To Doctor Empiric

When men a dangerous disease did 'scape
    Of old they gave a cock to Aesculape
Let me give two, that doubly am got free
    From my disease's danger, and from thee.

Ben Jonson (1753?-1637) from Epigrams and Epitaphs (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 27.

At the very end of the Phaedo, having drunk the hemlock, Socrates is reported by Plato as saying to Crito, "I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget to pay it." (tr. F. J. Church) Asclepius is the Greek god of healing.  Presumably, Socrates wanted to thank the god for his recovery from the sickness of life itself.

Nietzsche comments at the the beginning of "The Problem of Socrates" in The Twilight of the Idols:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good.  Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life.  Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster." (tr. W. Kaufmann)

Coyne versus Vallicella Vapaista Valinnoista

I can't read it, but maybe you can.  It is a response to my Jerry Coyne on Why You Really Don't Have Free Will.

Update (22 August):  Ilari Malkki writes:

I noticed that you posted a link to my blog post "Coyne versus Vallicella Vapaista Valinnoista" (Coyne vs Vallicella on Free Will).  Thanks for the link! The main language is Finnish, so I´m not too  surprised that you can´t read it.

One correction, though. It is not a "response" to you, but to Jerry  Coyne. I just lay out your arguments on that post and defend them  against Coyne.

Trotsky’s Faith

Leon Trotsky died on this date in 1940.  Here is something I posted about two and a half years ago:


TrotskyThe last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe.  Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.  My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth. [. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room.  I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere.  Life is beautiful.  Let the future generations cleanse it of evil,
oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)

No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future.  Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some.  But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic.   Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?  Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?

I should think that it is less credible.  Note first that there is no Man, only men.  And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division.  The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of communism.  In the 20th century, communists  murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.  That is a lot of eggs to waste for a nonexistent omelet.

We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith.  You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Trotsky, as you can see from the quotation, believed in a redemptive future.  Life in this world is beautiful and will be cleansed by future generations of evil, oppression, and violence.  But even if this fantasy future were achieved, it could not possibly redeem the countless millions who have suffered and died in the most horrible ways since time beyond memory.  Marxist redemption-in-the-future would be a pseudo-redemption even if it were possible, which it isn't. 

There is also the moral and practical absurdity of a social programme that employs present evil, oppression, and violence in order to extirpate future evil, oppression, and violence.  Once the totalitarian State is empowered to do absolutely anything in furtherance of its means-justifying ends it will turn on its own creators as it did on Trotsky.  Because there is no such thing as The People, 'power to the people' is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator.  The same goes for 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'  What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana. It is interesting to compare Edith Stein and Lev Davidovich Bronstein.  Each renounced the present world and both set out in quest of a Not-Yet, one via contemplation, the other via  revolution.  Which chose the path of truth, which that of illusion?  it is of course possible that both quests were illusory.

How strange the stage of this life and the characters that pass upon it, their words and gestures resounding for a time before fading away.

Literarily Pleasing, but Incoherent

I found the folllowing quotation here:

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. 

— Umberto Eco
The world is a play of phenomena, an enigmatic play of appearances beneath which there is no reality.  Harmless in itself, the world is made terrible by us when we make the mad attempt to lay bare an underlying truth it fails to possess.  Part of Eco's thought, I take it, is that those who seek the world's underlying truth fool themselves into thinking that they have found it, and having convinced themselves that they are now in possession of it, feel entitled and perhaps even obligated to impose it on others for their own good.  But these others, naturally, resist the imposition and react violently.  Hence the pursuit of the truth leads to contention and bloodshed. Better to live and let live and admit that there is a variety of perspectives, a diversity of interpretations, but no God's Eye perspective and no final interpretation, let alone an uninterpreted reality in itself, a true world hidden by the world of appearances.   The world is interpretation all the way down.  Being has no bottom.
 
The line of thought is seductive but incoherent.  If the world is an enigma, then it is true that it is an enigma.  If it is harmless, then it is true that it harmless.  If it is made terrible by our attempt to interpret it, then it is true that it is made terrible by our attempt to interpret it.  If our attempt is mad, then it is true that our attempt is mad.  And if it has no underlying truth, then it is true that it has no underlying truth.
 
If that is the truth, then there is after all an underlying truth and the world cannot be a play of relativities, of  shifting perspectives, of mere interpretations.  If the world is such-and-such, then it is, and doesn't merely seem.

Some Recent Writing on Kerouac

October is Kerouac month hereabouts and she is still a good six weeks off.  But Danny Lanzetta's In Defense of Kerouac and Other Flawed Literature should be noted before it scrolls into cyber-oblivion.  Excerpt:

Kerouac's work is undoubtedly sophomoric at times. He is hopelessly naïve about people, which sometimes leads to this and other times just comes off as laziness, a selfish desire to write the way he wanted to write and live the way he wanted to live, collateral damage be damned.

The first link is to this OTR passage:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!"

Lanzetta seems to be suggesting that this is a particularly bad specimen of  Kerouac's scrivening.  But although too often quoted, it is passages like this that grabbed my attention and gave me shivers back in the '60s  and that still do now in my 60s.  My 'beatitude' is considerably more measured these days, and it's a good thing too: too much 'madness' leads to an early grave.  Jack's prodigious quaffing of the joy juice caught up with him in '69 at the tender age of 47, and his hero Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty of On the Road) was found dead on the railroad tracks near San Miguel Allende, Mexico the year before a few days shy of his 42nd birthday.

But it is for the hyper-romanticism and the heartfelt gush & rush that some of us read Kerouac still despite his many literary flaws, not to mention the mess he made of his life and the lives of others.  He was no cool beatnik.  He was mad to live, to talk, to feel, to know, to be saved.  He was a restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of tears & mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa of this dolorous life, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.

More in the Kerouac category.

The Last Words of Leon Trotsky

On this date in 1940 in Mexico City Ramon Mercader drove an ice axe (not an ice pick as some accounts have it) into the skull of Leon Trotsky.  He died the next day.  Here we read:

Mercader later testified at his trial:

I laid my raincoat on the table  in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I  decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment  Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe  from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a  terrible blow on the head.

According to Joseph Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers Party  (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack. Stalin  has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before."

Trotsky, who didn't shrink from murder and brutality in pursuit of his utopian fata morgana, met his end brutally. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Gratitude

Every day find something to be grateful for. 

It might be the regularity of nature.  Without it, how would you make coffee?  And then there is coffee itself and its wonderful taste.  What a marvellous, yet harmless, drug!  And then there are the  thoughts that percolate up under its agency.  There are so many of them swarming and demanding attention.   Some are even worth writing down. Your notebooks lay ready: they weren't destroyed during the night.  And the pens too.  Your fingers are supple and free of arthritis.  And there is your library of  books, thousands of them, to supply you with thought- and blog-fodder . . . .

But if you want to be miserable you should be able to find something to kvetch about.

Doubt, the Engine of Inquiry

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 13, part II, p. 10, #48:

It is the first operation of  philosophical training to instill doubt, to free the mind of all those numerous suggestions and distortions imposed on it by others since childhood and maintained by its own slavish acceptance, total unawareness, or natural incapacity.

Or as I have put it more than once in these pages: Doubt is the engine of inquiry, the motor of mental development. Of course, doubting  and questioning are not ends in themselves, but means to the attainment of such insight as it is possible for us to attain.