The Great Books Of The Western World

Black Sheep · 10-12-2020 5:15pm

Schopenhauer is engaging.

I'm at a point where he is talking about the origins of knightly honour, and how it informs our honour today. He suggests is tied up in a belief that when someone - no matter how much of a wretch - speaks ill of us or impugns our honour there is a stain there that we have to erase by getting them to recant, or by violence. Schopenhauer says this type of honour came out of the medieval period and he goes through how some modern language (the idea of 'putting up' with things) derives from this sense of knightly honour and chivalry. He notes that there was no such sense of honour in the ancient world... Using various examples referring to Seneca and others who clearly believed that honour was something held internally, that could not be taken by the actions of another - particularly by someone who gives someone a beating or is rude to them... Whereas in knightly honour it's very much a big thing to lose honour if someone has got one over on you this way.

Black Sheep · 15-12-2020 12:13pm

Finished Schopenhauer's THE WISDOM OF LIFE and begun his MAXIMS AND COUNCILS.

He begins by advocating for Aristotle's advice that happiness is about avoiding life's greatest evils rather than chasing happiness itself.

---

Still working on THE DECLINE AND FALL. Interesting comments relating to Diocletian's separation of different pay and conditions for borderers (Fighting legions on the empire's frontiers) and those in cushier numbers in the interior of the empire... The palatines.

Gibbon quotes an ancient warning that the palatines' cups became heavier than their swords, and they loved downy pillows.

Meanwhile the borderers became disgruntled. Gibbon notes that there was an incorrect expectation that by diminishing, demoralising and reducing the borderers they would become more pliant and obedient. He uses the example of mistreating a dog... Do we expect it to behave better as a result?

Black Sheep · 22-12-2020 1:19pm

Schopenhaeur has a real complex about the non-recognition of people he considers the intellectual elite ... Including himself in that, of course. There's a lot of talk about being resented even by royalty, who recognise their mental superior.

His theory of friendship is that much of the fondness we extend to others is towards those who we are mentally more capable than (Not clear if this is a question of not being threatened by them in his view, or of some affection similar to our regard for hapless small children). Schophenhaeur suggests that as a consequence, the true intellectual is perpetually in a state of solitude, because others are not friendly towards him due to his greater intelligence.

To be honest much of what he wrote in his book on HAPPINESS and in the MAXIMS is essentially repackaged stoicism, with a dash of distinctly modern neuroticism and existential angst.

Black Sheep · 27-12-2020 12:42pm

Still chipping away with the DECLINE AND FALL.

Started SENSE AND SENSIBILITY by Austen.

Happy Christmas all.

Black Sheep · 31-12-2020 3:19pm

And so we come to the end of another year.

In the DECLINE AND FALL Julian has triumphed over Constantius, the son of Constantine.

Both men's downfalls were .. so mundanely of the period ... Constantius took ill and died after a very short illness returning from campaigning in Persia - on his way to challenge the upstart Caesar Julian.

And Julian, ironically, dies some months later, also fighting the Persians. He appears to have suffered a spear wound that eventually killed him (Infection?).

There's a lot to be said for the medicine of our modern world.

I have heard from American academic and writer David Grossman that if you adjust for medical advancements the death rate and violent crime rate contemporarily is actually extremely high. We pride ourselves on falling murder and manslaughter rates, but we consider that actually violent crime has become a lot more survivable due to medical intervention. Now, I also happen to believe we are probably living in safer and more prosperous times than the ancient world, but nonetheless it's an interesting point.

echo beach · 31-12-2020 8:36pm

Black Sheep wrote: »

I have heard from American academic and writer David Grossman that if you adjust for medical advancements the death rate and violent crime rate contemporarily is actually extremely high. We pride ourselves on falling murder and manslaughter rates, but we consider that actually violent crime has become a lot more survivable due to medical intervention. Now, I also happen to believe we are probably living in safer and more prosperous times than the ancient world, but nonetheless it's an interesting point.

On the other hand, along with advances in medicine have come advances (if you can call them that) in killing people. Automatic machine guns make it possible for one person to kill dozens before being stopped which isn’t so easy with a dagger or bow and arrow!

Black Sheep · 31-12-2020 8:42pm

echo beach wrote: »

On the other hand, along with advances in medicine have come advances (if you can call them that) in killing people. Automatic machine guns make it possible for one person to kill dozens before being stopped which isn’t so easy with a dagger or bow and arrow!

Absolutely, that’s true.

I suspect in pre 20th and 21st century history there was greater overall rates of violent crime and harm to civilians in wartime. And that was with hand held tools and simple missile weapons only...

If you zoom in on violent crime rates contemporaries and somehow could adjust for medical advancements I bet there are higher than we commonly think, however.

I’m still just amazed that even the most unhealthy of us now are almost guaranteed to live through childhood and to a ripe old age. Medicine and sanitation I guess.

Black Sheep · 08-01-2021 12:45pm

A fair chunk of the way through SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.

Austen has a great assessment of Lucy Steele, Eleanor's rival.

"Lucy was naturally clever; her remarks were often just and amusing; and as a companion for half an hour Elinor frequently found her agreeable; but her powers had received no aid from education: she was ignorant and illiterate; and her deficiency of all mental improvement, her want of information in the most common particulars, could not be concealed from Miss Dashwood, in spite of her constant endeavour to appear to advantage."

I like this because sometimes it seems like in the age of social media were are awash with Lucy Steeles of both genders... People who offer their opinions endlessly, and who never let their clear ignorance on a topic act as any barrier at all to offering it.

At a certain point I feel like as a society we were so busy making sure people understood we all believe every person has an inherent value and dignity that we forgot to caveat that by adding that it is ok not to offer your opinion on an issue you are ignorant of. Being ignorant on anything is no relation to your natural intelligence or mental acuity, it's about your education and knowledge of a given subject... It's possible to be intelligent and opinionated... But extremely ignorant. I feel like there's a lot of that going around.

Black Sheep · 08-01-2021 12:51pm

Gibbon is at a point in THE DECLINE AND FALL where the Huns have pushed various Goth tribes up against the Danube, causing some of them to gain permission from Caesar (Valens) to cross and become allies / subjects of Rome. Others follow illegally.

I've heard right wing thinkers point to this as a fatal error made by Valens. They argue it is a classic example of inviting in an external enemy and who then rampages within your borders, because they disregard an agreement to behave according to a pre-agreed set of norms / agreements. A parallel with the challenges posed by modern mass migration is drawn.

Reading Gibbon, however, what strikes me is that his Goths don't actually turn on the Empire until after they have been brought in. He paints a picture of Gothic tribes being forced to give up their children, sell their children as slaves even, and to buy dog-meat at extravagant prices, to be denied access to markets used by other Roman citizens and so on. He clearly argues that the Goths are turned against the Romans by some Roman governors' avarice and ill-will. Even after the point where the Goths begin attacking Roman cities he talks about the possibility for peace to have been made, but this possibility was thrown aside.

It's much more nuanced than I had expected. Gibbon does say it was a strategic calamity to end up with the Goths as enemies within the Roman borders, but it seems to me that he's pretty clear that they were made enemies through a set of ill-conceived policies and local mismanagement.

echo beach · 08-01-2021 7:12pm

Black Sheep wrote: »

A fair chunk of the way through SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.

I like this because sometimes it seems like in the age of social media were are awash with Lucy Steeles of both genders... People who offer their opinions endlessly, and who never let their clear ignorance on a topic act as any barrier at all to offering it.

Austen’s great genius is in her characters, who are so well described that although they are from a different era and social class we can easily relate to them. That is why her work is universal and stands up to re-reading.

Black Sheep · 08-01-2021 7:42pm

I was reading a reading list proposed by Teddy Roosevelt the other day, and even he is a colossal fan of Jane Austen... Says it all really.

Black Sheep · 12-01-2021 2:07pm

Nearing the end of the DECLINE AND FALL.

Stilicho is a Roman general I must admit I've never previously heard of. And yet, he is the undoubted hero of the Empire in its military twlight, staving off the fall of Rome to the Barbarians and beating the pants out of Alaric with everything against him.

When Stilicho delivers the Empire, and saves an ungrateful Emperor and people, there is a victory march through the city with a newly erected celebratory archway. Gibbon remarks that within 7 years, despite Stilicho's efforts, the Goths would be marching through that archway, the city having fallen, and the fine inscription on the archway would be meaningless to a horde who were illiterate.

I'm also nearing the close of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. I will admit Austen has me guessing how she is going to make the Dashwood girls happy. I guess I'm expecting Elinor to realise that Colonel Brandon loves her and she him, but I can't say who Marianne is going to end up with... Robert Harris?!

Black Sheep · 15-01-2021 2:51pm

Finished SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. I must say that I believe it to be vastly inferior to both EMMA and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, although perhaps it is a better vehicle for exploring the morality and social dynamics of the time than either.

I'm a chapter or two into WUTHERING HEIGHTS now. It's not on Adler's reading list, but this is one of those books that I cannot pass by and not go for. I have in mind a few others also that I want to add on ... Dumas' THE COUNT OF MONTECRISTO I should have done around the time of ROBINSON CRUSOE or even before. I also want to do TREASURE ISLAND.

Black Sheep · 16-01-2021 11:47am

I'm not sure what I expected from WUTHERING HEIGHTS but so far I'm very impressed. Somewhat unusually I seem to have never seen an adaptation so I actually don't know the story line, which is helping with the mystery / suspense.

Black Sheep · 20-01-2021 9:24am

I'm unaware of what contemporary critical readings of WUTHERING HEIGHTS focus on, but a few things jumping out at me:-

The adoption of Heathcliffe, a homeless gypsy boy found on the streets, was never satisfactorily explained for me. Why did his adoptive father feel so favourable towards him over his own son? I could believe that he did it out of a sense of religious obligation, but his religious fervour came a little later in his life, not at that stage I think. And if it had been obligation, there would still not have necessarily been the keen preference for Heathcliffe over his biological offspring.

Although Heathcliffe is painted as vindictive and clearly a dark character (even at this stage in the novel, I'm not sure whether he progresses further later), I think we'd characterise the abuse of all the children in the household as abusive by contemporary standards. By the standards of the day, however, I would think they probably weren't? Minimal corporal punishment and physical hardship. There seems to have been quite a lot of emotional abuse, of Cathy as well as Heathcliffe, but to be honest being forced to endure hours of scripture from old Joseph is hardly the worst fate considering what was occurring during the era.

Black Sheep · 20-01-2021 9:26am

I'm in the endgame for the Romans now, nearing the close of THE DECLINE AND FALL.

Gibbon takes a long chapter, in advance of Alaric laying siege to Rome, to describe the decadence and ill manners of the noble occupants. Also, the sheer scale and sprawl of the city and its plebeian inhabitants. If no one has seen it, the old HBO show Rome depicts a much earlier era, but I did think of it when reading this, in terms of its display of the underbelly of the city and Roman tenement life.

Black Sheep · 27-01-2021 5:10pm

Completed THE DECLINE AND FALL.

Amazing. It will go on the list of books on this course that I intend to revisit and maybe buy in nicer editions. My 20 year old Penguin paperback copy is ready for the scrapheap.

The concluding segment is Mohamed's conquering of Constantinople. A remarkable account of the 'general assault' by means of which the city fell, including details of the sack which followed. Always grimly fascinating.

I will never understand how the people of the past coped with the almost intolerable suffering and unfairness that were a routine part of life.

A copy of Von Clausewitz's ON WAR is before me on my desk. I will crack it open tonight.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS continues apace. I am at the part where Heathcliffe has returned (From where? The Sea? The Army?).

Black Sheep · 29-01-2021 9:40pm

Dang, Cathy and Heathcliffe are both bad news... Toxic before toxic was a thing.

Black Sheep · 31-01-2021 11:47am

ON WAR

"...war is always the shock of two hostile bodies in collision, not the action of a living power upon an inanimate mass"

Just a throwaway line, but Clausewitz inserts early in his book this warning, that your opponent in any conflict is not a passive actor that you do your plans to with no pushback, they are active like you are.

It's incredible in the martial arts world how prevalent this error is. You see endless demonstrations of martial arts students 'doing something' to an opponent who just stands there or behaves in a pre-programmed way. Introduce an element of competition and free play and it all just goes to ****. This is the reality of conflict.

"As long as the enemy is not defeated, I have to apprehend that he may defeat me, then I shall be no longer my own master, but he will dictate the law to me as I did to him. "

I love this. A chilling warning, and a recognition that both actors in war have the same self-interested purpose.

Black Sheep · 04-02-2021 12:40pm

ON WAR continues. He is not the most readable, although not clear if it's his prose that's the issue or it's that all German philosophy (because that's what this is) is gobbledegook because of German's vocabulary. So many words that don't translate easily, except in long complex paragraphs. ON WAR features page after page of text without any paragraph breaks.

Black Sheep · 08-02-2021 11:32am

I'm getting a bit peeved off with WUTHERING HEIGHTS. I think it's Cathy and her daughter, the gothic melodrama of it, it just irritates the hell out of me.

Black Sheep · 09-02-2021 1:04pm

ON WAR, book 1 chapter 7... I think this is my favourite chapter, titled 'Friction'.

So many great takeaways from this. He is articulating what not just soldiers but anyone who has faced real world adversity understands.

Maybe it is "murphy's law" to a large extent, but it is more than just the random slings and arrows of fortune... In talking about war as 'movement in a resistant medium' he is describing what it is like to try to accomplish even simple physical tasks in a theatre where everything, including the enemy's counter-actions, seem to conspire to try to hold you back. He note that of course friction can be overcome ... But only through an "iron will" and being acclimatised to physical discomfort.

Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war. Suppose now a traveller, who, towards evening, expects to accomplish the two stages at the end of his day's journey, four or five leagues, with post horses, on the high road—it is nothing. He arrives now at the last station but one, finds no horses, or very bad ones; then a hilly country, bad roads; it is a dark night, and he is glad when, after a great deal of trouble, he reaches the next station, and finds there some miserable accommodation. So in war, through the influence of an infinity of petty circumstances, which cannot properly be described on paper, things disappoint us, and we fall short of the mark.

A powerful iron will overcomes this friction, it crushes the obstacles, but certainly the machine along with them. We shall often meet with this result.

Activity in war is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in war, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity.

Black Sheep · 09-02-2021 1:06pm

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Heathcliffe's offspring and Cathy's offspring are met.

I am surprised by Heathcliffe's recognition that Earnshaw is more like him as a child than anyone else, and he describes him as "gold made to use as a paving stone" (i.e he admires him) and yet he still is determined to shape him into a ruined thing to spite Earnshaw's father.

Black Sheep · 09-02-2021 6:44pm

I nearly referenced Von Clausewitz in a meeting today. Managed to restrain myself. Thank God.

Black Sheep · 16-02-2021 4:31pm

Completed WUTHERING HEIGHTS at the weekend.

It was a somewhat up-and-down experience for me. The middle part of the book lagged for me, I think at the point where I felt Cathy strayed into melodrama in terms of her behaviour before her death. I found the later part of the book to rally and - I must admit - I was thrilled with the 'happy ending' and reinstatement of Earnshaw.

I know WUTHERING HEIGHTS has been described as a proto-vampire novel. The final part of the book really pushes this to the limit, it is practically supernatural in its intimations.

I thought Heathcliffe, upon his return from making his fortune, was already depicted in a way that was quasi-vampiric. Dark, often lurking on the threshold, holding an odd power over those at Wuthering Heights.... But at the end of the book, just before his death, Bronte goes all out and Nellie describes Heathcliffe as almost resembling a ghoul when she encounters him in his room at night. What's going on here? I am taking it that Heathcliffe has been driven mad by his memory of Cathy, and that what happens is he has a psychotic break and, in seeking to join her, stops eating and goes out at night, exposing himself to the elements, and it is this that kills him?

Black Sheep · 16-02-2021 4:31pm

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO... Oh yeah, baby... Amazing so far, I am delighted.

Black Sheep · 24-02-2021 11:39am

One of the observations I would make about reading classic books is that it is quite true that there is a discernible discourse that goes on between them. When read chronologically, there is a clear relationship of ideas and back-and-forth.

Sometimes, it is very subtle, only an aside. But if you're read what has gone before, you have a chance of grasping what is otherwise meaningless.

In THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, during his imprisonment, Dantes goes through a rollercoaster of emotions when he realises that he has been betrayed and wrongly imprisoned by three men. Before, he was angry at God. Now, he comments that he must focus on his vengeance, because if he cannot blame men for what has befallen him then it's back to being angry at God, a blasphemy he wants to avoid. When Dantes' grim existance begins to show signs of improving... His co-conspirator... His receipt of an education from him... His eventual escape... The narrator comments that now Dantes conceded that the world was not so bad as he had feared, but not so good as Dr Pangloss suggested, either.

The CANDIDE reference would have been as obvious and intelligible to a contemporary reader as a The Simpsons reference would be to us today, but I guess ... Just made me glad I read CANDIDE.

Black Sheep · 25-02-2021 1:25pm

If I am honest I find Von Clausewitz a bit overly German and a bit pedantic at times.

But I've picked out what has stood out to me so far...

The best strategy is always to be very strong, first generally, then at the decisive point.

This detail regarding the decisive point, and being strong, is kind of characteristic of the conflicts of the period. VC was a believer in numbers - outright numerical superiority - as one of the largest guarantors of victory, and he talks about there being historical examples of smaller forces beating larger, but that they were the exception rather than the rule, and in any case the larger forces in modern times were rarely much larger by a significant multiplier.

VC then has this notion that the decisive point, the target for attack that win win the battle or the war, is the point where you commit your resources.

There is no more imperative and simpler law for strategy than to keep the forces concentrated.—No portion is to be separated from the main body unless called away by some urgent necessity.

The question whether a simple attack, or one more carefully prepared i.e more artificial, will produce greater effects, may undoubtedly be decided in favour of the latter as long as the enemy is assumed to remain quite passive. But every carefully combined attack requires time for its preparation, and if a counter stroke by the enemy intervenes, our whole design may be upset. Now, if the enemy should decide upon some simple attack, which can be executed in a shorter time, then he gains the initiative, and destroys the effect of the great plan. Therefore, together with the expediency of a complicated attack we must consider all the dangers which we run during its preparation, and should only adopt it if there is no reason to fear that the enemy will disconcert our scheme. Whenever this is the case we must ourselves choose the simpler i.e quicker way. If we quit the weak impressions of abstract ideas and descend to the region of practical life, then it is evident that a bold, courageous, resolute enemy will not let us have time for wide-reaching skilful combinations, and it is just against such a one we should require skill the most. By this it appears to us that the advantage of simple and direct results over those that are complicated is conclusively shown.

Our opinion is not on that account that the simple blow is the best, but that we must not lift the arm too far for the time given to strike, and that this condition will always lead more to direct conflict the more warlike our opponent is. Therefore, far from making it our aim to gain upon the enemy by complicated plans, we must rather seek to be ahead of him by greater simplicity in our designs.

Black Sheep · 08-03-2021 7:34pm

Completed ON WAR.

Onto Ralph Waldo Emerson. I have a collected essays edition from Penguin. I am going to read several of the more important essays... NATURE, THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR and a few of the other well-known pieces.

So far I'm about halfway through NATURE.

Emerson observes that every person is childlike when they walk in the forest. Is this true? Is there a distortion of our perceptions, do we behave differently immersed in nature? I think it's a generalisation but would seem to be at least some truth to it. Perhaps then they were less removed from nature but paradoxically more able to be comfortable in it, even though it was more familliar.

Black Sheep · 12-03-2021 8:29pm

Well, finished NATURE and now onto THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, which was an address given by Emerson in a U.S university and is considered to be both an early transcendentalist work by him as well as a 'call to arms' for american thinkers.

Emerson basically calls on the nascent country to establish intellectual and scholarly independence from the old world.

There is one line that is quite striking where he says that young men in libraries are taken with Locke, Bacon and Cicero but they do not realise that the works they are reading are were written by people who were themselves once upon a time just young men in libraries.

---

Something I was thinking on the other day, when I was mulling over the meaning of Transcendentalism, as I understand it...

It's basically the idea that there is a divinity in mankind that is seperate to what is found in organised religion, and that men and mankind are capable of unlocking that divinity. Emerson seems to closely relate it to having a full appreciation of an engagment with NATURE. I'm not completely convinced that the key to unlocking the power of the universe lies in simply opening your heart and living in accordance with nature, but maybe that's a misreading on my part.

At at any rate, what I started wondering was ... When exactly did we, in the West, lose that powerful sense of belief that appears to have existed prior?

It's evident in Emerson. But it must have happened before. I feel like De Montaigne may or may not have believed. I feel like Pepys did. Locke, I don't know but I don't really think so. But go further back ... To the medieval people, and further back, and the sense of their belief is so palpably strong. But by the time we get to Emerson there is just no comparison.

We're all of us in that post-Christian society now. I think from the Enlightenment through to just recently, however, we had an intellectual tradition of belief which was dead on its feet, bar a few examples here and there. I'm not even sure believers today are anything like the believers of the past. Maybe outside of the developed world. Maybe.

echo beach · 12-03-2021 11:02pm

Black Sheep wrote: »

At at any rate, what I started wondering was ... When exactly did we, in the West, lose that powerful sense of belief that appears to have existed prior?
.

Have we lost that sense of belief or have we transferred it onto something else? Science, money or ourselves?

Black Sheep · 12-03-2021 11:34pm

echo beach wrote: »

Have we lost that sense of belief or have we transferred it onto something else? Science, money or ourselves?

Could be any or all of those.. I should have specified I definitely meant faith in God.

I think faith was integrated into the medieval and early Christian worldview in a really tangible way.

But interesting to wonder at what point that slide away crossed a tipping point. During or because of the Enlightenment is the classic claim. German radical Bible studies come up too.

Black Sheep · 17-03-2021 9:34am

Finished THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, which is a kind of mixture of trascendentalism, a vision of the scholar's role and a quick end call for a uniquely US academia.

Emerson's idea of man as one mind, a kind of gestalt being, feels reminiscent of some of earlier philosophies (Spinoza?) but if I'm honest it's the kind of metaphysics that I have limited interest in. We might behave as a herd, and there might be group psychology and all kinds of interesting inter group communication going on within us as a species, but we're not "one mind".

Emerson talks about the scholar as being "man thinking" in an ideal world, this one mind species' actual brain... Thinking deep and lofty thoughts, penetrating insights, resisting the pressure of the herd etc. I do actually agree with him that it becomes tragic when scholars (academics) are reduced to being mere transcribers and thinkers with a 'small T' (My phrasing, not his).

I'm going to read one last essay of his, SELF RELIANCE, and probably move on then.

Black Sheep · 25-03-2021 3:59pm

Emerson's SELF RELIANCE is one of the most interesting essays I have read in the course of this project. Rarely have I read an essay and so keenly had the sense that yes, this is truly a foundational stone of a country's nascent national character and philosophy. Either Emerson shaped the United States' sense of individualism over collectivism, or SELF RELIANCE captures that spirit around him.

He begins with a call to greatness that reminded me of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. His Trascendental philosophy is present when he writes:-

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

But there is an almost savage turn then to complete individual sovereignty and an absolute rejection of every kind of ties that actually shocked me.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.

Incendiary stuff, and it's all like this..

Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.

Haven't heard moral relativism advanced as keenly as this except when I was an eighteen year old and the 'edgy' kid in my philosophy class was explaining that good and evil are like, just a matter of opinion, man...

I think it was this paragraph below that particularly made me wince:-

I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;--though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked Dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

It is easy to airbrush what Emerson writes, and make it a little more palatable. If someone props up SELF RELIANCE and were to dwell on the passage below as being its fundamental message, we might not find it so objectionable. But I cannot overlook the preceding paragraph, where he made very clear that this is not just a philosophy of individualism but a philosophy, I would say, of extreme selfishness, that possibly finds its endpath in Ayn Rand.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

SELF RELIANCE does have some great, and well-known lines:-

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. [...] Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day

But of course it's typical that Emerson talks of speaking 'hard words' here, not just the truth, but 'hard words'. I think there's a self-awareness, a reflex that he is going to get push-back on what he's saying, and he seems to revel in it.

I don't know anything about Emerson's personal life, but I'd be curious whether he was as ****ty and inconstant a family member as SELF RELIANCE suggests he might be. All ties, including family, are to come secondary to his philosophy of self actualisation. Disagree? Resent me? He says you cleave to your truth and he will cleave to his. That might work with a friendship, but it's not usually what one says to your children, for example.

Anyway. A long post, and a bit of a hatchet job on Emerson, but I'm being as true as I can be to what SELF RELIANCE looks like, having read it cold, with only previous experience of some earlier essays and knowing nothing about his biography.

Black Sheep · 25-03-2021 4:00pm

THE COUNTER OF MONTE CRISTO rumbles on, a fantastic work.

I read a description of it lately, and it was explained that whereas THE THREE MUSKETEERS is an adventure swashbuckler, with a lot of action and not that much plot, THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO is a revenge fantasy that goes on and on with very little action... And yet it is remarkable how adroitly Dumas can hold our attention.

Black Sheep · 29-03-2021 6:44pm

I'm reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's THE SCARLET LETTER.

I think I had it confused with something about the Salem witch trials... The old movie with Winona Ryder... But of course it's actually the film with Gary Oldman and Demi Moore I was thinking of. If you google the posters for that movie, Oldman looks creepy as hell.

So far I'm still at the prologue where Hawthorne recounts a kind of semi-autobiographical account of the Counting House at Salem.

Black Sheep · 29-03-2021 6:45pm

Black Sheep wrote: »

THE COUNTER OF MONTE CRISTO rumbles on, a fantastic work.

I read a description of it lately, and it was explained that whereas THE THREE MUSKETEERS is an adventure swashbuckler, with a lot of action and not that much plot, THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO is a revenge fantasy that goes on and on with very little action... And yet it is remarkable how adroitly Dumas can hold our attention.

I missed my typo in this post...

Can I just say that "THE COUNTER OF MONTE CRISTO" would have been a good thing for Sesame Street to do with The Count if they ever got tired of the vampire stuff?

"Ah-ah-ah".

Black Sheep · 14-04-2021 2:36pm

Continuing THE SCARLET LETTER, I'll be done by the end of the week. I must say that the sinful offspring of Hester, the heroine, is quite difficult to get a read of. Perhaps deliberate on Hawthorne's part, was he actually writing her as a bad seed? I can never tell how progressive by contemporary standards or not some of these authors were in their social politics and intention. 'Pearl' is ungrateful, detached from her mother's pain and the way the character reads, if she was alive today she would be given an autistic diagnosis possibly?

Black Sheep · 23-04-2021 10:30pm

Done with Hawthorne.

Now: Charles Dickens GREAT EXPECTATIONS... A copy I bought about 25 years ago. I think my dad bought it for me actually, and I never actually read it.

Black Sheep · 25-04-2021 11:57am

I'll make some comments now about THE SCARLET LETTER.

I think this is a situation where I possibly "didn't get it" as much as a person of the era might. I couldn't help but interpret some of themes through a more contemporary lens, and I think it's hard for us to fully grasp the intent of the author in writing about personal demons, damnation and shame. I think there's no doubt that Hawthorne is more like a modern person in his sensibilities than the puritans that he set the book amongst, but nonetheless...

My favourite observation in it is that the puritans gradually began to hold a kind of odd regard for Hester over time, due to her unfailingly positive behaviour towards the community. Despite the scarlet letter.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS, I am only a chapter in but already I'm a bit caught up in it. I guess I might have seen a cartoon version about 30 years ago, and I'm familiar with some of the elements from popular culture in general, but it's still pretty unknown to me. Pip is in the grasp of the convict, who is obviously thinking of releasing him to fetch a file from Joe Gargery's forge.

Black Sheep · 03-05-2021 10:38am

I'm several chapters into GREAT EXPECTATIONS now. The beauty of a book published as a serial (Well, in three parts at any rate) is that the chapters seem deliberately sized for easy consumption. Approximately 4-6 pages of very self-contained plot development. Dickens really knew what he was doing. You might think you're not bothered, but within a page of each chapter you're drawn into the very particular scene concerned, he does setting amazingly well.

I'm surprised by how much is anachronistic / hard to quite understand, in terms of the activities and references Dickens makes. Ironically this has been less of an issue with the philosophy and 'ideas' books coming before Dickens in my reading list, perhaps because of the nature of the material concerned, and it being so referential to what has gone before. Whereas Dickens is very much down in the common mud and labour of his day, which is quite alien to us.

Black Sheep · 07-05-2021 7:16pm

Well, Monte Cristo has taken his revenge on the first of the trio who wronged him... Caderousse is dead.

I'm not sure if it's appropriate on this basis, but I would observe that just as Caderousse was never actively, calculatingly malicious to Dantes, the revenge which is visited upon him is not particularly well engineered by the Count directly, I would say. He dies, certainly, but Monte Cristo lets a lot of moving parts work to catch Caderousse up in their gears almost with an element of chance. I guess he trusts that Caderousse's own bad decisions will land him in bother.

Of course it's means I'm on the home stretch now. About 11 hours of audio left and I'm done. MIDDLEMARCH is up next, which I'm quite looking forward to, although it's another absolutely monster listen in terms of length.

Approaching probably 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through GREAT EXPECTATIONS. Still enjoying it, although it's more sort of ... humdrum... than I expected I think.

Black Sheep · 24-05-2021 4:12pm

I'm on the last hurdle of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, but time seems to have utterly slowed down.

I think I can barely remember a time the Count wasn't slowly unwinding his revenge. We're now past the endgame, the Count is like Frodo and the Hobbits returning to the Shire and having a torturous long goodbye with various characters. Meanwhile, the shoe of final punishment is just about to drop on Baron Danglars.

I'm more than halfway through GREAT EXPECTATIONS. I continue to be amazed at how alien Dickens' London is to me.

Black Sheep · 27-05-2021 9:12am

It strikes me that the mistreatment of Joe Gargery by Pip in GREAT EXPECTATIONS is the most emotionally powerful element of the book so far. From a selfish point of view I'd like a reconciliation, but I doubt it's coming.

Joe's relationship to Pip reminds me of my relationship with my own children. It doesn't really matter if they are difficult, you tolerate it, there's an elasticity to the love you feel for them that has a limit that's difficult to find.

I'm a eleven chapters into the audiobook of MIDDLEMARCH. My opinion of it is that it's higher brow than Jane Austen, and although it possibly lacks quite the same page turning quality, it's close. Elliott has some great lines (Which I'm struggling to recall now).

Rosamund Vincy gives out to her brother for ordering a hot breakfast late in the morning, which surely should be an irritation to the serving staff moreso than her. She says he is a disagreeable brother, and he rebukes her:-

I don't make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so. Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions

Look at my mother; you don't see her objecting to everything except what she does herself. She is my notion of a pleasant woman.

I don't know why this amuses me so much, but it does.

This is a weird connection to make, but it reminds me of an interview I heard with an American POW who shared a cramped cell in Hanoi with a guy who snored relentlessly. At first, he hated the snorer, and then eventually he came to a kind of realisation that his annoyance was his own problem, and no one else's.

Black Sheep · 09-06-2021 3:23pm

Heading towards the endgame of GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

It has its laugh out loud moments, and there is plenty of pathos, but it also feels like it's of its time. I'll be happy enough to move on.

MIDDLEMARCH is going to be going on until winter I would say, 28 hours of listening left.

Black Sheep · 21-06-2021 2:09pm

Completed GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

I guess I enjoyed it. It'll certainly stay with me, that's for sure.

At the end of the Penguin Classics version I read there was an odd little note on the epilogue which went in to a couple of different endings for GREAT EXPECTATIONS that Dickens considered, and which were debated about. There were various editions published with different endings, although the difference between all of them was pretty negligible. They all hinged, essentially, on the degree to which Estella would express regret to Pip about the decisions she made (I think).

The version in my edition basically said that GREAT EXPECTATIONS was intended to be a morality tale and that it was important to Dickens that Pip gained nothing from what he did during the time he was rich, except from the one morally good thing he did, which was to help his friend become a partner in a shipping business. So at the end of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, when Pip is destitute, he is given a place to live in the house of the friend he supported, and is given the job of clerk in the business.

Black Sheep · 21-06-2021 2:10pm

MIDDLEMARCH trundles on. Despite it's length I have to say I'm getting really into it. Some wonderful behavioural observations, and the characters are brilliant.

Following GREAT EXPECTATIONS I'm having a change of pace... John Stewart Mill's ON LIBERTY.

Mill was an English philosopher and MP, and I guess better known for his being a utilitarian and raised as an ideological follower of Jeremy Bentham.

What I'm interested in is how clear his notion of 'liberty' actually is. I find it a very frustrating concept as - even today - it is usually North Americans who talk and write about 'liberty', in law, philosophy and so on, and 'liberty' is invoked by them so often, it does a lot of heavy lifting on that side of the atlantic, but is not so important on this side, where rights have a meaning within a legal framework, but 'liberty' as an idea is harder to find in concrete black and white terms.

Black Sheep · 24-06-2021 10:31am

In the introduction of ON LIBERTY Mill makes an interesting point.

When we think the government is antagonistic to our interests, we actively try to put limits on their powers. We succeed to a greater or lesser degree.

But he makes the point that when we think the government is of a like mind to us, and is representing us, then that is when things become dangerous because we will approve any expansion of their power.

Mill is particularly concerned that in the latter example the government governs based on viewpoints and customs representative of the elites or the majority, not the whole people.

Paradoxically, in a state where the government is looked askance by everyone, the minority dissident might be better protected than in one where there is a tyranny of the majority, where the majority rubber stamp the reaching of the government beyond the law and into customs, opinions and private life.

Black Sheep · 03-07-2021 10:14am

Still enjoying Mill ON LIBERTY.

Mill talks about the resistance of people to countenance that the beliefs they hold could be wrong. Mill puts forth the strongest examples he can think of of eminent thinkers who were geniuses in their day, and yet held wildly wrong beliefs. Marcus Aurelius, probably a philosopher and ruler of such raw potential as has never been surpassed in an absolute monarch. And he persecuted the Christians, he got that badly wrong. Mill imagines an alternate history where it was Marcus Aurelius, not Constantine, who brought Christianity into the centre of life in the West, and the superior intellectual life that might have created.

He also warns against the loss when opinions are not challenged and reasoned out in the public square. The biggest loser, Mill warns, could be the holders of true beliefs, who never have the chance to see them battle-tested and proven superior to erroneous beliefs. Mill talks about how received wisdom, never challenged but just held to be true, becomes like a stiff article of faith which can be blown over at the slightest future turbulence, because the people who 'believe' it do not know what the reasons underpinning it are.

I wonder if this isn't a trap that Christians today have visibly fallen into. In philosophy of religion there is no final resolution on fundamental questions such as is there a god, or around the problem of god's omnipotence and human free will... These remain in play for Christian philosophers and their opponents. But in the mainstream culture I think there is a perception that the arguments of the "new atheists" have more intellectual weight than the views of believers. This stems, in my view, from many Christians having basically abdicated a willingness to contest and debate these matters in the public sphere. You certainly won't see many priests or bishops in Ireland debating some of these questions on a Sunday, or on the radio, or on a stage. There's a cohort of U.S based apologists, both Catholic and Protestant, who still do this, but they're something of a curiosity in many ways these days, think. At one point in time there was a close relationship between belief and reasonable argument, but that link has been broken and we've slid into the peril of a faith based solely on received wisdom, the trap Mill warned of.

Mill also makes an observation about the weight of legal proscriptions on particular beliefs. He says that the penalty imposed by law is just a visible marker of the much more powerful social enforcement that goes on. So you receive a fine for holding a proscribed belief, but Mill says it's the fact that society also shuns you that is the real penalty. He talks about people not being able to earn their bread as a consequence.

Black Sheep · 19-07-2021 2:53pm

Alexander De Toqueville DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA.

A very interesting take on the genesis of American democracy and how the townships and puritan's backgrounds were particularly relevant to how democracy emerged in America. There is a broader discussion going on about equality and how there is a risk of 'tyranny of the majority'. This fits very well with Mill's ON LIBERTY.

Still grinding away with MIDDLEMARCH too, which I'm still enjoying. It's just absolutely huge.

The Great Books Of The Western World

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