Book Notes: "A Summary of Stoic Philosophy: Zeno of Citium in Diogenes Laertius Book Seven" by Charles Duke Yonge and Keith Seddon

A Summary of Stoic Philosophy: Zeno of Citium in Diogenes Laertius Book Seven by Charles Duke Yonge

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took me a while to get into this book. It was recommended by one of the Stoic websites I have visited. I was a little confused when I first picked up the book. It was published by Lulu, a self-publishing platform, and for a time this put me off. But this is actually an annotated work of an original Greek work written some time in the early 3rd century CE, and then translated into English by Charles Duke Yonge in 1853, and then re-worked by Keith Seddon in 2007. The original author, Diogenes Laërtius, has, in effect, written a literature review of some of the major Stoic philosophers, and listed their various works. Unfortunately, only fragments of the original work, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, of which the present work is drawn, from Book 7, have been recovered. Once I had the provenance under control, I appreciated Seddon's work in resurrecting a Stoic classic, and then the knowledge of how much I don't know began to flow in. Without Diogenes Laërtius' work, the existence of many of the Stoic works would be unknown, as it seems that none of these other works has survived. These Stoic authors wrote on logic and ethics and physics and so on, and were far more sophisticated in their philosophy then simply not budging when somebody punched them in the face. As I am currently reading Aristotle's Rhetoric, there is some congruence with the basic elements of the philosophy that all piece together as I read more of the classics. What surprises me most is that much of my knowledge of the classics, gleaned as it was from the formal education system, is a facsimile of a facsimile copied and recopied and passed on through the ages until what I have been given barely resembles a mere trace of the original. There is too much in this for one reading, and it really is a study piece rather than a work for easy leisure, pointing to further studies to be done more than a standalone piece of literature (as one would expect of a literature review). That scholars were so sophisticated 2,000 years ago makes me wonder how humanity went so backward and has arrived today at what is barely an echo of the wisdom of the past. It haunts me in that if it happened before, it can and will happen again, so our present circumstances could easily dumb things down, if it is not already too late. And all this from reading a book published on Lulu. It is enough to change my opinion of the self-publishing platform!

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Book Notes: "The Good Soldier Švejk" by Jaroslav Hašek

The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is quite a tome. It is really four books in one (view spoiler).[or three and a half, as the author expired before the final book was completed. (hide spoiler)] This is my first reading of a Czech author. I understand that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was held back by the Russians and later the Italians, otherwise the Anglo-French and their allies may have been in some mighty trouble during the Great War. Švejk puts an interesting spin on the peoples and cultures of this part of the conflict and, as an ex-soldier, I couldn't help but chuckle at the timeless idiocies of the military life, and Švejk's nonchalant way of handling such banal annoyances as "greatcoats on, greatcoats off", making "lists of lists", and nonsensical statistics about serving soldiers. While the work is part comedy, it is also satirical. In my mind's eye the comical events were reinforced by the cartoon drawings of Švejk and his antics. These cartoon characters tended to dance in front of real war footage, so a Laurel and Hardy figure had me laughing with embarrassment while at the same time I felt like I shouldn't be laughing. The effect is brilliant. There are so many stories within stories, and Švejk reminds me of the many characters I crossed paths with during my time in the army. One constantly came to mind as I read The Good Soldier Švejk: a soldier who could recite word for word any Monty Python movie ever made. At times, you had to tell him to just shut up, but it was hard to dislike him. Švejk is this same person. Tragic comedy is how I would describe this work. Brilliant.

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Book Notes: "Eclogues" and "Georgics" by Virgil

Eclogues and Georgics by Virgil

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book of pastoral poems is a classic, and therefore difficult to dismiss off-handedly. What I found interesting were other reviews on Goodreads. One stated: "I have hardly any clue what I actually read". Virgil reads like Shakespeare, although the work is translated from Latin, so I share the sentiments of the other reviewer! It took me some time to read the poems, as I had to research the various characters and Greek and Roman gods to make sense of it. Even then, the background story of the civil wars and political instability in Rome is difficult to discern simply from the poems' text. The imagery of the text is evident in Naomi Mitchison's book Cloud Cuckoo Land, but the difference between Roman and Greek ideals about pastoral life are significant. While Virgil applies Greek imagery to the Italian landscape, the images belie the true story. In Virgil's time, rich Roman families dominated the farms and used slave labour to operate them. According to David Quint, writing in The New Republic, it was the Roman equivalent of what has happened in agribusiness in the United States, where the virtues of the rural life on the family farm persist, yet 'big business' owns most of the farms. The Georgics are didactic in that they provide guidance for farming, interspersed with metaphors for the birth of Rome. I found Georgic IV, which concludes the book, to be inspiring. We are hoping to keep bees, and bee-keeping is the subject of the poem (if one puts aside the birth-of-Rome metaphor). So there is some joy to be found for the virgin reader, much like one might find in a Shakespearean sonnet. However, without the background information, one might read and not absorb a word of what one had read. This brings me to this particular Dover Thrift Edition. I enjoy the size and price of this series, but sometimes I wonder whether a more substantial text with notes would be useful. Of course, there is the tendency, like in the Penguin version of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, to have longer notes than the actual work, and this can be worse. Nevertheless, this reading was useful as I steel myself for tackling Homer, Milton, and Dante.

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Book Notes: "Mrs Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Virginia Woolf novel I have read, but I have read her work before, specifically A Room of One's Own, where Ms Woolf writes about writing and feminism, and I found this interesting, even though Ernest Hemingway, my favourite author, didn't like Ms Woolf, and I wasn't sure whether this was because she was a rival or because she was a woman, and given her feminism and her love of women, more generally, I was not surprised that Hemingway, in his obvious then-contemporary male chauvinism, might not like Ms Woolf's views, but of course this was before I had read Mrs. Dalloway, which really is an interesting work, and rivals Hemingway's themes, at least in terms of the psychological impact of war, but Ms Woolf also covers the "war and society" aspects that Hemingway tends to ignore, outside of his protagonists' meanderings through society, so in this regard, at least, Ms Woolf's work differs, yet tends to be gender-focused in its own way, and that is not to say that it is bad, for it isn't, or that I found it difficult to read, for it wasn't, but there was something about it that made it difficult to read in bits and pieces, and it would be much better suited to a long sitting, if one could find the time, because it tends to read a little like James Joyce, even though Ms Woolf and her husband (notice I use Ms as I am sure 'Mrs' Woolf would have done, even though the New York Times referred to her as 'Mrs Woolf' in her obituary, which was, interestingly, only a 'believed dead' obituary because of a suicide note and her missing body, which is also interesting given that Hemingway, who really didn't like her so much, also took his own life), Leonard, were unable to print Ulysses because it was too big for their printing establishment, known as Hogarth Press, and all this from reading what is, comparatively, a rather short book, almost a novella, but if I were to record what I gleaned most importantly from this book is not so much that Woolf was a good or bad writer, for surely her work is very good, but that the reason Hemingway didn't like her had nothing to do with their polar opposites in terms of gender and so on, for surely even in death they were alike, but the thing that is most striking is the difference in their prose, and it is for this reason, I believe, that Hemingway didn't like Woolf, not for the aforementioned issues, but mostly because her writing leaves one feeling rather frantic and out of breath, which may well be a deliberate technique, and it surely works, as in leaving one breathless, but what I am not sure about is whether this has anything to do with the content or the simple fact that Ms Woolf's sentences are just so bloody long.

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Bank bashing popular, but taxpayers lose, too

Photo: Queensland Newspapers Pty Ltd [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I am imagining the populist sentiment: "About time those banks got some of their own back!" 

But this won't make much difference to the banks, that will simply pass on the costs to shareholders and consumers. This is effectively a tax increase on anybody who has a bank account and anybody who has a superannuation fund - in effect, almost everybody of working age. 

The Treasurer, Scott Morrison, saying "Cry me a river" sounds funny, but the populists should be crying in their soup, even though they won't because, despite paying more, they will do so without knowing. As a political scientist, this is the part that fascinates me.

Extracting more revenue from successful Australian industries is now de rigueur. Australia's penchant for tall poppy syndrome lends popular support for governments to go after any part of the economy that dares to do well. 

Sometimes there is good reason to rein in the cost of externalities like pollution, but doing so using a populist approach to attack the mining industry ended in disaster for everyone. Australians missed the opportunity to capture the benefits of the mining boom and then forgot to implement a proper emissions trading scheme.

If the targeting of industries for revenue extraction was based on the prevalence of high-wealth individuals in the Forbes list, then the packaging and media industries should get a guernsey, too. Note there are no bankers on the list!

It will be interesting to see how the banks react. The carbon tax potentially impacted mining industry profits (it is difficult to pass on costs to customers in commodity export industries). And the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies' advertisements worked.

The big question is whether the banks will do the same. They may simply pass on the costs to consumers and quietly simmer away. But I daresay the backlash has already started.

What I find interesting is the basis of the claims and counter-claims about industry profitability and the value of particular industries to the nation. Given that almost all Australian workers have super funds that invest in Australian shares, which more than likely include the big miners and the big banks, one might think that targeting successful industries was counter-productive.

By way of example, BHP's performance since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008 is shown below. Notice how, due to global market factors and the change in value of the Australian dollar, BHP shares have not recovered their pre-GFC value.

ASX: BHP via Google , 9 May 2017

The Commonwealth Bank, however, has been travelling quite well. What happens to the share value of the major banks remains to be seen, but it can't be good for investors.

ASX:CBA via Google, 9 May 2017

If the major banks choose to pass on the increased costs to shareholders and consumers, the impact upon households may be significant. If the Australian Bankers' Association launches a counter-offensive, then the budget will be ineffective as in past years.

How did this happen? I suspect that the lumbering, inefficient nature of liberal democracy is largely to blame. Citizens do not want to pay more tax, consumers do not want to pay higher prices, but somebody has to pay.

If only it could be as simple as saying this is what everything costs, and this is how much tax will be charged. But it is never so simple. The political process is inevitable. The only way to overcome politics is to allow tyranny. Most people don't want this, so the system evolves as it has.

But a cold, dispassionate view of the tax on the banks is that it is effectively a tax increase for everyone. That governments have to use smoke and mirrors to increase taxes is a consequence of the political process.

Harold Lasswell's famous definition holds true: "Politics is who gets what, when, how". The key to good politics today is to hide how the getting gets done, and I think populism helps this cause immensely.

PS: Ironically, the ABC's Budget Winners and Losers list shows taxpayers and banks side by side!

From Brad Baranowski, Aeon: How Robert Nozick put a purple prose bomb under analytical philosophy

Photo: Suzy Dubot CC0 (Public Domain)

Libertarians are a quarrelsome lot. Debates about who is the better von, Hayek or Mises, rivalries between the Austrian and the Chicago schools of economics, and fights among Ayn Rand’s objectivists and Murray Rothbard’s Circle Bastiat – schisms that would make a Leftist blush – have rent libertarianism. So heads turned when one of their fold decided to throw in the towel on arguing.

Robert Nozick (1938-2002) was not averse to controversy. Five years after arriving at Harvard, he published Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). A response to John Rawls, who had just published the monumental A Theory of Justice (1971), Nozick outlined the libertarian case for limited government. While plenty found A Theory of Justice unconvincing, critics found Anarchy, State, and Utopia to be unsavoury. One reviewer equated Nozick to ‘the average owner of a filling station’ whose only joy in life comes from ‘grousing about paying taxes’.

Such criticisms stung. ‘Is not the minimal state,’ Nozik’s book had asked, ‘an inspiring vision?’ A state stripped down to providing protection and enforcing contracts was simple and elegant. It was an art form, enchanting and efficient. Why didn’t others see this beauty? A sickness, answered Nozick, had descended upon Anglo-American thought. This illness had transformed intellectual life into a fit of assertion and counter-assertion. Nowhere was this impulse more malignant than in his own discipline, philosophy.

Postwar American philosophy departments were not famous for providing insights about living the good life. Dominated by philosophical analysis – a movement preoccupied with logic – professional philosophers neglected or even condescended to issues of broader interest such as ethics. In The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), Hans Reichenbach, a prominent defender of analysis, asserted: ‘Those philosophers who are willing to derive moral directives from their philosophies can only offer you a sham proof.’ Proof, in this rigorous, new philosophy, was everything.

Nozick had studied philosophy as a graduate student at Princeton University during the early 1960s, writing his dissertation about logical notation and decision theory. Few other topics were appropriate. Analytical philosophers made up the bulk of the faculty, and they sniffed at ethics and aesthetics. ‘There was a purity about the air,’ recalled one graduate student. Professors believed that there ‘were philosophical wars to be fought, with good guys and bad guys’. The latter, those who talked about the good and the bad, were easy targets. As W V O Quine, the philosopher whose work launched many dissertations, declared in 1953, ‘philosophy of science is philosophy enough’. All other approaches should be purged.

By the 1980s, Nozick had had enough of this mode of philosophical enquiry. ‘The language of analytic philosophy,’ he complained, ‘“forces” the reader to a conclusion through a knock-down argument.’ Discussion thus became a zero-sum game. If the loser of an argument did not accept his opponent’s conclusion ‘he dies’, a victim of his own mental weaknesses. Among the collateral damages of this aggression was an appreciation of intellectual diversity. Nozick aspired to pacify philosophy.

He was not alone. At nearly the same time, three highly regarded analytical philosophers began an intellectual guerrilla war within the discipline, breaking down the conceptual barricades against the value-talk that the previous generation had erected.

In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter battled the widely held perception that formal logic was impenetrable, showing in Gödel, Escher, Bach how cognition ran around a ‘strange loop’ of self-reference. The same year, Richard Rorty staged a coup against academic epistemology, calling it a ‘self-deceptive effort’ in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Following these engagements, Alasdair MacIntyre launched a frontal assault on contemporary meta-ethics in After Virtue (1981), decrying how the ahistorical assumptions of contemporary moral thought had created a new dark age.

‘I want to speak of the purity and dignity of an apple, the explosive joy and sexuality of a strawberry’

In Philosophical Explanations (1981), Nozick opened a new line of attack. Philosophers, he posited, would be better off if they stopped trying to prove things like scientists, an impulse he believed led thinkers to overlook how philosophy might stimulate the ‘mind’s excitement and sensuality’. Rather, they ought to limit themselves to explaining how a system of thought is possible. This would allow a ‘basketful’ of approaches to exist within philosophy, transforming it into an art form, one that sculpted ‘ideas, value, and meaning into new constellations, reverberative with mythic power’. Such an attitude would also recognise philosophers for what they were: ‘valuable and precious’, free to mould and express their lives as artists do theirs.

This big change in conceptualising philosophy liberated Nozick. He now discussed topics ranging from explorations of modern poetry and Hindu theology, to considerations of parenthood, emotions, and personal enlightenment. Gone, too, were the formal equations of his dissertation, replaced with the considerably looser prose in his next book, The Examined Life (1989), a series of informal reflections on life, death, and fruit. ‘I want to speak of the purity and dignity of an apple,’ he waxed in a representative passage, ‘the explosive joy and sexuality of a strawberry.’ Remarking on the shift in style himself, he admitted that he would have found this second line ‘ridiculously overblown once’. Some of his readers still did. As the British philosopher Bernard Williams observed, reading Nozick’s later work was like watching ‘a commercial for breakfast food’.

Purple prose aside, Nozick largely won praise from his colleagues. He had appeared, as one reviewer wrote, like a ‘knight in shining armour’, rescuing his peers from doing obscurantist philosophy. Thanks to his willingness to quit arguing and start explaining, philosophy had rediscovered its obligation to provide the public with lessons about living the good life. The Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking thought it nothing less than the ‘rebirth of philosophy’. Lost in this ballyhoo was the irony that a man who, in the previous decade, had argued for the moral benefits of privatisation, now spearheaded philosophy’s concern with the intellectual commons.

Of course, it had become easy to overlook such political incongruities. Nozick certainly did. If his libertarianism had gained a joie de vivre, it had done so by diluting its original raison d’être. Students should read Max Weber or Karl Marx, he contended in Philosophical Explanations, not because these authors provided insights into how society functioned. On the contrary, these political theorists were notable because their books are part of the ‘long list of human accomplishment, striving, and excellence’. Capital (1867-94) was a model of what hard work could achieve, not a book about how hard work is.

The same standard applied to Nozick’s own work. ‘The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate,’ he announced in The Examined Life. From here on out, he would apply his libertarianism inwardly, focusing on the cultivation of his self rather than the destruction of the state. While this admission shocked admirers of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it was a logical outgrowth of the author’s intellectual development. After all, this was the man who had declared that attempting to convince others of your views – the modus operandi of politics – was a ‘philosophically pointless task’. For Nozick, libertarianism had ceased to be an ideology. It had become a lifestyle, one that was not better or worse than any other – at least, not arguably so.

Brad Baranowski

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons CC-BY-ND 4.0.

"Into the Wild" but not Out of the Misery, or: First World Problems are simply history repeating...

Fairbanks City bus, Stampede Trail, Alaska, where Christopher McCandless starved to death in 1992.

A recent email from The Atlantic explains how, in 1857, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell sat down for dinner (Harriet Beecher Stowe wouldn't go because alcohol was being served), and the iconic magazine was born. The Atlantic "would make politics, literature, and the arts its chief concerns". 

For a long time I have been fascinated by these very things, but since the beginnings of the twenty-first century, I have become somewhat pessimistic about the prospects for humanity. 

Art and literature, fine; but politics? For a political scientist to be jaded at politics, things must be really bad. Oh woe is me. Turns out this is a First World Problem.

The first indicator came via Scott Pape, the Barefoot Investor. I like Pape's newsletters. He tells people straight: 

Old Lady: "Sir, we can't afford our McMansion, what can we do?"

Barefoot Investor: "Sell it and move into a smaller house you can afford, moron!"

This evening I watched Sean Penn's 2007 movie Into the Wild (based on the non-fiction book by Jon Krakaeur). This was no Hollywood sap story, and finding it on Netflix was a bonus (I had it sitting in my inbox as a "must watch" movie that Google had informed me about, no doubt because I recently read and blogged about Rolf Potts' book Vagabonding). 

As "Alexander Supertramp" travels throughout North America as a rejection of modern materialism, it had me thinking about my tiff with politics. And I was thinking about how the more things change, the more things stay the same.

As I read historical literature, the same old patterns keep repeating. Willa Cather said it best in O Pioneers: 

...there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before...

Fairbanks Bus 142 (pictured above), where McCandless was found starved to death, has become a pilgrimage site since the book and the movie. This is creating its own problems, not to mention some rather tacky re-enactments.

But pilgrims do what pilgrims do, and nothing much has changed since Ibn Battutah's time. Even Virgil was bemoaning the loss of the pastoral life that didn't exist for most people way back when.

The reaction to McCandless' plight provides an apt metaphor for contemporary politics. In the words of the book's author, Jon Krakaeur:

I’ve received thousands of letters from people who admire McCandless for his rejection of conformity and materialism in order to discover what was authentic and what was not, to test himself, to experience the raw throb of life without a safety net. But I’ve also received plenty of mail from people who think he was an idiot who came to grief because he was arrogant, woefully unprepared, mentally unbalanced, and possibly suicidal.

What does it all mean? Different things to different people. Some sick of experts telling them how to be, others sick of populism undoing all that is good for others. 

None of this is new. It is the same old story. And being jaded is a First World Problem. Although it may still be end of empire, it probably won't happen before my time is up. 

So what is there to be jaded about? For this, I return to the ancient wisdom of the Stoics, and the words of Marcus Aurelius:

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

I suppose I won't need to go on the wallaby to grapple with contemporary politics, after all. And what I find repulsive today will be the fascinating beginnings of post-truth politics in years to come. I don't need to go on a pilgrimage or recreate McCandless's photograph, maybe just somewhere in between.

Amazing what can happen to one after watching a movie that is un-Disneyfied. Shakespeare-esque is much better!

Book Notes: "How to be Idle" by Tom Hodgkinson

How to be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was useful in that it points to historical authors and works and it is reasonably well-referenced and includes some historical texts in an appendix. I enjoyed reading the book and had a good laugh several times, but it was obvious that the author was young (at the time of writing) and tended to reify a young person's happy relationship with drugs and alcohol as something that could not only be perpetuated indefinitely, but that was a normal part of being an idler. That may be true if you want to die young or do yourself a Hemingway, but it seemed to be a little too keen on the idea of chemically-induced idling rather than an intellectually-focused "flâneurie". I suppose it is easy to be a critic, but the book is formulaic in the way Robert Greene, Ryan Holiday, or Mark Manson tend to write. This is a recent trend and while I have followed this trend and read the contents of these authors greedily, it just doesn't have the spark that sets apart great literature from great absorption of the work of others. That's it! These works are useful and good, but the works tend to be - what was it they recently suggested lecturers should be? - that's right, "curators" of content. That's it precisely. This book is an excellent example of curated content on idling that the reader will enjoy and no doubt learn from. But it lacks that creative spark of great literature, and it tends to be mono-cultural in its appeal. Just like a competent lecturer. You will learn, not burn.

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