Canetti, Elias – Maverick Philosopher

Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti

From Granta, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me. It reads well with 'weblog' substituted for 'notebook.'

The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.

The Deep Thinker

Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations (Die Fliegenpein: Aufzeichnungen), Noonday 1994, tr. H. F. Broch de Rothermann, bilingual ed., p. 25:

His thoughts have fins instead of wings.

It flows better in German:

Sein Denken hat Flossen statt Flügel.

The title is my creation.

Many of Canetti's notations express insights; others, however striking, are exercises in literary self-indulgence, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Here are some good ones:

No code is secret enough to allow for the expression of complete candor. (5)

He will never be a thinker: he doesn't repeat himself enough. (13)

He desires the existence of the people he loves, but not their presence and their preoccupations. (15)

He wishes for moments that burn as long as match. (15)

I read that as a protest against time's fugacity.

He is as smart as a newspaper; he knows everything and what he knows changes from day to day. (19)

Even the great philosopher benefits from exaggeration, but with him she must wear a tightly woven garment of reason. The poet, on the other hand, exposes her in all her shimmering nudity. (19)

It's easy to be reasonable when you don't love anyone, including yourself. (21)

On fair days he feels too sure of his own life. (23)

That resonates with me. But it is not an aphorism if an aphorism must present a universal truth. This is an aphorism: On fair days one feels too sure of one's own life. But this is the philosopher talking with his zeal to transcend the particular toward the universal. The poet is more at home, or entirely at home, with the particular. There is an advantage to Canetti's formulation: it cannot be contradicted. He is reporting the feeling of a particular man, presumably himself. The corresponding aphorism invites counterexamples.

God does not like us to draw lessons from recent history. (23)

I surmise that the thought driving the aphorism is that the horrors of the 20th century make theistic belief psychologically impossible. Who can believe in God after Auschwitz?

Addendum. Contrast

On fair days he feels too sure of his own life

with

He whose days are fair feels too sure of his own life.

'He' in the second sentence functions as a universal quantifier, not as a pronoun. Pronouns have antecedents: the 'he' in the second sentence has no antecedent. Nor does it need one. The 'he' in the first sentence, however, could be called a dangling pronoun: its antecedent is tacit, and is presumably 'Canetti.' If this is right, the two sentences express different thoughts and are not intersubstitutable salva veritate.

I rather doubt that Canetti would approve of this analysis. Too philosophical.

Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death

An excerpt from Roger Kimball, Becoming Elias Canetti:

. . . . Canetti’s response to the fact of death—“the only fact,” as he sometimes puts it—is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear, is “whether he should put up with the fact that a death is imminent for him.”

Canetti has never worked out his thoughts on death in any systematic fashion. His basic message would seem to be the unexceptionable admonition not to go gentle into that good night. Yet he also uses the rejection of death as the starting point for other, often more questionable, sorts of statements. At one point, for example, his insistence that the individual take a stand against death leads him to the pious declaration that “I care about the life of every human being and not just that of my neighbor.” And in one of his essays, he goes beyond the posture of stoically resisting death to tell us that “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” We must of course be grateful that Canetti cares about the lives of all of us, even if the word “cares” is rendered practically empty in this context. But as for the relation between death and beauty and death and goodness—well, here I think we must question Canetti’s dictum. For it seems at least equally plausible that beauty and goodness can emerge as compelling forces in our lives only against the background of mortality; in this sense, death, as Wallace Stevens put it, is the mother of beauty. Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever. Now, I do not doubt that Canetti’s meditations on death betray a core of genuine pathos. But in the end I’m afraid that they amount to little more than a collection of sentimental exhortations; their chief function would seem to be to perpetuate the atmosphere of intellectual melodrama within which Canetti prefers to operate. Indeed, they would hardly be worth scrutiny, except that Canetti insists on placing them at the very center of his thought.

Canetti quoted: “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” Canetti paraphrased: To those who live free of illusions, nothing ultimately matters if neither we nor they last forever. Kimball quoted: "Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever."