The Catharsis of the Spirit from Poshlost'

 Recently, a friend gave me a copy of The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity, Volume One: The Doctrine of God by I.A. Il'in, translated and edited by Philip T. Grier. Il'in is of interest in part because he is said to be Putin's favorite philosopher. (After about fifty pages, I wonder to what degree Putin has ever seriously engaged Il'in's work.)

Toward the end of Chapter 1, "The Concrete-Empirical", Il'in writes that

One can accept without question, that if the German language had a word corresponding to the Russian word "poshlost'", Hegel would have called this path the path of the "catharsis of spirit from poshlost'".

I first encountered the term "poshlost" in Nabokov's book on Gogol. My recollection is that he defined it as something like "the pretentiously bad". In the chapter notes, Grier gives adjectival counterparts, and also refers to the essay "Philistines and Philistinism" in Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature. A friend, fluent in Russia, and for some years resident in Russia and the former Soviet republics, says that the word "is actually used very frequently in spoken Russian".

There are many things to be said about the conceptions of the British empiricists, who seem to be the philosophers Il'in had in mind in the chapter. But the notion that they indulged in poshlost' is odd.

Locust Pods

 The honey locust tree some blocks from here is dropping pods:

Years ago, in Vienna, I saw carob pods sold as "Johannisbrot", evidently from a tradition that these were the "locusts" John the Baptist ate in the desert. The OED gives as its fourth definition of locust "a. The fruit of the carob tree; a locust-bean. b. A cassia-pod, the fruit of Cassia fistula.", going on to say

(The Gr. name ἀκρίς, properly denoting the insect, is applied in the Levant to the carob-pod, from some resemblance in form; and from very early times it has been believed by many that the 'locusts' eaten by John the Baptist were these pods. The application to the cassia-pod is due to confusion with the carob-pod.)

The fifth definition is "Locust Tree".

The confusion of pods carried over to the Americas, very early, it seems. The Audubon Society field guide says that the English settlers in Jamestown named the tree designated Robinsia Pseudocacia, now generally called the Black Locust, "locust" after its pods' resemblance to those of the carob tree.  The  Honey Locust has longer pods than the Black Locust does, with an edible, sweet pulp around the seeds.

Regal Prince Oak

 Some years ago, I noticed a handsome, narrowly growing oak tree on 16th St. NW. The leaves and the acorns suggested that it might be an English oak, but the "columnar" shape was not at all that of the usual English oak. Last month I happened to see a new sapling planted, and saw from the tag on a limb  that this was a "Regal Prince Oak". That is "a hybrid of Fastigiate English Oak and Swamp White Oak". It is handsome, it grows to a good height, and it will not  grow limbs out into the traffic lanes, there to be clipped by buses or trucks.

All Six, Every Year

 In Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of Gilbert Ryle that he once was challenged by a woman to say whether he ever read a novel. Ryle replied that he read all six, every year. I was interested to see that early in Ryle's The Concept of Mind, in the chapter "Knowing How and Knowing That", he refers to one of the six:

Now the higher-grade dispositions of people with which this inquiry is largely concerned are, in general, not single-track dispositions, but dispositions the exercises of which are indefinitely heterogeneous. When Jane Austen wished to show the kind of pride which characterised the heroine of 'Pride and Prejudice', she had to represent her actions, words, thoughts and feelings in a thousand different situations. There is no one type of action or reaction such that Jane Austen could say  'My heroine's kind of pride was just the tendency to do this, whenever a situation of that sort arose'.

Daniel Dennett's introduction to the 2002 edition also remarks that Ryle read and reread Austen's novels. 

Ships

 The president thinks that the US Navy should move the islands (the superstructures) on aircraft carriers farther back, apparently so that they would look better to him. It seems to me unlikely that this will happen.

Robert Lowell's father was an officer of the US Navy, as were assorted family connections. Not all, perhaps, had the keenest judgment. One of the senior Lowell's Annapolis classmates said of a Lowell cousin that he

was really plotting to put aircraft carriers in square sails to stem the tide of our declining Yankee seamanship

("31 Revere Street", collected in Life Studies.)  One doubts the cousin had any such notion. In any case he never reached a position that would have required the Navy to pay attention to his ideas.

The president is also a fan of battleships and would like to see more of them built. During the Twentieth Century, US battleships bore the names of states, but apparently the new series would bear the names of presidents, starting with the incumbent. The fondness for battleships, long after their prime tactical years, is not unusual, it is true, but the fondness used to exhaust itself in finding new armaments and tasks for the Iowa-class battleships. There was some considerable cost involved, but nothing compared to the building of new ships. I do not believe that these will ever be built. 

An Obsolete Offence

 At my high school, a couple of old two-story buildings in white brick survived from the days when an orphanage had occupied the property. The ground floor of the building to the north was called "the freshman lounge". I don't remember spending much time there as a freshman. My only memory of it, was that it had at least one soft-drink machine.

One day, all the freshmen were assembled to be told off by Brother Benedict, FSC. Someone had gone to collect the take from a soft-drink machine, and found many filed-down pennies where dimes should have been. Brother Benedict let us know that this was conduct unbecoming. He must have issued threats, but what they were I have long forgotten. Those of us--the great majority of us--who had not filed down pennies resented this.

Back then there were no Dremels. If you wished to file down a penny, you needed a vice and a file. By then the minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. To earn that by filing down pennies to dime-size, you would have had to file down sixteen pennies each hour, roughly one every three and a half minutes. Never having put file to penny, I don't know whether the rate was possible or sustainable.

The Best and the Brightest

 A Little Free Library around the corner yielded a paperback of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. I was interested to find it in a "quality" paperback format; fifty years ago I saw it in mass-market format, more or less cubical, with a badly curved spine and the pages tending to fan out, worn at the edges--a housemate's copy, I suppose. I was not surprised that a couple of young acquaintances who came along had never heard of it. But in the 1970s it was much talked of.

Halberstam gives his account of the way that the Kennedy and then the Johnson Administrations found their involvement in Vietnam increasing, helped along the way by the stars that Kennedy had recruited to his administration, the "best and the brightest". Most had good to excellent credentials: McGeorge Bundy was Dean of Harvard College, Robert McNamara the head of the Ford Motor Company; Maxwell Taylor had been Army Chief of Staff during the Eisenhower Administration, and so on. Yet somehow events controlled them, and they oversaw an increase in military commitment, from advisers, to bombing, to the commitment of US ground forces.

The book is very readable, but very long: 665 pages to the end matter in this printing. The biographical sketches, though interesting, might have been spared or at least pared: Dean Rusk's childhood in Georgia and education at Davidson College; the schooling of innumerable (well, five or six) men at Groton; William Westmoreland's time at the Citadel and West Point. A bit of trimming there might have shortened the book by thirty pages.

I wonder about some of the interpretations. The Kuomintang forces that faced the Red Army in 1948 had been through a very hard ten years. Did they lose because they were a feudal army, or because the best of their divisions had been chewed up by the Japanese? Would the portrayal of the People's Republic of China have been as neutral ten years later, when the effects of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc., was known? Is Stilwell's reputation still what it was in the 1970s?

I also wonder about the author's confidence, expressed in a foreword for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, that his book had been not just purchased but read, "did not just sit on coffee tables." It is, as I say, a very long book, and the likely audience consisted largely of very busy people (students perhaps apart). When Michael Kinsley was editor of The New Republic, he developed a skepticism about the extent to which the most talked-of books were in fact read, and he would slip into bookstore copies notes redeemable for $20 at The New Republic office. He never had to pay up.

Gained in Translation

 A friend has mentioned the legend that German students of philosophy would learn English to be able to read Norman Kemp Smith's translation of The Critique of Pure Reason. Last week, in reading Foucault's Discourse on Language, I encountered the paragraph

First, Hyppolite took the trouble to give some presence to this great, slightly phantomlike shadow that was Hegel, prowling through the nineteenth century, with whom men struggled in the dark. He gave Hegel this presence with his translation of the Phenomenology of the mind; proof of the extent to which Hegel came to light in this text was the number of Germans who came to consult this text in order to understand what, for a moment at least, had become the German version.

 Perhaps; but I don't think I will be ordering La Phénoménologie de l'esprit anytime soon. It is not clear from the Albertine website that one can conveniently order Hyppolite's version.

Artisanal English

 From Sunday's New York Times, I learned of "the maelstrom unleashed" by the writer Rachel Cusk's divorce memoir. I might not have noticed this but for the Charybdis of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. How does one unleash or leash a whirlpool? It reminded me of a passage from one of T.S. Eliot's essays. I had to use the internet to find it, for the essay on Byron is not in the books I have:

Just as an artisan who can talk English beautifully while about his work or in a public bar, may compose a letter painfully written in a dead language bearing some resemblance to a newspaper leader, and decorated with words like ‘maelstrom’ and ‘pandemonium’: so does Byron write a dead or dying language.

 I don't think that the Times in general employs a dead or dying language: but bits of its language are in poor shape.

Gladstone on Macaulay

 I have never read Macaulay's histories. In his essays, I tend to be aware of the thumb on the scale, confident that someone could work from the same documents and come up with a very different interpretation. In his biography of Gladstone, Roy Jenkins mentions in passing, as judicious, a notice of Macaulay that Gladstone wrote, a review of The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. It is possible to find this on line, via the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page, and eventually HathiTrust. (If your IP address indicates that you are outside the US, this may not work.)

The review is quite long (the life and letters ran to two volumes), and with many interesting passages. A fair sample is

Hence arose, it seems reasonable to believe, that charge of partisanship against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has been, and probably much more will be, said. He may not have possessed that scrupulously tender sense of obligation, that nice tact of exact justice, which is among the very rarest, as well as the most precious, of human virtues. But there never was a writer less capable of intentional unfairness. This, during his lifetime, was the belief of his friends, but was hardly admitted by his opponents. His biographer has really lifted the question out of the range of controversy. He wrote for truth; but, of course, for truth as he saw it; and his sight was coloured from within. This colour, once attached, was what in manufacture is called a mordant; it was a fast colour; he could not distinguish between what his mind had received, and what his mind had imparted. Hence, when he was wrong, he could not see that he was wrong; and of those calamities which are due to the intellect only, and not the heart, there can hardly be a greater. The hope of amending is, after all, our very best and brightest hope; of amending our works as well as ourselves. Without it we are forbidden revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad aurus, when we have accidentally, as is the way with men, slipped into Avernus. While, as to his authorship, Macaulay was incessantly labouring to improve, in the substance of what he had written he could neither himself detect his errors, nor could he perceive him when they were pointed out.

I will remark that Macaulay had once published an unfavorable, very well written review of a pamphlet of Gladstone's; but Gladstone had long moved on from the views he professed there. 

Popular Down the Hall, Part II

 Sunday's New York Times Book Review included a review by Clancy Martin of Emily Eakin's The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, a book on the French postmodernists. I was interested to read Martin's personal take. He had dropped out of a graduate program in philosophy at the University of Texas, defeated by the emphasis on the postmodernists. After a few years away, having done his best to read them, he returned but found

Bad news for Clancy. You guessed it: Not even a decade later, the fashion had changed. As one of my friends at the time, now a professor at the University of Texas, told me: "It's so sad that you showed up thinking we'd all still be reading Rorty. You should've gone to the English department."

(Now I think of it, my very slight acquaintance with the postmodernists about fifty years ago came from an English class.)

It is interesting to see a confirmation, or at least reiteration, of Quine et al.'s complaint about Derrida. It is also interesting to read that Richard Rorty, who for some years seemed to be the house philosopher of The New Republic, was involved in postmodernism. Another gap in my reading.

Which Would Have Startled Dr. Graham

 In Chapter XXIX of Two Years Before the Mast Dana wrote of a time of hard physical labor, packing a ship with hides to be carried around Cape Horn to Boston, that

During all this time,--which would have startled Dr. Graham--we lived upon almost nothing but fresh beef; fried beefsteaks three times a day,--morning, noon, and night.  At morning and night we had a quart of tea to each man; and an allowance of about a pound of hard bread a day; but our chief article of food was the beef. A mess, consisting of six men, had a large wooden kid piled up with beefsteaks, cut thick, and fried in fat, with the grease poured over them.  Round this we sat, attacking it with our jack-knives and teeth, and with the appetite of young lions, and sent back an empty kid to the galley. This was done three times a day.  How many pounds each man ate in a day, I will not attempt to compute.  A whole bullock (we ate liver and all) lasted us but four days.  Such devouring of flesh, I will venture to say, was seldom known before.  What one man ate in a day, over a hearty man's allowance, would make a Russian's heart leap into his mouth. Indeed, during all the time we were upon the coast, our principal food was fresh beef, and every man had perfect health; but this was a time of especial devouring; and what we should have done without meat, I cannot tell.  Once or twice, when our bullocks failed and we were obliged to make a meal upon dry bread and water, it seemed like feeding upon shavings.  Light and dry, feeling unsatisfied, and, at the same time, full, we were glad to see four quarters of a bullock, just killed, swinging from the fore-top.  Whatever theories may be started by sedentary men, certainly no men could have gone through more hard work and exposure for sixteen months in more perfect health, and without ailings and failings, than our ship's crew, let them have lived upon Hygeia's own baking and dressing.

 Dr. Graham was an advocate of vegetarianism, and is remembered in the eponymous Graham crackers. Whatever the value of his theories of nutrition, anyone who has ever made s'mores around a camp fire is grateful to him.

And yet, was the all-beef diet that healthy in the long run?

... the oldest man of the crew, had broken down under the hard work and constant exposure on the coast, and, having had a stroke of the palsy, was left behind at the hide-house under the charge of Captain Arthur.  The poor fellow wished very much to come home in the ship; and he ought to have been brought home in her.  But a live dog is better than a dead lion, and a sick sailor belongs to nobody's mess; so he was sent ashore with the rest of the lumber, which was only in the way. By these diminutions, we were short-handed for a voyage round Cape Horn in the dead of winter.  Besides S---- and myself, there were only five in the forecastle; who, together with four boys in the steerage, the sailmaker, carpenter, etc., composed the whole crew.  In addition to this, we were only three or four days out, when the sailmaker, who was the oldest and best seaman on board, was taken with the palsy, and was useless for the rest of the voyage.

 I take "a stroke of palsy" or simply "the palsy" to mean "a stroke". But medicine was not particularly advanced then, and though the heavy and sedentary might have been supposed to be at risk on a rich diet, I don't suppose anybody worried about the active and lean.

Twenty Lines of Homer

I have read of the discipline of a nightly "twenty lines of Homer", which I suppose to include construing, perhaps after copying out, twenty (Greek) lines of The Iliad or The Odyssey every night. At the moment, the only citation I can give is to one of Flann O'Brien's Keats and Chapman stories. One could not in some ways ask for a finer source than O'Brien; one could certainly ask for a more reliable one. Still I doubt that he invented the practice.

The first book of The Odyssey runs to just over 440 lines, so just over three weeks at that rate. If the others run about the same, then it would take a year and a half to get through The Odyssey. Given the world's population, I expect that someone, somewhere is undertaking this.

Odysseys

 On Tuesday, I happened to look at the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online (RPO) site. I did not find what I was looking for (something short and pithy for ESL students to recite). I did see, though, that the Random Poem of the Day was "Hereux qui, comme Ulysse" by Joachim Du Bellay, Given that the new movie The Odyssey is just out, this struck me as a curious coincidence. A niece suggested that it might not be coincidental, though I find it hard to see how the selection could profit RPO. Searches for "Ulysses" give much more space to Joyce than to Homer, let alone Du Bellay.

 "Hereux" qui remains the Random Poem of the Day. Perhaps it is really the Random Poem of the Week, since RPO gives births and deaths for "On this Day: July 17".

Like a Romance

 The preface to Descartes's Principles of Philosophy includes

I would suggest reading it all the way through, like a romance, without greatly straining one's attention, or being held up by any difficulties one encounters, so as simply to get a general idea of the subjects discussed. Afterwards, if one decides that these are worthy of them, it can be read a second time, so as to follow the sequence of my arguments; but, again, one should not let oneself be put off, if one loses the thread now and again, or if one does not understand all the arguments; simply mark with a pen the places one has found difficult, and read on to the end without a break. Then if one goes back to the book a third time, I venture to say that one will find the solution to most of the difficulties one has noticed the previous time; and if any still remain, a final re-reading should put paid to them.

(This is the preface to the French translation, taken from Michael Moriarty's translation, in The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings.)

When I arrived at college, somebody gave or sold me a how-to book of some sort, which included the advice to read any given text three times. The first was certainly for an overview, corresponding to Descartes's "like a romance". It seems to me that once was for the author's style; and that I can't remember the other one's purpose suggests where some of my academic difficulties came from.

The Baedeker of the Soul

 Noticed today in The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield:

Important writing, strange to say, seldom gives the exact flavor of its period; if it is successful, it presents you with the soul of man, undated. Very minor literature, on the other hand, is the Baedeker of the soul, and will guide you through the curious relics, the tumble-down buildings, the flimsy palaces, the false pagodas, the distorted and fantastical and faery vistas which have cluttered the imagination of mankind at this or that brief period of its history.

Dangerfield nominates Georgian Poetry and Sinister Street as his Baedekers for the period 1910 - 1914. I could think of a few works to nominate as guidebooks for the last 50 or so years.

[July 20, 2026: I blush to say that I wrote "Saintsbury" for "Dangerfield" here.]

The Career Ladder

 My brother sent me a link to an article in The Denver Post to the effect that the University of Denver is shutting down two departments, of Religious Studies and of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I thought this curious in part because DU had closed the entire College of Engineering about 1975, then revived it.

(In this part of Colorado, the 'U' goes last in the abbreviation, wherever it appears in the name. The University of Denver is DU, the University of Colorado is CU, and references to UD or UC will not be understood by locals.)

The article also said that the faculty had voted to close three other departments: of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies, of Philosophy, and of Socio-Legal Studies. This sounded like The Raft of the Medusa, though of course I don't know what the deliberations might have been. I know nothing of the first and third offered sacrifices, but I had a look at the Department of Philosophy's web page.

The ranks stood out. In the usual academic understanding, an assistant professor hopes for tenure, an associate professor or professor has tenure. Here the only associate professors were emeritus. There were four professors (and one professor emeritus). The other two members were visiting assistant teaching professors.  As I read this, the components of this title mean

• visiting: don't sign a long lease
• assistant: not tenured
• teaching: heavier teaching schedule (likely running to the intro courses)
• professor: a courtesy

It seems to me that such a billet is more or less that of an adjunct, but paid by the year (or term) rather than the class.

When I was in college, even I could see weaknesses in the model that had carried American academia from 1946 through 1976, that is to say had worked well enough in a period of long expansion. By then such boomers as wanted degrees largely had them, and enrollment was no longer increasing. The young and promising faculty were too often on "soft money", with no better prospect than that of a visiting assistant teaching professor. Yet if you didn't look too closely, the enterprise seemed to be sailing along. No more, and not I suppose for many years.

Popular Down the Hall

In 1992, a number of academic philosophers signed a letter to The Times of London, suggesting that the electors at Cambridge University vote against granting an honorary degree to  Jacques Derrida. One of the matters alleged to the discredit of his writings was that 

Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature.

I remembered this because the introductory notes to the excerpts of Hans Vaihinger's work in The Neo-Kantian Reader say among other things that

Although he has been nearly forgotten by philosophers, there has been a continued interest in his thought in literary studies and psychology.

It is possible that Sebastian Luft, editor of The Neo-Kantian Reader thinks the forgetting not unjust, for Vaihinger gets a dozen pages, including textual notes. By comparison, Wilhelm Windelband gets 54 pages and  Ernst Cassirer gets 44 pages, not counting his "Davos Dispute" with Heidegger. And Vaihinger gets few and passing mentions in Frederick Beiser's After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840-1900. On the other hand, the cultural historian Egon Friedell wrote of Vaihinger with respect in Der Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit.

 

Warp Speed

The New York Times says that some young playwright's career is moving at warp speed. I was never particularly a Trekkie, but couldn't avoid knowing that in Star Trek warp speeds are beyond the speed of light. (And therefore beyond possibility, but never mind that.)

Given that I don't think much about Star Trek, "warp" first recalled accounts of ships that were warped here and there, either towed, or moved by the crew hauling on a rope secured to some fixed object. I find in Henry Adams's history of Madison's second administration

June 6, at leisure, Perry superintended the removal of the five small craft from the navy-yard at Black Rock; several hundred soldiers, seamen, and oxen warped them up stream into the Lake

(chapter "Proctor and Perry 1813") and

A little after dusk, Reid, seeing the suspicious movements of the enemy, began to warp is vessel close under the guns of the castle.

(chapter "Sloops-of-War, 1814")

 The vessels so warped must have moved slowly, and certainly moved at the cost of considerable effort. That does sound much more like the usual progress of a writer, whether for the stage or otherwise, than the Star Trek warp speed does.

The Washington Star

 According to The New York Times, two businesses are starting newspapers in Washington, one to be called The Star, one The Washington Star. The latter is suing the former for trademark infringement.

 It is hard for me to see that the name is worth much. The old Washington Star went out of business in 1981.The youngest person to have read it would have to be about 50; the youngest to have subscribed about 65. It is possible that some of them have been thinking, all these years, how much they missed The Washington Star. But how many, how often? Though I did read the Star pretty frequently, I haven't often thought of it since it went out of business.

The New York Times identifies the old Star as "a conservative-leaning afternoon newspaper." I suppose that it was conservative-leaning, though it did employ Mary McGrory. But I think that for the last years of its run it printed in the morning. I am fairly sure I looked at it on morning Metro trips in 1980.

In 1981 my office window looked out onto 15th Street NW, where there were newspaper boxes, one of them for The Washington Star. On the day of the Star's last edition, I saw a long line of persons waiting to buy a copy of it. It struck me then that if so many people had subscribed to The Washington Star or even bought it frequently, the paper could have continued in business.

The Washington Post in those days was a competitor the Star couldn't beat. The Post is much diminished now, but largely by forces that have weakened and closed newspapers everywhere. I will be interested to see what these newspapers look like. I will be surprised if they survive long.