Nietzsche and the Death of Socrates

Dionysus. Photo by Wouter Engler [CC BY-SA 4.0] from Wikimedia Commons

The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is not without significant trepidation that I approach this otherwise short work. The cover blurb tells me this is a "challenging work". Never truer words written. I was comfortable with the basic premise of Nietzsche's later work (written after 1888) - I understand this book represents the starting point for much of Nietzsche's later Apollonian (order) versus Dionysian (chaos) modes, but I was still not convinced about his critical position towards Socrates. How little I knew. 

There is too much in this work to make coherent comment, but suffice to say if one were to start reading Nietzsche, start with this one. Although it might not make so much sense unless one jumps in later when his ideas are more fully developed. Maybe. The thought that wouldn't leave me alone while reading this was Edward de Bono's idea about the Greek Gang of Three (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle). This really challenged my thinking. At the same time, I can't help but think of the Socrates who was also a soldier and was learning to play music just before he drank the hemlock, whereas Plato as far as I know didn't do anything else and was keen to ban certain types of music. 

So lumping them altogether al la Edward de Bono might be clever but I am not convinced. I am also not convinced that de Bono (and yes, I am a fan of de Bono) was all that original. This is one of the great wonders of reading the original texts. I did identify with the varieties of self-consciousness versus meta-cognition issues that consistently arise in the work. But I was unprepared for the onslaught of the Fans of Shakespeare that dominate my thoughts recently. To have Carlyle, Bloom, Nietzsche, and then before I have even written this, Oscar Wilde, tell me how important Shakespeare is, and I realise once more how far behind I am in my reading.

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Wright Brothers: Origins of my fascination with flight

Wright Flyer , first powered flight. By John T. Daniels [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a boy, I loved to read. Every so often at school, the Scholastic "book club" brochure would be sent home, and we were allowed to choose a few books from the catalogue. Two books I remember fondly, Robert Westall's (1975) The Machine Gunners and Quentin Reynolds' (1950) The Wright Brothers: Pioneers of American Aviation. 

McCullough had a lot of competition to win me over (when I think about it). McCullough's book was a gift from my sister. Just before my birthday, I (un)ashamedly posted my Book Depository wishlist on Facebook. Each of my sisters bought me some of the books from the list for my birthday, except the elder of my sisters. She remembered my fascination with Reynolds' book in the 1970s and bought McCullough's book for me instead.

And there it was, just like when I was a child, except the stories of the Wright's mother weren't as forthcoming, and my early education in things like "friction" and "wind resistance" and Orville winning the bicycle race, hunched over, and my burning desire to study "aeronautics" and become a fighter pilot crashed as a nostalgic tidal wave. We call them tsunamis these days, but not in the 70s. I couldn't put McCullough's book down, to the point of staying up far too late to finish it before I left some four hours later to fly to Shanghai. Not as a pilot, regrettably, but that is another, longer story.

I found McCullough's style much like Simon Winchester, but with an urgent sense of drama. Very entertaining. I also felt a bit put out that it didn't cover some parts of Reynolds' children's book, except the few times I read "wind resistance" and a shudder of pleasure rippled through my memories. Yet this is a fine book, and it fills out so much of the Wright brothers' story, more of their sister Katharine, and more of their time in Europe.

And every time I saw that replica of a 1910 Farman at Hong Kong Airport I could have sworn it was a modified Wright Flyer. I didn't know that it was actually Glen Curtiss, along with Alexander Graham Bell, who did a little more of the aeronautical plagiarism, and that the Wrights spent considerable energy in protecting their legacy. Their moral uprightness is evident in McCullough's writing, and the shy, standing on the shoulders of giants for the good of humankind genius of the Brothers Wright rather than greedy profit shines through probably a little too heroically, even for someone who still thinks of the Wright brothers the way he did in the 1970s.

Part of me wanted the book to be more academic, but at the same time it was riveting. It didn't make me regret reading it like part of me still regrets Simon Winchester's Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean. (Although, recently when I gave away a bunch of books to a second-hand bookstore, I rescued Atlantic from the pile because I think I liked it more than I let on.) And how academic could it be? There are pages and pages of references and notes at the back of the book; it is clearly well-researched and the record of the research is detailed enough for any scholar.

It is just that the popular genre leaves me with a sense of the unauthentic. And then I remember my sister remembering me and my fascination with the Wright brothers and I wonder how far one could be objective about these two heroes who did what every boy in history wished he could do, and how the early days of cycling and flying and racing cars were romantic to the point where one could still win the Grand Prix while smoking a cigar and now you can't even buy cigars without breaking the bank because you are not allowed to but the Wrights did it and even though others tried to take it away from them they couldn't and what else could I possibly want in a book?

The more I think about it, the more stars I keep giving it and I shall have to admit that I loved it, just as I did Reynolds' book over forty years ago, and I am reminded of what it is like to work hard and achieve the impossible so why wouldn't it be romantic and nostalgic? It was, it is, and the only thing that upsets me is that Orville neglected his sister Katharine, but thankfully saw her at the last moment and was with her at the end. But that wasn't McCullough's fault. I think it just bothered me more than I can admit, and from what I can remember, Reynolds' never mentioned it. Come to think of it, neither would I to a seven year old boy.

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Mad Men: Poem Unlimited!

Learning to enjoy poetry with Don Draper

Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This collection of poems made an appearance in Season 2, Episode 1 of Mad Men, and concludes with the eponymous title for the final episode of the season. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) sees a guy reading this book in a bar, and asks, "Is it good?". The guy says, “I don’t think you’d like it". Later, Don is reading the book.

I enjoy "discovering" literature through other books and media. One of my favourite discoveries was Lady Rose's Daughter by Mrs Humphry Ward, where a journalist visiting my home town in Gunning in 1905 tells of reading the book while waiting for a delayed train. I have since read numerous references to Mrs Humphry Ward, including in Downton Abbey. Both Downton Abbey and Mad Men include numerous cultural references that are worth pursuing.

Indeed, my fascination with the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald began with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which I first watched while finalising the submission of my PhD thesis. Since casting that monkey off my back, I have been reading great literature as often as I can in an effort to "catch up" (as Harold Bloom said, we often end up reading "against the clock").

It has taken me some time to come to enjoy reading poetry; my earlier hard work in reading Homer and Virgil stood me in good stead. Yet I recall a quote from The Big Short:

Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.

At the time, I might have agreed. But after reading O'Hara's work, I had to think why, as someone who randomly writes poetry, that I would shy away from reading it. And then it all flooded back.

It was in 1981. There was a monsoonal storm outside the old Queenslander classroom in Cairns, Far North Queensland. I was sitting next to the window on the verandah and it was our Year 6 English exam. We had to write a poem. I looked out the window and I wrote a poem about the storm, as if it were a group of demons "playing their game of bedlam" and then moving on. (Bedlam was a rough game all the boys in the school used to play. It was invariably banned as we cycled through new variants of rough games that often ended in bloodied noses.) Debussy would have been proud (the memory makes me think of one of my favourite pieces - the "symphonic poem" Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune).

I was quite happy about the poem, went home, and thought nothing of it. The next day, Mum was called to the school, and I was accused of plagiarism. No child could write such a poem. After what I remember as the longest time, it was decided that my poem was indeed original, and I was awarded 100% for the exam.

But then it got worse. They made me read it out to the entire class - a combined class of about 60 eleven-year-old children. My reference to the game of "Bedlam" wasn't a hit. Kids today would have said that this reference was "lame". What I didn't know then was that the other kids were jealous. But after the whole experience, my thoughts were simple. Fuck poetry. Until I read O'Hara.

I hope the reader will forgive my indulgence in my pitiful primary school memories (channelling Turgenev here), but O'Hara's work brought all this back to me. But not just childhood memories. O'Hara refers to Greek mythology, botany, music, composers, artists (many I had to look up), but I could recognise O'Hara channelling Walt Whitman when I read a line in "Mayakovsky", the final poem in the book:

I leap into the leaves, green like the sea.

So now I find myself wanting to read poetry again. The first thing I did today was to renew my subscription to The Paris Review. (Today I received the last edition of my subscription.) I don't want to miss out on any more new poems, and I will go back and read my old editions. I might even start writing poetry again. All this from buying a book based on a cultural reference in Mad Men.

But one thing that struck me while reading Meditations was what voice would the author use if he were to read his own poems? Would it be lyrical and sweet? How would he pause, where would he place his emphasis? I was shocked to watch a few of Frank O'Hara's readings on YouTube. It was a bit like listening to Ernest Hemingway's voice in his Nobel Prize speech after listening to Corey Stoll speak the way we wished Hemingway spoke (in Midnight in Paris). Yet it gives me confidence that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Magazine and movie people might provide us with perfect images of the literary greats, but great literature is written by real people who live real lives and have foibles like the rest of us.

Why read poetry? I will need to buy Harold Bloom's book to find out in more detail. But for me, at least, reading O'Hara has opened up a whole new world of inner experience, sentiment, and beauty. His work makes me feel exactly as I do when listening to the work of Claude Debussy or my favourite American composer John Adams. It isn't sublime, it's magical. It makes sense of the term that up until now has vexed me: Poem Unlimited.

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Meta-cognition: How I Read Bloom and Why

Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill by Pieter Claesz  (1628).
Pieter Claesz [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

How To Read And Why by Harold Bloom

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read of Bloom in The Paris Review article Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1. I took particular note of his relationship with his teacher, William K. Wimsatt, whom Bloom "agreed to disagree" with on matters literary. In my academic work, I hear this phrase often, and again only recently. For Epictetus, we should thank those who point out our faults so we may change ourselves. Bloom, however, suggests that we can bring about self-change on the basis of self-overhearing. A number of coinciding readings and experiences led me to self-consciously self-overhear myself. For Bloom:

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

This book outlines "how to read and why", and focuses on a handful of Bloom's chosen authors of short stories, novels, plays , and poems, and how and why to read them, in particular. Bloom's (p. 21) thesis is:

It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest... but eventually you will read against the clock... One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change is universal.

Further, Bloom quotes Sir Francis Bacon's advice on reading:

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

When I found myself recently forced to "agree to disagree" with a few people who like to argue for the sport of argument, and who, rather than to learn and change, prefer to find themselves persistently correct and take the final word as some form of noble victory, I found myself overhearing myself. In a case of reading "with an overt urgency" (p. 21), I stumbled upon the concept of meta-cognition in the literature on "self-consciousness". And, thanks to Bloom, a new horizon is visible from the scaffolding of my inner citadel.

Alexander Pope, in the first stanza of Part 2 of An Essay on Criticism, tells me that ignoramuses have the strongest biases, and they let pride prevent them from changing (or "growing"). Instead, our power of reason should drive away pride, so that we can see our faults - not through ourselves, but through friend and foe alike. In effect, we can use feedback from others to correct our knowledge, but only if we can learn to "overhear" ourselves.

The concept of overhearing ourselves, as in being able to hear what we are saying almost as an independent observer, is what Bloom meant. But when I first read it, I immediately thought of it as hearing ourselves too much. When I think of "agreeing to disagree", I see an un-shifting opinion, where facts are "false news", where it is no longer about knowledge, but about some sense of superiority, one over the other. For a very long time, for me this has been a form of "class self-consciousness". Not false consciousness, nor class consciousness, but of being simultaneously conscious of one's class and of one's position in one's class. (I must point out that I mean the class one inhabited as a child, rather than the class one may have "moved to" since.) It is often that I hear from silver-tails and dyed-in-the-wool working class comrades this inability to use reason to develop knowledge.

Pope (and later, Mortimer Adler) wrote that being educated and having read widely are not guarantees of wisdom. Indeed, many well-educated people I have met, particularly those who love to argue for sport and "agree to disagree" when they cannot beat down their opponent with their own sense of righteousness, may properly be referred to as "bookful blockheads, ignorantly read". Given Bloom's focus on the "Western Canon", I wondered how much he was of the Huntington creed of imaginary belonging to some mythical people who span half the globe and much of recorded history. I suspected at first that I might have to acquiesce and accept; to agree to disagree. Yet Bloom doesn't take it there at all.

I meet these people (too often), who, whenever they speak of democracy, are "extremists" who think that democracy is the source of all good, and all political alternatives are the sources of all evil. I don't mean Neoconservatives, but a form of non-violent insistence that "democracy is good for you even if you don't know it" - a form of Western pride. While I am not suggesting that political and economic circumstances are irrelevant, I am of the democracy "deserves two cheers, not three" camp. And I am open to learning more.

So as I "overhear" myself when ambushed by such projected pride in an ambiguous and abstract idea of where I belong in the "Clash of Civilisations" thesis, I feel class self-consciousness, rather than a sense of who is right or wrong. And this is why I read. But how?

Bloom paints so many pictures of literary theory, especially concerning Shakespeare, that focus on the concept of the "will to change". For Bloom, literature is of either the Shakespearean or Cervantean (of Don Quixote fame) modes. Shakespearean characters change when they overhear themselves, as if it were someone else who had spoken.

The Cerveantean approach is where we "learn how to listen to one another" (p. 195) as the basis of change. Further down page 195, Bloom suggests that the solitary reader is more likely to learn, from reading, how to talk to herself than to others. To put these two literary modes in context, authors in the Shakespearean camp include Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Proust, Jane Austen, and Stendhal. In the Cervantean camp reside Italo Calvino, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Guy de Maupassant. I suppose this is why my mind expands when I read the latter, because the mode is less Anglo. And this is where I find Bloom confusing. Is he talking about the Anglo (Shakespeare) versus the Continental (Cervantes) philosophical approaches? Or is there some mystical, mythical, "other" Eastern Canon, as opposed to the Western Canon? In the final pages, it seems more likely that Bloom means the West in all its Abrahamic glory. This makes more sense, hence my refusal to agree to disagree with Bloom. (And thank God I did not imagine Bloom waving a flag with Huntington's nonsense.) Which all leads to my own experience with overhearing myself, and the concept of meta-cognition in relation to my class self-consciousness:

The term “meta-cognition” typically refers to the capacity to monitor and control one’s own cognitive states, and is manifest in one’s judgements (or feelings) concerning one’s own learning and consequent level of certainty or confidence (J.D. Smith 2009; Beran et al. 2012; Proust 2013; Fleming & Frith 2014). The suggestion is that if a creature is able to monitor their own level of confidence, they are to that extent self-conscious.

So, how to read Bloom and why? There is genuine wisdom in his work, and, if one will only listen for oneself while reading, the reader may just "overhear" herself speak. Unless, of course, you prefer to agree to disagree. But I suspect if that is what is happening for you, you might be "overhearing" yourself in the manner of hearing yourself too much. The former helps us to change, the latter helps us to "harden the categories". Or at least that is what I overheard.

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