As I mentioned in a comment to the last post, I will no longer be updating this blog.

While that is of course a tragedy to none, I was touched by those who commented, or e-mailed, asking me to continue. Alas, my schedule makes that infeasible; Sirocco has to call it quits.

Thanks to all who have dropped by! My e-mail address will still be working.

To go out in style — and as a hat tip to fellow Zapffe aficionado Mr. P (we few, we happy few, we band of brothers!) — I will sign off with two final translations of the great existential pessimist. The short pieces in question represent, respectively, the first and the last by the adult Peter Wessel Zapffe. As usual, the originals are better.

One night, man was seated upon the curved back of the earth, and there were stars on the vault and a stone below his bottom. Then he felt that he was there, and that it was him, and he was deeply puzzled, for he had not known before. And he spoke aloud and said: Lo, I am pushed from below and stars are above my head! Yet as he heard his own voice, he became anxious and began to shout more loudly: Lo, I am pushed! And it was as if he drew it from his angst.
     From this day hence he did not eat, and his brethren he knew not any longer. Whenever his angst appeared he would scream the same words, but each time in a new way, as if always seeking a better one. And at times, his eyes would shine as he screamed. Those who met him would sometimes pause to wonder at the strange sound of his voice.
     Then his heart burst, and people gathered to remember him. None had understood him, himself least of all, but all felt that his words were the highest wisdom.

Dear all of you who have come to say goodbye to the incarnation that was made available as an abode for my spiritual life. Say goodbye to the inscrutable synthesis that emerged in 1899 and kept together for 90 years, before it again disintegrated back into its inorganic elements.

Thank you for coming, all of you, and each specifically, each with his own perspective on this that has happened, in part foreseeably and in part as a fruit of pure happenstance. This, which we partly owe gratitude and must partly consider our perfidious foe – if we imagine a governing consciousness behind it all.
     And if we do not, then we have in part been lucky in the great lottery, and in part drawn blanks or actual harm. But it often feels as though some consciousness is waiting in ambush to strike us in our vulnerable moments. In any case, we come from nothing and go to nothing and that is nothing to worry about.
     Goodbye, everyone.

Peter Wessel Zapffe. Drawing: Finn Graff

So we are supposed to believe that President Alberich is reading Camus and has conversations on the origins of French existentialism. Yeah, fine, whatever. The more he and his ilk are abusing this precious planet, the more I am drawn to an existentialist who makes Camus appear sanguine.

There is only one such, and his name is Peter Wessel Zapffe. Here is my imperfect rendition of a 1967 radio interview with NRK, as transcribed in the book Essays and Epistles. Enjoy.

I remember once on the Arctic Ocean. The steward came up on deck, saying: “You should come down to the lounge, Zapffe. They are arguing vehemently there.” “What is it about?” “When I left, they had come around to man.”

Interviewer: And so, perhaps, have we?

The human being is not only the bearer of philosophy; it is also at center stage as its object. As far as we can tell, it is the only being that is both alive and able to regard its life ‘as from the outside’. It can also view itself as an observer of itself, and so on in absurdum, i.e. until reason folds.

The animal seems to be naturally at one with its existence. This naturalness is broken in the human being. It can experience itself as an foreign guest.

Interviewer: And which are the consequences of that?

The world around us, and man with his I-experience and life-situation, come across as the complete mystery. We know nothing about the origin and the so-called ‘deepest nature’ of the universe. First we must ‘know’ what it ‘is’ to know, i.e., obtain a pair of shoes so tight that we can only get them on after wearing them for a week or so.

Interviewer: We really know nothing, then?

Within the mystery, reason can find relations of greater or lesser constancy. It orients itself, seeking to determine its position. It discovers, for instance, that classes and individuals both have finite life spans; a beginning and an end. We ourselves live within a parenthesis of iron between birth and death.

A basic fabric in the texture are innumerable pathways of origination. Nearby matter is entrapped and turned into wefts. It discovers that it has become a dog, an eskimo, or Peder Jensen in Thorvald Meyer’s Street. These have not chosen their form. Yet there they are. And here we have, perhaps, a possible foundation for ethics.

Interviewer: And what kind of difference does such an origination make?

There has arisen a synthesis, a potential, a high pressure. This persists for a while; dissolves; dissipates; and returns to the elements. While they endure, individuals have their own interest status. There is something they want, and something they do not want. Their ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ meet their destinies. Fortunate conditions yield a fortunate fate; unfortunate conditions an unfortunate fate. To assist them they have their equipment, their abilities.

Interviewer: And what if we regard man as such a synthesis?

Then it is natural to consider the extent and peculiarity of its endowment, relative to outer and inner conditions.

The rest of the living world seems to be geared exclusively for the survival of the species. Individuals only matter insofar as they serve this end. A large percentage of humankind appears to be similarly geared, both individually and collectively.

This notwithstanding, man has a surplus with respect to biological necessities. With the exception of viruses, it has overcome all its enemies, and the remaining animals exist at the mercy of man. Yet it is not content with being the last species standing. It rages forth toward the depths of future and past, and toward the boundaries of space.

Interviewer: But isn’t this just valuable?

Any realisation of active and receptive possibilities for living is experienced as valuable. Playing with the surplus can be harmless, but it can also collide with other vital interests. Think of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. We are becoming more numerous than the planet can sustain. As we divide into groups, the one may obliterate the other five or ten times over. This matter that everybody talks about today is just as much a chromosome bomb.

Within, too, the pressure of possibilitites and ends can overthrow the balance. We do have paleontological precursors: lobsters unable to raise their giant claws anymore, deer with antlers measuring more than three meters.

Interviewer: But scientists complain that our abilities do not suffice. Everywhere are problems we are unable to solve.

Indeed; we live upon a silk wrapper of safety. Yet the surplus resides in the fact that we see the problems. Around the bonfire of knowledge, we perceive the darkness. Otherwise, the sheep would despair of its ignorance.

Interviewer: Apart from the extent, you mentioned the peculiarity of our endowment?

Some animals have relatively constant reactions to impressions. Humans are more ‘un-fixed’; we are forced to make conscious choices. This can mean a greater pressure than our health endures. Dogs may become hysterical when their food becomes associated with pain.

Interviewer: But in general, surely, things do come out well?

Then one does not only take a ’general’ view, but also a selective one. Costs are left out. The promenade on Karl Johan Avenue is more presentable than all the hidden conditions that are rather not mentioned. Such isolation is but one of many means devised to neutralise the disastrous effects of the surplus and the lack of fixation.

Interviewer: But surely, not everything is mere doubt and uncertainty?

Beside the lack of fixation, there are also some fixations, partly in fortunate directions and partly not. The latter ones are especially relevant to our worldview and our view of life.

Interviewer: How so?

The unique quality within the biotic world that we demand morality of our surroundings, and an adequate meaning to it all, that is something we can hardly relinquish. And yet, what we call Nature displays neither morality nor meaning. So the question, What is the meaning of life? is less fertile than, Why do we ask for the meaning of life? Cats do not.

Interviewer: Shouldn’t we ask?

To be sure, we see the very criterion of humanity in this question. But anyone who is able to abstain from it, and e.g. breed children without hesitation, has at least a more comfortable spiritual economy. We can imagine an eskimo who suddenly arrives at a boarding house in Lier. He is perplexed and understands nothing. Where is the ice, he queries, and where are the seals? Yet noone can answer, and so he leaves again. Thus has man come into a world estranged from the soul. He asks for the meaning of Life, finds none, and leaves again. Only the moon stares after him in bewilderment.

Interviewer: You say that Nature has no morality. Yet at least it is brilliant in its adaptations?

If nature is seen as brilliant wherever it succeeds, then it is also idiotic wherever it fails. If not idiotic, then it is not brilliant. The Mystery does not call for awe. It just is what it is.

Interviewer: What do you really mean by saying that something ’is’?

Shall we say a conjunction of an X and a property? X derives from the Mystery, and the property, at least in part, from the observer.

Protagoras intuited this when he called man the measure of all things. Berkeley created the sentence ‘esse est percipi’ – to be is to be perceived by a consciousness. It can be read in many ways, including one that coincides with Kant’s doctrine of ‘Erscheinung’. Another interpretation appears to be confirmed by the biologist Jacob von Uexküll: The endowment of each individual helps determine its image of the surroundings. With humans, we must then consider more than just the senses.

Interviewer: Can you explain this further?

We have all learned that the so-called ’secondary qualities’, the colour red and so on, do not inhere in the ’thing itself’ but are formed by light waves plus the eye and the brain. Yet we can go further and regard even the model ‘wave’ as a human artifact, emerging from X as it meets our mental constitution. And similarly with all our dear and familiar, indispensable and obvious categories, such as time and space, distance, form, unity, beginning and end, ugly and beautiful, small and large, infinity, good and evil, Yes and No, to be or not to be. We take them with us when we leave.

Of the rest, one cannot even say ‘it is X’; one must say simply ‘X’.

Interviewer: Would you say, then, that the moon is not shining when nobody sees it?

If someone says that the moon is shining when nobody sees it, then he acts as a secret spectator. For we ourselves bring one half of the light.

Interviewer: Do you find this worldview satisfying?

If we need an adequate meaning to it all, that need goes unmet to be sure. A madam asked her husband: “What did the doctor say?” “He thought it was cancer.” “But surely, you cannot be satisfied with that.”

Interviewer: What, then, about all those who seek something perfect, something absolute?

Imagine a group of castaways afloat on assorted wreckage in mid-ocean. One seizes the floor, saying: “Our situation is untenable. What must we seek for? The only true, genuinely perfect system of rescue!” ”What is that like?” says another. ”You have to ask? It is something that picks us all up of the water, dries and warms us, treats us to the best of food and puts us into a wonderful bed. Will you not join us in seeking this means?” “I don’t think so.” ”What will you do then?” ”I am floating on an oar. Over there is another. I will try to reach it, to get an oar under each arm.” ”And such a goal satisfies you! You poor, undemanding soul!”

Interviewer: Can one do without the hope for a life after death?

When saying the hope, one presupposes a world or a form of life that is adapted to one’s own needs. Otherwise, one would ask: Can you do without the fear of a life after death? And that, I can. Olaf Bull could have written: “I think of days like this, when I shall not live. Buses will run into the ditch – without me.” Today is one of the days he had in mind. Terrible – or what?

Interviewer: So death becomes merely a question mark in the light of this?

Only the way of it, but that is not ‘mere’. The verdict is not published until the execution has begun. Personally I regard the year 2050 much as the year 1850, when I was nothing but northern wind and potato-land, and the lethal pathways swept past me far away. I did not worry about the war in 1864, nor will I be concerned by what awaits our descendants.

Yet even the image of death depends on whoever has it. We cannot pronounce on aspects of existence without being seated in one of them ourselves.

And this is where the Mystery engulfs us.

More Zapffe here.

Not depressed enough by the world situation? The existential pessimist and philosopher of tragedy, Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990), is here to help.

For more by this unjustly neglected thinker, see my Philosophy category.

It is said that the spirit is like a flickering fire in the night; thus we must be humble with regard to all that we cannot fathom. Whatever paroxysms of self-vaporising humbleness should not then be expected of sheep, or oysters? We “know that we know nothing”, yet the charting of our ignorance has in time become respectable. Rather, we are over-endowed when it comes to posing problems; even our flair at solving them has brought us to the brink of disaster.

It is said of the nihilist that ”to him, nothing is sacred”. He might reply that at least he does not sanctify the lie, the common compulsory living-lie; be it expressed as optimism about civilisation or as the falsettos and tightened throats of those who must hide the disconcerting facts to children, so these are not frightened witless even at the outset.

The sooner humanity dares to harmonise itself with its biological predicament, the better. And this means to willingly withdraw in contempt for its worldly terms, just as the heat-craving species went extinct when temperatures dropped. To us, it is the moral climate of the cosmos that is intolerable, and a two-child policy could make our discontinuance a pain-free one. Yet instead we are expanding and succeeding everywhere, as necessity has taught us to mutilate the formula in our hearts. Perhaps the most unreasonable effect of such invigorating vulgarisation is the doctrine that the individual “has a duty” to suffer nameless agony and a terrible death if this saves or benefits the rest of his group. Anyone who declines is subjected to doom and death, instead of the revulsion being directed at the world-order engendering the situation. To any independent observer, this plainly is to juxtapose incommensurable things; no future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will. It is upon a pavement of battered destinies that the survivors storm ahead toward new bland sensations and mass deaths.

So you ask whether I would choose to be unborn? One must be born in order to choose, and then the choice involves destruction. But ask my brother in that chair over there. Indeed, it is an empty one; my brother did not get so far. Yet ask him, as he is travelling like the wind below the sky, crashing against the beach, scenting in the grass, revelling in his strength as he pursues his living food. Do you think he is bereaved by his incapacity to fulfill his fate on the waiting list of the Oslo Housing and Savings Society? And have you ever missed him? Look around in a crowded afternoon tram and reflect whether you would allow a lottery to select one of the exhausted toilers as the one whom you put into this world. They pay no attention as one person gets off and two get on. The tram keeps rolling along.

It is no cure for tooth-ache to get ache in four more teeth. ‘Progress’ is a matter of quantity. In order to provide the multiplicants with a living, a place in the brooding box, and continuous clamour in their spare time, nature is crushed and put on sale. A new generation will discover that it was the landscapes of our minds we were demolishing. Preserves are not to be countenanced; a desolate island is a crime. Every municipality has but a single goal: to multiply. To multiply profusely. To multiply the most. And so what?

An experience-based ethic arises naturally from our predicament as prisoners of a cosmic concentration camp. In the blind law of transience we have a common enemy. Hence our model should be the ethics of the life-boat. Those who wish to die shall be allowed to. But whoever steals from the water cask makes himself a collaborator with the enemy, and only ethically irrelevant love can prevent his extradition to his new master.

Above all, we must make the reproductive question ethically relevant. A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness. Nobody flinches – except when saying cootchie-cootchie to the treasure in the cradle, little Hjalmar Alexander.

Besides Ibsen, especially Henri Fredric Amiel has made a profound impression upon me. He possesses that complete meditative relaxation which allows thought to sink, as heavy as lead, to the great conceptual depths – depths inaccessible to anyone whose attention is burdened by concerns with everyday welfare. But this discerning, generous, self-reflective and self-forfeiting type – a noble dreamer, impaled on the needle of the now – is naturally defenceless in a society that only acknowledges measurable value. And a nation of such refined minds would be haplessly abandoned to any blind, gluttonous conqueror. Cheaply victorious, he bids the broken mimosa a scornful farewell, oblivious to this being humanity bidding itself farewell. Some of the dreamer’s states of mind are ideal heights at which I look askance from the debasement of necessity. But this ideal is void of any future. A famous editor in Kristiania said to his son: “Are you still pursuing that nonsense.” Well then, he was only witnessing his own spiritual demise. But how can a planet hirsute with six billion vehicles of the flesh, all bellowing out their needs, have room for those who merely wonder and despair? Who dares demand of this panic-prone, surging avalanche, this oceanic breaker wave of jaws and claws, that it direct its power inwards, consider the dead and the tormented, and don every morning, in trembling, the mercy of chance?

If Western humanism has a preeminent advocate of the ages, it is Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1456–1536). His Adagia (1515), a collection of proverbs with commentary, was the first bestseller in history. And its most popular essay is composed on an ancient aphorism: dulce bellum inexpertis — “war is sweet to the inexperienced.”

These are fitting words on Memorial Day.

Written at a time when war had for perhaps the first time risen to rival disease and starvation — the two traditional scourges of humanity — Erasmus’ essay has been called the founding tract of pacifism. But he was not a pacifist. Rather he insisted, against the grain of his times, that war be confined to a last resort of self-defense, for the excellent reason that “even the most successful and just war,” waged by a good prince for a noble purpose, is prone to descend into unspeakable atrocities. Thus:

Man, says Erasmus, is the one creation made entirely for friendly acts, yet in war his social disposition turns him into “a brute so monstrous that no beast will be called a brute in future if compared to man.” After all, “When did anyone hear of a hundred thousand animals falling dead together after tearing each other to pieces, as men do everywhere?”

How is such perversion even possible? It is due to concerted campaigns for amnesia by which the bitter lessons of the past are unlearned. Though experience teaches that the expenses of bloodshed are ten times higher than those of peace with results much worse, the propaganda of clerics, lawyers, and princes has again made war “such a respectable thing that it is wicked — I might almost say ‘heretical’ — to disapprove of this which of all things is the most abominable and most wretched.”

Five centuries hence, another thoughtful commentator reflected on the difference between West Europeans and North Americans in this respect. William Pfaff, writing in The International Herald Tribune in January 2003, is worth quoting at length:

Pfaff adds the following observation:

Evidently, not just individuals but the whole country has ignored central lessons of “what war means for its victims.” As International Law scholar Richard Falk has put it in The Nation:

In mainstream US discourse, the unforgivable flaws of the Vietnam War are that it was (1) lost at (2) by US standards, a hefty cost in American lives (3) without clear US interests at stake. The scholars debate which was more instrumental in eroding support for the war. It is clear, however, that either dwarfs the fact that it (4) involved grave war crimes such as free fire zones; the deployment of the most poisonous chemical weapons known to science in civilian areas; and the bombing back to the stone age of Laos and Cambodia at an officially estimated cost of respectively 350,000 and 600,000 civilian lives.

Certainly the US military and political establishment had no significant qualms about (4). Anyone in doubt about this should contemplate SIOP-62, the top secret contingency plan for US nuclear first strike. Effective from 1962, this plan mandated a nuclear annihilation of not just the USSR but its enemy China in the event of suspicious Soviet troop movements. Thus it prescribed the murder of up to a hundred million innocent citizens of a non-belligerent nation posing no threat to any NATO country. Anything less, explained the head of the Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Powers, “would really screw up the plan.”

The 2004 release of these utterly sinister documents failed to cause any noticeable stir in the US public, even though they prove that America was ready, at a moment’s notice, to carry out a nuclear holocaust making every previous genocide pale in comparison. One shudders to imagine what Erasmus would have said of this ultimate deviation from his — or any — conception of justifiable warfare.

Or, to return to the current malaise, whatever would he have made of the following sermon, given at a time when only 25 percent of Americans thought the Iraq War a mistake?

Now the warmongering pundits who shilled for that bungled war are using virtually indistinguishable rhetoric to enable another “preventive” onslaught; one that might need to avail itself of nuclear weapons as a tactical necessity. The leading political commentator on America’s most trusted television network thunders: “You know in a sane world, every country would unite against Iran and blow it off the face of the Earth. That would be the sane thing to do.”

Are such odious operators met with a firestorm of popular derision from the US public? Not outside of liberal blogs.

Apart from 9/11 and the events of 150 years ago, the American people still has no experience of being at the receiving end of “this which of all things is the most abominable and most wretched,” but which remains so sweet to the inexperienced.

Today is the centennial of Henrik Ibsen’s death. My modest — and no doubt idiosyncratic — contribution to the commemoration of this immortal playwright is the below translation of a short essay by Peter W. Zapffe, the great philosopher of tragedy whom Ibsen’s work inspired and strongly influenced. In this succint meditation on the human condition, Zapffe puts forth for the first time the existentialist philosophy he developed at length in his 1941 magnum opus, On the Tragic.

The piece originally appeared in Morgenbladet on September 21, 1932. As with my other renderings of Zapffe, available in the Philosophy category, I have used British spelling for this likely first translation into English.

Ibsen aficionados may note that the term ‘hobgoblin thoughts’ alludes to Act Five, Scene Five of Peer Gynt.

We must presume that humans are the only species on Earth with a capacity for self-consideration, the ability to reflect on its particular circumstances and assess them in relation to those of other beings. By virtue of our spiritual endowment we not only can adapt to this given environment, but by means of techical remedies even survive changes of environment that would mean death for all other creation. If equipped with the bare capacity for reflection, we would however soon see through the repetitions of nature and know them as a mounting nightmare; and a sober comparison of the benefits and the costs of existence would swiftly lead to life’s voluntary surrender. Serving as a check on this danger is the relentless yearning that has no particular object and is independent of fulfillment, persisting as a static condition of variable magnitude. The toothache offers a metaphor of this. Working in tandem with our yearning is the imagination, which incessantly presents new singular goals, diverting from the hopelessness of the necessary conclusion that our yearning is unfounded in reality, that all speculations are but paper money without security in gold.
    Our form of existence is thus not conducive to bliss. Simpler organisms are more fortunate in this regard. The human being is, as an organic experiment, so highly driven as to approach an oscillation, an inner explosion. Cognition hands us more than we can carry. We suffer from the constant tension, the back-and-forth undulating battle between what drains the will to live and what builds it up. This is the pain of living. In certain moments we can immediately experience what it means to be of human birth, what it involves to be a thinking and feeling being, forged into an organism that follows alien laws. When exposed without mediation to those certainties and possibilities that the range of our faculties makes us liable to, when lonesome and naked under the cosmos — then we call it Weltschmertz. It is the purest form of suffering, the profoundest, truest and strongest emotion a human being can have. Popular it is not. It is often mentioned with a tentative irony to camouflage the horror. One is led to think of passengers joking about the breaker between their ears. Perhaps only those have fully felt this who were rendered unfit for life. The ancients called it to see Jehova.
    The struggle for existence, then, is only in its outward respect a fight for the daily bread. The real battle rages over the ghost of life within ourselves — where we ourselves are both the warriors, the battleground, and the strife.
    From the great bewilderment, the panic of living, has the theater, as well as cultural life in general, emerged. There is something eerie about a type of being sitting down to watch its own mode of existence and characteristics. But the idea is clear. In the theater, the battleground is moved from the mind onto the stage. We become mere spectators, relieved for a time of the burden of existence. Our own secret distress is seen to be borne by others and brought to solutions that comfort and soothe us, be it direct or indirect ones, elementary or involving high ideas, familiar or new. We look for a web of meaning and context that may isolate and shelter us from the hobgoblin thoughts. The theater is to some what mass is to others. Katharsis, said the Greeks, meaning thereby a moral purification. But the notion can be extended to signify cosmic hygiene. At worst we are led from despair to uncertainty, induced to think: Maybe still. Will and faith can be passed from spirit to spirit, especially when the donor is in command of form. The play is the most effective form there is.
    Thus the theater is directly enrolled in the service of struggling life. It stretches a bridge of purpose over the abyss, pushing with dynamic élan whenever it creaks. By cultivating the joys of experience it becomes a greenhouse for life-affirming values. The social prestige, the artistic strength, the architectonic power, the confidence of the stage machinery, and the insuperability of the entire task to any one individual endow the voice of the theater with a persuasive authority that the words by themselves might lack.
    Even in tragedy the idea, more or less manifest, should survive the disaster. There is in society a tacit understanding that the natural shall not be tolerated. A man who weeps on the street is removed, not for his own sake, but for others. The raiment of the minds is taboo.
    The state has a direct interest in this effect of the theater’s activity. Like a log driver on his logs, life jumps from creed to creed. It is imperative that the current one not be allowed to sink before the next one is within reach.

I remember stumbling upon, as a kid, The Book of Job in a family bible. Set in archaic language and almost indecipherable gothic font, it was a struggle to get through; but the story was absorbing and the poetry, otherworldly. Like countless readers before me, however, I was baffled by the ending.

Years later, the existentialist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990) helped me make sense of it at last. His classic essay on The Book of Job is adapted from his masterpiece, On the Tragic, published in 1941 under German occupation. It is a subversive and blasphemous reading of this ancient meditation on the Problem of Evil, which Zapffe understood as an indictment of the human condition. The final paragraph never fails to send a chill down my spine. As promised to a commenter a while ago, I have attempted to render the essay; presumably for the first time in English.

My previous translations of Zapffe are here, here and here. As before, I have chosen British spelling. The prose is extraordinary and I have no illusions of having done it justice.

But then, where is justice found in this world?

The problem of interpreting a text that is either difficult to make particular sense of, or else allows more than one reading, is in theory the same for a work of today and one of bygone times. Only factually does there tend to be a difference — in the access to means and material. The interpretation may be determined by its causae, its effective causes; such is the case when the interpreter by means of historical and biographical knowledge seeks to present the author’s supposed intentions, or reconstruct the contemporary reception. But it may also be determined by its telos; such is the case when the interpreter asks, How does the text affect a reader of today — what does it yield when studied in terms of our present-day preconceptions?
     In the case of The Book of Job, we lack direct knowledge of the `author intention’ or the attitudes of the recipients upon its `publication’. Schück places the poet in Alexandria in the 4th century B.C.E., suggesting that he, in the context of an ancient myth, voiced his own heartfelt views on the philosophy of religion. Theodicé, the `defence of God’ as opposed to `criticism of the world order’, gained burning relevance as Judaism and Hellenism clashed in the minds. Both causae and telos are thus at play in the following interpretation.

Job is a kindred spirit of Prometheus; they both suffer godly malice and appeal to the principle of justice. Furthermore, a network of historical arteries is believed to link Aischylos’ play to the form given The Book of Job in canonical Scripture.
     The textual history is interesting — with the `traditional book’ as the source and servile theologians carrying a train of piety along. Together they frame a gem of world literature. It is a man of deeply personal acquaintance with pain, tremendous passion, and a reason of incisive clarity who meets us here, a thinker with a fanatic will to intellectual honesty and a poet of soaring cosmic pathos to match his flair for bestowing a blinding satirical form upon his abysmal hate of the god. There is a golden irony in the destiny of the writing: through the interpolations of the pious, this book of revolt, with all its smoking imprecations, has gained a place among the rocks of faith upon which people build their metaphysical consolation even today.
     The poet takes as his point of departure the tradition that Job was great in the eyes of his tribesmen in terms of religion, status, and wealth. He was `blameless and upright, one who feared God, and turned away from evil’, and self-effacingly helpful too. He was the greatest of all the people of the East, happy and highly esteemed by young as well as old, poor as well as rich. There is none like him on the earth — so says the Lord himself. In other words: Job is perched at the pinnacle of his society’s culture, and just those rare and fine qualities that placed him there become in turn the direct cause of his destruction, of his biological, social and metaphysical ruin. He is to be a bone of contention among the powerful; a victim, in a sense, of an inverted `envy of the gods’.
     For the Lord brags to Satan about his servant Job — what must not I be like, who am feared by a man like Job, and Satan replies: Hah! Job worships you merely in tribute to your patronage. Now deprive him of his assets, and we shall see. Jahve agrees to the bet, and soon Job is struck by two fearsome floodwaves of disaster until his life is barely left him. God wants to show his adversary that Job serves and fears him (love is not at issue here) whether blessings or curses are sent, simply for `God’s own sake’ — however that is supposed to be motivated. Job has to prostrate himself unconditionally, humbly conceding — what? God’s might or God’s right? Well, that is precisely the burning question in what follows.
     And Job really bows, as he has been taught is the right thing to do, during both of his ordeals. In the traditional book he is also promptly rewarded, but this is where the poet enters to request a place for human nature in Job. And the human is more than a docile slave to his image of the god; he brims with earthly life and élan. So Job gives God what is God’s due, but like Jeremiah, he curses the day he was born. It is better to be dead than to lead a life like this; still better, to never be born. Why does God force those to live who do not wish to do so?

These thoughts provoke an outpouring of eloquence from the `friends’ Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. It is in reply to their more or less unthinking dogmatic cant that Job is to make an accusation of timeless dimensions, attaining a voice that concentrates all of humankind’s prayers and threats, laments, hopes, and curses into a few immortal verses. Above the vital biological interests of the people and humanity, whose assurance was hitherto the only purpose of the pact with Jahve, the poet now elevates a new interest: The Book of Job is a drama about the emergence of culture; a depiction of a spiritual `mutation’ comparable to Prometheus, The Eumenides, and Grillparzer’s Libussa. One can perceive a new metaphysical consciousness crystallise under the maximal pressure of agony — a consciousness of the fundamental conflict between the god (or by analogy, natural forces) as the environment’s master, and the sacred human demand for meaning in what happens.
    The friends’ traditional doctrine claims, with minor variations, that God rewards the righteous (law-abiding) and punishes the ungodly (law-infringing) in this life — a creed that Job too has grown up with. As Job is now `unpunishable’, says the old Eliphaz, God will certainly deliver him from agony if only he endures in patience while recognising God’s rightfulness in doing all this to Job. No man is perfect to God, not even you, which is why you now suffer. But when the cup of suffering is full, you will be reestablished in your former bliss. During the ordeal you may cry out as much as you like; none can hear you. Be grateful for His scolding of you; it only proves that you are in His hand.

I may perhaps have made too much of it, Job meekly replies, but this I simply cannot take! I have no peace while I swallow my spittle; I am after all a human, not a mineral! And yet I will try to be humble, if only you explain my fault to me, the fault that earned me such a treatment. For it can hardly be my impatience now after the fact that brought down my misadventure! — Neither here nor later on is there any sign that Job equals himself with God in moral stature — the respective demands are also different, to put it mildly. Job is merely requesting a reasonable proportion of `punishment’ to imperfection, especially inasmuch as perfection is entirely beyond human reach. He must, given the central dogma, be free to compare his fate with those of others, and this is where he grows sceptical about the distribution of goods and ills. But his friends misjudge his zeal in pleading his innocence, suspecting a mad pride behind it: that Job regards himself as `absolutely’, not `relatively’, faultless. The source of Job’s fervour is another, however: it is for the sake of the problem, in the interest of clarity, that he reviews his conduct. He queries what they mean by sin when basing their defence of God on the doctrine of the sinner’s doom and the righteous person’s vindication. It is easy for you to preach, he concludes in his reply to Eliphaz, who have all your assets intact. My life is in tatters; I shall soon perish from this disease, and then there is no more. Those are different terms, indeed. And since I have no more to lose, nor anything to gain by keeping quiet, I might at least indulge in lamenting my plight.
     And now he directs his words straight at his, and his friends’, God. What is the point of all this? Do you find me a worthy object of your destructive power? Have you no better things to do? Do you not think you lessen yourself by going on like this? Mightn’t you stop while I am still alive and grant me a moment’s peace - for when I shortly die, you must, after all, stop anyway!
     The young Bildad then repeats Eliphaz’ claim, applying it to Job’s sons. They must surely have sinned egregiously who were so swiftly slain, for God’s justice cannot be doubted.
     True enough, Job ponderously replies; it is futile for a human to challenge God. But now the critical breakthrough occurs in Job’s thought: How so? Is it because we are so feeble in our sense of justice that we should bow our heads in shame if God the Lord were to explain to us the least of his motives? No, he infers with desperate rigour, it must rather be due to his overwhelming power relative to ours, his greatness in meters and kilos, that we cannot prevail against him. Our rightness or wrongness in the human sense makes no difference whatsover. It is immaterial twice over: firstly, he cannot be summoned for negotiations; he is invisible, exempt from our limitations, has no need for our facilities, and does not communicate with us as we do among ourselves. And secondly: even if he did arrive for negotiations — what good would it do? No umpire could arbitrate between us; he does not accept to be bound by even one explicit principle of justice. He is an absolute autocrat by virtue of his strength and knowledge; mercy I may appeal for, but no justice. Indeed, he can render the innocent guilty, twisting the sense of justice in his chest and forcing him to convict himself. Let him make us equal before the law, and I will answer him. As long as he keeps me on the rack, standing above me as an executioner, there is no basis for negotiation. Accordingly, even an indictment from God would be invaluable.

But surely there is at least a meaning in the misery, even if at odds with the idea of justice? Let me know then why you harass me! I am, after all, your own creation wholly; in the name of reason you must have a motive for destroying it. The call for comprehension erupts like a flame toward the heavens; Job is hammering God’s ear in hope of striking a humanly related cord. If you probe my sin and delinquency, there must at least be a chance of contact on a single point; one common principle must apply to your judgment and mine. If there is any truth in your claim to have made us in your image, then something must be commensurable in our respective views and verdicts, and this must also pertain to my sense of justice, which you created together with the rest. For if the god’s understanding of justice deviates from humanity’s, then it is as good as arbitrary for us; then our last chance is lost, there is no pathway of hope through perfectibility, we are surrendered to a metaphysical sweepstake, and there is no longer any guarantee that our highest virtues, faithfulness, humility and benevolence, are not in fact the broad path to damnation. But then, if his notion of justice deviates from ours, we will no more use the word `justice’ of his dispositions. Nor will we condone the fraud inherent in the theodicé of the pious: calling an act the most heinous crime and irredeemable offence when performed by a human, but inscrutable love when by God. It is one out of two: same law and same verdict for both, or different laws and verdicts. If we are to accept the governance of our world as just, says Job, it has to be just in the human sense. Otherwise God can be as `just’ as he likes in his own language, but in ours it is called unjust.

The same consideration applies to experience, Job affirms. When I see that a man is a crook, and he nonetheless, or precisely therefore, fares jolly well, the apologist cannot claim that he fares badly without giving a wholly new sense to the words. If he now pretends to use them in their ordinary senses, he is being dishonest in logical terms. So when Zophar, on God’s behalf, repeats the hackneyed dogma that virtue shall be rewarded, and so on, Job is seized by the ruthlessness of battle. He takes on the creed of his friends (or foes), exposing it as nonsense by the standards of reason and experience — the only ones we may decently apply. After all, even animals can sense their subordination to forces that have nil to do with good and right, and as for the human world, injustice is rather the prevailing principle. The human condition is dreadful from the vantage point of death. You should not go so far to save your illusory grounds of consolation as to defend God by pure deceit. If someone can convince me, I will concede, but not to manifest folly. Nor will I yield to the talk of God’s mysterious ways, for if I cannot form an image of him, neither can you; then we all stagger blind about.

Bildad’s second entry introduces a new element: Of what significance are you, and your demand for justice, to the entire worldly household? This is the Stoic philosophy; it sits uneasily with the principle of retribution, but Bildad ties them together with a well-known apologetic trick: to connect the incompatible items with a `nonetheless’. Job takes no solace in the fundamental unimportance of his fate; he has no use for a world-scheme where humans play no part. The call for meaning erupts in him more insistently than ever; against Stoicism he demands that his destiny (i.e. all people’s) be graven into the legend of the universe with everlasting letters. And his challenging thought proceeds to a higher authority than the god he was taught about but is dismissing, to one whose interests connect with the most sacred of human needs. Job has risen high above his individual pain and is speaking on behalf of all humanity; his sense of justice is incorruptible, ascending in merciless majesty from his despair. He even rejects the clause that the evil of `ungodly’ ancestors be visited upon descendants, for any `punishment’ must befall the delinquent in the flesh.

But now Bildad comes along with his last bullet: God’s greatness of quantity; if sitting in the entire colloquium, he has either failed to understand a thing or refused to do so. As Job lacks the Lord’s astronomic dimensions, he should not try to prevail. Baffled by the argument, Job asks: With whose help have you uttered words, and whose spirit has come forth from you? Being only too acquainted with this aspect of the Lord’s exertions, Job schools Bildad in the sublime poetic art of extolling the many mechanistic wonders that we cannot copy. But then — Job ominously concludes — that also circumscribes his powers; he can storm and roar as much as he likes, that does not help one iota in the matter at hand. On the contrary: the Lord abused his might to violate my right. At this point I must stand firm, for I cannot betray my conviction without harm to my soul. And I do not shy from calling any cosmic force ungodly that strays from the rightful path. If Job’s expression `my enemy’ refers to Jahve, as the context suggests, then he here puts forth a novel theology: the notion `divine’ shall not conform to `the god that be’; rather, the god we can accept shall conform to the norm of divinity — to our conception of the ideal god by the token of humanity. And so we require the god to embody the highest wisdom, shooting all creation through with order and meaning. Where, then, is the well-spring of wisdom, inquires Job — where is the source of spirit that animates god and human alike? Jahve is obviously not this source, though he alone knows the origin of spiritual power. And to what end has he put it himself? To wreak havoc with wind and rain and lightning, playing war games on humanity. `Fear Me and depart from evil’ — that was all he got out of it.

A later author finds no way to save the three reproachful friends. Job has torched every imaginable argument — yet cannot in all decency be ceded the dispute without further ado. Thus he adds a fifth character, Elihu, who is previously unmentioned and supposed to speak the timely words to satisfy the demands of both faith and experience. However, despite notable pretensions, he is able only to rehash and vary what has already been said. It must therefore mystify the reader that the Lord, when the Day of Reckoning arrives, does not rebuke him for heresy together with the other three. Even more surprising is it, though, that he hauls them over the coals after repeating the gist of their lectures himself. But we are only mystified because we still retain some notions about the divine logic. After the Lord has made his personal introduction, there shall be nothing more to surprise us.
     For this speech of God must be one of the most marvellous passages in the whole of canonical Scripture. Job, for one, is clearly perplexed by the rich demonstration of all that is weird and wonderful in nature.
    And when the Lord expectantly prompts his reply, Job says rather quietly: You know what I think of my misery. These zoological conjuring tricks hardly concern our differences. What else do you want me to say?
     So the Lord is compelled, however reluctantly, to address the question of justice. (God was careless enough to show up on the scene; he cannot pull out now without loss of prestige. And in prestige, vanity, is perhaps the deepest motivation for this god’s benighted rule.) How dare you allege that I am unjust?? asks the Lord in the whirlwind. Do you not see my strength and do you not hear how terribly I can roar? Prove that you have my might, and I will bow to recognise your right. Only might carries weight in my eyes. Do you know what is the apex of my creation? Not the human spirit with its sickly sense of justice, as you fool believe, no the hippo sir! Its legs are copper pipes and its bones like iron rods! A far cry from you effeminate whimp with all your tender sensibilities. Now maybe you think Man is second to the hippo? Oh far from it, the crocodile is its only equal. It has armor plates, that one, but what have you? Aye, you are quite someone to lecture me about justice!

One can imagine Job’s boundless consternation at this tangible appearance of Jahve. Here Job has been attributing to his problem the profoundest, most crucial significance of principle — assuming himself faced with an adversary who should convince him to the point of mortal shame as soon as his tongue touched the burning questions — a god so dignified and sacred and pure that even his indictment must cause exultation! And now he is met with a grotesquely primitive world-ruler, a cosmic caveman, a blustering braggart, almost endearing in his utter ignorance of spiritual culture. Job also readily realizes that it would be laughably naïve to raise theoretical questions here; to assert a persuasion requires an adversary who is equipped to comprehend it and to see the argument as common ground. Nothing could be more misplaced than to beat his chest in a display of moral heroism until Jahve puts his paw down to squash him like a flea. He might as well take his high-minded stands vis-a-vis the hippo and the crocodile, who much more than Job are created in the Lord’s image. The situation is utterly transformed now that Jahve has made the mistake of revealing his true nature and no longer benefits from the idealising human imagination. `I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes’. Job is paying lipservice to God as one does to the mentally unbalanced. His battle with God was based upon a false premise. What is news to Job is not God’s greatness of quantity, which he fully knew beforehand. It is the poorness of quality. His loftiest belief, his conception of the god, has taken a fatal blow. To this inane ur-force, Job can yield without the slightest shame, since the `battle’ left his principled stance untouched. A spiritual force may be annihilated, but not `defeated’, by the annihilitation of its corporal vehicle. Not even corporally is Job `defeated’, for in that area he did not fight. He is unpersuaded of having erred about the justice of the worldly order; on the contrary, his views are borne out. By so capitulating, he deals the tyrant the most damning insult there is: that the adversary does not even merit a fight.

One who does not smell a rat is Jahve: thrilled as a child by his `triumph’, he initiates a grand reconciliation. The poor friends, who thought they had served their master diligently, adhering to the law that has just been confirmed by personal revelation, and even foretelling the reconciliation itself — those are harshly dealt with, while Job, who has still not recovered from his initial shocks, sees the return and doubling of his chattel and wealth. He gets as many sons and daughters as were crushed in the beginning — it is clearly the Lord’s opinion that no harm is done as long as the number is preserved. What an unflattering light does not fall on this godly Caliban, who believes he can make it all up with money and cattle when Job has put his finger on the rotten rub in the very world machinery!
     Thus ends this grand metaphysical confrontation in blind comedy. Job keeps wisely quiet in his newfound bliss, but he shall hardly forget the glimpse that he, in his time of terror, caught behind the scenes of creation, even as he grows to be 140 years old and full of days.
     Has Satan lost his bet? If he is of Jahve’s caliber, he has. But if he is a clever Mefisto, then he and Job now share a little secret. Within, Satan achieved a victory far more precious than one without: the colossus has exposed his weak spot, allowing his arch-enemy a grip on the human mind previously unthinkable. God missed the scope of Job’s test; a ruler’s whim during merry recreation has turned into a deadly serious affair.

Job’s tragedy is, in the first regard, the outer one that he is broken along with his household for being the most praiseworthy person in the land. But here the causal chain is ascribed to a Prolog im Himmel and cannot be tied to known earthly conditions. True, wealth might attract robbers, but storms and leprosy are accidents in the light of experience. So this tragedy is rather bereft of philosophical substance.
     All the weightier is the inner tragedy. Firstly, his sense of justice (the new greatness evoked by the outer tragedy), unique to Job within his circle and his finest quality in the eyes of the modern reader, brings him melancholy and Weltschmertz, the severest of mental anguish. Secondly, Job’s vivid imagination and noble spirit render him especially prone to such anguish — he is dismayed when the Almighty gives him `the visions of the night’. Shallow natures are spared such deep Hamletian vistas, and the `ungodly’ have no analogous problem of justice. This dilemma concerns us all the more for being somehow `eternally human’.
     But the god in The Book of Job — does he concern us? Is there anything more to it than poetic play with a conception of god now exotic and obsolete? Do we know this god? Indeed, we do from the history of religion; he is the god of the Old Testament, the god of wars, armies and divisions, the jealous, or as we would say, the harsh and vigilant Jehova. But does he only dwell in the history of religion? We are hardly so fortunate: he holds sway in experience as well, today as 2,400 years ago. He represents a familiar social and biological environment: the blind forces of nature oblivious to the human craving for order and meaning, the unpredictable strikes of disease and death, the ephemerality of fame, the betrayal of friends and kin. He is the god of machines and might, of rule by violence, Moscow tribunals, party yoke and conquest, of copper pipes and armor plates. Job is not alone to confront him with weapons of the spirit. Some are trampled underfoot in heroic martyrdom; others see the limitation even of martyrdom — they bow in outer things, but hide despair in their hearts.

Crossposted from European Tribune; Booman Tribune; and My Left Wing.

According to a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), fetuses cannot feel pain until the last few weeks of a pregnancy, reports the BBC.

I find the latter assertion untenable. In philosophy, there are two rival conceptions of what a ‘right’ is. On one analysis it is a norm protecting some rational agent’s opportunity to choose in some specific respect. Clearly, this is out as far as fetuses are concerned, inasmuch as they are not yet rational agents. On the other, more inclusive analysis, a right is a norm protecting a certain interest of some being, whether a rational agent or not. This is more promising for a rights-based pro-life position, since it could be argued that a fetus does have interests worth protecting.

But which are the minimum conditions for having an interest? One such, it seems to me, must be the capacity to have experiences. There must be a way in which events in the world can impinge on your consciousness for better or for worse. Thus a cat, for instance, has interests, but a tree does not, because only the former (as far as we know) has any mental states at all.

Now, the most primitive experience conceivable is the experience of pain. If a nervous system can’t even support that, it’s reasonable to infer that it can’t support any experience. And since having experiences is a necessary condition for having interests, which in turn is a necessary condition for having rights, the fetus cannot have any rights, including the right to life, until its brain is more developed. If the current findings hold up, that is not until the 23rd week of pregnancy.

To be sure, it is wise to err on the side of caution, so one might want to subtract a few weeks from that. But this is incidental to my point.

Also note that, in my view, it will not do to argue that the fetus, if left alone in the womb, would later develop the neural wiring for sustaining experiences. Rights are not assigned retroactively. Suppose you learn that some tree in your garden will develop mental states within three weeks if you don’t cut it down. Does that imply that the plant has a “right to life” now? Surely not.

There are of course other ways than the rights-based one to argue for a ban on abortion. I believe they fail too; but that is for another day.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Sunday philosophical food for thought: I have translated an essay by Toril Moi, a Literature professor at Duke University, from the current edition of the weekly Morgenbladet. Those so inclined can skim the text, whose point is the succint existential question of the final paragraph.

Short note on the characters: Henrik Ibsen does not really need introduction. He is widely regarded as the creator of the modern drama and the second greatest playwright of all time; his masterworks like Ghosts, Rosmersholm, and The Wild Duck are constantly performed around the world in ever new interpretations. Once seen (or even read) they are never forgotten, and could easily affect your life.

Then there is… Paul Heyse. Whoever is this? Well, read on to find out.

In 1874 Georg Brandes [Danish progressive critic, tr. n.] was 32 years old and on his way to making a name for himself on the European cultural scene. Three years earlier he had already given the first in the long series of scandalous lectures collectively known as Major Streams in European Literature. In June 1874, Brandes visited Ibsen in Dresden, whence he continued on to Munich. In a letter to his mother he wrote disparagingly about Ibsen:

As I read this, I raised my eyebrows. Who on earth was this Heyse whom Brandes esteemed so much higher than Ibsen? My astonishment was unabated as I discovered that when Ibsen moved to Munich in the spring of 1875, he wrote Brandes of his “great keenness to make the acquiantance of Paul Heyse,” and asked Brandes to “put in a few good words” for him with Heyse. If this man was so impressive, how come I had never heard of him? A quick quiz among colleagues and friends revealed that I was far from the only one who didn’t know who he was. Curiosity drove me to do some research. What I found gave ample cause for reflection.

In 1875 Heyse, not Ibsen, was the grand celebrity. Paul Heyse (1830-1914) was actually Germany’s unrivaled literary lord. People would flock to Munich to meet with Heyse, who was often called Goethe’s successor.

Born in Berlin, Heyse grew up in a cultivated family with the nation’s foremost artists and intellectuals in its social circle. At the tender age of 24 he was summoned to be poet laureate at the court of Maximillian II, King of Bavaria. The assiduous Heyse never lacked inspiration: He wrote a total of 150 short stories, eight novels, more than sixty plays, and countless poems.

But Heyse was not just prolific; he was also handsome and charming, and in time, extremely rich. He was honest, principled, and loyal. He was magnetically attractive to women and a sympathetic and hospitable host to a whole network of famous male friends. His second wife was an 18 year old beauty from the high society of Munich. In 1873 he built a splendid Italianate villa with a big garden, in which Brandes was a frequent guest. Villa Heyse was the scene of a flourishing social life. One of Heyse’s many soirées was in honor of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson [Norwegian author and liberal intellectual, tr. n.], and Ibsen was often there. No wonder that Brandes, in sheer entrancement, wrote that Heyse is “the chosen favorite of the gods, Fortuna’s own spoiled child.”

Not only was Heyse respected, he was also a bestselling author. In 1897, Hjalmar Johansen [Norwegian polar explorer, tr. n.] wrote Heyse to thank him for the great reading joys he had given the crew of the Fram as they were drifting about up there in the icy nothingness. In 1910, as he turned 80, Heyse was knighted. In December that year he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Paul Heyse died in 1914. In 1920, he was forgotten.

Ibsen never won the Nobel Prize. He was not in the least magnetically attractive, neither to men nor to women. The older he got, the more asocial he became. In an 1875 letter to Brandes, Heyse reports that he has now finally met Ibsen, who appeared stiff, formal, private, and uneasy. Heyse himself was of course worldy-wise, relaxed, warm, and empathetic.

Last year I went to Munich. In the city’s finest book store I requested books by Paul Heyse. Noone had heard of him. At the house in Maximillianstrasse where Ibsen’s apartment used to be, there is a big memorial plate. There is none at Heyse’s villa, which I only found after a thorough quest. Most of the house had been converted to a lace factory. Within two meters of the windows on what was once the facade to the garden, there is now a wall. There is a Paul Heyse Street in Munich. The short street is located in a down-market district and ends, symbolically enough, in a black hole: a subway underneath the railroad.

The question I am now left with is this: Which life is preferable? Ibsen’s, or Heyse’s?

By Toril Moi 2005. Translation by Sirocco.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Yes, I know that online polls of any kind shouldn’t be taken all that seriously. Still it is amusing, as well as a little depressing, that Karl Marx has been voted the greatest philosopher in history on the website of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. He got 27,93 percent of the votes, well ahead of the runner-up David Hume at 12,63 percent, and the bronze medal winner Ludwig Wittgenstein at 6,80.

Though it’s uplifting that the voters obviously have seen past the horrific mockery of Marx’s ideas made by 20th century dictatorships - a cruelly ironic fate for one of the least statist and most anti-authoritarian thinkers ever - the ranking is patently ridiculous. True, Marx is without question a towering intellectual figure whose highly original output fills a hundred thick volumes and straddles a range of disciplines from history through sociology to economics. But only a fraction of it is usefully called philosophy and even the parts that are, like his thesis of self-realization through work, are heavily indebted to indefinetely more deserving nominees. Aristotle, anyone? He finished ninth.

As to the other top contenders, I personally don’t mind that the underrated David Hume smashed the anally-retentive Kant, who came sixth, but let’s face it: He isn’t the second greatest philosopher of the ages. The inscrutable Wittgenstein is an equally mysterious choice for #3.

On the face of it there is national chauvinism at play, inasmuch as all three highest-ranked thinkers either were British (Hume) or produced some of their most influential work in Britain (Marx and Wittgenstein). With all three of them living in the last three centuries and Plato - to whose thought all of Western philosophy has been called mere footnotes - clocking in fifth after Nietzsche, there is also a measure of time dilation involved. The end result reminds me a little of another British poll a few years ago which determined the greatest composer of all time to be Robbie Williams.

For those who want to brush up on good ol’ Karl’s philosophy on the occasion of his new status, I recommend this encyclopedia article by Jonathan Wolff. Those who want even more can do far worse than seeking out a scintillating monograph by my countryman Jon Elster: Making Sense of Marx.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Following up this, I have translated another story by existentialist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe — an animal fable from his 1941 masterpiece, On the Tragic. Here a bunch of castaway cats face a deep dilemma in trying to survive on a desert island. The fable is an image of the human condition, of which Zapffe took a pessimistic view.

Once upon a time there was a ship carrying cats, a lot of cats of all kinds, to a World Exhibition on Hawaii. Underway, the ship sunk ‘with men and mice’, the cats clinging to matresses and other strange things and drifting ashore on a desolate island. There was no life on this island except certain sprightly and irresistibly funny, but sadly inedible beetles, so at first sight they appeared all condemned to miserable death.

Then it was discovered that the soft clay along the beach brimmed with fat and delicious clamshells, easily opened with a claw or two. Thus arose for most a terrible dilemma. The only decent path was surely to leap like tigers for the beetles, the alternative being a foul activity to which no cat of the genus Felidae would descend. They represented the Cat as it had jumped forth from the mind of God, as one of them had learned by mom’s knee while a kitten at Mrs. Bloom’s, and the very thought of it abhorred them utterly.

But ‘cat, schmat’, as the madam also used to say, and sure enough, it was not long before the first ones dipped their paws and were followed by others, there being soon a veritable rush. Indeed they displayed such indifference to feline standards as to lie in the pleasantly sun-warmed mud merely gorging and breeding — their progeny slurping clams as soon as weaned. At fitting intervals they would raise their mudstained faces to squint at the snobs ashore; scorn and ridicule altered with a glowing hatred as the sight of land cats reminded them of their betrayal against the family’s precious heritage.

Optimism became a treasured way to dull their awareness of guilt and inferiority. Before long, they had to extend their defences; the land cats were called neurotics and psychotics — tricky words, but stimulating to the mud colony. Finally an analyst was sent up from the beach; he found resistance against recovery and diagnosed a fear of water. The plebeians were in triumph, but the others too were convinced by the explanation and acknowledged it, knowing well what the bottom line was.

By contrast, the cats of prey became pessimists. Not due to such burdens as the others gave weight to — lesions and starvation, choking and cold — but to finding themselves put into a world of poor terms for the sacred formula in their hearts. In recognition of this fact they instilled reproduction, the future appearing darker day by day.

Then prophets arose among them to teach the art of hope: Once upon a time we all came from a land where the objects of our noble pursuit could also be eaten and digested. Yet many were slothful, neglecting to exercise their nimbleness and strength, and that is why the ship went ashore. Now death awaits the faithful, but after death a new ship will come for the ones who did not fail. And then all those who lived in sin shall perish, and no ship shall come to deliver them.

But hunger tore their bowels, and they would whine in many keys and say: “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in unsrer Brust!” Still some became traitors and went into vulgus and sated themselves, whilst others converted by the prophet’s word and went ashore and cleansed their pelt and prepared for their great departure. The proudest of them formed a fraternity, publically declaring it the duty of any honest cat to die before selling one’s soul for a dish of clams. And when the leader felt his powers waning, he laid down on a stub to die what humans call a tragic-heroic death. Many would revere him as a saint and follow his lead, as they could not bring themselves to useful resignation; those stayed faithful to the highest ideals of felinity, though they saw through the prophet’s consolation and fought despair in their hearts.

Yet a majority in both camps became slaves of eternal doubt, dividing their time between uneasy satedness and abstinence with devouring wants. It was of course a relief to be rid the aristocrats; but the new maxim of merging with the crabs proved unrealisable in the end.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Here is the second and final part of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s Science Fiction fable from 1936, as translated by yours truly. Professor Dreistein has successfully returned to earth after his revolutionary co-discovery of a perished civilization on Venus. His new challenge is to decipher the alien document he brought along.

The inscribed-upon, or more accurately, nucleostilographed cylinder, now preserved in the Professor’s laboratory where it has already begun to corrode, is believed to be a kind of matrix for audiographic replication… The cryptic tokens are of course resisting any and all interpretation at the present time. – Thus declared the official communiqué.

Yet the Professor did not begin work on the cylinder before having paid his respects to his brave colleague’s bereaved ones; his old lonely mother and pregnant wife. He personally felt it a poor consolation that the earthly shape of the deceased had gained eternal preservation by freezing to -273 degrees, now being as hard as diamond. But he did, at any rate, promise them a copy of the translation when available, complete with a personal dedication, and this seemed to help a little.

Professor Dreistein then went into total seclusion in his highly modern laboratory, to which no sound, beam, or living soul was allowed – except the two young philologists who had shared the last Nobel prize for their work on cryptogral coefficients. The thousand-headed crowd besieging the building all day and all night, preferring to starve and freeze rather than to miss any opportunity of whatever nature, had to be dispersed by the police as it began to assume a threatening attitude. The silence from within the building caused psychosis; many would kneel and pray out loud while others presented their ailing children to the Professor’s blackened windows. Armed sentries had to guard the entrance; nothing, it was felt, was quite impossible anymore.

The frantic efforts of the three gentlemen did not fail to bear fruit. On the 24th of December the press, in inch-thick headlines, announced that the Professor and his co-workers, by a supra-brilliant synthesis, had discovered the key to interpreting the cylinder, it being now a matter of time before the first word from transglobal cultures would come forth in intelligible form.

Already on the next morning the trinitarian team, in the Professor’s name, dared offer a waiting world the prospect that he, on the following Monday at 20.00.00 o’clock, in a lecture at the Hauptakademie der Integrierten Wissenschaften, would outline the phases of the interpretive process and likely, allow a preliminary glimpse of the result. His sole caveat concerned the eventuality that ill health might preclude his public appearance. The Professor’s old age, combined with a lengthy period of late hours and with the absorbing excitement of it all, gave his physicians cause for concern.

The key discovered, the philologists retreated leaving the old enthusiast bent in cosmic solitude over the final hermeneutic meta-theses. One wished to allow him the glory of being alone about this gift to humankind; the apex of his life and of his century.

“There is every reason”, wrote Berliner Abend in high-flown Aryan syntax, “to anticipate the deciphering’s impending announcement, not only with the utmost interest, but even with disquieting unease. A world that has lived its life to the fullest measure can be presumed to have attained such outer and inner maturity, such harmonious balance of technology and spirit, as humans too anticipate at our journey’s end – the end that shall validate our efforts and bestow meaning upon the self-denial and forgotten heroism of all perished generations, upon their shining, unfaltering faith, their productive labours, suffering, and struggle. A world that has passed through the concluding phases of its thousand times ten thousand years of history, onto the final stage, and engraved its profoundest insight into a material everlasting1 – that insight which is now spilling over to our own world in one fertilising flash, a spark from the singing forge of Depth itself – whatever may it not divulge to a humankind still so painfully on its way, so ravaged by the storms of mature existence? Whatever may not be awaiting us in terms of scientific impulses, of occult apocalyptic revelation, of food for popular thought and conversation, of novel spiritual domains – indeed, in plain terms: of gates flung wide open into the ultimate, so yearningly desired deliverance of the human soul? Surely we do not go too far when anticipating that Professor Dreistein’s lecture on next Monday will signify no less than a mutation in the history of the human spirit, without thereby losing sight of the awe-inspiring fact that culture does not die as planets do, but instead, carries on its elated crusade across universes ever new…”

Every room in the Hauptakademie der Integrierten Wissenschaften was crammed to capacity. From all over Europe, indeed, from the remotest corners of the globe, distinguished scholars had gathered to fully savour the impressions of this event and its creator, while every transmitter on earth was attuned to the little steely lectern in the Hörsaal für Sinnesempfang.

It was already a quarter past eight, yet none would dream of taking offense at this slight academic delay. The Professor’s excuse would doubtless be a valid one.

At about nine o’clock a certain unrest was felt in the lecture hall, and at half past nine the Presidency decided to make for the Professor’s study. One knocked on the door, but there was no reply. One waited another fifteen minutes before knocking again – with the same result. One then withdrew to cancel the meeting. At five o’clock the next morning, after exhaustive deliberation, one determined to force open the door.

For a moment the little assembly stood as if nailed to the floor – before scrambling to the rescue. Lying on the isolopyrium tiles in front of his desk was Professor Dreistein, his hair whitened overnight, with a bloody wound in his temple and an expression on his harried face suggesting to the gaping adepts the profoundest human despair. His bony, sinewy graybeard’s hand convulsively clutched a short-barrelled laser gun.

At the center of the desk were papers indicating various stages of interpretation, and in front of these, at the table’s edge, was a sheet with the first few sentences in modern German.

With throbbing heart, the President leaned over the table and recited:

“The prohibition of sale of intoxicating drink will lead to bitterness in wide circles of our people.”

—————–
(1) In a sterile atmosphere, that is.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Europeans are from Venus while Americans are from Mars, right? As a Saturday amusement I have translated a humorous fable from the mid-1930’s by the Norwegian existentialist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990). A lampoon of golden age Science Fiction, it features two daring Europeans venturing upon Venus in a homemade rocket. Their journey is more than a space flight: It is a quest for the Meaning of Life.

To fully appreciate this story it helps to know the outline of Zapffe’s philosophy, which can be stated thus:

Here goes, for the first time in English, AFAIK (I adopted British spelling conventions for the occasion).

Berlin was in seething fever. And as the voice from Grosse Rundfunken collapsed upon the planet like a cloth, the peoples held their breath until the whole of earth, hirsute with humans, trembled in painfully tense expectation. Month after month the rumours had been swirling, at times met by disdainful snorts, at others, by exultation, at still others, by solemn silence. For this was something else and more than all the technical adventures that had so far come to life before people’s eyes; this was the epoch of the epochs, the leap and the metamorphosis, the most decisive crisis in the life of humanity, the realisation of its boldest dreams. And now it had actually happened; now it would no longer do to make a skeptical face; now it was a matter of historical fact!

On the Fourteenth of March Nineteenhundredandninetythree, Professor Amadeus Dreistein, the world-renowned astrophysicist and philosopher, accompanied by his loyal disciple, Dr. Viertelstein, began his journey to the planet Venus. At 21.51.33 ½ o’clock, a sky-threatening pillar of smoke arose from Tempelhofer Feld, followed by a million staring eyes all unable to believe themselves. On its top rode a rocket on which Dreistein had been working for a lifetime – his own, not just anyone’s - and baptised in champagne, ‘Flos Veneris’. Inside the rocket, suspended in clever anti-gravitational springs, were two men with less regard for their lives than for the ecstatic consummation of a thirty year long mass at the altar of science. The Argus eyes of telescopes traced them to the edge of emptiness, where they could no longer be distinguished from a mote on the lens.

When the estimated time expired, everyone on earth outside of camps and prisons went on lookout. Endless debates arose on the morning tram and swept around the globe like breaker waves. Had the rocket missed its target, to be consumed by infinity? Many still remembered the transmission from the moonbus ‘Hubris XV’, which in 1987 passed an Ameuropean astronaut; presumably one ejected during the collision of ‘Hubris II’ with the unmanned ‘Lunatic VIII’. In its obituary, Space Times had pointed out that this was the third of those austronauts who, after the big shipwrecks in the heavily polluted whirls of northern light, continue in orbit ‘on their own’. Dressed in their white spacesuits and lit by the set sun, they are, during interlunar periods, visible by ordinary telescope. Unfortunately they can only be identified by position, but their birth certificate names have been retained, and the Institute for Astrology, in cooperation with the Salvation Army, may on request provide their families with the azimuth at the next culmination.

This could have been the destiny of ‘R/K Flos Veneris’, but the heroic pioneers might also have been caught, slain and devoured by Venuvians. Or was one in store for a triumph to shake the Milky Way? At the least unusual noise, people would leave their desks and workshops and dash to the windows. Crowds, staring and clashing in midroad, behaved threateningly toward buses trying to pass. A state of emergency had to be declared in Berlin, but there were also grave effects elsewhere. In the South of Norway a cult arose which, in accordance with Malachi 4,5, believed that Eliah would join the return to appoint a date for the Day of Reckoning. The hopes invested in the expedition knew no bounds; unfathomable amounts of gems, gold, and radium would be anyone’s as soon as a permanent link was established. The Office of Migration spawned an interplanetary department and The Oslo Evening Gazette planned an ambulatory branch.

The 9th of September the following year, the bomb went off: ‘Flos Veneris’ had landed in the Mediterranean, the Professor being on his way to Berlin. As the morning papers came out on the 10th, the newsstands were rushed and paperboys all across Europe obliterated by the advance of their customers. Indeed, the stacks of the special edition might be so obnoxiously described as ‘worth their weight in blood’. The editor of The Swedish Central Times, who had never, even in the heat of polemic, used a stronger word than ‘quite’, met his secretary with the following morning salutation: “Scimitars in my kidneys, lad, today we have one god-damned, storm-ridden, enormous-as-hell sensation!”

Dreistein and his heroic companion had discovered an extinct planet, its surface so shot through with architectonic filigree as to seem, from a distance, like a hovering bone-coloured lacework against the jet black sky. At landing the two scientists had just enough oxygen left four a half-hour stay outside the rocket. Singleminded as they were, they did not indulge in aimless sight-seeing as was certainly invited by the unutterably beautiful buildings, the strange contraptions of unknown purpose, and the grotesque wax-imbued figures of the crypts. Dreistein sought one matter only: archives and libraries. As the half-hour drew to a close and the quest remained unsuccessful, the Professor, with a heart as heavy as iridium, ordered the retreat.

Then it is that Dr. Viertelstein resolves to sacrifice his life. He shuts off his can of oxygen, and before the Professor can get a hold of the tap, his companion has unwrapped his Nirwana suit, whereupon he drops dead to the ground. Dreistein grasped the situation immediately. His assistant had donated his oxygen supply, not to him, but to Science. He was obliged to use it, and right away. And now the miracle occurs: the Professor makes his way to a vault full of steel cylinders with inscriptions. Semi-conscious and with waning powers, he pulls one of them back to the rocket, slots his respirator into the main supply – and sets course for 14 Unter den Linden.

To be continued.