Lessons from Camus' The Plague: or, Doing one's duty in the present moment

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain at Tate Modern. [Public Domain, photo by David Shankbone, London].

The Plague by Albert Camus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This literary work by Albert Camus might be rewarding if read simply as a novel. But to comprehend the work in the context of his philosophical "book-length essays", The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel (which I am yet to read), and his other famous novel, The Stranger, requires an understanding of Camus' philosophy of the absurd. While Camus refused the label of existentialist philosopher, it is clear that he develops a philosophy of the absurd in the three of the above works I have read thus far. 

I suspect that a reading of The Rebel and also Nuptials will provide further insight into his ideas, but much like reading Nietzsche, I think one could develop a sense of Camus' ideas no matter where one starts. I enjoy referring to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy when trying to comprehend philosophical works, but I follow Mortimer Adler's advice to read the work first, so as to form my own impression, before immersing myself in the interpretations of others'. This particular edition of the novel is helpful in that it contains an afterword, rather than an introduction, by the late Professor Tony Judt.

Whenever I think of absurdity, I tend to think of the Dada Movement. But the ridiculousness of Dada served the purpose of mocking the bourgeois, so it does not relate so much to the absurd in the philosophical sense as it does "absurd" in the sense of "ridiculous". What I gather from my reading is that the absurd relates to the absence of any meaning of life. It is irrational in that you cannot reach, by reason, the meaning of life other than that you live and then you die. 

There is an element of Nietzsche's "God is dead", too, in that Camus attacks religion, no, challenges religion, in its attempt to provide meaning to life (or the after-life). As the title suggests, this novel is a fictional story about the plague striking Oran, Algeria, and the lives of a group of men who are caught up by the inevitable quarantining of the city. In his afterword, Tony Judt tells of how Camus relied on his personal experience of Nazi-occupied France (Camus was a reluctant hero of the French Resistance) as a basis for his story, and how as soon as the tragedy is over, people simply pick up from where they left off and seem to forget the lessons learnt from the trauma.

Without giving too much of the plot away, nor the interesting use of the narrator, the non-religious protagonist simply does his duty. In doing so, we see a human Sisyphus at work. It probably didn't help being sick myself while reading this, and wondering if each time one of the pets scratched themselves I might be in for a dose of the plague, but like all of Camus' work I have read thus far, it leaves me with a strange sense of resignation. I was going to say hope, but this is where Camus disagreed with Sartre and the existentialists: he saw them as "deifying" the knowledge that there was no god (or God or gods), and turning existentialism into its own form of religion, much like the anti-religionist non-scientist science-lovers do on social media these days.

Something that strikes me with Camus is the absence of hope. If one doesn't like it, then one can always end it. And here I draw parallels with the Stoics. There is always that macabre option. But if we choose to live, we can only live for the present moment. What appears again and again in The Plague is a sense of duty. Not so much for a cause, but to do what one does because that is what one does. To live in the present moment, for the future is death, and the past is beyond our control.

Yet this doesn't mean we adopt a hedonistic approach to life, but rather that we do our duty, in accordance with our nature. Of course, these ideas are difficult to comprehend without a thorough reading of Camus, Nietzsche, and the Stoics; even so, it is still difficult to articulate the concept. Camus' use of the novel to explain these concepts is powerful, in that through metaphor, we can come to understand his non-philosophical philosophy.

Rather than attempting to find meaning in life (which is absurd because there is none), we can exist in the present moment and do our duty. And while this may sound nihilistic, there is a sense of peace one can gain by acknowledging that all we can control are our impressions of external events, and then how we react to the things we cannot control. As Camus observed in The Myth of Sisyphus (p. 64):

...integrity has no need of rules.

It would seem that there is some relation to Stoicism, in that personal decision and choice is a central theme. 

But that is just my take on it. If you would rather just read an excellent novel, then this is it. If, of course, you can not wonder about the absurdity of it all after reading it.

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On Creativity and Liberalism: Albert Camus

Allegory of the Seven Liberal Arts by Maerten de Vos (1590). Public Domain via Wikimedia.

Create Dangerously by Albert Camus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short work consists of three speeches: Create Dangerously, delivered in 1957 a few days after Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; Bread and Freedom in 1953; and Defence of Intelligence in 1945. For Camus, there are two kinds of intelligence: "intelligent intelligence, and stupid intelligence" (p. 7). Camus searches for the authentic liberty, rather than the society of signs, the artificial liberty that "inscribes the words 'liberty' and 'equality' on its prisons as well as on its temples of finance" (p. 7). Artists struggle with liberty, in that, to be regarded as great, they must be popular, but in being popular, they cannot be great. Asserting one's freedom is an act of establishing order over chaos:

The free artist is one who, with great effort, creates his own order (p. 27)... [and assumes] all the risks and labours of freedom (p. 28).

Art, then, is the "enemy marked out by every form of oppression" (p. 29). It is here that I start to see parallels between Camus' time (the time of mutually assured destruction) and our own era of incremental tyranny. Camus surprises me by a desire to defend the West, and it would seem specifically the defence of the liberal tradition. But he is not pessimistic; rather, the artist's "ordeal contributes meanwhile to our chances of authenticity" (p. 31). Rather than seeking solitude, the paradox is that the artist must not be popular, but must find peace "in the heat of combat". This reminds me of Jordan B. Peterson and the criticism he is facing at the moment. I must suspend my criticism here as I have only read parts of his work as it relates to Stoicism, but Peterson is surely in the heat of combat in his attempt to make order out of chaos. This connection with the Stoics and Peterson is interesting and appears in Defence of Intelligence, in that:

...the enemy in the future must be fought within ourselves, with an exceptional effort that will turn our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice (p. 36).

And the comparison with our present doesn't end there. For Camus, who fought against the Nazis as part of the French Resistance, attacks against intelligence were part and parcel, not just of Nazi Germany, but of greater Europe:

Goering gave a fair idea of their philosophy by declaring: "When anyone talks to me of intelligence, I take out my revolver". And that philosophy was not limited to Germany. At the same time throughout civilised Europe the excesses of intelligence and the faults of the intellectual were being pointed out" (p. 37).

Now tell me that doesn't resonate with your daily news feed? Artists (experts?) should not "give in when they are told that intelligence is always unwelcome or that it is permissible to lie in order to succeed". Is that what is happening in academia? The collection concludes with Bread and Freedom, where Camus tells us that justice and freedom go hand in hand: we cannot have one without the other, and we cannot allow the few democratic liberties we have now be "taken from us without a protest" (p. 48). If the first concern of any dictatorship is to "subjugate labour and culture", then it is clear we are well-advanced on the path to tyranny. Like all great works of the liberal tradition, Camus' final words ring true:

[F]reedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all (p. 54).

And while for years we have focused on the state and society more generally, and for all our "individualism", I cannot help but think that we have lost the idea of liberty. The words of James Allen (As A Man Thinketh, p. 91) (and certainly the Stoics would agree) mirror Camus' view:

Where the calm mind is there is strength and rest, there is love and wisdom; there is one who has fought successfully innumerable battles against self, who, after long toil in secret against his own failings, has triumphed at last.

For Camus, the problem is more complex than just the artist fighting against or capitulating to the state: it is insidious. It is like the screaming echo chambers of social media, where we protest. But we cannot tell whether we are the martyr or the lion (p. 4); the artist is not faithful to her own genius (p. 5). To put it simply, there is no comfort in freedom, and the free artist is no more comfortable than the free man. Camus seems to be telling us that in the life of the artist, and this encompasses all of "the arts", wisdom only declines when it involves no risk and "belongs to a few humanists buried in libraries" (p. 31). Rather than condemn, the artist must absolve (p. 25). If I were to capture the big problem in higher education in a short sentence, it would be students' constant search for the "right" answer. If wisdom and learning is hard won, and there is no right answer, then this becomes a recipe for burn-out, or at least a jaded fatigue. Camus reminds us that this is because we look for good and evil (see also Nietzsche), rather than to understand. And so, to absolve rather than condemn, to take on the risks and the labours of freedom. Were it only so simple.

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Stranger than Fiction? Indeed, Absurd!

Harbouring the Stranger (circa 1649) by Michiel Sweerts. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Upon finishing this book, I found it difficult to shake the images it left behind. Coupled with Guy de Maupassant's powerfully class conscious Bel Ami, I felt like the chips on my own shoulders now had Maupassant and Camus sitting on them, haunting me like spectres and no way to shake them off. Not as if the books had been absorbed into my identity, which most good books seem to do, but as if they were somehow added on and would require surgery to be removed. One sleep after finishing the book, I feel like John Nash's character in A Beautiful Mind, I know they are there, but they do not bother me too much if I don't engage with them. I have had the urge, since reading The Myth of Sisyphus, to read all of Camus' work, as I did with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I had purchased The Plague and The Outsider to read, not realising at the time that The Outsider is actually a different translation of L’Étranger, the latter translated by Sandra Smith. I was annoyed that I had purchased the same book, but a quick perusal of Smith's translation shows some differences that will be worth exploring. Nonetheless, with these two spectres haunting enough as it is, I was not ready to read the same story again - it is much too vivid still. On the back cover of Sandra Smith's translation, a quote by William Boyd says it more eloquently than I:

One of those books that marks a reader's life indelibly.

I'll say. When I went in search of William Boyd, I discovered a review in The Guardian that seemed to be somewhat sour grapes. In a review entitled "Bamboozled", Adam Mars-Jones says:

It's a mystery how some of William Boyd's journalism was published the first time, let alone reprinted in Bamboo.

Very clever! But maybe not as clever as the New York Times review by David Haglund:

It’s difficult, in fact, to argue with any of Boyd’s conclusions. But if one can’t argue with a review, why bother with it at all? One would rather — at least, I would rather — read a striking if ultimately dubious argument about a book or a movie than the level-headed evaluations provided in these pages. It is more important for a critic to be interesting than to be right.

The artist as critic. But Boyd says what I felt about Camus:

...one remembers vividly the actual reading of the book itself, the sense of unfolding revelation afforded, however modest, of doors being opened, the power of one writer's imagination impinging irrevocably on your own... the urge to consume the entire oeuvre was a vital part of this writer's allure.

Camus died at age 46. For some reason his James Dean-like cover photo and his candid discussion of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus had me thinking he had suffered the same fate as other literary greats. But it wasn't the case, he was killed in a car crash while holding a train ticket - he had caught a lift rather than catch the train. And in this example of life imitating art, we find Camus' idea of the absurd (apparently he didn't like being called an existentialist) neatly captured in The Stranger:

Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. Camus’s philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox.

When Meursault, the protagonist, is attempting to accept "the machine" (I couldn't help thinking of the term "machinery of government"), the idea of the system and indeed the guillotine all occupy one's imagination in a swirling confusion of "absurdity". I was perplexed by the idea of the guillotine in a novel written in 1942, so I did a little research. The last use of the guillotine in France, and the last official "beheading" in the West was in Paris in 1977, when I was seven years old. In my lifetime. Just over forty years ago, in France. I am still flabbergasted. Yet the last public execution by guillotine was in 1939, only three years before Camus published the novel, so the terror of that machine was very much still in the public memory. (It makes me shudder to think of the guillotine simulation at Questacon - I don't think I could put my head in there nowadays.) Marcel Chevalier was the last Chief Executioner (the position was informally known as Monsieur de Paris) of France - can you imagine a public service position with that title in Australia? And yet, there it was in France in my own lifetime. Now that is absurd! The bottom line is that I don't know what to think, and Camus' absurd philosophy suggests that there is no point anyway. Having said that, the second part of Camus' philosophy deals with rebellion, and so the absurd and the rebel provide some understanding of the "why". I will have to reserve judgement for now, but if I do find I am actually in The Matrix, at this point I would be wishing I had told Morpheus to shove that red pill up his butt! For Aristotle, the root of education may be bitter and the fruit may be sweet, but he never said that once you were planted, you would grow until you die and you could never cut off those nasty philosophical roots, no matter what you did, ever again. How absurd!

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The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Camus gives words and thoughts and theories and literary examples to my own primitive discoveries about work and suicide. I remember waking one morning, at age 19, and thinking: "If this is all my life will ever be, then today I must either change it or end it". If I had to roll that rock up the hill one more time then that was it for me. I don't write this gratuitously or intend to treat suicide glibly, but in the context of Camus' "philosophical suicide", my experience of the absurd has informed much of my philosophy for living. I have often thought that if God does not exist, then there is no point in living. Camus twists around varieties of my thoughts, but he does so referring particularly to Nietzsche (that most famous of God's "assassins") and antitheses of my understanding. This is a short book and it seems to be an abridged version of a much larger work. Nevertheless, it is sufficient to point out a number of my reading deficits. This may require a second reading once I complete Kafka's The Castle, and much of Nietzsche. Camus broaches many topics that tend to be completely avoided by almost any person to whom I have ever spoken. It would seem that once again Continental philosophers have a monopoly on saying what everyone is thinking but were too afraid to say. Two quotes resonated with me:

On the futility of suicide, from p. 6:

I have heard of an emulator of Peregrinos, a post-war writer who, after having finished his first book, committed suicide to attract attention to his work. Attention was in fact attracted, but the book was judged no good.

And on death as a work in progress, from p. 111:

If something brings creation to an end, it is not the victorious and illusory cry of the blinded artist: 'I have said everything', but the death of the creator which closes his experience and the book of his genius.

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La Chute: Albert Camus on the consequences of not learning to live

The Fall of Phaeton by Peter Paul Rubens, [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Fall by Albert Camus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the last of Camus' works completed before his death in 1960. First published in 1956, the work is presented as a monologue by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Parisian lawyer who has moved to Amsterdam to become a "judge-penitent". I will return to this term later. 

Clamence has become bitterly cynical about judges, law, and justice, and has taken to womanising, drinking, and generally driving himself into the ground through hard living. I've read other reviews suggesting the work is Clamence's "confession", for others it is his "self-accusation". The story (it is clearly a philosophical work, rather than a novella) incorporates the stolen panel "The Just Judges" of the Van Eyck painting, The Mythical Lamb (also known as the Ghent altarpiece). The panel was actually stolen in 1934 and is missing to this day. 

There are a few other historical references which I found fascinating, including Girolamo Savonarola (a Florentine precursor to the Reformation and mentioned in Machiavelli's The Prince); Bertrand du Guesclin (a Breton knight and French commander during the 100 Years War); Johannes Vermeer (Dutch painter famous for Girl with a Pearl Earring); and the "Little Ease" (1.2 metre square torture cell in the Tower of London's White Tower where one can neither stand nor lie down); Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (and an earlier reference to Iseult, an alternative name for Isolde in the Arthurian story); and François Achille Bazaine (who rose from the ranks under Louis-Philippe and later Napoleon III, and held every rank from Fusilier to Marshal of France).

I was surprised by how others had interpreted the work. Scott Horton (2009) in Harper's Magazine Blog sees Clamence's fall as the fall of society after the Second World War, and draws parallels with the recent past. He also suggests that the The Just Judges symbolises that while the panel is fake, there is an original, and we can live in hope that the just judges will return some time in the future. I find it interesting that this echoes Girolamo Savonarola's prediction of a prophet from the north who would come to remove the corruption of the church. 

Tony Judt (1994) in the New York Review of Books goes so far as to say that Camus was already in decline before his death, and that he was only "moderately gifted" at philosophy. (Judt also wrote that The Myth of Sisyphus "has not worn well".) I am inclined to make my own interpretation of the work, based on a few things that others (as far as I know) have not mentioned. 

First, Clamence mentions frequently how he despises the dark, underground, and cramped spaces (like the "little ease") and prefers the heights and mountain-tops. Maybe his work as a lawyer frustrates his desire to be a philosopher? 

Second, there are several references to the problems with altruism. For example (p. 8):

...he wrote over the door of his house: 'Wherever you come from welcome and enter'. And who do you suppose welcomed his invitation? Why, militiamen, who marched in, made themselves at home and disembowelled him.

And (p. 72):

Too many people have decided to do without generosity in practising charity.

From these, I see the work is much more about the individual. 

Third, the work addresses the challenge of living a virtuous life. Virtues and vices make numerous appearances, including jealousy (p. 66), cowardice (p. 34), shrinking from responsibility (p. 24), being so self-centred as to not take anyone else seriously (p. 54), and a raft of other issues that resonate with me. For example (p. 52):

...we would like at the same time to be no longer guilty and not to make the effort to purify ourselves. Not enough cynicism, not enough virtue.

I could go on. For me, the work addresses all of the issues of the self-centred person coming to terms with self-respect, and dealing with the guilt and shame that replays itself in the mind. In particular (p. 70):

Don't wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day.

And avoiding self-reflection has its own price (p. 50):

I received all the wounds at once and lost my strength at a single blow. Then the whole universe began to laugh around me.

I have written previously about self-respect and how we suffer what Joan Didion referred to as our own home movie, but Clamence refers to as a film (p. 50):

I ran this little film a hundred times, with odd variations, in my imagination. But it was too late and for a few days I would suffer from a feeling of bitter resentment.

Clearly, Clamence is not happy with his past choices and has no idea of his purpose in life. In assessing his life (he is aged 40 by this time), he laments (p. 55):

I measured the years that separated me from my end. I looked out at examples of men of my age who were dead already. And I was tormented by the idea that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I don't know.

All Clamence can do is judge himself (the judge-penitent) (p. 53):

Some mornings, I would conduct my trial to the very end and reach the conclusion that what I excelled in above all was contempt.

Clamence is not free, but wishes to be so (p. 58):

I wanted to break up the mannequin I presented to the world wherever I went, and lay open to scrutiny what was in its belly.

For me, the fall is not about the fall of society or humankind, but the inevitable residue that greets he who does not learn to live (p. 90):

These nights, or rather these mornings, because the fall occurs at dawn, I go out and walk briskly along the canals.

Camus presents to us, through Clamence, what it is like to live without philosophy, what it is like to live without self-respect (p. 90):

Yes, we've lost the light, the mornings, the holy innocence of the man who forgives himself.

Clamence is happy to die, not because of some reconciliation of the self, but because he knows himself, yet is incapable of conquering himself.

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Overcoming Self-Doubt: Stillness is the Key

"Sisyphus" by Pietro della Vecchia (Public domain).

I am a fan of Ryan Holiday's work. I tell my students in my leadership and politics classes, "Be like Ryan". Read, write, think about your future. Develop a philosophy - rules to live by. Establish your purpose - what a colleague calls one's ikigai.

Ryan Holiday reads books. He is well-read. He writes books. He lives on the land. He is doing in his early thirties what I am still not quite able to do in my fifties. But that's not the point. 

As Theodore Roosevelt warned, "comparison is the thief of joy". I know all about my own circumstances, not somebody else's. Better to judge myself by my own principles and standards. 

I have read many self-improvement books and I take something away from each one I have read. But I am also conscious of the marketing behind such works. I recall accompanying one of my in-laws to an event. It turned out to be Amway. I bought Dale Carnegie's famous book but I was wary of every time a colleague asked me, "I'd like to talk to you about a business opportunity".

I found myself becoming a little wary of Holiday's approach to this book about one third of the way through. I felt it was formulaic and repeating old ground from his earlier works. But I have been following his work from the early days of the simple Reading List email newsletter, so I acknowledged my concerns and pushed on.

I think it is the way the book builds. The end of each paragraph gives a few short sentences of encouragement. I was experiencing the elevation at the end of each chapter much like one does when reading Carnegie. Frowning often while reading, it wasn't until the last few pages that my faith in Holiday was restored.

In "Act Bravely", one of the final chapters, Holiday discusses Albert Camus' The Fall. I am nodding in agreement and I thought, "I know this story, I've read most of Camus". I had to check my blog and there is was, "La Chute".

It struck me again that Holiday is really well-read. My faith restored, I went back and examined what had been going on for me.

To cut a long story short, I suffer from self-doubt in the way of Steven Pressfield. It can be crippling. Writing this right now is part of my preparation to write something else that I wish would just go away. But it won't and I have a job to do.

Holiday discusses the idea of stillness in the context of looking after oneself. I noted that many of the tips and tricks he mentions for maintaining stillness in one's life, I have used since I can remember.

Albert Camus struck me the same way when he discussed suicide. (I am not advocating suicide but I went through the philosophical exercise as the Stoics do without realising it had been done by others. This is a major reason to read according to Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino.) Ryan Holiday introduced me to the Stoics and they had the same view of suicide as a legitimate philosophical option.

Reading Stillness is the Key revealed to me the extent of my self-doubt. Not only about myself and my academic work, but also about the processes I use and how I defend my inner citadel from nonsense, how I do things like writing this blog post as a hobby and how I might prioritise doing so on this long weekend holiday instead of doing other work that is always there and can take up all my time when I let it.

And there it is - Ryan Holiday has done it again. All writing follows a formula, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is formulaic. Indeed, Aristotle's formula was original once! It brings me back to a quote from Jack London's To Build a Fire on my blog post from last Sunday:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

To be formulaic in writing is to lack "the significances". In these, Ryan Holiday lacks nothing.

The Futility of Buying Life to Escape Death

El Tres de Mayo (The Third of May 1808) by Francisco Goya, 1814. Photo: [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

This novella by Graham Greene was written in 1944 (first conceived in 1938) as a screen play that was somehow discarded and lost in the MGM archives. Greene was unable to make a living from writing books and took a contract with MGM to write screenplays, and before the main story, the book includes a couple of screen sketches. In 1983, the story was found and MGM sold the rights to a publisher, hence this book.

Reading other's unfinished work is a great learning experience, and it is useful to see how the plot and structure of creative writing emerges from different authors. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is a book I wish I had read while writing my PhD - the thought process is clear, but the details are still being threshed out. Seeing how Fitzgerald did this has left a powerful impression on me.

In the first part of Greene's book, he tells the story of what he was doing before and after the war, and how the story came about. He then introduces two film sketches that remained unfinished. It is interesting that in just a few pages, the outline of a movie appears. Greene added the film sketches because he had largely forgotten about The Tenth Man, thinking it was only (p. 10):

...two pages of outline but [it was] a complete short novel of thirty thousand words.

He then went through his own archives and found two other sketches - although less complete - that he had also forgotten about. (Wouldn't it be lovely to have written so much one had forgotten some of it?)

The main text, The Tenth Man, reads as a complete novella - there is certainly nothing undeveloped there. But the introduction sets out how the novella began as a few sentences outlining an idea. The two film sketches, which are incomplete, provide a bridge to Greene's process from a few sentences to a complete story.

As for the story, the cover blurb says it all: a rich man in a German prison draws lots to see who will die. (The Germans are going to execute 1 in 10 prisoners, and the prisoners have to decide who it will be.) The rich man loses, but offers all of his wealth to stay alive. Another prisoner, thinking of his family, takes up the rich man's offer.

I recall from reading Hemingway's letters and various articles how he developed a story out of a simple idea. For example, The Sun Also Rises is a story to answer the question, What would happen if your penis was shot off during the war? Greene's story follows a similar process: What would it be like to pay somebody else to die for you, if you gave up everything to live?

The story isn't so much Faustian, for the poor prisoner insists that the rich man sticks to the deal (after the rich man has an attack of conscience), and there is much more to the story after that.

In many ways, it addresses questions of life and death, and whether we control our fate or whether it matters or not. Or indeed, if we think we can thwart destiny, think again. Maybe the moral of the story is amor fati?

I've been reading and thinking a lot about death lately, especially the idea that all fear can be reduced to a fear of death, and, because we all die, there is nothing to be afraid of - it is a given. Perhaps it is not a topic Australians discuss in any philosophical sense, unlike what I have read by the Stoics, Albert Camus or what is explored in Mexico's Festival of the Dead. 

I think this aversion to thinking about death is philosophically limiting. But rather than Camus, which might be a little confronting for the uninitiated, Graham Greene deals with the topic in a way that makes it hard not to reflect on one's values, the purpose of life, and, I suppose, that death accompanies life.

It is certainly macabre, but there is much to learn from this novella. The story was made into a TV movie starring Sir Anthony Hopkins in 1988.

The Inner Civil War of Right and Wrong, Life and Death, and Being and Time, or: How I pine for the me who knew everything

Cypher in The Matrix: "Ignorance is bliss".

I am constantly annoyed by the pro-science Atheists who think that religion causes war. Since when was Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, a priest? After much reading and reflection, I find myself unable to implement any philosophy of life without taking a leap of faith. Or, to use the analogy from The Matrix, now that I have taken the red pill (education) and I cannot go back, the way forward insists that I have faith in the victory of one side of my inner civil war. But which one?

An important place to begin in philosophy is this: a clear perception of one’s own ruling principle (Epictetus 1.26.15).

I have been reading in ever-decreasing circles lately that begin and end, like my days, with Stoicism. In Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle is the Way, drawing on Epictetus (Discourses 1.26.15), and later Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 12:22), how we perceive the world is the critical first step in practising philosophy.

It's all in how you perceive it. You're in control. You can disperse with misperception at will, like rounding a point (Marcus Aurelius 12:22).

In my reading, this is repeatedly referred to as "right perception". Some translations equate this with "right thinking", but thinking and perceiving are not the same. For example, I could conduct a thought experiment where I might deliberately think differently about something, whereas the only way I can "perceive" something differently is to either have a fundamental change of base character or otherwise to deceive myself in a stupid way. So "right perception" becomes key.

The trouble is that now I enter unfamiliar territory with the likes of, in reverse chronological order, Heidegger, Camus, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. I could come forward (or go back) to Harold Bloom and Joseph Epstein, too, but I will leave that for another time. There are others but this is where I am at right now.

What I still find surprising is that the thoughts I have have been had by others, even two thousand years ago, and reading reveals this time and again. I think I read this from Epstein, but I cannot be sure until I find it again.

Which brings me to Camus. His first principle of philosophy was whether one should commit suicide or not. I see this mostly as a decision to live or not to live. The Stoics had a similar view of choosing to live or not. I recall when I was nineteen years old, when my repetitive job was so boring, and I thought to myself, "this cannot be all there is to life". I chose, metaphorically, to live.

Nietzsche took this further, expanding on Schopenhauer's ideas. But Nietzsche declared that God was dead, and we had killed Him. This left a great void. Where do our first principles come from if there is no God? I have grappled with this for decades, but settled my theological comprehensions deeper and deeper over time. If there is no God, then there is no point.

So, if we take our own beliefs as a starting point, then Heidegger presents a further clue: We are what we do. Not what we talk about doing. But there is more to Heidegger.

Yesterday, I read Simon Critchley's eight-part blog article on "Why Heidegger Matters". Of course, I have much reading to do to command the literature, or to master the philosophical lessons, but my thinking is leading to somewhere useful.

It struck me how much of what Heidegger wrote follows my own "perception" of the world. While the Stoics spoke of "right perception", Heidegger suggests we are "thrown" into the world. Again, the strange occurrences of things happening at the right time gives me a sense of "flow" rather than "throw". This particular topic miraculously appeared on ABC Radio National last night as soon as I had changed the radio station out of boredom with ABC Canberra. The topic was Epicurean versus Existentialist views on death.

This throws up two issues, assuming my idea of "perception" is how I perceive the world to be and derive my meaning from my life in that perceived world. First, there is "right" as in what does one mean by the "right" way to perceive something? Is there a general or universal idea of what is "right", or is this something an individual judges for themselves? I think that, should an individual make their own judgement, which is what Heidegger seems to mean by "freedom" (loosely - I think!), then "right" perception would be what I thought to be "right" for me.

If I were to encapsulate Stoicism, James Allen, Benjamin Franklin, and various religious works I can subscribe to, collectively, a sense of "right" - which I see as congruent - then my idea would be that my sense of what Heidegger was saying, in that life is finite and who I am is what I do, then I have the recipe for constructing "right" perception, with which to practise Stoicism properly, at least according to me.

But this leads me to my second problem: Can "right" change with "time", or with circumstances through "being"? What if one measured one's virtues against a preconceived notion of "right perception", only to get to one's deathbed (a Stoic measure) to find that their perception was wrong?

So, deciding upon one's idea of "right" and how to determine the idea, whether this means "right" according to a universal principle or "right" as in what is "right" for me, is a skill that ought to be a priority from a young age. This negates much of the Atheist scientists' view of the world. They annoy me with their "I know everything" pessimism and the assumption that humans, being inherently social animals who pretend to deny their instincts in the name of "science", have no answer for the two big questions (some of what follows is borrowed and paraphrased from The Daily Stoic):

What do I really want? What am I actually after here?

These are difficult questions, and mostly the answers are sought in the middle of an internal struggle. Martin Luther King Jr said:

There is something of a civil war going on within all of our lives.

So we have contradiction and inconsistent wishes that have us working against ourselves. The Stoics said this is the result of screwed up judgements or biased thoughts. The "civil war" King spoke of was a war, in each individual, between the good parts of their soul and the bad.

To quote somebody from my past who I cannot recall, but whose words have never left me, I find that the pursuit of knowledge, which is part of my day job, is admirable but incomplete. My past friend or colleague said it best:

Knowledge gets us part of the way but faith fills the gap.

And so, as I turn to James Allen as part of my daily reflection, there are echoes of two important religious teachings:

Whom Allah doth guide - he is on the right path (Qur'an 7:178) [and] The foolishness of a man twists his way while his heart frets against the Lord (Proverbs 19:3).

There is so much more for me to do. So much more to read and learn. And while it appears to be within grasping distance each day, I know that the only certain goal is death (hopefully not too soon!) and I can never know everything. Serendipitously, Allen brings it all together in a program for living:

To follow, under all circumstances, the highest promptings within you; to be always true to the divine self; to rely upon the inward Voice, the inward Light, and to pursue your purpose with a fearless and restful heart, believing that the future will yield unto you the need of every thought and effort; knowing that the laws of the universe can never fail, and that your own will come back to you with mathematical exactitude - this is faith and the living faith.

One cannot know what one doesn't know. But one can know how much one doesn't know. Regardless, the end is death. But once one has taken the red pill, there is little one can do. Sometimes I pine for the me who knew less. At least then I knew everything.

On Naturalism: Guy de Maupassant and literary cloning of humans

Christ Walking on the Water (circa 1880) by Julius Sergius Von Klever. Public Domain via Wikimedia. In Bel Ami (1885), a similar painting by the fictitious Hungarian painter, Karl Markovitch, plays an important metaphor. 

Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In his review of the 2012 movie version of this novel, New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden refers to Georges Duroy as:

...the coldblooded social climber who seduces his way to the top of Gallic society in Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 novel, Bel Ami, is one of the nastiest pieces of work in French literature.

Sure, Holden says this so he can point out how lame Robert Pattinson (of Twilight fame, apparently - I wouldn't know, I can't stand teeny-bopper nonsense. Besides, Georges had a moustache, maybe Pattinson was too young to grown one) plays the part of this cold-blooded social climber. Yet Georges reminds me of almost everyone I work with, and everyone around me, including myself. Or at least how everyone wants to be. For he has a major chip on his shoulder, one borne by being of a peasant family. But Guy de Maupassant is regarded as a "naturalist", in that he tried to depict human nature as it really was, rather than an idealised or "Disney-fied" version that late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century humans have plastered over their collective vision. I got the feeling that Duroy was not as bad as all that. He was parts of me and parts of those around me. His depictions of envy and the "chip on the shoulder" talented peasant boy who was wrenched out of his comfort zone by the army resonates deeply. And those around Duroy remind me of how I see many others. Maybe my empathy for Duroy holds up a crystal-clear mirror to me. Not something to celebrate, but certainly a reflection to reflect upon. And I think that is why this novel is so very good - it really does depict human nature. The good guy doesn't win in the end, the bad guy doesn't win either, but the scheming Duroy, self-made not through hard work but purely through social climbing, and climbing on the social climbers around him - it was like watching real life, but not where one could sit in judgement (as we tend to do), because deep down, we know that we are one of these very characters, too. This is only the second book I have read by Guy de Maupassant, and my earlier discussion of the collection of short stories in A Parisian Affair had me thinking of Hemingway. It is interesting that I am presently half-way through Albert Camus' The Stranger, and the translator's introduction mentions the similarities between Camus' style and Hemingway, and how his "American" translation brings back some of what Gilbert's "English" translation lost. How much have we lost in the translation of Bel Ami? It would seem like not a thing. How would it be possible for this novel to be any better? I am pleased novels like this are few and far between, or I would quickly become tired of reading. And the biggest lesson I have learnt from this novel? Nietzsche's idea of "beyond". Beyond morality. Nietzsche, I think, meant what Guy de Maupassant does: strip away the veneer of morality and tell the story like it is - no embellishing the facts with morals, no pointing out vices and virtues. Only then, it would seem, can we truly reflect upon ourselves, can we truly see ourselves as we are, without the bias of morality. As Nietzsche suggested, many so-called virtues are weaknesses. Not because he was the "Antichrist", but because if we look at ourselves in the mirror of life, we can only see the vices and virtues we choose to see: "Oh, OK, I get it, I eat too much, but at least I am not a liar..." [never mind that we are disgustingly jealous but can't see this while it is in the very act of taking out our own eye]. This is how I interpret Nietzsche's meaning, and Guy de Maupassant, the great naturaliste, makes this clear to me in this wonderful story.

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I think, therefore, I am... Hey, what's that shadow?

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre meet Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960.
Photo: Public Domain.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book provides an overview of existentialism. Originally written in 1958, Barrett was bringing the tradition of existentialism (those leading to Sartre) to the United States. That the book is set in the midst of the Cold War is obvious, and when released again in the 1990s, the book's setting had not yet (albeit imminently) changed. But there were many lessons to be learnt and the book achieved for me what I really needed: an overview of existentialism and the works of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre all in one place. I needed this to make sense of other works I am still engrossed in, and this book fulfilled the role admirably. I will get to the works of these aforementioned existentialists, plus Wittgenstein, but not yet. 

When I read John Stuart Mill in detail I couldn't help but recognise fragments of my education materialising almost as if I had written them in On Liberty. Elements of Stoicism remind me of things I had discovered (apparently) independently but more likely acquired through osmosis through my education. Thinking of myself as a frustrated post-modernist who can only really comprehend empiricism and positivism, I welcomed the familiarity of Heidegger's work, again, as if I had heard it before. But what really struck me was the eloquence of Barrett in saying what I was just saying to my students in my lecture today: you have to understand ideology and philosophy to understand politics. Barrett says it thus:

...anyone who wishes to meddle in politics today had better come to some prior conclusions as to what man [sic] is and what, in the end, human life is all about. I say "in the end" deliberately because the neglect of first and of last things does not - as so-called "practical" people hope - go unpunished, but has a disastrous way of coming in the back door and upsetting everything.

Barrett also highlights a problem for Americans that any typical group of Australian political science lecturers will tell you could easily still apply to Australians:

The [Australian] insisted that all international problems could all be solved if men [sic] would just get together and be rational; Sartre disagreed and after a while discussion between them became impossible. "I believe in the existence of evil," says Sartre, "and he does not." What the [Australian] has not yet become aware of is the shadow that surrounds all human Enlightenment.

The final words indicate the extent of this darkness surrounding the light, and in these words I see my frustration in the background of my positivist and empiricist viewpoint: put simply "he [sic] must first exist in order to logicize". While I doubt I can ever change my habitual viewpoint, particularly this late in the game, I have just purchased a copy of Walter Kaufmann's edited collection, Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, which recaps a number of works I have read previously (such as Notes from Underground and Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, but it also includes numerous works by Heidegger, Nietzsche, Jaspers, et al. which are essential reading. 

It is as if I have just stepped off the MTR at East Tsim Sha Tsui station in Hong Kong. I must walk now to Tsim Sha Tsui station (proper) to get back on the main line, but I know I will have to walk to East TST to venture back into existentialism again sometime soon. The branches of my literary journey do get tangled at times, but at least now the basics are starting to reveal themselves more clearly, even if I am noticing the darkness in the background.

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Perception in Stoicism, Buddhism, and New Thought: Creating an inner life through imagination

Drinking tea and reading books and enjoying the life of the mind. Photo by Dr Michael de Percy.

Mastering Your Inner World Neville Goddard Explained: Manifesting with Ease by Rita Faith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There will be no more academic snobbishness from here on in. Reading this book, it hit me like a thunderbolt, bringing back a bunch of lessons from earlier readings and confirming so many life experiences. I've noticed the difference already with some simple techniques that make life so much better. Is it the book, the techniques, the confirmation of naturally acquired skills? I don't know. But here is my attempt to explain.

I am at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in early 1993. The ropes test. 6 metres up and down then up and down again in patrol order (rifle and webbing). Not my greatest strength and I am on "sluggers" or remedial physical training until I pass. I am talking with a colleague about it, that last "bite" on the rope that we struggle to make. We decide that we should just do it. Take that last bite. The body won't let us down. Wrong. And the blisters are worse than the thump on the ground from 6 metres up. No shame though, I gutted it out.

That  night, I dream about the ropes. While everyone else is eating dinner tomorrow night, I (along with the other sluggers), will get another crack at the tests we haven't passed. All night I toss and turn and I am up the rope and then down and then up again and then down and it all flows. The dream repeats, repeats, repeats, repeats... zzzzzz.

The next day I pass and I never fail the ropes test again. It was a purely mental issue from an earlier experience with the rope obstacle on an obstacle course and an arsehole I have since cursed and forgiven and now whatever. I was just a boy. A feeling of cowardice and not good enough and immorality in that sense of the bayonet as a moral weapon and I was immoral. So much conservative crap that did more for that arsehole's ego than my motivation. Life experiences have proven the opposite and I have learnt to be much kinder to myself.

Recent experiences with Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) have revealed a bunch of parts of me that I wasn't aware of. I have learnt to recognise the various parts of me, the good, the bad, the evil, the off with the daisies naive kid, the arsehole dirty fighter, the whole shebang. They are all part of me and they won't go away. But my imagination has been fired up to see the Council of Me, the various parts that run riot if the conscious me doesn't acknowledge them and keep them under control.

It all sounds hokey. I felt this recently when I decided that I needed to find my inner compass. I found the website Wanderlust and an exercise by Melissa Colleret to do just that. It felt hokey, but I came up with three of my core values that echo past exercises I have done. Love, Freedom, and Learning: Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina.

I realised that I have been manifesting my entire life. Be an army officer; be a theologian; be a politician (oh no, not for me! Well saved!); be a political scientist; live the life of the mind; live in the country but work in Canberra (my favourite city in Australia); live in a federation house (and other things too personal to mention). I remember after graduating from Duntroon how it struck me: Now what? It makes me think of a quote attributed to the actor, Lily Tomlin:

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific.

I've been trying to practice Stoicism for the last four years, and along with every other endeavour of my idealism, I have trashed my ideals. My enthusiasm for Stoicism has not been able to overcome its shortcomings. Are we really to resign ourselves to our circumstances? Imagine if I'd done that when I was stuck in a job that was so bad, I contemplated the main problem concerning philosophy, a la Albert Camus.

Often, when teaching leadership classes, I get to re-live my shortcomings. For example, James Clawson's work separates the "what do I want to be" from the "how do I want to feel" (the Internal Life's Dream - LDint - versus the External Life's Dream - LDext - otherwise known as "Resonance").

I have found my calling and I am living in accordance with my inner compass (even when I felt I wasn't).  Nothing hokey about any of that.

But the Stoics don't feel too much. And, like Buddhists, they focus on managing their perceptions or impressions. And here is the common ground I have found with Goddard's ideas:

Imagination is God and God is imagination.

And finally I arrive at Rita Faith's book. It isn't hokey. Neville Goddard was an inspiration to Wayne Dyer. So you don't like Hay House? Well Dyer's PhD supervisor was Abraham Maslow. You know, the first theory you learnt at uni and the theory you tried to fit into all your first year essays because it was the only one that made sense? Yeah, him.

As I finished reading Faith's work on Goddard, I was half way through Jack Kerouac's Wake Up, a biography of the Buddha. I've been thinking a lot about Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. (I am still trying to work out whether Hesse was writing about Buddha or a parallel to Buddha. I suppose it doesn't matter.)

The Britannica entry on Herman Hesse's Siddhartha reads as follows:

Despairing of finding fulfillment, he goes to the river and learns to simply listen. He discovers within himself a spirit of love and learns to accept human separateness... As Siddhartha grows older, a fundamental truth gradually becomes apparent both to him and to us: there is no single path to self-growth, no one formula for how to live life. Hesse challenges our ideas of what it means to lead a spiritual life, to strive after and to achieve meaningful self-growth through blind adherence to a religion, philosophy, or indeed any system of belief.

There was my connection. The aptly named Rita Faith tells me that Goddard says I have to die to my former state of mind. I have to imagine not how I will achieve what I want to achieve, but how I will feel (there's that Clawson again) when I have achieved it.

The Law of Attraction and other New Thought self-help books go back to the 19th century. The latest iteration by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, has some major issues. For starters, Wayne Dyer wanted nothing to do with it. Second, Neville Goddard didn't think it was a secret at all and (apparently) he taught for some forty years never charging for his lectures, only asking for a contribution to his travelling expenses.

And more recently, Mark Manson has called "bullshit" on The Secret. And then it takes an interesting turn:

Call me crazy, but I believe that changing and improving your life requires destroying a part of yourself and replacing it with a newer, better part of yourself. It is therefore, by definition, a painful process full of resistance and anxiety. You can’t grow muscle without challenging it with greater weight. You can’t build emotional resilience without forging through hardship and loss. And you can’t build a better mind without challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.

Call me crazy, but isn't that what Goddard said? Isn't that what Rita Faith says, too? You have to actually DIE to your former self, not think it positively away with other positive delusionals!

Here is the key takeaway from Faith's short book. We can manage our impressions (or perceptions). For the Stoics, events are facts neither good nor bad, only our reaction to our impressions of these events is good or bad. To the Buddhists, as far as my reading takes me, our impressions of the world are the cause of our suffering. What if there was another way? And what if it wasn't a secret?

The Stoics leave out the how of managing our impressions. I still use Stoic philosophy, but as Seneca would have said, if Epicurus tells me something good I should use it. Rita Faith is telling me something good and I'm using it.

For all the times I have dwelt upon negative thoughts, becoming jaded at being overworked or overworking myself out of some sort of fear or self-doubt, or been afraid to be happy about something in case I jinx it, I can finally call bullshit.

There is no single way, religion, or philosophy. Human separateness (from Hesse), and individualism as a reaction to my senses (from Kerouac), versus re-programming my senses, or dying to my former state of mind, has provided me with a way to use my imagination to control my inner world. The Stoics tell me to do this, but they don't tell me how.

It's not the kind of delusional positive thinking that I abhor. It's like the law of attraction but it is also more like the experiences I have had when all of my mind and energies were focused and brought to bear on some purpose. And it can be done with memories, too. The idea of revision is to go back and reimagine the past. Not the events per se but the feelings.

It struck me that during one of my EMDR sessions, I recall an event as a kid in Western Sydney. I am in a fight with another kid. The mother of the kid I am fighting and her friend are standing by, telling the other kid how best to hurt me. 

I had mostly forgotten about the experience, but I remember a moment of clarity that makes me laugh. The mother's friend had mini-fox terriers. I looked at them and thought "wow they are cool dogs!" I have two of my own mini-foxies now! And so the memory is revised. No longer crapping on about a crappy situation, but grateful for my mutts and the revised memory.

And every day I think about how I will feel when I accomplish the things I aim to accomplish. Not how I will accomplish them. And much like giving myself time to think really works, giving myself time to feel works remarkably well, too. I am delighted that this book fills some gaps in my knowledge. Or, in the words of my sister:

Learning is cyclic, not linear. There are never any gaps, just the right timing and prior knowledge to build upon.

And all this from a 46-page page quick-read at AUD$3.99 via Kindle!

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The Inner Life

Thomas a Kempis on Mount Agnes (c. 17th Century) via Wikimedia.

The Inner Life by Thomas à Kempis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Penguin's Great Ideas series showcases important works in an abbreviated format (not my favourite way to read), and this work by Thomas à Kempis is drawn from the larger work The Imitation of Christ. After reading Benjamin Franklin (see his 13-week virtues program in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin), Albert Camus, and James Allen, I can see the connections to this work dating from the early fifteenth century. There are also elements of Stoicism, recalling Marcus Aurelius. For example, on death at p. 20:

If you are not ready to die today, will tomorrow find you better prepared?

And of being in the world, especially when one is distracted by others, on p. 28:

But to be able to live at peace among hard, obstinate, and undisciplined people and those who oppose us, is a great grace, and a most commendable and manly achievement... He who knows the secret of endurance will enjoy the greatest peace. Such a one is a conqueror of self, master of the world, a friend of Christ, and an heir of Heaven.

Here, James Allen's meditations shine through and it is pleasing to read these in the original. Having said that, there are times when the dialogue between Christ and the disciple, I suppose borrowing from Plato, irked me a little. Nevertheless, there is one part where, and I say this without having researched others' views on the matter, but in Chapter 2 of Book 3 (pp. 40-41), entitled How Truth Instructs us in Silence, the disciple raves on and on and never lets God put a word in edge-wise. This reminded me of Franklin's second virtue, silence, and how we tend to talk too much. I wonder if this was a precursor to the style of La Rochefoucauld? It certainly had me yelling at the disciple to just shut up and listen! Finally, Franklin's thirteenth virtue, to be like Jesus or Socrates, might make the reading of the complete book worthwhile. This is the most difficult of the virtues to comprehend. My reading of Kempis suggests that to think ourselves capable of imitating Christ is folly, and as a non-Christian, even emulating Socrates is egotistical, especially if one were to self-assess as anything other than a black mark for each day for not having been able to be so. Again, without looking to others, what I have gained from Kempis is not that we can imitate Christ (or Socrates, for that matter), but that we can only strive for the ideal. In self-assessing against Franklin's thirteenth virtue, I can only ever give myself a perforated black mark, as I could never say I had reached such levels of perfection (some suggest that Socrates belongs to the list of Abrahamic prophets, so he may well be out of reach, too). And yet the struggle over this one problem is exactly what Kempis suggests we do. Herein lies the genius of Franklin. In assessing himself every day for thirteen weeks, I doubt he could ever not give himself a black mark; yet every day he was reminded to strive for the ideal, no matter how imperfect a man may be in (as opposed to "of"), the world.

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Logocentrism and Deconstruction: What's the Différance?

Jacques Derrida on Writing and Difference.

Introducing Derrida by Jeff Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have a copy of Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to get to it. I also had this introductory text laying around. I am glad I went for the easy option first, as this text saved me from learning the hard way. I am not ready for Derrida - I have to start with Hegel and work my way through to Heidegger first.

I am not averse to reading introductory texts, but this one is a little different, in that it is more like a comic book. Or, indeed, it is very similar to the style Alain de Botton has adopted for The School of Life (but this book predates the YouTube series).

But the book is not too basic. Even after reading this introductory text, I am little the wiser.

I see Derrida's idea of "deconstruction" as an attempt to critique logo-centrism, where Western philosophy tends to privilege one thing over another in a binary either/or paradigm. For example, speech tends to be privileged over writing; philosophy over literature, men over women (traditionally), and so on.

Deconstruction is helpfully explained using the example of a zombie. Zombies are neither dead nor alive - their status is "undecidable" (see also the pharmakon, p. 73):

To embrace the curious logic of this writing, we have to be willing to sign up to it, to subscribe to it the task it takes on: the creation of destabilizing movements in metaphysical thinking.

Had I set out to read Writing and Difference, I would have been lost in Derrida's writing, which this text suggests can be "puzzling, infuriating, and exasperating"(p. 73). It would be better to tackle his three major works on "structuralism and phenomenology" in order: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, then Of Grammatology.

However, the reading list at the end of the text sets out a reading plan to ease into Derrida's work gradually, beginning with Peggy Kamuf's Derrida Reader: Between the Lines. Sound advice.

It would seem that I must also go right back to Plato for a closer reading of his work so I can engage with Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy.

What all this means is that I am completely out of my depth! Whereas with Albert Camus and even Nietzsche I was able to struggle through, with Derrida I will have to tackle post-modernism (Derrida didn't necessarily think of his work as "post-modern"). I suppose it is time.

This text was a good place to start. I also found the School of Life's video (below) useful. I must admit to being pleased to find an area of my knowledge that is so completely lacking as to require considerable thought - especially in approaching Derrida. At the same time, the task is quite daunting and it may have to wait until some time later next year if I am to do it any justice.