HYLAS AND PHILONOUS

 

To promote his theory of existence through perception, Berkeley uses the quite frequent, since Plato, form of the Dialogue,--- in his case, between a helpful curious questioner (Hylas) and himself (Philonous). Coming to see Philonous, right after the introductory greetings, Hylas asks the first leading question: “Can anything be more fantastical, more repugnant to Common Sense, or a more manifest piece of Skepticism, than to believe that there is no such thing as matter?” (Considering that the questioner’s name Hylas relates to the Greek word “hylos,” “matter,” the ironic undertone of the question cannot escape the reader.)

Now Philonous engages Hylas in a typical Socratic discussion, asking questions to which the other answers either yes or no.

“…In reading a book, what I immediately perceive are the letters; but mediately, or by means of these, are suggested to my mind the notions of God, virtue, truth, etc. Now, that the letters are truly sensible things, or perceived by sense, there is no doubt: but I would know whether you take the things suggested by them to be so too.” (Hylas: No.) “It seems then, that by sensible things you mean those only which can be perceived immediately by sense?” (Hylas: Yes.) “Doth it not follow from this that, though I see one part of the sky red, and another blue, and that my reason doth thence evidently conclude there must be a cause of that diversity of colors, yet that cause cannot be said to be a sensible thing, or perceived by the sense of seeing?” (Hylas: Yes.) “In like manner, though I hear variety of sounds, I cannot be said to hear the causes of those sounds?” (Hylas: No.) “The point then is agreed between us that sensible things are those only which are immediately perceived by sense. You will further inform me, whether we immediately perceive by sight anything besides light and colors and figures; or by hearing, anything but sounds; by the palate, anything besides tastes; by the smell, besides odors; or by the touch, more than tangible qualities… It seems, therefore, that if you take away all sensible qualities, there remains nothing sensible? Sensible things, therefore, are nothing else but so many sensible qualities, or combinations of sensible qualities?”

Having thus prepared the ground, Philonous launches his attack: “Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?” But the brave Hylas is not ready to concede: “To exist is one thing, and to be perceived is another.” Philonous, however, finishes him off with this famous aquatic argument: “Suppose now one of your hands hot, and the other cold, and that they are both at once put into the same vessel of water, in an intermediate state; will not the water seem cold to one hand, and warm to the other?” To which Hylas concedes: “Well, since it must be so, I am content to yield this point, and acknowledge that heat and cold are only sensations existing in our minds.” Then, taking different senses one by one, Philonous proceeds to convince Hylas that whatever is immediately perceived is an idea, and it is an absurdity to seek any ideas outside the mind.

As the reader may have noticed, Berkeley’s argument sleekly jumps from reality to logic, just like Zeno the Eleatic makes a similar jump in his paradoxes, resulting in nonsense, which is obvious, but rather difficult to refute while remaining on those same logical grounds. And then, as soon as our discussion leaves the terra firma, where common sense is still with us to open our eyes to the presence of absurdity, reaching into the rarefied layers of the upper atmosphere, where thinking, like breathing, becomes more strained, our senses become somewhat blurred, and our argument loses its lifeline to the reality. Otherwise, how could we find Hegel, for instance, subscribing to some of the most outrageous of Berkeley’s absurdities? Here is Russell:

“Berkeley, as we have seen, thinks that there are logical reasons proving that only minds and mental events can exist. This view, on other grounds, is also held by Hegel and his followers. I believe this to be a complete mistake. Such a statement as there was a time before life existed on this planet, whether true or false, cannot be condemned on grounds of logic any more than there are multiplication sums which no one will have ever worked out. To be observed or to be a precept is merely to have effects of certain kinds, and there is no logical reason why all events should have effects of these kinds.”

Russell concludes his Berkeley chapter with this paragraph:

“It will be seen that… a mind and a piece of matter are each of them a group of events.” There is no reason why every event should belong to a group of one kind or the other, and there is no reason why some events shouldn’t belong to both groups; therefore some events may be neither mental nor material and other events may be both. As to this, only detailed empirical considerations can decide.

…One of my Apte Dictums says: Here is a philosophical riddle: God created nonsense, and saw that it was good… It gives two solutions: Solution 1: The Irrational is just as important as The Rational. And Solution 2: Find it at the end of my Berkeley series in the Magnificent Shadows. I hope that the reader understands its meaning now: Only the irrational, that is, nonsense, can lead us off the pedestrian track of thinking into the wild virgin country, where anything becomes possible, and where life becomes truly interesting, poetic, I can say. And, of course, George Berkeley, like a truly great philosopher, leads us into his own realm of nonsense, and that nonsense is good.

 

BERKELEY'S IDEA

 

There is a brainy quirk being told to the novices of science charades, to the effect that there can be no noise if there is no one there to hear it. Which should instantly bring the name of George Berkeley to our mind.

There was already another curious although perhaps totally irrelevant quirk concerning Berkeley in my past experience. When in my young years I first learned about his theory, I was somehow particularly impressed that he was a bishop, obviously unaware then of the fact that he wrote the definitive exposition of his theory in 1713 at the age of twenty-eight, which was long before he would become a bishop…

But enough of such quirks. The reason why I would like to connect Berkeley to the first conundrum is that the gist of his theory of ideas boils down to the statement that all matter exists by virtue of perception only. Take away our perception of it, and all matter will cease to exist.

There is a necessary clarification of this nonsensical theory to the effect that, of course, our earth and things on it exist without having to be perceived by us humans, because all Creation is already being perceived by God in perpetuity, and, in that sense, none of the material world owes its ultimate existence to us, but rather to its Creator. Thus, there will always be noise, as there is always the eternal Someone to hear it.

Well, even with this helpful clarification, this theory remains nonsensical to common sense. Yet, instead of calling George Berkeley a madman, or a charlatan, we call him a great philosopher, and we will surely keep calling him that for as long as philosophy as such endures. I do hope that my reader is no longer bewildered and does not want to ask why, as we have discussed this subject extensively throughout the previous pages. In philosophy it doesn’t matter what nonsense our philosopher utters (like, say, there is no way for Achilles to ever outrace the slowest turtle in the world, as long as it gets a head start and keeps moving), but the quality and nature of his (in this case, Zeno’s) arguments in support of it do matter, and these arguments are what determines the greatness of the philosopher. (There are numerous nuances to this rather coarse statement, but its essence is true.) There are also collateral discoveries, that happen to be made along the way, which often represent far higher values than the principal theme and argument of the discussion. We shall, therefore, seek the value of Berkeley’s arguments and collaterals, rather than the validity of his wacky theory, for the remainder of this entry.

George Berkeley’s (1685-1753) fame rests mainly on his two works (A Treatise Concerning The Principles of Human Knowledge [1710], and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (the first name is a play on the Greek word “matter,” and the second name means “Lover of the Intellect,” which is the name the author reserves for himself, in these Dialogues) [1713], both written and published in his twenties.

While talking about our need to distinguish the object from its perception, he introduces a new argument, identifying all things as bundles of sensible qualities, which somehow get intertwined together, enabling us to identify each such bundle with the particular object which it represents. But, because of the separation of perception from the object and placing the former with the perceiving subject who forms ideas on the basis of his perception, Berkeley’s theory has become known as subjective idealism, and it has had a great impact on the development of the empirical method of obtaining knowledge.

Thus, from Berkeley’s ostensibly most improbable fantasy follows a set of extremely practicable principles. One is that any knowledge of the world is to be obtained only through direct perception. Hence, the ideal form of scientific knowledge is to be obtained by pursuing pure de-intellectualized perceptions. Therefore, if individuals would pursue these, we should be able to obtain deepest insights into the natural world, and the world of human thought and action that is available to man. And finally, the goal of all science should be thus to de-intellectualize or de-conceptualize, and thereby to purify, human perceptions.

In his Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer writes of him: “Berkeley was, therefore, the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously, and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity. He is the father of idealism.”

(Curiously, compare Berkeley’s idea to Lenin’s definition of matter as “objective reality given to us in sensations.” Come to think of it, how far is Lenin’s objective materialism from Berkeley’s subjective idealism?..)

Need I add that Berkeley’s Idea had also given rise to a host of empirical philosophies, the foremost among them being that of David Hume (whose own series will be immediately following the Berkeley series).

 

LEIBNIZ IN PRICELESS SELECTIONS

 

Leibniz was a genius philosopher, and his thoughts expressed in aphoristic form are priceless for any such collection. As always, I am not motivated by quoting for quote sake. In my personal selection of favorites, I am omitting many of his most famous, signature quotes, to focus on those only, to which I can relate in the explicitly idiosyncratic manner, to which my accompanying comments provide all necessary corroboration. So, here they are, his quotes and my comments.---

---“To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.” (The Elements of True Piety; circa 1677.)

This thought of a younger Leibniz rings a very powerful bell in my memory. This is what my mother used to tell me, in a slightly different way, as I reveal in my posted entry Proof Of True Friendship (February 11^th, 2012). There it says that the truest friend is revealed not so much in need as in his or her ability to be happy upon your happiness, as if it were their own. The parallel is clear … I wonder if my mother was somehow paraphrasing Leibniz, or, far more likely, had come up with this wisdom independently, out of her life experience…

---“Omne possibile exigit existere.” (“Everything that is possible demands to exist.”) (De veritatibus primis; 1686.)

Here’s one of the most profound ideas formulated on behalf of philosophy and science... I am jokingly alluding here to Kant’s famous boast, but otherwise, I am quite serious. The only catch is not to decide this matter ex post facto (It exists, ergo it was possible), but to ideate a possibility before the actual existence is discovered… The more I think about it, the more I realize how breathtaking this Leibniz thought truly is!

---“It is necessary to act conformably to the presumptive will of God, in so far as we are able to judge of it, trying with all our might to contribute to the general welfare and particularly to the ornamentation and the perfection of that which touches us, or of that which is nigh and, so to speak, at our hand.” (Discours de Metaphysique; 1686.)

Need I spell it out that Leibniz wrote this long before Kant would come up with his Categorical Imperative, and a very similar discourse on the principles of moral behavior?

--“One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from the dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.”

(Of the Division of the Sciences, Book 4, Chapter 21; written in 1704; published in 1765).

Definitions, definitions, definitions! Haven’t we been here before? But Leibniz was here long before us. Oh, yes, our friend Epictetus had been near the same place long before Leibniz, but not in such a sophisticated manner, tying science with linguistics, and words with scientific terms…

---“Now this supreme wisdom, united to goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best. For, as a lesser evil is a kind of good, even so a lesser good is a kind of evil, once it stands in the way of a greater good; and it would be something to correct in the actions of God if it were possible to the better. As in mathematics, when there is no maximum nor minimum, in short, nothing distinguished, everything is done equally, or when that is not, nothing at all is done: so it may be said likewise in respect of perfect wisdom, which is no less orderly than mathematics, that if there were not the best (optimum) among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any.” (Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God and Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil; 1710.)

I invite the reader already familiar with my treatment of evil as a product of the freedom of choice to make a comparison here with Leibniz’ proposition. In matters of choice, “a lesser evil” indicates a better choice, and therefore, a good thing, when compared to the “greater evil” of the wrong choice, which is a bad thing. On the other hand, “a lesser good” does indeed turn itself into a bad thing, even if it is intrinsically good, if we compare it to the “greater good,” which must be the one and only good thing, in matters of choice. This consideration, so important to our thinking about the freedom of choice, organically brings Leibniz to his most famous idea of our world being “the best of all possible worlds” on the grounds of the logical conclusion that “the second best” is a bad thing…

---“Music is the pleasure which the human mind experiences from counting, without being aware that it is counting.” (from Leibniz’ Letter to Christian Goldbach, of April 17, 1712.)

It is absolutely delightful to find this comparison of music to mathematics although it becomes less original in the shadow of a similar effort made by Leibniz’ senior partner Pythagoras. Yet, it was not Pythagoras but Leibniz whom Schopenhauer would later choose to paraphrase in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: Book I, as: “Musica est exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi.” (“Music is a hidden metaphysical exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is philosophizing.”)

“There are also two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible: truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. When a truth is necessary, reason can be found by analysis, resolving it into more simple ideas and truths, until we come to those which are primary.” (Monadologie; 1714.)

This passage is very close to my two related lines of thinking on the question of truth. On the one hand, my skepticism about the” truth of fact” finds a genius champion in Leibniz, whom in the future I can always be calling as an expert witness on this subject. On the other hand, my concept of “truth of creation” holds well here, considering that the only “lie” to be concerned about there, would be an internal contradiction. Thus, my verification of truth in this instance, would be a thorough analysis and careful reasoning which turns the truth of this nature into a necessity, in the absence of self-contradictions, and its opposite within the framework of the same “fiction,” a total impossibility, as the said opposite immediately exposes itself as an internal contradiction, and therefore a lie.

---“These principles have given me a way of explaining naturally the union or rather the mutual conformity of the soul and the organic body. The soul follows its own laws and the body likewise follows its own laws; and they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.” (Monadologie; 1714.)

Remember Nietzsche’s splendid observation to the effect that we are by no means masters of our thoughts, as they come and go on their own will, not ours. Curiously, the Leibniz passage above addresses the same question (“the soul follows its own laws and the body likewise follows its own laws”), but he resolves this paradox immediately by stressing that they are not totally disattached, which would have been an absurdity, but that “they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.”

---“A great doctor kills more people than a great general.” (Alas, I have not been able, so far, to ascertain the Leibniz work, from which this wonderful quote has been sprung.)

Doctor James Tyler Kent, my frequently mentioned homoeopathic authority, and a great philosophizer too, candidly admits that before a physician reaches the end of his practice, he sends a lot of patients to the other world, as a direct result of his mistakes, but the difference between an average doctor and a great doctor is that the latter always learns a lot from each of his lethal mistakes, and thus gains a priceless experience that he starts using in much more rewarding instances of spectacular patient healing.

 

 

PROBABILITIES OF EXISTENCE

 

There is a connection of sorts between Leibniz’s published and esoteric philosophies. We shall enter it via his famous doctrine of many possible worlds. A world is possible if it does not contradict the laws of logic. In my understanding, any world can start with any kind of premise, or hypothesis, even the most fantastic one, as long as the logic of the development of this hypothesis is flawless, in which case, it is as perfectly viable as any other one. (In other words, which I have been using, as long as the creation is true within its properly defined boundaries.)

Now, according to Leibniz, an infinite number of possibilities of world creation existed to God, but, being good, He could only be satisfied with the creation of the best of all possible worlds, determined in this case by the greatest excess of good over evil within it. The existence of evil as such is necessitated within God’s creation by the presence within it of the goodness of free will, which, being a greater good than the fact of the collateral evil, wins over the alternative. In other words, a world with both free will and evil within it (the former cannot logically exist without the latter) is better than a world without evil, and, consequently, without freedom of the will. (The preceding discussion shows how much affinity my own thinking on this subject has with Leibniz’s. It is the more regrettable, for this reason, that Leibniz was a mean, unpleasant man, in which aspect of character we are worlds apart with him.)

And now comes the most philosophically interesting part of Leibniz’s philosophy, even more valuable for the fact that, looking back, it is unique to him in its complex wholeness. Rather than retelling it in my own words, which I may eventually end up doing, let me, once again, quote Bertrand Russell on it:

“There is… a point, which is very curious. At most times, Leibniz represents the Creation as a free act of God, requiring the exercise of His Will. According to this doctrine, the determination of what actually exists is not effected by observation, but must proceed by way of God’s Goodness. Apart from God’s Goodness, which leads him to create the best possible world, there is no a priori reason why one thing should exist, rather than another…

But… there is a quite different theory as to why some things exist and others, equally possible, do not. According to this view (laid out in Leibniz’s unpublished papers) , everything that does not exist struggles to exist, but not all possibles can exist, because they are not all ‘compossible.’ It may be possible for A or B to exist on their own but not together in which case A and B are not compossible. In other words, two or more things are only compossible when it is possible for all of them to exist together. Leibniz seems to have imagined a sort of war in the Limbo inhabited by essences all trying to exist; in this war, groups of compossibles combine, and the largest group of compossibles wins… Leibniz even uses this conception as a way of defining existence: “The existent may be defined as that which is compatible with more things than is anything incompatible with itself… The existent is the being which is compatible with the most things.”

In this account there is no mention of God, and apparently no act of creation. Nor is there need of anything but pure logic for determining what exists. The question whether A and B are compossible is for Leibniz a logical question: does the existence of both A and B involve a contradiction? It follows that in theory logic can decide what group of compossibles is the largest, and this group consequently will exist.

This is a breathtaking philosophical exercise on Leibniz’s part squarely putting him in a place of the highest honor among the pre-Socratics. Compare this to Empedocles’ ontology, for instance! Alas, poor Nietzsche missed the discovery and publication of Leibniz’s papers by a few decades; otherwise, he would have been eager to communicate with him, among those selected underworld shadows, either raising their number to nine, or at somebody else’s expense. I am particularly impressed by Leibniz’s leap off the beaten track, by his return to the noble pre-Socratic origins of philosophy, as well as grateful to him for providing me with ample intellectual fodder to further develop my truth-of-creation theory. In Leibniz’s bold and unorthodox cosmogony I see a clash of what I perceive as incompatible creations, which must coexist in separateness, as the basic ontological law of coexistence, but, somehow, got themselves embroiled in an internecine war, by unlawfully intruding into each other’s sovereign territory… What a supreme intellectual feast! Thank you, Leibniz!

 

THE LEIBNIZ COMET

Having in the previous entry agonized over the fact that our dear Leibniz was not a nice man by any stretch of imagination, I still have this entry left to give him his due as one of the greatest geniuses of all time. In the words of the English essayist Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), which have inspired the title of this entry: “There are such people as Leibnizes on this earth, and their office seems not to be that of planets to revolve within the limits of one system, but that of comets: to connect different systems together.” Having studied a long time ago Frege’s mathematical logic, this becomes a personal thing for me to try to reach into the depths of Leibniz’s genius (as deep as I can), to find out how this great intellect was capable of overturning the millennia of Aristotelian unassailable logic (not that the latter was to be proven faulty in any measurable way, but by the same token as Lobachevsky, and, perhaps, even Gauss before him, would be much later capable of reaching beyond the Euclidian flat-earth truth) and produce the science of mathematical logic, which, most ironically, was never published in his lifetime, but was kept virtually under lock and key until the twentieth century when, to everybody’s great astonishment, it was accidentally discovered. But this thrilling incursion into Leibniz’s logic will take place much later, if at all, under the customary condition, by now, that I shall have the luxury of time in the future to engage myself in this adventure.

Leibniz’s philosophy (of the published kind) is most famous for the eerie fantastic concept of “windowless monads.” Here again we are turning to our Bertrand Russell to provide us with the stock summary (I have compressed and rearranged this summary, to the point that it no longer looks like his quotation):

Like Dèscartes and Spinoza, Leibniz based his philosophy on the notion of substance, but he differed from them radically as regards the relation of mind and matter and the number of substances. Dèscartes allowed three substances: God, mind, and matter; Spinoza admitted God alone. In Dèscartes’ view extension is the essence of matter; for Spinoza both extension and matter are attributes of God. Leibniz held that extension cannot be an attribute of a substance. He believed in an infinite number of substances, called monads. Each can be roughly likened to a physical point, but in fact each monad is a soul. This follows naturally from the rejection of extension, leaving thought as the only remaining possible essential attribute. Thus, Leibniz is led to deny the reality of matter, and to substitute an infinite family of souls… The Cartesian doctrine that substances cannot interact was retained by Leibniz. No two monads, he declared, can ever have any causal relation to each other. “Monads are windowless,” in his words. The semblance of interaction is produced by a “pre-established harmony” between the changes in one monad and another. This parallels the concept of two clocks which strike time simultaneously not because of their interaction, but because of their accuracy in keeping the correct time.

Monads form a hierarchy and thus in the human body, which consists of monads entirely, there is one that is dominant, which is what is called the soul of the person to whom the body belongs.

Of the infinite number of monads, no two are exactly alike. (This is one of his famous principles called the “identity of indiscernibles,” also known as Leibniz’s Law.)

Talking about Leibniz’s fundamental philosophical Principles, here they are:

Identity. If a proposition is true, then its negation is false, and vice versa.

Identity of indiscernibles. Two things are identical if and only if they share the same properties.

Sufficient reason. There must be a sufficient reason often known only to God for anything to exist, for any event to occur, for any truth to obtain.

Pre-established harmony. The appropriate nature of each substance brings it about that what happens to one, corresponds to what happens to the others, without, however, their acting upon one another directly. (Discourse on Metaphysics, XIV) A dropped glass shatters because it knows it has hit the ground, and not because the impact with the ground compels the glass to split.

Continuity. Natura non saltum facit. A mathematical analog to this principle would proceed as follows. If a function describes a transformation of something to which continuity applies, then its domain and range are both dense sets.

Optimism. God assuredly always chooses the best.

Plenitude. He believed that the best of all possible worlds actualizes every genuine possibility, and argued, in Théodicée, that this best of all possible worlds would contain all possibilities, with our finite experience of eternity giving no reason to dispute nature’s perfection.

A much more questionable endeavor on Leibniz’s part was to finalize the corpus of metaphysical proofs of God’s existence. (The reader knows of my objection, as a matter of principle, to any effort to prove matters of faith, under the slogan: if the proof were available, who would need the faith?) Still, Leibniz made this effort obviously in vain, but for us it has the indisputable value of giving us these grounds for arguing with him. His arguments are (following Russell’s order):

(1) the ontological argument; (2) the cosmological argument; (3) the argument from the eternal truths; (4) the argument from the pre-established harmony, which may be generalized into the argument from design, or the physico-theological argument, as Kant calls it.

The ontological argument is terribly arcane, and at the end of a successful demonstration the proof is most probably achieved through the listeners complete bafflement and resignation to the prover, rather than by a genuinely successful proof of anything whatsoever. The argument strives to prove the existence of God by virtue of the existence of the idea of God. Its silliness becomes instantly exposed when we consider any of the universally known purely fictitious characters, like, say, Zeus of the Greeks, or Goethe’s Mephistopheles. Many of the heroes of literary fiction and folklore have very elaborate ideas spun around their existence but that kind of existence by virtue of an idea by no means proves their existence in reality. Leibniz sees the basic flaw of the ontological argument, but instead of rejecting it altogether, he decides to supplement it by formally suggesting that God is the ideal sum of all perfections, and existence being among those necessary perfections, it means that God exists. The way Leibniz goes about it, reminds me of Zeno the Trickster and his signature “proofs” of the realistically impossible, yet mathematically comprehensible, and of course the value of Leibniz’s ontology of God is about the same as Zeno’s argument (actually, quite valuable for science!) that Achilles will never catch up with the tortoise.

The cosmological argument is once again based on a shaky foundation. Everything has a cause for being, but for some reason it is believed that the backtrack of the causal chain must be finite, and thus there has to be the First Cause, itself uncaused, of everything, and that First Cause must be God. This argument reminds me of the backtracking puzzle of the chicken and the egg. In this latter case we are resigned to the fact that in this case the first cause (either the chicken or the egg) does not exist, but still we allow the First Cause of everything being possible, and call it God. Leibniz obviously tweaks this argument, to make it more plausible, and he succeeds in formulating a challenging logical puzzle, which however does not result in solving the problem of the objective existence of God.

The other two arguments follow the same pattern. Leibniz sees the deficiencies of the arguers before him, and he considerably improves on each argument in so far as its logical sophistication is concerned, but he obviously fails to perfect what is impossible to prove to make it possible.

All of these arguments are of interest to me in terms of their formal logic, but not in terms of their pragmatic value in proving what they set out to prove. In the future I may probably write a lengthy analysis of this whole effort, say, in the Acorn section. But for now, I will only refer the curious reader to Russell’s chapter on Leibniz, where he gives his own take on Leibniz’s vanity project. In the meantime, we are now about to move on from here.

And next we are coming to the most interesting part of Leibniz’s philosophy: the unpublished lot, and to do it justice, we might just as well start a new entry, which is the one that now follows, to be posted tomorrow.

DETESTABLE GENIUS

This entry opens the fairly short series on Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), one of the greatest giants of mathematics, science, and philosophy who ever lived. Having co-invented the infinitesimal calculus (his work was done independently from Newton’s), he was the sole inventor of mathematical logic, but, having left it unpublished, it took some two hundred years after his death to have it “officially” reinvented. Also, having generated the concept of the binary system, and a score of other revolutionary ideas, he is seen as a precursor of modern cybernetics, computer science, and even quantum mechanics, among many-many other things. But as a philosopher he was no less groundbreaking, although his most spectacular philosophical ideas remained unpublished until the twentieth century.

***

In his philosophical play Mozart and Saglieri, the great Pushkin argues that “genius and evil are two things incompatible,” and it is up to us to agree or disagree with him, provided only that we understand Pushkin’s point. He means, of course, a very special kind of genius, never to be confused with the supervillains on the Manichean scale, such as Ahriman, Voldemort, or Professor Moriarti. Nor does he have in mind the great statesmen of history: Alexander, Genghis Khan, Peter the Great (and later Stalin), and others, all of whom must have appeared as the consummate evil-doers to their numberless victims, but who can also be seen in a much more appreciative light, through the macroscopic lens of world history.

The kind of genius Pushkin has in mind is spelled out in the name Mozart. It is the wholesome, beneficent type of genius, who inspires admiration in the hearts and minds of humanity, and a pride to be a part of the civilization which had given him birth. It is that kind of genius, which seems totally incompatible not only with any manifestation of evil, but even with regular impropriety. We want to love such genius, not to hate him, not even to dislike him, for that matter.

It is therefore extremely unfortunate and objectively deplorable (meaning, not even aimed at the particular offender, but at the fact itself that we should be offended by his offense) when a benefactor of humanity, a great genius, whose name is spoken with reverence in professional settings, fails to elicit similar reverence as a person whose biography we were so eager to read, unsuspecting of the dismal disappointment lying in store for us.

Alas, the great Leibniz was of such kind, namely, not a nice man at all. Here is what Bertrand Russell says about him on that account:

“Leibniz was one of the supreme intellects of all time, but as a human being he was not admirable. He had, it is true, the virtues that one would wish to find mentioned in a testimonial to a prospective employee: he was industrious, frugal, temperate, and financially honest. But he was completely destitute of those higher philosophic virtues that are so notable in Spinoza. His best thought was not such as would win popularity, and he left his records of it unpublished in his desk. What he published was designed to win approbations of princes and princesses. The consequence is that there are two systems of philosophy, representing him: one, which he proclaimed, was optimistic, orthodox, fantastic, and shallow; the other, that has been slowly unearthed from his manuscripts by fairly recent editors, was profound, coherent, largely Spinozistic, and amazingly logical. It was the popular Leibniz who invented the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds; it was Leibniz whom Voltaire caricatured as Doctor Pangloss. It would be unhistorical to ignore this Leibniz, but the other is of far greater philosophical importance.” (Pausing right here, I am so glad that Russell is giving this proof first of Leibniz’s unadmirability. It is a crime against one’s own genius to keep it under wraps and possibly never to see the light of day, while publishing the “commercial” philosophical fare, apparently with good conscience.)

“…It was in Paris, in 1675-1676, that Leibniz invented the infinitesimal calculus, in ignorance of Newton’s previous, but unpublished work on the same subject. Leibniz’s work was first published in 1684, Newton’s, in 1687. The consequent dispute as to priority was unfortunate and discreditable to all parties.” (This is not the only such occurrence of petty ugly bickering over works of genius, and each time it looks reprehensible and utterly unworthy of genius. I may want to repeat that being a genius is not only God’s special gift, but also a social and moral obligation to behave accordingly, that is, at the highest ethical level. Unfortunately, this obligation is hardly always honored.)

“Leibniz was somewhat mean about money. When any young lady at the court of Hanover married, he used to give her what he called “a wedding present,” consisting of useful maxims, ending up with the advice not to give up washing now that she had secured a husband.” (Leaving the question of money aside, even if we are to take this last phrase about “washing” figuratively, it does sound like a very mean joke, and it is awfully unpleasant at the least.)

The last important influence on Leibniz’s philosophy was that of Spinoza, whom he visited in 1676. He spent a month in frequent discussions with him, and secured a part of the Ethica in manuscript. But in later years he joined in decrying Spinoza, and minimized his contacts with him, saying that he had met him just once, and that Spinoza had told some good anecdotes about politics.” (Such dishonesty on his part is all the more deplorable that both men were geniuses, and genius must recognize his kind, and grow an affinity to him, which ought to rise beyond all friendships!)

It is not my intention in this entry to trash poor Leibniz, but its outburst must be definitely attributed to the fact that I have admired Leibniz since my school math years (I studied advanced mathematics there, along with other advanced subjects… It was a very good school!). It is therefore still inconceivable to me how an object of my profound admiration could be so mean and ugly, so utterly unworthy of himself!

 

SUB SPECIE SPINOZAE

 

(The title of this entry borrows Nietzsche’s Spinoza pun from his book Antichrist, #17. Like in a number of other instances, this entry is eminently postable on account of my original commentary. The selections of particular quotations, as opposed to others, no less well-known, yet ignored in this entry, are deliberate, and indicative above everything else of my personal preferences.)

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The following are a few of Spinoza’s aphoristic phrases, primarily found in his magnum opus Ethica.---

“Nature abhors a vacuum.” (Ethica, Part I, Proposition XV, Note.) This is a thought about life and death. Vacuum in this case is nothingness, and nature revolts against nothingness. The natural cycle goes on, of course, but something being natural, like death, does not preclude its being abhorred by the living nature.

“He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.” (Ethica, Part II, Proposition XLII, Proof.) My general appeal Definitions! Definitions! Definitions!, has the question of true and false as its particular. Remembering Epictetus, first learn the meaning of what you are going to say, and only then say it.

“Will and Intellect are one and the same thing.” (Ethica, Part II, Proposition XLIX, Corollary.) I would be in strong disagreement with this, just as much as Schopenhauer would, if we allow an element of irrationality to the Will, and limit the Intellect to rationality only.

“Sadness diminishes or hinders a man’s power of action.” (Ethica, Part III, Proposition XXXVII, Proof.) It is so true that powerful feelings, especially the most humane ones, like compassion, have a paralyzing effect on both our capacities: to act and to think!

“Fear cannot be without hope, nor hope without fear.” (Ethica, Part III, Definition XIII, Explanation.) This is true, of course. A fearless Siegfried has no capacity for hope, whereas all of us who hope are beset with a host of fears, not the least of which is that our hope will be murdered by circumstances beyond our control.

“Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.” (Ethica, Part III, Definition XXIX, Explanation.) Dickens’s Uriah Heep is of course a classic illustration of the thing that Spinoza is writing about. Compare this, although do not confuse it with, my observation that humility is the highest form of arrogance.

“One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e. g. music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.” (Ethica, Part IV, Preface.) This is so very true! A hurricane causing death and destruction in its path, is not an evil in itself, as it can also be good for something. In other words, evil is only a consequence, but not a thing in itself. I have elsewhere described evil as the wrong choice in our exercise of the God-given freedom of choice.

“Avarice, ambition, lust, etc., are nothing but species of madness, although not enumerated among diseases.” (Ethica, Part IV, Proposition XLIV, Note.) I like this, even if this sounds overly declarative. It is quite obvious that greed, covetous desire, and such, are ubiquitous qualities of human nature, but so is disease in the world and all around us. The fact that Spinoza’s examples of madness are so common among men has no proof in itself that they are the norm, rather than an aberration, natural states of man, rather than a disease.

“To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man… Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.” (Ethica, Part IV, Appendix, XVII.) Here is a straightforward advocacy of socialism, just as I espouse the socialist responsibilities of the State. In a future return to this ground theme of mine, I will be well served to quote Spinoza among my appeals to authority.

“Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.” This is a splendid proof of the fact that freedom as such is not possible in the world where all individual things are tightly interconnected.

“Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws.” That’s precisely it! There is nothing heroic in one’s incapacity to play the villain. It is only the strength of character, directed toward the good, despite all the temptations of evil, which makes the hero. In other words, there is no hero without claws.

“If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.” Isn’t there an uncanny connection here to Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse?! Indeed, Spinoza clearly says here that the free dwell beyond good and evil. The difference between Spinoza and Nietzsche, though, comes down to Spinoza’s “if,” which obviously implies that men are not free, whereas for Nietzsche, the notion of freedom is heroically projected and taken for granted as the key characteristic that distinguishes the master from the slave, the Übermensch from the Untermensch.

 

SPINOZA'S FREEDOM

Spinoza is a God-loving man, and what makes his philosophy so attractive is that it is filled with optimism. His boundless optimism, in my view, consists in the repudiation of free will, in conjunction with the belief in God’s Absolute Goodness. Free will is, in fact, the one and only source of evil, as it is logically impossible to have a choice between different courses of action, including the opposites, that would be all “good,” so that there would be no ethical preference whatsoever of the right choice over the wrong choice, depending on the course which we may choose to take. In fact, free choice is the choice between good and evil. It is therefore extremely depressing to realize ex post facto that we have made a mistake while exercising our free will, and then yet another mistake and another, eventually screwing up our life beyond redemption. It is for this reason that Christianity has come up with the concept of repentance, and Evangelical Christianity with its source of unconditional optimism, albeit restricted to professing born-again Christians only, which is the notion that any sin, even of the very worst kind, will be washed away by the blood of Jesus in the hereafter.

But philosophically, free will can only be a source of our frustration, and ultimately of indecision, where the circumstances require a prompt, energetic and ethically complex action. Such indecision has no place in the deterministic view of life, where anything which happens has been preordained, and, therefore, hesitation is nothing but procrastination.

Spinoza sees everything in the world as ruled by absolute logical necessity. All events are manifestations of a higher power, over which we have no control. By the same token, as he denies free will in human conduct, he rejects the notion of chance in nature. As Russell summarizes Spinoza’s doctrine, “It is logically impossible that events should be other than they are. This leads to difficulties with regard to sin, which the critics were not slow to point out. One of them observing that, according to Spinoza, everything is decreed by God, and therefore must be good, asks indignantly: “Was it good that Nero should kill his mother? Was it good that Adam ate the apple?” Spinoza answers that what was positive in these acts was good,--- and only what was negative was bad; but negation exists only from the point of view of finite creatures. In God, who alone is real, there is no negation, and therefore the evil in what to us seem sins, does not exist whenever they are viewed as parts of the whole.”

This dismissive view of sin, and the resultant denial of damnation, are completely consistent with Spinoza’s metaphysics. In the previous entry we have referred to the latter as a modification of Dèscartes’, but this is in no way indicative of Spinoza’s acceptance of Dèscartes. Quite the contrary. Using Cartesian metaphysic only as the starting point, Spinoza parts ways with Dèscartes right away, moving instead toward Parmenides and The One. In Dèscartes there are three substances altogether: God, mind, and matter. Mind is defined by the attribute of thought, matter by the attribute of extension. But in Spinoza’s metaphysic there is room for one substance only, which is God. Both thought and extension are attributes of God. ("God is a thing that thinks. He is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of infinite attributes expressing His eternal and infinite essence." [Ethica]). Human souls or particles of matter are not things to Spinoza, but aspects of God. This is where Spinoza’s theology is seen as a quintessential representation of pantheism, if ever there was such a thing at all.

It should come as no surprise now that, to Spinoza, the concept of freedom is nothing but an illusion. When he talks of freedom, which he often does, he uses this term in a patently restrictive sense (for example, “He alone is free who lives with free consent under the guidance of reason,” etc.). On the other hand, talking of freedom in the sense that we might expect, or want to hear, he says that “those men who think that they are free, do not understand the sources of their actions.”

 

In other words, Spinoza’s freedom is man’s capacity to understand that freedom as such does not exist, and to be able to say “yes” rather than “no,” to the events which take place, with the full comprehension of their metaphysical and logical inevitability.

With this apotheosis of Spinoza’s ethical determinism, we are about to end this terribly abbreviated series on Spinoza. It must be remembered that there are considerably developed entries on him scattered throughout this book, so that my decision to make this series short has been made merely in order to avoid unnecessary repetition. Yet, there is one more thing left before we part with him in this section, which happen to be, predictably, his dicta. This is going to be the subject of my last Spinoza entry, to be posted tomorrow.

THE PUREST PHILOSOPHER

[Spinoza (1634-1677) deserves a lot of personal attention on several fronts, which in no way can fit into one entry or inside a single section. A very large separate entry Ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch all devoted to him, already exists in the Tikkun Olam section, and to it I am now eagerly directing my reader for reference. The epithet “purest philosopher” was applied to Spinoza by Nietzsche.]

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Baruch/Benedict Spinoza is universally considered among the greatest philosophers of the Western world. Not only that, but he also appears to be among the best-loved personalities in history. Let us therefore start the roster of his character references providers with our much-beloved source Bertrand Russell: “Spinoza is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.” In another place, Russell observes: “We may, again, take philosophy aesthetically, as probably most of us take Spinoza.” (From his 1899 essay Seems, Madam? Nay, It Is.)

As I had a chance to observe elsewhere, Nietzsche goes out of his way in his praise for Spinoza calling him a “learned genius” (in Menschliches 157), or making the following comment in Menschliches 475, which I am quoting in a broader context in the entry Nietzsche And The Jews: I’d like to know how much one must excuse in the overall accounting of a people (the Jews), to whom we owe the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Spinoza), the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in the world.

In fact, Nietzsche’s lavish tribute to Spinoza can be called exorbitant, as the latter is most unusually being included into a number of elite “sets of greatness,” which, when reduced to a common denominator, leave a peculiar club, more exclusive than any other club on earth:

From Nietzsche’s 1879 Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche (408). The Journey To Hades: I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, to speak with a few of the dead. Four pairs did not deny themselves to my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. On these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes fixed on me. May the living forgive me, if occasionally they appear to me as shades, while those men seem so alive to me. In another note, Nietzsche calls four names: My ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe. In the cross-section of these two sets we are now left with just Goethe and Spinoza, but after Spinoza receives an honorable mention in the company of his fellow philosophers per se, this leaves Spinoza by himself in the most exclusive and infinitely elite club of one! And there are, indeed, an unusually high number of usually positive references to Spinoza throughout Nietzsches Werke, to mention just this one, as an illustration: For, this overestimation of, and predilection for, pity is something new: hitherto philosophers have been at one as to the worthlessness of pity. I name only Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant--- four spirits, as different from one another as possible, but united in one thing: in their low estimation of pity. (Preface to Genealogie [#5]). Knowing, as we do, that Nietzsche was himself an anti-pity Crusader, he ought to appreciate the low estimation of pity in any philosopher, and the choice of these four, as exemplifying such an attitude, is a mark of their particularly high status, in his eyes.

Apparently, Spinoza’s genius was not explicitly recognized either in his time or in the century following his death. Quoting Bertrand Russell again, “He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him. Christians abhorred him equally; although his philosophy is dominated by the Idea of God, the Orthodox accused him of atheism. Leibniz, who owed so much to him, concealed his debt, and carefully abstained from saying a word in his praise.”

In a curious historical “tit-for-tat” (I am alluding to the famous rediscovery of the German Bach by the Jew Mendelssohn-Bartholdy), Spinoza’s genius was first rediscovered for posterity by the Germans Lessing and Goethe (as well as by the Englishman Coleridge, whose admiration for Spinoza saved his reputation in the English-speaking world from David Hume’s stigma, the latter branding Spinoza’s philosophy “an hideous hypothesis.”)

Spinoza’s main philosophical value lies in his ethics. He was also writing on the subject of politics, but his political theory was derivative from Hobbes, with whom he agrees on many things, but disagrees on which form of government is the best, preferring democracy. His psychology is also reminiscent of Hobbes, while his metaphysic is a modification of Dèscartes. (See Bertrand Russell on this!) But his ethic is original, and it is his ethics, going hand in hand with theology, which is by far of the greatest interest to us in this series and elsewhere.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXXXII.

Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Concludes.

 

“Four. Heavy, like a blow.

‘To Caesar what is Caesar’s,---

To God what is God’s…’

But for someone like me, where can I fit?

Where is the lair ready for me?”

V. Mayakovsky.

 

The idea of the novel Master and Margarita having been written by Ivanushka, has one major shortcoming: Ivanushka has never seen Azazello. As we know, on Patriarch Ponds, Ivanushka talked with Woland, or rather had a heated confrontation with him. Master comments to Ivan concerning that argument:

“You ought not to have behaved toward him [Woland] so forwardly, and even saucily. Now you had to pay for it, and I must say, you got off easily.”

Ivanushka also had some communication with the “former regent,” and then watched how Woland and the Regent were joined by an enormous, like a hog, cat. But where is Azazello here? Ivanushka does not meet or see him. We know of course that Azazello was indeed present in that scene on Patriarch Ponds in the form of a sparrow… (See my posted chapter Birds, segment Sparrow, #XLVII.)

The strange thing seemed to be not only the fact that Ivanushka never saw Azazello. You surely remember that when master and Margarita came to say farewell to Ivanushka before their departure for their last retreat, Azazello did not enter Ivanushka’s room, but was waiting for the two under the building of the psychiatric clinic, and Ivan couldn’t even hear his whistle.

Our first witness on Azazello’s appearance, Stepa Likhodeev, describes Azazello like this:

“…Right out of the console mirror, came a small but exceptionally broad-shouldered fellow, wearing a top hat on his head and with a fang protruding from his mouth, disfiguring his already uncommonly despicable physiognomy. And being a flaming red-head at that.”

Azazello, the killer demon is not supposed to be red-haired --- a hair color far too noticeable for a professional assassin. Bulgakov explains this to the reader by making another killer, the only guest at Woland’s Ball to produce a stunning impression on Margarita, namely Malyuta Skuratov, also red-haired, although I could not find a corroboration of this in any Russian historians’ depictions of Malyuta Skuratov. (However, he is portrayed as red-headed on Russian paintings.)

As for our last witness regarding the appearance of Azazello, we have a somewhat different and very interesting description of him from master at the time when Azazello brings the couple a gift from Woland: an old bottle of Falerni wine:

“…There was nothing scary in this reddish-haired small-stature man, except maybe that he was wall-eyed... and his dress was rather unusual too: some kind of robe or cloak… again, if one thinks about it, that should not be uncommon either. He was a skillful drinker of cognac also, like all good people, he drank it by full glasses without taking a bite of food with it… He started looking at Azazello with much greater attention, and became convinced that he found in his eyes something forced, a certain thought [sic!], which he is not eager to share for the time being…”

Nothing scary?! How’s that? Where did Azazello’s fang go? Master also draws our attention to the fact that Azazello was dressed like Malyuta Skuratov, the creator of “Oprichnina” in Russia (secret police during the reign of the infamous tsar Ivan Grozny). So, in master’s description, Azazello turns from a “flaming-red, of small stature with a fang [in his mouth],” as Margarita saw him at their meeting on Red Square, into a man with reddish hair and without a fang.

And how skillfully Bulgakov inserts into this the familiar expression “good people” describing a killer! It is also remarkable how master appears here in the role of a psychiatrist discerning in the eyes of Azazello, the demon-tempter who plants ideas in the minds of others, a certain secret thought…

Why such incongruence? It’s time for us to examine the appearance of Ivan himself, whose portrait is given by the author on the very first page of the novel.---

“...broad-shouldered, reddish-haired and disheveled young man in a checkered cap tilted to the back of his head --- he was wearing a cowboy shirt, chewed-up white slacks, and black keds.”

Endowing Ivan with a “checkered cap,” Bulgakov invites the reader to solve his next riddle, regarding Ivan’s prototype. [Who this prototype is will be revealed in my chapter Two Adversaries.]

Bulgakov tells us nothing about his height, but even the description above alone is sufficient to understand why Ivan didn’t have to meet Azazello. Ivan who “somewhat apologetically chuckled” when he heard from master that Margarita had wanted to poison the critic Latunsky, saw himself in the novel Master and Margarita as a “messenger of the devil,” a demon-assassin, a demon tempter. The “virginal” Ivan saw himself as a goat-legged Pan…

With the words “right out of the console mirror” Bulgakov gives his own version of Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass, considering that this is the first appearance of Ivanushka as Azazello.

Here we have our vintage Bulgakov: how hard it is to solve his characters in Master and Margarita, and, but for the ending of the novel, explicitly telling us about deceptions across the board, and the description of the dark-violet knight and the youth-demon, still, regardless of the oddities, it would have been virtually impossible to recognize Pushkin in Koroviev.

Bulgakov loves contrasts, he loves dichotomies, thus he has come up with the duality of Ivanushka not only as split into the old Godless Ivan and the new Ivan obsessed with the history of Ha-Nozri and Pontius Pilate, but also distinguishing between the timid Ivan and his wild side, that comes out loud and clear in his feisty remarks to Woland, and which side he must have suppressed in himself in a normal state (for instance in his interaction with Berlioz).

Also obvious is Bulgakov’s parallel between Azazello, Malyuta Skuratov, and Ivan, showing the Russian version. Being Russian, Bulgakov shows Azazello as a Russian, in spite of his name and preference for Rome (false clues). And, of course, there is nothing unusual in a man seeing himself in his fantasies different from what he is in reality, but rather a kind of antipode to his “normal” self. Naturally Bulgakov uses this approach in order to confound the reader…

And lastly, both Azazello and Ivan have unusual, attention-catching voices. Ivan’s hoarse voice is not quite the same as Azazello’s nasal voice, but they are close enough. Had their voices sounded identical, it would have been too easy to realize that Azazello’s character is in some way a literary version of Ivan himself. This is the only way to explain why master fails to observe Azazello’s protruding fang…

And also, had Azazello been a genuine messenger of the devil, a demon-tempter, how could any plain mortal “read in his eyes” any kind of hidden thought at all? It is clear that at the table master sees not Azazello, but Ivanushka, writing his “poisoning scene” of Master and Margarita.

A second interesting moment which explains the situation even better, is the episode on Vorobievy Hills, in which Woland and his company come together in order to depart from Moscow. Bulgakov writes:

“On the heights of the hilltop between two groves, three dark silhouettes could be seen. Woland, Koroviev, and Begemot were sitting in the saddles on black stallions, looking down on the city sprawling beyond the river below. There was a rustling in the air, and Azazello, who had master and Margarita flying in the black tail of his cloak, landed together with them near the group that was waiting for them.”

How could master and Margarita be flying “in the tail of Azazello’s cloak” when they both were mounting the same kind of black horses, and were wearing the same cloaks as well? When only recently before that Bulgakov was describing Azazello through the eyes of master, like he would describe an ordinary “good man”?

The only possible way to reconcile this inconsistency is by admitting that master and Margarita, by the same token, as he himself as “Azazello,” are merely products of Ivanushka’s imagination.

This becomes especially understandable if we remember Maksudov from the Theatrical Novel:

“…Out of a white page something colorful was emerging… a picture. And, moreover, that picture was not flat, but three-dimensional… Like a box… A light is burning, and moving inside that box were the very same figurines as the characters described in my novel.”

In other words, an analogous picture. When Ivanushka is writing, similar figurines are coming out of his pages and moving; and he sees a flying Azazello, and “flying in the black tail of his cloak” are master and Margarita, only of a smaller size.

By the same token, Ivanushka looks at himself in the mirror, and sees himself coming out of it, or rather through it, in a totally frightening look: wall-eyed, with a fang sticking out of his mouth, and a knife behind his belt. In other words, Azazello, the bad side of Ivanushka himself.

Also, no matter how realistic the scene of master’s farewell to Moscow in Chapter 31, On the Vorobievy Hills, may seem, we must understand that this scene, as well as the scene of master’s and Margarita’s farewell to Ivanushka at the psychiatric clinic, is merely a product of the author’s imagination, a product of his creative flight of thought. The reader can clearly see Margarita “sitting in the saddle like an Amazon, akimbo, with the sharp train of her dress hanging down,” as well as master, who “threw himself out of the saddle, left the horseback group, and ran to the edge of the hill,” to say goodbye to Moscow.

The proof that even in this scene Margarita does not exist comes to us from a rather unexpected source: a dead bird, but this belongs to the chapter master…

With this puzzle I am coming to the end of my chapter IVANushka Through the Looking Glass with the very appropriate chapter of Bulgakov On the Vorobievy Hills, where not only master, but the whole retinue of Woland are saying goodbye to Moscow.

“Margarita looked back at full gallop and saw that behind her not only were the multi-colored turrets gone, but the whole city was no longer there, having gone into the earth, leaving only the fog behind it.”

From farewell to forgiveness. In the next chapter Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, Ivanushka is sending his creations, as well as himself, clad in shining armor as the knight Azazello, to their last resting place, immortality, where they will be deservedly sharing their place with the other immortal heroes of world literature.