SCHOPENHAUER AND HIS PLACE IN HISTORY

I interrupt my ongoing sequence of entries, to commemorate the 225^th anniversary of the birth of the great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (22^nd February 1788 – 21^st September 1860). This is the opening entry of my Schopenhauer series. Three more entries are to follow.

Schopenhauer’s lofty place in history, strangely enough, has been disputed. In his Introduction to the 1928 American edition of Die Welt, the American philosopher-scholar Professor Irwin Edman (1896-1954) calls him, rather patronizingly and unpleasantly, “one of the very great second-raters in the history of European thought.” Bertrand Russell, although considerably less unpleasantly, attributes a certain “shallowness and inconsistency” to his philosophy (name me one great philosopher who can be called consistent through and through!), but redeems himself, however, by consistently putting Schopenhauer’s name among the greatest.

Every Russian, who is spiritually a Russian, ranks Schopenhauer among the very greatest and reveres him as Nietzsche’s direct precursor. Nietzsche himself gives him the highest distinction: “Schopenhauer is the last German to be really reckoned with. He is not a mere local or national phenomenon, but a European event, like Goethe, Hegel, and Heine.” (Götzen-Dämmerung: Skirmishes #21.) Needless to say, Schopenhauer is among the most quoted persons throughout Nietzsche’s works, and he is also the subject of his long essay Schopenhauer as Educator.

Some things said about Schopenhauer by Russell in his History of Western philosophy deserve a mention, and here are a couple of important excerpts.---

“Schopenhauer is in many ways peculiar among philosophers. He is a pessimist, whereas almost all others are in some sense optimists. He is not fully academic, like Kant and Hegel , nor yet completely outside the academic tradition.” (He certainly writes much better than Kant and Hegel, and if good writing is a mark of academic outsiders, more power to these, then!) “He dislikes Christianity, preferring the religions of India, both Hinduism and Buddhism. He is a man of wide culture, quite as much interested in art as in ethics.” (In Russia, such is the mark of the Intelligent. Art is an essential part of the Russian intellectual and spiritual outlook.) “He is unusually free from nationalism, and as much at home with English and French writers as with those of his own country.” (On numerous occasions I have mentioned the peculiar Russian eclecticism, which, however, should not be mistaken for a lack of nationalism, on the contrary, Russia sees all the best in Western Culture as her own, and sees herself as the repository of the best.) “His appeal has always been less to professional philosophers…” (who are they, I wonder, after Nietzsche, who was of course, a great admirer of Schopenhauer!) “…than to artistic and literary people in search of a philosophy, which they could believe. He began the emphasis on Will, which is characteristic of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy; but for him Will, though metaphysically fundamental, is ethically evil,-- an opposition only possible for a pessimist.” (Curiously, Nikolai Gumilev counts “renunciation of the Will for the sake of contemplation” as one of Schopenhauer’s most admirable achievements!) “He acknowledges three sources of his philosophy-- Kant, Plato and the Upanishads, but I do not think that he owes as much to Plato as he thinks he does. His outlook has a certain temperamental affinity with that of the Hellenistic age; it is tired and valetudinarian, valuing peace more than victory, and quietism more than attempts at reform, which he regards as futile.”

“…Historically, two things are important about Schopenhauer: his pessimism, and his doctrine that Will is superior to knowledge.” (Not in the moral, but in the physical aspect only.) “His pessimism made it possible for men to take to philosophy without having to persuade themselves that evil can be explained away, and in this way as an antidote it was useful. More important than pessimism was the doctrine of the primacy of the will. It is obvious that this doctrine has no logical connection with pessimism, and those who held it after Schopenhauer frequently found in it a basis for optimism. In one form or another, the doctrine that Will is paramount has been held by many modern philosophers, notably by Nietzsche, Bergson, James, and Dewey. It has, moreover, acquired a vogue outside the circles of professional philosophers.” (But certainly not to the exclusion of the “professionals”! If non-A has a certain quality, it does not follow that A, out of spite or out of something, does not possess it.) “And in proportion as Will has gone up in the scale, knowledge has gone down. This is, I think, the most notable change which has come over the temper of philosophy in our age. It was prepared by Rousseau and Kant, but it was first proclaimed, in its purity, by Schopenhauer. And for this reason, in spite of inconsistency and a certain shallowness, his philosophy has considerable importance as a stage in historical development.”

It is thus obvious now, even from Russell’s rather reserved assessment, that Schopenhauer was a trailblazer of the first magnitude, and, as such, he belongs to philosophy’s crème de la crème, no matter what anybody might say about his depth or shallowness, consistency or inconsistency, and my personal partiality for him has nothing to do with this objective assessment of his historical legacy.

KALININ: MORON, MONSTER, GENIUS, SAINT -- PART II

This is Part II of my two-part Kalinin entry. Part I was published yesterday. The following are the Kalinin-related excerpts from my father’s 2006 book Conversations About Stalin, co-authored with his interviewer Ekaterina Glushik. The book is in Russian. All translations into English are mine. Artem’s quotes are given in blue color; my comments are in automatic color.

…Stalin was a good pool player. Once he invited Kalinin to play pool at his dacha, and cleaned his clock. Kalinin pretended to be furious: “A decent host ought to have honored his guest by losing the game to him, and look what you have done! What kind of uncouth creature are you anyway?” (Unlike some other stories of this nature, I have no reason to doubt this one, which rings authentic to me from everything I know. Such humor was common in Stalin’s company, as Stalin always encouraged it, and only some obsequious lackeys of his entourage, whom Stalin despised, never trusted, and eventually repressed, would never engage in such exchanges. It follows, therefore, that Kalinin was not an obsequious lackey, as often depicted.)

Stalin loved and respected Kalinin, who was a peculiar man and a true original. And besides, he was a metal turner of the highest caliber, working not on straight lines only but on all curved configurations: the hardest job in the metal turning profession. And Stalin respected him not just for his dedication and sharp mind, but also for his attainment of such a high level of worker’s skill. (This is true, but once again it shows Kalinin as a skilled worker, and not as a peasant.) He was also a big specialist in peasant affairs. (But this is already a disingenuous nod to Kalinin’s official Soviet legend. Now see how Artem will next try to substantiate his platitude not from personal experience, and not even from the experience of his friends and comrades, but in generalities, quite uncharacteristic of his usual style of memoir.) Peasants used to say that during harvest time he would take a scythe and start working with the others, like a natural-born reaper. (In the last sentence my father is by no means making something up. He is simply repeating an official Soviet legend, created to promote Kalinin’s connection to Soviet peasantry. Nor is the credibility of his narrative compromised here: he is clearly sourcing this story, but this time it is coming from a source of rather dubious credibility: the official Soviet agitprop.)

Now, here is another Kalinin story, this time from Artem’s personal experience, and I am convinced that it is quite true and practically unembellished, as this is not one of those “obligatory cases” where my father feels compelled to alter history for public consumption, ad majorem Russiae gloriam. The story is taken from his interview to the Express Gazette, as always in my translation.

The Kremlin had one barbershop for all. Once-- I was just a boy then-- I was waiting for my turn to have my haircut. Suddenly Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin comes in. My turn happened to be next and I offered him to go in front of me. And he suddenly tells me: “No, one must not do it. It’s your turn now and so you go first. Do we have a law on the books anywhere, which says that Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin must be served ahead of the line at the barbershop? No, we don’t, and I know it because I write them and sign them. So, take your turn now, and I will wait for mine.”

For the benefit of those eager to dismiss this story as sugary and disingenuous hagiography (after all, Artem was Comrade Stalin’s son, and Kalinin certainly knew that), I’ll note that deviousness was not in Kalinin’s nature. From what I heard about him from my parents and from other people who personally knew him, he would have done exactly the same thing for someone who was not Stalin’s son, simply out of a general sense of fairness. On the other hand, I know of quite a few men and women at the Kremlin, the obsequious lackeys, I spoke of earlier, who were plotting day and night how to keep themselves in Stalin’s good graces, but would never see anything wrong in taking a little boy’s turn at the barbershop.

KALININ: MORON, MONSTER, GENIUS, SAINT -- PART I

(“Moron, Monster, Genius, Saint” is a jocular allusion to John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. This entry obviously comes out of my Russian/Soviet history subsection, alongside many already posted entries. See, for instance, my postings of February/March 2011.)

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (1875-1946) was a distinguished Soviet statesman, nominal head of state from 1919 until his natural death in 1946. Russia’s westernmost outpost, the former German city of Königsberg, was annexed to the USSR after World War II, and renamed Kaliningrad in his honor.

Habitually depicted as an ignorant fool, picked as a compliant stooge for the post of President of the USSR, he is also described by some post-Soviet re-discoverers of history as an insatiable sexual predator, with one dark allegation of a mysterious disappearance of his mistress, later found dead. It is a fact, however, that his wife separated from him at least twice (which may, or may not, have been linked to her alleged espousal of free love), and when in 1938 she was arrested and sent to a prison camp (from which she would be released shortly before Kalinin’s death in 1946), Kalinin did not seem to protest too much…

That was one side of the picture, the ugly side. There is another side, too, of course. It shows Kalinin as an unrivaled genius in his work, and as a very nice and kind man, during one of the roughest times in Russia’s history. Need I tell the reader that my father Artem promoted this other side, dismissing the former one as a vicious calumny?

But as for myself, I will prefer to start with what I see as a peculiar irony. Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was of peasant birth, but instead of inheriting the peasant gene, sending him into the fields to plough, to sow and to reap, he was anxious to get away from his village and village work, to the city, where he learned the trade of metalwork and was by all accounts a master turner of the greatest level of skill. Thus, he could rightfully call himself a worker, yet he was always called a “peasant” by those same people who hailed the worker as the prime mover of the Proletarian Revolution, but denigrated the Russian peasant as a second-class citizen. Recommending him for the post equivalent to President of Soviet Russia, in 1919, Lenin had the following to say about Comrade Kalinin: “This is a Comrade who is counting twenty years of Party work to his credit; he is himself a peasant from the Tver Region, who has the closest connection to peasant economy...”

Why was he billed as a lowly peasant, even by Lenin himself, when all along he had repudiated his peasant roots and had chosen to be a worker, and to substantiate his claim, his worker’s skills were, indeed, second to none, and became legendary among his comrades? To my knowledge, this legitimate question has never been asked by historians, yet it certainly needs to be asked, as the paradox here is quite obvious.

The most likely answer is that, although extolling the supremacy of the blue-collar worker, the new Soviet power tacitly recognized the national core of Mother Russia, and her intimate and unbreakable connection to the Russian soil. That connection could hardly be expressed through the internationalized symbol of the industrial worker, but it was veritably crystallized in the Russian peasant. Therefore, contrary to its revolutionary Marxist proletarian-rich rhetoric, the new Soviet order sorely needed to find a way to re-emphasize that connection to the peasant, and comically assigned the epitome of a determined defector from peasanthood for that indispensable role. New Russia’s President simply had to be a man of the soil, the all-Russian Village Starosta, whether Comrade Kalinin the master turner liked it or not…

Such is my answer, which is presented here in lieu of a personal opinion of Kalinin, which I do not have, as my “objective” knowledge of him is virtually non-existent. I shall not repeat here the rather bland official tribute to him from the erstwhile Soviet sources, nor shall I dignify with my further attention the indignities attributed to him by old Soviet rumors or new post-Soviet gossip which has little or no value to monumental history. But in Part II of this entry, to be posted tomorrow, I shall be quoting, and commenting on, my father’s memories and opinion of Kalinin, from his 2006 book Conversations About Stalin, co-authored with his interviewer Ekaterina Glushik.

 

UNITED NATIONS, DIVIDED NATIONS

How does the United Nations fare among the multitude of civil war-torn disintegrating nations, which are supposedly to be protected by the great Organization, as their protection is one of her most solemn duties?

As we can see only too well, the United Nations is helpless, and has been forced to admit it against the better judgment of projecting a positive message of hope. Even I myself, a staunch champion of the UN no matter what, and a former UN official, have to admit that the good Organization has become a pathetic caricature of itself.

Since its inception, and as stipulated in the United Nations Charter, there are sufficient mechanisms within its stated power to quell local conflicts and civil wars, as long as there exists a mutual consent among the Great Powers of the Security Council. Here is the problem, though. There is no consensus among the rulers of the planet, as they are themselves caught at cross purposes. The United States is in pursuit of her global hegemony dream, and one of the perceived tools of achieving such a hegemony is to sow discord among all nations and within all nations that are possibly standing in her way. Hence, it has become the actual policy of the US to divide these nations, and potentially all nations, friends and foes alike, as in their disunity lies the key to the policy’s success. This is exactly what we are witnessing today, especially in and around the Middle East, where the center of gravity has apparently shifted to, on account of Israel.

Accordingly, the United Nations has become a bitterly Divided Nations, both within and among themselves, and this is what the newest “world order” has come to…

What does Europe have to say about this? Nothing, as Europe has been too busy lately, attending to the big bad problem of the economic and financial crisis, with nearly half of the EC going under and threatening an imminent meltdown. Let me remind the reader that the origin of Europe’s present economic problems lies across the ocean, which fact the Europeans had quickly understood and complained about at first, before the “Divided Nations” curse struck them with a vengeance…

Now, what is the role of Russia in all this? I think that the Kremlin secretly, and not so secretly, relishes the plight the world has found itself in because of the deliberate American policy. Moscow has a sharp sense of the long-term effect of the present ugliness, being an accomplished chess player on the world stage. Surely, the Russian leadership believes, not without grounds for it, that everything going on, no matter its outcome, works in Russia’s interest, so why interfere with the enemy destroying himself? as Napoleon wisely said not too long ago, by the Russian clock standards.

I cannot say that I like what the Russians are doing, but I do not know what constructive moves they could have made otherwise, in the face of the unconstructive Washington policy, except to manipulate the situation and to take maximum advantage of the problems of everybody else concerned…

DOES THE WORLD NEED A LEADER?

Our earlier entry (namely, Leader Principle, published on this blog on November 26^th, 2011) raised the subject of America’s belief in the Leader Principle, and it goes without saying that one must indeed believe in this principle, in order to declare oneself the leader of the world. Honestly, it seems almost inevitable that, should there be a vote among the nations as to which of them is to be declared the leader, America will garner more votes than anybody else on the rather questionable but understandable assumption that the leader is the one who pays for the party, and the richest man at the table must therefore get the wallet vote. I am sure however that this question of leadership will never be taken to the vote, and there is a good question which must be raised in this connection: does the world need a leader-nation at all?

My judgment is that even to suggest that the world can have a leader is utterly delusional. Most nations are too proud to accept the role of a follower, especially after the stabilizing principle of bipolarity has been so rudely undermined. I also suggest that any nation, without exception, claiming for herself the mantle of the leader will immediately antagonize the rest of the world, regardless of her objective merits.

Thus it is ridiculous to discuss whether the world needs a leader, as clearly the world just cannot have one, that is, one recognized by all, which is the only meaningful way to have a world leader.

A much better and infinitely more practical solution would be to energize the existing international organizations, particularly the United Nations, where the strong powers will naturally play stronger roles than the weak ones, but where the presence of their strong competitors will provide the necessary balance and thus become acceptable to those who will never be able to pass the leadership test by themselves.

Long live the United Nations, and may her detractors be hoisted with their own petards!

LIBERATORS OR OCCUPIERS?

(On the one hand, this is obviously a dated entry, but, on the other hand, it does raise certain issues of lasting importance.)

After so many years of the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the question that ought to have been asked a long time ago is waiting to be asked with a no less burning urgency.--- What is the difference between liberators and occupiers?

Late in his life, during the second and last exile to Saint Helena, Napoleon was still marveling over the fact of his fatal miscalculation of Russian patriotism, when, at the start of his disastrous Russian campaign, he was very much counting on the “natural” desire of those millions of Russian serfs to be liberated from the yoke of serfdom, only to find out that these wretched peasants flatly rejected his offer of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and zealously supported their Russian slave masters in defeating their generous liberators. That event happened two centuries ago, and this historical mistake of the “greatest Frenchman who ever lived” was supposed to become a textbook illustration of the “good or bad, this is still my country” response of all occupied nations to foreign occupation.

A century later, during the World War I invasion of Russia by the Entente forces, allegedly, to punish the Bolsheviks for their “separate peace” with Germany and to support the White armies who had been fighting the Bolshevik usurpers of power at that time, many old Tsarist generals of the White movement in the areas of the Entente incursion were grudgingly shifting their allegiance to the only Russian government in existence at the time: that of the Bolsheviks! Scoundrels and usurpers all, but at least they were not some opportunistic foreigners! And so, that ill-advised and clueless foreign invasion was to doom the rest of the White resistance to Bolshevism, thus assuring Lenin of a “surprise” victory.

Still a quarter of a century after that Hitler at least made little pretense of liberating anyone, but his fate was the same, going the way of all occupiers.

Yet, twenty years after Hitler was Vietnam, and yet another forty years later, no lessons learned. The great American superpower was now stuck in Iraq, with no prospect other than an ignominious retreat-in-defeat in sight. If there is any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam it must be that same underestimation of the resilience of native patriotism which, ironically and oddly, seems so… foreign to America that one simple question keeps hanging on without an answer: “Had the situation been reversed, and some foreign occupying force had overrun the United States for whatever good reason wouldn’t it have been natural for all good men of the American Union to join the Resistance?” I bet had a strong foreign power invaded the Southern American States before or during the American Civil War, under the honorable pretext of emancipating the slaves, the North and the South would have stood united against such an aggression, leaving their deep domestic dispute over slavery aside, for the moment.

Alas, the American history of national freedom from foreign occupation is both a blessing and a curse, the latter by virtue of this nation’s glaring ignorance of what it truly means to be occupied by a foreign power, be that an aggressive intruder, or an imperialist benefactor of the world. Apparently, there is no wisdom in theorizing without a direct personal historical experience, and such life experience is ostensibly lacking in this wonderful, but terribly spoiled brat of a nation.

By the same measure, America fails to understand the simple truth that the so-called New Europe does not have a congenital hatred for the Russians on the one hand, and an eternal and inextinguishable love for the United States on the other. It is just the fact that for quite a while, in some instances dating from the end of World War II, in others, such as of Poland, much-much longer, these nations had found themselves under the Russian/Soviet occupation, which fact they had naturally resented, and now, regaining independence, it will take another while for the inertia of that old resentment to wear off, but that time, sooner or later, must surely come, accelerated, in a number of cases, by the powerful draw of their historical pan-Slavism, which term with its interesting implications, is not too familiar, I am afraid, to the wishful thinkers of the new Pax Americana.

Come to think of it, some of the Russophobic tendencies, on the part of a few New European governments, are more likely to be caused by their eagerness to please Washington, singing, to the American politicians, the sweet songs, which they are presumably so anxious to hear, in exchange for a couple of extra dollars. It should come as no surprise, however (although I have a feeling that this will strike them like a thunderbolt), that a few years down the road the American intensive presence in the nations of New Europe will, in itself, begin to be regarded as an occupation, and the talking heads of inside-the-beltway may then start scratching their heads and talking about the black ingratitude of the New Europeans toward their generous benefactors, after so much good having been done them…

Live and learn? Perhaps, but even more likely, live and never learn! The uniquely kind historical experience of the United States has made this nation incapable of understanding how it feels to be somebody else.

DOG EAT SELF

First, a general philosophical riddle, courtesy of Nietzsche’s Jenseits (76):

“Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.” Nietzsche’s aphorism exposes his generally negative attitude toward the Ascetic Ideal, with its self-torture: the zealot-saint killing his Dionysian self. It follows easily that self-abuse is a form of war whenever ‘normal’ war is for any reason beyond the abuser’s reach. Does it mean that the will for [aggressive!] war is a form of religious zeal? To those who will dispute such a suggestion, we might elucidate that any zeal is a form of religion, not a particular religion, mind you, but proselytizing religion as such.

Freedom to kill, characteristic of war, is a very revealing sort of freedom. It goes hand in hand with the two remarkable Hobbesian ideas: of war being the natural state of man, and of liberty as freedom from restraint. Thus, war is the ultimate expression of freedom in the Hobbesian man. Which is why men ought to be organized in commonwealths, according to Hobbes, to put their freedoms in restraints.

The shocking conclusion from this is that the idea of freedom itself may need to be put under restraint. The notion that “I am free” is a very dangerous notion when promoted with unrestrained abandon. “I am free” is translated in Dostoyevsky as “Everything is allowed,” hence we have Raskolnikov on the smaller scale, and the Demons, on a somewhat larger scale. The celebrated Russian nihilists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, were men and women who cried “Freedom! Freedom!” Stalin put severe restraints on Russia’s revolutionary freedom in order to save the freedom-intoxicated Russians from themselves, channeling their bellicosity instead into a defensive zeal in preparation for the great war with Nazi Germany.

...Now returning to the Nietzsche passage above, let us consider this. Granted that the blond barbarian beast is a warlike creature, under what circumstances does he happen to set upon himself? Would not this become an immediate contradiction? Such self-destruction of the healthiest type of man… to add insult to injury, of the fictional man, who has every right to be perfect!... But, perhaps, the forces of nature, such as the warring urge, are much stronger than any ideal, and have been destined to overpower man’s desire for peace?

How do all these things stand together in the American context?

I am sure that if we put the recurrently exhibited American bellicosity under the lens of this argument, we may see things which we have not seen before, and get enlightened with many new insights. So here finally comes the big reason why I am putting this entry in the Twilight section. Here is our neat riddle for the New American Century:

Granted that, even if we like to grumble about the evils of today, as opposed to the good old yesterday, this world of ours has always been a dog eat dog place. Assuming, only hypothetically, of course, that, after all dogs but one have been eaten, a one-dog world emerges,--- does it mean then that the new order of the day is Dog Eat… Self?

This is what can actually happen to a superpower that has lost her noble enemy, and has declared herself the one and only remaining superpower in the modern world. Georgi Arbatov was absolutely right: Russia may have indeed defeated the United States in the apotheosis of the Cold War, by… depriving her of her enemy. (Need I add: her Nietzschean noble enemy?!)

That is why in the absence of such an enemy, America willed to revert to a search for another Vietnam, but this time without even a quasi-legitimate cause, and most definitely an enemy far inferior to either Vietnam or previously North Korea. Iraq in particular, and Afghanistan later on after the al Qaeda rationale had worn off, have represented wars for war sake, to satisfy the excessively cultivated national Crusader zeal of “I am free, he must be subdued,” paraphrasing Nietzsche in Jenseits 19.

But could the new freedom-loving American zealot be satisfied with questionable wars with little enemies? A bigger enemy had to rise or had to be erected in the vacuum created by the collapse of the USSR. Islam? A quick-acting narcotic injection, perhaps, but certainly unrealistic and outright devastating as a long-term solution. That is why our freedom-loving zealot is increasingly seeking gratification on the domestic scene. A frightening form of autocannibalism!… The worst part of it is that we are not dealing with some isolated freaks of nature, who regularly run amok in every society, but with a persistent effort to breed their psychological type by America’s new social engineers…