Thoughts 21 Jan. 22

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

An algorithm is what the left hemisphere wants; the recognition that it’s got to be free of any algorithm, yet not at all random, is characteristic of the understanding of the right hemisphere. We can specify what is not jazz, but not what is. Our knowledge of anything unique is similarly apophatic.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Just as ‘and’ is not merely additive, ‘not’ is not merely negative. Both are creative. Indeed resistance – ‘not-ness’ – is an absolute necessity for creation, another apparent paradox that will become clearer as this book unfolds.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

This is what is known as the ’âlam al-mithâl, or, as Corbin calls it, the mundus imaginalis, or ‘Imaginal World’. As Corbin writes, this is ‘a very precise order of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode of perception’. This ‘order of reality’ and ‘mode of perception’ is based on a ‘visionary spiritual experience’ that Suhrawardi believed was ‘as fully relevant as the observations of Hipparchus and Ptolemy are considered to be relevant to astronomy’.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

As for the power of reason, it is the servant of what today we call confirmation bias, an idea Montaigne impressively anticipated. “Men’s opinions are accepted in the train of ancient beliefs, by authority and on credit, as if they were religion and law. They accept as by rote what is commonly held about it.… On the contrary, everyone competes in plastering up and confirming this accepted belief, with all the power of their reason, which is a supple tool, pliable, and adaptable to any form. Thus the world is filled and soaked with twaddle and lies.”

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

For sure, self-censorship is part of living together (we call it “courtesy”)—but not when it impedes honest conversation and criticism in university intellectual life, where honest conversation and criticism are the whole point of being there.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Demoralization,” I tell Theaetetus, “denies your agency. It makes you feel helpless. Don’t let them do that. You are not helpless.”

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The error is to think of radicals as political types or of radicalism as a set of ideas. The terms “radical” and “moderate” are not substantive but adverbial. Radicalism and moderation bear on pace, posture, and style, not content. The difference turns on how aims are held and acted on: rigidly or flexibly, zealously or temperately, in attacking thrusts or defensively dug in, bent on annihilating opposition or allowing for compromise, unable to live without conquest or able to survive defeat and failure.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

This old standard argument of the opponents of democracy was supported there by an unusually strong tradition of political passivity and by a no less unusually strong tradition of work and pure production. Taken together, these traditions made appear quite plausible a curious equating of purely technical capability with purely human activity, the latter of which has always had to do with questions of right and wrong. Once the moral basis of the knowledge of right and wrong, unarticulated as it was, began to crumble, the next step was to measure social and political actions by technical and work-oriented standards that were inherently alien to these larger spheres of human activity.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific.

Be Here Now

Ram Dass

“Early in the journey   you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.”

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

One reason I and others promote the idea that eating saturated fat from animal products is most likely benign is that we’ve been consuming these fats as a species for as long as humans have been a species. The evidence isn’t compelling enough to convince us that this assumption is likely to be wrong. We may or may not have been consuming as much of these saturated fats, but we can presume we are genetically adapted to eating them.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Where Heidegger places his Dasein-redeeming confidence in primal anxiety, Benjamin places it in the rapture of different kinds of artificial paradise; the wild roar of rush-hour traffic replaces the experience of the storm high in the Black Forest; aimless flâneuring replaces the ski slope down to the abyss; absorption in outward things replaces the retreat into the interior; apparently random distraction occupies the space of contemplative concentration; the deracinated, disenfranchised masses of the international proletariat replace those people rooted in their homeland . . . Both Benjamin and Heidegger longed for revolutionary change, in everything that they were and had.

Thoughts: 28 October 2021

 

Last Best Hope

George Packer

The great danger of equality is atomization. If we’re all side by side on the same level and constantly in motion, there’s no fixed relation between us. “Aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain,” Tocqueville wrote. “Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link.” Equal and independent people will satisfy their own desires with no obligation to others outside their narrow circle. The chance to be anything or anyone gives them the idea that they don’t owe anything to anyone. They grow indifferent to the common good and withdraw from others into the pursuit of personal happiness, especially wealth. Tocqueville called this “individualism.” It explains how the American passion for equality can lead to extreme inequality, even a new aristocracy, but one without links between people.

This quote and the following one from William Ophuls direct our attention to the shadow side of democracy, it's inherent defects that must receive our continuing attention and course corrections. Also, consider this quote in light of our failure to take actions for the common good in response to the pandemic.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

As in a Greek tragedy, democracy’s virtue is also a fatal flaw. For it is in the nature of democratic polity to foster increased freedom, and as freedoms compound they eventually produce an unstable, ungovernable society in which anything goes.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

Consider in light of the preceding quotes from Packer & Ophuls. Since Postman published this book in the early 1980s, the American people (never a majority) voted in sufficient numbers to elect an utterly unqualified, undignified rich kid (old at the time, but still . . .) made most famous by "reality" (staged) TV. How prescient--sadly.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

This truth—a-lētheia, that which is disclosed (Heidegger)—can be conceived only as another “appearance,” another phenomenon originally hidden but of a supposedly higher order, thus signifying the lasting predominance of appearance. Our mental apparatus, though it can withdraw from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance. The mind, no less than the senses, in its search—Hegel’s Anstrengung des Begriffs—expects that something will appear to it.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Heidegger’s philosophical vision may have been cogent and powerful, but it was time-bound and partial, and so too was his notion of humanity itself—which [Leo] Strauss called “narrow.” There was neither tenderness to his thought, nor a consideration of love or charity, or any of the other finer impulses in humanity. Heidegger appealed to anyone who embraced a “tragic sense of life” as the only, or at least the most sophisticated, outlook, but he had nothing to say, Strauss observed, about “laughter and the things which deserved to be laughed at.”

One doesn't read Heidegger (if at all) for laughs, for humor, for kindness, or a sense of human warmth. A sound critique from Leo Strauss.

A Brief History of Everything

Ken Wilber

Calculations done by scientists from Fred Hoyle to F. B. Salisbury consistently show that twelve billion years isn’t even enough to produce a single enzyme by chance.

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

A simple first-pass way to define intuitions is to say that they are judgments (or decisions, which can also be quite intuitive) that we make and take to be justified without knowledge of the reasons that justifies them. Intuition is often characterized as “knowing without knowing how one knows.” Our conscious train of thought is, to a large extent, a “train of intuitions.” Intuitions play a central role in our personal experience and also in the way we think and talk about the mind in general, our “folk psychology.”

A Short History of Decay

Emil M. Cioran, Richard Howard (Translator), Eugene Thacker (Foreword)

“Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation”

Cioran was a mid-20th century Romanian writer.

The Principles of History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History

R. G. Collingwood, W. H. Dray, and W. J. van der Dussen

The student of historical method will hardly find it worth his while, therefore, to go closely into the rules of evidence, as these are recognized in courts of law. For the historian is under no obligation to make up his mind within any stated time. Nothing matters to him except that his decision, when he reaches it, shall be right: which means, for him, that it shall follow inevitably from the evidence.

So long as this is borne in mind, however, the analogy between legal methods and historical methods is of some value for the understanding of history; of sufficient value, I think, to justify my having put before the reader in outline the above sample of a literary genre which in the absence of any such motive it would, of course, be beneath his dignity to notice.

An intriguing point if one is, like me, a lawyer and a student of history. I find a lot of overlap. Both deal with the past when the lawyer is involved in resolving--as opposed to trying to avoid--disputes.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 21 August 2021

 

We have forgotten that “man is not only a freedom which he creates for himself. Man does not create himself. He is spirit and will, but also nature.”

(Location 288)

“[T]o commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God.” [Quoting Patriarch Bartholomew]

(Location 304)

[Patriarch Bartholomew] asks us to replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing, an asceticism which “entails learning to give, and not simply to give up. It is a way of loving, of moving gradually away from what I want to what God’s world needs. It is liberation from fear, greed and compulsion.”

(Location 307)

And now from some other folks

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[A]s we try to improve the efficiency and performance of . . . systems, we tend to erode the very characteristics that make them highly reliable. And as these systems become more automated and complex and contain more unknown unknowns, we frequently don’t understand them well enough to maintain their reliability.

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

Like Nietzsche, Heidegger saw that the West was heading into an age of nihilism and that the history of Being would end, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, not with a bang but a price tag. It was out of what Heidegger called the “destruction of metaphysics,” his attempt to undo the damage, that movements like deconstructionism and postmodernism emerged.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

[Hans] Morgenthau was not championing “irrationalism,” as some of his critics charged. Rationality was required for the solution or, more accurately, the management of social problems even if people were behaving irrationally. Human interactions could be understood through reason, which could encompass un-reason (just as un-reason could encompass reason), but it was a mistake to project reason as a template onto nonrational reality itself by developing mechanical equations to explain and predict behavior. Each situation was unique, to be interpreted according to its own particularity and evaluated on its own terms.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Liberal education, [Leo Strauss] said, is the effort to establish “an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” Western civilization, as Strauss understood it, was the property of an educated minority. But that didn’t make it unworthy of defense against the nihilistic Nazis. Quite the contrary.

Science and the Modern World

Alfred North Whitehead

The exact observational methods of science are all contrivances for limiting these erroneous conclusions as to direct matters of fact.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The Constitution of Knowledge relies on independent observers; cancel culture relies on mob action.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“When complete agreement could not otherwise be reached,” wrote the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in his great 1877 essay, The Fixation of Belief, “a general massacre of all who have not thought in a certain way has proved a very effective means of settling opinion in a country.”

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Your Life claimed that the secret to longevity rested in breathing through the nose as well as a healthy dose of temperature variation. Catlin encouraged people to train themselves to sleep with their mouths closed, arguing that the nose is a natural filter of pathogens.

The Price of Peace by Zachary Carter & The Time of the Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger

One of the best books of 2020

 Normally I don't review two books in the same article. And on the face of it, these two books would seem to create an odd tandem. The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes centers on the life and work of John Maynard Keynes and his intellectual progeny in economics, while The Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy deals with the work of four German-speaking philosophers during the period from 1919 to 1929: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Cassirer. There is some overlap of personages: Keynes, as a Cambridge intellectual and would-be philosopher makes an appearance in The Time of the Magicians as an acquaintance of Wittgenstein via their shared Cambridge connections and Keynes was scared off (as it were) from philosophy by his encounter with Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus, published in 1922, after Keynes has served as a courier to get the draft into the hands of Bertrand Russell for publication in Britain. The other common figure is (at least to me) a little known Italian economist named Piero Sraffa, who collaborated with Keynes for many years and who also understood Wittgenstein--according to Wittgenstein--and who influenced the shift in Wittgenstein's thinking from that of the Tractatus to that of his Philosophical Investigations. But other than these coincidental overlaps, what ties these two books together in my mind? 

In short, both books begin at the end of the First World War--the Great War. Carter does begin his portrait with Keynes with the financial panic in Britain at the outbreak of the war and with Keynes's life as a Cambridge Apostle and then as a charter member of the Bloomsbury group that focused on aesthetics and---by the standards of the time--uncommon sexual mores. But it's not until his participation in the Versailles Conference and his subsequent appraisal of the Conference in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that Keynes hits his stride as a public intellectual and as an influential (although often ignored) influence on government policy. Keynes and his intellectual legacy arose during the inter-war period that was so marked by economic and political turmoil. Keynes became an economist dedicated to preserving the liberal, market-oriented democracies. His focus becomes overwhelmingly practical, even when he delves into more esoteric topics, like theories of probability or ancient monetary regimes. 

Before moving on to The Magicians, let me pad this review with some further quotes from The Price of Peace. Not a cool move for a reviewer, but still, to bring this to a conclusion and to add some spice, I'll share them: 

"The real struggle of today…is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist, or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice. . . . The great threat facing liberalism was not socialism but the thirst for military domination. “Soldiers and diplomatists—they are the permanent, the immortal foe.” (John Maynard Keynes, “On the Way to Genoa: What Can the Conference Discuss and with What Hope?,” The Manchester Guardian, April 10, 1922; CW, vol. 17, 373.)

The Price of Peace (p. xvii-iii). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Keynes was a philosopher of war and peace, the last of the Enlightenment intellectuals who pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design. He was a man whose chief project was not taxation or government spending but the survival of what he called “civilisation”—the international cultural milieu that connected a British Treasury man to a Russian ballerina

Id.(p. xviii). 

[S]o the manuscript Keynes had helped salvage from a POW camp in Cassino, Italy [Wittegenstein's Tractatus], pushed Keynes out of the philosophy business. A Treatise on Probability was debated avidly by the leading lights of Cambridge philosophy but quickly fell out of favor. Wittgenstein’s work, meanwhile, became the foundational text of analytic philosophy—a school of thought that still dominates English-speaking philosophy departments, in which language itself is understood to be the source of all truths that philosophers can uncover.

Id.(p. 116). 

Price instability undermined the public’s faith in its government and its institutions; failing to control it would, Keynes told the Treasury, “strike at the whole basis of contract, of security, and of the capitalist system generally.”

Id. (p. 129). 

Governments would find themselves forced to choose between maintaining a stable exchange rate and a stable price level. When the choice came, Keynes argued, there should be no hesitation: Keep prices stable, and adjust exchange rates. It might be true that “over the long run,” rashes of inflation and deflation would burn themselves out. “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” Keynes observed. “In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” (A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1924, p. 80.)

Id. (p. 130). 

Money existed to be spent on finer things: the pursuit of Apostolic “good states of mind.” From his undergraduate days to his deathbed, Keynes believed that these were not exclusive goods. One man living a good life did not detract from another’s ability to live well any more than one person’s enjoyment of a painting would ruin another’s ability to appreciate it.

Id. (p. 146). 

[A] snapshot of Keynes’ view of economics in the hierarchy of intellectual pursuits. Ethics—by which Keynes meant the elements that made up a good life—were a more important consideration for public policy than economics, the field that had made Keynes famous. The remains of his early reverence for Edmund Burke is evident in the note’s distinct modesty of ambition. Even when imagining the “ideal future of society,” Keynes could only envision striking a balance between what was “tolerable” and what was “not intolerable.” Keynes had in truth already been working on his political theory project for some time.

Id. (p. 149). 

He was forging a new set of philosophical foundations for twentieth-century society. He announced the program across the top of the page: “Prolegomena to a New Socialism—The Origins and End of Laissez-Faire.” Keynes had an ambiguous relationship with the word socialism. Sometimes he deployed it as an epithet; in other moods, he used it to describe a progressive ideal.

Id. (p. 149). 

The Time of the Magicians, on the other hand, deals with four thinkers who made their mark on post-war culture in ways that are, on the whole, quite apart from politics. Wittgenstein spent his time in an Italian POW camp (he was an Austrian soldier) writing the Tractatus, which attempts to resolve some of the most vexing issues of philosophy by his analysis of propositions. Heidegger, on the other hand, after his service in the German military, sloughs off his prior train of thought and delves into what he labels Dasein, our "being-there" in this world. Despite its immediate impact and its concern with human placement, his thought--like Wittgenstein's--held no immediate political implications. (But more on this later.) Benjamin was an itinerant (meaning often broke and without a position) scholar who wasn't a systematic thinker but who made penetrating (according to some) observations about intellectual topics that he investigated. Again, no immediate political implications arise from his work. Finally, Ernst Cassirer is the oldest, most established, and most "bourgeois" of these four. He, too, was a philosopher obsessed with issues surrounding symbols, language, art, and such, but he pursued his project within the context of Neo-Kantianism, then the reigning school of philosophy in Germany. In this period (1919-1920) he didn't write directly about politics (although after the Second World War he published The Myth of the State). But while none of these four directed their thinking toward politics, all three deeply influenced the course of philosophy and high culture during this period and beyond. 

I would be remiss, however,  to suggest that the only impetus for a new philosophic perspective represented by The Magicians arose only from the War and the consequent social, economic, and political dislocation that it wrought. Even before the war, the world of Newtonian physics had been crumbling under the weight of Einstein's new theories of relativity, which were soon followed by theories of quantum mechanics. In philosophy itself, there was a strong movement, such as found in the Vienna Circle and via Moore and Russell at Cambridge, to anchor philosophy in science and logic and to jettison the rest of traditional philosophy, such as metaphysics and ethics. And the arts, which had experienced profound changes before the war, continued down new and often disorienting experimental roads. Change was happening in all walks of life, and The Magicians were responding to these changes. 

Both books are exceptionally fine and important works of intellectual history. Thinkers who worked and struggled with the realities of the inter-war years, such as those listed above, and others, like R.G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, and others, have a renewed value today as we experience democracy under attack and the world haunted by irrational spirits among the people. History doesn't offer answers, but it does provide lessons, hints about the future, that we ignore at our peril. 

H

The Myth of the State by Ernst Cassirer

 

Cassirer's last book, published in 1946 shortly before his death

For how I came to this book and some of my (all too brief) history with Cassirer, you might begin with my review of Language and Myth (here). I can now add to that history that I'm amazed by what I had missed. Cassirer's work here is an impressive history of myth and Western political thought. He begins at the beginning: considering myth and mythological thought, and he then takes the reader forward in time through to the rise of modern mythologies. I was deeply impressed by not only the scope of Cassirer's work here--from the deep past into the near present, but also by the depth of his analysis. His chapters on Plato, Machiavelli, and Hegel provide some of the most succinct but insightful commentaries on these pivotal thinkers that I've encountered. His observations about Machiavelli and Machiavellian are among the best I've encountered. Machiavelli, to me at least, is a profoundly intriguing figure, and far too many commentators seem not to have gotten beyond the stereotype of the "evil Machiavel" laid down by Shakespeare; and on the other side, there are those Machiavellians who sing his praises unreservedly, failing to see the contradictions and nuances of Machiavelli's thought. Cassirer is both a scholar and an original thinker and his work here, along with his briefer but similarly valuable considerations of Plato and Hegel, is exemplary. 

Cassirer begins his book (Part I), as I noted above, with consideration of myth, its origins and functions. This section is more or less an abbreviated recapitulation of his work that I cited above, Language and Myth, but not less valuable (and perhaps more valuable) because of its brevity. After reviewing some of the most important works on language and mythology, Cassirer arrives at conclusions of his own. He writes: 

Here we grasp one of the most essential elements of myth. Myth does not arise solely from intellectual processes; it sprouts forth from deep human emotions. Yet on the other hand all these theories that exclusively stress the emotional element fail to see an essential point. Myth cannot be described as mere emotion because it is the expression of emotion. The expression of a feeling is not the feeling itself--it is emotion turned into an image. This very fact implies a radical change. What heretofore to was dimly and vaguely felt assumes a definite shape; what was a passive state becomes an active process.

To understand this transformation it is necessary to make a sharp distinction between two types of expression: between physical and symbolic expressions.

The Myth of the State, 43.  

Cassirer goes on to state that "generally speaking, human responses belong to quite a different type. What distinguishes them from animal reactions is their symbolic character…. Linguistic symbolism leads to an objectification of sense-impressions; mythical symbolism leads to an objectification of feelings." Id. 45.  This characteristic of humans leads to "no mere exteriorization but condensation. In language, myth, art, religion our emotions are not simply turned into mere acts; they are turned into "works." These works do not fade away. They are persistent and durable." Id. 46. Cassirer notes that these works are not aimed at individual experience (at least until Plato) but at social existence. Cassirer observes that "genuine myth does not possess philosophical freedom; for the images in which it lives are not known as images. They are not regarded as symbols but as realities." But these "images" provide "uncivilized man" with "an interpretation of life the life of nature and of his own inner life." Id. 47. Cassirer disagrees with the contention that myth and religion are merely the products of fear (and ignorance); he contends that myth and religion provide a "metamorphosis" of fear into something that humans can grasp and thereby contend with. 

In Part II "The Struggle of Myth in the History of Political Theory," Cassirer addresses the effort to move beyond mythical thinking as reflected in the ancient Greeks; the battle between mythos and logos as best exemplified by the struggle between Socrates and the Sophists and their different ideas about the value of myth. This debate also entailed the difference between "the many" and "the One." Of course, out of this came Plato and his transformation of the Socratic quest into his own intellectual edifice. And while I won't discuss it here, Cassirer's chapter on Plato's Republic is as concise, insightful, and valuable as any such effort of comparable length that I can think of (at least viz. politics). From Plato, Cassirer moves on the Augustine and the development of the medieval theory of the "legal state," which draws greatly on Roman law as well as Christian ideas. The next three chapters deal with Machiavelli and his legacy. And as I remarked above, this section, too, proved revelatory about a  topic upon which there's been a lot of misguided commentary. If one were diving into Machiavelli for the first time, this might be the best place to start. This section concludes with chapters on "The Renaissance of Stoicism and "Natural Right" Theories of the State" (Ch. XIII) and "The Philosophy of the Enlightenment and Its Romantic Critics" (Ch. XIV). I have to admit that the role of Stoicism in the "natural right" tradition and upon a view of equality arising within society was something I'd not appreciated before. 

Part III is entitled "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" and it opens with a chapter on Thomas Carlyle. I had to pause and ask myself, "Thomas Carlyle, the early Victorian historian and essayist, the author of the "The Hero in History," of whom I know very little and whom I'd never seen included in a history of political thought?" Yes, the same. And yet, here again, Cassirer impressed me with his careful scholarship and insightful overview about Carlyle, a key figure in Cassirer's consideration of the myth of the state. But Carlyle's value comes not from anything he had to say about the state, but because of his best-known work,  The Hero in History. Cassirer patiently examines Carlyle's outlook and the particulars of his idea of the hero and its connection with a style of thought that looked outside of more quotidian views of culture and politics. From Carlyle, Cassirer goes directly on to Gobineau, the late nineteenth-century French writer who wrote a treatise on the superiority of the "white man." As with Carlyle (a much more respectable figure), Cassirer treats Gobineau with respect and a thorough consideration of his work, although Cassirer no doubt agrees with Gobineau's friend, Tocqueville, that he is "utterly opposed to these doctrines. I think them probably false and certainly pernicious." By the way, the title of this chapter is "From Hero Worship to Race Worship" and one section is titled "The Theory of Totalitarian Race." A chapter is also dedicated to Hegel, a notoriously difficult thinker. Suffice to say that again the treatment is thorough and considered. In short, Hegel spawned followers on the radical right and the radical left. The common bond: the significance of the state as an historical actor. 

The final chapter is "The Technique of Modern Political Myths," and Cassirer opens the chapter with these observations: 

If we try to resolve our contemporary political myths into their elements we find that they contain no entirely new feature. All the elements were already well known. Carlyle's theory of hero worship and Gobineau's thesis of the fundamental moral and intellectual diversity of the races had been discussed over and over again. But all these discussions remained in a sense merely academic. To change the old ideas into strong and powerful political weapons something more as needed. They had to be accommodated to the understanding of a different audience. For this purpose a fresh instrument was required --not only an instrument of thought but of action. A new technique had to be developed. This was the last and decisive factor. To put it in the scientific terminology we may say that this technique had a catalytic effect. It accelerated all reactions and gave them their full effect.  While the soil for the Myth of the Twentieth Century had been prepared long before, it could not have borne its fruit without the skillful use of the new technical tool. Id. 277.

Cassirer goes on to note the extraordinary challenges of the post-WWI period throughout the world, especially in the Germany of the Weimar Republic, which suffered from both unemployment and depression. "In desperate situations man will always have recourse to desperate means--and our present-day political myths have been such desperate means." Id. 279. Indeed, as he notes, even in primitive societies where myth and magic still prevail, members of those societies have recourse to magic when empirical, quotidian ways of solving a problem fail to do so. (Cassirer cites the work of Malinowski). Thus, both more modern, "rational" societies and more primitive societies follow the same pattern of recourse to the magical and mythical when social challenges become too great. In the Europe of the inter-war years, the rational mode developed over the centuries succumbed to a reversion to more primitive ways.

[I]n politics the equipoise [between rationality and myth] is never completely established. What we find here is a labile rather than a static equilibrium. In politics we are always living on volcanic soil. We must be prepared for abrupt convulsions and eruptions. In all critical moments of man's social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again. For myth has not been really vanquished and subjugated. It is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity. This hour comes as soon as the other binding forces of man's social life, for one reason or another, lose their strength and are no longer able to combat the demonic mythical powers.  Id. 280.

 Or he might have quoted Yeats, writing in 1919: 

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

So no matter how rational humankind may think it is in contemporary societies,  we are still given to extreme and often violent passions that yield to "the most irrational impulses." Id. 281. (January 6, anyone?) And while "modern man no longer believes in natural magic, he has by no means given up the belief in a sort of "social magic. If a collective wish is felt in its whole strength and intensity, people can easily be persuaded that it only needs the right man to satisfy it." Id. Cassirer notes that Carlyle's theory of "hero worship made its influence felt." Id. And in this situation we see a new type of political myth and politician emerging

[W]hat we find . . . is a blending of two activities that seem to exclude each other. The modern politician has had to combine in himself two entirely different and even incompatible functions. He has to act, at the same time, as both a homo magus [man of magic] and a homo faber [man as craftsman and artisan found in the "age of technics"]. He is a priest of a new, entirely irrational and mysterious religion. But when he has to defend and propagate this religion he proceeds very methodically. Nothing is left to chance; every step is well prepared and premeditated. It is this strange combination that is one of the most striking features of our political myths. 

Myth has always been described as the result of an unconscious activity and as a free product of imagination. But here we find myth made according to plan. The new political myths do not grow up freely; they are not wild fruits of an exuberant imagination. They are artificial things fabricated by very skillful and cunning artisans. It has been reserved for the twentieth century, our own great technical age, to develop a new technique of myth. Henceforth myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapons--as machine guns and airplanes.  Id. 282. 

If you have difficulty conceiving an image of what Cassirer is arguing, go watch Leni Riefenstahl's film "Triumph of the Will" or a video of a Donald Trump rally.  

Cassirer contends this mythical environment alters even the nature of human language. Human language has always involved "two entirely different functions. . . the semantic and the magical use of the word." Id. But in our time, we've experienced "not only a transvaluation of all our ethical values but also a transformation of human speech. The magic word takes precedence of the semantic word." Id. 283. Cassirer goes on to describe the creation of new rites to supplement the new use of magical words, rites that lull the critical mind into a form of trance or waking sleep (my description, not his). 

Cassirer moves his argument into the issue of freedom and the Kantian legacy that describes freedom as an interior condition defined by autonomy. But "freedom is not a natural inheritance of man. In order to possess it we have to create it. Id. 288. And "under extremely difficult conditions man tries to cast off this burden. Here the totalitarian state and political myth step in." Id. 

Cassirer also notes that divination also appears again in contemporary political myths: "The politician becomes a sort of public fortuneteller. The most improbable or even impossible promises are made; the millennium is predicted over and over again." Id. 289. Cassirer sees this function melded with "the rebirth of one of the oldest mythical motives. In almost all mythologies of the world we meet with the idea of an inevitable, inexorable, irrevocable destiny. Fatalism seems to be inseparable from mythical thought. " Id. 290. 

One has to wonder if Trump and his like-minded ilk around the world didn't have a secret book club in which they share ideas about how to refine their dark arts--they sometimes seem to have taken their cues directly from Cassirer! 

Cassirer also addresses the work of two German thinkers whom he contends reinforce these myths of inevitability and fatalism: Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger. In remarking on these two contemporaries, he cautions 

I do not mean to say that these philosophical doctrines had a direct bearing of the political ideas in Germany. Most of these ideas came from quite different sources. They had a very "realistic" and not a "speculative" purport. But the new philosophy did enfeeble and slowly undermine the forces that could have resisted the modern political myths. Id. 292.

A remarkable contention that bares further contemplation. 

Cassirer concludes his chapter on an ambiguous note. 

It is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths. A myth is in a sense invulnerable. It is impervious to rational arguments; it cannot be refuted by syllogisms. But philosophy can do us another important service. It can make us understand the adversary. In order to fight an enemy you must know him. That is one of the first principles of a sound strategy. . . . We should carefully study the origin, the structure, the methods, and the technique of the political myth s. We should see the adversary face to face in order to know how to combat him. Id. 296

And the concluding sentences of the book: 

 [T]he mythical monsters were not entirely destroyed [by rationality]. They were used for the creation of a new universe, and they still survive in this universe. The powers of myth were checked and subdued by superior forces. As long as these forces, intellectual, ethical, and artistic, are in full strength, myth is tamed and subdued. But once they begin to lose their strength chaos is come again. Mythical thought then starts to rise anew and to pervade the whole of man's cultural and social life. Id. 298.

My conclusion: this book is a stunningly deep and revealing examination of Western political thought that begins at the beginning--myth, It then traces the course of thought and culture toward increasing rationality until the twentieth-century experiences of a return of the dominance of myth. And its relevance to the twenty-first century?