Notes to: The Great Conversation: Kierkegaard and Marx (& other chapters)

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

"The Great Conversation," by Norman Melchert (sixth edition)

Chapter eighteen: "Kierkegaard and Marx"

• "The authorship of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is exceedingly varied and diverse. For one thing, about half of it is pseudonymous (written under other names-- and quite a number of them, too). Why? Not for the usual reason, to hide the identity of the author; nearly everyone in Little Copenhagen knew Kierkegaard, and they knew he had written these books."
• "A solution is worked out in one's life by the choices one makes, thereby defining and creating the self one becomes. His pseudonymous authors 'present themselves' to the reader as selves in the process of self-creation. They thereby function as models for possibilities that you or I might also actualize in our own lives; they awaken us to alternatives and stimulate us to self-examination."
• "Kierkegaard calls this technique 'indirect communication.'"
• "We are not honest with ourselves about the categories that actually structure our lives. He attempts to provoke the shock of self-recognition by offering characters with which the reader may identify and then revealing slowly, but inexorably, what living in that way really means." 
• "The fond desire of A's life is simply to be something. His ideal is expressed in a line by the twentieth-century poet T. S. Eliot: 'You are the music while the music lasts.'"
• "Don Juan represents something analogous to a force of nature-- an avalanche or hurricane-- but for this very reason there is something subhuman about him. A thereby concludes that this 'pure type' can exist only in art and that music is the appropriate vehicle for its expression." 
• "What, then, to do? To A, there seems to be one obvious solution: to make one's life itself into a work of art. Then one could enjoy it as one enjoys any fine aesthetic object. The pleasures of immediacy may be vanishing, but the pleasures of aesthetic appreciation are all the more available." 
• "The rotation technique is a set of techniques for keeping things interesting." 
• "Variety, of course, is essential because nothing is as boring as the same old thing. But it is no use trying to achieve variety by varying one's surroundings or circumstances, though this is the 'vulgar and inartistic method.'... What one must learn to do is vary oneself, a task that A compares to the rotation of crops by a farmer."
• "In addition, one requires absolute freedom to break away at any time from anything, lest one be at the mercy of something or someone boring. Thus, one must beware of entanglements and avoid commitments." 
• "All is planning, arranging, scheming, plotting, and enjoying the results, as one would enjoy a play at the theater. Johannes is at once the playwright, the actor, and the audience in the drama of his life. It is not the actual seduction that matters to him (one moment of physical conquest is much like another), but the drama leading up to that moment. That is where the art lies." Keep an eye out for Bombadil.
• "A has not self-- or rather, he is splintered into a multiplicity of semi-selves, which comes to much the same thing."
• Soren Kierkegaard, as "A": "My life is utterly meaningless. When I consider its various epochs, my life is like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which first of all means a string, and second a daughter-in-law. All that is lacking is that in the third place the word Schnur means camel, in the fourth a whisk broom." 
• "If you can fall into love, you can fall out of it again. For this reason, it is easy to make romantic love look ridiculous; it promises what it cannot deliver: faithfulness, persistence, eternity."
• "The promise of eternity in romantic love can be realized, but not if you simply 'go with the flow' (as we say). What is required is choice, a determination of the will." 
• "Marriage, as an expression of the will, is not the death of romantic love; it comes to its aid and provides what it needs in order to endure. Without the will, love is simply inconstant and arbitrary nature." 
• "Note that the judge is defending the aesthetic validity of marriage. You want something really interesting? Commit yourself to making romantic love last a lifetime. Moreover, the judge sees marriage as an example of a style of life quite other than that which A has been leading. The ethical life requires the development of the self." 
• "Amy choice might as well have been the opposite-- and can be tomorrow. After all, if your aim is 'the interesting,' you must not get stuck in commitments. None of the aesthetic choices really mean anything for the self doing the choosing." 
• Kierkegaard, as "A": "Whether you hang yourself, or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all wisdom of life." 
• "When one chooses seriously, when one engages oneself, one chooses ethically."
• "And yet the judge is not-- at least not directly-- urging A to choose the good. He just wants him to choose."
• Kierkegaard, as "Judge Williams": "What, then, is it that I separate in my Either/Or? Is it good and evil? No, I only want to bring you to the point where this choice truly has meaning for you." 
• "The necessity for secrecy in the aesthetic life (remember the seducer) is supplanted by a requirement of openness in the ethical." 
• "If the key characteristic of the aesthetic style of life is enjoying (and perhaps arranging) what happens to one, and that of the ethical stage is taking oneself in hand and creating oneself, it seems apparent that human existence involves a tension between two poles." 
• "On the one hand, we simply are something: a collection of accidental facts... On the other hand, we are an awareness of this, together with some attitude toward these facts and the need to do something about them." 
• "Struggling with the ethical task, we inevitably discover ourselves failing. What then should we do? Perhaps, the pastor says, we try to console ourselves by saying, 'I do what I can.' But, he asks, doesn't that provoke a new anxiety?"
• "If there is anything beyond the ethically human, it must be something like this. It must be a state in which one lives in an absolute relationship to God, where even universally human requirements of the ethical drop away into relative insignificance. Yet it is not an escape from this world, but a life wholly engaged in the concrete finitude of one's earthly being." 
• "The Knight of Infinite Resignation withdraws into the interior chambers of the spirit, makes no claims on anyone, asks for nothing worldly. He no longer identifies himself with his possessions, his worldly relationships, or even his body." 
• Kierkegaard, as "Johannes de silentio": "Infinite resignation is that shirt mentioned in an old legend. The thread is spun with tears, bleached with tears; the shirt is sewn with tears-- but then it also give protection better than iron or steel. The defect in the legend is that a third person can work up this linen. The secret in life is that each person must sew it himself, and the remarkable thing is that a man can sew it fully as well as a woman."
• "[The Knight of Faith] also resigns everything, sets himself adrift from the world, takes refuge in the eternal side of himself. But as he is making the movements of infinite resignation, the Knight of Faith comes back again into the world. How does he do that? Where does he find the strength? Johannes doesn't know. He can't understand it." 
• "It [meaning 'faith'] is not like a theorem that has been proved, which you can use to prove still other theorems. Here we have a way of life. To aspire to get beyond it is to show that you haven't the slightest idea what sort of life is lived by knights of faith. In an entire lifetime, he says, Abraham did not get further than faith. If it is possible at all, it is apparent that the life of faith is the greatest and most arduous life one could live." 
• "The greater the distance between where you are and where you want to be, the greater the passion." 
• "The distance between where the judge is and where he genuinely wants to be is much greater: His aim is to construct himself as a concrete ethical individual over a lifetime, making his moment-to-moment particularly an exemplary instance of what is universally required of all. Now that's reaching pretty far; that's a task! And that's why the judge insists that the way to reach it is committed, passionate, whole-hearted choice." 
• "Sin is a condition of the self. Sin is despair. And what is despair? We already know; despair is not being willing to be oneself." 
• "Being able to be in despair is our advantage over the other animals, but actually to be in despair is 'the greatest misfortune and misery.'"
• "Like Abraham's faith in God (maintained though he can't understand God's asking for the sacrifice of his son), Socrates' life exemplifies a passionate faith in the existence of a truth about human existence. This faith manifests itself in a lifelong search." 
• "Suppose that we are not just lacking the truth but that we are continually engaged in obscuring the truth-- hiding it from ourselves, deceiving ourselves, pretending that we are other than in fact we are. If that were our situation, we would be even further from the eternal truth than Socrates thinks. Once again, passion would be intensified." 
• "I am in despair over myself; my despairing is my not being willing to be this self that I now am-- this self whose wife has left him, whose stock portfolio is worthless. I would rather be someone else, perhaps almost anyone else. That is my sickness. That is the essence of despair." 
• "Being a self, as the judge also says, is a task. It is a task we can fail at. And our failure is despair, an imbalance in the factors of the synthesis that manifests our unwillingness to be ourselves."
• "The Despair of Infinitude. If I fall into this kind of despair, I lack finitude. I drift off into never-never land and become 'fantastic.' My emotions slide into fantasy in a kind of abstract sentimentality; I absolutely melt with sympathy for suffering mankind, but I cannot stand my next-door neighbor... My will fantasizes by building castles in the air; I am full of all the many wonderful things I will do, but do not focus on the nearest act at hand that would move me one step along the way. All this is despair. All this is not being willing to be myself. All this is sin." 
• Kierkegaard: "Naturally the world has generally no understanding of what is truly horrifying." 
• Kierkegaard: "What we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world. They use their abilities, amass wealth, carry out worldly enterprises, make prudent calculations, etc., and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not themselves." 
• Kierkegaard: "The despairing self is forever building only castles in the air." And for this reason it is in despair. 
• "It is Kierkegaard's claim that among these three possibilities (and they may not be the only ones) existing human beings must choose. And they must choose without being able to attain a position in which they could know for certain which choice was the right or best one." 
• "A move from one kind of life to another is less the result of rational persuasion and more like conversion. If one makes such a move, it is by a leap." 
• "You and I, he thinks, are free to choose among the possibilities, but we are not free to choose for good reasons-- from an objective point of view. Neither are we free not to choose. Simply by living, we are making out choices; we cannot help it."
• Blaise Pascal: "What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and shame of the universe." 
• "Characteristic of a logical system is that all the theorems are already implicit in the premises. That is the respect in which 'finality' is an essential characteristic of a system-- if a proposition that cannot be deduced from the axioms is introduced, it follows that a mistake has been made." 
• "Since the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries in the latter part of the eighteenth century, any system of geometry has to be regarded, as far as its application goes, as a hypothesis about the nature of space. For all these systems themselves can tell us, space may be either Euclidean or non-Euclidean." 
• "The problem is that in constructing a system that supposedly captures existence, the speculative philosopher supposes that he can be finished with existence before existence is finished with him! As long as he lives, he must choose; his own existence is precisely not something finished." 
• "The essential task for an existing human being, then, is not to speculate philosophically about absolute knowledge, but to become himself." 

Chapter nineteen: "The Utilitarians"

• "Aristotle has already noted that people disagree widely over what happiness is. If happiness means one thing to Jones and another to Smith, how will it help to note that all their actions are aiming at happiness? Bentham and Mill are convinced, however, that this variability is only superficial; at its core, happiness is everywhere alike." 
• "The utilitarians, however, give the principle of utility a moral character by insisting that what is ethically relevant is not my happiness or yours, but happiness itself." 
• "Bentham believes we will be concerted to utilitarianism if we just consider the alternatives to it... The clearest opposite to the principle of utility is what he calls the principle of asceticism. An adherent of this principle would judge many actions to be right, which involve a denial of pleasure for themselves and, perhaps, for others." 
• "Some hold that the utilitarian standard is unrealizable. Is it possible that everyone should be happy? First, Mill replies, even if that were impossible, the principle of utility would still be valid. We can do much to minimize unhappiness, even if we cannot attain its opposite. Second, it is an exaggeration to say that happiness-- even the general happiness-- is impossible." 
• "Mill's argument is that there is one part of utility that is so basic,so fundamental, that in its absence everything else making for happiness is in jeopardy: security." 
• "Mill stresses that the situation now sanctioned by law was simply the situation that was actually in place when laws were first written. This amounts to an adoption of the law of the strongest, a law that led to kingship and slavery, as well as to the subjection of women."
• Mary Wollstonecraft: "I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty. For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same." 

Chapter twenty: "Friedrich Nietzsche"

• "He served as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War and returned in poor health, but he continued working and published his first book in 1872. In 1879, he resigned his professorship on grounds of ill health and spent the next nine years in lonely apartments or flats in Switzerland and Italy. He was severely ill for a long time, racked with pain and weakness that would have put most men in the hospital. But throughout his illness he kept working, producing book after book." 
• "There is also no doubt that he would have been sickened by the whole Nazi business. He was no friend of nationalism, thinking of himself always as a 'good European.' Scarcely any other writings contain such malicious attacks on 'the Germans.' And anti-Semitism was diagnosed by Nietzsche as a particularly reprehensible form of resentment (about as bad a thing as he could say about anything)."
• "Let me encourage you to read widely in Nietzsche, but with the warning that it is easy to get him wrong if you just dip in here and there." 
• Nietzsche: "We want to be the poets of our life." 
• "Contrary to the accepted view of Greek cheerfulness, Nietzsche believes that the Greeks looked into the abyss of human suffering without blinking, that they experienced the terrors and misery of life-- and they did not look away. All things considered, said Greek folk wisdom, Silenus is right; the best of all is not to be. And yet the Greeks found a way to live, to affirm life, even to rejoice in life."
• "Nietzsche says that for the Greeks, everything was a contest. Characteristically, he sees envy, ambition, and the struggle to prevail flaring out in every sphere of Greek life, from athletics to poetry. What distinguishes the Greek ethos from our own, he thinks, is that this competitive spirit is affirmed and not condemned; 'Every talent must unfold itself in fighting'."
• "It is the spirit of Apollo that reigns supreme in the harmonious sculptures on the Parthenon, where each individual being reaches a divine perfection without denying the perfection of any other." 
• "In tragedy, the suffering in human life is not 'veiled and removed from view'; it is presented, explored, and given weight. Tragedy shows us the terror." 
• "For Schopenhauer, as for Kant, the world of our experience is merely appearance, not reality. But unlike Kant, Schopenhauer thinks he knows what it is that appears. In itself, this world we are so familiar with is nothing but will-- endless striving, desiring, wanting. The principles that individuate things-- that make you different from me, one stone different from another-- are space, time, and causality (as Kant taught). But these principles apply only in the realm of phenomena. Reality in itself is not cut up into individual things by our intuitions and concepts."
• "Apollo governs the world of appearance. Dionysus represents the [world] in itself."
• "Tragedy has a religious dimension. In some way that we need to understand, tragedy redeems. Through tragedy we can be saved." 
• "Tragedy as we have it is not just music and dance. There is drama, a story, individual characters who act and suffer. So far we have not accounted for that. But the explanation is not far away: The drama, Nietzsche tells us, is the dream of the chorus. The Dionysian chorus dreams an Apollonian dream, and the spectators, identifying with the chorus, dream it too." 
• "In what do we find out dignity and value? What is it that makes life worth living? Not anything moral, Nietzsche says, not another life (the 'life of the world to come'), nor our relation to God. Only its aesthetic value justifies our life and makes it worth living. There is something intrinsic to Oedipus Rex that leads us to value it, to continue to perform and experience it after 2,500 years. If our liues had that same sort of aesthetic value, that would be enough to justify the living of them." 
• "We can accept our lives even if our eyes are wide open to the wisdom of Silenus. We are works of art! Nothing else, Nietzsche tells us, could suffice. That is the way to solve the problem of 'the value of existence.' That is the only way it could be solved." 
• Nietzsche: "Little by little I came to understand what every great philosophy to date has been: the personal confession of its author, a kind of unintended and unwitting memoir; and similarly, that the moral (or immoral) aims in which every philosophy constituted the actual seed from which the whole plant invariably grew. Whenever explaining how a philosopher's most far-fetched metaphysical propositions have come about, in fact, one always does well (and wisely) to ask first: 'What morality is it (is he) aiming at?'"
• "It is not reality that philosophical theories display, but the philosophers themselves: what sorts of people they are, how weak or strong they are, how sick or how healthy. Philosophy is 'confession.'"
• Nietzsche: "Man is by no means the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection. And even this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, of course, he is the most interesting." 
• "'INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA' means 'Zarathustra begins.' And the time of Zarathustra is noon-- when the shadows are shortest, when everything is in light and can be seen for what it is."
• Nietzsche, as "the madman": "Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." 
• Nietzsche, as "the madman": "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us-- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto." 
• Nietzsche: "'I have come too early," he said then; 'My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars-- and yet they have done it themselves." 
• Nietzsche, as "the madman": "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
• Nietzsche, as Zarathustra: "When gods die, they always die several kinds of death." 
• "As Zarathustra understands pity, it is the opposite of a life-affirming emotion. In pity, one deplores the condition of someone's existence." 
• "The thing Nietzsche holds most adamantly against Christianity is that it is (as he sees it) a religion of pity. If pity is the appropriate reaction to human life as a whole-- is even the reaction of God!-- then one is virtually saying it would be better if life did not exist at all. And then one is back with Silenus. Nietzsche condemns Christianity for giving in to pessimism instead of overcoming it." 
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