Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Greek money and philosophy

I’ve been reading Richard Seaford’s 2004 Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy.

Seaford’s theme: “the monetisation of the Greek polis in the sixth and fifth centuries BC contributed to a radical transformation in thought that is, in a sense, still with us. Academics—perhaps because they are more interested in texts than in money—have emphasized rather the role of alphabetic literacy in the radical intellectual changes of this period.” (p. xi)

He then notes a striking coincidence: “The earliest surviving texts in the Greek alphabet were written shortly before and concurrently with the monetization of the city-states.” (p. 10)

Both alphabetic literacy and money involve a leap of abstraction.

Written texts are abstract representations of knowledge that are portable, easily transmittable among many people, and good for long-term storage.

Money is an abstract representation of wealth that is portable, easily transmittable among many people, and good for long-term storage.

Money is to the economic realm what texts are to the intellectual realm: empowering tools. Cultures that develop literacy become smarter and more knowledgeable. Cultures that develop money become more productive and wealthier.

So I wonder if there is a deep, common connection in the ancient Greek culture that led to both great innovations’ developing at almost the same time.

[Images: The text is a very early Greek alphabet. Source: The Schoyen Collection. The coin is an Athenian "owl" from around 450 BCE. Source: Money Museum.]

How to insult like an Elizabethan

Get thy reeky hide hither, sirrah, and desist with the pewling — beslubbering puttock thou oft art.

(Via John Enright: no mammering lewdster he.)

Roark and Keating: first meetings [Re-post]

[We started The Fountainhead this week in my Introduction to Philosophy course, so this is a re-post for new readers this semester.]

I am a philosopher, and when I’m on the job I have been known to read literary works as “premises with feet.” Despite that occupational hazard I am also fascinated with how some great fiction writers can seamlessly integrate abstract philosophical themes with concrete literary portrayals.

When I teach Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, my focus in class is philosophical but I do like to point out along the way how her fiction-writer’s methods concretize, dramatize, and foreshadow her abstract themes. One example:

On the premise that first meetings matter immensely in life and literature, let’s look at our first meetings of Howard Roark and Peter Keating.

At the beginning of Chapter 1, we meet Roark:

“He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. …
“His body leaned back against the sky. It was a body of long straight lines and angles, each curve broken into planes. He stood, rigid, his hands hanging at his sides, palms out. He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together …
“He was looking at the granite.
“He did not laugh as his eyes stopped in awareness of the earth around him …

At the beginning of Chapter 2, Keating is introduced. He is graduating top of his class, and the distinguished architect Guy Francon is giving the address:

“The hall was packed with bodies and faces, so tightly packed that one could not distinguish at a glance which faces belonged to which bodies. It was like a soft, shivering aspic made of mixed arms, shoulders, chests, and stomachs. One of the heads, pale, dark haired and beautiful belonged to Peter Keating.
“He sat, well in front, trying to keep his eyes on the platform because he knew that many people were looking at him and would look at him later. He did not glance back, but the consciousness of those centered glances never left him.”

The contrasts so far:

* Roark is by himself and his body is described in singular terms. Keating is indistinguishable in the midst of a crowd.

* Roark’s conscious focus is on nature. Keating’s consciousness is focused on other people’s watching him.

* Roark is naked. Keating is robed and capped in conventional graduation attire.

So right from the beginning we are introduced to Roark’s individualism and his orientation to reality; we are introduced to Keating’s collectivity and his social metaphysics; and we are invited by Rand to contrast the two directly.

Side note for another post: On the premise that who gets the first and word matters in life and literature: In The Fountainhead the first words are “Howard Roark” and the last words are …

On the “blond beast” and racism [Section 28 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 28 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

28. On the “blond beast” and racism

Take the phrase “the blond beast.”

In recoiling from what he saw as a flaccid nineteenth-century European culture, Nietzsche often called longingly for “some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace.”[87] And he spoke of “[t]he deep and icy mistrust the German still arouses today whenever he gets into a position of power is an echo of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe observed for centuries that raging of the Blond Germanic beast.” And again inspirationally about what one finds “at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness.”[88]

What are we to make of these regular positive mentions of the “blond beast”? It is clear what the Nazis made of them—an endorsement by Nietzsche of the racial superiority of the German Aryan type.

But for those who have read the original Nietzsche, that interpretation clearly takes Nietzsche’s words out of context. In context, the “blond beast” that Nietzsche refers to is the lion, the great feline predator with the shaggy blond mane and the terrific roar. Nietzsche does believe that the Germans once, a long time ago, manifested the spirit of the lion—but they were not unique in that regard. The spirit and power of the lion have been manifested by peoples of many races.

To see this, let us put one of the quotations in full context. The quotation begins this way: “at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness …”

Now let us complete the sentence as Nietzsche wrote it: “the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings—they all shared this need.”[89]

So Nietzsche clearly is using the lion analogically and comparing its predatory power to the predatory power that humans of many different racial types have manifested. Nietzsche here lists six different racial and ethnic groups, and the Germans are not special in that list. So while Nietzsche does endorse a strongly biological basis for cultures, he does not endorse racism of the sort that says any one race is biologically necessarily superior to any other.

This is a clear difference with the Nazis. The Nazis were racist and thought of the Germanic racial type as superior to all others the world over. Nietzsche disagreed.

This leads us directly to a second major point of difference.

[Update: The entire Nietzsche and the Nazis in hardcover and Kindle at Amazon.]

References

[87] GM 2:17.

[88] GM 1:11.

[89] GM 1:11.

[Bibliography.]

[Return to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]

A book recommendation

The main character is a young architect. A creative designer — he is visionary and innovative the use of materials. Before he can finish his formal training, a conflict with a teacher leads to his expulsion. So he has an extra challenge to breaking into his profession.

Another major character is a highly intelligent and independent woman. She loves the architect, but she has a confused, extreme, and occasionally idiosyncratic way of defining and pursuing her independence, which puts her in conflict with the architect.

Another key character is a younger man, who is dominated by his social-climber mother. To achieve his desired position in life, he manipulates, deceives, and otherwise maneuvers four men out of the way to get where he wants to be.

The book is Ken Follett’s World Without End. The characters mentioned above are Merthin, Caris, and Godwyn.

Before I read the book last summer, Marsha Enright recommended it to me and suggested that I would find in it strong echoes of another, classic work. Enright has published an article on the comparisons, along with a recommendation. I’m glad to second her recommendation, for World Without End is in its own right a gripping story, historically rich, and thematically deep. And she’s right about the striking parallels.

The Holocaust [Section 19 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 19 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

19. The Holocaust

In 1821, the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.” Heine was evoking the terrible era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in which both people and books were burned regularly. But he was also making a philosophical point about the importance of ideas: books are about ideas, and ideas matter. We humans live what we believe, and if history teaches us anything it is that people can believe an incredible variety of things about themselves and the world they live in. Books store and transmit ideas, but it is in the minds of actual human beings that ideas live and are put into practice. Burning a book has some stopping power for an idea, but the only way to eliminate an idea fully is to eliminate the individuals who believe it. Dictators know this and they have no compunction about eliminating individuals.

The Nazis were not historically unique in this way—where they were unique is in the huge scale upon which they operated and the cold-bloodedly efficient ruthlessness with which they destroyed, killed, and burned human beings.

Eleven to twelve million human beings were exterminated during the Holocaust; approximately six million of them were Jews. We have all heard the numbers and the terrible stories before, and sometimes it is hard for them not to become just abstract statistics in our minds.

But just think of one person you know who lives a real life, has dreams, works hard, loves his or her family, has a quirky sense of humor, wants to travel the world. And then imagine that person taken away in the middle of the night, herded into a cattle car, stripped naked, experimented upon without anesthesia, slowly starved, gassed, shoved into an oven and burned to cinders. That is what the Nazis did to millions of human beings.

All of the theoretical ingredients of the National Socialist program that contributed to the Holocaust were announced publicly twenty years before the Holocaust began:

That human beings are divided into collective groups that shape their identity.

That those collective groups are in a life and death competitive struggle with each other.

That any tactic is legitimate in the war of competing groups.

That human beings are not individuals with their own lives to live but are servants of the state.

That the state should have total power over both the minds and bodies of its citizens and may dispose of them as it wishes.

That citizens should obey a higher authority and be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of their group, as defined by higher authority.

Additionally, during the 1930s the Nazis had experimented with most of the practical techniques that would be used in the Holocaust. In the 1930s, basic human rights to liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness were denied to millions as a matter of official policy. Many of those deemed undesirable had been forced to leave their homes and country. Those who stayed were subject to officially tolerated vandalism, beatings, and occasional murders. Some of those deemed unfit to reproduce had been sterilized. Some of those deemed unfit to live had been euthanized. As early as 1933, concentration camps had been established north of Berlin at Oranienburg and at Dachau in the south of Germany. More camps were added as the decade progressed.

And of course the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their sympathizers among millions of Germans had been common knowledge and common practice. It is appropriate that the classically-educated Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Culture, would express it most bluntly and clearly: “Certainly the Jew is also a Man, but the Flea is also an Animal.”[42]

So I return to our early question: How could Nazism happen?

References

[42] “Sicher ist der Jude auch ein Mann, aber der Floh ist auch ein Tier.”

[Bibliography.]

[Return to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]

Kleist: How Kant ruined my life

Ian Brunskill reviews Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, in a new translation by Peter Wortsman.

Kleist was widely-traveled, energetic, a brilliant writer — and a suicide at age 34. Why?

Brunskill writes: “Kleist in his youth had espoused with enthusiasm all the optimism of the Enlightenment. Reason would conquer all; happiness would come with experience and understanding. In March 1801, however, by his own account, he seems to have encountered the thought of Immanuel Kant (it is not clear what precisely he read), and his world fell apart. By testing the nature and limits of human knowledge, Kant had sought primarily to establish the possibility of a meaningful metaphysics. To Kleist, however, it was much grimmer than that: Kant had shown, he believed, that empirical knowledge was unreliable, reason illusory, truth unattainable and life quite meaningless. ‘My sole and highest goal has vanished,’ he wrote. ‘Now I have none.’”

In my Explaining Postmodernism (p. 81), I quoted Nietzsche on Kant:

“As soon as Kant would begin to exert a popular influence, we should find it reflected in the form of a gnawing and crumbling skepticism and relativism.” That quotation continues with Nietzsche’s making a direct connection to Kleist: “and only among the most active and noble spirits, who have never been able to endure doubt, you would find in its place that upheaval and despair of all truth which Heinrich von Kleist, for example, experienced as an effect of Kant’s philosophy. ‘Not long ago,’ he [Kleist] once writes in his moving manner, ‘I became acquainted with Kant’s philosophy; and now I must tell you of a thought in it, inasmuch as I cannot fear that it will upset you as profoundly and painfully as me.’”

Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist (Archipelago, 2009) is also available at Amazon. Brunskill’s review is online at the Wall Street Journal for a few days. (Thanks to Roger for the link.)

Update: C. August has an excellent, extended follow-up post on Kleist, Kant, and the competing readings of the two.

Anacreon and Simonides

An old favorite, discovered in my graduate school days, Anacreon (570–488 BCE) is one of the great poets of drinking parties, the many varieties of love, and the sweetness of life in the shadow of death.
.

Infatuation from a distance:

O sweet boy like a girl,
I see you though you will not look my way.
You are unaware that you handle the reins of my soul.
.

Explaining rejection by a girl at a party:

Not that girl — she’s the other kind,
one from Lesbos. Disdainfully,
nose turned up at my silver hair,
she makes eyes at the ladies.
.

More seriously, the theodicy problem:

Here lies Timokritos: soldier: valiant in battle.
Arês spares not the brave man, but the coward.
.

And even more seriously, the end of life and the approach of death:

I have gone gray at the temples,
yes, my head is white, there’s nothing
of the grace of youth that’s left me,
and my teeth are like an old man’s.
Life is lovely. But the lifetime
that remains for me is little.
For this cause I mourn. The terrors
of the Dark Pit never leave me.
For the house of Death is deep down
underneath; the downward journey
to be feared; for once I go there
I know well there’s no returning.
.

I came back to Anacreon recently because he features as a character in The Praise Singer, a fictionalized life of Simonides by the excellent Mary Renault. Simonides was another of the great lyric poets, long lived and widely traveled. Renault’s novel spans Greek history from Polykrates and Peisistratus, tyrants of Samos and Athens respectively, through the Athens of Hipparchus the art patron and Themistocles the naval genius, to Thessaly and Syracuse.

Simonides is most known to our generation as composer of the epitaph at Thermopylae, after the out-numbered Greeks held off a huge force of Persians for three days:
.

Four thousand of us fought three million.
When you visit Sparta, tell them:
Here, the soldiers kept their word.
.

If you love historical fiction and the Greeks, then Mary Renault is your author. Her fictionalized versions of the Hellenic world are all historically rich and realistic and with characters whom you come to care about.

My favorites are The King Must Die, The Mask of Apollo, and The Persian Boy. The first focuses on the legend of Theseus during his bull-leaping years as hostage to the Cretan empire. The Mask of Apollo is set in Athens and Sicily, weaving together the tumultuous theatrical and political worlds of the time. The Persian Boy tells the story of the mature Alexander and his conquests from the perspective of Bagoas, the beautiful Persian youth who was his lover.