Vonnegut

I read Slaughterhouse-Five for WWII book club topic. The few passages that I enjoyed:

She said she was going to join a church as soon as she decided which one was right. She never did decide. She did develop a terrible hankering for a crucifix, though. And she bought one from a Santa Fe gift shop during a trip the little family made out West during the Great Depression. Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

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Billy asked for something to read on is trip to Tralfamadore. His captors had five million Earthling books on microfilm, but no way to project them in Billy's cabin. The had only one actual book in English, which would be placed in a Tralfamadorian museum. It was Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.

Mysteries at book club

For book club I read Dorothy Hughes, The Expendable Man.


"Unyielding bigots were a minority save in pockets of the Deep South. In today's climate, it was they who could do nothing but retreat behind their warped, sagging fences. No longer could they demand that the fences enclose the rest of the country."

The last of Rousseau and Hume

For Hume, every detail had to be addressed. In uncovering the conspiracy, Rousseau accorded the most trivial incidents equal probative value with the most wounding. No happening was by chance or without significance. To misquote T. S. Eliot slightly, “In the sordid particulars, the unearthly design appears." And only by confronting and disputing the sordid particulars could Hume confront and dispute the underlying narrative-his alleged plot against Rousseau. 

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For a period, Rousseau's educational theories were all the rage, not only in France and England, but in Switzerland, Germany, and lreland, too. Scores of novel pedagogical treatises were produced, almost all of them bearing his imprint. Parents who experimented by raising their children on Rousseauian principles experienced mixed results, some reporting that they produced a disconcerting wildness in their guinea pigs. [t is possible that Davenport intentionally brought up his orphaned grandson Davies along Rousseauian lines. The boy turned out well, but fretted that he had received insufficient formal education, and did not like to hear the name of Rousseau mentioned. 

In Paris during 1770-71, Rousseau gave readings-sometimes for up to seventeen hours-from the Confessions. His erstwhile friend Mme d'Epinay, feeling defamed by his portrayal of her as a scheme: and gossip, eventually persuaded the police to prohibit them. His readings elicited polarized reactions. Some listeners wept and kissed Rousseau’s hand.Others were revolted.
 

Also posthumously published was the insanely brilliant Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques, which had gestated over several years. In these split-personality dialogues between Rousseau and Jean-Jacques, Rousseau is judge, jury, and defendant as the author's deeds and personality are forensically examined and extracts from his writings used as evidence against him. Rousseau convicts himself on several counts, including being weak willed and following his whims, rather than being influenced by his duty. (Here he also has second thoughts on Ramsay's portrait of him, accusing Hume of having contrived the painting out of sheer malice and ensuring that in every respect-posture, clothes, Ramsay’s palette-the sitter emerged as dark and monstrous with, in Rousseau’s characterization, “the face of a frightful cyclops.”) When the work was completed in 1776, Rousseau was desperate to forestall any attempt by his foes to suppress it. 

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OUR TWO PROTAGONISTS shared one noteworthy devotee. In 1762, with Rousseau in Métiers and Hume about to move to Paris, in the isolated Prussian city of Konigsberg, a thirty-eight-year-old lecturer devoured Rousseau’s works as they were published. According to one anecdote, the fastidious Immanuel Kant, whose daily routine was so rigid and undeviating that people set their watches by him, became so absorbed in Emile that he bewildered his neighbors by forgetting to take his usual post-lunch constitutional. Kant was alert to the seductive dangers of Rousseau’s language: he worried that its beauty detracted from his ideas; to penetrate these ideas he read and reread him Rousseau understood, he thought, the paradox of autonomy-that freedom meant conformity to a rule. As he was writing his own masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason, he had a single portrait in his house-of JeanJacques Rousseau. 

As for Hume, Kant said the Scot had “woken him from his dogmatic slumber.” His preoccupation with cause and effect, which he thought the basis of all scientific knowledge, was provoked by Hume's skeptical reflections. Unable to accept Hume’s skepticism about causation, he sought to demonstrate how a proposition such as “every event has a cause" could be known a priori (i.e., could be known independent of experience), even though it was a synthetic proposition (not true or false by virtue of its terms). “Water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius” is a synthetic proposition. “All bachelors are unmarried” is an analytic one, true by definition. 

WITH THE EXCEPTION of Nietzsche, probably no philosopher’s posthumous reputation has fluctuated quite so dramatically as Rousseau’s. The Confessions was initially decried ...pompous and obscene being the general judgment. Yet within a decade, sentiment was already becoming more positive. The work is now established as a literary masterpiece. 

Rousseau’s political legacy has been much more contentious. Although he himself was no advocate of rebellion, his name became inextricably bound up with the French Revolution. Its makers on all sides drew on his works to justify their actions, most famously Robespierre, who ideologically embraced Rousseau (along with such Romans as Cato) and executed with zeal his understanding of “the general will of the people”-in his own phrase une volonté une, “one single will." Nevertheless, two years before Robespierre grasped power, Edmund Burke had responded to the revolutionaries’ worship of Rousseau with a brilliant and farsighted diatribe, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. “Everyone knows that there is a great dispute among leaders [of the National Assembly] which of them is the best resemblance to Rousseau." The truth was, he said, they all resembled him. And Burke accused them of adopting the worst of Rousseau’s vices, vanity, “that makes the whole man false." “We have had the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England. . \ . He left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no principle to influence his heart of guide his understanding but vanity. With that he was possessed to a degree little short of madness.” In the twentieth century, Rousseau was charged with offering intellectual justification for totalitarianism. 

Rousseau’s constant influence on later generations is indubitable though not always positive). He can be seen as father of the Romantic movement (and even a great-grandfather of the Green movement). The Romantics were inspired by his confirmation of the worth of each and every one of us, however ordinary, by his emphasis on equality, on knowledge of the inner self, and on a spiritual connection with nature, as well as by his imagination and the depth of his feelings. 

In 1816, Byron and Percy Shelley went on a pilgrimage to Lake Geneva, carrying with them Héloise. Shelley described Rousseau as “a sublime genius.” Mary Shelley had studied Rousseau, and his writings inspired Frankenstein: the monster becomes corrupted by his association with society. Schiller, Stendhal (for whom he was “the noblest soul and the greatest genius that ever was”), de Tocqueville, and Schopenhauer were all admirers. To Hazlitt, he was a new Prometheus. Lytton Strachey said of the Confessions that it "started the vast current in literature and sentiment which is still flowing." A youthful Leo Tolstoy took to wearing a medal on which was engraved Rousseau's portrait; he read all of Rousseau’s works, but was captivated in particular by Héloise, Emile, and the Confessions. 

IF ROUSSEAU’S POSTHUMOUS reputation has ridden helter-skelter...one moment as a benevolent patron of equality and liberty, the next the warped mastermind of tyranny-Hume's has steadily climbed, though with the occasional hiatus. In America, the influence of his less theoretical writings (his essays and History) should not be overlooked. Among the United States’ founding fathers, for instance, James Madison was a staunch disciple, his version of federalism traceable to Hume’s thinking. Many American luminaries consumed Hume's History-including Samuel Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Rush (though Thomas Jefferson despised the work, labeling Hume a “conceited Scotchman”). 

In the nineteenth century, the historian began to make way for the philosopher. Hume’s History ceased to be the standard text, superseded by, among others, Thomas Macaulay’s. Meanwhile, the Treatise, the book that fell "dead born," came to be recognized as an enduring masterpiece. By the twentieth century, Hume's standing as one of the most significant thinkers of all time became firmly entrenched: there remain ongoing engagement with his skeptical conundrums, which still fascinate and unsettle, tease and bewitch. His philosophical style is hailed as an exemplar of clarity and a model of ingenuity. Bertrand Russell, an empiricist in the Humean tradition, acknowledged Hume’s supreme importance in his A History of Western Philosophy. The Vienna Circle, which for a time before World War II dominated the world of philosophy, was a legatee of the eighteenth-century Scot. This group of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers dismissed much of aesthetics, morality, and religion as meaningless metaphysics; to be meaningful, propositions had either to be verifiable through experience or true by definition. Two centuries earlier, Hume had famously concluded his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: 

If we take in our hand any volume: of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance: let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental masoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. 

Members of the Circle grappled with Hume's conundrum about induction, as did the Viennese-born Professor Sir Karl Popper. In his book about Hume, the philosopher Sir Freddie Ayer could confidently assert that Hume was the greatest of all British philosophers. Beyond the confined world of academic philosophy, Albert Einstein revered Hume, giving credit to the philosopher for transforming his powers of critical reasoning and ultimately with being a catalyst in his discovery of the theory of relativity. In a 1915 letter Einstein revealed that just before his fundamental insight, he studied Hume's treatise with eagerness and admiration.

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It was at this point that a disjunction in their intellectual personalities ensured that the division between them would be unbridgeable. Rousseau conceived a bold conclusion, and then filled in the details. Hume operated in the other way-starting with the facts, and using these to build a case. So Rousseau imagined the deadly and extensive conspiracy against him, before unearthing his corroborative evidence. Hume, in contrast, went straight to that evidence. By examination of each piece, he sought to discredit his attacker’s nightmare thesis, to persuade the public that there were more reasons to disbelieve than to believe it. Rousseau’s reliance on intuitive imagination disoriented and enraged his erstwhile benefactor. 

All this goes some way to explaining why Hume erupted so violently when he saw Rousseau’s allegations, and why he made such frenetic efforts to limit any damage from what he knew was plausibly the most potent and destructive pen in Europe, for he never lost sight of Rousseau’s genius. But the unremitting brutality of Hume’s reaction put his reputation in Paris more at risk than any claim of Rousseau’s: in effect he exchanged roles with his accuser in his search for vengeance. He also demonstrated how little he had assimilated the manners of the salons in which he was feted. Perhaps he had not been offered the opportunity to study the Rule of Life on Mme de Boufflers’s bedroom wall. 

MORE PERPLEXING IS Hume’s persistent mendacity-his utter falsehoods, his economies with the truth, his deviousness. Before the “plot” coalesced, these included the false impression he gave that he was ignorant of the King of Prussia letter; his holding back its authorship from Rousseau, then telling him that Walpole had intended it to remain secret; his not forwarding letters to Rousseau from de L’Espinasse and (later) d’Alembert; the exaggeration of his role in winning Rousseau’s pension. 

The affair of the faux retour chaise is illuminating. Surely this was subterfuge with the purest of motives, for he was supporting the indigent and concealing the charity.

Hume was just as unlikely to give the ploy a second thought When it came to the truth, he had an instrumentalist outlook, telling his publisher, in August 1770: “You see I am a good casuist, and can distinguish cases very nicely. It is certainly a wrong thing to deceive any body, much more a friend; but yet the difference must still be allowed infinite between deceiving a man for his good and for his injury." 

That attitude, to Rousseau, was anathema. As so often, there are puzzling inconsistencies in Rousseau’s pronouncements, but his gut instinct was to recoil at any form of deception. For Rousseau, a white lie was still a lie, an act that both slighted its target and sullied its creator. Even if Hume was not the originator of the trick over the chaise, his awareness of it, in Rousseau’s eyes, made him complicit; his private judgment as to what was in his guest’s best interest was both condescending and contemptuous. 

In the Fourth Walk of the Reveries, where he confesses to having sometimes lied out of shame or embarrassment, he writes, “The lies we call white lies are real lies, because to act deceitfully in one’s interest or that of others is no less unjust than to act deceitfully against the interests of others." Rousseau saw himself as the apostle of truth: for him, the truth was of paramount importance, for him his “horror of falsehood outweighed all other things." 

PERHAPS THE MORAL of the whole sad encounter is that while m men cannot make madman sane, madman an make sane men mad. In his momentary madness, fury, and panic, Hume never grasped the root of Rousseau’s complaint: that though Hume I'M carried out the obligations of a friend in practice, he was constitutionally incapable of doing so in spirit. Rousseau expected his fnends to be entirely straight with him, to open their heart, to be motivated purely by love. Friendship required a special form of understanding. He wanted Mme d'Epinay: “My expressions rarely have the usual significance, for it is always my heart that communes with you, and some day maybe you will realise that its language is not that of other hearts." The nature of friendship is something Rousseau returns to time after time. In the Confessions, he reveals the bar of suspicion potential friends had to hurdle.

Rousseau had a visceral grasp of Aristotle's analysis of friendship m the Nicomachean Ethics.“What is just is not the same for a friend towards a friend as towards a stranger.” Friendship involves a basket of mutual emotions-respect, trust, warmth, a desire for that penal. happiness and success, a desire to be in that person’s company-rein. forced by action. And friendship is sustained over time. Do not expect friendship to ripen too quickly, Rousseau admonished young Flam Coindet in 1758. Friendship “is something that must mature slowly ovuthe years, so that true friends are friends long before they use the word ‘friend.’ ” 

Hume was baffled by Rousseau’s fondness for Sultan, “his affection for that creature is above all expression or conception." But Round: relationship with the canine gives us some insight into Rousseau’s relationship with his fellow humans. Friendship for Rousseau was achievable only by equals, who were independent of each other. A true friend had every claim on his heart but none on his liberty. During Boswell’s pilgrimage to Rousseau in Motiers, Rousseau maintained that a person’s attitude to cats was a vital test of character. Those of a despotic nature “do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave." A relationship with a dog, too, should not be one of ruler and subject. About the predecessor to Sultan, Rousseau mote. “My dog himself was my friend, not my slave: we always had the same will, but it was not because he obeyed me." As for Sultan, though he was a source of endless trouble, he could never be mendacious; he could never be disingenuous, insincere, hypocritical, or patronizing. Sultan was incapable of disloyalty.

Naked in the City

by R Sennett

Perikles took for granted what might most strike a modern person. The leaders of the young warriors were depicted In art as nearly naked. their unclothed bodies protected only by hand shields and spears. In the city, young men wrestled in the gymnasium naked; the loose clothes men wore on the Streets and in public places freely exposed their bodies. As the art historian Kenneth Clark observes, among the ancient Greeks a nakedly exposed body marked the presence of a strong rather than vulnerable person-and more, someone who was civilized. At the opening of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, for instance, he traces the progress of civilization up to the war’s outbreak; as one sign of this progress, he remarks of the Spartans that they “were the first to play games naked, to take off their clothes openly,” whereas among the barbarians of his own day many still insisted on covering their genitals when in public at the games.The civilized Greek had made his exposed body into an object of admiration. 

To the ancient Athenian, displaying oneself affirmed one’s dignity as a citizen. Athenian democracy placed great emphasis on its citizens exposing their thoughts to others, just as men exposed their bodies. These mutual acts of disclosure were meant to draw the knot between citizens ever tighter. We might call the knot today “male bonding”; the Athenians took this bond literally. In ancient Greek, the very words used to express erotic love of another man could be used to express one’s attachment to the city. A politician wanted to appear like a lover or a warrior. 

The insistence on showing, exposing, and revealing put its stamp on the stones of Athens. The greatest building work of the Periklean era, the temple of the Parthenon, was sited on a promontory so that it stood out exposed to view from throughout the city below. The great central square of the city, the agora, contained few places which were forbidden territory as is modern private property. In the democratic political spaces the Athenians built, most notably the theatre built into the hill of the Pnyx where the assembly of all citizens met, the organization of the crowd and the rules of voting sought to expose how individuals or small groups voted to the gaze of all. Nakedness might seem the sign of a people entirely at home in the City: the city was the place in which one could live happily exposed, unlike the barbarians who aimlessly wandered the earth without the protection of stone. Perikles celebrated an Athens in which harmony seemed to reign between flesh and stone. 

The value placed on nakedness derived in part from the ways Greeks of Perikles‘ time thought about the interior of the human body. Body heat was the key to human physiology: those who most concentrated and marshalled their bodily heat had no need of clothes. More, the hot body was more reactive to others, more febrile, than was a cold and sluggish body; hot bodies were strong possessing the heat to act as well as react. These physiological precepts extended to the use of language. When people listened, spoke, or read words, their body temperatures supposedly rose, and So again their desire to act---a belief about the body which underlay Perikles’ belief in the unity of words and deeds. 

This Greek understanding of physiology made the idealization of nakedness far more complex than the stark contrast Thucydides drew between a Greek, proud of his body and proud of his city, and the barbarian dressed in patchy furs who lived in the forest or in the marshes. The Greek understanding of the human body suggested different rights, and differences in urban spaces, for bodies containing different degrees of heat. These differences cut most notably across the dividing line of gender, since women were thought to be colder versions of men. Women did not show themselves naked in the city; more, they were usually confined to the interiors of houses, as though the lightless interior more suited their physiology than did the open spaces of the sun. In the house, they wore tunics of thin material which extended to the knees; on the street, their tunics were ankle-length, coarse, opaque linen. The treatment of slaves similarly turned on the belief that the harsh conditions of enslavement reduced the body temperature of the slave, even if a noble-born male captive, so that he became more and more dullwitted, incapable of speech, less and less human, ht only for the labor which the masters imposed on him in the first place. The unity of word and deed celebrated by Perikles was experienced only by male citizens whose “nature" fitted them for it. The Greeks used the science of body heat, that is, to enact rules of domination and subordination. 

Athens was not alone in subscribing to this ruling image of the body, in treating people in radically unequal ways based on it, and in organizing space according to its dictates. But the Athens of Perikles’ time speaks to us in modern times as ancient Sparta perhaps does not in part because of how this master image of the body inaugurated crises in Athenian democracy. In his history, Thucydides returned to the themes of the Funeral Oration again and again; he feared the confidence Perikles expressed in the POHWThUCYdideS' hi5t01'Y 

More from G.H.A.

Stuart Jeffries

While Marcuse dreamed of utopia in America, Adorno despaired in Europe. ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’,‘ he wrote in Negative Dialectics, the book he published in 1966 under the long shadow of Auschwitz and the threat of nuclear Armageddon. The Holocaust imposed what he called a ‘new categorical imperative’ that human beings arrange their thought and action so that ‘Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen’. In Adorno’s corner of Frankfurt, there was no future in Marcuse’s Californian dreaming. Negative Dialectics is an untimely meditation anti-systemic, anti-utopian and devoid of hope. ‘There can be few works of philosophy that give such an overpowering sense of sterility as Negative Dialectics’, wrote Kolakowski in Main Currents of Marxism. Marcuse may have thought that utopia could be realised in this world and soon, but Adorno’s implicit counter suggestion in Negative Dialectics was that it could only be realised in art, and there by definition only imaginatively. 

‘Negative dialectics flouts tradition’, he wrote in the book’s preface. ‘As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation . . . This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy.’ Before Plato, Heraclitus had proposed that the world is constantly in flux. The dialectical imagination takes this thought and tries to impose order on the change: for dialecticians, and Adorno was a lifelong member of that dialectical club, the question is, if the world essentially involves change not stasis, then where is that change heading? 

The suggestion from Plato onwards was that change, and in particular historical change, has a goal or telos. Hegel’s idea was that history unfolds through dialectical process. The paradoxical German term ‘aufheben‘, which means three different and contradictory things to preserve, to elevate and to cancel and which, in its philosophical usage. is usually translated as ‘sublate’, is important here. The translator and philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote: ‘Hegel may be said to visualise how something is picked up in order that it may no longer be there just the way it was, although, it is not cancelled altogether but lifted up to be kept on a different level." Crucially for Hegel, nothing is discarded in this process everything is taken up from one historical age to the next. For him, history is the unfolding of human freedom towards the Absolute and, what is the same thing, the expression of the Weltgeist, or world spirit. For Hegel ‘everything that is real is rational’, by which he means that everything has its place in the unfolding dialectical process. The result is that there is an ‘identity of identity and non-identity’. History, thus conceived, is like a cosmically large recycling project in which nothing is allowed to become mere landfill. For Hegel, consequently, the whole is the true. For Adorno, in a typically perverse aphorism, the opposite is the case: ‘The whole is the false.’

Throughout his writings Adorno is suspicious of those philosophies that offer harmonious reconciliations. He was doubtful, as Martin )ay put it, of the young Lukacs’s vision of epic wholeness in ancient Greece, of Heidegger’s notion of a fulfilled being now tragically forgotten, and of Walter Benjamin’s faith in a prelapsarian oneness of name and thing." But in Negative Dialectics, he was chiefly concerned, not with deconstructing such regressive fantasies, but with opposing the idea that dialectical historical processes had to have a goal. In particular, he rejected the idea that the narrative of history was destined to conclude with a happy ending. Thus, in opposition to Hegel's ‘identity of identity and non-identity’, Adorno proposed the even more battling notion of ‘the non-identity of identity and non-identity’. In making this suggestion, Adorno was asserting that the object does not go into its concept without remainder. And yet an object has to be subsumed without remainder if identity thinking is to make sense. If the object does not go into its concept without remainder then, because all thinking is conceptual, all concepts misrepresent their objects and all thinking involves an act of brutality to its object. such. at least, was Adorno‘s inference. 

Effectively, Adorno was deploying Marx’s account of the exchange principle retrospectively to put holes in Hegelian identity philosophy: in achieving identity, Adorno suggested, Hegelian philosophy asserts the equivalence of what is not equivalent. Instead of such brutal identity thinking, Adorno tentatively proposed a different approach to knowledge, what has become known as a constellational theory, borrowing the term ‘constellation’ from Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Constellational thinking rejects the identity thinking that understands an object by subsuming it under a concept. To understand an object, for Adorno, was not to subsume it under concept but to set it in dialectical historical relationship with a constellation of other objects. In this sense, there is a strong parallel between constellational thinking and Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image. This use of the term constellation bears affinities with the devices of modernist art and literature that appealed to Benjamin such as cinematic montage, cubist collage, Baudelaire’s correspondances or Joyce’s epiphanies. 

In particular, Benjamin’s constellations were akin to Proust’s notion of involuntary memory. When he tastes a madeleine, the narrator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu involuntarily brings his whole childhood to life. These sudden flashes of insight were what Adorno hoped for in his constellational theory of knowledge. Through such changing constellations and such evanescent flashes, the truth about an object would emerge to the sympathetic observer. Adorno unveiled this approach to cognition in his inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1931 to be greeted with incomprehension by his listeners. In Negative Dialectics, he tried to expound a new version, using an analogy that made him sound like a combination of a safe-cracker labouring in a bank’s vault after working hours, a Buddhist virtuoso of mindfulness, and a quantum physicist aware that his investigation is going to change the nature of what he's investigating.

Insight if it is to beattained at all, was to be reached by adepts who had transcended identity thinking, and then on in flashes... constellations.... always changing, flickering in and out of the beholders' grasp. 

When Gershom Scholem read Negative Dialectics, he wondered if critical theory now amounted to Marx’s analysis of capitalism without the class struggle. If so, that could equally be said of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. But while Marcuse spent the 1960s looking for a revolutionary subject to replace the proletariat, Adorno’s philosophy was a reversal of Marxism: it could never help change the world, but only interpret it more profoundly. If it had a role, it was to reduce the systems of other philosophers to rubble and thus help cure the faithful of their delusions. 

In his 1964 book Jargon of Authenticity, for instance, Adorno attacked the post-war tendency in German philosophy to find delusive succour in subjective inwardness. That kind of existential turn in philosophy which he had critiqued in his pre-war works on Husserl and Kierkegaard he found especially intolerable in the writings of Heidegger, Martin Buber and Karl Jaspers. He took their works to be self-mystificatory. Each in their own way devised elitist philosophies with abstruse terms in order to avoid confronting social realities, basking in the purported glow of such words as angst and leap, and thereby distracting themselves from the darkness of the times. What Wittgenstein said of his mission was also true of Adorno’s in Jargon of Authenticity: ‘This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.’

In 1961, Adorno met Karl Popper in Tabingen at the German Sociological Association. Both were principal speakers at a symposium to debate the methodology appropriate to social science research. It should have been a bruising encounter, a prize fight between two representatives of hostile philosophical positions or a Cold War era confrontation between the representatives of the rival ideologies of liberal democracy and Marxism. 

In the blue corner was the Viennese-born Popper, professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London, of whom his British disciple Bryan Magee once said: ‘He puts me in mind of a blowtorch” Popper was the defender of the Open Society against various forms of totalitarianism, champion of scientific method, acerbic excoriator of what he called pseudo-sciences such as psychoanalysis, and insistent that the dialectical thinking in which the Frankfurt School specialised was not only false but dangerous. 

In the red corner was Adorno, a man whom even his dedicated and sympathetic follower Martin lay found painfully capable of the ‘withering rant'. Adorno doubted that the liberal, putatively open society that Popper extolled against totalitarianism was so very different from the latter. He, like other Frankfurt School critical theorists, had been impressed by Freudian psychoanalysis. Most significant, as the two men squared up, was that Adorno was sceptical about the pretensions of scientific method to be an objective means of establishing truth. ”The idea of scientific truth cannot be split off from that of a true society'. Adorno wrote.” The corollary being that, given that we do not live in the latter, the former is beyond us. This conception of scientific truth was to have ramifications, not just for the natural sciences. but for the topic of the symposium- namely how sociology should work. 

For the Frankfurt School. the sciences, be they natural or social. had become tools used by capitalism’s oppressors to keep the true society from coming into being. Philosophy too, by abandoning a critical perspective on social reality, became a tool of oppression rather than liberation. 

The task facing the Frankfurt School was to free oppressed humanity from a mindset that ensnared individuals in the pursuit of happiness rather than questioning why the sought such an end. Because there was no critical reflection on the irrationality of such ends, Horkheimer thought that the project of Enlightenment became self-defeating. Enlightenment was supposed to involve the use of reason to free humanity from myth and superstition. Instead it replaced one myth with another. "The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity", they wrote.

Enlightenment creates a world the better to fit its scientific picture of it. But that world is a distortion. We have a false sense of connectedness with the world that gives us a limited sense of how the world can be.

That said, Popper’s views about science were as challenging to scientific orthodoxy as to the Frankfurt School. His 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery followed the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume who had pointed out that there is a contradiction in the notion that all knowledge is derived from experience and that general statements, including scientific laws, are verifiable by reference to experience. This notion was the foundational commitment of empiricism and indeed of positivism. And yet, Hume argued, no scientific hypothesis could be finally confirmed and so no scientific law could be definitively true. For example, if all the swans we have seen are white. that doesn’t mean the proposition ‘All swans are white’ is true. This was the problem of induction, and yet, Hume suggested, we cannot help but use inductive reasoning even if we cannot justify its results as knowledge. 

Hume’s scepticism about the rational basis of induction was inspiring to Popper because it challenged the prevailing view that. only what can be proved by reason and experience can be accepted. This perspective on how science worked, called justificationism, and forming the rhetorical basis for much of science’s endeavour to understand the world (the better, as the Frankfurt School would argue, to dominate it), was opposed by Popper. Like the Frankfurt School, if for utterly different reasons, he sought to clip the wings of science, to undermine its pretensions. For him, the progress of science did not so much expand the frontiers of human knowledge as reveal the vast empire of our ignorance. As he said at Tubingen, ‘Indeed, it is precisely the staggering progress of the natural sciences . . . which constantly opens our eyes anew to our ignorance, even in the field of the natural sciences themselves.’ 

For Popper, every test of a scientific hypothesis involves an attempt to refute or to falsify it, and one genuine counter-example will falsify the whole theory. He argued that the same scientific method of testing hypotheses did not apply in the case of psychoanalysis or Marxism Rather, because there was no evidence that could count as false in either theory, he thought, nothing could refute them. Both psychoanalysis and Marxism were for Popper akin to astrology: by refusing to countenance any counter-examples they made themselves unfalsifiable and therefore superficial. 

To be sure, Popper’s account of the logic of scientific discovery is hardly uncontroversial and it was questioned by later philosophers of science, in particular the American Thomas Kuhn, who pointed out that scientists are more loath to give up cherished hypotheses than Popper suggested. Instead of taking one counter-example to spell doom for a hypothesis, scientists tend to shore it up with auxiliary hypotheses. This so-called ‘conventionalist stratagem’ makes a lot of sense, not least if you have spent a lot of time, intellectual effort and money testing a beloved hypothesis. Scientists, and this is something readily forgotten in the philosophy of science, are human too. 

Indeed, Kuhn argued in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science involves competing paradigms, each of which consists of a core theory and auxiliary hypotheses.” The latter change but the former remains constant until that upsetting moment when it proves impossible to support the core theory through modified hypotheses. Then something unusual happens, which Kuhn called a paradigm shift, wherein the core theory is abandoned or radicaly changed- often when the old guard retire or die.

Popper’s perspective on how science worked is important because his 1961 meeting with Adorno was heralded as the start of the Positivmusstreit or Positivism Dispute that rumbled on until the end of the decade at a series of conferences in German universities. The name of the dispute might suggest a clash between the Frankfurt School and the defenders of the hubristic scientific project that arose during the Enlightenment, premised on submitting the world to human understanding and control, but the truth is more complicated. In fact, the Positivism Dispute is really a misnomer. Popper, for all that he had written for the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, was no positivist, or at least refused the description. Indeed, Otto Neurath had called Popper the official opposition to the Vienna School. Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, republished in an updated English language version only two years before the Tubingen symposium, included an eviscerating attack on the very basis of logical positivism, namely the verification principle, which asserts that a proposition is only cognitively meaningful if it can be definitively and conclusively determined to be either true or false, that is, either verifiable or falsifiable. It was a principle that applied a blowtorch to vast tracts of human discourse: if the verification principle held, then the judgements of ethics and aesthetics were meaningless, perhaps most charitably construed as more or less grunts of approval or disapprobation. And any talk of religion was similarly devoid of sense. 

Popper would have none of this. He applied his own blowtorch to the principle, arguing that instead of verificationism what was needed was falsificationism. The latter meant, as we have seen, that hypotheses can be accepted as probable but never utterly confirmed. 

Human knowledge. he argued. is never conclusive but only conjectural, hypothetical. aspiring to certainty perhaps but achieving only probability. Human knowledge in Popper’s perspective was like the British Empire or the Third Reich it may have seemed to its most blinkered supporters that its borders were conclusively established. that once territory was captured it need never be surrendered, but the truth was that it was provisional and liable to change. 

But if Popper was no positivist, that didn’t stop Adorno and his acolytes during the dispute from describing him and his supporters. including the German philosopher Hans Albert, as such. ‘It must be restated in advance here’, wrote Adorno in a footnote to his introduction to a book about the dispute published in German in 1969 after hostilities had ceased, ‘that Popper and Albert distance themselves from the specific position of logical positivism. The reason why they are nevertheless regarded as positivists should be evident from what follows. What was evident was that Adorno called Popper and Albert positivists because they disdained to do what the dialecticians of the Frankfurt School did, namely to question the authority of science. 

Popper, for his part, described himself as a critical rationalist. which makes drawing up the battle lines in Tubingen a marvellously challenging business. Adorno, after all, described himself as a critical theorist. But what is the difference between a critical rationalist and a critical theorist? Horkheimer in his essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ distinguished between the Savant who doesn’t realise that the economic (and thus currently capitalist) structure of society shapes scientific work, and the critical theorist who does. For the Frankfurt School, a self-styled critical rationalist like Popper was just as much a Savant in that sense as other self-declared positivists were. But how did Popper understand the term critical rationalist? He made his own distinction between critical rationalism and ‘uncritical or comprehensive rationalism’. The latter was really another term for positivism. at least as the latter pertained to philosophy and science. It maintained that information derived from sensory experience, interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge. 

Christianity localised

From Richard Sennett

In the pagan world, bodily suffering seldom appeared as a human opportunity. Men and women may have confronted it, may have learned from it, but did not seek it out. With the coming of Christianity, bodily suffering acquired a new spiritual value. Coping with pain perhaps mattered more than confronting pleasure; pain was harder to transcend, a lesson Christ taught through His own sufferings. The Christian’s journey in life took shape through transcending all physical stimulation; as a Christian became indifferent to the body, he or she hoped to draw closer to God. 

If the Christian’s journey in time succeeded, away from the body and toward God, the believer would also withdraw from attachments to place. The pagan commands to look and believe, look and obey would not arouse faith; no orientation in space would reveal where God is. God is everywhere and nowhere; Jesus was a wanderer, as were Jewish prophets before Him. The believer following in the 
prophet's path would leave the city, at least spiritually.

The Christian would re-enact the Exile from the Garden, becoming more aware and more compassionate towards other human beings in pain. 

This Christian journey made heroic demands on its followers. A religion aimed at the poor and the weak asked them to find within themselves a superhuman strength. The story of the early Christians in Rome was of a people who clung to that faith yet discovered they, only human, needed ground under their feet. They needed a city. 

1. THE ALIEN BODY OF CHRIST 

Antinous and Christ 

One of the most dramatic passages in early Church history arose from the charge a Christian brought against Hadrian’s most personal building project, a city built in honor of Antinous.

Marguerite Yourcenar had Hadrian consider the possibility that Antinous committed suicide. It was commonly believed in the eastern Mediterranean at this time that one could, through suicide committed using the proper ritual, save the life of a person one loved; the life force would then pass from the dead into the living. Hadrian had been perilously ill shortly before Antinous' death, and Yourcenar conjectured that the young man had killed himself in order to preserve the emperor. In the 1305 the dead Antinous indeed became a popular cult figure as a new Osiris, the young, healing Egyptian god whose death passed his life force into others. 

Because the Antinous cult referred to Osiris, some Romans compared Antinous to other gods who had sacriflced themselves for men. The most famous of these comparisons was made by Celsus, a Roman who wrote a generation after Hadrian in the latter third of the second century; he compared Antinous to Christ. Celsus had declared, probably in a text dating from 177-180, that since Antinous’ suicide to save Hadrian’s life was comparable to the martyrdom of Christ, “the honour which [Christians] give to Jesus is no different from that paid to Hadrian's favourite.“ 

This comparison provoked a generation later a counterattack by Origen, one of the first great Christian intellectuals. He sought to disparage a loving bond between men as weak and unstable: “What is there in common between the noble life of our Jesus and the life of the favourite of Hadrian who did not even keep the man from a morbid lust for women?” But in responding to Celsus, and in challenging the comparison between Antinous and Christ, Origen had a far deeper goal in mind: he wanted to show that the body of Christ IS unlike a human body. 

Unlike Antinous, Origen maintained, Jesus cannot be accused “of having had the slightest contact with the least licentiousness,’ because Christ is not like a pagan god with desires and bodily longings.’ The pagan gods of Hadrian’s time appeared as magnified human beings, endowed with supernatural powers and eternal ltfe. They knew pleasure and fear, jealousy and rage; many of them were monsters of egotism. Jesus, Origen wrote, was different; just as He had no sexual desires, He suffered upon the cross only out of compassion for HIS earthly followers. Christ may well seem strange to pagans for lacking bodily sensations, but this is because He is God, His body is an alien body, unfathomable by human beings. 

Origen dismissed the magical powers of the dead Antinous as mere “Egyptian magic and spells," mocked Hadrian’s construction of Antinopolis, and declared that “the case of Jesus is very different from this." Here Origen took a second, immensely challenging step. He declared that faith in Jesus cannot be created by the state. Christians did not “oblige some king who commanded them to come or to obey the order of a governor.“ In the Pantheon the gods gathered in their niches to attest to the fortunes of the Empire, as they had gathered four hundred years before in the Portico of the Twelve Gods to smile, “agreeing and harmonious," on the felicity of Rome. politlcs and religion were inseparable. Now the state could not decree faith, and all monuments and temples were mere hollow shells. 

The early Christians did not so much publicly challenge the state controlled forms of worship as recoil from them personally. Yet the new religion drew a line with even (he most cosmopolitan and accommodating Christian could not cross. He or she was obliged by the rules of faith, the historian Arthur Darby Nock writes, “to renounce the public cult of the Emperor" Such a divide between politics and faith arose from the very conception of time which marked early Christian belief. 

This belief asserted people are not born Christian, they become Christian; a self-transformation which does not occur by following orders. Faith has to be created in the course of an individual's life, and conversion is not a one-time event; once it starts, it never stops unfolding, Such spiritual time was expressed in theological language by the assertion that believing is an experience of becoming. Conversion separates the person ever further away from dependence on the commands of a dominant power, and so drives a wedge between state and religion. 

When William James came to write about the psychological experience of conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he noted that conversion could take two forms; the first form of conversion is psychologically “cool,” James thought, rather like changing political parties. One may well include bits and pieces of what one believed before in converting, and one preserves a certain measure of detachment about the new doctrine even in subscribing to it. One does not lose one’s place in the world; such an experience is usually a discrete, One-time event. James had in mind people who converted to Unitarianism in New England; reform Judaism might also fit this picture. 

The other experience of conversion, James wrote, is much more impassioned; it comes from a sense that the way one lives now is all wrong, that fundamental change is necessary. But in this form of conversion, "the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal that we can aim at." This form of conversion has been expressed by Arthur Darby Nock as a “turning away . . . as much as a turning towards.” Because it does not resemble changing political parties, this turning away is never finished in the course of a lifetime. The early Christians converted in the second manner. that of turning away. In the pagan world, the body belonged to the City; yet free from this bondage, where did one go” There was no clear roadmap; the maps of worldly power were useless. And the confusions of becoming were especially potent among early Christians because in the Judaic origins of Christianity a devout person wandered uprooted from place to place. 

The people of the Old Testament thought of themselves as wanderers, and the Yahweh of the Old Testament was himself a wandering god, his Ark of the Covenant portable. In the theologian Harvey Cox's words “When the Ark was finally captured by the Philistines the Hebrews began to realize that Yahweh was not localized even in it. .He traveled with His people and elsewhere. " Yahweh was a god of time rather than of place, a god who promised to his followers a divine meaning for their unhappy travels. 

Early Christians drew on these Old Testament values. The author of the “Epistle to Diognatus” at the height of the Roman Empire's glory, for instance, declared that 

Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity either in locality or in speech or in customs. For they do not dwell off somewhere in cities of their own . . . nor do they practice an extraordinary style of life. . .. They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners. . . . Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is a foreign country.

Even if one does not wander physically, one must lose one’s attachments to where one lives. St. Augustine expressed this injunction as the Christian’s obligation to make “a pilgrimage through time." He wrote in The City of God: 

Now, it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, while Abel, as though he were merely a pilgrim on earth, built none. For, the true City of the saints is in heaven, though here on earth it produces citizens in which it wanders as on a pilgrimage through time looking for the Kingdom of eternity.” 

This “pilgrimage through time” rather than loyalty to physical places drew its authority from Jesus’ refusal to allow His disciples to build monuments to Him, and His promise to destroy the Temple of Jerusalem. To be an ardent citizen, engaged in the life around oneself. conflicted with the values of faith in another world. For the sake of one’s spiritual welfare, one had to break the emotional bonds of place. 

That effort began in one's own body. Origen’s attack on Celsus. Antinous, and Hadrian meant to show that Christianity had revolutionized the pagan experience of the body. Origen sought in his writings against Celsus and in his own life to exemplify that revolution. He wrote that conversion may start intellectually, in pondering how Christ's body is so unlike our own. The convert learns not to identify his or her own sufferings with the sufferings of Jesus, nor to imagine that divine love resembles human desire. For this reason, Hadrian’s sin in deifying Antinous, and Antinous’ sin in dying for Hadrian, lay in connecting physical passion to divinity. Pagan Romans like Celsus, who could make little sense of these assertions, thought the secrecy practiced by Christians came from the fact that they conducted orgies in private-perfectly acceptable behavior, and not foreign to the occasional wild patties staged by the gods themselves. 

The Christian’s next step in conversion would be more radical, a step Origen took to an extreme. In a fit of religious ecstasy, he castrated himself with a knife. Again, pagans frequently accused Christians of mutilating their bodies in the secret rites. If few actually did, Origen saw his own passion as more generally significant in following the Passion of Christ, for the effort to confront and overcome pain is a far more decisive step than the mere resolve to abstain from pleasure. We cannot simply decide to abstain from pain. Origen’s self-mutilation had resonances in ancient paganism, moreover, for instance the self-blinding of Oedipus, which led the pagan king to a new moral understanding; or again in other monotheistic cults like early Zoroastrianism, whose followers sometimes stated at the sun until they went blind; as their bodies transformed, they thought they 
began to sense God. 

A modern person may honor these acts as truly ascetic, yet explain them as deriving from a sense of bodily shame, in the Christian case a shame traceable back to the transgressions of Adam and Eve. For Origen, bodily shame could not be an end in itself. The body of the Christian must step beyond the very limits of pleasure and pain, in order to feel nothing, to lose sensation, to transcend desire. Thus Origen reacted most strongly against the charge made by Celsus, who himself turned a gimlet eye on the orgiastic practices of many of the Eastern cults devoted to Osiris, that Christian discipline of the body was a form of masochism. Celsus wrote that Christians “go astray in evil ways and wander about in great darkness more iniquitous and impure than that of the revellers of Antinous in Egypt." 

By describing this arduous and unnatural bodily journey, Origen came to affirm the two social foundations of Christianity. The first was the Christian doctrine of equality between human beings. In the sight of this God, all human bodies are alike, neither beautiful nor ugly, superior nor inferior. Images and visual forms no longer matter. Thus did the Christian principle challenge the Greek celebration of nakedness. the Roman formulas, “Look and believe,” "Look and obey.” Moreover. though Christianity for a long time held to ancient ideas about body heat and physiology, early Christianity broke in principle with the conclusion about the inequality between men and women based on that physiology. The bodies of men and women are equal, among believers there will be no more "male and female.” St. Paul in First Corinthians argued for strict dress codes separating the appearance of men from women; yet he also maintained that male and female prophets are filled with "one Spirit,” and in this sense gender-free. It was thanks to the alien, revolutionary body of Christ that His followers freed themselves from the prison of worldly appearances based on sex or wealth-or any other visible measure. These had no compelling value in this religion of the Other. 

Secondly, Christianity allied itself ethically with poverty, with the weak, and with the oppressed-with all those who are vulnerable bodies. Of prostitutes,John Chrysostom declared, “For say not this, that she that is stripped is a harIot; but that the nature is the same, and they ate bodies alike, both that of the harlot and that of the free woman.” The Christian emphasis on the equality of the humble and the power of poverty derived directly from the religion’s understanding of Christ's body. Perceived as a low-born, weak man by others, His martyrdom was meant in part to restore honor to those who most were like Him in the world. The historian Peter Brown summarizes this connection of Christ‘s vulnerable body and the bodies of the oppressed by saying that “The two great themes of sexuality and poverty gravitated together, in the rhetoric of John and of many other Christians. Both spoke of a universal vulnerability of the body, to which all men and women were liable, independent of class and civic Status.”