The following comments by ERH speak for themselves as we move from the intellectual conditions of the preceding time to the time of Dostoevsky:
"In the sixties, after the emancipation of the peasants, when the split between official Czarism and the Intelligentsia had become final, when the revolutionary youth vanished from the surface and sank into the people, the soul of old Little Russia began to expire. But some poets caught the sigh. Through their voice and through the atmosphere created in their writings Russia could still breathe between 1870 and 1914. This literature, by being highly representative in a revolutionized world, became the contribution of Russia to the rest of the world. Without Dostoevski and Tolstoi, Western Europe would not know what man really is. These Russian writers, using the Western forms of the novel, gave back to the West a knowledge of the human soul which makes all French, English and German literature wither in comparison. Step by step Russian literature works its way closer and closer to the work-a-day world of the Russian peasant, pedlar, soldier, prisoner.
The title pages of Dostoevski's novels tell the story: The Idiot, The Humiliated and Offended, Reminiscences of the Dead-house (which means Siberian forced labour), The Demons.
Dostoevski extricates the types of men who will become the standard bearers of the Revolution. To read Dostoevski is to read the psychic history of the Russian Revolution. All the facts, of course, are different; he ignores any quantitative questions of society. On the other hand, state and government must disappear, as in the Marxian theory of society. Since the artist and seer is unwilling to see life in terms of quantities, the only future he can think of is a church-like order. In The Brothers Karamasov, his greatest book, the venerable Staretz, an orthodox abbot and somewhat a saint, exclaims prophetically: 'Not the Church becoming State, but the State becoming Church, mark that well!' Government by military or police force no longer has any meaning for Dostoevski. The men he describes have nothing to do with the hilarious and creative geniuses of Western civilization. They are as dirty, as weak and as horrible as humanity itself, but they are as highly explosive, too. The homeless soul is the hero of Dostoevski, the nomadic soul.
In this inner vision of Dostoevski, the prodigal son is the central figure, the prodigal son, yes, but paralyzed midway, impenitent, obdurate, hardened, refractory. Incendiary, blasphemous, criminal, he sometimes is, but only because he cannot find the way home to his father's house. In a miraculous way, the situation of the man who leaves home at fourteen to go into a factory and never goes home again because he never starts on an independent career, the proletarian form of life, is anticipated in Dostoevski. To a certain extent, the disillusion with our first home and its reconstruction after a time of homelessness has to be experienced by every man during .the years between fourteen and thirty. If he escape this crisis it is true he would never become a man. But in The Adolescent (another of Dostoevski's novels) all life seems to be concentrated in this unique phenomenon of the wandering between the old home and the new. This type of man is "in becoming." He is open to every temptation, he is agnostic, he is immature. All the hell of humanity lives in the visitations and manias of the eternal revolutionary.
Society has always had to deal with this side of our nature.
But man preferred to appear strong, rich, human, intelligent, and the rules of the social game were based on the pretence that the human being is rich, good, and beautiful. Dostoevski lays the corner-stone for a new building of humanity. In the new house, the prodigal son becomes the basic element. Hell is opened. Mankind, always frightened by hell before, now resolves to bear its presence consciously. The class consciousness of the proletariat, a favourite topic of Marxism, finds its explanation in the fact that the uprooted outlawed stranger, the idiot, the proletarian, have nothing but their consciousness. He who lives in peace and has roots in the earth, has little need of consciousness. The Russian intellectuals need consciousness.
Something eternally human gains form and shape in these Russian figures. These novels, therefore, belong to the Russian Revolution and to the history of the world. The deepest stratum of our being, the one most alienated from light, is lifted up into the clear day of history. The reverse of all our creative power, namely, our capacity for destruction, our demons, our self-contempt, hatred and laziness, envy and indifference, greediness and jealousy, are faced without the fury of the moralist, or the indifference of the anatomist, but with a glowing passion of solidarity in our short-comings..."(ERH, OoR, p.118-120)
Sunday, October 28, 2007
ERH & FD: ERH as he pertaineth unto the reading of Dostoevsky
I am here sharing some cultural background information from the history of Russia that bears upon the writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
This passage here quoted is from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's "Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man" and deals with what was going on among the intelligentsia preceding Dostoevsky and influencing him and other writers. This was written in 1938:
"The history of Russian literature is of more importance for the evolution of Russia that the history of any other literature for its own nation. This has been valid at least since the days of Peter the Great. In the other countries of Europe, civilization is, so to speak, the result of all the social and political struggles, of corporations and estates. In Russia the reverse was true. There, political life began by detour via culture. In Europe the parties are founded by corporative and social interests. These groups elect and found their organs. In Russia it was the press and the organs of literature which called new parties into life and enabled them to exist. Whilst in Europe every efficient individual represented a profession or a corporation, and was supported by his group or the privileges of the group, in Russia 'the individual could succeed only as an individual, never as a representative of his kind.
Through the importing of Western erudition, the individual found ways of social activity. The exchange of literary reflections might make him influential. It was for that reason that poets and literati exercised such a great influence in Czarist Russia. Only a few of the leading spirits could end their days without being troubled by exile or administrative discipline. The rulers themselves propagated their reforms by literary productions. Peter the Great introduced plays which were meant to make people laugh at the foes of his reform. Catherine II founded satirical journals, and herself wrote plays and essays. The sense of political satire is so fierce that even today the normal Soviet newspaper has its daily page of caricatures.
In Russia literature brought men into groups and excited them to political activity. You could mingle with a circle for years without divining whether or not this or that member were a nobleman. The only question was which line of literature he preferred. There was an astounding number of reviews. There were, monthlies, often two or three hundred pages thick, and around the magazines political parties were formed. Belles-lettres were the battlefield of politics; aesthetic appreciation was impossible.
The existence of censorship had led to a real art of reading and writing between the lines. Sometimes books passed the censorship but the authors were disciplined for the secret sense of the writing.
The violence of Peter's reforms, and the formation of a staff by sending young men to foreign countries, or by having them educated by foreigners, had this odd result that the literature of Russia began with satires, with the criticism of existing society. It had an eye that was detached, like a foreigner's, and a pen that took a negative and didactic line.
The very first poet, Prince Cantemir (1708-1744). was educated in Paris, and his Parisian education made him think how queer society was at home. He became a satirist. Later, Karamzin began an epoch (1765-1826). He was sent to the West for his instruction and published immediately afterwards (1791-1792) his famous Letters of a Russian Traveller. Up to that time Europe and her great men in art and science had been known from translations only. Now Karamzin introduced the nature and society of Europe by faithful and lively descriptions. His readers seemed to meet the leaders of European literature and scholarship personally. Karamzin founded the review, The European Courier (Vestnik Evropy). St. Petersburg's aim to be the window towards Europe-is well illustrated by this title of the leading national review.
The Napoleonic Wars had a great effect on the national conscience. The army, which marched as far as Paris, contained a mass of educated Russians. On April 15. 1814, the Te Deum of the Allies on the Place de la Concorde was celebrated by six Orthodox priests. Everyone could now verify for himself the reports of Karamzin. Young men came home with Western ideas, and again they went into Literature. No field for practice seemed open to them. The neologists fought despite censorship, exile and jail. In 1825, the martyrdom of this specific intelligence, conjured up by Czarism, began. This year marks the final estrangement between the government and the youth of the leading classes, because the government tried to make undone its own work. The Czars owed all their success after 1697 to the introduction of Western techniques. And they knew it. Catherine II (1763-1796) corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot; she anxiously awaited what Professor Schloezer of Goettingen had to say in his magazine about her policy. Now, in 1825, this cornerstone of Czarist expansion broke. Freedom of thought, the very instrument that had founded St. Petersburg, the bureaucracy and the army, was thrown away. 1825 was the point of departure for the Russian drama.
The facts are very simple. Alexander I, 'the monarch who, in his own kingdom, had worked so much into the hands of the Revolutionists, succumbed mentally and bodily in the fight. Seeing himself deceived in all his calculations, under the necessity of himself striking at a class of his own subjects who had been led astray and instigated by men and principles whom he himself had long supported, his heart broke.'{Clemens Metternich, Memoirs, Vol. I, p. 332, New York, Scribner. 1880.}
A conspiracy broke out against the succession of Alexander.{Compare also Anatole G. Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825: The Decembrist Movement, Its Origin, Development, and Significance, Berkeley, Univ. of Calif., 1937.} The soldiers understood little of the French ideas of the young officers. They cried: 'Hail, Grand Duke Constantine, and hail his wife, the Constitution!' There was no nation behind the innovators. But these idealists themselves paid a terrible price. The leader of his generation, the poet Ryleev, was hanged in 1826. Bestuzhev, the Prince Odoevski, Polejaieff, ended their lives in exile in the mines of Siberia, or were degraded into private soldiers in the Caucasus. Alexander Pushkin escaped banishment to Siberia only by a miracle, and had to live on his estate under the supervision of the police.
The women of these Dekabrists accompanied their husbands as volunteers. They shared the sufferings of the men and were ennobled by this rare companionship in permanent misfortune. Russian women were emancipated and exalted by their rare quality of being fellow-sufferers. This makes for an equality with man which surpasses all the legal or moral equality in Western society.
Pushkin was the first to speak poetically, in the character of Tatiana in Eugen Onegin, of this new type of Russian woman. The state of mind after 1825 is well shown in the comedy, The Misfortunes of Being Clever (Gore ot uma). [Does this title not remind you of "Notes from Underground"?--Jim]
Anybody who did not bow before bureaucracy and the army was taken to be a politically dangerous man, and was finally declared mad. The malformation of Russian society, its hunched back, so to speak, was permanent after 1825.
The Intellectuals were all preoccupied with Western problems, even though they divided themselves into Westerners (Zapadniki) and Slavophils. It was a period of heavy oppression. In the textbooks the history of the French Revolution was cancelled. A period of despondent literature opened. Lermontov's Hero of Our Times torments himself and others with fruitless grief and seems to be destroying himself because he can be of no use in Russia. Nicholas Gogol opened the procession of novelists who wished to unveil social wrongs. Alexander Herzen drew the consequences of the situation. He published, in 1843, his Who Is Responsible? The hero of this book, who aims in vain at greater activity in Russia, leaves the country and wallows in distinguished slothfulness. [sounds like the narrator in "Notes..." doesn't it?--Jim]
The defeat in the Crimean War and the death of Nicholas I opened the sluices. For the first time the fruits of suffering seemed to ripen. Alexander Herzen rang The Bell, his London journal. Though an exile, he gave audiences like a future Regent. The highest dignitaries visited "the criminal" with great reverence. The revaluation of values affected all the "pillars" of Church and State in Russia; nowhere could jail and banishment so little degrade a man as in the best circles of St. Petersburg.
The new era was announced in Turgenev's Eve, and the hero of his novel Fathers and Sons (1861) chooses for himself the name of Nihilist. The innovators had found their shibboleth. Nihil, i.e., nothing, of the old loyalties was to be kept. A complete break was the only condition for a new future. [years down the road, it might be instructive to read Turgenev--Jim]
But this future was still far off. Turgenev, in 1867, full of despair, wrote Smoke. Nothing had come of the emancipation of the serfs, and he declared the absolute bankruptcy of "Fathers and Sons," parties and groups of the better classes of society. He was right. The "Gebildete Gesellschaft," the upper classes, were rotten. Intellectually and mentally, everything had been thought through and fought through."(ERH, OoR, p.81-84)
[this is now the time that Dostoevsky is writing the works that we are and perhaps shall be reading--Jim]
In another post I will show more of ERH on Dostoevsky.
This passage here quoted is from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's "Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man" and deals with what was going on among the intelligentsia preceding Dostoevsky and influencing him and other writers. This was written in 1938:
"The history of Russian literature is of more importance for the evolution of Russia that the history of any other literature for its own nation. This has been valid at least since the days of Peter the Great. In the other countries of Europe, civilization is, so to speak, the result of all the social and political struggles, of corporations and estates. In Russia the reverse was true. There, political life began by detour via culture. In Europe the parties are founded by corporative and social interests. These groups elect and found their organs. In Russia it was the press and the organs of literature which called new parties into life and enabled them to exist. Whilst in Europe every efficient individual represented a profession or a corporation, and was supported by his group or the privileges of the group, in Russia 'the individual could succeed only as an individual, never as a representative of his kind.
Through the importing of Western erudition, the individual found ways of social activity. The exchange of literary reflections might make him influential. It was for that reason that poets and literati exercised such a great influence in Czarist Russia. Only a few of the leading spirits could end their days without being troubled by exile or administrative discipline. The rulers themselves propagated their reforms by literary productions. Peter the Great introduced plays which were meant to make people laugh at the foes of his reform. Catherine II founded satirical journals, and herself wrote plays and essays. The sense of political satire is so fierce that even today the normal Soviet newspaper has its daily page of caricatures.
In Russia literature brought men into groups and excited them to political activity. You could mingle with a circle for years without divining whether or not this or that member were a nobleman. The only question was which line of literature he preferred. There was an astounding number of reviews. There were, monthlies, often two or three hundred pages thick, and around the magazines political parties were formed. Belles-lettres were the battlefield of politics; aesthetic appreciation was impossible.
The existence of censorship had led to a real art of reading and writing between the lines. Sometimes books passed the censorship but the authors were disciplined for the secret sense of the writing.
The violence of Peter's reforms, and the formation of a staff by sending young men to foreign countries, or by having them educated by foreigners, had this odd result that the literature of Russia began with satires, with the criticism of existing society. It had an eye that was detached, like a foreigner's, and a pen that took a negative and didactic line.
The very first poet, Prince Cantemir (1708-1744). was educated in Paris, and his Parisian education made him think how queer society was at home. He became a satirist. Later, Karamzin began an epoch (1765-1826). He was sent to the West for his instruction and published immediately afterwards (1791-1792) his famous Letters of a Russian Traveller. Up to that time Europe and her great men in art and science had been known from translations only. Now Karamzin introduced the nature and society of Europe by faithful and lively descriptions. His readers seemed to meet the leaders of European literature and scholarship personally. Karamzin founded the review, The European Courier (Vestnik Evropy). St. Petersburg's aim to be the window towards Europe-is well illustrated by this title of the leading national review.
The Napoleonic Wars had a great effect on the national conscience. The army, which marched as far as Paris, contained a mass of educated Russians. On April 15. 1814, the Te Deum of the Allies on the Place de la Concorde was celebrated by six Orthodox priests. Everyone could now verify for himself the reports of Karamzin. Young men came home with Western ideas, and again they went into Literature. No field for practice seemed open to them. The neologists fought despite censorship, exile and jail. In 1825, the martyrdom of this specific intelligence, conjured up by Czarism, began. This year marks the final estrangement between the government and the youth of the leading classes, because the government tried to make undone its own work. The Czars owed all their success after 1697 to the introduction of Western techniques. And they knew it. Catherine II (1763-1796) corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot; she anxiously awaited what Professor Schloezer of Goettingen had to say in his magazine about her policy. Now, in 1825, this cornerstone of Czarist expansion broke. Freedom of thought, the very instrument that had founded St. Petersburg, the bureaucracy and the army, was thrown away. 1825 was the point of departure for the Russian drama.
The facts are very simple. Alexander I, 'the monarch who, in his own kingdom, had worked so much into the hands of the Revolutionists, succumbed mentally and bodily in the fight. Seeing himself deceived in all his calculations, under the necessity of himself striking at a class of his own subjects who had been led astray and instigated by men and principles whom he himself had long supported, his heart broke.'{Clemens Metternich, Memoirs, Vol. I, p. 332, New York, Scribner. 1880.}
A conspiracy broke out against the succession of Alexander.{Compare also Anatole G. Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825: The Decembrist Movement, Its Origin, Development, and Significance, Berkeley, Univ. of Calif., 1937.} The soldiers understood little of the French ideas of the young officers. They cried: 'Hail, Grand Duke Constantine, and hail his wife, the Constitution!' There was no nation behind the innovators. But these idealists themselves paid a terrible price. The leader of his generation, the poet Ryleev, was hanged in 1826. Bestuzhev, the Prince Odoevski, Polejaieff, ended their lives in exile in the mines of Siberia, or were degraded into private soldiers in the Caucasus. Alexander Pushkin escaped banishment to Siberia only by a miracle, and had to live on his estate under the supervision of the police.
The women of these Dekabrists accompanied their husbands as volunteers. They shared the sufferings of the men and were ennobled by this rare companionship in permanent misfortune. Russian women were emancipated and exalted by their rare quality of being fellow-sufferers. This makes for an equality with man which surpasses all the legal or moral equality in Western society.
Pushkin was the first to speak poetically, in the character of Tatiana in Eugen Onegin, of this new type of Russian woman. The state of mind after 1825 is well shown in the comedy, The Misfortunes of Being Clever (Gore ot uma). [Does this title not remind you of "Notes from Underground"?--Jim]
Anybody who did not bow before bureaucracy and the army was taken to be a politically dangerous man, and was finally declared mad. The malformation of Russian society, its hunched back, so to speak, was permanent after 1825.
The Intellectuals were all preoccupied with Western problems, even though they divided themselves into Westerners (Zapadniki) and Slavophils. It was a period of heavy oppression. In the textbooks the history of the French Revolution was cancelled. A period of despondent literature opened. Lermontov's Hero of Our Times torments himself and others with fruitless grief and seems to be destroying himself because he can be of no use in Russia. Nicholas Gogol opened the procession of novelists who wished to unveil social wrongs. Alexander Herzen drew the consequences of the situation. He published, in 1843, his Who Is Responsible? The hero of this book, who aims in vain at greater activity in Russia, leaves the country and wallows in distinguished slothfulness. [sounds like the narrator in "Notes..." doesn't it?--Jim]
The defeat in the Crimean War and the death of Nicholas I opened the sluices. For the first time the fruits of suffering seemed to ripen. Alexander Herzen rang The Bell, his London journal. Though an exile, he gave audiences like a future Regent. The highest dignitaries visited "the criminal" with great reverence. The revaluation of values affected all the "pillars" of Church and State in Russia; nowhere could jail and banishment so little degrade a man as in the best circles of St. Petersburg.
The new era was announced in Turgenev's Eve, and the hero of his novel Fathers and Sons (1861) chooses for himself the name of Nihilist. The innovators had found their shibboleth. Nihil, i.e., nothing, of the old loyalties was to be kept. A complete break was the only condition for a new future. [years down the road, it might be instructive to read Turgenev--Jim]
But this future was still far off. Turgenev, in 1867, full of despair, wrote Smoke. Nothing had come of the emancipation of the serfs, and he declared the absolute bankruptcy of "Fathers and Sons," parties and groups of the better classes of society. He was right. The "Gebildete Gesellschaft," the upper classes, were rotten. Intellectually and mentally, everything had been thought through and fought through."(ERH, OoR, p.81-84)
[this is now the time that Dostoevsky is writing the works that we are and perhaps shall be reading--Jim]
In another post I will show more of ERH on Dostoevsky.
Social Philosophy: The deficiencies of two economic systems (cont.).
And now in pointing out problems with the socialist economic model and implementation, and before one gets to the mechanics of a theory so not connected with empirical reality that it has become non-reality, I begin with its moral failure:
ERH again:
"The Bolsheviks challenged the old rule that in a misfortune a man does not argue against his country. They deserted old Russia. The desertion made them discover Judas.
The martyr Judas is extolled in both psychoanalytical and Communist literature. One might expect the successful ruler of Jesus' day, Caesar Augustus, to be hailed as the model; but Augustus is not mentioned. The pagan emperor has no connection with the history of our soul; Judas has. The revolutionaries prefer to set up Judas, the permanent natural and pre-Adamite force within ourselves, in opposition to the perfect man who healed Adam's wound.
In human history, in so far as it dates from Adam and Jesus, the pre-Adamite is represented by the traitor. 'No manual worker can be virtuous,' said Aristotle.
Modern society has to recognize that man, in so far as he is a cog in the machine, must be looked upon as frail, unreliable, traitorous--and all this not from bad intentions, but through his lasting weakness, helplessness, fear, and disappointment. But this recognition does not mean that exalted heroism or the virtues of strength and faith and reliability are abolished or denied. Only, the mass man in his tribal fears and nightmares cannot reach them."(ERH, Oor, p.109-110)
More later.....
ERH again:
"The Bolsheviks challenged the old rule that in a misfortune a man does not argue against his country. They deserted old Russia. The desertion made them discover Judas.
The martyr Judas is extolled in both psychoanalytical and Communist literature. One might expect the successful ruler of Jesus' day, Caesar Augustus, to be hailed as the model; but Augustus is not mentioned. The pagan emperor has no connection with the history of our soul; Judas has. The revolutionaries prefer to set up Judas, the permanent natural and pre-Adamite force within ourselves, in opposition to the perfect man who healed Adam's wound.
In human history, in so far as it dates from Adam and Jesus, the pre-Adamite is represented by the traitor. 'No manual worker can be virtuous,' said Aristotle.
Modern society has to recognize that man, in so far as he is a cog in the machine, must be looked upon as frail, unreliable, traitorous--and all this not from bad intentions, but through his lasting weakness, helplessness, fear, and disappointment. But this recognition does not mean that exalted heroism or the virtues of strength and faith and reliability are abolished or denied. Only, the mass man in his tribal fears and nightmares cannot reach them."(ERH, Oor, p.109-110)
More later.....
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Social Philosophy: The deficiencies of two economic systems.
In a previous entry (Feb. 28, 2007) I linked to two blog entries by Dr. Peter Leithart who gave an analysis of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s (ERH) observations about time and the whole man. The links are now broken as Leithart’s blogs were moved to his archives. I am beginning to understand some of what Leithart was saying as I am now reading ERH for myself. Currently I am working my way through Out of Revolution: The Autobiography of Western Man, which deals with a good many things about human society and perceptions of time and economic-historical development. We will return to the question of time after we begin with economic realities in human societies.
As one may have noted from my position on socio-politico-economics (see Jim’s Labour Page), I have tried to grapple with these social philosophies and find what actually bears on empirical reality. I think that ERH has realized an important factor in the wholeness of being human versus the dehumanizing economic social contracts that we are compelled to participate in. I am going to begin quoting some excerpts from his section on “the reproduction of man” found in his section on the Russian revolution in his book Out of Revolution. I believe that he means by the term reproduction of man the continuance of a full orbed human life in a developing (for the better) society or the redemption of humanity not just in the spiritual sense.
Here we begin:
“Marx and Engels were the first to study the problem of Revolution and Reproduction seriously. They made it plain to what extent business is behind all history,…
But they did not complete their analysis.
We sum up our statements thus: It is not valid to pretend that the workers are exploited by the capitalists because they get low wages.” {although the wage problem has returned now with tighter integration of global markets.—my comment} “The real outcry of man’s offended nature should be that he is degraded because his boss does not care for his past or future, and because he, the worker, is deprived of the power to weave past or future into his own day of work.
The boss, by virtue of the privileges conferred upon him by liberalism {in the classic sense, JRI}, hires a man’s force and skill and presence and brains as a ready-made product. All the traditions that were needed to concoct this man’s talents, and all the props that are needed to keep up his character, are degraded into his own private affair. Modern society and the fellowship of our modern society use present-day forces, disregarding their past and their future. What you are paid for is not a slow growth or an organic evolution, but something that can be ground out immediately by the mill of social life. Modern society exchanges goods, and man is used as a ready-made product. His own mystic process of reproduction, his long way of birth, education, apprenticeship, disciplineship, hope and faith in the intrinsic powers of his nature—all this is of no interest to the business man who hires him for an hour or a year or ten years. Schools, parents, friends, foundations, can take care of his personality. For his boss he is not a growing child of God, but a standardized labour-force*, number such and such, output such and such, reliability such and such. A modern factory requires above all regular and repetitive work of the same kind; a man is taken as a machine of regularized, standardized capacity, doing his 7,325 "ergs" or "ergons" per X Y Z calories an hour. But that is only another expression for a thing which has no past and no future. Electricity, coal, linen, have no past and no future. A labour-force* has no past and no future. In the world of physical experiment we base our behaviour on the expectance of recurrence. A labour-force* may last a long time, or may be wasted very quickly. But fifty years or five days of repetitive labour in the factory are equally devoid of any meaning for the past or future of its owner.”(ERH, OoR, p.84-85)
*I use the term labor-unit.
And now on the nature of time:
“This world of bodies is a world of mechanical time, repeating its sixty minutes every hour. The other world must be sought through another gate than the "business entrance." We live in a plurality of worlds. In one world, Mr. Smith, the employer, is at home. He sits at the breakfast table, perhaps as an autocrat, but nevertheless as a man, a father, a husband, who has a past when he was unmarried and belonged to his father's family, and a future when all his children will have founded their own homes and ceased to listen to his orders. He is an autocrat, yes, but if he is not a fool he feels happy at being limited in time by his own experience and by his own purpose and intentions. He feels how his present day stretches out between two other ages of equal worth. His present is no better than his past or his future; at its very best it can only rival them. Such a house is a world where death almighty mitigates the arrogance of mere life. Here life is a conscious adventure of man between youth and old age. In this world both past and future exist in a positive sense, because they assist in keeping the family alive and in setting its real standards.
In the business cycle and the circle of business we are in a world of bodies: neither past nor future is represented. They may be preserved in schools and museums, as history, as education; but business itself cannot use them. It has a different concept of time, as a mechanical recurrence. But this kind of time occurs only in the dead world of physical nature.
Thus we are right in saying that we treat ourselves and our neighbors as though we had to obey the laws of two different worlds at once. In one world we deal with a man's individuality, in the other we deal with ourselves and others as bodies. Body and soul are not objective parts of the outside world. They are the two constituent elements of two different worlds which we ourselves are constantly building by our own actions and reactions. The world of bodies embodies our way of working, and the world of souls our way of living. We shall soon see that there is a third world, of another type, which we are building all the time by our way of thinking. Our mind is a creator, too, and constructs a third world. But for the explanation of the Communistic reaction the discovery of the two worlds may suffice.
The important conclusion is that all raw material can be transferred from one world to the other, since our own attitudes create both worlds and since we can tell which occurrences in our lives we ought to treat as elements of real life and which we should treat as business. Lumber, electricity, a man's talents, can be commercialized; or they can acquire a past and a future, enter the real life of the soul, as soon as we become or feel responsible for their reproduction.
Suppose all the kinds of raw material we use in our business begin to grow scarce: rubber, wood-pulp, children, poets; forest-fires begin to destroy our timber, and drought our fields… At that moment the employer becomes deeply interested in the process of "Reproduction"; a new world opens before his eyes: a world of change. The circular process of raising rubber, replanting forests, educating foresters, resettling the country, begins to present itself to the minds of business men who up to that time had thought of nothing but the logs they bought from the farmer who needed cash.
Or again: artists, civil engineers, composers, publicity men, are hired by an employer who assumes he can get them by a simple advertisement in the Times or Herald. But one day he discovers that this recruiting in the labour market does not work. Hundreds and thousands of men wish to be employed; and not one of them is up to the standard of the men he could buy on the market a year before. The irresponsibility of the employer for the reproduction of the forces he hires, uses, and eventually destroys or wastes, is the curse of capitalism.”(ERH, OoR, p.85-87)
This last bit reflects my own attitude toward my present employment. While I am grateful to God in the extreme for His gift of this lucrative job opportunity, I am still only selling a piece of my life energy in the form of my personal time. My intellectual, spiritual, social, and physical development as a human is not a concern of my employer (some would argue that it should not be, but we are exploring the bankruptcy of this attitude among other things). I then, approach this necessary evil of selling off a portion of my life, so that I might provide for my family and acquire the economic means to finance the cost of living and the cost of my development as a human being.
More later…
As one may have noted from my position on socio-politico-economics (see Jim’s Labour Page), I have tried to grapple with these social philosophies and find what actually bears on empirical reality. I think that ERH has realized an important factor in the wholeness of being human versus the dehumanizing economic social contracts that we are compelled to participate in. I am going to begin quoting some excerpts from his section on “the reproduction of man” found in his section on the Russian revolution in his book Out of Revolution. I believe that he means by the term reproduction of man the continuance of a full orbed human life in a developing (for the better) society or the redemption of humanity not just in the spiritual sense.
Here we begin:
“Marx and Engels were the first to study the problem of Revolution and Reproduction seriously. They made it plain to what extent business is behind all history,…
But they did not complete their analysis.
We sum up our statements thus: It is not valid to pretend that the workers are exploited by the capitalists because they get low wages.” {although the wage problem has returned now with tighter integration of global markets.—my comment} “The real outcry of man’s offended nature should be that he is degraded because his boss does not care for his past or future, and because he, the worker, is deprived of the power to weave past or future into his own day of work.
The boss, by virtue of the privileges conferred upon him by liberalism {in the classic sense, JRI}, hires a man’s force and skill and presence and brains as a ready-made product. All the traditions that were needed to concoct this man’s talents, and all the props that are needed to keep up his character, are degraded into his own private affair. Modern society and the fellowship of our modern society use present-day forces, disregarding their past and their future. What you are paid for is not a slow growth or an organic evolution, but something that can be ground out immediately by the mill of social life. Modern society exchanges goods, and man is used as a ready-made product. His own mystic process of reproduction, his long way of birth, education, apprenticeship, disciplineship, hope and faith in the intrinsic powers of his nature—all this is of no interest to the business man who hires him for an hour or a year or ten years. Schools, parents, friends, foundations, can take care of his personality. For his boss he is not a growing child of God, but a standardized labour-force*, number such and such, output such and such, reliability such and such. A modern factory requires above all regular and repetitive work of the same kind; a man is taken as a machine of regularized, standardized capacity, doing his 7,325 "ergs" or "ergons" per X Y Z calories an hour. But that is only another expression for a thing which has no past and no future. Electricity, coal, linen, have no past and no future. A labour-force* has no past and no future. In the world of physical experiment we base our behaviour on the expectance of recurrence. A labour-force* may last a long time, or may be wasted very quickly. But fifty years or five days of repetitive labour in the factory are equally devoid of any meaning for the past or future of its owner.”(ERH, OoR, p.84-85)
*I use the term labor-unit.
And now on the nature of time:
“This world of bodies is a world of mechanical time, repeating its sixty minutes every hour. The other world must be sought through another gate than the "business entrance." We live in a plurality of worlds. In one world, Mr. Smith, the employer, is at home. He sits at the breakfast table, perhaps as an autocrat, but nevertheless as a man, a father, a husband, who has a past when he was unmarried and belonged to his father's family, and a future when all his children will have founded their own homes and ceased to listen to his orders. He is an autocrat, yes, but if he is not a fool he feels happy at being limited in time by his own experience and by his own purpose and intentions. He feels how his present day stretches out between two other ages of equal worth. His present is no better than his past or his future; at its very best it can only rival them. Such a house is a world where death almighty mitigates the arrogance of mere life. Here life is a conscious adventure of man between youth and old age. In this world both past and future exist in a positive sense, because they assist in keeping the family alive and in setting its real standards.
In the business cycle and the circle of business we are in a world of bodies: neither past nor future is represented. They may be preserved in schools and museums, as history, as education; but business itself cannot use them. It has a different concept of time, as a mechanical recurrence. But this kind of time occurs only in the dead world of physical nature.
Thus we are right in saying that we treat ourselves and our neighbors as though we had to obey the laws of two different worlds at once. In one world we deal with a man's individuality, in the other we deal with ourselves and others as bodies. Body and soul are not objective parts of the outside world. They are the two constituent elements of two different worlds which we ourselves are constantly building by our own actions and reactions. The world of bodies embodies our way of working, and the world of souls our way of living. We shall soon see that there is a third world, of another type, which we are building all the time by our way of thinking. Our mind is a creator, too, and constructs a third world. But for the explanation of the Communistic reaction the discovery of the two worlds may suffice.
The important conclusion is that all raw material can be transferred from one world to the other, since our own attitudes create both worlds and since we can tell which occurrences in our lives we ought to treat as elements of real life and which we should treat as business. Lumber, electricity, a man's talents, can be commercialized; or they can acquire a past and a future, enter the real life of the soul, as soon as we become or feel responsible for their reproduction.
Suppose all the kinds of raw material we use in our business begin to grow scarce: rubber, wood-pulp, children, poets; forest-fires begin to destroy our timber, and drought our fields… At that moment the employer becomes deeply interested in the process of "Reproduction"; a new world opens before his eyes: a world of change. The circular process of raising rubber, replanting forests, educating foresters, resettling the country, begins to present itself to the minds of business men who up to that time had thought of nothing but the logs they bought from the farmer who needed cash.
Or again: artists, civil engineers, composers, publicity men, are hired by an employer who assumes he can get them by a simple advertisement in the Times or Herald. But one day he discovers that this recruiting in the labour market does not work. Hundreds and thousands of men wish to be employed; and not one of them is up to the standard of the men he could buy on the market a year before. The irresponsibility of the employer for the reproduction of the forces he hires, uses, and eventually destroys or wastes, is the curse of capitalism.”(ERH, OoR, p.85-87)
This last bit reflects my own attitude toward my present employment. While I am grateful to God in the extreme for His gift of this lucrative job opportunity, I am still only selling a piece of my life energy in the form of my personal time. My intellectual, spiritual, social, and physical development as a human is not a concern of my employer (some would argue that it should not be, but we are exploring the bankruptcy of this attitude among other things). I then, approach this necessary evil of selling off a portion of my life, so that I might provide for my family and acquire the economic means to finance the cost of living and the cost of my development as a human being.
More later…
Friday, October 12, 2007
W: LP: LG: FD: NFU
At our first meeting, the moderator of our literary group (currently studying Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground) summarized our first meeting with these words:
"If you missed the discussion you may want to pay attention to some of the
terms that came up tonight: the repeated metaphors of the wall linked to
the mathematical equation 2 X 2=4, the discussion of the satirical and
humorous tone on the part of Dostoevsky that contrasts with the dark
loneliness in the story of the narrator (the underground man) and how the
novel unfolds on these two separate levels: how the novel is at once a
sophisticated humorous attack on the thinking of the liberals in Russia at
the time (who were the precursors of what came to be known as the
Bolsheviks), and how it portrays man in his fallenness on another level. A
description of this technique has been borrowed from music, "polyphonic,"
meaning music in which two or more different voices or melodies are occuring
simultaneously. A feature of Dostoevsky's genius is that he writes
"polyphonically." We discovered how the humor comes out as the passages are
read aloud. We noticed his repeated use of the terms "action figures" and
"ingenuous persons" and speculated as to what could be meant by these groups
and how Dostoevsky has them relating to the "wall" and "2 X 2 = 4". We
discussed what the phrase in the foreward, on the first page, might mean:
how the underground man shows "the dialectic of the isolated consciousness"
and how it might refer to the narrator's bragging about lying and then
denying he ever lied in the next paragraph (as one example). We looked at
the metaphor of the mouse seeking revenge in the reading, how it stands for
the narrator, and we discussed the narrator's assertions that his guilty
awareness of his sins, his "nastinesses" as he calls them, and then uses
them to gnaw and eat at himself inwardly until the pain becomes a "decided
pleasure" and how this differs from the idea of the pleasure in the sin
itself, because it is a sort of pleasure in the misery and guilt of the sin.
Thus, the underground man is not repudiating morals, he accepts the
morals, but rejoices, indeed eventually comes to take pleasure in the
degradation and shame that result from breaking them. This seems to be an
aspect of Dostoevsky's depiction of our fallenness."
There were other points discussed and much interesting conversation beyond the above summary, but the summary is fair.
I am still thinking and working out how I am going to express all the ideas and fancies in my mind that are needing expression. Here are the bare beginnings of my comments on the piece of literature that we are studying:
Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The writer laughingly begins a caricature of himself and humanity in general. By contrasting humans as they really are with how the Romantics, Liberals, and various related philosophers would want humanity to be, I have discovered a few of my own presuppositions that I had not before questioned. Perhaps at a later time I will explore some of the ideas and philosophies that have, until now, been the basis of some of my world-view assumptions. But besides all this philosophical wrangling and sardonic criticism made by the writer in the voice of the narrator, the narrator reminds me of some my own mental entanglements in my earlier years. I would say that the narrator is possibly a bit more neurotic than I was. Or maybe I was that neurotic?!:) Anyway, and to use colloquialisms, I can relate; more on this later as well.
"If you missed the discussion you may want to pay attention to some of the
terms that came up tonight: the repeated metaphors of the wall linked to
the mathematical equation 2 X 2=4, the discussion of the satirical and
humorous tone on the part of Dostoevsky that contrasts with the dark
loneliness in the story of the narrator (the underground man) and how the
novel unfolds on these two separate levels: how the novel is at once a
sophisticated humorous attack on the thinking of the liberals in Russia at
the time (who were the precursors of what came to be known as the
Bolsheviks), and how it portrays man in his fallenness on another level. A
description of this technique has been borrowed from music, "polyphonic,"
meaning music in which two or more different voices or melodies are occuring
simultaneously. A feature of Dostoevsky's genius is that he writes
"polyphonically." We discovered how the humor comes out as the passages are
read aloud. We noticed his repeated use of the terms "action figures" and
"ingenuous persons" and speculated as to what could be meant by these groups
and how Dostoevsky has them relating to the "wall" and "2 X 2 = 4". We
discussed what the phrase in the foreward, on the first page, might mean:
how the underground man shows "the dialectic of the isolated consciousness"
and how it might refer to the narrator's bragging about lying and then
denying he ever lied in the next paragraph (as one example). We looked at
the metaphor of the mouse seeking revenge in the reading, how it stands for
the narrator, and we discussed the narrator's assertions that his guilty
awareness of his sins, his "nastinesses" as he calls them, and then uses
them to gnaw and eat at himself inwardly until the pain becomes a "decided
pleasure" and how this differs from the idea of the pleasure in the sin
itself, because it is a sort of pleasure in the misery and guilt of the sin.
Thus, the underground man is not repudiating morals, he accepts the
morals, but rejoices, indeed eventually comes to take pleasure in the
degradation and shame that result from breaking them. This seems to be an
aspect of Dostoevsky's depiction of our fallenness."
There were other points discussed and much interesting conversation beyond the above summary, but the summary is fair.
I am still thinking and working out how I am going to express all the ideas and fancies in my mind that are needing expression. Here are the bare beginnings of my comments on the piece of literature that we are studying:
Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The writer laughingly begins a caricature of himself and humanity in general. By contrasting humans as they really are with how the Romantics, Liberals, and various related philosophers would want humanity to be, I have discovered a few of my own presuppositions that I had not before questioned. Perhaps at a later time I will explore some of the ideas and philosophies that have, until now, been the basis of some of my world-view assumptions. But besides all this philosophical wrangling and sardonic criticism made by the writer in the voice of the narrator, the narrator reminds me of some my own mental entanglements in my earlier years. I would say that the narrator is possibly a bit more neurotic than I was. Or maybe I was that neurotic?!:) Anyway, and to use colloquialisms, I can relate; more on this later as well.
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