The Brothers Karamazov

It's hard to say anything sufficient about one of the greatest novels ever written.  While I thoroughly enjoyed the dark psychology of the hero of Notes From Underground, the longer format and larger cast of characters of a full novel really made me appreciate the full scope of Dostoevsky's insight into the human soul.  Here we find what feels like the whole of the human predicament, refracted into so many distinct strands of motivation, from the most petty to the most lofty, not excluding the simple, conformist banality of everything that parades between these in the name of moderation.  In fact, we needn't even go so far as considering all of Dostoevsky's psychological insights into the whole cast; the development of the four brothers alone represents a deep look into the way the most diverse perspectives can emerge as solutions to the same inherited problem.  

But I don't want to make it sound like The Brothers K is some sort of dry psychological study.  It's an absolute page turner that almost doesn't let you catch your breath till you reach the final 'amen'.  Dostoevsky combines genres and tones and voices in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat for over 800 pages.  For me, the particular highlight of all this variation was Ivan's paired stories -- The Grand Inquisitor and The Devil.  These magnificent allegories operate together like some kind of dark refrain worthy of Kafka or Borges.  And while Alyosha is ostensibly the hero of the novel and Dmitri its chief victim, for me, it's Ivan I have the most sympathy and respect for.  But the beauty of such a rich book is that you may disagree.  

 

#reread  

The Fall of Hyperion

The end of Dan Simmons' novel is as bad as the beginning was good.  Whereas Hyperion slowly builds up suspense and complexity by setting six nearly unrelated tales within a minimal frame, The Fall of Hyperion simply wastes all that energy in a tangle of incoherent sub and sub-subplots, each of which culminates in its own earth shatteringly dramatic and final climax.  Again. The writing becomes much more repetitive, the descriptions more needlessly frilly, and the whole works starts to resemble nothing so much as a bad action movie script where there are constantly only seconds to go before the next thing blows up.  Again.  It's interesting to see how a writer can lose control of something so quickly; despite the fact that they are clearly conceived as a single novel, this sequel isn't just a little worse than the original, but downright awful.  Perhaps the root of the trouble is that Simmons tries to cram every idea he's ever had into a single story.  The plot becomes a pastiche of unrelated elements that get so tangled they require not merely one but two deus ex maquinas to resolve.  

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber

In the depths of my Zarathustra bender I noticed the second volume of Walter Kaufmann's Discovering the Mind series sitting on the shelf.  Having read many of Kaufmann's translations of Nietzsche, all of which include interesting introductions that attempt to distance Nietzsche from his many misappropriators, I had long intended to read some of Kaufmann's own work.  My interest was particularly piqued when I glanced at the prologue and discovered that Kaufmann really doesn't like Heidegger.  While I enjoyed Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche more than Jung's course, I still felt surprisingly underwhelmed by the fucking Nazi.  It was intriguing to find that Kaufmann shared this low opinion of a guy who has had an enormous influence.  So I blew through Buber and dug into what promised to be an interesting comparative study.  

Unfortunately, this just wasn't a very interesting book.  There are definitely things to admire about Kaufmann.  He's an admirably jargon free writer.  He's interested in the big questions like how can we discover the mind our own minds or that of another person, and how would this help us to live better.  And he is a perceptive reader of writer's that he loves (eg. Nietzsche).  So the long section on Nietzsche which comprises roughly one third of the book is at least useful, even if it's not really profound or original.  

On the other hand though, Kaufmann's writing can also be needlessly digressive and erudite.  He has a professor's bad habit of starting three steps removed from what he really wants to say.  So, for example, his simple point that Heidegger conceived of Being and Time as providing a "fundamental ontology" that updated the one in Kant's Critique is spread over three pages (181-184) and involves a dozen German titles and phrases.  Sure, through this explanation he does indicate some of Heidegger's obscure terminology.  But did we really need all this to just convince us that Heidegger is obscure?  Isn't this sort of hyper-detailed and often heavily ironic form of criticism just sort of ... petty?  

Then too, what he offers to us on the big philosophical questions is often tepid to the point of bordering on vacuous.  While the Nietzsche section does contain some useful ideas -- mainly that consciousness is only the surface of the mind -- most of the rest of the insights he offers are almost platitudes.  For example, he considers Buber's key contribution to the "discovery of the mind" to be the idea that we interpret the an author by trying to hear their distinctive voice, that is, by trying to translate them into our own terms.  Kaufmann considers this fairly obvious understanding of the "Thou" to be profound because Buber subsequently extends it by analogy to God as the World.  His critique of Buber's concept is only that Buber considers our access to the though to be intermittent rather than constant; we constantly fall back into treating the Thou as an It.  Kaufmann claims that the Thou can be there all the time, and that Buber's whole theory derives from his experience of being abandoned by his mother at age 2.  In other words, Kaufmann takes the experience of the Thou even more for granted than Buber.  It seems to me that this goes in precisely the wrong direction, further down the same road I already objected to.  If we are trying to "discover the mind", shouldn't we quit taking it for granted that there is "a" mind called You there for Me to discover?  Wasn't this precisely the lesson we learned from Nietzsche?  As I write this rhetorical question, I can see that Kaufmann would like to think that this is exactly what he has done as both translator and commentator -- discovering the mind of the author and, through them, discovering something about how his own mind works.  But he ultimately gets no further than claiming that this mind-to-mind connection is created through ... dialog. Is that some kind of Eastern thing?.

Finally, we come to what was for me the main impetus for reading the book -- the critique of Heidegger.  Kaufmann gives us six theses, none of which I can claim to disagree with.  Unfortunately, despite all the noise he makes about challenging himself and his own opinions, Kaufmann is simply not that perceptive a reader of an author he does not like.  Here, he only comments on Heidegger's most famous work Being and Time, despite the fact that even a casual reader of Heidegger knows that his philosophy changed substantially over time.  The shift from early to later Heidegger dates from precisely the period in which he gave his mammoth Nietzsche lecture course, which you would think makes it the perfect text for Kaufmann to comment on if he wants to separate his own thinking from Heidegger's.  And indeed, he comments upon it (pgs. 71, 176) -- in a single line stating the obvious thesis of the book that Heidegger repeats ad nauseam!  You're left to wonder whether he even actually read the thing.  And despite reading it, his commentary on Being and Time is only marginally more perceptive.  He argues that:

1. "Existential Ontology" is dubious anthropology.
2. Heidegger's thinking is deeply authoritarian.
3. The analysis of authenticity and inauthenticity is shallow and Manichaean.
4. Heidegger doesn't help us understand important problems but covers them up.
5. Being and Time belongs to the romantic revival in Germany.
6. Heidegger secularized Christian preaching about guilt, dread, and death.

As I said, I would basically agree with these theses.  It's just that I would barely bother to write them down.  I mean, as Nietzsche pointed out, 1 could serve as a critique of just about any Western philosopher's system.  2 is perhaps more dubious, but certainly Heidegger's tone is more oracular than argumentative.  And as an extension of this, Kaufmann critiques him in 4 for his obscure language.  Which no one has ever noticed before.  While it's nice to hear someone else point out that the distinction in 3 is problematic, Kaufmann does this for all the wrong reasons.  He's worried that you can still do authentically bad things.  But the problem with "authenticity" is not that you can be authentically nasty, but that it is always a moral concept, that presumes some real inner subjective core and thus begs the obvious question, "authentic to who?".  And while 5 and 6 seem pretty indisputable to me, I don't see how they form a critique of Heidegger's philosophy or much of a contribution to understanding it.  Anybody who spends as much time talking about "the meaning of Being" as Heidegger is obviously a theologian of sorts.  But is Kaufmann really so juvenile as to consider this the kiss of death for a philosophy?  Once again, this critique, while valid in some sense, turns out to be rather superficial.