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.  

I and Thou

In an ongoing effort to read things that are already on my shelf, I picked up Martin Buber's slim classic.  It was an interesting short read that left me deeply ambivalent in precisely those places where it didn't leave me deeply confused.  

On the one hand, it appears that Buber is writing a theistic version of non-dual poetry.  Despite the theistic angle, the primacy of the I-Thou relationship he tries to describe is clearly marked by a lack of subject-object division.  This promises to make Buber's Hasidic take on non-duality another chapter in Loy's great catalog of primary source materials.  I find it hard to believe that anyone is capable of writing passionately about such spiritual matters without having directly experienced ... something.  In other words, this is no mere intellectual book that argues for a particular metaphysical world view.  This, I think, legitimately pardons some of its obscurity, and suggests that the wisest approach here is similar to how we might approach Zen literature -- to simply take away what we can understand and lay aside what we cannot for another time.  Seen in this light, the essence of the book is the simple but profound idea that we don't always have to see the world as a collection of discreet things that we the subject experience as objects.  The I-It relationship is not the sum total of all possible experience.  Buber's I-Thou concept points us to another type of experience in which we are seamlessly enmeshed in and connected to the world, rather than separated from it by an unbridgeable metaphysical gulf.  Though Buber would prefer to call this non-dual type of experience "relation" so as to avoid confusing it with the inner experience of the subject, it's clear that, despite the terminology, the I-Thou relationship at least lies in the same family as paradoxical Zen experiences of a mystical unity of diversity.  I and Thou are different, and must come together in a "meeting", but nevertheless we are held together as aspects of one totality (the Eternal Thou).

On the other hand, it's not at all clear that Buber approach to describing or conceptualizing this unfathomable experience is helpful.  How can we really reach the non-dual if we take our experience of other subjects as our root metaphor?  He encourages us to relate to God as if this relation were an extension or generalization of our best relationship to other humans.  Of course, we see other humans (and sometimes natural and spiritual beings) as subjects, not objects.  But has this advanced us into the non-dual?  What is a subject but a thing that requires an object?  And doesn't my recognizing this subjectivity in another simply involve me a game of mirrors where I turn myself into the object that I call subject?  Isn't this way of the describing the non-dual in terms of the Absolute Person bound to fail in the most obvious fashion -- by reifying our own concept of personhood?  I'm certain that Buber feels as if he has answered this objection, if not in the text, then at least in his postscript.

     Is what has here been said valid except as a "personalizing" metaphor? Are we not threatened by the dangers of a problematic "mysticism" that blurs the borderlines that are drawn, and necessarily have to be drawn, by all rational knowledge?
    The clear and firm structure of the You relationship, familiar to anyone with a candid heart and the courage to stake it, is not mystical. To understand it we must some­ times step out of our habits of thought, but not out of the primal norms that determine man's thoughts about what is actual. (I-Thou, 177, Kaufmann translation)

But this response only reinforces my suspicion.  Buber is eager to defend his I-Thou distinction from any charges of "mysticism" which could be leveled at the notion of an Absolute Person or Eternal Thou.  For example: Isn't this latter nothing but a metaphor that drags our 'normal' conception of the you beyond the "primal norms" for which it makes sense?  Buber replies that we all already know what it means to be an I who relates to a You.  This may blunt the charge of mysticism, but only at the price of placing a mystification into the heart of our direct experience.  Do we really know what it's like to be an I or a You because of some "primal norm"?  Is this given?  In fact, it seems to me that this is the whole question.  What's it like to be me?  What's going on?  And what's it like to relate to others with some unstated assumption of mutuality if I don't even know who I am?  We've learned nothing from Nietzsche if not that the presumed unity of my self or your self reflects nothing but the surface of reality, and none of its depths.  

As I say, I reserve the right to change my opinion on this book.  But on this reading at least, I didn't find it led in a particularly useful direction.  

Black Wings Has My Angel

When I mentioned The Long Goodbye to my esteemed colleague and former Cherry-Stepper JZ, he suggested that Elliot Chaze had written another noir masterpiece I should also check out.  The suggestion did not disappoint.  Everything in this novel -- from the language, to the confessional narrative style, to the way the plot so satisfyingly twists up your expectations -- comes together to carry you smoothly to the brink of inevitable doom that pervades the story from the start.  While Chaze's writing is often simpler, and his plot less complex, this one is nevertheless on par with the Chandler novels I've read so far.  More's the pity that there has yet to be a good film adaptation.  

Hyperion

I think I picked up Hyperion at the cat bookstore simply because I'd had a good experience with the SF Masterworks series. But this was even better than The Forever War.  Dan Simmons doesn't break any new conceptual ground, but the craft of his writing is excellent by sci-fi standards, and he tells a great, page-turning story.  I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the novel revolves around the effect of various manipulations of time.  With this theme in mind, Simmon's structures it as a series of Canterbury Tales.  Each of the main characters tells their own backstory, each line of which begins at a different point in the past and converges onto the novelistic present.  This reaches a climax at the end the book, when all the characters have spoken and we are finally oriented to the mystery that has lurked throughout.  The situation is far from resolved at that point however, and it would be almost impossible not to read the second half of the novel, published in a separate volume as The Fall of Hyperion.  Stay tuned!

The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Since I had been having vision of the Mandelbrot set as a manifestation of god, I figured I'd better learn a little more about it.  And what better place to start than the classic from the man himself?  The only problem turned out to be that the book doesn't make it to a discussion of the famous bug until page 188, roughly halfway through, which turned out to be about as far as I could follow it.  While Mandelbrot's style is mostly informal and aimed at 'the general reader', his explanations still often suffer from every mathematician's annoying habit of over-compressing things because they're 'obvious'.  For me, that was fine with the less complicated material early on in the book (self-similar and scaling 'linear' fractals), and with a little effort, I felt pretty good about my grasp of his examples.  But as the material became more complicated (non-scaling, self-inverse and non-linear fractals) more and more obvious things were anything but, and while I was still getting the gist of it, I was mostly just taking his assertions on faith.  

Still, it was an enjoyable and mind-expanding journey while it lasted.  And I did finally come away with a clear understanding of what saying that something can have a non-integer dimension means.  It turns out that there are various ways of defining 'dimension', and the topological definition we are accustomed to is only one of them.  Mandelbrot motivates another definition (the Hausdorff Besicovitch dimension) by considering the question: how long is the coast of Britain?  The answer is that it depends on what size ruler you use to measure it.  A kilometer long ruler appropriate for making a map will give you a smaller length than the roughly meter long ruler you would use if you were trying to walk the complicated edge of every bay and inlet.  Similarly, an ant-sized ruler forced to crawl the perimeter of every rock would calculate an even larger length, and so on ... till we discover that the length of a coast seems to be infinite.  Needless to say, since we don't usually think that the size of our ruler influences the length of the thing we are trying to measure, this realization poses a problem.  

It turns out you can solve this problem and calculate a determinate coast length independently of the size of the ruler, only if you allow the 'dimension' of the coast to be a number between 1 and 2.  This works because the coastline length calculation exhibits an approximate empirical relationship where the total length measured by a ruler of length e is proportional to e^1-D.  The D in this equation is empirical and varies by coastline, but if we make an abstract model of a coastline using something like the Koch snowflake, we can calculate it exactly.   If we choose D=1, we find that the coastline length tends towards infinity, for D=2, it tends to zero.  If we pick the correct D in between these we get a well defined total length that no longer depends on which e we chose to use as our ruler size.  This is exactly how we intuitively think measurement of length, area, and volume should work -- we break the original shape into smaller pieces, and then we raise the size of each piece to the appropriate power and add them back together again.  It's just that the "appropriate power" for a rugged coastline happens to be non-integer.