GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXVI.

Margarita and the Wolf.

“She hobbled home on a shattered paw

And curled up into a ring by the hole.

A thin trickle of blood contoured

A mysterious face on the snow…

The head was lifting disquietedly,

And the tongue was gelling on the wound.

The yellow tail’s fire fell into the blizzard…”

Sergei Yesenin. Vixen.

 

Sergei Yesenin has a charming poem What Is This?, where he practically identifies himself as both “Peter” and “the Wolf.” He writes about his going a-hunting:

“Along a clean and smooth trail,

I walked without leaving any dirty footprints.”

On his way back, he discovers that “the fragile snow was all broken.” He asks the reader:

“Who played here furtively before?

Who was the one who fell and walked?”

As we already know from the chapter Two Adversaries, Yesenin saw himself as a wolf in a family of animals, about which he writes in his long poems. Like, for instance, in Pugachev:

“All people have the soul of a beast ---

That one is a bear, that one is a fox, that one is a wolf,

And life is a big wood,

Where the dawn gallops like a red horseman.

One must have strong, strong fangs.”

Or, as Yesenin writes in another long poem of his, Land of Scoundrels:

“I realized that it was all a social contract,

A contract of beasts of different color.”

Or, like in a 1921 poem, Yesenin compares himself to a wolf:

“Greetings to you, my beloved beast!

You do not yield to the knife for nothing!

Like yourself, I am everywhere a pariah,

Walking among enemies made of iron.

Like yourself, I am always alert,

And although I can hear a victory horn,

My last deathly jump

Will taste some enemy blood.”

Returning to our long poem about a hunt, it is no wonder that S. A. Yesenin writes:

“Here were claws, and here were elbows…”

And he concludes:

“…Someone strange was running here.”

Being a “peasant son,” as Yesenin calls himself in his poems, he must have loved riddles.

In his dealings with peasants, A. S. Pushkin was of the highest opinion of the intelligence of a Russian muzhik (peasant). We learn this from a letter written by Pushkin to his wife, in which he confesses to her that, while he succeeded in making a deal with his relatives concerning the matter of the estate…

“We both dissimulated, I hope to God that I had outwitted him in the actual deal; but in the matter of words I must have gotten the better of him… Going to Moscow, I will get this deal done in a couple of days, and will then come to Petersburg a lucky fellow, owner of the village of Boldino.”

…but he was hardly able to convince the peasants with regard to the profitability of this deal:

“...I have just been visited by peasants who had a petition, and with them I was forced to dissimilate, but these must have outwitted me…”

In his very short poem What Is This, Sergei Yesenin fogs up the reader’s mind, peasant-style:

“Had I firmly known the secret

Of enchanted speech,

I would have found out, even if inadvertently,

Who was walking around here at night…”

Mind you, in reality, on his way home, Yesenin saw traces of his own ski poles in the snow. (So much for the “claws and elbows”!)

“From behind a tall spruce tree,

I would have spied on the circle,

Who has been leaving the traces,

Deep and far-going, in the snow.”

Bulgakov just loves relatively unknown works of literature, and uses them to pose his riddles. So do I, my reader, try to follow their traces in the snow, and pose my own riddles. Hence, the title of the present chapter about Yesenin’s Margarita: Margarita and the Wolf.

Incidentally, has my reader solved my puzzle about the appearance of Woland, that is, Vladimir Mayakovsky through his poetry, already on the second page of Master and Margarita?

By the way, the answer comes from Mayakovsky’s 1921 play Mysteria Buff:

“What is that in the air, some kind of sweetness apricoted around?”

As Bulgakov writes in Master and Margarita, when Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomny ask the kiosk vendor about Narzan mineral water and beer, they are told that available at the moment is only apricot water, which is warm anyway.

Curiously, the answer to why Berlioz wants to order Narzan can also be found in Mayakovsky’s poetry. Here is an excerpt from his poem Hey!

“Blessed is he who could at least once.

At least having closed his eyes,

Forget you, useless like a runny nose,

And sober like Narzan…”

Regarding Ivan’s order of beer, it is more complicated, as it is not quite connected to S. A. Yesenin’s alcoholism. We will return to the question of beer in my forthcoming chapter Strangers in the Night.

To be continued…

CAMUS

There is a curious parallelism between the lives of our previous subject Sartre and his contemporary Camus, who happens to be the subject of the present last entry of this section. Despite his unquestionable brilliance, Camus had somewhat been confined to dwell in Sartre’s shadow since early on, and even the famous revelation of fairly recent memory that the American President George W. Bush was-- what do you know!-- a reader of Camus, appeared so utterly ludicrous that it kept the spotlight on the absurdity of that suggestion, rather than on its positive side effect, that is, bringing it to where it mattered more, namely, to the philosophy of the absurd proper, for which Camus had become historically famous.

The larger figure of Sartre had become a large circle, within which the slightly smaller circle of Camus was contained. Camus (1913-1960) was born after Sartre and died (in an automobile crash) before him. Both of them were French, although Camus has been misleadingly labeled as Algerian-French. (He was indeed born in French Algeria, but his father was a Frenchman and his mother was Spanish.) They were both outstanding writers (Camus saw himself as a writer first and foremost and always denied that he was a philosopher), and both of them were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (Sartre in 1964, at the age of fifty-nine, and Camus seven years earlier, in 1957, at the age of forty-three). Both of them have been labeled existentialist philosophers, although Camus never agreed with such a label, and Sartre-the-existentialist agreed with him. In a celebrated 1945 interview, Camus said this about the practice of comparing the two giants: “No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked.”

As a matter of fact, there was yet another, this time political, connection falsely attributed to them. Camus began his political life as a Marxist and a Communist, like Sartre; but he deviated from Marxism early on. Having joined the French Communist Party in 1935, he was expelled already in 1937, and he was counted as an anarchist, and thus incompatible with Communism. In the later post-WWII years, he became quite vocal against the repressive policies of the USSR in Eastern Europe and considered the Soviet Union an authoritarian state. He and Sartre parted their ways on this question in particular.

Despite Camus’ explicitly negative attitude toward the USSR (to be fair, he was no less critical of the US in his opposition to all forms of state violence and strong-arm politics), his books were well-known, available, and much-read in Russia. Curiously, I happened to read two of his books, La Peste and La Chute, in French as part of my French studies at a fairly early age. At that time, I naturally thought of him, just as he thought of himself, as an intense and thoughtful writer in the philosophizing tradition which was so characteristic of Russian literature. Today, although I still see him as a brilliant philosophical writer, I find his philosophy of the Absurd worthy of being separately discussed in the Philosophy section. (See my entry Absurdism As A Philosophy there.)

Unlike Sartre’s, the essence of Camus’ philosophy is not an expected rebellion against political and social injustice, but a philosophical recognition of the Absurd, both inside and outside us, as the driving force of life. Even those oppressive social regimes, as fascism and communism, are merely different expressions of the absurd. In his brilliant philosophical essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942), he compares human life to the eternal misery of Sisyphus, whose work is incessant and hard, and at the same time completely meaningless.

The absurdity proceeds from the incongruity of human existence clashing with that of the universe. Camus suggests that one cannot find a meaning in life by trying either to rationalize the absurd or to transcend it by finding a meaning in the transnatural. He calls for a revolt against absurdity, which he understands as… our refusal to commit suicide.

But that already properly belongs in the Philosophy section. See you there!

CONDEMNED TO BE FREE

[The title of this entry is a quotation from its subject, Sartre, to the effect that man’s freedom is equated with his responsibility for his own actions.]

The great and controversial Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) used to be famous in Russia of my time as much, if not more, for his politics, as for his peculiar existential philosophy. He was a fiercely independent thinker who was particularly respected for his habitual practice of standing up to his friends no less than to his enemies.

He was never a Marxist, as it is impossible to identify him with any specific political movement or ideology (as he was himself loath to do), but his political position has been described as “being close to Marxism.” He was an enemy of all tyranny and vociferously protested equally against the actions of the USSR in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968; of the United States in Cuba and Vietnam; and of his own France in Algeria. He welcomed Castro’s revolution in Cuba, but later quarreled with Castro over his treatment of the political prisoners in Cuba. In 1964, despite his protestations before the fact, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he still refused to accept it, explaining this by his unwillingness to be used as a political pawn in the Cold War between East and West. (He stressed that he was particularly averse to receiving the Prize from the well-known anti-Soviet organization, the Nobel Committee, at the time when he was sharply critical of the USSR, and his selection could well be seen as his reward for that criticism. Curiously, this reminds me of my maternal grandfather Mitrophan, an ultra-conservative monarchist in his younger pre-Revolution years, who had given refuge from the Tsarist government to a firebrand revolutionary whom he thoroughly detested, just because he was his fellow student, and especially because Mitrophan detested the fellow’s anti-Government views, and did not wish to be misconstrued.)

Sartre’s most famous novel La Nausée published in 1938 has become known as his Manifesto of Existentialism, the philosophy which he professed and became the face of. In his words, “existentialism that is humanism,” and his political life and philosophy always lived up to this understanding.

One of the key concepts of Sartrean philosophy is the concept of freedom, an absolute which is precedential to man’s essence. His freedom is not some inactive freedom of the spirit, but the most fundamental freedom of choice, which cannot be taken away from man under any circumstances. Even a prisoner is free to make his decision whether to give up or keep fighting. Existence is the constantly living moment of activity, taken subjectively. It is not a steady substance, but a never-ending imbalance. The “I” in-itself has no meaning. It is through man’s activity that a meaning is given to the external world. Outside such activity, all objects are merely data, that is, passive and inert circumstances. By giving them meaning through his activity, the man forms himself as a certain individuality.

Closely related to the concept of freedom is that of alienation. Modern individuum is an alienated being: his individuality is standardized, subjugated to various social institutions, such as the state itself. The alienated man has problems with material objects: they oppress him by their overbearing existence, causing a nausea. In counterbalance to this, Sartre posits the immediacy and wholesomeness of human relationships.

Finally, there is the peculiar Sartrean concept of dialectics. The essence of dialectics is the synthetic unity of the whole (totalization), since only within one whole the laws of dialectics have a meaning. (This is actually much closer to Hegel than any of the more common interpretations! It also throws some extra bright light on the much abused Gentilean concept of “totalitarismo.” See my numerous challenging entries on totalitarianism throughout this blog.) The individuum totalizes the material circumstances and his relationships with other people, and himself creates history just as much as this history creates him. (This is already an influence of Marx’s interactive metaphysics of matter and consciousness!) Objective economic and social structures present themselves as an alienated superstructure over the internal individual elements of the project. Totalization expands the space of individual freedom, as the individuum realizes that history is being created by him.

Sartre insists that dialectics originates with the individual, and consistently denies dialectics to nature.

…All of the above clearly shows that despite certain derivative elements, Sartre is a noteworthy and original philosopher, who deserves a further study from us, and he shall undoubtedly get it, time and circumstances permitting. Of a special additional interest to me will be the connection between his and Dostoyevskyan philosophies, since Sartre himself acknowledges Dostoyevsky’s particular influence on his thinking. Needless to say, I am looking forward to this challenge with great relish.

"BEING AND TIME"

This is my entry on the controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The bulk of that controversy is unmistakably political: the fact of his membership in Hitler’s Nazi Party and the brave postwar defense of him by the remarkable Jewish political theorist and Heidegger’s erstwhile student, and alleged mistress, Hannah Arendt. We are not going to touch upon that controversy beyond what has just been said.

There is a curious indirect exchange between Heidegger and one of his milder critics Bertrand Russell. This is what Russell wrote about him in his book Wisdom of the West:

“Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in Existentialism this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic.”

And here is Heidegger’s world-historically famous indirect reply:

“Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”

Reading this delightfully shocking one-liner, one might be surprised that among Heidegger’s major influences and role models, were two great philosophers with a great propensity for masterfully literate and supremely intelligible styles of writing: yes, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche!

Having said that, let us now move on to Heidegger’s philosophy proper. The differently-colored passage below is borrowed from Wikipedia. My original design has been to write a commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. Hopefully, I will do just that in the foreseeable future. Meantime, I do not wish to withhold this entry from the reader, because my other purpose of drawing attention to the philosophy of this unusual man ought not to be hindered by such a trifle inconvenience.

His most interesting and influential 1927 work Sein und Zeit is based on a combination of two key insights.

The first is his observation that in the course of over two millennia of history, philosophy has attended to all the beings that can be found in the world (including the world itself), but has forgotten to ask what being is. This is his question of being, and it is his fundamental concern throughout his work. He opens Sein und Zeit with a citation from Plato’s Sophist, indicating that Western philosophy has neglected being because it was considered too obvious, unworthy of questioning. Heidegger's intuition about the question of being is thus a historical argument, which in his later work becomes a concern with the history of being, that is, the history of the “forgetting of being”, which now requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a Destruction of the history of philosophy. (I am much tempted to translate this as ‘deconstruction,’ rather than destruction, as it has been normally translated into English.)

His second intuition animating derives from the influence of Husserl, a philosopher largely uninterested in questions of philosophical history. Rather, Husserl argued that philosophy should only be a description of experience. (Hence the phenomenological slogan “to the things themselves.”) But for Heidegger this meant understanding that experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being. Thus Husserl’s understanding that all consciousness is intentional is transformed in Heidegger’s philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in care. This is the basis of his existential analytic, as he develops it in Sein und Zeit. Heidegger argues that to describe experience properly entails finding the being for whom such a description might matter. He thus conducts his description of experience with reference to Dasein, or the being for whom being is a question. In the course of his existential analytic, he argues that Dasein, who finds itself thrown into the world amidst things and with others, is thrown into its possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of one’s own mortality. The need for Dasein to assume these possibilities, that is, the need to be responsible for one’s own existence, is the basis of Heidegger’s notions of authenticity and resoluteness, that is of those specific possibilities for Dasein that depend on escaping the vulgar temporality of calculation and of public life.

The marriage of these two observations depends on the fact that each of them is essentially concerned with time. That Dasein is thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities means not only that Dasein is an essentially temporal being, but also implies that the description of Dasein can only be carried out in terms inherited from the Western tradition itself. For Heidegger, philosophical terminology cannot be divorced from the history of the use of that terminology; thus genuine philosophy can hardly avoid confronting questions of language and meaning. The existential analytic of Sein und Zeit is thus only a first step in Heidegger’s philosophy, to be followed by the said Destruction of the history of philosophy, meaning, a transformation of its language and meaning, that would have made of the existential analytic only a kind of limit case…

But, curiously, Heidegger never wrote that second, follow-up part. Having asked the question, he prudently stopped short of attempting an answer.

A FASCIST AND A HUMANIST

[The title is a jocular take on the familiar phrase “An officer and a gentleman.”

For much more on Giovanni Gentile see my entry Totalitarismo E La Dottrina Del Fascismo in the Collective section. I have numerous references to Gentile in other entries, for which I advise the reader to use the Find function. In the future, my entries on the person of Gentile and the phenomenon of Italian fascism are to be properly organized and thematically separated to a far greater extent than they are now, but obviously, this important task does not belong to my immediate priorities.]

Giovanni Gentile, admittedly, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, but at the same time the chief ideologue of Italian fascism… An incredible paradox!

Is this an irreconcilable contradiction or a natural connection in the mind of one man? The latter must obviously be the case, but an admission of this fact complicates the world’s rejection of the political system of fascism, making the fascist phenomenon far more complex than its mandatorily cartoonish depiction. My Webster’s Biographical Dictionary ‘solves’ this terribly politically incorrect problem by openly ignoring the fascist side of Gentile in the following biographical entry quoted here by me in toto.---

“Gentile, Giovanni. 1875-1944. Italian philosopher; professor, Naples (1898-1906), Palermo (1906-1914), Pisa (1914-1917), Rome (1917-44). Founded Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana (1920). Minister of public instruction (1922-1924); reformed Italian educational system; president, Supreme Council of Education (1926-28).”

It is to Webster’s credit not to besmirch Gentile’s legacy by his direct association with Fascism, and, not so obviously, it’s not Webster’s place to get bogged down in highly complicated discussions, although its glaring omission of the details of the man’s lifelong professional activity altogether can in no way be counted among the strongest points of Webster’s Gentile entry.

This is my special entry on the terribly intriguing Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), who was unquestionably an outstanding bona fide thinker, but politically had the vilest misfortune of living when he lived and volens-nolens being one of the most conspicuous champions of the losing political cause of Italian fascism, which to me of course is a source of great fascination. Unlike Santayana, who admired it, at least for the most part, but did not champion it philosophically, Gentile proudly described himself as “the philosopher of fascism,” and he co-wrote with Mussolini the 1932 La Dottrina del Fascismo (or perhaps wrote it in toto, but both names appear as its authors, Gentile’s name coming first, a tribute to a certain “modesty” exhibited here by Il Duce), the definitive formulation of the Fascist doctrine, as Gentile saw it. Ironically, he believed so strongly in the philosophical superiority of the Fascist idea that he welcomed open intellectual opposition, which, he thought, could only highlight and validate the truth of his conception of Fascism as a superior form of social organization.

It is very unfortunate that his writings on Fascism are hard to come by. I am convinced that a great deal of absolutely fascinating stuff could be gleaned from them, not for the purpose of resurrecting that doctrine, of course, but in order to understand its immanent attractiveness to the masses, which will no doubt keep reappearing on the world stage in numerous and varying, but all organically connected, reincarnations. It is one of those “eternal recurrences,” which better be not swept under the rug, lest we lose the track of human history.

It was an amazing and regrettably sorely uninvestigated combination of two seemingly incompatible traits in the person of Gentile: he was a fascist and a humanist! This is as far as I can go at this time in my depiction of Gentile’s fascism, except to remind the reader the previously mentioned fact that he was the originator of the little-understood term totalitarianism (which he obviously used in the positive sense), and to state a few details of his life, such as that he was minister of education and later a member of the Fascist Grand Council during the Fascist regime. Staying loyal to Mussolini through thick and thin, he was murdered, in 1944, by a group of anti-fascist partisans, while returning from the Prefecture in Florence, where ironically he had been arguing for the prompt release of a group of recently arrested anti-fascist intellectuals. As an indispensable part of his life’s résumé, becoming Italy’s Minister of Public Education in 1923, Gentile introduced a progressive and radical educational reform of the secondary school system, known as Riforma Gentile. It had a profound effect on Italian education, which would incredibly survive the downfall of Fascism and live on through postwar time as an example to be emulated.

Every philosopher, even the most uniquely original, is necessarily influenced by other thinkers, both directly and indirectly. Turning now to Gentile’s general philosophical interests, his philosophy was influenced by a wide variety of earlier philosophers, from the Pre-Socratics, Protagoras, Plato, Vico, and Hegel to Marx and Nietzsche. The latter’s Übermensch finds his realization in Gentile’s Uomo Fascista. Let us not judge him too harshly, though, on the strength of this title alone. His meaning of the term and ours are politically worlds apart, without any prospect of philosophical reconciliation.

Gentile is known as the originator of what he himself called Actual Idealism, a form of idealism which contrasts the Transcendental Idealism of Kant and the Absolute Idealism of Hegel. The following sequence has been taken from the Wikipedia, as there is no need, except as an exercise in vanity, to try to tell this thing in my own words.---

Actual Idealism holds that it is the act of thinking as perception, not creative thought as imagination, which defines reality. Therefore one idea or another can only be a formulation of particulars within the bounds of a known totality that one idea is not on any side of those particulars. Totality constituting the whole reality, is negated in this idea by itself. Integration of totality against idea in appealing to oneself is the sole fruitful means of idea, which poses no favoritism to the developed ideas giving a knowing precedence to the world it has created itself into. Anything less is a presupposition and therefore innately unreal. This totality is the act of thinking, not thoughts so regarded by thinking.

While Realists agree that the world known to them is the only one they possibly know “as a static concept,” they continue to regard something real about the concept having nothing to do with their thinking. Actual Idealists disregard the static concept as totally false in regard to the world, where the only real for them is in “the act of thinking” within being.

The stance of Realism claims that repeatability of experience gives proof of a basis which transcends and outruns our percepts, refuting Idealism. Yet it doesn’t consider that the process of thinking as creation and the thought about thinking as abstraction interchange depending on the quality of our act. It is the process of thinking that creates thought, which may not recur, but what occurs as thinking of it, is what cannot be outrun as a conceptualization because it is the very immanent process of it, which is what definitely is. Not as thoughts perceived, but as perceptive thinking prior to being construed outside its totality as a thought, not made an abstraction, that cannot exist or be supposed to exist in any form outside one’s thinking. Only one’s thought reached from, and thus put outside of thinking can be surpassed; but only by thinking, not by an abstract external.

Actual Idealism therefore rejects the Hegelian Absolute, as being a presupposition unprovable to the mind, unless considered to be synonymous with what is known, or the totality of the act of thinking. Which therein would put the dialectical processes making self & not self a consideration proving external existence real, in so far as it is in reality part of the self’s own thinking. Since the self regarded alone is always a concept and can’t be given reality as such. Neither does Actual Idealism admit archetypal concepts in that possible conception of them in relation to all else gives them no reality. Gentile made a pivotal distinction to factors concerning Idealism’s own criteria for reality which have stood since Berkeley’s adage Esse est percipi, by distinguishing between pensiero pensante, the act of thinking, and the static thought pensiero pensato.

Gentile posited then, that knowledge as thought fixed against a fuller range of thinking limits thinking’s every proposition. If truth is what surpasses the conditions of every proposition, taking a known postulate as truth removes its criteria from having that capability in thinking. Objectifying actuality. Truth then cannot be known by thought, since knowledge held as thought is privative toward thinking as decided by what is thought. Only thinking as it penetrates, not given in to what categories of thought orient it, can be truth, so long as it does not resort to thought in doing so which would objectify it. Such thinking is truth because it, therefore, defines reality as by that thinking, rather than excluding truth from the possibility of thinking, because of its relation to yielding thoughts. Only because thinking’s results, namely, thoughts, do not pertain to what is arising from its act, the truth, does thinking itself become questioned as a proper conductor of truth. That however does not detract from the nature of truths being defined within the act as the concrete. Thinking, being the condition in which truths are measured, in fact affirms thinking’s own condition as truth, and when coupled with the idea that it generates thoughts which negate it, must the concrete be identified with thinking rather than simply being denied to thought seen as abstract and having that together assumed with thinking as denied also. For thinking cannot therefore be solely a producer of thoughts alone to Gentile, as is the position taken by materialists, because thoughts are to him what negate it, but must also be what produces the stable environment wherein being happens. Which, then, is the direct result of oneself, as the further quality, in which reality is not negated, as it is by thoughts to themselves.

Therefore this postulate maintains that thinking is an active process, and the static conception of a thought is its dialectical opposite. Where thinking is the vitality of psychological being, a thought is opposed to that vitality and therefore would be opposed to that immanent quality where alone existence takes on its reality to the Actual Idealist. No sense or imagining of something beyond or external to the act of thinking in itself for the thinker can be real, and, therefore, cannot be said to exist, even if, to continue the act of thinking it must be said that it does exist, as a creation of the act of thinking, if even then it remains unreal. Which, in considering it the measure of its existence, is realized for then it is exposed to the act of thinking, subject to reality; from an a priori beginning to a non-empirical conclusion without presupposition. (Wikipedia.)

Gentile’s philosophical basis for fascism was rooted in his understanding of ontology and epistemology, in which he found vindication for the rejection of individualism and acceptance of collectivism, with the state as the ultimate seat of authority, and loyalty to which the individual found in the conception of individuality with no meaning outside of the state (which in turn justified totalitarianism). Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds were not to be given sanction as existing independently from each other; that “publicness” and “privateness” as broad interpretations were currently false, as imposed by all former kinds of Government; capitalism, communism, and that only the reciprocal totalitarian state of Corporative Syndicalism, a Fascist state, could defeat these problems. Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see conditional subject as abstract and object as concrete, Gentile postulated quite the opposite, namely, that subject was the concrete and objectification was the abstraction (or rather; that what was conventionally dubbed ‘subject’ was in fact only conditional object and that true subject was the act of being or essence above any object).

Gentile was a notable philosophical theorist of his time throughout Europe, having developed his system of Actual Idealism, sometimes called Actualism. It was especially in which his ideas put subject to the position of a transcending truth above positivism that garnered attention; by way that all senses about the world only take the form of ideas within one's mind in any real sense; to Gentile even the analogy between the function and location of the physical brain with the functions of the physical body were a consistent creation of the mind (and not brain; which was a creation of the mind and not the other way around). An example of Actual Idealism in Theology is the idea that even though man may have invented the concept of God, it does not make God any less real in any sense possible in so far as it is not presupposed to exist as an abstraction, and except in case qualities about what existence actually entails (that is, being invented apart from the thinking making it) are presupposed.

Gentile took the stand against psychology and psycho-analysis that one cannot abstract (that is, make object out of) the source, which creates its own surrounding reality, as one does by one’s own philosophy, and that any empirical observations of behavioral anthropology appear true because empiricism adheres to its own laws, being a closed system, it is true within its own considered vacuum. His theory may be viewed as an extreme form of Occam’s Razor, even though it can appear to common sense to defy Occam’s Razor outright by the complex thinking involved to relate with his theory. But Gentile deduced that common sense in considering material reality was, to him, unphilosophical, because it was not self-critical of its sensory presuppositions. To him, making a thought category of his theory itself defied it by turning it into object, as any such idea of the philosophy that was not kept in subject or truly “actual” could not be Actual Idealism.

And finally, back again to Gentile’s definition of and vision for Fascism. He sought to make his philosophy become the basis of Fascism in much the same manner that Marx had developed his philosophy as the basis of Communism. However, with Gentile and Fascism the problem of the party existed by the fact that Fascist party came to be organically, rather than from a tract, or pre-made doctrine of thought. This complicated the matter for Gentile, as it left no consensus for any way of thinking among Fascists, but ironically, this aspect was close to Gentile’s view of how a state or party doctrine should live out its existence with natural organic growth and dialectical opposition intact. The fact that Mussolini chose to give credence to Gentile’s view points, via Gentile’s authorship, helped with an official consideration, even though the problem of the party continued to exist for Mussolini himself as well.

Gentile placed himself in the Marxist tradition in many respects but he found Marx’s view of the dialectic to be the basic flaw of his application to system-making. To Gentile, Marx turned the dialectic into an external object, thus abstracting it, by making it part of some process that theoretically exists, of outward matter and material. Dialectic to him could only be something of human precepts, something which is an active part of human thinking, a concrete subject and not an abstract object. Externalizing dialectic, Karl Marx was essentially engaging in a fetishistic mysticism. Though when viewed externally thus, it followed that Marx could then make claims to the effect of what state or condition the dialectic objectively existed in history, a posteriori of where any individuals opinion was while comporting oneself to the totalized whole of society, i.e. people themselves, could by such a view be ideologically “backwards” and left behind from the current state of the dialectic and not themselves be part of what is actively creating dialectic as such. Gentile thought this was absurd, and that there was no “positive” independently existing dialectical object. Rather, the dialectic was natural to the state as such. Meaning that the interests composing the state are composing dialectic by their living organic process of holding oppositional views within that state, and unified therein. It being the mean condition of those interests as they exist. Even criminality is unified as a necessary dialectic to be subsumed into the State and a creation and natural outlet of the dialectic of the positive State as ever it is. This view is justifying the corporative system, wherein the individualized and particular interests of all divergent groups were to be personably incorporated into the State, each to be considered a bureaucratic branch of the State itself, given official leverage. Gentile, rather than believing the private to be swallowed synthetically within the public (as Marx had it in his objective dialectic), believed that public and private were a priori identified with each other in an active and subjective dialectic: one could not be subsumed fully into the other, as they already are beforehand the same. In such a manner, each is the other after their own fashion, and from their respective, relative, and reciprocal, positions. Yet both constitute the state itself and neither are free from it, nothing ever being truly free from it, the state existing as an eternal condition and not an objective, abstract collection of atomistic values and facts of the particulars about what is “positively” governing the people at any given time.

 

"IT WILL RAIN, BUT I DON'T BELIEVE IT WILL."

G. E. Moore (1873-1958) would have hated to be called George Edward, both of which names he, for some reason, intensely disliked. To indulge this little weakness, I shall refer to him from now on only as Moore.

In the thin forest of post-Nietzschean philosophers Moore stands out as a large, albeit relatively little-known, tree. He was by no means a system-builder, and none of his theoretical elaborations are convincing. But the rich originality of his brainstorms, the questions he was in the habit of posing all his life, even if his answers seldom measured up to his questions, propel him to the forefront of philosophy, reassuring his indisputable historical greatness.

The reader may not remember, but it was Moore who occupies a prominent place in my Contradiction entry Keynesian Ethics As A Watchdog Over Economics, otherwise devoted to Moore’s admirer Keynes, to which I am gladly referring my reader now, feeling no need to reiterate in different words or to repeat verbatim the Moore passages there.

I shall however place a fairly large stock of reference material in this entry, to serve me as a starting point in its future rewriting and personal elaboration. So, here it is.

Moore asserts that most other philosophers working in ethics had made the mistake he calls the Naturalistic fallacy. The business of ethics, he agrees, is to discover the qualities that make things good. So, for example hedonists claim that the quality “being pleasant” is what makes things good; other theorists could claim that “complexity” is what makes things good. With this project Moore has no quarrel. What he objects to is the idea that, in telling us the qualities that make things good, ethical theorists have thereby given us an analysis of the term good and the property goodness. Moore regards this as a serious confusion. To take an example, a hedonist might be right to claim that something is good just in the case that it is pleasant. But this does not mean that we can define value in terms of pleasure. Telling what qualities make things valuable is one thing, but analyzing value is quite another.

Moore is well-known for the so-called open question argument, which is contained in his greatly influential Principia Ethica. This work is one of the main inspirations of the movement against ethical naturalism, and it is partly responsible for the twentieth-century concern with meta-ethics.

Moore’s argument for the indefinability of “good” (and thus for the fallaciousness of the naturalistic fallacy) is often called the Open Question Argument. It hinges on the nature of statements such as “Anything that is pleasant is also good” and the possibility of asking questions such as “Is it good that x is pleasant?” These questions are “open,” according to Moore, and these statements are “significant”, and they will remain so no matter what is substituted for “pleasure.” He concludes from this that any analysis of value is bound to fail. In other words, if value could be analyzed, then such questions and statements would be trivial and obvious. Since they are anything but trivial and obvious, value must be indefinable.

Moore argues that goodness cannot be analyzed in terms of any other property. He writes:

“It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not “other,” but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. Therefore, we cannot define good by explaining it in other words, we can only point to an action or a thing and say: That is good! Similarly we cannot describe to a blind man what yellow is whereas we can only show a sighted man a piece of yellow paper or a yellow scrap of cloth and say: That is yellow!”

In addition to categorizing “good” as indefinable, Moore emphasized that it is a non-natural property. That is, two objects that are identical cannot have different values. There cannot be two yellow shirts identical in every way (the same shade of yellow, made at the same factory, the same brand name, the same style, etc.), except for their reception of the predication of “good.” (One cannot be good, and the other not good). An object’s property of “good” is determined by what other properties the object has. This is a property that is a product of having other properties. Therefore, if two objects are qualitatively identical, they must have the same value of “good.” (This is actually wrong, as two identical substances can have opposite effect in two different sets of circumstances, for as they say, one man’s cure is another man’s poison. Thus the very same thing can be “good” or “bad,” depending on the method and purpose of its use and application.)

Moore says that once arguments based on the naturalistic fallacy have been discarded, questions of intrinsic goodness can only be settled by appealing to what he called moral intuitions that is self-evident propositions which recommend themselves to moral reflection, but are not susceptible to either direct proof or disproof. “In order to express the fact that ethical propositions of my first class (propositions about what is good as an end in itself) are incapable of proof or disproof I have sometimes followed Sidgwick’s usage in calling them ‘Intuitions.’ But I beg that it may be noticed that I am not an ‘Intuitionist,’ in the ordinary sense of the term. Sidgwick himself seems never to have been clearly aware of the immense importance of the difference that distinguishes his Intuitionism from the common doctrine, which has generally been called by that name. The Intuitionist proper is distinguished by maintaining that propositions of my second class propositions (which assert that a certain action is right, or a duty) are incapable of proof or disproof by enquiring into the results of such actions. I, on the contrary, am anxious to maintain that propositions of this kind are not “Intuitions,” whereas propositions of my first class are Intuitions.” (Principia Ethica, Preface.)

One of the most important parts of Moore’s philosophical development was his break from the idealism that dominated British philosophy (as represented in the works of his former teachers Bradley and McTaggart), and his defense of what he regarded as a “common sense” form of Philosophical Realism. In his 1925 essay A Defense of Common Sense, Moore argued against idealism and skepticism toward the external world, on the grounds that they could not give reasons to accept their metaphysical premises that were more plausible than the reasons we have to accept the common sense claims about our knowledge of the world that skeptics and idealists must deny. He famously put this into dramatic relief with his 1939 essay Proof of an External World, in which he gave a common sense argument against skepticism by raising his right hand and saying: “Here is one hand,” and then raising his left, and saying: “And here is another,” then, concluding that there are at least two external objects in the world, and therefore that he knows (by this argument) that an external world exists. Not surprisingly, not everyone inclined to skeptical doubts found Moore’s method of argument entirely convincing; Moore, however, defended his argument on the grounds that skeptical arguments seem invariably to require an appeal to “philosophical intuitions” that we have considerably less reason to accept than we have for the common sense claims that they supposedly refute. (In addition to fueling Moore’s own work, the Here is one hand argument also deeply influenced Wittgenstein, who spent his last years working out a new approach to Moore’s argument in the remarks published posthumously as On Certainty.

Moore is also remembered for drawing attention to a peculiar inconsistency involved in uttering a sentence such as “It will rain, but I don’t believe it will”-- a puzzle which is now commonly called Moore's paradox. The puzzle arises because it seems impossible for anyone to consistently “assert” such a sentence; but there does not seem to be any “logical contradiction” between “It will rain” and “I don’t believe that it will rain.”

In addition to Moore’s own work on the paradox, the puzzle inspired a great deal of work by Wittgenstein, who described the paradox as the most impressive philosophical insight that Moore had ever introduced.

And finally, Moore’s description of the principle of organic unity is extremely straightforward; nonetheless, it is a principle that seems to have generally escaped ethical philosophers and ontologists before his time:

The value of a whole must not be assumed to be the same as the sum of the values of its parts (Ethica §18).

According to Moore, a moral actor cannot survey the “goodness” inherent in the various parts of a situation, assign a value to each of them, and generate a sum in order to get an idea of its total value. A moral scenario is a complex assembly of parts, and its total value is often created by the relations between those parts, and not by their individual value. The organic metaphor is thus very appropriate: biological organisms seem to have emergent properties, which cannot be found anywhere in their individual parts. For example, a human brain exhibits a capacity for thought when none of its neurons exhibit any such capacity. In the same way, a moral scenario can have a value far greater than the sum of its component parts.

To understand the application of the organic principle to questions of value it is perhaps best to consider his primary example, that of a consciousness experiencing a beautiful object. To see how the principle works, a thinker engages in “reflective isolation”, that is, an act of isolating a given concept in a kind of null-context, and determining its intrinsic value. We can easily see that per sui, beautiful objects and consciousnesses are not very valuable things; they may have some value but when we consider the total value of a consciousness experiencing a beautiful object, it seems to exceed the simple sum of these values (Principia Ethica 18:2).

Here ends our extended selection on Moore’s ethics, which clearly demonstrates that, in the ethical field, his position is solid as a legitimate heir of the great ethical philosophers of the past.

A FOREIGNER KNOWN AS AN AMERICAN

The rather peculiar case of the Spanish-born philosopher, poet and author George Santayana (Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás) (1863-1952) is considered here, in this section, instead of the Twilight section, where he would have resided, had I agreed to his common designation as an American philosopher. But there is no way I could, because of several reasons. Brought to America from Spain in 1872, he attended a very good school in Boston, and went straight on to Harvard, graduating in 1886. He then left America to study in Berlin for two years, returning to Harvard for his dissertation, and to teach philosophy. In 1896-1897, his residence was at the University of Cambridge, where he added another feather into the hat of his education. In 1912 he left Harvard and America never to return, and would spent the rest of his life (forty years of it) in Europe, primarily in Rome, where he eventually died. Ironically, he did not mind Mussolini’s fascist regime (although strongly objecting after 1936 to Franco in his native Spain) and the regime did not mind him. This fact alone constitutes an irresistible motive for a further investigation which I most definitely intend to undertake at a later time with more blessed leisure on my hands.

Temperamentally and otherwise, Santayana was as far from being “an American” as only can be imagined by one with an adequate imagination and discernment. Characterized as a “Castilian Platonist” he was aristocratic, detached, and elitist. Like Alexis de Tocqueville (nobody would dare calling that one an American!), Santayana observed American culture and character from a foreigner’s point of view. But even though he remained, on principle, a lifelong citizen of Spain, having declined to become an American citizen, and happily resided in fascist Italy for decades, he is unswervingly considered an American writer by Americans! But as he himself admitted, he felt most at home, intellectually and aesthetically, not even in Rome, but at… Oxford.

“Philosophically” speaking, he was more an aphorist than a philosopher. He wrote books and essays on a wide range of subjects including philosophy of a less technical sort, literary criticism, the history of ideas, politics and morals, human nature, and the subtle influence of religion on culture and social psychology, in a literary style, with ample wit and humor. While his writings on technical philosophy are difficult, his other writings are far more readable, and all of his books contain quotable passages.

For the purpose of this raw preliminary entry we shall briefly consider the outline of his philosophical credo and finish it with some of my best-liked quotations.

From everything I have read of him and about him, I find Santayana philosophically more of a commentator that a postulator. The following Wikipedia summary is highly inadequate yet I will quote it here as reference (or rather a virtual space-filler) for a future reexamination and elaboration. Any longer and more substantive summary would be impractical at this time.

Santayana’s main philosophical legacy of work consists of The Sense of Beauty (1896), probably, the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; The Life of Reason, in five volumes (1905–6), the high point of his Harvard career; Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923); and The Realms of Being, in four volumes (1927–40). Although Santayana was not a pragmatist in the mold of William James or John Dewey, The Life of Reason is arguably the first extended treatment of pragmatism ever penned.

Like many of the classical pragmatists, and because he is also well-versed in evolutionary theory, Santayana was committed to a naturalist metaphysics, where human cognition, cultural practices, and social institutions have evolved so as to harmonize with the conditions present in their environment. Their value may, then, be adjudged by the extent to which they facilitate human happiness. The alternate title to The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, is indicative of this metaphysical stance… Santayana was an early adherent of epiphenomenalism, but admired the classical materialism of Democritus and Lucretius. He held Spinoza in high regard, without subscribing to the latter’s rationalism or pantheism.

Although an atheist (?!), he held a fairly benign view of religion in contrast to thinkers like Bertrand Russell who held that religion was harmful in addition to being false. His views on religion are outlined in his books Reason in Religion, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion.

The question of Santayana’s “atheism” must be taken with a complex grain of salt. Here is how it is treated by Bertrand Russell in the chapter On Catholic and Protestant Skeptics in Why I Am Not a Christian:

In the realm of philosophy, a very interesting example is Mr. Santayana, who has always loved orthodoxy in itself, but hankered after some intellectually less abhorrent form than that provided by the Catholic Church. He liked always in Catholicism the institution of the Church, and its political influence. He liked, speaking broadly, what the Church has taken over from Greece and from Rome, but he did not like what the Church has taken over from the Jews including of course whatever it owes to its founder. He could have wished that Lucretius had succeeded in founding a church based on the tenets of Democritus, for materialism has always appealed to his intellect, and, at any rate, in his earlier works, he came nearer to worshipping matter than to awarding this distinction to anything else. But in the long run he seems to have come to feel that any church which actually exists is to be preferred to a church confined to the realm of essence. Mr. Santayana however is an exceptional phenomenon hardly fitting into any of our modern categories. He is really pre-Renaissance and belongs, if anything, with the Ghibellines whom Dante found suffering in Hell for their adherence to the doctrines of Epicurus. This outlook is, no doubt, reinforced by the nostalgia for the past, which an unwilling and prolonged contact with America was bound to produce in a Spanish temperament.

Most interesting and instructive, as virtually everything written by Russell’s pen. No wonder he is one of my staple foods! And now, of course, comes the final segment of this entry: my favorite Santayana dicta:

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is such a powerful phrase and it is so much in harmony with what I am doing in this book, that I might just as well use it as one of the epigraphs to Nunc Dimittis. Nota bene!

A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. The trouble, though, is that one cannot see the world for what it is from the outside, but getting inside foreign places is not possible without getting one’s feet off the home ground. I think that Santayana was one of the best to understand this from his own expatriate experiences.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a much happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. This is a remarkable multifaceted adage, that can be understood with reference to one’s advancing age, but also purely philosophically, and particularly stoically, as one’s attitude of happy imperviousness to one’s changing fortunes.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it. This usually misquoted adage speaks for itself, whether in this correct form, or even when misquoted.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences. Another pearl of wisdom which speaks for itself better than any commentator.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and were it not assumed, the most improbable of conclusions. Another dictum best left without a comment, and what a magnificent one!

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope. This is a very pleasant pro-theistic statement. After an apologetic affirmation like this, who would dare calling Santayana an atheist, even if he himself might have played with this word on occasion?

A child only educated at school is an uneducated child. How true!

There are many more aphoristic masterpieces originated by Santayana, but the ones above are the closest to my heart and to my mind. Au révoir, chèr Santayana… A bientôt!