Watt on Crusoe

The novel’s serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people seems to depend upon two important general conditions: the society must value every individual highly enough to consider him the proper subject of its serious literature; and there must be enough variety of belicf and action among ordinary people for a detailed account of them to be of interest to other ordinary people, the readers of novels. It is probable that neither of these conditions for the existence of the novel obtained very widely until fairly recently, because they both depend on the rise of a society characterised by that vast complex of interdependent factors denoted by the term ‘individualism’. 

Even the word is recent, dating only from the middle of the nineteenth century. In all ages, no doubt, and in all societies, some people have been ‘individualists’ in the sense that they were egocentric, unique or conspicuously independent of current opinions and habits; but the concept of individualism involves much more than this. It posits a whole society mainly governed by the idea of every individual’s intrinsic independence both from other individuals and from that multifarious allegiance to past modes of thought and action denoted by the word ‘tradition’ —a force that is always social, not individual. The existence of such a society, in turn, obviously depends on a special type of economic and political organisation and on an appropriate ideology; more specifically, on an economic and politcal organisation which allows its members a very wide range of choices in their actions, and on an ideology primarily based, not on the tradition of the past, but on the autonomy of the individual, irrespective of his particular social status or personal capacity. It is generally agreed that modern society is uniquely individualist in these respects, and that of the many historical causes for its emergence two are of supreme importance—the rise of modern industrial capitalism and the spread of Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist or Puritan forms. 

Capitalism brought a great increase of economic specialisation; and this, combined with a less rigid and homogeneous social structure, and a less absolutist and more democratic political system, enormously increased the individual’s freedom of choice. For those fully exposed to the new economic order, the effective entity on which social arrangements were now based was no longer the family, nor the church, nor the guild, nor the township, nor any other collective unit, but the individual: he alone was primarily responsible for determining his own economic, social, political and religious roles. 

It is very difficult to say when this change of orientation began to affect society as a whole—probably not until the nineteenth century. But the movement certainly began much earlier. In the sixteenth century the Reformation and the rise of national states decisively challenged the substantial social homogeneity of mediaeval Christendom, and, in the famous words of Maitland, ‘for the first time, the Absolute State faced the Absolute Individual’. Outside the political and religious sphere, however, change was slow, and it is likely that it was not until the further development of industrial capitalism, especially in England and in the Low Countries, that a mainly individualist social and economic structure came into being and started to affect a considerable part, although by no means a majority, of the total population. 

It is, at least, generally agreed that the foundations of the new order were laid in the period immediately following the Glorious Revolution of 1689. The commercial and industrial classes, who were the prime agents in bringing about the individualist social order, had achieved greater political and economic power; and this power was already being reflected in the domain of literature. The middle classes of the towns, we have seen, were becoming much more important in the reading public; and at the same time literature began to view trade, commerce and industry with favour. This was a rather new development. Earlier writers, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Ben Jonson and Dryden, for example, had tended to support the traditional economic and social order and had attacked many of the symptoms of emergent individualism. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, Addison, Steele and Defoe were somewhat ostentatiously setting the seal of literary approval] on the heroes of economic individualism. 

The new orientation was equally evident in the philosophical domain. The great English empiricists of the seventeenth century were as vigorously individualist in their political and ethical thought as in their epistemology. Bacon hoped to make a really new start in social theory by applying his inductive method to an accumulation of factual data about a great number of particular individuals;! Hobbes, also feeling that he was dealing with a subject that had not been properly approached before, based his political and ethical theory on the fundamentally egocentric psychological constitution of the individual;? while in his Two Treatises of Government (1690) Locke constructed the class system of political thought based on the indefeasibility of individual rights, as against the more traditional ones of Church, Family or King. That these thinkers should have been the political and psychological vanguard of nascent individualism, as well as the pioneers of its theory of knowledge, suggests how closely linked their reorientations were both in themselves and in relation to the innovations of the novel. For, just as there is a basic congruity between the non-realist nature of the literary forms of the Greeks, their intensely social, or civic, moral outlook, and their philosophical preference for the universal, so the modern novel is closely allied on the one hand to the realist epistemology of the modern period, and on the other to the individualism of its social structure. In the literary, the philosophical and the social spheres alike the classical focus on the ideal, the universal and the corporate has shifted completely, and the modern field of vision is mainly occupied by the discrete particular, the directly apprehended sensum, and the autonomous individual. 

Defoe, whose philosophical outlook has much in common with that of the English empiricists of the seventeenth century, expressed the diverse elements of individualism more completely than any previous writer, and his work offers a unique demonstration of the connection between individualism in its many forms and the rise of the novel. This connection is shown particularly clearly and comprehensively in his first novel, Robinson Crusoe. 

Robinson Crusoe has been very appropriately used by many economic theorists as their illustration of homo economicus. Just as ‘the body politic’ was the symbol of the communal way of thought typical of previous societies, so ‘economic man’ symbolised the new outlook of individualism in its economic aspect. Adam Smith has been charged with the invention; actually, the concept is much older, but it is natural that it should have come to the fore as an abstraction expressing the individualism of the economic system as a whole only when the individualism of that system itself had reached an advanced stage of development. 

That Robinson Crusoe, like Defoe’s other main characters, Moll Flanders, Roxana, Colonel Jacque and Captain Singleton, is an embodiment of economic individualism hardly needs demonstration. All Defoe’s heroes pursue money, which he characteristically called ‘the general denominating article in the world’;! and they pursue it very methodically according to the profit and loss book-keeping which Max Weber considered to be the distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism.? Defoe’s heroes, we observe, have no need to learn this technique; whatever the circumstances of their birth and education, they have it in their blood, and keep us more fully informed of their present stocks of money and commodities than any other characters in fiction. Crusoe’s book-keeping conscience, indeed, has established an effective priority over his other thoughts and emotions; when his Lisbon steward offers him 160 moidores to alleviate his momentary difficulties on return, Crusoe relates: ‘I could hardly refrain from tears while he spoke; in short, I took 100 of the moidores, and called for a pen and ink to give him a receipt for them’.

Book-keeping is but one aspect of a central theme in the modern social order. Our civilisation as a whole is based on individual contractual relationships, as opposed to the unwritten, traditional and collective relationships of previous societies; and the idea of contract played an important part in the theoretical development of political individualism. It had featured prominently in the fight against the Stuarts, and it was enshrined in Locke’s political system. Locke, indeed, thought that contractual relationships were binding even in the state of nature;' Crusoe, we notice, acts like a good Lockean—when others arrive on the island he forces them to accept his dominion with written contracts acknowledging his absolute power (even though we have previously been told that he has run out of ink).? 

But the primacy of the economic motive, and an innate reverence for book-keeping and the law of contract are by no means the only matters in which Robinson Crusoe is a symbol of the processes associated with the rise of economic individualism. The hypostasis of the economic motive logically entails a devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling and action: the various forms of traditional group relationship, the family, the guild, the village, the sense of nationality—all are weakened, and so, too, are the competing claims of non-economic individual achievement and enjoyment, ranging from spiritual salvation to the pleasures of recreation.3 

This inclusive reordering of the components of human society tends to occur wherever industrial capitalism becomes the dominant force in the economic structure,* and it naturally became evident particularly early in England. Unlike Goldsmith, Defoe was not a professed enemy of the new order—quite the reverse; nevertheless there is much in Robinson Crusoe that bears out Goldsmith’s picture, as can be seen in Defoe’s treatment of such group relationships as the family or the nation. 

For the most part, Defoe’s heroes either have no family, like Moll Flanders, Colonel Jacque and Captain Singleton, or leave it at an early age never to return, like Roxana and Robinson Crusoe. Not too much importance can be attached to this fact, since adventure stories demand the absence of conventional social ties. Still, in Robinson Crusoe at least, the hero has a home and family, and leaves them for the classic reason of homo economicus—that it is necessary to better his economic condition. ‘Something fatal in that propension of nature’ calls him to the sea and adventure, and against ‘settling to business’ in the station to which he is born—‘ the upper station of low life’; and this despite the panegyric which his father makes of that condition. Later he sees this lack of ‘confined desires’, this dissatisfaction with ‘the state wherein God and Nature has placed’ him, as his ‘original sin’.! At the time, however, the argument between his parents and himself is a debate, not about filial duty or religion, but about whether going or staying is likely to be the most advantageous course materially: both sides accept the economic argument as primary. And, of course, Crusoe actually gains by his ‘original sin’, and becomes richer than his father was. 

Crusoe’s ‘original sin’ is really the dynamic tendency of Capitalism itself, whose aim is never merely to maintain the status quo, but to transform it incessantly. Leaving home, improving on the lot one was born to, is a vital feature of the individualist pattern of life. It may be regarded as the economic and social embodiment of the ‘uneasiness’ which Locke had made the centre of his system of motivation,? an uneasiness whose existence was, in the very opposite outlook of Pascal, the index of the enduring misery of mortal man. ‘All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own room’ Pascal had written. Defoe’s hero is far from agreeing. Even when hes old, Crusoe tells us how: ‘, . » nothing else offering, and finding that really stirring about and trading, the profit being so great, and, as I may say, certain, had more pleasure in it, and morc satisfaction to the mind, than sitting still, which, to me especially, was the unhappiest part of life’.! So, in the Farther Adventures, Crusoe sets out on yet another lucrative Odyssey. 

The fundamental tendency of economic individualism, then, prevents Crusoe from paying much heed to the ties of family, whether as a son or a husband. This is in direct contradiction to the great stress which Defoe lays on the social and religious importance of the family in his didactic works such as the Family Instructor; but his novels reflect not theory but practice, and they accord these ties a very minor, and on the whole obstructive, role. 

Rational scrutiny of one’s own economic interest may lead one to be as little bound by national as by family ties. Defoe certainly valued individuals and countries alike primarily on their economic merits. Thus one of his most patriotic utterances takes the characteristic form of claiming that his compatriots have a greater productive output per hour than the workmen of any other country.? Crusoe, we notice, whom Walter de la Mare has justly called Defoe’s Elective Affinity,3 shows xenophobia mainly where the economic virtues are absent. When they are present—as in the Spanish Governor, a French papist priest, a faithful Portuguese factor—his praise is unstinted. On the other hand, he condemns many Englishmen, such as his English settlers on the island, for their lack of industry. Crusoe, one feels, is not bound to his country by sentimental ties, any more than to his family; he is satisfied by people, whatever their nationality, who are good to do business with; and he feels, like Moll Flanders, that ‘with money in the pocket one is at home anywhere’, 

What might at first appear to place Robinson Crusoe in the somewhat special category of ‘Travel and Adventure’ does not, then, altogether do so. The plot’s reliance on travel does tend to allot Robinson Crusoe a somewhat peripheral position in the novel’s line of development, since it removes the hero from his usual setting in a stable and cohesive pattern of social relations. 

But Crusoe is not a mere footloose adventurer, and his travels, like his freedom from social ties, are merely somewhat extreme cases of tendencies that are normal in modern society as a whole, since, by making the pursuit of gain a primary motive, economic individualism has much increased the mobility of the individual. More specifically, Robinson Crusoe’s career is based, as modern scholarship has shown,! on some of the innumerable volumes which recounted the exploits of those voyagers who had done so much in the sixteenth century to assist the development of capitalism by providing the gold, slaves and tropical products on which trade expansion depended; and who had continued the process in the seventeenth century by developing the colonies and world markets on which the future progress of capitalism depended. 

Defoe’s plot, then, expresses some of the most important tendencies of the life of his time, and it is this which sets his hero apart from most of the travellers in literature. Robinson Crusoe is not, like Autolycus, a commercial traveller rooted in an extended but still familiar locality; nor is he, like Ulysses, an unwilling voyager trying to get back to his family and his native land: profit is Crusoe’s only vocation, and the whole world is his territory. 

The primacy of individual economic advantage has tended to diminish the importance of personal as well as group relationships, and especially of those based on sex; for sex, as Weber pointed out,? being one of the strongest non-rational factors in human life, is one of the strongest potential menaces to the individual’s rational pursuit of economic ends, and it has therefore, as we shall see, been placed under particularly strong controls in the ideology of industrial capitalism. 

Romantic love has certainly had no greater antagonist among the novelists than Defoe. Even sexual satisfaction—where he speaks of it—tends to be minimised; he protested in The Review, for example, that ‘the Trifle called Pleasure in it’ was ‘not worth the Repentance’.3 As to marriage, his attitude 1s complicated by the fact that economic and moral virtue in the male is no guarantee of a profitable matrimonial investment: on his colony ‘as 

it often happens in the world (what the wise ends of God’s Providence are in such a disposition of things I cannot say), the two honest fellows had the two worst wives, and the three repro. bates, that were scarce worth hanging . . . had three clever, diligent, careful and ingenious wives’.! His puzzled parenthesis bears eloquent testimony to the seriousness with which he views this flaw in the rationality of Providence. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that love plays little part in Crusoe’s own life, and that even the temptations of sex are excluded from the scene of his greatest triumphs, the island. When Crusoe does notice the lack of ‘society’ there, he prays for the solace of company, but we observe that what he desires is a male slave.? Then, with Friday, he enjoys an idyll without benefit of woman—a revolutionary departure from the traditional expectations aroused by desert islands from the Odyssey to the New Yorker. 

When eventually Crusoe returns to civilisation, sex 1s still strictly subordinated to business. Only when his financial position has been fully secured by a further voyage does he marry; and all he tells us of this supreme human adventure is that it was ‘not either to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction’. This, the birth of three children, and his wife’s death, however, comprise only the early part of a sentence, which ends with plans for a further voyage.3 

Women have only one important role to play, and that is economic. When Crusoe’s colonists draw lots for five women, we are gleefully informed that: 

He that drew to choose first . . . took her that was reckoned the homeliest and eldest of the five, which made mirth enough among the rest . . . but the fellow considered better than any of them, that it was application and business that they were to expect assistance in as much as anything else; and she proved the best wife of all the parcel. 

‘The best wife of all the parcel.’ The language of commerce here reminds us that Dickens once decided on the basis of Defoe’s treatment of women that he must have been ‘a precious dry and disagreeable article.

The same devaluation of non-economic factors can be seen in Crusoe’s other personal relationships. He treats them all in terms of their commodity value. The clearest case is that of Xury, the Moorish boy who helped him to escape from slavery and on another occasion offered to prove his devotion by sacrificing his own life. Crusoe very properly resolves ‘to love him ever after’ and promises ‘to make him a great man’. But when chance leads them to the Portuguese Captain, who offers Crusoe sixty pieces of eight—twice Judas’s figure—he cannot resist the bargain, and sells Xury into slavery. He has momentary scruples, it is true, but they are cheaply satisfied by securing a promise from the new owner to ‘set him free in ten years if he turn Christian’. Remorse later supervenes, but only when the tasks of his island life make manpower more valuable to him than money.! 

Crusoe’s relations with Man Friday are similarly egocentric. He does not ask him his name, but gives him one. Even in language—the medium whereby human beings may achieve something more than animal relationships with each other, as Crusoe himself wrote in his Serious Reflections-—Crusoe is a strict utilitarian. ‘I likewise taught him to say Yes and No’, he tells us; but Friday still speaks pidgin English at the end of their long association, as Defoe’s contemporary critic Charles Gildon pointed out. 

Yet Crusoe regards the relationship as ideal. He is ‘as perfectly and completely happy if any such thing as complete happiness can be found in a sublunary state’.5 A functional silence, broken only by an occasional ‘No, Friday’, or an abject ‘Yes, Master’, is the golden music of Crusoe’s ile joyeuse. It seems that man’s social nature, his need for friendship and understanding, is wholly satisfied by the righteous bestowal or grateful receipt, of benevolent but not undemanding patronage. It is true that later, as with Xury, Crusoe promises himself ‘to do something considerable’ for his servant, ‘if he outlive me’, Fortunately, no such sacrifice is called for, as Friday dies at sea, to be rewarded only by a brief word of obituary compassion.

Emotional ties, then, and personal relationships generally, play a very minor part in Robinson Crusoe, except when they are focussed on economic matters. For instance, after Crusoe has left, it is only when his faithful old agent in Lisbon reveals that he is now a very rich man that we get any emotional climax: ‘] turned pale and grew sick; and had not the old man run and fetched me a cordial, I believe the sudden surprise of joy had overset nature, and I had died upon the spot’.! Only money —fortune in its modern sense—is a proper cause of deep feeling; and friendship is accorded only to those who can safely be entrusted with Crusoe’s economic interests. 

Sitting still, we saw, was ‘the unhappiest part of life’ to Robinson Crusoe; leisure pursuits are almost as bad. In this he resembles his author, who seems to have made as few concessions to such distractions as anyone. The fewness of Defoe’s literary friendships has been commented on, and he is perhaps a unique example of a great writer who was very little interested in literature, and says nothing of interest about it as literature.? 

In his blindness to aesthetic experience Crusoe is Defoe’s peer. We can say of him as Marx said of his archetypal capitalist: ‘enjoyment is subordinated to capital, and the individual who enjoys to the individual who capitalises’.3 Some of the French versions of Robinson Crusoe make him address hymns of praise to nature, beginning ‘Oh Nature!’ Defoe did not. The natural scene on the island appeals not for adoration, but for exploitation; wherever Crusoe looks his acres cry out so loud for improvement that he has no leisure to observe that they also compose a landscape. 

Of course, in a wintry way, Crusoe has his pleasures. If he does not, like Selkirk,’ dance with his goats, he at least plays with them, and with his parrot and his cats; but his deepest satisfactions come from surveying his stock of goods: ‘I had everything so ready at my hand,’ he says, ‘that it was a great  pleasure to see all my goods in such order and especially to find my stock of all necessaries so great.

(b) 7 

If Robinson Crusoe’s character depends very largely on the psychological and social oricntations of economic individualism, the appeal of his adventures to the readcr seems mainly to derive from the effects of another important concomitant of modern capitalism, economic spccialisation. 

The division of labour has done much to make the novel possible: partly because the more specialised the social and economic structure, the greater the number of significant differences of character, attitude and experience in contemporary life which the novelist can portray, and which are of interest to his readers; partly because, by increasing the amount of leisure, economic specialisation provides the kind of mass audience with which the novel is associated; and partly because this specialisation creates particular needs in that audience which the novel satisfies. Such, at least, was the general view of T. H. Green: ‘In the progressive division of labour, while we become more useful as citizens, we seem to lose our completeness as men... the perfect organisation of modern society removes the excitement of adventure and the occasion for independent effort. There is less of human interest to touch us within our calling. . . . ‘The alleviation’ of this situation, Green concluded, ‘is to be found in the newspaper and the novel.’? 

It is very likely that the lack of variety and stimulation in the daily task as a result of economic specialisation is largely responsible for the unique dependence of the individual in our culture upon the substitute experiences provided by the printing press, particularly in the forms of journalism and the novel. Robinson Crusoe, however, is a much more direct illustration of Green’s thesis, since much of its appeal obviously depends on the quality of the ‘occasions for independent effort’ in the economic realm which it offers Defoe’s hero, efforts which the reader can share vicariously. The appeal of these efforts is surely a measure of the depth of the deprivations involved by econo~ mic specialisation, deprivations whose far-reaching nature is suggested by the way our civilisation has reintroduced some of the basic economic processes as therapeutic recreations: in gardening, home-weaving, pottery, camping, woodwork and keeping pets, we can all participate in the character-forming satisfactions which circumstances force on Defoe’s hero; and like him, demonstrate what we would not otherwise know, that ‘by making the most rational judgement of things, every man may be in time master of every mechanic art’.

Defoe was certainly aware of how the increasing economic specialisation which was a feature of the life of his time had made most of the ‘mechanic arts’ alien to the experience of his readers. When Crusoe makes bread, for instance, he reflects that “Tis a little wonderful and what I believe few people have thought much upon, viz., the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing, procuring, curing, dressing, making and finishing this one article of bread’. Defoe’s description goes on for seven pages, pages that would have been of little interest to people in mediaeval or Tudor society, who saw this and other basic economic processes going on daily in their own households. But by the early eighteenth century, as Kalm reported, most women did not ‘bake, because there is a baker in every parish or village’,3 and Defoe could therefore expect his readers to be interested in the very detailed descriptions of the economic life which comprise such an important and memorable part of his narrative. 

Robinson Crusoe, of course, does not deal with the actual economic life of Defoe’s own time and place. It would be somewhat contrary to the facts of economic life under the division of labour to show the average individual’s manual labour as interesting or inspiring; to take Adam Smith’s famous example of the division of labour in The Wealth of Nations,* the man who performs one of the many separate operations in the manufacture of a pin is unlikely to find his task as absorbing and interesting as Crusoe does. So Defoe sets back the economic clock, and takes his hero to a primitive environment, where labour can be presented as varied and inspiring, and where it has the further significant difference from the pin-maker’s at home that there is an absolute equivalence between individual effort and individual reward. This was the final change from contemporary conditions which was necessary to enable Defoe to give narrative expression to the ideological counterpart of the  Division of Labour, the Dignity of Labour. 

The creed of the dignity of labour is not wholly modern: in classical times the Cynics and Stoics had opposed the denigration of manual labour which is a necessary part of a slaveowning society's scale of values; and later, Chnstianity, originally associated mainly with slaves and the poor, had done much to remove the odium on manual labour. The idea, however, was only fully developed in the modern period, presumably because its compensatory affirmation became the more necessary as the development of economic specialisation made manual labour more stultifying; and the creed itself is closely associated with the advent of Protestantism. Calvinism in particular tended to make its adherents forget the idea that labour was God’s punishment for Adam’s disobedience, by emphasising the very different idea that untiring stewardship of the material gifts of God was a paramount religious and ethical obligation.

The quality of Crusoe’s stewardship cannot be doubted; he allows himself little time for rest, and even the advent of new manpower—Friday’s—is a signal, not for relaxation, but for expanded production. Defoe clearly belongs to the tradition of Ascetic Protestantism. He had written much that sounds like the formulations of Weber, Troeltsch and Tawney; in Dickory Cronke’s aphorism, for example: ‘When you find yourself sleepy in a morning, rouse yourself, and consider that you are born to business, and that in doing good in your generation, you answer your character and act like a man’. He had evenwith a certain sophistic obtuseness—propounded the view that the pursuit of economic utility was quite literally an imitation of Christ: ‘Usefulness being the great pleasure, and justly deem’d by all good men the truest and noblest end of life, in which men come nearest to the character of our B. Saviour, who went about doing good’.3 

Defoe’s attitude here exhibits a confusion of religious and material values to which the Puritan gospel of the dignity of labour was peculiarly liable: once the highest spiritual values had been attached to the performance of the daily task, the next step was for the autonomous individual to regard his achievements as a quasi-divine mastering of the environment. It is likely that this secularisation of the Calvinist conception of stewardship was of considerable importance for the rise of the novel. Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person’s daily activities are the centre of continuous literary attention. These activities, it is true, are not seen in a wholly secular light; but later novelists could continue Defoe’s serious concern with man’s worldly doings without placing them in a religious framework. It is therefore likely that the Puritan conception of the dignity of labour helped to bring into being the novel’s general premise that the individual’s daily life is of sufficient importance and interest to be the proper subject of literature. 

Sennett on Christianity

  Beginning in the eleventh century, church builders sought to carve figures at human scale to show, in the words of a modern art historian, the “relationship berween human values and those values immanent in the world.” The carved figures made a direct appeal to the viewer to see him or herself as part of the church, an act of inclusion which began in an earlier age through the preaching of St. Francis of Assisi, who spoke directly to the ordinary Christian in simple language. By the year Jehan de Chelles began to complete Notre-Dame, such a union of flesh and stone had grown ever stronger as Christians began to connect their own bodily suffering to the suffering of Jesus. 

Christ “was, as it were, roasted and slowly baked to save us,” Jean Barthélemy wrote consolingly in Le Livre de Crainte Amoureuse.'° Such an earthy, homey image made the Crucifixion a comprehensible experience in terms of daily life. Rather than Christ the King, people identified with “the suffering Christ, the Christ of the Passion. The Crucifixion was increasingly portrayed, and increasingly realistic.”!! This movement of passionate identification with Christ’s bodily suffering was known as the “Imitation of Christ,” just because Christ’s sorrows seemed imitated by the human body’s sufferings. This was no casual figure of speech. The image of imitation stood directly opposed to Origen’s conviction that Christ’s body is alien to our own. St. Francis of Assisi told his parishioners that if they thought about their everyday experience, their own sensations, the world around them, they would realize what God is. Theologically, St. Francis recovered Nature for Christianity: God is in the world, God is Flesh as well as Light. 

By caring about the sufferings of other people, we imitate our teligious feelings about Jesus on the Cross: St. Francis reaffirmed that identification with the poor and outcast which marked the earliest Christianity. Sociologically, he exploded a bomb. He taught that in our bodies we contain the ethical yardstick for judging rules, rights, and privileges in society: the more these cause pain, the more our bodies know they are unjust. If the Imitation of Christ recovered the flesh for religion, it thus made the flesh the judge of social hierarchy. More, this religious view contrasted the bonds among those who care about one another to societal structures like commercial dealings where love for others may be entirely absent. 

To be sure, the Middle Ages practiced tortures and other bodily Cruelties with an abandon that would have done credit to the Romans who slaughtered Christians in the Colosseum. But this new ethos of compassion introduced at least rudimentary ideas of respecting the pain of others during torture. The public torture in Paris of persons afflicted by devils, for instance, was not quite the casual affair from about 1250 onward that it had earlier been; the torturers sought ecclesiastical assurances that they were causing pain to the devils inside, not to the person in whose body they lodged. 

By its very nature, the Imitation of Christ affirmed the life of the masses against the privileges of the elite. But it drew support, and indeed was articulated, by certain elements of medieval science because it accorded with what educated men and women believed about their own bodies. 

Johnson

 A few of his definitions must be admitted to be erroneous. Thus, Windward and Leeward, though directly of opposite meaning, are defined identically the same way; as to which inconsiderable specks it is enough to observe, that his Preface announces that he was aware there might be many such in so immense a work; nor was he at all disconcerted when an instance was pointed out to him. A lady once asked him how he came to define Pastern the KNEE of a horse: instead of making an elaborate defence, as she expected, he at once answered, 'Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.' 

On Goldsmith 

It has been generally circulated and believed that he was a mere fool in conversation; but, in truth, this has been greatly exaggerated. He had, no doubt, a more than common share of that hurry of ideas which we often find in his countrymen, and which sometimes produces a laughable confusion in expressing them. He was very much what the French call "un etourdi," and from vanity and an eager desire of being conspicuous wherever he was, he frequently talked carelessly without knowledge of the subject, or even without thought. His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar aukwardly affecting the easy gentleman. Those who were in any way distinguished, excited envy in him to so ridiculous an excess, that the instances of it are hardly credible. When accompanying two beautiful young ladies with their mother on a tour in France, he was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him; and once at the exhibition of the "Fantoccini" in London, when those who sat next to him observed with what dexterity a puppet was made to toss a pike, he could not bear that it should have such praise, and exclaimed with warmth, "'Pshaw! I can do it better myself." He, I am afraid, had no settled system of any sort, so that his conduct must not be strictly scrutinized; but his affections were social and generous, and when he had money he gave it away very liberally. His desire of imaginary consequence predominated over his attention to truth.

Krazy

 By Tisserand

This much is known: in late 1899 or early 1900, at the age of nineteen, George Herriman arrived in New York City. Needing a place to live, he promptly made his way to Coney Island. 

It’s not hard to see why Herriman would choose Coney Island. In fact, it is difficult to imagine him wanting to be anywhere else. During the past century Coney Island had transformed from a beach resort to “the oddest place about New York,” as described in a Los Angeles Herald article that appeared when Herriman still worked at the newspaper. Amid the rumble of rides and the smells of seawater and circus animals, doorways led to “what no one can ever know who has not investigated,” promised the Herald. For new neighbors, Herriman could choose among the Island’s “peddlers, fakirs, shell game men, disorderly women, intoxicated persons, and petty gamblers.” 

Little is known of any early relationships in New York, but sey. eral years later Charles Emmett Van Loan, a friend and newspaper colleague, reported that Herriman had made the acquaintance of , woman who performed in Coney Island’s Sultan’s Harem show: “He used to know a girl down at Coney Island—‘Zuleika, the Sultan’ Favorite, on the bills but Mary Callahan to her friends—and that was where he got his taste for Oriental music.” Callahan might have been one of the women who dressed in billowy harem clothes, smoking Turkish cigarettes while barkers gave mock-scholarly lectures about the Orient. Possibly she is the woman seen in a three-dimensional “anaglyph” from the era titled “The Sultan’s Favorite,” which features a dark-haired woman reclining on plush pillows, her robe indelicately opened to expose a long, bare leg. Nothing more is known about Mary Callahan, however. 

Herriman lived in a boardinghouse on Jones Walk, a block-long stretch of games and concessions. His landlord, Jacob Jones, a fortythree-year-old son of German immigrants, owned the Jones Shooting Gallery, which sat close enough to the boardinghouse for the reports of its rifles to be heard in Herriman’s room. On Friday, June 1, 1900, 4 census taker visited the house on Jones Walk and enumerated thirteen men, along with Jones and his wife. 

 There was a new industry to build and a new art form to create. 

A comic strip is, most broadly defined, a series of pictures that tell a story, usually combined with words and most often published in a newspaper or magazine or, more recently, online. Over the years, comics developed their own visual language: word balloons, radiating worry lines, droplets of nervous sweat, hats popping off heads, and “grawlixes,” the term coined by cartoonist Mort Walker for typographical symbols indicating profanity. At its best and with rare exceptions (such as the wordless Henry), the comic strip’s unique integration of those three elements- words, pictures and symbols- allows it to tell a story, whether humorous or serious,  that can't as effectively be told any other way. 

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A former Baraboo, Wisconsin, publisher named Ansel Nash Kellogg is credited with launching the first newspaper syndicate in 1865 when he began sending preprinted stories to small newspapers across the country. In 1884 an Irish immigrant named Samuel S. McClure started the first profitable literary syndicate, which he named Associated Literary Press. McClure was a driven man, called a “dog on the hunt” by muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell and a “holy terror” by novelist Joseph Conrad. McClure introduced those writers and more to readers across the country, eventually handing over operations to his brother, T. C. McClure, who added a printing plant capable of turning out color comic supplements. In 1900 the operation was renamed the McClure Newspaper Syndicate. 

In 1901, McClure client newspapers published florid announcements promising “four pages of harmonious color blended for the purpose of producing smiles, wide smiles of delight and such laughter as is induced only by clean American humor.” Among the providers of that humor was Herriman, who now was being introduced to a national readership thanks to McClure papers such as the Minneapolis Tribune, the New York Press, and the Boston Post. 

The promise of clean humor didn’t satisfy preachers across the country, who took to pulpits to condemn the full-color pleasures that threatened to keep worshippers home on Sunday mornings. In Philadelphia, city leader John Wanamaker, a religious man, discovered to his horror that his own son, Thomas B. Wanamaker, planned to launch a Sunday edition of the Philadelphia North American. The elder Wanamaker did everything in his power to stop his son, even attempting to buy the newspaper out from under him. His efforts failed spectacularly. On Saturday, September 28, 1901, the North American's front page featured a letter from Thomas B. Wanamaker denouncing his father’s actions. 

 Minstrelsy’s stock characters—the northern dandy Zip Coon, the dull-witted southern black named Jim Crow—lingered well into the twentieth century, providing stock characters for movjes, radio, and television. They are still seen on the painted faces of circus clowns as well as the black-faced, white-gloved Mickey Mouse. 

In early newspaper comics, pen-and-ink minstrelsy adopted many of the same characters and stories as staged shows. George Herriman had published his first caricatures of blacks when he drew courtroom scenes for the Los Angeles Herald. His first full-fledged minstrel cartoon, The Starter of Ragtime, appeared in 1901 in Judge magazine. In it, Noah lectures his son, Ham: “See here, Ham; you’ve got to go to Africa and populate it—see? . . . How do you think this world is going to get along without ragtime in a few generations from now?” While he speaks, Noah’s other two sons taunt Ham with shouts of  “Look at de coon!” 

As surely as F. Scott Fitzgerald embodied the Lost Generation, and Neal Cassady was, in the words of poet Allen Ginsberg, the “secret hero” of the Beats, so did Tad Dorgan define what might be called the “Sports”: an informal group of writers and artists, mostly based in newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in the early decades of the twentieth century. Largely self-educated and self-made men, the Sports celebrated a hard-brawling immigrant America. Their influence in art included the “Ashcan” school of urban realism, and their sensibilities entered literature and theater via writers Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon. Runyon’s street-savvy, slangspeaking hustlers took to the stage in the musical Guys and Dolls, and the term “Runyonesque” would later define the Sports aesthetic. But the Sports themselves agreed that their finest was Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan, a physically frail man with shiny blue eyes, half a right hand, and a quick-jab wit. 

“Tad was for years the life of the Roaring Forties,” wrote O. O. McIntyre, referring to New York’s theater district. “It was the playground for this shy, funereal humorist who liked to pry into the mechanism of a hectic night life to see what made it tick.” 

The Sports’ motto might be found on a sign that Dorgan said should hang over every man’s desk: “Don’t Kid Yourself”’ Dorgan has been credited with coining much of the glossary of the age. H. L. Mencken wrote that Dorgan either invented or popularized “skiddoo,” “drugstore cowboy,” “cat’s pajamas,” and “Yes, we have no bananas.” Upon Tad’s death in 1929, the newspapers brimmed with accolades, and at Madison Square Garden ten thousand fight fans stood in reverence while a bugler played taps. “Oh, yes, there was the greatest fellow that ever lived,” Herrman once said. “He had a million friends, all kinds.” 

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Ithough bursting with gags, Stumble Inn also represented a new type of strip that was starting to populate the comics pages. Sometimes called the midwestern or Chicago school of cartooning, it introduced a somewhat calmer, more observational narrative style. Pioneers include Clare Briggs and John McCutcheon, and Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. Bricks might still fly and hats still pop off heads, yet such vaudeville touches were now put in the service of longer stories. “The first comics were wildly exaggerated affairs in which slapstick comedy and burlesque drawing played the principal parts. Then began a humanizing process,” observed author and cartoonist Amram Schienfeld in a 1930 article. The popularity of comic-strip situational comedies such as Blondie would lead to radio and television adaptations, eventually called sitcoms. Such changes in comedy reflected changes in the cartoonists’ life

styles. Gone were the days when Herriman and Dirks roamed Coney 

a 

In 1919, Roach built a studio south of Los Angeles, on nineteen acres of land provided by developer Harry Culver, the future namesake of Culver City. Roach had land and stars, but he needed writers. Herriman’s friend, Los Angeles Examiner sportswriter H. M. “Beanie” Walker, started doing occasional work for Roach as a “titlest,” penning dialogue and scene setters for silent films’ title cards. Walker soon went to work for Roach full-time. There, he developed a reputation as an eccentric who passionately loved crossword puzzles (a recent invention) as well as cats, which filled his office at the Roach lot. 

To start each day, Walker would take the cover off his typewriter, bang it loudly against his legs, and get to work on Roach masterpieces, ranging from Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! to Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box. His title cards could be mini-masterpieces in wordplay, from “A Man shouldn’t brag because he is Self Made—so is an oyster” to “J. Quincy Quack—Has a wife and twelve children. No other responsibilities.” Wrote Harry Carr in the Los Angeles Times: “I saw a Hal Roach comedy the other day that would have been a sad affair but for Mr. Walker's titles, which literally saved it as it was going down for the last time.” 

Flesh and Stone

The Roman Christians sought, as Christians, to affirm by contrast a particular experience of time in their own bodies, bodies transformed in the course of adulthood. The Christians hoped that through religious conversion the chaos of bodily desires would cease to afflict them; the weight of the flesh would lighten as a Christian moved to union with a higher, immaterial Power. For change to occur, believers like St. Augustine emphasized St. John’s horror of the “lust of the eyes”; compelling visual images created attachment to the world.’ A Christian’s visual imagination was to form around the experience of light, God’s Light, which blinds the beholder, effacing the ability to see the world or look into a mirror. 

As their faith in God grew stronger, the early Christians believed in turn they would feel ever less attached to the places in which they lived. In this they drew on the long Judaic heritage affirming dispossession, Jews who saw themselves as spiritual wanderers in the world, in it but not of it. Yet the devoted Christians eventually ceased to wander; they came to pray in Hadrian’s temple. The civic fiction of Roman place reappeared, “the old became new,” the art historian Richard Brilliant writes, “the past the present.” And with that resurgent sense of place Christians felt less urgently the need to transform their bodies. 

The passage from pantheism to monotheism thus unveiled a great drama about body, place, and time. The intense polis-love of the Greeks had already given way by Hadrian’s era to a more anxious desire for security and an uneasy obsession with images, among people troubled about their traditional gods and their place in the world. The passage to monotheism now emphasized inner change at the expense of urban continuity, put greater value on personal history than on civic membership. Yet if the pagan would not give himself Over to the realm of stone without nagging doubts, the Christian could no more entirely give his body over to God. 

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As in the provincial cities, the geometry of power in Rome’s center eroded the display of human diversities. As the Forum Romanum became more regular, the city’s butchers, grocers, fishmongers, and merchants took themselves off to separate quarters of the city, leaving the business of the forum, in later Republican times, to lawyers and bureaucrats; then, as the emperors built their own forums, these political pets left the Forum Romanum to follow their masters into new spaces. The buildings became, in modern planning jargon, more “mono-functional,” and by Hadrian’s time many were largely empty. “Many of the political and commercial activities that in the agora required free space have been displaced to the periphery,” the archeologist Malcolm Bell writes; “in this well-planned world ... there was little need for the ambiguous values of the stoa.”

As diversity ebbed, this ancient center of Rome became a place given over to the ceremonial, the Forum Romanum becoming a point at which power donned the reassuring robes and roles of pantomime. For instance, until about 150 B.c. both trials by jury and certain voting by citizens occurred within a building at the side of the Forum Romanum, the Comitium. As urgent appeals to buy a rare apricot from Smyrna or to make a good deal on bulls’ testicles faded from the Forum Romanum, voting and political discussion moved outside. Speakers harangued the crowd from the Rostra, originally a curved platform jutting out from the Comitium, the voice of the speaker reinforced by a solid building behind him. When Julius Caesar moved the old Rostra to a new site in the Forum Romanum, from the side in to the northwest end, he meant this new speaker’s stand to be a place for ceremonial declaration rather than participatory politics. The speaker no longer spoke surrounded by people on three sides; instead, he was placed like a judge within the earliest basilicas. Outside, his voice now projected poorly, but no matter. The orator was meant to appear, to point a finger, to clutch his breast, to spread out his arms: he was to look like a statesman to the vast throng who could not hear him, and who had lost the power to act on his words in any event. 

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In their early years, urban Christians in some ways resembled the adherents of revolutionary communism in the early twentieth century. Both were organized into little cells of believers meeting in houses, spreading news by word of mouth or by reading aloud secret documents; lacking a unifying structure of command, schism and conflict between cells was rife in both early Christianity and communism. But the first communists discounted the house as a significant scene of action; their beliefs focused on infiltrating the public sphere of the city, its factories, newspapers, and government institutions, For the first Christians, the house was the place where their “pilgrimage through time” began. 

The house began to serve Christian fellowship from the generation after Jesus’ death to about the middle of the second century, when Christians moved out of houses into other buildings. In Hadrian’s reign, Christianity was entirely confined to domestic space; the state forbade public practice of the religion, and the faithful also protected themselves against harassment by staying within walls. Because of these restrictions, it had long seemed to Church historians that early Christians were powerless, if not poor. We now know better: urban Christianity drew converts from a wide economic spectrum. They seem absent from the middle and upper classes of society because these Christians had to engage in evasion when others were en féte; to compromise themselves in public if they hadn’t the strength for martyrdom; above all, to practice secrecy. 

Within the shelter of the house, their journey of faith began in the dining room. The small Christian cell shared a common meal, during which the faithful talked, prayed, and read out letters from Christians elsewhere in the Empire. Though the experience of conversion was intensely individual, this social setting gave a particular kind of emotional support. As St. Paul explained, gathering around a common table echoed the gathering of the Last Supper.2° Moreover, 4 modern Church historian observes, “dining in individual house church groups was fundamental” because “eating was a sign of social relations with others. The extension of hospitaliry through the meal setting was the central act that served to define the worshipping community.” Christians as a whole were called by St. Paul an Ekklesia using the Greek usage for the body politic. Christians called this meeting-dinner agape, which can be translated as “a celebration o fellowship,” But agape also had connotations of passionate love—which is why, when pagans heard about these feasts, they imagined they were orgies. 

The Christian feast sought to break the patterns of pagan sociability, of the sort Petronius described in his novel Satyricon illustrated with almost cartoonlike exaggeration. Petronius writes about a feast given by Trimalchio, an immensely rich ex-slave, who almost buried his guests under mountains of rich food and drowned them in expensive wines. After several courses had been served, they fell into a stupefied trance, while Trimalchio’s energy never faded and he never stopped talking. The dinner became a kind of theatre of cruelty, as the guests farted, gagged, and vomited their way through the evening. In place of the commonality at the Greek symposion, Trimalchio’s feast dramatized the dominance of a single individual over those around him. There was no mutual competition, instead an active host and his passive, fawning guests. Yet Trimalchio’s guests were not unwilling victims; their gullets always had a little space left for another mouthful of oysters in cream, the guests managed just enough energy to hold out their cups for another glass of wine. If everything at the dinner drew attention to Trimalchio’s own wealth and power, if Trimalchio’s luxury literally took possession of the guests’ bodies, still they came back for more, they gave him their bodies to fill, rhey ate themselves into submission. 

Agape sought to break the impulse of clientage. The feast shared equally by all sought to mark that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond {slave} nor free, there is neither male nor female.” Whereas people mostly attended pagan banquets by invitation, strangers bearing Christian news were openly and easily welcomed at the table. It was to Romans gathered around a dining-room table that St. Paul sent his great Letter to the Romans, setting out the principles which would later define the structure of the Church. This letter dates from about A.D. 60, which is also the time when St. Peter preached in Rome. Phoebe, his envoy, carried the letter into the household cells of the Christians at Rome, each time reading out Paul’s propositions to the faithful, who in turn debated and discussed the letter, and other discussions of it followed in other houses. In these discussions, unlike Trimalchio’s feast, no one voice dominated, by right, as host. 

In the early house gatherings, the Christian ethos changed where people sat. The Roman code of linear seating placed the mor important person at the head, people ranged around him in descending rank. The Christian gathering broke this order, instead placing people in the room according to the strength of their faith. Posty, lants, who were individuals interested in Christian teaching but no yet Christian, and catechumens, who were converted but not ye, baptized, stood at the door or along the sides of the dining room, while full Christians sat together around the table. Although the evidence is sketchy, all the faithful seemed to sit directly at table together for the crucial moments of the meal, at least until about A.D. 200, when formal rituals replaced the informal common meal. 

“The impulses of nature and the impulses of the spirit are at war with one another,” St. Augustine wrote in his Confesszons about wha he felt during such a feast when the smell of food, the kick of alcohol in his blood, aroused him.”? “Time and again I force my body to obey me, but the pain which this causes me is cancelled by the pleasure of eating and drinking.”*4 Augustine sought comfort in the words of Luke 21:34: “And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life.” Yet agape served to test him, a test which would first lead him to understanding the meaning of the phrase “the alien body of Christ.” 

Both fellowship and test culminated in the Eucharist, drinking the wine and eating the bread which symbolized the blood and flesh of Christ. By the time St. Paul wrote his First Letter to the Corinthians, the ritual of the Eucharist had become defined in its enduring form: “And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner, also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink, in remembrance of me.” The cannibalistic overtones of the Eucharist joined early Christianity to many other cults which also sought to eat the bodies of their gods. Yet the Christian who “partakes” of the god’s blood and flesh did not feel imbued with god’s power, as the Aztec priests felt when drinking the actual blood of a sacrificial victim. The test lay in resisting the surge of bodily energy provided by bread and wine. As Origen preached, the soul triumphed when the senses tasted nothing. In this way, writes thé Church historian Wayne Meeks, the Eucharist gave ritual meaning FO the biblical adage to “strip off the old human” and put on “the new human, Christ.”

The ritual of baptism was the other way Christians sought in the pouse to “strip off the old human” and put on “the new human, Christ.” In this ritual, as in dining, they also radically departed from sociabiliry. The importance of baptism lay in the challenge i indeed posed to one of the most important pagan Roman civic experiences, the experience of bathing together. 

By Hadrian’s time, Rome had filled with public and private bathing establishments; the baths were great domed structures, covering pools and exercise halls. Insututions in which all Romans met, usually in groups, the baths, unlike Greek gymnasia, accommodated women as well as men, old as well as young. Until Hadrian’s era, men and women bathed ar the same ume; he was the first to segregate the sexes, the women bathing before the men. Bathing occurred in the afternoon and early evening, after the day’s visits and labors had concluded. Very wealthy people had their own private baths, and went to the public ones only when they needed to curry favor or make a point to the general populace. Hadrian himself often bathed in public with his subjects, which earned him their immense regard. The poor lingered inside the public baths, finding there a refuge from che squalor of their own homes until the buildings closed at sunset. 

Pagan bathing was organized in a regular sequence: the bather, after paying a small fee and undressing in a common room called the apodyterium, moved first to a large pool filled with hot water, the caldarium, where he scraped his sweating pores with a bone brush; then he moved to the pool of warm water called the tepidarium, and finally plunged into a cold pool called the frigidarium. As in a modern public swimming pool, people lolled around the edges of the pools, chatting, flirting, and showing off. 

Seneca scorned the bath as a scene of noisy self-regard, for instance, “the hair plucker keeping up a constant chatter in his chin and strident voice, to attract more attention, and never silent except when he is plucking armpits and making the customer yell instead of yelling himself,” or che “cries of the sausage dealer and confectioner and of all the peddlers of the cook shops, hawking their wares.” Procurers for boy and girl prostitutes worked the baths, and baths more generally released people from the harshness of the life outside, as in the Roman saying that “baths, wine, and women corrupt our bodies—but these things make life itself.”

Yet people also felt thar bathing dignified their bodies; Roman descriptions of barbarians obsessively stereotyped the foreigners as unwashed, Cleanliness was a shared civic experience, and a public bath was the most popular building a ruler could erect. The baths mixed the enormous diversity of the city together in a common nakedness. 

Christians frequented public baths just like other Romans. But their religious immersion in water had a personal and religious, rather than civic, importance. Baptism in water signified that the individual felt he or she had come sufficiently far in the struggle with bodily desire to make a life-long commitment to the faith. As practiced in the early Christian house, someone who felt ready for baptism undressed completely, then plunged into a tub of water in a room or space separated from the space of the ritual feast. Upon emerging from the pool, the celebrant put on entirely new clothes to signify that he or she was now a changed person. “The bath [became] a permanent threshold between the ‘clean’ group and the ‘dirty’ world.”

This water ritual helped set the Christians off as well from their Jewish ancestors. In ancient as in modern Judaism, women bathe in mikveh pools to purify themselves symbolically, particularly to wash away menstrual blood. As the Hebrew scholar Jacob Neusner notes, the mikveh pool has no connotation of the washing away of sins; it is a purifying but not self-transforming ritual.*° The women who leave it have not become different human beings; rather, their bodies are ready to participate in rituals. Baptism was instead a permanent threshold, one the believer crossed when he or she felt a life-long commitment to the religion. The cleansed, transformed Christian body reflected the story of Christ’s own death and Resurrection: Paul writes in his Lecter to the Romans, we are “baptized into his death.”

In the early Church, baptism was for adults rather than for infants; itcould have no meaning for babies because baptism entailed making a decision, the most serious decision of one’s life. For this same reason, the early Christians renounced the Jewish practice of circumcision. One source in the New Testament does speak of baptism as “the circumcision of Christ,” but in this Christian “circumcision” the penis would not have been altered. St. Paul, in writing against circumcision, sought to erase any predtcate on the body, any marking of those persons who from birth were automatically included within the faith. The refusal of circumcision arose again from the early Christian belief that people were not born as Christians; they came to be Christian. 

Baptism sharply broke the command to “Look and believe” which tuled pagan Rome. The baptized Christian carried a secret within which could not be seen. Male Jews could be identified and perseCuted by stripping them naked and examining their genitals, while “the circumcision of Christ” left no mark on the body. More generally, it was impossible to understand what Christianity meant by looking at a Christian; his or her appearance was meaningless. And yet the practices of house worship began to root Christians to the Cities in which they worshipped. 

Hiking with Nietzsche

 John Kaag

Returning to the ancient Greeks, he argued that their remarkable strength was born of agon—the friction of contest—which was far from comfortable. Being sick could be a condition to which one eventually succumbs, but it could also be a trial that is heroically endured. The Greeks, according to Nietzsche, didn’t deny the existence of human suffering and limitation, but rather sought to transform them in art. In tragedy, characters lay hold of suffering and make it their own—claim it in such a way that failure and limitation become meaningful, indeed, gloriously so. Human existence is cruel, harsh, and painfully short, but the tragic heroes of ancient Greece found a way to make the suffering and sudden endings of life beautiful, or aesthetically significant. This is what Nietzsche meant in The Birth of Tragedy when he claimed that the existence can be justified only as an aesthetic experience. 

Aesthetic experience—the experience of the beautiful and sublime—has often been regarded as beyond the purview of modern philosophers. As the scientific revolution gathered speed and tipped into the Age of Enlightenment, thinkers prioritized rational and moral ideals above all others. One’s decisions and actions were to be guided by universal principles of prudence, logic, and reason rather than by any vague pursuit of the beautiful life. By contrast, Nietzsche believed that a quest for aesthetic experience was the only way to mitigate the horror of existence. The Greeks understood beauty in its most robust sense—as a way of transforming agony and drudgery into something creative and enrapturing. There was no such thing as “art for art’s sake” for the Greeks; the point was to come to see the tensions and contradictions of life—even the despised and the hideous—as one would take in a work of art. 

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Chur hadn't changed. Indeed, in many respects it never has. It’s been continuously occupied since the Bronze Age, five thousand years ago, and the signs of this enduring inhabitancy are everywhere. “We need history,” Nietzsche tells his reader, “inasmuch as the past wells up in us in hundreds of ways. Indeed we ourselves are nothing other than what we sense at each instant of that onward flow.” In 1464 Chur burned to the ground, but when German artisans rebuilt it in subsequent years, new buildings were laid on the foundations of the old. The city, unlike so many modern ones, does not assault the landscape but settles gently in the valley between vaulting mountains. This too was a matter of being situated in, or on, the past—a deep foundation of glacial stone. 

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Beyond Good and Evil has two primary targets: Kant and women. Kant, one of the great moral theorists of the Western canon, has a theory of duty that drove Nietzsche wild, and not in a good way. The diminutive fellow from Konigsberg had a notion of ethical obligation that threatened to abnegate Nietzsche’s vision of the free spirit. But there was something more essentially wrong with Kant; even before his ethical theory got off the ground, there was something foundationally amis, in his philosophical system. Before turning to ethics, Kant wag an epistemologist: he wanted to know what sorts of truths are available to the human mind. Working in the 1780s, Kant confronted the skepticism of David Hume and the other British empiricists and was intent on overcoming it. Modern skepticism had come very close to reducing the idea of true belief to mere custom, opinion, or habit—that is to say, to not much at all—and Kant wanted to resurrect the primacy of truth and certainty. He did it in a weird and, Nietzsche suggests, philosophically suspicious way. 

Kant argued that one apprehends indubitable truths about the world because humans possess a certain mental faculty that can apprehend indubitable truths about the world. His theory is more complex than this, but not much, and Nietzsche argues that Kant spills no small amount of ink on a circular argument. Kant then uses this circular argument to explain where values—moral and aesthetic judgments—come from. Humans’ ability to ascertain truth by way of reason makes them special—so special, in fact, that they have “incomparable worth.” This means that they cannot be bought or sold or exploited or, in his words, used as a “mere means.” It is a good story, but one that begins with a circular (fallacious) argument. None of this would matter, not one bit, if the history of European philosophy hadn’t spent more than a century championing Kant’s supreme triumph. Writing a century later, Nietzsche had had enough. 

Where do moral values come from? According to Nietzsche, it isn’t from a shadowy mental faculty that allows a human mind to grasp the truth. Instead, it comes from a basic need...from a fear so pervasive and elemental that modern society has been erected in enduring protest, in the cover-up: the fear of existential uncertainty. I'd never squabbled with Carol about this point, but I had asked, “What attracts you to Kant? You know he’s a raging sexist, right?” Yes, she knew. She just didn’t care. He provided what she called “manifest certainty,’ and this made everything else somehow forgivable. Manifest—like clear, apparent, obvious, palpable, definite, self-evident. That kind of certainty. She didn’t even care about the argument that much, just the conclusion: every human being had incomparable worth owing to his or her rational faculties, and this meant that no one was any better than her neighbor when it came to the calculus of moral judgments. 

Kant’s circular argument promised a sort of brute equality that Carol could, and would continue to, live with. I knew her well enough not to argue about this. She’d grown up in a small town in Saskatchewan, far removed from the ivory tower. Her first job at fourteen was waitressing at the truck stop she could see from her bedroom window. The idea that everyone was equal by virtue of their powers of reason was an axiom that didn’t have to be proved in an academic way. It had an unquestionable, practical power, a belief that led her out of the truck stop and came to buttress the Canadian egalitarianism that had enabled much of her life. To deny its validity was to deny what she’d become: a college graduate, a doctoral student who became a female tenured professor in the discipline of philosophy. Carol defended Kant’s manifest certainty as if her life depended on it, because, on a certain level, it did. 

Nietzsche explains that for all of philosophy’s highmindedness, it often boils down to satisfying certain brute needs—a desire for protection, an adaptive proclivity for nourishment, a means of effectively negotiating a dangerous world, This is the origin of what he calls “the will to truth,” a force that drove Kant to develop a system that came to domi. nate Western philosophy, Nietzsche suggests that the “greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the instine. tive functions, and it is so even in the case of philosophical thinking...” One's attraction to manifest certainty is not the outcome of reasonable argumentation but rather the out. growth of primal fear, 

After his tirade against Kant, Nietzsche turns to the possibility of walking as a “free spirit.” What will these liberated thinkers look like? One thing is sure, Nietzsche contended: “they will not be dogmatists. It must be contrary to their pride,” he explained, “and also contrary to their taste, that their truth should still be truth for every one... ‘My opinion is MY opinion: another person has not easily a right to it’—such a philosopher of the future will say, perhaps.” 

Nietzsche heralds a coming age of new philosophers, what he calls the “philosophers of the future.” Perhaps they will also be moved by the will to truth, but these new thinkers will neither pursue it rabidly as their guiding ideal or, even more dangerous, confuse truth with grand illusion. Kant’s “manifest certainty” is worthy of contempt, according to Nietzsche, because it postures as objectivity, a weak argument done up to the nines and presented as absolute truth. At the end of the section on the free spirits Nietzsche shifts the discourse away from truth entirely. His philosophers will write on behalf of the will to life or more famously the will to power. Power is different from faint truth. Very different.

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Within the Frankfurt School, Adorno joined Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse in espousing what has come to be known as “critical theory.” It was, at least at first, a neo-Marxist movement, one that held that culture itself could be, and was being, used as a force of oppression. This might seem like a stretch. Culture—entertainment, consumerism, the arts—doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that can imprison a people. This intuition, however, Adorno argues, is precisely the thought that lowers one’s defenses. Popular culture shapes a people’s preferences, delimiting the scope of human activity and desire. Our consumer culture might give us choices, might give us the semblance of being free to choose, but this liberty amounts to pitifully little if everyone is given the same circumscribed options. Critical theory, according to Horkheimer, who coauthored the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Adorno, was meant to free people from the subtle forces that enslaved them. How it was supposed to do that had, during my years as a graduate student, completely eluded me. But the Waldhaus gave me some idea. 

The critical theorists—following Nietzsche—attacked popular culture in all its forms. They objected to the commodification of beauty and the sublime and the leveling out of difference and individual taste. Like Nietzsche, Adorno both abhorred and was riveted by herd mentality. Unlike many psychologists, Adorno asserted that this mentality wasn't a natural social impulse but a grand performance orchestrated by a priestly master (he came of age in Nazi Germany and wrote against fascism in all its forms). The sheep that comprised the herd could, at any time, opt out of the performance, but the theatrics of culture combined with the necessities of capitalism had given it an almost irresistible draw. Still, Adorno wrote in 1951, “If they would stop to reason for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.” 

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on Friedrich Holderlin. 

Holderlin had confronted the decline of Western civilization nearly a century before Nietzsche. Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, in a style that attempted to wed German and ancient Greek thought, he tried to understand the relationship between destruction and creation, and he held, much like Nietzsche, that destruction created the space and opportunity for new birth. In a fragmentary essay titled “Becoming in Dissolution,” Hdélderlin writes, “in the state between being and non-being, however, the possible becomes real everywhere and. . . in art this is a frightful yet divine dream.” 

Following the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, Holderlin was a “weeping philosopher,” one who suffered deeply from what was, at the time, termed “hypochondria” but would today be called depression or anxiety disorder. His psychological fragility made working for a living very difficult, and he was supported largely by his mother. His last years of freedom were spent playing the piano “morning until night.” Eventually those free years came to an end, and in 1800 he was institutionalized at the Autenrieth asylum, where he was straitjacketed and forced to wear the Autenrieth mask. Made of leather and wood, the mask was a muzzle that kept a patient from talking or screaming. Hélderlin was force-fed—a hell I've often imagined. And he descended ever more quickly into what most people call madness. 

Nietzsche adored Holderlin’s writings and must have felt no small amount of sympathy for a man who imploded in the frenzy of creation. His deep respect for Hélderlin, however, can be traced to a mutual admiration that both thinkers held for an ancient philosopher who came closest to their worldview. It wasn’t Heraclitus, but rather Empedocles. Empedocles believed that the world operated under exactly two principles of order: love and strife. His cosmology envisions a dynamic cycle that, in turn, pulls things apart in strife and draws them together in affection, eternally. This is the heart and soul of all creation, according to Empedocles. Both Hdlderlin and Nietzsche could wholly accept this description of reality. 

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 Ecce Homo, translated “Behold the Man,” is Nietzsche’s autobiography. It is the account he gives at the brink of mental collapse. Perhaps it is the story that allows him to go over the edge. It is, indeed, the most personal and authentically inauthentic story I've ever read. It is full of bombast and self-aggrandizement, switchbacks and dead ends, what some readers regard as the sign of a deranged mind. “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books”: these are the principal chapter headings of Ecce Homo. | agree: Nietzsche would be completely insane were he not aware of his exaggeration. But this is a false bombast that knows itself. 

Irony allows one to say two things at once, indeed to express two mutually exclusive realities in a single utterance. It allows one to give voice to love and strife, to indebtedness and ingratitude, to salvation and guilt, triumph and utter defeat all in one breath. “I am the world’s best philosopher,” “I am the perfect parent,” “I have absolute self-knowledge”: these impossible instances of hyperbole actually indicate, very honestly, how far they are from the truth. Irony is the language of the two-faced. It allows one to be a decadent and its opposite. Nietzsche admits, “A dual series of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, is repeated in my nature in every respect: 1 am a Doppelgdnger, I have a second face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third.” 

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Dionysus’s adopted father, Silenus, played one of these flutes. Forever lighthearted, the satyr frolicked drunkenly through the forest of Greek mythology. He was enigmatic, uncatchable. When Midas tried to pin him down, to wrest from him the meaning of life, the little imp rebelled: the key to life is never to have been born, or if you are born, to die as quickly as possible. Live and die as quickly as possible. I've spent most of my adult life fixated on Silenus’s nihilistic suggestion, ignoring what was most obvious about the creature, namely that he represented fertility and rebirth. Die as soon as you can—so that you can come to life again and again, like a morning flash, or spring after a brutal winter. There is another way to interpret the Ubermensch that has little to do with perfectionism and self-stylizing: Nietzsche would like us to die, to get out of the way, to get out of our own way, so something else can take our place. So that we can become what we are. 

The entire festival is in honor of death—to either appease it or become it—but ultimately for the sake of creation—or, better, re-creation. This is the wisdom of Silenus and why the satyr was chosen as Dionysus’s guardian. Dionysus was twiceborn, or, more dramatically, reborn. He died as quickly as possible, only to rise again. By some accounts he was the offspring of an illicit affair between Zeus and the goddess of the underworld, Persephone. Hera, Zeus’s wife, discovered the adultery. Flying into a rage, she convinced the Titans, a family of primordial giants, to hunt the child down, dismember him, and cannibalize him. The only thing left when they were finished was the boy’s heart. But Dionysus would live on. When the Titans devoured him, Dionysus’s body was ground up, ingested, and digested by ancient giants. After Zeus found out about this act of revenge, he brought his son back to life and obliterated the Titans in a storm of lightning bolts. Nothing remained of the giants, just a wet soot: titanic and earthly, but with a hint, a mere fragrance, of something divine. It is a haunting admixture: the shame of ingratitude, tempered with the faint possibility of creativity and redemption. According to Orphic myth, Zeus combined this soot with clay to fashion small imperfect figures—humans. “Our body is Dionysian,” the neo-Platonic philosopher Olympiodorus explains, “we are part of him, since we sprang from the soot of the Titans who ate of his flesh.” 

Eventually time lapses and the night recedes. The parade passes away and the sun rises. All great festivals are based on a cycle of death and rebirth. It doesn’t matter where they’re celebrated—Easter, Halloween, Ramadan, Diwali, Saturnalia, Morganstreich—they all have a similar flavor. Things must suffer, go dark, perish before they live again. This is not an escape or respite from life but rather its realization: in the end, to burn up and out, as Zarathustra does, “like a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.”