The Origins of the Second World War

I no longer recall who suggested that A.J.P. Taylor's short study of European politics between the Wars was a masterpiece.  Which is too bad because they were right and I should listen to more of their suggestions.  Taylor does a great job of explaining the tensions remaining after the Treaty of Versailles, and then tracing these lines of force forward as the complicated machinery of European politics played out over the following 20 years.  Since I've never studied the details of this history before, all I can say is that it is a fascinating story that seems well supported and well argued enough to perhaps be mostly true.  The book has apparently come in for a lot of criticism, and the reason for this is entirely predictable -- he doesn't blame the war on how evil Hitler was.  However, Hitler's inherent evilness is only a convincing historical explanation for people who just want to have a simple way to avoid considering the question.  For the rest of us, it's obvious that while Hitler's evilness may be a true and even necessary cause of the war, it is far from sufficient.  By explaining anything Germany might have done, it explains nothing about what it actually did.  

Instead, Taylor suggests that while Hitler transformed Germany domestically, his foreign policies were almost identical to all other German leaders since the end of WW1.  Since that war ended with German defeat and humiliation, but not a dismemberment of the German state, the goal of German leaders and the German people thereafter was to restore their greatness as the largest power in Europe.  And since Germany was the size of France and Britain combined, Taylor asserts that both those countries accepted that a restoration of German power was the inevitable outcome of the gradual dismantling of Versailles.  Naturally, they both also hoped that this could be delayed as long as possible, and ultimately carried out peacefully.  The shocking part of Taylor's thesis is that he suggests Hitler shared this latter goal.  Hitler had no intention of starting a great war with France and Britain in 1939.  He merely used the threat of force to hurry along the process of reunifying the German speaking people who had been separated off into Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland).  Germany had long sought this reunification, and the French and British had long assumed it would eventually happen despite whatever objections those small countries might have.  So while successive occupation of these three areas was indeed the direct trigger for the start of the war, Taylor argues that their reincorporation into Germany was not a sign of Hitler's endless desire to dominate the world.  Instead, Hitler's tactic all along was one of bluffing then waiting.  He threatened to use military force, and constantly exaggerated the capability of the German army (apparently much to the discomfort of his generals), but only as a means of pressuring the various European powers to acquiesce without a fight.  Unfortunately, gambling is a dangerous business.  Sometimes people call your bluff, and the rest is history.

Against the Gods

Peter Bernstein's "Remarkable Story of Risk" had been on the shelf for so long that it somehow migrated into bedtime reading.  While it was engaging and well written, I found I wasn't really the target audience for the book.  I was already familiar with all of the mathematics, and even many of the historical anecdotes, that he discusses in the first half of the book.  And just a routine tour of duty in finance makes the second half's discussion of risk management techniques a bit redundant.  In fact, I almost stopped reading after the eye-rolling-ly triumphant late 90's tone of the introduction; these days, that era's presumption that we had managed to design a foolproof self-correcting risk management system looks nothing short of amazingly naive.  However, I'm glad I pushed on despite my misgivings.  I ended up enjoying the way Bernstein unfolded his story and nuanced the neo-liberal tone he began with.  Ultimately, it's not a bad book to hand someone who has never reflected on the issue of what "risk" is, nor how our definition of this concept has shifted over time.  

Religion and Nothingness

I'm unsure how to approach this review of Keiji Nishitani's collection of essays on the relationship between religion and nihilism.  

From a comparative philosophy perspective, they form a deep reflection on the connection between the Buddhist concept of emptiness and the way Nietzsche saw the history of Western philosophy dead-ending in nihilism.  Exploring this connection, and especially examining Nishitani's reading of Eternal Recurrence as, "... breathing ... the same pure mountain air that we felt in approaching the the standpoint of Dōgen ..." (RN, 215), could easily be a review in itself.  It's the only time I've seen anyone transpose Nietzsche's idea to a Buddhist context and ask the rather obvious question -- does the Eternal Return describe samsara or nirvana, the greatest weight, or the most unbearable lightness of being?  Yes.  

But there's so much more to the book than this question that it seems unfair to focus on it exclusively.  In fact, even if we stick with a purely philosophical lens, there are so many point of correspondence with The Fold and Nietzsche and Philosophy that the book also deserves its very own chapter in my forthcoming magnum opus The NonDual Deleuze.  Nishitani reinvents emptiness as the plane of consistency, a field of force that holds everything together in a "non-being that is not the being of the negative".  He insists that this field of experience only arises on the far side of our personal ego, after a journey through the center of an impersonal nihilism again to a Great Death.  He discusses various syntheses of time that lead us to see every instant as a "monad of eternity".  I could go on, but it's clear these two are breathing the same mountain air of non-duality.  

And yet, even this longer review would fail to do the essays complete justice.  Because ultimately Nishitani doesn't even see his point as purely philosophical.  As a devoted Zen practitioner himself, his point is also deeply religious or "existential" -- he is concerned with that aspect of our human experience where we necessarily call into question just who we are and what it means to experience, where we begin to look outside of ourselves in an attempt to understand what's happening on the inside, and thus begin to blow apart the nice stable contained self we imagine is our birthright.  This vertiginous exploration of the ground of our existence is for Nishitani the essence of the religious impulse and directly explains it connection to nothingness.  Colloquially speaking, it's that moment of quiet reflection when we wonder, "what does it all mean?"  When we live, rather than theorize, this search, we find ourselves starting into the same groundless abyss that stared back at Nietzsche. And only by crossing this river of absolute nihilism, this gulf where nothing really means anything, can we reach the far shore where the abyss converts 'full circle' into the empty suchness of the present.  In other words, at the deepest level, I think Nishitani is trying to construct a philosophy adequate to his lived experience of sitting zazen.  In a sense, we might see it as asking what is the transcendental condition of possibility of Zen -- who or what are we that sitting still and doing nothing can have such a profound effect on our experience?  The answer of course is that we are the world, and the world is a field of infinite emptiness.

There's so much more that could be said here.  For example, another interesting review would focus on how Nishitani continues Heidegger's line of thought about technology and the fixation of human telos as mechanism.  He illuminates this question by bringing it into connection with Nietzsche's ideas about the master-slave 'dialectic' and Buddhist thinking about freedom and dependent origination.  Yet another review would be needed to address the theory of Christianity that Nishida develops, which centers on a mystical interpretation of the circumincessional unity of the trinity as another expression of what Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing.  But since it's clear that I'm not going to write all these reviews, or in fact any of them, I think I'll just leave it here and start rereading the book.

Middlemarch

I was a little surprised when my esteemed colleague from Tejas suggested we read George Eliot's classic.  I didn't know a whole lot about the book when we began.  I think I mentally lumped it together with "the Jane's" -- Jane Eyre and Jane Austen -- simply because these were British female authors of roughly the same era.  And I very vaguely remember disliking the Jane's as sort of soap-opera-y.  As it turns out Eliot was born after Austen died.  A while it's true that she and Brontë were contemporaries, and one could indeed call Middlemarch a kind of soap opera ... I rather enjoyed it. 

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the book was its dry English sense of humor.  There are not merely many droll comments from the narrator, but some wonderfully sarcastic dialogue that must have been hilarious in the original 19th-century English, but comes through fine even in translation.  Beyond that, there is also a lot of perceptive and even wise psychological observation.  Eliot only rarely provides any 'realistic' detail about settings and dress and the way the light glimmered in her father's eye on that dappled afternoon in the ... etc ... etc ...  Instead, she provides something I consider much closer to reality by ignoring all this setting and delving deeply into the psychology of each character.  We see their strengths and flaws in such clear light that we almost feel as if we're reading non-fiction, a case study where all the characters simply did what they had to do, given who they are.  If most soap operas rose to this level, I would certainly watch more TV.