Crossposted from Late Nite Music Club
Rest In Peace.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
A Philosophical Biography
By Julian Young
Illustrated. 649 pp. Cambridge University Press. $45
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Drink. Trade. Refill. Lose $10 Million.
By JULIA WERDIGIER
Published: June 30, 2010
LONDON — Alcohol-induced behavior has produced many unintended consequences, but pushing up the global price of oil and losing $10 million must rank among the most novel.
Britain’s financial regulator disclosed on Tuesday that Steven Noel Perkins, a former oil futures broker, single-handedly engineered a jump in the price of oil a year ago and cost his firm millions of dollars with a string of unauthorized trades after a weekend of heavy drinking.
Mr. Perkins had just returned from a liquor-soaked golf weekend with colleagues in June of last year when he sat down in front of his laptop at his home east of London and started to place bets on Brent crude futures, according to a report by the Financial Services Authority. He continued to drink and place bets through the night, and by the morning of June 30, Mr. Perkins had placed more than $520 million worth of trades, at one point pushing the price of oil to $73.05, an eight-month high. The trades by Mr. Perkins were the main reason the price gained about $1.65 a barrel in just over two hours in the middle of the night, according to the report.
“Mr. Perkins’s explanation for his trading on 29 and 30 June is that he was drunk,” the F.S.A. said. “He claims to have limited recollection of events on Monday and claims to have been in an alcohol-induced blackout at the time he traded.”
Just before 7 a.m., Mr. Perkins realized what he had done and tried to unwind his positions. To gain time he sent a text message to his boss at PVM Oil Futures saying that a relative was ill and he would not be in the office that day.
When a back-office clerk called Mr. Perkins at 7:45 a.m. on June 30 to ask for details about the trades, Mr. Perkins lied and said he made them on behalf of a client. PVM takes commissions on fulfilling orders from its clients, which are banks and other institutions, and does not trade for itself.
But by 10 a.m., PVM, where Mr. Perkins had worked since 1998, had discovered that his trades were unauthorized and suspended his access to the trading system. The trades cost PVM almost $10 million, the company said last year.
The F.S.A. fined Mr. Perkins about $107,600, for market abuse and barred him from working in the financial services industry for at least five years.
The regulator reduced the fine from about $224,000 to avoid causing Mr. Perkins “serious financial hardship.”
Mr. Perkins joined a rehabilitation program last year and has stopped drinking, the F.S.A. said.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Nietzsche: A Philosophy in Context
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Published: April 29, 2010
One of the pitfalls of writing a biography of a great philosopher is the temptation to reduce important ideas to mere psychology, an outgrowth of some fluke in the philosopher’s personal development. Julian Young, a professor at the University of Auckland and Wake Forest University, has for the most part avoided this trap by writing a “philosophical” biography of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in which the life story provides context but ultimately not explanation for the ideas. In so doing he has provided a serious and readable, if not exactly ground-breaking, introduction to Nietzsche’s “philosophy with a hammer.”
Context is particularly important in Nietzsche’s case because his life story was so dramatic. The young Friedrich (or Fritz, as he was known) was, by all accounts, simply the most brilliant student any of his formidable professors had ever encountered, going all the way back to his boarding school days at Pforta. His teacher of classical philology at Leipzig, Friedrich Ritschl, said that in his 39 years of teaching he had “never known a young man who has matured so early.” Nietzsche was awarded a doctorate at age 24 and a professorship at the University of Basel the same year; he was promoted to full professor at 25 — a feat not even Larry Summers could duplicate.
From a very early age, however, Nietzsche was afflicted with a host of maladies, including blinding headaches that would last for days, problems with his digestion that would leave him vomiting and bedridden, and a progressive blindness that allowed him to read, painfully, for only a couple of hours a day. So debilitating did these symptoms become that he was forced to give up his professorship at age 34, after which he withdrew into a solitary and nomadic life, traveling between Switzerland and the South of France in search of a climate that would marginally ease his suffering. His great works were written in the few days of lucidity that were permitted him between long bouts of physical disability, “On the Genealogy of Morals” having been composed for the most part in a mere three weeks in 1887.
One of the central concepts in Nietzsche’s philosophy was the “eternal return of the same,” that is, the need to affirm the value of one’s life in every single detail as something to be repeated endlessly through time. Given the sheer torture of his physical existence, such an affirmation was testimony to Nietzsche’s own gigantic will — a will that transformed into madness when he collapsed on a Turin sidewalk in January 1889 with delusions that he had become a world-creating God.
Young resorts to purely psychological explanation primarily on the subject of Nietzsche’s attitude toward women. He notes that Nietzsche had a large circle of highly intelligent and forceful female friends, and that many could be regarded as early feminists. As a Basel professor Nietzsche took a minority stand favoring admission of women to the doctoral program. But after his disastrous courtship of Lou Salomé, whose affections were stolen by Nietzsche’s close friend Paul Rée, he came to regard feminism as one of the most disastrous byproducts of modernity, and women as needing (in the words of a character in “Zarathustra”) “the whip.”
The most serious issue raised in this or any other study of Nietzsche concerns the nature of his politico-cultural program, the “transvaluation of all values,” that was to take place in the wake of the death of Christianity. Young properly criticizes attempts by the Nazis to appropriate Nietzsche as one of their own. He points out that despite some casual anti-Semitism in his early years, the older Nietzsche became a principled anti-anti-Semite, an opponent of Bismarck and a critic of the German chauvinism that emerged after the Reich was unified in 1871.
Nietzsche, however, hoped for a future hierarchical society in which the labor of the many would support the greatness of the few, one in which the cultural cacophony of contemporary liberal societies would be replaced by the solidarity of a single, common culture. Young argues that this was not really a political project, and that the Übermensch at the top of the pyramid should be thought of less as a Hitler-like dictator and more as a spiritual leader, whom he compares variously to the Dalai Lama or Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. Cultural conformity was not, for Young’s Nietzsche, something to be enforced through political power, but rather something generated spontaneously through communal participation in art, much as the ancient Greek polis had been bound together through the common performance of tragedy.
This then explains the central role that music played in his philosophy. Nietzsche, a talented pianist and occasional composer, had great hopes that Richard Wagner’s music might somehow serve as the foundation for a refounding of German culture on the basis of a unifying art, and for that reason he entered eagerly into the circle of Wagner and his wife, Cosima. He broke with the composer not because he ceased to believe in the project, but because he felt that Wagner himself was too crude an individual to implement it.
But understanding Nietzsche’s project as a cultural rather than a political one should not blind us to its terrible implications. For while one might be able to create a small-scale community based on common and voluntary commitment to art, as Wagner sought to do in Bayreuth, scaling up such a project to society as a whole, with all its de facto diversity, would require dictatorial political power. The mystical origins of Nietzsche’s Dionysian community are an open invitation to the unleashing of irrational passion that is perfectly happy to squander the life of any individual standing in its way. Ayatollah Khamenei is indeed a much better model of Nietzsche’s future leader than the powerless Dalai Lama.
Young’s biography illustrates concepts from Nietzsche’s books with examples drawn from the contemporary world, so one finds Diana, Princess of Wales; “The Truman Show”; and the Iraq war popping up in incongruous places. Some of these are helpful, but many simply detract from the book’s seriousness, like the dozen or so references to global warming scattered through the text.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche. Postmodernism, deconstructionism, cultural relativism, the “free spirit” scorning bourgeois morality, even New Age festivals like Burning Man can all ultimately be traced to him. There is a line running from “Beyond Good and Evil” to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s assertion (in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) that liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.”
Young appropriately underlines the notion that postmodernism, with its embrace of diversity in values, is no different from the 19th-century modernism that Nietzsche hated. He would not have celebrated alternative lifestyles, non-Western cultures or the right of every fourth grader to be his or her own value-creator. Acknowledgment of the death of God is a bomb that blows up many things, not just oppressive traditionalism, but also values like compassion and the equality of human dignity on which support for a tolerant liberal political order is based. This then is the Nietzschean dead end from which Western philosophy has still not emerged.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Arendt
| A new kind of tyranny By Shlomo Avineri | |||
| The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt. newly published in Hebrew as "Yesodot Hatotalitariut," translated from the English by Idith Zertal; H
In English, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" is available in hardcover from Schocken, with an introduction by Samantha Power, 704 pages, $37.50; in paperback from Mariner Books, 576 pages, $19. Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," first published in 1951 (in English), has played a major role in shaping the way international affairs have been viewed, from the second half of the 20th century onward. Perhaps more than any other treatise, it has contributed to the way people with a liberal outlook have grappled with the totalitarian ideas and regimes of both the right and the left. To a large extent, this book entrenched the concept of totalitarianism and characterized this type of regime, stressing the shared characteristics of Nazism and Communism, despite the many differences between them. The publication of the first Hebrew translation of this work, which entailed considerable effort because of Arendt's complex and sometimes unsystematic mode of writing, is an important and welcome event. It is sometimes said that the reason the book was never translated earlier was because of the anger in Israel over her theory about the "banality of evil," as expressed in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (1963). Yet other books about totalitarianism also took a long time to come out in Hebrew: Karl Popper's "The Open Society and its Enemies," which was first published in 1945, was only translated into Hebrew in 2003; F.A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" (1944 ) came out in Hebrew only in 1998; and "Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy," by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1956 ), has not yet been accorded a Hebrew translation. For understandable reasons, "The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy," by Jacob Talmon, then a professor of modern history at Hebrew University, came out in Hebrew shortly after the 1952 publication of the English edition. This hasn't been some kind of evil conspiracy. Rather, there are objective difficulties with the translation of many important theoretical books, and the need is less than urgent because intellectual and academic circles in Israel, after all, have access to them in English. The absence of a Hebrew edition has not prevented lecturers at the country's universities from including Arendt's book on reading lists for students since the mid-1950s. Nevertheless, it will come as no surprise if the appearance of the Hebrew translation makes waves in the public discourse. It is difficult to classify Arendt's volume on totalitarianism as a book on philosophy, history, political science or mass psychology. In fact, it is a treatise about the history of culture that is tremendous in its scope, and in this respect it is in the tradition of all-embracing works like Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" or Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History." Nevertheless, despite its eclectic character (or "hybrid" nature, as Idith Zertal, the translator and editor of the Hebrew edition, calls it in her preface ), to this day it offers the best insight into totalitarian movements and regimes. After World War II, the West faced an intricate problem: While Nazism and Fascism had been defeated, this victory was made possible largely thanks to Stalin's Soviet Union. Before 1945, the war could be depicted as pitting the "free world" against the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini, but the strong-armed Communist takeover of Eastern Europe made it difficult to cling to this fiction. Hannah Arendt -- like Popper and Talmon -- afforded the West the ideological infrastructure needed to see the Cold War not only as a struggle between two superpowers aspiring to world hegemony, but also as a continuation of the fight against totalitarianism as such, whether it comes from the right or the left. Arendt made a crucial contribution to that fight, and therefore her book -- which does not make for easy reading -- won tremendous popularity not only in academia but also among the general public. As happens in such cases, it is not entirely clear that everyone who cites the book has actually read it or thoroughly understood it (much as with Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" and Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" ). Arendt's primary contribution to the understanding of totalitarianism lies mainly in her contention that the totalitarian movements, both fascist and communist, provided an answer to the masses facing the disintegration of traditional European society, with its hierarchies, norms and accepted modes of behavior. Modernization and democratization, it emerges, did not in fact elevate "the people" but often, rather, the "masses" or the "mob" ? an observation already made by conservative writers like Jose Ortega y Gasset. According to this perspective, fascism and communism were not a continuation of the historical dictatorships based on ruling classes or conquests. They represented a new kind of tyranny, nourished by the alienation spread by modern life. The individual, "the common man," is entirely cut off from moderating or restraining affiliations. He has nothing in his life but the idea that connects him directly, with no need of institutional mediation, to the movement and the leader. Hence the mass marches and pageants -- whether in Nuremburg or in Red Square. Hence the intoxication from the stunning individual experience of marching together with tens of thousands of others to stirring music and flags waving. Hence, too, the creation of an intrusive bureaucratic machine, accompanied by a secret police force and concentration camps, with hierarchical and rigid discipline binding together a population with no other foci of identification. What enthusiastic belief does not do, fear will, and the combination of the two is tremendously powerful. The cruel irony is that the totalitarian society really is a classless society that could therefore be headed by nonentities like Hitler and Stalin, who truly did represent the "people's will," as embodied in an indistinguishable mass, far more than their sophisticated and educated rivals. These leaders demanded total conformism in every aspect of life, from thought to dress, and therefore they excluded, and destroyed, minority groups. Blind loyalty to the populist leader also led to belief in his supernatural powers, and the absence of an effective opposition to his rule, even when the extent of his failure should have been clear to all. Nazism and nationalism Today we know far more about totalitarian regimes than Arendt did when she wrote the book. Thousands of studies have opened the Nazi regime's secrets to us, and many facts about the Soviet Union came to light (or were finally confirmed ) after its disintegration. Nevertheless, Arendt's descriptions are still read with great excitement, just as Arthur Koestler's novel "Darkness at Noon" still provides insight into the purge trials in Moscow, perhaps more than many learned treatises. However, most of Arendt's book does not actually discuss totalitarianism. Of its three sections, only the last focuses on totalitarianism; the first two are entitled "Antisemitism" and "Imperialism." While the fact that Arendt was not a historian did not impair her analysis of contemporary totalitarian regimes, it did lead her to develop some problematic conclusions in the first two parts of the book, in which she discusses political developments in Europe in the modern period, mainly the emergence of racism and what she calls "the decline of the nation-state." The justified excitement over Arendt's profound insights into totalitarianism in the final section of the book are to a large extent responsible for the lack of attention paid to the other parts of the tome. In the section on imperialism, Arendt devotes a chapter to the rise of the pan-German and pan-Slavic movements and, surprisingly, depicts them as evidence of the decline of the nation-state. However, historical research, like the statements of those selfsame "pan-" movements, indicates that they are clearly nationalist movements taken to the extreme. For instance, pan-Slavism was an expansion of Russian nationalism, aided by the national movements of other Slavic peoples (such as the Czechs, but never the Poles ). And German nationalism at its most extreme was not satisfied with the unification of Germany. The pan-German ideology saw itself as the clearest expression of German nationalism, and therefore saw the Volksdeutsche -- ethnic Germans living in other Eastern Europe countries -- as an integral part of the German people and the Third Reich. To argue otherwise means overlooking and missing the historic connection between Nazism and its roots in the extreme wing of German nationalism. Associating the "pan-" movements with the decline of the nation-state also brings Arendt to her problematic placement of modern anti-Semitism in the fabric of European history. Her key statement on this issue, which pervades her entire discussion of anti-Semitism, is that "modern anti-Semitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of powers crashed." There is no historical support for this contention, and research shows that the opposite is true: It was the rise of the modern nation-state, and the challenges it faced, that led to the sharp increase in anti-Semitism. As Zeev Sternhell has shown, the rise of integral nationalism at the end of the 19th century in France was channeled in the Dreyfus affair into extreme anti-Semitism, and studies by George Mosse and Peter Pulzer indicate a similar link in Germany and Austria. Moreover, and this is totally missing from Arendt's account, the rise of aggressive anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe is directly connected to the rise of nationalist movements and nation-states there. As nationalism thrived and achieved its political aims in Romania, Hungary, Poland and Lithuania, anti-Semitism increased when the nationalist movements had to confront the existence of a relatively large Jewish minority in their territories. Apart from a discussion of Russia, where Arendt's analyses are riddled with her problematic view of pan-Slavism as an expression of the failure of Russian nationalism, Eastern Europe is absent from Arendt's discussion. This raises the following very big question: How is it possible to discuss modern anti-Semitism while ignoring what happened to the most sizable Jewish population, which was in Eastern Europe? A more comprehensive examination of Arendt's theory concerning the rise of anti-Semitism in the parts of Europe she does discuss (mostly Germany and to a certain extent France ) confronts the reader with yet another problematic conclusion: that the Jews, through their financial and banking activities, played a crucial role in the rise of the absolute monarchies and the modern nation-state. Critical readers cannot help but ask themselves what exactly is going on here, and where these views are coming from. The answer is clear: Arendt, who explicitly acknowledges that she is not a historian, is talking about the role played by the "court Jews," mainly in the 18th century, in the courts of some German princes. At the same time, she is basing her argument on Jewish bankers' involvement in the development of the banking system in the 19th century. No one disputes this. The problem is that Arendt generalizes from these historical findings to draw conclusions about the place of "the Jews" in European history, while entirely ignoring the fact that most of the Jews -- even in the German states -- were neither court Jews nor financial advisors to princes, but rather small traders and shopkeepers. 'No poor Jews' As Arendt would have it, there were no poor Jews living on the margins of European society, managing to live with difficulty and without political and civil rights. As Arendt would have it, "the Jews" were all bankers, financiers, court Jews and privileged, or in her generalizing language: "The Jews had been purveyors in wars and the servants of kings." Not some individual Jews, but "the Jews." Moreover, Arendt seems to be unaware of a major fallacy in her account of the Jews' role in the rise of absolute monarchies and the modern nation-state: Several of these countries had few or no Jews living in them at the time of their emergence as modern nation-states. France emerged as the major European absolutist monarchy under Louis XIV when hardly any Jews lived there. In England too, a modern state took shape toward the end of the 18th century in the wake of the industrial revolution, but very few Jews lived there at that time either. As for Spain, an absolutist state par excellence, the Jews had been expelled during the period when the Spanish absolute monarchy was being consolidated. The ahistoricity so blatantly visible in these theories is accompanied by other generalizations that do not stand up to scrutiny. According to Arendt, "the Jews" always supported the governments in power in whichever country they were living, but the truth is that the number of Jews in the revolutionary, liberal and socialist movements was far greater than their representation in the overall population. "The Jews," continues Arendt, were responsible for the hatred felt toward them because of their communal seclusion, their non-involvement in politics, their concern solely for themselves and their non-participation in social and class struggles. The point is that one can argue precisely the opposite, that it was the disproportionate prominence of Jews in politics -- especially liberal and socialist politics -- that gave rise to anti-Semitic criticism. Examples range from Karl Marx and Eduard Bernstein in Germany to Ferdinand Lassalle in France; Jews were also heavily involved in the Communist revolutions in Bavaria and Hungary after World War I, and clearly in the Soviet revolution. Indeed, this was one of the classic anti-Semitic canards of the 19th century and of the Nazis in the 20th. But there is no mention of any of this in Arendt's analysis. Equally astounding is the fact that in a nearly 200-page discussion of anti-Semitism in Germany, Arendt never mentions the writings of some of the chief anti-Semites: Wilhelm Marr, Eugen Duehring and Heinrich von Treitschke. (While not discussed in the text, Duehring is, however, mentioned in a footnote, though his Christian name is misspelled. ) Nor is there any mention of the fact that the German student fraternities, the Burschenschaften, were a hotbed of anti-Jewish activity at the start of the 19th century, with the rise of German nationalism during the Napoleonic wars. As for the anti-Jewish statements by Johann Fichte, the major philosophical precursor of German nationalism -- not a word. The absence of these works and developments from discussion is all the more surprising because these are figures whose books resonated greatly among the German public -- in fact, it was Marr who coined the term "anti-Semitism." Nor is there any mention of Richard Wagner's "The Jew in Music." Just as Arendt does not discuss the Jews themselves (apart from court Jews and bankers ), so the anti-Semites do not really appear in her treatise. This is presumably due to the fact that had she mentioned them, it would emerge that the anti-Semitic criticism of the Jews was very different from what Arendt claims it to be: Anti-Semitic propaganda maintained, for example, that Jews, in their revolutionary activity, were undermining the existing political order or that they were "contaminating" the purity of the German culture or race. These aspects of anti-Semitic accusations against the Jews are absent from Arendt's account. One of the problems with Arendt's historical analysis is that she bases her views not just on balanced, well-respected research, but also on the writings of Nazi historians such as Walter Frank, whom she cites often and without reservation. Frank, who headed the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany, was responsible under Nazi rule for "cleansing" the German universities not only of Jewish lecturers but also of books written by Jews. Citing Frank, who committed suicide after the fall of the Third Reich, as a historical source regarding the role of the Jews in German history is problematic, to say the least. Arendt also demonstrates a shallow historical understanding of Benjamin Disraeli. Rightly, she says there are racist elements in his novels and speeches, and it is appropriate to link him to thinkers like Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Yet there is a difference: Gobineau and Chamberlain wanted to exalt the white race as supreme and justify European dominance of "inferior" races. But while Disraeli glorifies the oppressed and humiliated Jews and depicts the Europeans as intellectually inferior, this is protest racism by the humiliated, much like the black racism of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X and James Baldwin. All racism is despicable, but there is room for distinctions. 'The oriental mob' Bearing all this in mind, readers of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" will perhaps not be surprised by several strains of thought that appeared later in "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Nevertheless, they might be surprised by the way Arendt described the atmosphere at the Eichmann trial in a letter to German philosopher Karl Jaspers: "My first impression: On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic ... And outside the doors, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country." Nevertheless, it would be wrong, even wicked, to see Arendt as a person tainted by Jewish self-hatred. She was a proud Jew and a courageous fighter against anti-Semitism and totalitarianism, which is why she wrote this book. Yet as she herself would acknowledge, sometimes victims internalize the criticism aimed at them by their enemies. And indeed, though her book contains echoes of anti-Semitic stereotypes and accusations, Hannah Arendt is by no means a self-hating Jew. On the contrary, she comes across as a victim of anti-Semitism, in what is perhaps one of its cruelest, and most insidious, forms. There are tragic aspects to this monumental treatise, demonstrating just what anti-Semitism can sometimes do to the most brilliant of Jewish minds. This tragedy is painful and distressing -- and far from banal. Prof. Shlomo Avineri's most recent book is "Herzl," published in Hebrew by Zalman Shazar Center Press. Haaretz Books, March 2010, haaretzbooks@gmail.com | |||
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