Horseman, Pass By

This was McMurtry's first novel, and it feels like it. While it is a good story, it certainly doesn't rate with Last Picture Show or even Leaving Cheyenne. It does have the west Texas bleakness built into it, but it's not the book that you might expect from the buildup surrounding Hud. I first read it years ago and enjoyed more than this time, so it may also have something to do with the narrator. Just a bit too hang-dog, I guess.

Jimmy told me years ago that his uncle Jack and a number of his cronies reminded him of Hud, the same wild ass, amoral characters that seemed to populate West Texas. I guess that mom's cousin Vernon could go in that same mold: good lucking guys driven around by their dicks and general lack of scruples. But Hud wasn't nearly as unscrupulous as I remembered him from my first reading. Even his shooting of Homer makes sense in terms of relieving suffering. And then he's the one that makes Lonnie seem respectable at the church during the funeral.

The book is really about Homer and the way of life that is dying with him, the old cowboy who has worked the ranch for so long. He finally breaks under the pressure of the last catastrophe, in a life filled with catastrophes, and one that was brought on by his buying cattle on the cheap from Mexico. There is something to be said about Hud's negative judgement of Homer. It's just that we see Homer through Lonnie's worshipful eyes. And maybe it's really Lonnie's voice that I don't enjoy so much. McMurtry uses the first person narrator so seldom, and maybe there's a good reason for it.

Author: McMurtry, Larry

Date Published: 1961

Length: 7 hr 34 min

Narrator: McCue, Kevin

Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

Betraying Spinoza means trying to tie him down to a particular time, place, personality, circumstance, and that's just what Rebecca Goldstein accomplishes in this book. She brings her sensitivities both as a philosopher and as a novelist to bear on Spinoza in such a way that vivifies him and his thought by placing him in the matrix of the times and the community that he inhabited. She also makes it clear that Spinoza would object strenuously to such particularizing as trivial. The circumstances of his life were irrelevant to the real task of understanding reality.

The central experience of his life was his excommunication by the Jewish community in Amsterdam. I was disturbed by the decree the first time that I read it years ago in Will Durant's history of philosophy, and wondered at its severity. Goldstein makes it clear that the preoccupations of this community, just a generation removed from the persecution and expulsion first by the Spanish ("the other 1492") and then by  the Portugese, not only triggered Spinoza's excommunication but also drove his thinking to finding a way out of the problems of suffering and identity that dominated La Naçao, the former Marranos living in Holland. "It was the community itself that had made the problem of personal identity of such crushing exigency for Spinoza that a way simply had to be found out of it, even though the way would set him at irreconcilable odds with that community."

Forced to live as Christians under Spanish and Portugese rule, most Marranos had to practice Judaism as secretly as possible, risking torture and death if found out. Goldstein suggests that Theresa of Avila (coming from a family of Conversos, or Jewish converts to Christianity) also came out of this environment where spirituality was strictly a matter of private observance. Having lost the knowledge of many or most of Judaism's essential practices and beliefs over the years, a fierce debate broke out over what constituted Jewish identify. Can the Marranos still in Portugal, for example, still be considered Jewish even though they were forced to practice Christianity? Much of the debate was fueled by a strong steak of kabbalism among the Sephardic Jews and the problems of suffering and identity become questions of cosmic redemption.

But Spinoza, in a classic case of reframing, saw his excommunication as an opportunity to pursue the problems of meaning and intelligibility without fear of offending the community. "The first and foremost rule is to remember that we have no control over anything other than the progress of our own understanding. And the second rule is to care only about that over which we have control." He couldn't offend them because he was now completely and totally cut off from the community. Amsterdam Jews were even forbidden to speak his name, much less acknowledge his presence. That didn't keep him from offending the rest of Europe, however, as the "atheist jew" pursued the meaning of life, the universe, and everything without any reference to an external creator God.

The first thing to understand about Spinoza's thought is that the "world is…intelligible, through and through." Goldstein calls this the presumption of reason: "All facts have explanations. For every fact, there is a reason why it is true." "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." That's not to say that we know it all, for we're trying to understand an infinite universe with a finite mind. But logic can reveal the fabric of reality because "logic alone is the fabric of reality." Interestingly enough, Goldstein, who comes out of the empiricist school  that would find such ideas nonsensical, seems to accept this premise as she considers the alternatives, citing David Hume that the rejection of the presumption of reason leads to the mind being just a series of mental events with no necessary connection to reality.

Spinoza begins with a few basic premises and proceeds to discover reality by using deductive logic. "By that which is self caused (causa-sui), I mean that of which the essence involves existence." (Is this the formula that Sartre stood on end when he said that existentialism means that existence precedes essence?) Only Substance is self caused, and so Substance = Nature [as in Laws of Nature] = God. All that is. What is, is, and that's all there is. There is nothing external or outside this. There is no God different from nature. There is no spirit different from matter. There is no soul different from body. Every separate thing in the universe, then, is a "logical entailment" or mode of the Substance. But as Goldstein makes clear, this is more than just an exercise in metaphysics. Bento's message is one of salvation using reason and logical proofs. "Salvation is achieved by bringing the vision of the causa-sui -- the vast and infinite system of logical entailments of which each of us is but one entailment--into one's very own conception of oneself." "Spinoza turns the Cartesian methodology…to illuminate the mysteries of the kabbalists:…the beginning of all things, the Ein Sof's [That Without End] relationship to creation and to our knowledge, the mysteries of evil and suffering."

Here Goldstein leads into a discussion of "conatus" which is any thing's identity with itself. It's that which makes me me, or you you. The logical and automatic consequence of the "conatus" is that everything seeks, as far as possible, to further it's own well being. "Our very essence, our conatus, will lead us, if only we think it through, to a vision of reality that, since it is the truth, is in our interests to attain." This leads to "dispassionate knowledge of oneself…the most self-expansive of all experiences, the most liberating, the boundaries of one's self stretching to incorporate the infinite system of explanations that constitute the very world." Goldstein calls this ecstatic rationalism, but Spinoza calls it "amor dei intellectis," the intellectual love of God. (This was certainly not a God that would love us back, but Spinoza's love of God does not depend on God loving us.) Taking this point of view then takes us outside the contingent situations of time and place and personality and circumstances. "To the extent that we are rational, we, all of us, partake in the same identity." To be caught up in the contingent, then, weakens us, leading to suffering, pain and evil.  (Isn't this essentially what Gautama said in the fifth century BC, that avidya [ignorance] leaks to dukkha [suffering]?) But is it possible to live and thrive with such an objective, dispassionate point of view?

Spinoza says that pursuit of anything else will not lead to that which all men seek: continuous, supreme, unending happiness. It is only through reality itself that we will reach the highest possible state of emotional well-being. "When we are able to grasp its infinite sweep, to sense the infinite context embracing each finite modification, then there is supreme, continuous, and unending happiness." Is this what we want? Goldstein questions this outlook: "I would argue that the highest level of imagination also amounts to a sort of love. I would further argue that the imaginative acts by which we try to grasp the substance of others, that specific singularity of them that resists universalizing into the collective, rational impersonal are a necessary component of the moral life." And so she brings us around to a view of Spinoza that is both personal and particular, and while it may not lead us to supreme happiness, it certainly deepened my understanding of the man and his thought and has led me to grapple with the issues of being human from yet another perspective. Can there be anything more moral in a book?

Author: Goldstein, Rebecca

Date Published: 2006

Length: 304 pp

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Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

We're all of us going to fuckin' die, and it's not going to mean a goddamned thing. Nothing that we've done or thought or felt means jack shit. That's Nietzsche in a nutshell. All the rest of it--overman, will to power, eternal recurrence, last man, slave morality, resentiment--is just whistling in the dark.

I mean, the starting point is "God is Dead." That makes Nietzsche the direct heir of Spinoza. And Darwin. This line of thought begins, at least since the Renaissance, with Descartes, who resolves to doubt everything until he can find something that is certain. What he comes up with is the fact that he's aware that he's aware. That's the cogito. From that point he goes on to posit the existence of a soul and of God as distinct from the material universe of things and bodies. But in steps Spinoza who says, Hold on; wait a minute; if there is an ultimate substance to the universe, then it cannot be two. Therefore, everything there is--Life, the Universe, and Everything--can only be one Substance=Nature=God. There is no split between the physical and spiritual, nor between body and soul, nor between God and the Universe. And God is no personal deity to ask favors from or to seek sanctions for the way we live and see the world. 

Nietzsche certainly wasn't the first thinker who recognized that Spinoza's God was cold comfort at best. Leibniz was both enthralled and horrified at this prospect, and Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard sought to refute or challenge the implications of Spinoza's thought. But Nietzsche said, "Bring it on!" and resolved to question everything until he reached the most fundamental implications of those ideas. He ends up with "God is Dead" and the spectre of nihilism haunting the west. As Ivan K. says, if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. And if that's the case, why not just commit suicide and be done with it? Why keep on keepin' on?

Nietzsche saw the something similar happening with the Greeks after the Ionian Enlightenment, and he wondered how they could look at the suffering, calamity, and absurdity inherent in life and still maintain an affirmative attitude, a joyous celebration, even, toward living--"a yet unbroken reply to the vicissitudes of fortune, a triumphant response to suffering, and a celebration of life as, at bottom...indestructible, powerful, and joyous.'" (Is Fred idealizing the Greeks here? I remember the Sophocles who says "Nothing surpasses not being born/but if born, to return where we came from/is next best, the sooner the better.") The Greeks "looked with bold eyes into the dreadful destructive turmoil of so-called world-history as well as into the cruelty of nature" and "without yielding to resignation...reaffirmed life with works of art." What was it that allowed them to do this?

Nietzsche's inquiries lead him, eventually, to three concepts: will to power, the overman, and eternal recurrence. It's kinda bizarre that he would put forth such sweeping and dubious sounding concepts after resolving to question everything. Those ideas have certainly been put to questionable uses, including some of the intellectual underpinings of the Nazi state. But Kaufmann sets out to clear Nietzsche's name from some of these associations and to show how Nietzsche had been misunderstood by just about everyone in the 80 years between Nietzsche's books and the first printing of this book in 1949. 

First off, any meaning that can be found for life, the universe and everything cannot apply to everybody but only the best and the brightest. Man is just another animal, just another primate, and therefore, "the mass of mankind lacks any essential dignity or worth." So "the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest specimens." The rest of us are shit out of luck. Some men--very, very few--look squarely at the apparent absurdity of life, the universe, and everything and then seek to overcome their own natures and give meaning and order to existence. This is the meaning of the will to power, the perpetual need to surpass ourselves. Those who can do it honestly without need for external forces or validation, then, are the overmen, primarily artists, philosophers, and saints. The essence of this self transcendence is the sublimation of their impulses into one focus, an artistic unity of self: "One thing is needful--giving style to one's character…in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason." "He has overcome his animal nature, organized the chaos of his passions, sublimated his impulses, and given style to his character." "The man who perfects himself and transfigures his physis [nature] achieves ultimate happiness and experiences such an overwhelming joy that he no longer feels concerned about the 'justification' of the world: he affirms it forward, backward and 'in all eternity.'" That's eternal recurrence: the man who in saying Yes! to his own being also affirms the world just as it is for all times.

So Nietzsche spoke to me big time 30 years ago. "Independence of soul! That's at stake here. No sacrifice can be too great." "The spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism." "Man can live and die in a grand style, working out his own salvation instead of relying on the sacrifice of another." I thought I was hot shit then and this heroic image grabbed me. I could thumb my nose at the universe and get along on my own, maintaining an intellectual superiority to anyone else who couldn't.

Only, I don't feel that way so much anymore. Maybe I wasn't nearly as hot shit as I thought I was. Certainly, I wasn't nearly as strong as I supposed myself to be. But, also, maybe Nietzsche didn't get it all right, either. Hard to say. But I do feel that he doesn't get it that we're all in this together. If only the "highest specimens" are able to find meaning in self overcoming, the rest of us are kinda stuck with just muddling along the best we can, trying to make sense of it all. If we say that the mass of humanity lead meaningless lives, we've just denied importance to ourselves and our fellow travelers and sufferers. When I think about what has given my life the most meaning--my love of Sara and my family, my friendships with Jim and George and Frank, my attachments to my students and athletes, it's only inadvertently about self-overcoming and more about connections. Isn't that what evolutionary psychology is telling us these days, that we are hard-wired to be deeply connected to each other?

Likewise, I'm finding the "vivesectionist" of contemporary values to be a bit of a bore. Maybe it is needful to look down on others at some point--Kaufmann says in another book that consciousness really begins on the other side of alienation--but at 62, I don't so much feel the need for that any more. When we define ourselves by what we are not, then it's really just another limitation on ourselves. Likewise, why just the artist, philosopher and saint? Why not the athlete, the teacher, the graphic designer, the computer programmer, the shoe store salesman? If we do something well, and we love it, and we seek to continually surpass ourselves at it, why shouldn't that path be open to finding meaning and transcendence in our lives? Can't we get there by chopping wood and carrying water?

So maybe Nietzsche has lost a lot of his appeal to me because I've grown old and tired and lazy and mediocre over the years. And, of course, there's the hard realization that I'm not one of the highest specimens. So be it.

I'm a little more disturbed that Kaufmann doesn't speak as deeply to me now as when I read him 20, 30, even 40 years ago. I would have put "Critique of Religion and Philosophy", "The Faith of a Heretic", and this book among the five or six most important books in my intellectual development. I've reread them all three or four times, and somehow now they don't seem as deep, as important, as they once were. I re-read "Critique" a few years back, and I didn't feel that the arguments held up as well as I previously thought. And I've kinda had the same feelings about this book. Kaufmann continually points out how Nietzsche has been misunderstood over the years, but he doesn't do quite as thorough a job of explaining Nietzsche's thought as he advertises. There were a lot of digressions in his presentation, and the book just doesn't seem as well organized as it has in the past. When I read it before, I thought that I had the final word on modern thought. Now, it just doesn't seem as convincing. That leaves me pretty bummed, really, for I feel like I've lost an old and important teacher.

Author: Kaufmann, Walter

Date Published: 1949

Length: 532 pp

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The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

So, it comes down to this: Spinoza believed that there was only one substance--make that Substance--to everything there is--all things, events, thought, everything--and everything is a mode of this substance. It can be called Substance, or it can be called Nature, or it can be called God. Therefore, mind is not separate from body, therefore there is no immortal soul--mind is really only an abstraction that the body has of itself.

"The most important feature of Spinoza's Nature--and, in a sense, the very point of his philosophy--is that it is in principle intelligible or comprehensible…there is nothing that cannot be known--even if we do not necessarily know everything."

"Spinoza claims to demonstrate once and for all that there can in fact be only one Substance in the world…everything in the world is merely a "mode" of an attribute of the Substance, or God"

(and how does he prove this? What does Spinoza take for his starting point? This crucial step is not in my highlights for the book. I wonder if I missed it or if Stewart put this in? If this is missing, then Substance becomes just another article of faith…and I don't think that Spinoza would have gone down that path. Does it follow from the determination that everything can be known? That seems to be Leibniz's jumping on point, where he found Spinoza so attractive, and so dangerous. "With a chain of definitions, axioms, and proofs…" is about the closest I can come to this. Isn't Kant's point that we cannot know how things really are?)

Leibniz sees the possible consequence to social order of this seemingly metaphysical proposition, and Stewart claims that Leibniz's mature philosophy is built on a rejection of Spinoza--namely that the universe consists of an infinite number of immortal "monads" and that the world was created and set into eternal harmony by God, who chose this universe out of an infinity of other universes as being the best that there is. Hence, Voltaire's Pangloss: this is the best of all possible worlds.

From this basic conflict, which Stewart calls "the twin founders of modern thought. We live in an age defined by its reaction to Spinoza…and there is no more compelling expression of this reaction to Spinoza…than …Leibniz." We live largely in a world of thought traced back directly through Spinoza: liberal, secular democracy, a naturalistic explanation of the growth and order of the world we see around us, and a concept of human life that is naturalistic and materialistic (vide Antonio Damasio's books: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain) Leibniz, in Stewart's explanation, stands for those forces who look to authority, especially to divine authority, to give order and meaning to life and to the universe.

The central act of the book is three days of conversation between Leibniz and Spinoza calls the defining moment of Leibniz's life and thought: the rejection of Spinoza's naturalistic explanation of everything--which Leibniz really saw as depending on Spinoza's concept of Substance.  Substance = Nature (as in natural law) = God. Unfortunately, there is no there there. There is only the sketchiest of records of the conversations themselves--some marked over notes that Leibniz made--and so what we're really left with is an act of imagination on Stewart's part of what must have taken place. Leibniz himself downplayed the importance of the conversations in trying to distance himself from Spinoza's thought, but as Stewart makes clear, Leibniz is hardly to be trusted in matters of honesty.

The books has given me the best description of Spinoza's thought and of Spinoza's importance in the history of thought. A lot of Jonathan Israel's ideas about the "radical enlightenment" now make more sense to me. The chapter of "A Secret Philosophy of the Whole of Things" is alone worth the price of the book. I still can't grasp the proposition of Spinoza's thought, but at least I can see how it came about. About Leibniz's thought, which is given equal treatment in "The Antidote to Spinozism," however, I'm not so sure. I guess that I get, in some measure, the idea of monads, but I'm not quite sure why Leibniz felt so compelled to go there. I understand the reaction to Spinoza, but I don't find his logic for the monads very compelling. But then, neither did Bertrand Russell, who called Leibniz's metaphysics "a fascinating fairy tale, coherent, perhaps, but wholly arbitrary," so I guess I'm in good company.

I suspect that Stewart gives Leibniz fairly short shrift in his descriptions of his character and motivations. Leibniz comes off as fairly shady and self deluded, so it's hard to say how much of Leibniz is a straw man who is chosen for the purpose to represent an idea--a conservative, religion idea. (the T. S. Eliot of his day--"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics.") How much of his character is caricature?

Author: Stewart, Matthew

Date Published: 2006

Length: 312 pp

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Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

I've been waiting to read this book for a long, long time. I bought this copy of Lila shortly after it came out in paperback almost 20 years ago and wanted to jump right into it since I was so transfixed, and transformed, by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I have told a couple of groups now that not only was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance my favorite book of all time, it was also the most important. What's not to love about: "You should remember that it's peace of mind you're after and not just a fixed machine."? And it's a book that I've both reread a couple of times and listened to recently. It's held up well each time. That's kind of what made Lila an intimidating presence on my bookshelf, for what else could it be but a let down. It certainly has garnered that reputation over the years. Many reviewers talk about how much they enjoyed ZAMM and then slam Lila because it is not ZAMM.

And that kinda describes my reaction, too. I enjoyed Lila, to be sure, and found the story of Phaedrus having to deal with her one way or another to be fairly compelling. There's even  a sinister quality with Jamie and Fatso that give a hint of a detective novel. It's one of the few times that Pirsig steps out of Phaedrus' consciousness and into another character, a bit strange in a book prety much devoted to Phaedrus' philosophizing. He does it with Riegel, once, and he does it more effectively with Lila, especially when she is trying to get back to the boat and begins a psychotic episode. Phaedrus' decision to care for her until she cures herself, regardless of how long that takes, gives a depth and a reality to all the sermonizing going on in his head. It also gives an ironic twist to all his thinking since he really is pretty naieve about what's going on with her.

The question that drives the book, of course, is "Does Lila have Quality?" which Riegel asks him the night after he picks Lila up in a bar, and Phaedrus is forced to justify his reasons after he tells Riegel yes. His response then becomes the whole Metaphysics of Quality, from the first moment of insight on a peyote high with Dusenberry to his final pronouncement that Good is a noun.

And I got lost in there somewhere. One of my annotations says: "pure experience = pure value? what does this mean?" It's the heart of quality--of the Metaphysics of Quality--  in that precognitive moment of awareness before the subject/object dualism of conceptions and things come to the fore, before the intellectual patterns give birth to our awareness of things. Is it the Tao? But then, aren't the Tao and Quality really just abstractions for a physiological process of sensory intake? Or is it more than that? Pirsig brings in religious mysticism and dharma and rta to make metaphors for this preintellectual event that suggests so much more than physiology. It has value, and, he suggests, something almost supernatural or mystical, comparing it to the dharmakaya light. He calls it Dynamic Quality and keeps insisting that it is higher on the evolutionary scale than intellectual or social or biological or material patterns of matter. As a matter of fact, it drives evolution. "Because Quality is morality…They're identical. And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world. That just seems too big of a leap for me to take right now. What to make of a sentence like this: "if one applies the Metaphysics of Quality and sees that a chair is an inorganic static pattern and sees that all static patterns are composed of value, and that value is synonymous with moral, then it all begins to make sense." That's just it. It doesn't all begin to make sense for me. Sometimes I wondered that all of his ratiocinations weren't really just rationalizations for judgements that he had already made.

Then, as in ZAMM, Pirsig uses this value driven system as a means of social criticsm--a paralysis of moral patterns in the modern world that MOQ could set right if given the chance. Plato, of course, said the same thing, that when philosophers are made kings then all would be right with the world. And these philosophers were specially qualified because they knew the Good--and that brings us around to the final sentence of the book: Good is noun. I just don't get it.

Author: Pirsig, Robert

Date Published: 1991

Length: 468 pp

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