfere with the earlier kinds of interchange. This is because words allow the speaker to remain a word’s length away from direct experience and emotional participation. On the one hand, the abstract, representative quality of words helps children to imagine, to represent, and to gain distance from themselves; but on the other hand, it helps them to misrepresent and evade; and the earlier nonverbal kind of sharing of experience grows less dominant in their lives and is at times at cross-purposes with the new verbal mode of expression.16 Although he could not resist exaggerating, what Nietzsche said of words was surely perceptive. This point deserves to be elaborated. Language brings closeness and brings distance. Speaking children become more human, make more effective contact with persons outside of the family, and discover more easily that they are part of a larger human community. But the structure of language is different from that of the emotions, and it expresses feelings and even perceptions in a standard, standardizing way because these are so difficult to put exactly into words.17 The word that allows a child to express always variable perceptions as a single, uniform abstraction tends to split him into a partly hidden, clumsily expressed “existential” self and an easily externalized and shareable verbal self. And then a hidden, private, “true” self is created that contrasts with and often contradicts the external, public, spoken self.18 All through the present essay I have been implying that the metaphysical explanations for the doctrines of ineffability are less enlightening than the nonmetaphysical ones. I add, to be fair, that it is very difficult to try to think things out metaphysically without encountering the feeling that we are in a world we can never fully understand, a feeling like that of the questioner in a brief ironic and unsettling story by Kaf ka: It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized

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that it was much later than I had thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I wasn’t very well acquainted with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: “You are asking me the way?” “Yes,” I said, “since I can’t find it myself.” “Give it up! Give it up!” said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laugh­ter.19

This Kafkaesque feeling of being lost in a world in which every destination has become obscure has its intellectual counterpart in our unsettling ignorance of so much that we should like to know, in our inability to sum up the endless variety of contexts into a single thinkable one, and in our frustrating sense of a universe too old, big, and numerous to be captured in the philosophi­cal questions that return and return and breed dilemmas only sharpened by our attempts to solve them. Anyone who is much troubled by such thoughts experiences a feeling of helplessness or loneliness—which is as likely to be the cause as the effect of the troubling thoughts. Not surprisingly, the antidote that may be discovered is a form of emotional safety that doubt cannot touch or analysis diminish. Hence the frequent relationship between safety and ineffability; because if the safety one needs is not beyond the reach of words, it is not beyond the doubts that words can express and is therefore not deep or protective enough. But the relationship with words may be approving if the safety one needs is found less in the devaluation of words than in an enveloping intimacy, personal or communal. And the relationship may be even excellent if, like those with creative occupations, one discovers how to merge instead of separating awareness, action, and self-expression. In merging them, one learns to use one’s ability in a given medium in order to achieve self-transcendence, the sinking of one’s self in something other and larger.20 The relationship in fact is excellent if one’s medium is language, because then, regardless of what one says about words, one’s competence and hope are invested in their success. To create something is helpful. But I add the almost unspoken condition that I do not mean to substitute rhetoric of any kind for our often inescap­ably difficult lives, and I do not feel the temptation to migrate seriously toward any psychological utopia. The taking of an empirically tested psychological point of view is not, in itself, empirically decisive. This is true not only because of the variety of psychological points of view that can be taken, but also because psychology intersects with other social sciences, each of which imposes a different perspective.

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Think of what I have said about religious devotion to Krishna. Think, first, how it might look if transposed into the concepts of the sociology of religion or symbolic anthropology. For them, to see how the cult depends on the natural relationship of mother and child or illicit lover and woman is only to begin to understand. The sociologist (of a certain type) would go on and ask: How exactly have these natural relationships achieved their social power and symbolic depth; and why have they achieved it in just their particular social or symbolic forms; and why and how are these forms peculiar to each of the different kinds of Krishna worship? The symbolic anthropologist would be interested in reading the symbolic code as a kind of language spoken in symbolic objects and actions. To adopt a sociological or anthropological attitude and give developed answers to these questions would take us too far beyond the bounds of this book and of my competence. However, I will give examples of the attitude of the anthropologists, who take ritual to be “a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication” designed to shape and intensify experience.21 Seen in this light, the devotees of Krishna make use of profound emotions in order to humanize themselves more deeply, neutralize their pains and fears more effectively, and consolidate their communities more closely. The emotions they use—mother love and adult sexual love—create strong reciprocal ties. These ties are augmented by poems, paintings, flower arrangements, food, music, and ceremonies, each of these with its own sensory effects, each simultaneously material and metaphorical, each created, prepared, or performed by members of a special subtradition, and each exerting a synergistic effect on all the others. In a tradition of this sensory opulence so soaked in implicit meanings, emotions are named, organized, and explained so that members of the religious tradition know what they are expected, even obliged, to experience; and what they know is specific to the community and tradition—Chaitanyaite, Vallabhite, or other—by which the devotees’ emotions “are culturally constructed and symbolically mediated.” This construction can be so highly socialized that in a Chaitanyaite community “it is believed that the collective religious experience itself is the living body of Krishna, superior not only to his iconic representation but even the god himself.”22 Speaking of the Chaitanyaites, an anthropologist says, “Perhaps in no other religious system have human emotional potentials been so considered, categorized, and sacralized.”23 The position of the anthropologists that I have been summarizing limits the tendency to generalize because it assumes that each symbolic system is highly specific to its tradition and, perhaps, its time and place. Every traditional kind

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of symbolic depth, they seem to feel, is so grossly and subtly different from every other that it is very difficult for an outsider to enter, and probably futile for the outsider to criticize. The position of psychologists, by whom I mean, in this instance, psychoanalysts, is quite different. First, they begin with a different stock of experiences and presuppositions. Second, whereas the anthropologist tries not to disturb the community under study—a strong disturbance would counteract the purpose of studying it—the psychoanalyst’s whole purpose is to intervene, knowingly and carefully, in order to lessen suffering, not of the community, of course, but of the individual. In other words, the contemporary anthropologist wants to share in the understanding of others in order to analyze and appreciate their cultural symbol systems; the analyst, now as before, wants to share in the experience of others in order to mitigate individual pain. It is a case of the translator-connoisseur as against the physician. However, because analytic training has assumed a relatively uniform human nature, the analyst may discover, as the anthropologist knows to begin with, that human nature has different cultural patterns. I have been putting the difference abstractly. But contrast the attitude of the anthropologists with that of the Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, who is primarily concerned, he says, with fantasies of intimacy. In his informal account, he draws not only on his experience as an analyst, but also on Indian myths, folktales, novels, and films. Kakar points out that among some Hindu communities sexual taboos are still very strong, especially for upper-caste women. He thinks that these taboos play a part in impoverishing and souring sexual experience. In spite of the importance of bearing sons, he explains, traditional rules set severe limits on the time available for marital intercourse; and the sexual indifference and hostility found in the upper castes are no less prevalent in the lower ones. “The general disapproval of the erotic aspect of married life continues to inform contemporary attitudes.”24 This disapproval fits in with the Indian kind of preoccupation with sex. Indian men still accept the old belief that the emission of semen is weakening and, if excessive, will shorten their lives. Sexual restraint is therefore assumed to improve men’s health and lengthen their lives. In orthodox Hinduism, celibacy is a prerequisite for anyone who aspires to a religious vocation; and, by traditional medical-mystical teachings, the man who resists temptation even in thought and learns to direct his semen upward, refines the semen and gains spiritual realization. Indian mythology records many instances of holy men who by their sexual restraint attained nearly godly powers, which were

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instantly abolished by the temptation that caused even a drop of semen to be emitted. Although seminal restraint is close to holiness and to the superlative experience that holiness promotes, opposite ideals have also been cultivated in India. These are evident in the art surrounding the worship of Krishna. The opposites activate one another: The alchemy of restraint is opposed by the alchemy of abandon; and, not infrequently, the two are joined in an alchemy of abandon as elaborately solicited as it is severely restrained. Given such a background, Indians (we are told) are fascinated by Freud. To Jung, whose doctrine appears on its face to be well adapted to Indian beliefs, they are, on the contrary, indifferent.25 The reason is that so much of Indian religion is consciously based on sublimation in the direct, Freudian sense. In infancy and early childhood, an Indian, especially a boy, is treated with great indulgence. The father may be distant; but the mother is always there, and the little boy is touched, fondled, embraced, cuddled, fed, protected, and indulged by her and by the other women around him. Rather than punish a child, the mother will distract it with something pleasing; but the child becomes very sensitive to the mother and when her mood is bad, acts in a way that will improve it. The child’s sensitivity is reflected in the grown person’s openness to nonverbal clues and emotional states, not to speak of susceptibility to praise and shame.26 The birth of a new child drives the older one from the mother’s bed and arms, and adds to the internalized image of the good, indulgent mother that of the evil, denying one; and when the child approaches the age of four, its yoke of obedience becomes far heavier. Yet the tie to the mother remains strong and sensual enough for the grown man—now also displaced in his mother’s affections by the father whose continuation he knows himself to be—to feel close in emotional, imaginative ways to a woman, which is almost to say, close to being a woman. To put it in the analyst’s language, “One is struck by the fluidity of the patients’ cross-sexual and generational identifications. In the Indian patient, the fantasy of taking on the sexual attributes of both the parents seems to have a relatively easier access to awareness.”27 After the man marries, socially speaking in order to continue the family line, the pleasure of sexual intercourse is devalued and easily becomes a source of anxiety or guilt. The wife is apt to be regarded as prone to infidelity, and as demanding what the man can supply only at too great a cost to his health and spiritual well-being. Rather like the young Krishna of mythology, the Krishna kind of lover in Indian films is aggressive in drawing women’s attention to him-

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self and teases and startles them, and the more they dislike his attentions, the more they excite him, because “love is fun only when the woman is angry.”28 His most satisfying conquests are of an innocent adolescent, and his sexual importunities must be powerful enough to transform her initially androgynous coolness into masochistic, feminine surrender. But even though she surrenders to her dark lord, she is not, in the myth, the potential wife—someone who threatens to displace the mother—but only the woman as the force of servile, clinging passion. A woman’s seductions are too like the unclearly remembered but extremely powerful ones of the mother; and this seductive woman is felt to be as apt to betray as the betraying, evil mother; and so for the sake of the tie to the mother, new seductions must be resisted. In a full, honorable sense, the man can love only the (good) mother. Somehow, to retain the tie with the mother, he must—now or later—deprive the other woman of her full sexuality or, recognizing her as dangerous, desexualize himself.29 So far, the Indian analyst Kakar. What we have seen until now, as in the discussion of Krishna, is the closeness of the erotic to the ascetic, the possibility of identification either with the mother or with the woman who is the adoring object of Krishna’s phallic potency, or with the union itself of woman and man, Radha and Krishna. There is also the deeply learned sensitivity to mood and to the wordless communication it entails. At least for the Indian devotee of Krishna, the search for intimacy with a consumingly spiritual and endlessly gratifying reality turns out to mirror his intimate experience with his mother— protector, gratifier, and implicit lover—or with the dreamed innocent who confirms his virility without robbing him of his pure, powerful innocence. Longing for intense closeness, the best years of which are not consciously remembered, longing as much for social approval as for self-approval, and schooled by a tradition the direct sources of which he finds in his intimate experience, the traditional and sometimes the untraditional Indian easily comes to regard his spiritual advancement as the most important goal of his life. For the sake of this goal, he may pray, worship, meditate, and attach himself to a spiritual mentor. Maybe because of his early, deeply ingrained symbiotic relationships, which give him his ability to neutralize and cross the boundaries of his physical self, it is easy for the Indian to experience himself as actually, bodily or spiritually, affected by what others consider to be no more than mythical or symbolic.30 Such descriptions persuade me that to understand the nature of transcendent ineffable experience, it is essential to consider the effects of a person’s lon­g­ ing for complete closeness, that is, the longing to merge with the source of  love

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and protection, which is with love and protection in themselves. One longs to merge or share one’s self, or to lose one’s individual self in merger with a greater one: one’s self strives by nature to become the reciprocal (one-many) whole it feels itself to be. In this spirit, one issues from one’s self, emits one’s desire, and draws in perfection from its source. It is in this spirit that the disciple gazes fixedly at his guru in order to assimilate him—and assimi­late the other disciples who assimilate him. So, too, by perfecting his devotion, the devotee assimilates and becomes Krishna or Radha-Krishna—as well as the whole community of devotees who become him or her-and-him. In every case, one becomes one’s self by again becoming the great, singularly plural self of one’s infancy.31 The sort of claims I have been making—which a psychiatrist, psychoana­lyst, or clinical psychologist is likely to find acceptable, a philosopher evasive, and a theologian belittling—seem to me worth exploring further. It is not possible for philosophy to give up the problems I have been addressing, but it is so often inconclusive, as I have said, that light cast from any other direction should be welcome to philosophers; and if psycholo­gy, too, can rarely if ever be conclusive, its light shows what otherwise remains unseen or seen with merely casual eyes, which lack the educated sharpness taught by a discipline in relation to its own subject matter. In the final analysis, however, I think that the psychological hypotheses I have used are too limited even when they turn out to be em­pirically useful. I mean not only that empirical hypotheses are all fallible and the psychological ones among them often especially fallible, but that the very claim that a limited discipline of any kind can offer a really final explanation of any kind strikes me as wrong. We see this indirectly in the various attempts, resembling those of the symbolic anthropologists, to make psychology or psychoanalysis more adequate to religious experience and claims. Such attempts require us to give up the view of Freud himself that religion is nothing but an illusion, with a psychopathological basis. By now it is not unusual for psychoanalysts to emphasize the human need for religious attitudes. The Freudian view is that the fantasies that dominate childhood should yield to a mature objectivity in the adult. The response to this view may be that it presumes that the separation between subjective and objective can be neat and decisive. But—continues the response—the separation is, in fact, impossible and the attempt to make it perhaps damaging. When we get to the border of the unknown and the ideal, it is argued, we have no choice except to run the objective and subjective together. A child is able to achieve a coherent self, transformed from its earlier indeterminate,

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uncontrolled existence, by virtue of the parents it has taken into itself; and, in the same pattern, the grownup achieves coherence by virtue of God, whose unifying nature consolidates the personal world together with the person at its center. The beginning of the sense of God is the infantile sense of closeness to the protector, to the protector’s warmth, touch, voice, habits, and benign authority. This infantile closeness is no longer enough for an adult, but it becomes the core of the necessary sense of God. God, we may then say, is one of the necessary fictions by which we live: The fictive creations of our minds . . . have as much regulatory potential in our psychic function as people around us in the flesh . . . Human life is impoverished when these immaterial characters made out of innumerable experiences vanish under the repression of a psychic realism that does violence to the ceaseless creativity of the human mind. In this sense, at least, religion is not an illusion.

But what exactly does it mean to say that, taken as “fictive creations of our minds,” the “immaterial characters” of religion are not illusory? The psychoanalytic investigator who said this is apparently no literalist. But how literally must the believers themselves take their myths and immaterial characters in order to do themselves no psychic violence? Dogmas give official answers to what must and must not be literally believed; but it remains unclear to what extent an established dogma determines the private beliefs of the individuals who in practice accept it. My suspicion is that here, too, there are great individual variations, more easily revealed, of course, where the penalties for expressing them are weak. Many people, I assume, would find it difficult, unpleasant, and unnecessary to distinguish between three different ways of valuing their myths: as parable-like encouragement to adopt a certain religious point of view; as symbolic expression of the truth that theologians know how to put more abstractly; and as the simple, literal truth—itself perhaps regarded as a secondary, merely empirical kind of truth. Psychological research into such questions is too intimate to be easy. Psychologists who explore religious experience are obliged to be aware of and discount their own biases, and to be aware, as well, of the social context of the life they are exploring. But their discipline forbids them to begin by accepting religious beliefs at their face value, and a psychological explanation may therefore diminish or conflict with religious claims, especially when they are literal. Yet the psychologist’s discovery of how religious attitudes are embedded in

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the most intimate human relations, beginning in infancy, in no way discredits religious experience. Artistic, scientific, and philosophical attitudes are embedded in these relations no less deeply than is religion.32 What, then, is at stake? To answer, I want to distinguish between the attitudes of the psychologist who professes allegiance to science and the mystic who professes allegiance to a different, intuitively known truth, which may be understood as either antagonistic to science or as superior to it. The distinction is not that science changes and religion is fixed, because religious doctrines, mystical ones among them, undergo a constant process of revision. Even the doctrine most carefully fixed in scriptures must be reinterpreted when transmitted to other persons and generations. However, to make the comparison of psychology (with a scientific ideal) and religion closer and more difficult, for the moment I take into consideration only doctrines that are conscious corrections of past ones and—what is rarer—allow the possibility of future correction. In keeping with the theme of this essay, the only constant required in such self-correcting religions is that they have an ineffable ideal known, to whatever supposed degree, by ineffable experience. The ideal itself may be sanctioned by tradition or by faith in the leaders who profess it. As for the experience, it may be undergone by ordinary believers, but must have been undergone at least by their teacher or by their teacher’s ultimate teachers, in which case ordinary believers accept the reality of the experience on faith. But what is the criterion of this experience? Maybe its authoritative description, which makes it possible to distinguish it from less significant experiences. In Zen, the Master decides. The experience overrides doubts (which sometimes return); but what connects it with the doctrine that establishes and interprets whatever it is that is not doubted? Training, surely, and philosophy, which formulates, justifies, and defends against rival methods and doctrines. All this can be construed to resemble the process by which science is taught and verified. It particularly resembles clinical psychology and, even more, psychoanalysis, which has often been accused of being a religion. In mysticism as in psychoanalysis, the criterion is the doctrine’s persuasiveness, verified by the well-being given in some sense by experience—the mystical experience or the experience of effective psychoanalytic insight. But however well or ill the ideal is pursued, the scientific ideal—accepted, I assume, by psychology and psychoanalysis—is significantly different, and the difference is that the overwhelming power of the experience or the sense of well-being or security that follow are not enough in themselves because, instead of explaining, they must themselves be explained. I must acknowledge that this difference is far

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from absolute: there is always a partly circular relationship between theory and experience, each being used both to justify the other and to correct the perception of the other. But difference there is, and it is rooted in a different sense of what constitutes truth and how it is to be reached, verified, modified, and fitted into a framework of experience judged with the greatest commitment to objectivity of which human beings are capable. A psychology that abandons the ideal of objectivity as science, in its often uncertain way, has established it, is—to that extent only—the same as religion. I put the difference starkly, although the history of science, too, is a tangled web, and the distinction more difficult to express exactly than it may seem at first; or impossible to express exactly because science is not at all uniform and fades off, without a clear borderline, into its opposites. Yet when the defense of possibly life-giving fictions goes so far as to threaten the distinction between the objective (what is more or less objectively verifiable) and the fictional (what is imagined because needed or desired), the scientist’s mercilessly consuming search for truth is attenuated—though granted the deflections of individual scientists, it is more realistic to see the search as merci­ less only in its collaborative force. The philosophic affirmers such as Bhartrihari and Plotinus assimilate the search for objective truth into the search for the perfection that accounts for and, so far as humans go, surpasses it. But the others, the deniers, deny incredibly much in order to be able to deny the search as well, and then, after declaring subjectivity and objectivity indistinguishable, to submerge themselves in primal experience: Lao-tzu, Chuang-tzu, Nagarjuna, the Zen masters, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger. Ambivalence, paradox, humor, pain, yearning, deconstruction—all are enlisted for the denial. Logic, too, is enlisted, as when Nagarjuna uses both the law of contradiction and the technique of bi-negation to break down the border between logical, conventional truth and neither-logical-nor-alogical emptiness; and conceptual analysis is used—along with the meditative identification of the object of one’s thought with nothingness—in order to reverse and still the voice of abstract and objective thought. So while our final aspirations are not discredited by the depth to which they are rooted in our origins, when we clothe them in fictions and make nonfictional demands in their name, we endanger the aspiration to know the truth as free of fiction as possible. And yet, as I have been saying, the truth is that there is no discipline—whatever its hostility or its receptiveness to fiction— that is adequate to the truth as a whole; for all disciplines are such by virtue of the limitation of their respective points of view. This holds, I should say, even of disciplines as embracing as philosophy and theology—I use the word

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“theology” to emphasize that a discipline must be technically developed and not merely amorphous. Hence the effect on us of powerful art, of Wagner, Kafka, Joyce, Artaud, or Marquez, and hence the effect of such antiphilo­ sophical philosophers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the later Heidegger. I see that in the process of making whatever final judgments I can, I am intruding myself more and more openly into the argument, and I think that I ought to make my philosophical attitude explicit. Although I am politically and intellectually very unlike George Santayana, I share a trait with him that is both a philosophical bias and an imaginative openness: like him, I am irredeem­ably secular, but also like him, I have the greatest interest in the life of the imagination, and sometimes the greatest admiration for the imaginative and intellectual structures built on what I regard as transparently dogmatic, even intellectu­ally absurd, foundations. Such interest, admiration, and rejection extend to all the great philosophical systems I am acquainted with. Much that is admirable or useful—much that, without these systems, we should never see so clearly—can be salvaged from every one of them; but as systems meant to capture the whole truth and the truth alone, even if only by way of negation, they are invariably unconvincing and often deeply absurd—impressive castles of sand, exhilarating in their architec­ture and the sagacity that glitters on their walls here and there, but as sadly fragile to criticism as they are to time. My conclusion is that both philosophy and religion are inevitable because we or our immediate neighbors need them; but that they both are always intellectually inadequate. Their intellectual inadequacy is not diminished by the emotional help they give or the social cohesion they maintain. They are what we have, but what we have is not enough. What is the truth, the truth? The experience of the rich inwardness of oneself is related outwardly to what we call holism. But holism, though it can play a constructive role in science, has often competed to its disadvantage with reductive analysis. The worlds that the learned build out of their analyses and accumulations of facts are creviced everywhere; too much necessarily escapes them—as it also escapes every form of holism. Something always escapes both analysis and synthesis, just as it escapes enumeration and escapes our conception of escaping. How does one combine what we learn to grasp intellectually—science, philosophy, theology, or any intellectual enterprise to which we can set a name— with lyricism, with humor, with the word “truth” above, the shadow of a joke? How is the egocentricity of the individual’s consciousness situated in relation to a world filled with other equally egocentric nodes, each with a demand for the understanding and empathy that only an infinitely selfless, totally altruistic

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Bodhisattva could give? What can it mean to be an infinitely selfless ex-human being? The truth is that we are made to be partial in every way. In the light of our past and present, the near-objectivity of the exact sciences appears very difficult, almost freakish; and every way of looking at the world, even the comprehensive, so-to-speak synesthet­ic ways of the richer, more hospitable philosophies and theologies, and even the structured emotivity of the arts, cannot and, I suppose, should not encompass everything we might hope them to. Tales of the kind we tell ourselves for our cosmic comfort’s sake have grown in time to be profoundly deep, profoundly local expressions of our human condition. To compare them, too parochially, with a few recent Western novelists, these religious tales have grown to be more filled with moral indignation, droll eccentrics, theatrical denouements, and touching lads and ladies than Dickens; more pessimistically humorous and objectively compassionate than Chekhov; more carefully verbose in reliving the fictions of love and the ambiguities of sex than Proust; more religiously tragic, self-contentious, psychologically probing, and ethically passionate than Dostoyevsky; more epically panoramic and loving, intuitive, and hating than Tolstoy; more starkly, realistically, comically nightmarish than Kafka; more interpenetratingly kaleidoscopic, pun-charged, disgrammatical, and zanily freighted with everything and everything else than Joyce—always more, to the extent that these and all other writers are single individuals whose wisdom is bounded by the brevity of their lives and the necessary narrowness of an individual’s perspective. For the shortest (though long enough) merely literary proof of what I have said, consult the Mahabharata or Ramayana—together with their literary prolongations and commentaries. But I mean to go beyond such literary evidence and include religious traditions, among which I have chosen to explain only some that pertain to Krishna. And yet the tales for comfort, though enriched so extraordinarily far beyond an individual’s span of life and imagination, are still limited by their nature as tales for comfort. We know we are capable of small fractions of truth, and tale-tellers or not, are always discovering who and what we are as we talk with others and with ourselves in any of the various human modes of expression, including plain words. Deaf, we hear something all the same, and blind, we see something even with our blind eyes. And everything we discover and say truly increases our knowledge and, in doing so, reveals new perspectives of ignorance, which allow us to discover and say again. Such is the light in which I have learned to see ineffability. To stress the

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inadequacy of language, which is such an extraordinarily liberating invention, seems to me a sour way of showing gratitude to this power that allows us to experience so much of our rich inwardness, and that gives us so much of our ability to imagine what we do not experience immediately, and so much of our power to investigate and create. I’d much rather worship a god of speech than a god of silence. Speech, for all the complaints made of it, shows itself to be as flexible and as able to assume shapes as water. Not only does it take the shape of our indeterminate and ambivalent desires, but—unlike formal logic—it is able to declare it own limits and, by the declaration itself, to hint what these limits are and where they end. After all, what does a declaration of ineffability declare? That there is an inchoate union between one’s own ultimate worth and something half-else that continues and justifies this worth. This self-else is speakably sacred but not speakably questionable. So by ineffability we mean that everything conceivable can at least be hinted at in speech, but that this hint should not be expanded too explicitly or spoken of in any way that invites depreciation. That we are able to say all this in a few formulaic words is a tribute to the subtlety that language confers on us. Yet there is always the residue: what has not been said, what one has forgotten or cannot remember, what one has not conceived or conceived clearly, and what escapes because it is too delicate or quick. For such reasons, we should speak not of ineffability but of the many ineffabilities—neurological, synesthetic, musical, logical, philosophical, and religious, personal, familial, and tribal, childish and adult, normal, abnormal, and outright pathological—that make our speech less regular and more human. These ineffabilities are the demons (and maybe angels) of incomplete­ness and incompletability. They are also our rest, after and between speech, in silence, which derives its possible eloquence from the speech that surrounds it. The gaps themselves of speech translate our intermittency into still another of its complex perfections.

chapter 14

The Bird with Bread in Its Beak

Delivered at an international symposium on Confucianism and Inter-religious Dialogue. Given the idea alone of interreligious dialogue, I might have prefaced this conference by discussing the religious debates held in Europe long ago between Christians and Jews, or the religious debates held in India in Akbar’s court, or, in China, between Confucians and Jesuits. Or I might have followed the wonderful religio-philosophical sequence in which Al-Farabi teaches Avicenna—Avicenna reads Aristotle’s Metaphysics forty times before Al-Farabi’s book makes it clear to him—and Al-Farabi and Avicenna both teach Maimon­ ides. The unusual tolerance of the three philosophers was made possible by their conclusion that scriptures should be understood philosophically rather than literally. Everything I have just mentioned, I omit, because I wrote this essay spontaneously, and it came out in the words you will hear. I think that you and I will be satisfied if you laugh at my jokes and listen with extra interest to the more strange among my comparisons and conclusions. I want to suggest a very broad framework for our consideration of interreligious dialogue. I begin with some words on the often unpredictable dialogue between human beings and nature at large. Then I shift to the nature of the often unpredictable dialogues between human beings. I speak of the dialogue between humans and nature because it so often is, on the human side, the posing of a question, to which nature, humans hope, will give an answer. As shown in astrophysics, the questions grow astonishingly acute and extend over astonishingly large spaces, which may verge on and even be infinite. And as

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Cats Walking up an inkline

shown in particle physics, the questions are extended, with the help of particle accelerators, to particles, some too small to have a size, and particle exchanges. The biggest and most powerful of such colliders, located in Geneva, is built deep underground, in a circular tunnel twenty-seven kilometers in circumference. Like any number of theologies, it is meant to explain the creation of the universe. Unfortunately, it has had setbacks. From my standpoint, the most interesting of these is the shutting down of its operations in November because of a piece of bread dropped by a bird into an open substation. I will use this brief moment of dialogical interaction between the Large Hadron Collider and the bread-carrying bird as a model for the unexpected difficulties in interreligious dialogues among humans. Among them, too, it often happens that there is an unexpected bird with a loosely held piece of bread in its beak. Compare the difficulties of the collider scientists in getting answers from nature with the difficulties of the dwellers in some small island paradises of Papua New Guinea in getting answers from the spirits that rule nature. These islanders pay no taxes, have no police or other form of government, and have felt free and secure. But now the sea is beginning to eat away and sometimes sweep over their islands. In the past, when they needed rain or calmer weather, they would petition their ancestral spirits to talk to the gods and get help. Now

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magic is no use, and the old gods can’t hear them any longer. What or who, they wonder, is to blame? For birds and electrical malfunctions of the scientists, they substitute sorcerers from other islands, excessive canoe travel, or the anger of the gods at the islanders’ conversion to Christianity. Both scientists and islanders want understanding in the service of power, in the one case by means of scientific theory and particle colliders, and in the other by tradition that teaches them to perform magic and to ask their ancestral spirits to speak to the gods for them. Since these expedients are failing, islanders turn to the regional government for help, and the regional government turns to the world and its concern with climate change. Traditional India had a dialogically much more complicated life than that of either particle scientists or Papuan island dwellers. The ordinary Indian fed his home god, talked soothingly and hopefully to him or her, and watched for the god’s expected signs of life and favor. But the erudite Brahman philosopher, speaking in the curt technical style of Indian philosophy, debated real or imagined opponents, representatives of other, usually religious schools. For formal occasions, there were rules and judges. A great victory in debate had something of an aura of miracle, and if a king were present, practical results—rewards for the winner, and perhaps exile or forced conversion for the losing side. Mostly, I suppose, a debater reveled in his technical acuity, even though he could never checkmate his equally acute, equally inspired opponent (when one of them was successful, it might be because he was a god in human guise). Looked at empirically, such traditional dialogue raises two I think selfevident problems. The first is the conviction of almost every religion or sect that it is superlatively true, as would be acknowledged by all in a better world, or, at least, at the end of days. A noncondescending respect for other religions or sects seems rare. Individual conversions are usually emotional, while largescale conversions usually take place as a result of conquest or obvious social convenience. Dialogue per se rarely changes anything. The second problem is less obvious and more interesting. It comes from the prevalence of mysticism, or, rather, from mysticism’s glorification of absolute unity, such as the experienced unity of consciousness. Long ago, Yajnavalkya explained to his wife, Maitreyi, that when, at death, all of someone has become just the Self, there are no means, no senses, by which the Self could sense anything, and nothing or no one is there to “be seen, smelled, tasted, talked to, heard, thought of, touched, or known. By what means could one know the Knower, apart from whom there is nothing and nobody?” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3, trans. Edgerton). Diotima explains the matter to Socrates,

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though differently. Plato compares material bodies to shadows projected on a wall, Shankara, to a rope mistaken for a snake. Plotinus, whose view of reality is not unlike Yajnavalkya’s, affirms that he experienced the Absolute. Yoga continues to teach how to arrive at it. To realize this, is of course to realize that everything material or plural is an illusion. If so, all dialogue, religious or not, is an illusion because there is nobody else to talk to. Strictly speaking, we cannot even talk to ourselves because there is no real division in us between subject and object. So if we are dead serious, this conference has no real subject and therefore cannot say anything real about it. What then can we do to save the reality of this conference? For us here the threat of derealization shows that mysticism is even more disturbing than bread. I’d rather shut my mind to the enticements of mysticism and open this conference by declaring it to be real. It should be a help that Confucianism, which is central to the conference, is so down-to-earth and humanistic. Maybe, for the sake of our conference, we can endorse Chu Hsi’s fear that mysticism, that is, Ch’an mysticism, can be socially disruptive. Yet when I think of the explicit doctrines of the two great Neo-Confucians, Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming, I’m puzzled, because there is in them so much that is not only reminiscent of Taoism and Ch’an, but also of Neoplatonism. Plotinus, a disciple said, attained unspeakable actuality four times. The critical moment of transcendence in Wang’s life came when he sat, desperate, sleepless, upright, in front of the sarcophagus he had made, searching for enlightenment, Heaven’s command, until, feeling a voice tell him that his nature sufficed for attaining sagehood, he felt at peace. Plotinus writes that everything is the One, which is the Good, and that “the true love is all things being one and never separate” (Enneads 6.7.14, trans. Armstrong). Chu Hsi says that when considered separately, all things have their own principles, but when considered collectively, they are merged with one another and are only the Great Ultimate. Wang Yang-ming says, “The great man regards Heaven and earth and the myriad things as one body. He regards the world as one family and the country as one person” (Inquiry on the Great Learning, Yang-ming ch’üanshu 26, trans. Wing-tsit Ch’an). Nothing I’ve said is meant to exaggerate likeness or deprive a thinker or religion of individuality. Yet see how variably and unpredictably the interreligious dialogue works. Seeking for understanding of the unknown and maybe unknowable, scientists, looking for the hypothetically necessary Higgs boson, hope to produce it by firing particles at one another. The Papuan islanders know how to ask the gods about their misfortunes, but not why communica-

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tion with them has been cut off. The dematerializing mystics are more than sure they are right and yet have to communicate with one another and with us by living in what they take to be a secondary, dreamlike, unreal reality. Chu Hsi, directly or indirectly influenced by Taoism and Buddhism, disowns them and grows to hate Buddhism; but he needs what, in the service of Confucianism, he rescues from Taoism and Buddhism. Wang Yang-ming is miserable for a while because he so respects Chu Hsi but feels that he must depart from Chu’s doctrine, something he becomes able to do by undergoing a Ch’an-like encounter with the Heavens, as he thinks, although the Buddhist would say that the encounter is with nothingness. Is there any interreligious dialogue between Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming on the one side, and Plotinus, who never knew them, on the other? Speaking for them, I think there is, not a dialogue but two monologues delivered by philosophically fraternal twins. The idea held by Chu Hsi, Wang Yang-ming, and Plotinus is the idea of a universe that is a variety of different-appearing things the final reality of which is their unity. This, as an abstraction, is the same on both sides. The state of religious thought in these thinkers’ respective traditions, their emotions, and their speculatively active brains led them to a like enough conclusion. If they had undergone transmigrations, I’d say that in one of their previous lives they all had Plato for a teacher. I haven’t forgotten about accidental birds with bread in their beaks. They were everywhere, I’m sure, but since I abide by scholarly conventions, I can’t report anything for which I have neither historical references nor scriptural authority.

chapter 15

You, Me, and Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind

Briefly and simply, Discovering the Mind is Kaufmann’s account of  the modern thinkers who played a notable role either in furthering the quest for selfunderstanding or in obstructing or deflecting it. Because Kaufmann organizes his account in terms of individual thinkers, the most natural way to become acquainted with it is to repeat some of  his assessments of these thinkers. I use the word “assessments” rather than “descriptions” or “analyses” for the reason that he is always engaged in passing  judgment, and he leaves no doubt who or what has his approval or disapproval. The scale of this review is such that it would be futile to attempt a careful examination of the justice of Kaufmann’s view of each thinker he takes up. I am not aware of any grave errors of scholarship. Granted the carefulness of Kaufmann’s scholarship and his awareness of context, correctness in the ordinary sense is not at issue, but rather his view of the world, a matter that is hardly subject to argument in a simply scholarly or logical sense. Kaufmann’s model of the autonomous, creative person, his ideal, is Goethe, of whom he approves even more wholeheartedly, I think, than of Nietzsche and Freud. Goethe was so great, he says, because so fully autonomous, and because he realized that, to develop, he had to live dangerously and risk love and the unforeseen (I, 29). His kind of autonomy influenced generations of writers and thinkers, among them, Nietzsche, Freud, and the Existentialists (I, 54). It was in contrast to Goethe that Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger attempted to hide something from themselves. Goethe wrote so clearly, says Kaufmann, because he thought clearly (I, 42), while they wrote obscurely because they were (among other things) engaged in concealment. Their obscurity ought

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not to be attributed to their rigor. Consider Kant. “What makes Kant so difficult to read and often so hopelessly obscure is not at all exemplary rigor but rather his appalling lack of rigor,” which “covers up difficulties that he should have faced” (I, 106). Everywhere Kant makes the same mistakes: reliance on dichotomies and classifications that he takes to be exhaustive; substitution of play with concepts and terms for close examination of moral or aesthetic experience; and the mistaking of his own unusual mind for the human mind in general (I, 148). Because he found no love in his own adult experience, “Kant’s untenable model of the human mind has no place at all for love, unless it is assimilated to ‘pathological interests’ ” (I, 156). It was not accidental that it was the abstracted and loveless though also powerful Kant who managed to persuade the Germans that philosophy required a special language, which Hegel and, later, Heidegger tried purposely to create (1, 183). Therefore, as Goethe is the influential, exemplary success, so Kant is the influential, exemplary failure, in many ways “an embodiment on a large scale of what is wrong with philosophy” (I, 195). Kaufmann speculates, though hesitantly, that if  Kant “had not insisted on certainty, necessity, and completeness,” philosophy might have developed in a more fruitful direction. As things have in fact developed, it is to be doubted that “mainstream philosophy will ever become strong enough to be of much help in the discovery of the mind.” According to Kaufmann, while Hegel had genius, he was more a failure than a success as a philosopher. Hegel’s “stroke of genius” was his “systems approach,” his insistence “that views and positions have to be seen as a whole, that theoretical and moral belong together as aspects of a single standpoint, that the histories of politics, art, religion, and philosophy are disciplines “through which we can try to discover the human mind or spirit or, in one word, man” (I, 262, 265). Much of later intellectual history, as shown by Kier­ kegaard, Marx, and G. E. Moore, is a series of revolts against Hegel (I, 265). What is “bizarre and almost incredible about his books” is “due in large measure to his attempt to reconcile Kant and Goethe.” The Phenomenolog  y of the Spirit is in many ways “a bold, almost foolhardy book, and the conception underlying it was a work of genius inspired by Goethe” (2, 200–201). “What Hegel got from Goethe was that Storm and Stress, classicism and romanticism were not simply alternative styles but rather, like bud, blossom, and fruit, stages in a development” (ibid.). But this genial conception was subjected to Kant’s disastrous influence, to Kant’s “insistence on necessity and certainty (‘absolute knowledge,’ no less!) and completeness” ( I, 226), for Hegel, like Kant was unable to bear uncertainty and was “filled with anxiety by the notion of the fortuitous and accidental” (ibid.).

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In the second volume of Discovering the Mind, the major roles are played by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Kaufmann takes as plausible Freud’s remark that Nietzsche “knew himself better than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live” (II, 54). Kaufmann enumerates Nietzsche’s major contributions to the discovery of the mind: that consciousness is a surface, the role of which has been vastly overestimated (II, 54); that we are governed by the will to power (which, contra Heidegger, should be understood psychologically, not metaphysically) (p. 70); that there is, as Jaspers was later to see, a “psychology of world views” (II, 119); that history was also “psychohistory”; and that human roles and role-playing are to be understood by means of the philosophy of masks. Kaufmann believes that Nietzsche, despite his genius as a writer, is easy to misunderstand. Nietzsche himself, he points out, repeatedly insisted that superficial readers would miss his meaning, and he asked to be read with understanding and caution (II, 54). Somewhat as Kant is contrasted with Goethe, Heidegger is contrasted with Nietzsche. In a generally dreary academic landscape, Heidegger’s vibrant personality attracted students; and he was attuned to what excited them (II, 234). His obscurity, too, proved attractive, as did his secularized religiosity. When Hitler came to power, Heidegger “spoke up publicly for the regime,” and his adherence lasted longer than his admirers assume. “In his lectures on Schelling in the summer of 1936 he was still praising Hitler, though the relevant passage was omitted in the published version of the lecture in 1971” (II, 235); and he remained morally insensitive to the issue of Nazism. Like Husserl, says Kaufmann, Heidegger has a bias against science and psychology, a bias rooted in “the hunger for certainty and apodictic discourse,” on which, unlike Nietzsche, he “never reflected psychologically” (II, 196). His “authoritarianism” is inseparable from his attitude toward reason. In his exegeses Heidegger stands revealed as a virtuoso of violence and manipulation. In spite of all his talk of openness, he never opened himself up to the distinctive voice of the texts he interpreted or to objections and alternatives” (II, 193). His “Manichaean hatred of reason” came out into the open when, at the end of his first long essay on Nietzsche, written in 1950, he called reason “the most stubborn adversary of thinking” (II, 193). Nothing if not conscientious, Kaufmann tested his image of Heidegger by attending his lectures, by talking with him repeatedly, and by translating one of his essays, of which he got explanations, both oral and written, from Heidegger himself. Kaufmann’s conclusions were altogether negative, or he decided that Heidegger’s “existential ontology” was no more than a dubious anthropology; that his thinking, which paid no attention to negative evidence, was deeply authoritarian; that

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his analysis of authenticity and its opposite was shallow and Manichaean; that he neither solved important problems nor opened them for fruitful discussion, but rather covered them up; and that, instead of breaking, as he claimed, with two thousand years of Western thought, he had merely secularized Christian preaching about guilt, dread, and death (II, xv–xvi). The hero of Kaufmann’s third volume is Freud. Kaufmann contends that Freud has been obscured by three misleading legends—that he was a dogmatist who excommunicated dissenting disciples, that he was essentially a nineteenth-century reductive materialist, and that his thought can be understood only in the light of  late nineteenth-century Viennese culture (III, 3). The truth is that “Freud repeatedly modified his theories in the light of negative evidence and, what is more, told his readers what considerations had led him to do so” (III, 90). What Freud created was “a poetic science of the mind, which fused the sensitivity of a poet with the rigor and self-discipline of a scientist” (III, 109). Freud’s final contribution to the discovery of the mind was his own personality, for, despite Freud’s own opinion, “He was one of the most remarkable human beings of all time” (III, 109). Like Kaufmann’s other writings, Discovering the Mind is sui generis, a highly individual combination of carefulness and boldness. His scrupulousness in matters of translation and bibliography, his symmetrical organization, and his meticulously informative table of contents all serve his truculent independence of contemporary philosophy. Obviously, he is not tempted by any current philosophical fashion, Anglo-American or Continental. The problems that concern him most are so general that Anglo-American philosophers now for the most part neglect them, either because they feel them beyond the reach of philosophy as they think it should be practiced or because they are too difficult to deal with in the attentive fragmentation and precise technicality that mark so much philosophical writing today. Kaufmann believes, as most Anglo-American philosophers cannot, that literature and philosophy are or ought to be one, that personality is not separable from philosophy, and that the philosopher’s deeds and thoughts illuminate one another. He never forgets to measure thinkers by their moral stature. He is always serious, sometimes perhaps to the point of solemnity. He writes in an openly personal (self-referential) way, echoing his previous writings and not infrequently repeating himself. Like Nietzsche, with whom he so profoundly identifies himself, he is most often in pursuit of heroism as he sees it, or is in a state of indignation at the moral or intellectual failures of others. Like Nietzsche, he is quintessentially a reflective moralist trying to see and live life whole. Very demanding in everything having to do with scholarship, he is less demanding in philosophical argument; where one might expect

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Parting is such sad sorrow, 1990

him to slow down and proceed by small, careful steps, he often hurries on, as if so aware of his goal or so sure of it that he cannot slow down even where the footing is slippery. Now that I have written this characterization of Kaufmann as a thinker, I remember that he is dead, and so I shift to the past tense and to sadness. I remember that in spite of his defiance of current philosophical attitudes, he was hurt by the failure of philosophical  journals to review or to ascribe importance to his later books. Professionally speaking, he was a loner and a lonely man. Yet his life was rich in interests—apart from philosophy, there were religion, literature, and art, especially East Asian art, and photography. In everything he was humble-proud, an individual whose voice speaks (I hear it clearly) from each page he wrote. If I have been reluctant to probe more deeply, it may be because Walter Kaufmann and I shared many interests and were good friends, but also because

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he died before his own self-discovery (which he says was furthered by this series of books), reached the limit of which, granted a longer life, he was capable. He says, “We are not finished until we are dead. While we live we are like a speaker in midsentence, who cannot be fully understood until he has had a chance to finish” (II, 446). I have the feeling, however, that it was just his death that caught him in midsentence, and that he remained unfinished and (like all of us?) even enigmatic.

sources

Several of the essays collected in this book were previously published in slightly different form in the following books and journals. I am grateful to the publishers for granting their permission to reprint them.

c h a p t e r 4 w h at d e at h m a k e s o f p h i l o s o p h y Reprinted from H. Kenaan and I. Ferber, eds., Philosophy’s Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking, Springer, Dordrecht, 2011, pp. 201–7.

chapter 5 keeping the world together Reprinted from K. Zilmans and W. van Damme, eds., World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, Valisz, Amsterdam, 2010, pp. 11–22.

chapter 6 the common universe of aesthetics Reprinted from Zilmans and van Damme, eds., World Art Studies. “The Common Humanity Evident in European, African, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Aesthetic Theory,” pp. 343–67. This essay, written in 2009, is based on Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Art without Borders: An Exploration of Art and Humanity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009.

c h a p t e r 8 pa i n , c r u e lt y, a n d pa t h o l o g y i n a r t Reprinted from “Pain, Cruelty and Pathology in Art: An Essay on Body Art and the Carnal Art of Orlan,” written in December, 2008, and first published in Assaph: Studies in Art History, vols. 13–14, 2010: H. Taragan and N. Gal, eds., The Beauty of  Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Studies in Honour of Mordechai Omer, Tel-Aviv University Press, Tel-Aviv, 2010, pp. 465–69.

230  Sources

c h a p t e r 9 o n t h e t r a n s pa r e n c y a n d o pa c i t y o f p h i l o s o p h e r s Reprinted from The Monist, vol. 71, no. 3, July 1988, pp. 455–65.

chapter 10 the three philosophical traditions Reprinted from Ben-Ami Scharfstein, A Comparative History of Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant, SUNY, Albany, 1998, chap. 1, pp. 1–54.

chapter 11 does philosophy progress? Reprinted from Ben-Ami Scharfstein, A Comparative History of Philosophy, afterword, pp. 517–30.

c h a p t e r 1 2 n o n u t o p i a n o b s e r va t i o n s o n m a c h i av e l l i s m Reprinted from Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Amoral Politics: The Persistent Truth of Machiavellism, chap. 7, “Nonutopian Observations,” pp. 216–43, SUNY Press, Albany, 1995.

c h a p t e r 13 o n t h e nat u r e a n d l i m i t s o f i n e f fa b i l i t y Reprinted from Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Ineffability: The Failure of Words in Philosophy and Religion, Albany, SUNY Press, 1993, chap. 5, “In Judgment of Ineffability,” pp. 179–220.

chapter 15 you, me, and kaufmann’s

discovering the mind

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 21, 2, April 1983, pp. 244–47.

notes

chapter three 1. M. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in W. McNeill, ed., Pathmarks, Cambridge, 1998, p. 154. On Heidegger’s interest in and use of  Hölderlin, see R. Safransky, Martin Heidegger, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 282–84. 2. H. Kawabata and S. Zeki, “Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Journal of Neural Physiolog y, vol. 91, no. 4, pp. 1699–1705. 3. S. Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, New York, 1999, p. 1. 4. Zeki, Inner Vision, chap. 7, “The Modularity of Vision.” 5. S. Zeki, “The Ferrier Lecture 1995: Behind the Seen: The Functional Specialization of the Brain in Space and Time,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc B (205) 260, 1145–83, 2005 (published online June 29, 2005), p. 1178. The same ideas are presented much more briefly and simply in Zeki’s well-illustrated article “The Disunity of Consciousness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 7, no. 5, May 2003, pp. 214–18, available at http://tics.trends.com. 6. Zeki, Inner Vision, p. 201. The problems I speak of in the following paragraph are discussed, and sometimes exaggerated, in the following: J. Hyman, “Art and Neuroscience,” in the Internet Art and Cognition Workshops, www.interdisciplines.org/artcogniton/papers/15, January 2006. I owe this reference to Shimon Edelman of Cornell University. See Edelman’s “Constraining the Neural Representation of the Visual World,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 6, no. 3, March 2002, pp. 125–31. 7. For handedness and the laterality of the brain, see R. W. Boven et al., “Tactile Form and Location Processing in the Human Brain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 102, no. 35, August 30, 2005, pp. 12601–12605; M. S. Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain Revisited,” Scientific American 279 (1), 1998, pp. 35–39; M. S. Gazzaniga, “Facts, Fictions, and the Future of Neuroethics,” in J. Illes, ed., Neuroethics, New York, 2005, available at http://www.cogsci.ucsd .edu/~rik/courses/cogs200-w05/readings/GazzNeuroethicsJI-1.pdf; H. J. Neville and D. Bavelier, “Specificity and Plasticity in Neurocognitive Development in Humans,” in M. S. Gazzaniga, ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences, 2nd ed., Cambridge, MA, 2000; B. N. Morton, “Inevitability of Brain Laterality-Based Behavioral Differences from the Variable Sidedness of the Brain

232  Notes to Chapters 3–6 Executive System,” Hemisity Review 11, 2004; S. P. Springer and G. Deutsch, Left Brain, Right Brain, New York, 1982; S. Walker, “Lateralization of Functions in the Vertebrate Brain: A Review,” British Journal of Psycholog y, vol. 71, 1980, pp. 329–67 (detailed comparison of  lateralization of the human brain with that of of other animals). My summary also reflects the research projects during recent years on language and the brain carried out by C. Chiarello and others at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of the University of California Riverside on the Internet at www.facultv.ucr.edu/~chrisc/research. My remarks on the excision of whole hemispheres are drawn from C. Kenneally, “The Deepest Cut: How Can One Live with Only Half a Brain?,” New Yorker, July 3, 2006, pp. 36–42. 8. O. Grusser, T. Selker, and B. Zynda, “Cerbral Lateralization and Some Implications for Art, Aesthetic Perception, and Artistic Creativity,” in I. Rentschler, B. Herzberger, and D. Epstein, eds., Beauty and the Brain: Biological Aspects of Aesthetics, Basel, 1988; as summarized in A. L. Strachan, “In the Brain of the Beholder,” Harvard Brain, 7, Spring 2000, http://www.hcs .harvard.edu/~hsmbb/BRAIN/vol7-spring2000/aesthetics.htm. 9. J. Coney and C. Bruce, “Hemispheric Processes in the Perception of Art,” Empirical Studies of the Arts, vol. 22, no. 2, 2004, pp. 181–200.

chapter four 1. F. Nietzsche, The Antichrist 1.5 and 1.10, in W. Kaufmann, trans., The Portable Nietzsche, New York, 1954, p. 576. 2. Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, 1968, p. 682. 3. I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. L. W. Beck, Chicago, 1949, pp. 58–59. 4. I. Kant Anthropolog y from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. M. Gregor, The Hague, 1974, p. 15. 5. R. D. Loewenberg, “From Immanuel Kant’s Self-Analysis,” American Imago 10, 1953, pp. 307–22. 6. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood, Cambridge, 1998, section A536/B564. 7. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, section A828/B856. 8. D. Hume, The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Y. T. Greg, Oxford, 1932, vol. 1, p. 16. 9. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. A Selby-Bigge, Oxford, 1896, section 1.4.7. 10. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, section 1.4.7. 11. Letter to Sir John Pringle, 13 Aug. 1776, in The Letters of David Hume, vol. 2, p. 356.

chapter six 1. See S. Pinker, How the Mind Works, New York, 1997, pp. 268–75. Pinker refers to I. Biedermann, “Visual Object Recognition,” in S. M. Kosslyn and D. N. Osherson, eds., An Invitation to Cognitive Science, vol. 2, Visual Cognition, 2nd ed., Cambridge, MA,1995. For a different, more phenomenological account of visual construction, see J. Willats, Art and Representation, Princeton, 1997.

Notes to Chapter 6  233 2. For an account of the anthropological investigation of color terms, see B. Berlin and P. Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Berkeley, 1969. Berlin and Kay’s research led to a series of responses and researches that, as usual, multiplied questions and made clear, definitive answers hard to reach. See, e.g., J. Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, London, 1993, chaps. 2 and 7, and his chapter, entitled “Colour and Culture,” in T. Lamb and J. Bourriau, eds., Colour: Art and Science, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 186–93. Gage is rather skeptical of Berlin and Kay (it is not clear to me what is meant by “the assimilation of white to black,” the phrase attributed to the anthropologist R. E. MacLaury on p. 187 of Gage’s article). R. H. Barnes, “Anthropological Comparison,” in L. Holy, ed., Comparative Anthropolog y, Oxford, 1987, pp. 119–26, is highly skeptical of Berlin and Kay. J. Lyons, “Colour in Language,” in Lamb and Bourriau, pp. 194–224, who is relatively favorable, asks for more careful formulation of the hypothesis ( pp. 201, 222). See also G. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Chicago, 1987, pp. 24–38. For an evolutionary hypothesis, see R. N. Shepard, “The Perceptual Organization of Colors: An Adaptation to Regularities of the Terrestrial World?” in J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind, New York. D. C. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence, New York: Norton, 1998, chap. 5, deals with the process of color perception. 3. Two general books on color: Lamb and Bourriau, Colour: Art and Science (see note 2, above); and C. A. Riley II, Color Codes, Hanover, NH, 1995. For the history of the use of color in Western painting, see J. Cage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, London, 1993, which is thoroughgoing, though limited to European art. The same author’s Colour and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism, London, 1999, contains wideranging essays. M. Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color, Princeton and Oxford, 2001, is the social history of the color blue in Europe. 4. On the test and the emotional qualities attributed to colors, see the brief account in J. Gage, “Colour and Culture,” in Lamb and Bourriau (see note 2), pp. 189–91. 5. But see A. Jacobson-Wedding, Red-White-Black as a Mode of Thought, Stockholm, 1979. I owe this reference to R. Needham, Circumstantial Deliveries, Berkeley, 1981, p. 47. 6. In the associated footnote, I quote from Pastoureau, Blue (see note 3), pp. 7, 9, 10. On white, black, and red in European antiquity, see Pastoureau, pp. 14–16, and the entry “colours, sacred” in S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., Oxford and New York, 1996, p. 366 (quoting E. Wunderlich, 1925). In some contradiction to the impression left by Pastoureau, who says that in Europe up to the twelfth century blue was an uncommon color ( p. 13), who points out that the Greeks had no simple, unambivalent word for blue, and notes that Latin authors were indifferent or hostile to the color blue ( p. 26), see Gage, Colour and Culture, pp. 11 (blue and yellow were often used in early Greek painting), 12 (for Aristotle, deep blue was one of the five unmixed intermediate colors), 14 (Lucian speaks of bright blue), 15 (Greek painters use blue and green), 16 (mosaics from Pompeii and Herculaneum use vivid blues (also Pastoureau, p. 30 (Latin had eight terms for blues))), 30 (in painting, the Greeks used bright, saturated blues (see also Pastoureau, pp. 27–29)). 7. For a sharp, well-informed criticism of most of the kind of universalizing tendencies I show here, see R. Needham, Circumstantial Deliveries, Berkeley, 1981. For Africa in particular, see the essays in B. Lloyd and J. Gay, eds., Universals of Thought: Some African Evidence, Cambridge,

234  Notes to Chapter 6 1981. The essays are under the general headings of “Perception,” “Cognitive Development,” and “Language.” 8. For the footnote, see C. A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory, Chicago, 1988, pp. 5, 8. The attitude she objects to is exemplified by the research that I depend on, of Paul Ekman and his associates. See, e.g., P. Ekman, ed., Emotion in the Human Face, 2nd ed., Cambridge and Paris, 1982. See also the later summary of his work in the introduction, afterword, and commentaries to his edition of Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd ed., London, 1998. A few, among many, relevant books or articles (I omit books studying Chinese, Japanese, and Indian emotion or personality): A. J. Fridlund and B. Duchaine, “ ‘Facial Expressions of Emotion and the Delusion of the Hermetic Self,” in R. Hare and W. G. Parrott, eds., The Emotions: Social, Cultural, and Biological Dimensions, London, 1996, pp. 259–84; P. Heelas, “Emotion Talk across Cultures,” in Hare and Parrott, The Emotions, pp. 171–99; A. Kleinman and B. Good, eds., Culture and Depression Studies in the Anthropolog y and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder, Berkeley, 1985; G. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Human Mind, Chicago, 1987; R. S. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, New York, 1991; J. Marks and R. T. Ames, eds., Emotions in Asian Thought, Albany, 1995. 9. Plotinus 5.8.1, in Plotinus, trans. A. M. Armstrong, London, 1953, p. 149. 10. E. Panofsky, Idea, New York, 1968, pp. 36ff. 11. See Panofsky, Idea, pp. 49–64; E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images, Oxford, 1972, pp. 172ff; and also A. Chastel, Art et humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique, Paris, 1959, pp. 102ff. 12. Panofsky, Idea, pp. 93–95. 13. Panofsky, Idea, pp. 115–16. 14. In addition to Panofsky, Idea, see, e.g., M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, New York, 1971, pp. 27, 29, 31, 169. 15. H. von Glasenapp, Das Indienbild deutscher Denker, Stuttgart, 1960; R. Schwab, La renaissance orientale, Paris, 1950. Schopenhauer: e.g., The World as Will and Representation, para. 34. Theosophists: B. F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement, Berkeley, 1980, pp. 168–71. 16. B.-A. Scharfstein, Mystical Experience, Oxford and New York, 1973; K. Wilbur, Quantum Questions, Boulder, 1984. 17. See, e.g., P. Vogt, The Blue Riders, Woodbury, NY, 1980, pp. 6–7. 18. Mysticism and European abstract painting, general: Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, 2, From Impressionism to Kandinsky, New York, 1998, pp. 293–371; A. Besancon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, Chicago, 2000 (from roughly Plato to Kandinsky and Malevich); J. Golding, Paths to the Absolute, London, 2000 (on Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still); J. Harrison and P. Wood, eds., Art Theory 1900–1990: An Antholog y of Changing Ideas, London, 1992 (a number of relevant texts); A. Moszynska, Abstract Art, London, 1995 (comprehensive, brief, general); M. Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, Los Angeles and New York, 1986 (from my standpoint, the fullest and most pertinent account).

Notes to Chapter 6  235 Mysticism and European abstract painting, individual artists: V. Spate, “Orphism,” in N. Stangos, ed., Concepts of Modern Art, rev. ed., London, 1981, pp. 88–89; R.-C. W. Long, Kandinsky, Oxford, 1980; H. K. Roethel, Kandinsky, Oxford, 1979; P. Selz, German Expressionistic Painting, Berkeley, 1957, pp. 223–24; but see also N. Kandinsky, Kandinsky et moi, Paris, 1978, p. 270; J. Andrea, ed., Kazimir Malevich, Los Angeles, 1990; S. Faucereau, Kazimir Malévitch, Paris, 1991; Y.-A. Bois, Piet Mondrian, Boston, 1990; F. Elgar, Mondrian, London, 1968; H. Holzman, “Mondrian Biography,” www.snap-draqon.com/MondrianBio.html, 2002; D. Vanier, L’art abstrait, Paris, 1967; J. Milner, Mondrian, London, 1992; D. Sylvester, “Piet Mondrian (1872–1944),” http://artchive.com/artchive/ftptoc/mondrian_ext.html (from D. Sylvester, About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948–1997, London, 1997). 19. Roethel, Kandinsky, p. 18. 20. S. Ringbom, “Transcending the Visible,” in Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art, p. 146. See also, in the same book, C. Blotkamp, “Annunciation of the New Mysticism: Dutch Symbolism and Early Abstraction.” 21. Mondrian, “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art,” pp. 14–15. 22. M. Tuchman, “Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art,” in Tuchman, The Spiritual in Abstract Painting, p. 49; quoted from a 1971 Museum of Modern Art catalogue, Barnett Newman, by T. B. Hess. 23. Ancient Indian aesthetics. General: N. Ray, An Approach to Indian Art, Chandigarh, 1974. Iconography and canons: L. J. N. Banarjea, The Development of Indian Iconography, 3rd ed. (from 2nd ed., 1956), New Delhi, 1974; T. Bhattacharyya, The Canons of Indian Art, 2nd ed., Calcutta, 1963; P. N. Bose, ed., Silpa-Sastram, Lahore, 1929. Poetics: S. K. De, History of Sanskrit Poetics, reprint, 2 vols. in 1, Calcutta, 1977; S. K. De, Sanskrit Poetics as a Study of Aesthetics, Berkeley, 1963; K. C. Pandey, Comparative Aesthetics, vol. 1: Indian Aesthetics, Banaras, 1950; A. K. Ramanujan, “Indian Poetics,” in E. C. Dimock, Jr., et al., The Literatures of India, Chicago, 1974: A. K. Warder, Indian Kavya Literature, vol. 1, Delhi, 1972. 24. Ray, An Approach to Indian Art, p. 177. 25. Ray, An Approach to Indian Art, pp. 266–67. 26. De, History of Sanskrit Poetics; Pandey, Comparative Aesthetics; Ramanujan, “Indian Poetics”; Warder, Indian Kavya Literature, vol. 1. 27. Abhinavagupta: R. Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, Rome, 1956, pp. 55, 87–96; D. H. H. Ingalls, trans., An Antholog y of Indian Court Poetry, Cambridge, MA, 1965, pp. 13ff; D. H. H. Ingalls, J. M. Masson, and M. W. Patwardhan, trans., The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavadhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta, Cambridge, MA, 1990; J. M. Masson and M. W. Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, Poona, 1969, pp. 50–55; Pandey, Comparative Aesthetics, p. 21; Ray, An Approach to Indian Art, pp. 131ff. 28. K. Krishnamoorthy, trans., Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka, Dharwar, India, 1974, p. xxix. See also Warder, Indian Kavya Literature, vol. 1, p. 118. 29. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavadhana, p. 14. 30. In Indian style, Anandavardhana’s Light on [the Doctrine of ] Suggestion consists of verses, meant to be memorized, and a prose commentary on them, which some modern scholars believe is by another, anonymous author. Because there are no marked discrepancies between verses and commentary, I do not distinguish between their different possible authors.

236  Notes to Chapter 6 31. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavadhana, pp. 45, 679–89 (Dhvanyaloka 4.2). 32. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavadhana, pp. 47–48, 243 (Dhvanyaloka 1.1, 1.1.5). 33. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavadhana, p. 721 (Dhvabyaloka 4.16). 34. De, History of Sanskrit Poetics, vol. 2, pp. 21–25; Pandey, Indian Aesthetics, pp. 17–20. 35. See, e.g., M. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era, London, 1948, pp. 388–90. 36. Masson and Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, p. 9. 37. Masson and Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, p. vi, attribute the quoted characterization to “pandits.” And see Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavadhana, pp. 38–39. 38. Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, pp. 87–90; Masson and Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, pp. 56–57; Pandey, Indian Aesthetics, p. 144. 39. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavadhana, pp. 114–16; and Masson and Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, pp. 46–47, 57–58. 40. Masson and Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, pp. 65–67, 70. 41. Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, p. xxii. 42. Masson and Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, p. 13. 43. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavadhana, pp. 120–21; Masson and Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, pp. 12,18–19. 44. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavadhana, pp. 520–26; Masson and Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, pp. vii-viii, 130–59; Pandey, Indian Aesthetics, pp. 196–206. 45. On Abhinava’s philosophy, see Pandey, Abhinavagupta, pp. 293ff. 46. Masson and Patwardhan, Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, pp. x-xiii, 51–52. 47. Chinese aesthetics: W. R. B. Acker, Some Tang and Pre-T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting, pp. xxvii-xxviii, 2 vols., Leiden, 1954; Shou Kwan Lui, “The Six Canons of Hsieh Ho,” Oriental Art N.S. 17, summer, 1971, p. 144; K. Munkata, Ching Hao’s “Pi-fa-chi”: A Note on the Use of the Brush, Artibus Asiae Supplementum 31, Ascona, 1974, pp. 3, 20–21, 24–25. See also O. Siren, The Chinese on the Art of Painting: Translation and Comments (sometimes misleading), Peiping, 1936; and especially S. Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, Cambridge, 1971; and S. Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, Cambridge, MA, 1985. Lin Yutang, The Art of Painting, London, 1967, is knowledgeable but very free. 48. D. Pollard, “Ch’in Literary Theory,” in A. A. Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch’i-chao, Princeton, 1978, pp. 64–65. 49. Acker, Some Pang and Pre-T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting, p. 4. Acker gives a careful explanation of the terms of the canon on pp. xxi­x–liii. 50. From Yang Wei-chen, Precious Mirror for Examining Painting, completed in 1365, as quoted in Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, p. 246. 51. See esp. Acker, Some T’ang and Pre-Pang Texts on Chinese Painting; Shou Kwan Lui, “The Six Canons of Hsieh Ho.”

Notes to Chapters 6 and 12  237 52. Munkata, Ching Hao’s “Pi-fa-chi,” pp. 20–21 note 13, p. 225 note 21. 53. Wen Fong, “The Problem of Forgeries in Chinese Painting,” Artibus Asiae 25, 1962; Wen C. Fong et al., Images of the Mind, Princeton, 1985, p. 171. 54. Rowley, Chinese Painting, pp. 48, 55 55. Siu-kit Wong, “Ch’ing and Ching in the Critical Writings of Wang Fu-chih,” in A. A. Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature . . . , Princeton, 1978, pp. 148–50. 56. J. Ching, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming, New York, 1976, p. 127. 57. Ching, To Acquire Wisdom, pp. 142–44. 58. For Japan and Europe, see S. Odin, Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics, Honolulu, 2001, is a well-researched and well-thought-out exposition of this theme, with examples from modern Western and modern Japanese literature. As is usual, Odin finds the Western origin of the idea in Immanuel Kant, who probably owes the idea to the seventeenth-century empiricists beginning with the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713)—“the first thinker to bring the phenomenon of disinterestedness to light and analyzing it”—and continuing with David Hume, Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, and others. (Quotation from p. 27, quoting J. Stolnitz, “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophical Quarterly 11 (43), p. 100.) I think that it was the work of Edward Bullough that made the “psychical distance” well known.

chapter ten 1. B.-A. Scharfstein, ed., Philosophy East/Philosophy West, Oxford and New York, 1978, chaps. 1, 2 (“Three Philosophical Civilizations: A Preliminary Comparison,” “Scriptures, Revelation, and Reason”). 2. Mesopotamian thought: J. Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, Chicago, 1992 (esp. for “The Dialogue of Pessimism”); S. Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, Oxford, 1989 (esp. for the probable moral of the Gilgamesh epic) p. 150; P. Garelli, “La Pensée préphilosophique en Mésopotamie,” in B. Parain, ed., Histoire de la Philosophie, vol. 1, Paris, 1969, pp. 24–49; T. Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness, New Haven, 1976, chaps. 7 and 8, and epilogue; H. McCall, Mesopo­tamian Myths, Lon­don and Austin, 1990; J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed., Prince­ton, 1955, pp. 600–601 (“The Dialogue of Pessi­mism”). 3. Egyptian thought: J. Assmann, Maat, l’Eg ypte pharaonique et l’ideé de justice sociale, Paris, 1989; H. Brunner, “Die Lehren,” in Äg yptologie: Literatur, vol. 1.1 of B. Spuler, ed., Handbuch der Orientalistik: Der Nahe und der Mittlere Osten, Leiden, 1970; E. Hornung, Concep­tions of God in Ancient Eg ypt, London, 1983, esp. “Conclusion”; A. Loprieno, ed., Ancient Eg yptian Literature: History and Forms, Leiden, 1996 (see chaps. on didactic literature, theology and literature [in French], and myth and literature; the index of topics does not contain the entry philosophy); J. Yoyotte, “La Pensée Préphilosophique en Egypte,” in B. Parain, ed., Histoire de la Philosophie, vol. 1, pp. 1–23. 4. Eskimo thought: K. Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, vol. 7 (1) of Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24, 1929, pp. 54–56. See also Rasmussen’s other books.

238  Notes to Chapter 10 5. C. Leslau and W. Leslau, African Proverbs, Mount Vernon, N.Y., 1962, pp. 8, 9, 19, 48, 51. 6. African thought, dilemma tales: W. Bascom, “African Dilemma Tales: An Introduc­tion,” in R. M. Dorson, ed., African Folklore, New York, 1972, pp. 148–49; R. D. Abrams, African Folktales, New York, 1983, part 2. The character and rationality of African thought: D. Forde, ed., African Worlds, London, 1954; R. Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West, Cambridge, 1993 (Horton finds “features of cognitive life that were common to both Africa and the West” and argues that contextual explanation is also needed for the ideas that Westerners consider rationally founded [ pp. 12, 14]); J. S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophies, Garden City, 1970. Two (among many) monographic studies: J. Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa, Princeton, 1982 (shows how the Fang (of Gabon) have tried “to recapture the totality of the old way of life” ( p. 9)); W. McGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, Chicago, 1986 (Kongo [Zaire] life as it reflects the tension between religious, political, and economic values and leads to the “speculative and explanatory thought” that religion makes possible [ p. 250]). Argument over the existence of African philosophy, general: V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington, 1988, chap. 5 (surveys the debates of anthropologists and of contemporary African philosophers); P. Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher, New York, 1927 (defends the implicitly rational character of so-called primitive thought; in contrast to Horton [above], philosophically unsophisticated). Argument over the existence of African philosophy, specific constructions or denials: K. Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme, Cambridge, 1987; M. Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli, London, 1965; P. Hountondji, African Philosophy, London, 1983; P. Ikunobe, “The Parochial Universalist Conception of ‘Philosophy,’ ” Philosophy East and West 47.2 (April 1997); H. O. Oruka, ed., Sage Philosophy, Leiden, 1990; A. Kagame, La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’Être, Brussels, n.d.; P. Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, Paris, 1959; K. Wiredu, Philosophy and an African Culture, Cambridge, 1980. 7. Indian philosophy: S. Dasgupta, Indian Idealism, Cambridge, 1933 (a series of lucid, relatively concentrated lectures); E. Frauwallner, History of Indian Philoso­phy, 2 vols., Delhi, 1973 (a not particularly elegant but generally reliable translation of the German original, an unfinished work of original scholar­ship that tempts fate by trying to work out the historical develop­ment of early Indian philosophy); B. K. Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge, Oxford, 1988; B. K. Matilal, Logical and Ethical Issues of Religious Belief, Calcutta, 1982; B. K. Matilal, Logic, Language, and Reality, Delhi, 1985; B. K. Matilal, The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language, Delhi, 1990 (Matilal was a noteworthy mediator between Indian and Western, especially analytical, philosophy);  J. N. Mohanty, Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought, Oxford, 1992; K. H. Potter, Presuppositions of India’s Philosophy, New Delhi, 1965; K. N. Tiwari, ed., Suffering: Indian Perspectives, Delhi, 1986 (especially the essays by K. H. Potter, B. K. Matilal, and A. Sharma). Relations between Indian and European philosophy: H. von Glasenapp, Das Indienbild deutscher Denker, Stuttgart, 1960; W. Halbfass, India and Europe, Albany, 1988 (a clear-minded, very knowledgeable account of the intellectual relationship); S. S. Rama Rao Pappu and R. Puli-

Notes to Chapter 10  239 gandla, Indian Philosophy: Past and Future, Delhi, 1983 (contemporary Indian philosophers assessing the present status of their tradition); E. J. Sharpe, The Universal Gita: Western Images of the Bhagavadgita, London, 1985; S. Sommerfeld, Indienschau und Indiendeutung romantischer Philosophen, Zürich, 1943. Chinese philosophy: R. E. Allinson, ed., Understanding the Chinese Mind, Hong Kong, 1989; Fung Yu-lan (in Chinese order, family name first), A History of Chinese Philosophy, 2nd ed., 2 vols., Princeton, 1952, 1953 (a standard work that, unlike the other histories of Chinese philosophy mentioned here, continues up to the twentieth century); Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, New York, 1948; Qi Gong, “The Relationships between Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting,” in A. Murck and W. C. Fong, eds., Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligra­phy, and Painting, New York and Princeton, 1991, pp. 11–20; A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophi­cal Argument in Ancient China, La Salle, 1989 (philosophically sharp); H. Lenk and G. Paul, Epistemological Issues in Classical Chinese Philosophy, Buffalo, 1993; F. W. Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China, 2nd ed., New York, 1989 (brief, clear, and intelli­ gent); B. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, Cambridge, 1985 (in particular, alert to the relation between Chinese and world culture). Relations between Chinese and European philosophy: J. Ching and W. Oxtoby, eds., Discovering China: European Interpretations in the Enlightenment, Rochester, 1992; J. Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, Cambridge, 1982; D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinolog y, Honolulu, 1989. Japanese philosophy: L. Brüll, Die Japanische Philosophie, Darmstadt, 1989. I include European philosophy in this note for the sake of the symmetry I am trying to preserve, but to keep the bibliography manageable, confine it to a few recent books on the history of the history of Western philosophy: L. Braun, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie, Paris, 1973; L. Goldsetzer, Die Philosophie der Philosophiegeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, Mannheim, 1968; T. Z. Lavine and V. Tejera, eds., History and Anti-History in Philosophy, Dordrecht, 1989; R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History, Cambridge, 1981; U. J. Schneider, Die Vergangenheit des Geistes: Eine Archäologie der Philosophiegeschichte, Frankfurt, 1990. 8. This kind of statement has been repeated too often to document, but one can find a variant in S. Radhakrishnan’s History of Indian Philosophy, 2 vols., London, 1923, 1927 (see the introductory pages of vol. 1). My representation of the view that I think mistaken is paraphrased in part from P. T. Raju, “The Western and the Indian Philosophical Traditions,” in S. S. Rama Rao Pappu and R. Puligandla, eds., Indian Philosophy: Past and Future, pp. 69–71, 79. 9. E. W. Burlingame, Buddhist Parables, New Haven, 1922, pp. 92–94. 10. H. Lenk, introduction to Lenk and Paul, eds., Epistemological Issues in Classical Chinese Philosophy, p. 6. 11. D. Krishna, M. P. Rege, R. C. Dwivedi, and M. Lath, eds., Samvada, Delhi, 1991. For a broader description see D. Krishna, “Emerging New Approaches in the Study of Classical Indian Philo­sophy,” in G. Fløistad, ed, Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 7, Asian Philosophy, Dordrecht, 1993. The quotation is from p. 73. 12. Krishna, “Emerging New Approaches in the Study of Classical Indian Philosophy,” p. 75. 13. W. Halbfass, On Being and What There Is, Albany, 1992, pp. 248–55. The translation is of

240  Notes to Chapters 10–11 a passage from the commentary of Vyomasiva, of perhaps the ninth century CE on the standard Vaisheshika treatise written by Prasastapada, of perhaps the sixth century CE. 14. See the attempts made by Mohanty in his Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought or those made by a variety of Indian philosophers in Rama Rao Pappu and Puligandla, eds., Indian Philosophy: Past and Future, Delhi, 1983. 15. This list has been mostly drawn from the tables of contents of  J. Sinha, Indian Psycholog y, 2 vols., Calcutta, 1958, 1961. 16. The passage is from Hsün Tzu 23, as translated word for word in Bodde, Chinese Thought, Society, and Science, p. 51, and normally in B. Watson, trans., Hsün Tzu: Basic Writings, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963, p. 162. 17. Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching 1.2, trans. D. C. Lau, Hong Kong, 1982, p. 5 (the same translation appears in Penguin Books). 18. Bodde, Chinese Thought, Society, and Science, pp. 74–80.

chapter eleven 1. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech, London, 1991, p. 576 (from “An Apology for Raymond Sebond”). 2. Halbfass, India and Europe, p. 356. 3. D. Twitchett, The Writing of Official History under the T’ang, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 84–91. 4. B. Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, New York, 1958, p. 190. 5. On Aristotle as historian of philosophy, see Braun, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie, pp. 16–20. 6. Ibid., pp. 33–36. 7. Ibid., pp. 119–37. For the history’s eminent readers, see p. 121. 8. Ibid., pp. 126, 135. 9. Ibid., pp. 184–203. 10. Ibid., pp. 193–94. 11. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller, Oxford, 1985, p. 5. 12. See Halbfass, India and Europe, chap. 6, and H. von Glasenapp, Das Indienbild deutscher Denker, Stuttgart, 1960. The quotation on Chinese religion is from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (of 1827), one-volume ed., ed. P. C. Hodgson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p. 249. 13. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Screech, pp. 1209–10. As Screech notes, Montaigne quotes Quintilian 10.3.6, “explaining why peasant and educated folk speak more directly and less hesitantly.” 14. L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Oxford, p. 44e; The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Screech, p. 1258 (On Experience). 15. See the translations of Chuang-tzu by Graham, Mair, and Watson. The translation used here is from A. Birrell, Chinese Mytholog y, Baltimore, 1993, p. 100. Birrell translates Hun Tun’s name as Confusion, which seems to me confusing, so I have substituted Formless, another translation she suggests.

Notes to Chapters 11 and 13  241 16. This ambiguous passage is from the famous hymn, Rigveda 10.129. 17. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Screech, p. 707 (“On Glory”). After consulting the original text I have changed the translation somewhat. 18. See, e.g., N. Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie, Oxford, 1983.

chapter thirteen 1. S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, London, 1909, pp. 1–10; J. M. Masson, The Oceanic Feeling, Dordrecht, 1980, pp. 35–50. 2. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 3. 3. On the early life of children, see J. Bowlby, Separation, New York, 1980; D. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, New York, 1985; and D. Stern, Diary of a Baby, New York, 1990. For the translation of children’s memories and yearnings into various stories and traditional ideals see S. Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, New Delhi, 1990; and, especially, S. Kakar and J. M. Ross, Tales of Love, Sex, and Danger, London, 1987. 4. B. Stimpson, Paul Valéry and Music, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 11–13. 5. Stimpson, Paul Valéry, pp. 25, 47, 45, 48; C. J. Whiting, Paul Valéry, London, 1978, pp. 48, 51; and P. Valéry, Aesthetics, Princeton, 1971, p. 54 (quoted). 6. Whiting, Paul Valéry, p. 55 (from Valéry, Cahiers II, 1074); Valéry, Aesthetics, p. 71. 7. P. Valéry, Poems, vol. 2, trans. D. Paul, Princeton, 1984, pp. 421, 423, 429. 8. Valéry, Poems, vol. 2, pp. 418, 400. For parallelisms between poetry and music, see L. Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After, Berkeley, 1084. 9. M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 1950–60, trans. A. Hofstadter, New York, 1971, pp. 12, 95. 10. R. Wagner, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. S. Spencer and B. Millington, Lon­ don, 1987. See “Uber die Benennung ‘Musikdrama,’ ” in Wagner’s Sämtliche Schriften und Dich­ tungen, Volks-Ausgabe, 14 vols,, Leipzig, n.d., vol. 9, p. 306. 11. As quoted in E. Gartenberg, Mahler, New York, 1978, p. 228. 12. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. 13. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, chap. 7. 14. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, pp. 139–46. 15. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, pp. 151–58. 16. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, pp. 162–63. 17. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, pp. 175–81. 18. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 226. 19. F. Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. N. N. Glatzer, New York, 1983, p. 456. 20. M. Csikszentmihalyi and I. Csikszentmihalyi, Optimal Experience: Studies of Flow in Consciousness, Cambridge, 1988. 21. P. Bennett, “In Nanda Bab’s House,” in O. M. Lynch, ed., Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India, Berkeley, 1990, p. 185. 22. P. Toomey, “Krishna’s Consuming Passions,” in O. M. Lynch, ed., Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India, Berkeley, 1990, pp. 175, 171. 23. C. R. Brooks, “Hare Krishna, Radhe Shyam,” in O. M. Lynch, ed., Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India, Berkeley, 1990, p. 264.

242  Notes to Chapter 13 24. Kakar, Intimate Relations, p. 19. 25. Kakar, Intimate Relations, p. 118. On the congeniality of  Jung’s doctrine, see D. M. Wulff, “Prolegomenon to a Psychology for the Goddess,” in Divine Consort, ed. J. S. Hawley and D. M. Wulff, Boston, 1986. 26. A. Roland, In Search of Self in India and Japan, Princeton, 1988, p. 263. 27. Kakar, Intimate Relations, p. 130. 28. Kakar, Intimate Relations, p. 37. 29. Kakar, Intimate Relations, p. 144. 30. A. Roland, In Search of Self in India and Japan, Princeton, 1988, pp. 253–54, 299–307. 31. Here I have drawn on A. Collins, “From Brahman to a Blade of Grass.” Journal of Indian Philosophy, June 1991. Collins, who makes particular use of a psychoanalytic concept of narcissism, draws interesting analogies between Indian mythology, traditional Indian ideas (e.g., karma), and the psychological development of the Indian self. 32. R. Ochse, Before the Gates of Excellence: The Determinants of Creative Genius, Cambridge, 1990 gives an up-to-date account of the psychology of creativity. Music is dealt with in S. R. Feder, R. L. Karmel, and G. H. Pollock, eds., Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music, Madison, Conn., 1990. For philosophy and art see, respectively, B.-A. Scharfstein, The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought, Oxford and New York, 1980; and B.-A. Scharfstein, Of Birds, Beasts, and Other Artists: An Essay on the Universality of Art, New York, 1988. For science, one might begin with A. Roe, The Making of a Scientist, New York, 1953; D. L. Hull, Science as a Process, Chicago, 1988, is a detailed and convincing case history of the effect of scientist’s human relations on their work (and vice versa). For world art, try B.-A. Scharfstein, Art without Borders: A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity, Chicago, 2009.