April 2025
My reflections on the books I read this month
The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice
by Jack Fairweather
The “one man” mentioned in this book’s subtitle is Fritz Bauer, a Jewish German judge who left Germany in 1936 and lived in exile, first in Denmark and then in Sweden, until he returned to Germany in 1949. Upon his return, he re-entered Germany’s justice system, and eventually took the position of state prosecutor in the German state of Hessen. He served in that position from 1956 until his death in 1968. The book charts Bauer’s involvement in three major trials of Nazi officials that together served not only to bring individuals to justice but also to change German attitudes towards Nazism and the Holocaust in the decades following the end of World War II.
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In the background of all three of these trials is the rather positive attitude toward Hitler and Nazism more generally in the first few years after the end of the war. Fairweather offers several examples of these attitudes. The philosopher Karl Jaspers (the director of Hannah Arendt’s dissertation) lived in Germany with his Jewish wife for the entire war. But he and his wife were subject to such strong abuse in the late 1940s that they moved to Switzerland. German school textbooks had only 47 words about the Final Solution as late as 1956. A 1950s museum at Auschwitz said almost nothing about Jewish suffering in the camp, and argued that Nazism was inspired by American capitalism. In the late 1940s, sociologist Theodor Adorno developed a questionnaire that might identify fascist attitudes in those who responded to its questions. Many protested. “‘Why should Germans be forced into collective self-accusation for years on end?’ exclaimed the prominent Hamburg sociologist Peter Hofstätter. Adorno shot back that Hofstätter’s comments made it clear: In the house of the hangman ‘you should not speak of the rope’” (pp. 138f).
The first — and smallest — of the three trials involved slander charges against the far right politician Otto Remer. In a 1951 speech, Remer argued that the small group who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944 were in fact traitors who contributed to Germany’s downfall. Bauer didn’t bring these charges, but he took responsibility for the prosecution. Fairweather suggests that Bauer hoped that the public would come to see this indictment of one individual as in fact an indictment of the Third Reich. He won the case.
The second of the three trials was the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Bauer didn’t participate directly in this trial — which was held in Jerusalem by Israeli authorities rather than in Germany — but he was instrumental in locating Eichmann in Argentina and in pushing Israel to extract him from that country for trial. Eichmann was convicted and executed.
The third trial is known as the Auschwitz trial, and it was much more ambitious than the other two. Bauer and his associates brought indictments against almost two dozen officials who participated in different ways in the Auschwitz death camp. Bauer hoped that this trial would bring to light the participation of many, convincing Germans that the Holocaust simply could not have happened without tremendous community support, whether that support was direct and concrete or more implicit in the reluctance of many to speak out against it. This third trial was less successful in some ways – five defendants were convicted of murder and received life sentences; a few others were convicted as accessories and received shorter sentences. Five of them were freed after the trial, either because they were acquitted or because the time spent in jail during the course of the trial was deemed sufficient punishment. But the power of witness testimony, and also the power of the court’s trip with journalists to see Auschwitz itself, helped to reshape German attitudes.
Bauer was disappointed in the results of this last trial, but Fairweather argues Bauer’s efforts overall were effective and influential. Those who visit Auschwitz and the camps in Germany today see exhibits detailing both the harsh living conditions in those camps and the circumstances in which so many Jews and others died. By the 1960s and 70s German students were reading many more than 47 words about the Holocaust in their textbooks. As one small example from my own experience, I first learned of Bauer when I visited an exhibit detailing his work on the first of these three trials at the Nuremberg Trial Memorial. That exhibit highlighted how the Remer trial began to change German attitudes.
Fairweather’s account of each of these trials is detailed and extensive. It’s clear to me that the current political climate in the United States deepened my sensitivity both to the trials and to the way that German attitudes have changed. In that light, I find Fairweather’s concluding remarks particularly telling. Bauer, he says, wasn’t seeking redemption for the Nazis. Instead, he hoped “to push us to examine ourselves, in the belief that the strength of democracy and the guarantee that Nazism will never return lies not in the lines society draws, which can be breached, nor in institutions, which can be corrupted. Rather it lies in our commitment to seek connection with those we struggle to understand” (p. 322).
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
by Lindsey Stonebridge (a re-read)
This is perhaps the best book on Hannah Arendt that I’ve read, and I think it’s a very good introduction to her thought and its relevance for someone yet to read any of Arendt’s challenging texts. It’s very easy to find Arendt’s footprints these days – in newspapers and journals, in my Mastodon feed, which is peppered with choice quotations (some that I’ve posted) from her many writings, and in books. It’s easy to explain the renewed (or at least broadened) interest: the world she faced in the 1930s and 1940s that formed her has many similarities to the world that we face today. If you’ve seen any of that but haven’t dived into Arendt for yourself yet, a very good — perhaps even the best — first step would be to read this book.
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Stonebridge clearly explains many of the basic points in Arendt’s philosophy and political thought, and she builds on that explanation an insightful account for the relevance of Arendt today. I’ll list here a few of the insights that I find particularly germane.
- A political and existential void leaves room for “pseudo-actions” of those in power: “There is nothing like a political and existential void for making an atrocious idea welcome. If nothing makes sense, then anything is possible. As populists and propagandists know, whipping up fake storms in the wastelands gives the appearance of action, meaning, purpose, salvation. This is pseudo-action only (as today’s social media storms again illustrate), yet with each passing tempest people become less, not more, sensitive to suffering, and less able to judge. Life, politics, and suffering itself become tedious. Then the big men with the big ‘impossible’ ideas move in and suddenly the world is at war with itself again” (p. 30).
- If human rights are defined and defended only by nation-states, then stateless people are left out in the cold. Obviously, I’m thinking here of those swept up by Trump’s ICE. “The point about being superfluous, … imprisoned in a camp, on the run, on the margins, is that you’re no longer really in the world — you just exist, a dim figure in the dark background against which everyone else carries on with the rest of their lives; a shadow person among the shadows” (p. 112).
- In this situation the “right to have rights” is crucial. “‘The right to have rights’ guarantees the only right that perhaps matters, the right to be in the political conversation” (pp. 97f).
- Love is crucial — Arendt wrote her dissertation on Augustine’s concept of love — but one who cares about those without rights must move beyond love to action: “if you don’t want people to die in camps or suffer in poverty, exile, and indignity, instead of loving them you would do better to engage directly with ‘the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics’: to act, in other words, and to take political moral responsibility in a crooked world” (p. 129).
There’s so much more to say about this book; I hope that the little I’ve said here will encourage others to read it for themselves. As the title says, We are free to change the world, but only if we manifest that freedom in action.
The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
by Robert Zaretsky (a re-read)
I’ve read relatively little of Simone Weil’s writings, but I found this to be a very good introduction to her thought. My confidence in making that judgment is based largely on the fact that Zaretsky quotes liberally from her work to substantiate his account of her position as a philosopher and as an activist.
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One thing that strikes me about Simone Weil is how she set her moral standards so high that no one – including she herself – could meet them. And I gather that this is true about other things as well, not just morality. From her notebooks: the “proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting” (Zaretsky, p. 2). This, I take it, is a major theme in her life – the notion that one will never succeed fully, that one is always “patiently waiting” for a solution that never comes.
But this doesn’t mean that she didn’t think acting is important. In fact, she would say that thinking isn’t thinking unless it leads to action. And action proper requires that one think.
After finishing her studies, Weil taught, both in standard classrooms and also to workers outside of the academy who wouldn’t otherwise have a chance for such an education. “Far from being a means of social refinement, Weil believed, the teaching of literature should be a tool for revolution. By mastering language, the worker would learn how to master his place in the world. Rather than dismissing culture as a bourgeois luxury, the labor unions should embrace it as a universal necessity. Workers must prepare to take possession of our culture, Weil declared, ‘just as they must prepare themselves to take possession of our entire heritage. This act of possession is the Revolution itself’” (17).
But – and this is one example of how Weil changed her mind as she thought about things – she gave up the notion that successful revolution is possible. Writing in 1934, she said that “The word ‘revolution is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the laboring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content’ (18).
Weil was definitely on the side of the oppressed, but she also thought that those who were (temporarily) in control were also oppressed by power. “… those who hold power are never secure; faced by rivals seeking to take it and the oppressed seeking to resist it, the powerful live in a constant state of insecurity. Here today and gone tomorrow, power is a fickle phenomenon, as elusive as it is inexorable. Ultimately, it is not power itself, but the pursuit of power, that oppresses humankind” (18).
The approach Zaretsky offers to Weil is via a discussion of five themes he finds important in her work: affliction, attention, rootedness, resistance, and goodness.
Affliction
Weil thought it important, not only that she see the affliction in others, but that she experience affliction from the inside, as it were. She sought out work usually performed by oppressed peoples, in factories and on farms. She found that the intensity and drudgery of work left her unable to think, but she also came to a conclusion about force in the capitalist workplace: “Men no less than women, managers no less than workers, employers no less than employees are all subject to force. It was an equal-opportunity oppressor” (19). But if Weil is right that an oppressive relationship oppresses both the one who submits and the one who dominates, then she would have to say that both oppressor and oppressed suffer from affliction.
Zaretsky notes that Weil found affliction to be a “mark of slavery” that (threatens to) destroy one’s sense of self. “Nothing in the world can rob us of the power to say ‘I.’ Nothing except extreme affliction” (37). And yet, Zaretsky says, there’s another side to this. Affliction also provides the opportunity for other virtues. “Weil insisted that in and of itself, affliction does not hold any value whatsoever. Its value, instead, lies in the use we make of it. Whether it can teach us anything as grand as wisdom depends on how we define wisdom. If virtues like comprehension and compassion, toleration and moderation are to constitute at least part of wisdom, we could do worse” (37).
Paying Attention
Each person has his/her own reading of the world. “Is there a center, as Weil asks in her notebooks, ‘from which may be seen the different possible readings – and their relationship – and our own only as one among them’?”
Attention transports us “to that center of thought from which the other person reads values; contemplate the values destroyed by what we are going to do.”
And the value of attention is more in the “going” than in the “getting there.” And it’s more a matter of opening ourselves to others, canceling our own desires, than of focusing our gaze on others (45).
“Reverence is the work of attention” (53). This recalls Kant’s emphasis on achtung.
Resistance
Thought enables one to resist the power of “the collectivity.” “True liberty, she argued, is defined ‘by a relationship between thought and action; the absolutely free man would be he whose every action proceeded from a preliminary judgment concerning the end which he set himself and the sequence of means suitable for attaining this end.’ Subject though we are to irresistible social, economic, and material forces, we can nevertheless assert our liberty by doing what we can within these constraints. ‘Man can choose between either blindly submitting to the spur with which necessity pricks him on from the outside, or else adapting himself to the inner representation of it that he forms in his own mind’” (74).
Only by thought (attention) alone can one “locate the sources of oppression and how they ripple across our lives” (80). But, again, this thought is worthless unless it leads to action.
Rootedness
Sense of uprootedness can be physical but also psychological and/or social.
Rootedness means to participate in a community – grounded in it both spatially and temporally.
Rootedness implies a social self, rooted in a social context whose past and present are both crucial.
The nation is not perfect, but it’s the best available way to ground the sense of rootedness that in turn grounds the notion that the needs of others is the basis for one’s obligations to these others.
The Good
This is one theme that Zaretsky says is not systematically and explicitly developed in Weil’s writing. In this discussion, he draws heavily on Iris Murdoch’s position and also on her interpretation of Weil. Weil and Murdoch rely on Plato’s notion of the Good. And they take Plato’s metaphor of the cave to focus on the Good and morality rather than on the truth and knowledge.
Weil insisted that democracy is not an end in itself, but rather a means to the end of goodness. If democracy fails to facilitate goodness, then it should be set aside. It’s important to note here Weil’s insistence that political parties actually subvert democracy. She argued rather passionately that political parties should be abolished.
Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting not to Know
by Mark Lilla
I find Lilla’s own brief description of his book to be better than anything I can come up with: Ignorance and Bliss, he says, “can perhaps best be described as an intellectual travelogue retracing my own circuitous and somewhat episodic excursions in reading and thinking about the will not to know. … You are being invited on a ramble, not a journey to a fixed destination” (pp. 13f). Reading the book was definitely a ramble for me — a rather haphazard ramble at that — but I found myself more or less at home when I finally reached the end. Spoiler alert: in the next paragraph I offer his account of that end.
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Here’s my main take-away: “At one extreme, there is the person who treats his life as a journey of discovery, expecting pleasure and happiness from it — homo viator. At the other, there is the person who anticipates loss and harm, and so builds dikes against the tides and flees if the waters crest over the top — homo fugiens. Two human types, two ways of living for us to choose between” (pp. 223f). Though I have occasional moments of fear regarding just what I might discover, I like to think I live my life in the first camp. I also think that this inclination really is the only reason that I stayed with this book until the end.
That sounds like a negative comment, but my opinion of the book is more positive than negative. However, at times I was frustrated by seemingly random collection of observations and insights. I want more narrative structure on my journeys. Having said that, there are some gems in this random collection. Some examples:
- The ambiguity of Socrates’s understanding of the tension inherent in philosophical inquiry and dialogue: “Socrates held that the spirit of philosophy, the love of wisdom (philo-sophia), was diametrically opposed to the spirit of combat, the love of victory (philo-nikia). Yet both spirits get activated when we engage in argument” (p. 49).
- The contrast between understanding freedom, on one hand, as the freedom to believe whatever one wants to believe without fear of challenge and, on the other hand, the freedom to inquire into the truth. The latter is a freedom that comes with responsibility. (This is similar to something that Orwell said about freedom.)
- Charles Dickens’s fake books in his country house. The collection included a multi-volume set on The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, with titles like Ignorance, Superstition, Dirt, and Disease. Next to these rather imposing volumes was a single book, much thinner, called The Virtues of our Ancestors. (For what it’s worth, I was interested enough in this to investigate further. I confirmed that Dickens had in his library a collection of fake books, but I didn’t find these particular titles in online lists. I did, however, find a less detailed description of these books in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens.)
- Lilla makes what I take to be an obvious point that the gaining of knowledge leads to a loss of many characteristics we associate with children: e.g., spontaneity, trust, transparency. And I do at times feel what he characterizes as a nostalgia for childhood: a wish “to experience a state of mind unburdened by what we have experienced and learned since childhood and the responsibilities we have taken on” (p. 191). But I agree with his observation that a similar “historical nostalgia” drives many people to wish — and fight — for an earlier time, perhaps fantasized, that they see as more innocent and pure. On that note, I think this quotation from a late 18th century notebook is almost prophetic.
All in all, he would say — and I agree — the choice to pursue knowledge is better and more human than the will not to know. That’s not to say that it’s an easy choice to make or to carry out. “One doesn’t have to search far today to run into misologues who reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the real machinations of power. Or bagpipes who believe they have been blessed with private access to truth and have been chosen to make sure we live in the light of it. Or mass movements made up of holy fools and eternal children whose distaste for the present sends them rushing, vainly, to restore an imagined past. Nor is it hard to find today’s prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who, whether from conviction or ambition, idealize people who resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs. In the face of all this, those devoted to reasoning and open inquiry can start to feel like refugees” (p. 225).
So, he might say, choose to know. But recognize the burdens of that choice.
Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century
by Laura Beers
Beers argues that a careful reading of Orwell’s work – both his fiction and his non-fiction — can help us to understand and also to respond to many of the political challenges we face today. However, she insists, understanding his work requires that we move beyond the superficial use of the term “Orwellian” so common in today’s political discourse.
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Beers develops her points with frequent quotations from and references to Orwell’s writings, thus offering a solid road map for making one’s way through his extensive corpus. But she also describes crucial elements of his experience – most notably his particular position in Britain’s class structure and his experience in the Spanish Civil war — that she says are crucial to development of his thought.
The resistance to Franco in Spain brought together a disparate group. The United States, Britain, and France all maintained neutrality. Mussolini supported Franco, and some of those opposed to Franco were from Stalinist Russia or supported by Russia. Orwell, while fighting with a group not supported by the Soviets, was dismayed by the tactics of Stalinist totalitarianism, and this turned him against the Soviets. In fact, Beers argues, “had Spain not awakened Orwell to the dangers of Stalinism’s totalitarian approach to political dissent, he would never have gone on to write Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four, the two books that have cemented his historical reputation as a champion of individual liberty against government tyranny” (p. 41).
Orwell’s experience of social and economic inequality was complicated. He came from what might be described as a middle – or even an upper-middle — class. He attended Eton on a scholarship, and maintained a lifelong friendship with school mates like Cyril Connolly, but resented what he saw as the snobbishness of many of the students whose families were much more wealthy than his. His experience in Paris, where he supported himself by working for long days as a dishwasher, provided a deeper understanding of poverty. This, Beers argues, both informed his understanding of the evils of income inequality and also helped him give up the standard Victorian view that poverty was evidence of moral degeneracy. A few years later, he argued that the challenge of World War II required “revolutionizing the command and control of the economy,” and also proposed to reduce economic inequality by mandating that the top tax-free income in Britain be limited to ten times that of the lowest. (Notably, Beers points out, he proposed to achieve this ratio, not by raising the income of the lowest earners, but by taxing the income of the highest earners.)
Beers suggests that Orwell would likely have been pleased by the Occupy Wall Street movement. For example, he argued that those who benefit from the current economic system should face the fact that their privilege depends on the suffering of others: “Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation — an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream” (pp. 86f, quoting Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier).
While Orwell argued for the importance of liberty, he would be critical of those who discount honesty and responsibility. As Beers puts it, his “commitment to objective truth explains why he defines the essence of freedom in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the right to say 2 = 2 = 4, not the right to say 2 + 2 = 5” (p. 56).
Beers’s appreciation of Orwell’s work doesn’t blind her to its problems. He was critical and dismissive of many who would join the socialist movement, arguing that the movement attracted “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” Many would accept his criticisms of pacifism; he said that a pacifist was essentially a supporter of Nazism. His response to feminism is particularly problematic – in fact, Beers suggests, there are passages in his fiction (and also episodes in his personal behavior) that are misogynistic and abusive.
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
by Jenny Odell
Earlier this year, I re-read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. Reading that book pushed me to re-commit myself to focusing my attention on the things that matter. It also led me to pick up Saving Time, her more recent book. Here she pushes the reader to find ways to live without constantly attending to the clock.
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I should admit right up front that I’ve decided to set this book aside for the moment. However, that’s not because I think it’s not worth reading – in fact, I’m taking the time to record here some reflections on the book because I think Odell provides some valuable insights. I read about a third of the book, and I’d like to finish reading it. The irony is not lost on me that I’m setting Saving Time aside now precisely because I want to save time to read other books that I think are more pressing in light of current events. It wouldn’t surprise me if Odell and others would say that I’m short-sighted.
With that caveat, here are a few points that I found very insightful. Odell laments the way that the strategies of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management have grown even more intrusive with the power of new technologies. As an example, she quotes Jessica Bruder’s account of the way that a UPS truck monitors the driver: Sensors in the truck “reported when he opened the bulkhead door. When he backed up. When his foot was on the break. When he was idling. When he buckled his safety belt.” And UPS time-and-motion studies instruct the driver “how to handle his ignition key, which shirt pocket to use for his pen (right-handed people should use the left pocket, and vice versa), how to pick a ‘walk path’ from the truck, and how to occupy time while riding in an elevator” (p. 33).
Odell urges workers and others to push back against such demanding micro-management of what might be called authentic human behavior. Succumbing to such demands, she says, too often leads to burnout. This is obviously true for those, like the UPS driver, who are forced to adapt to the company’s strict time regimen. But others, because of their standing in life, have more freedom to push back. Even so, these people — who might be called the self-timers — face their own pressures. Such a person “perceives herself to be controlled and surveilled by the cultural ‘logic of expansion.’ If Linda does not participate, she will be judged and have to pay a cost, whether it is social or financial” (p. 75f).
This book, like Odell’s first book, offers a critical analysis of current cultural trends that make it difficult for us to live authentic lives. I’m hoping someday to return to it, but for the moment I’ve decided to put it back in the stream.
My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale
by James Atlas
In this collection of essays, Atlas discusses his life — memories of youth and his anticipations of growing old — from the perspective of his mid-life. He admits that his life as a member of “the middle- and upper-middle-class Manhattan dwellers who lead lives of privilege” is decidedly less fragile than that of many people.
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I’ve often thought I should keep notes on how I come to read the books I read. I can’t remember why I checked this book out of the library — I know that another author recommended Atlas’s book as an insightful discussion of a particular perspective on life. And there were moments while reading it that I had some misgivings about spending the time to read it — more than a few of the life challenges Atlas discusses fall into the category of what are called first world problems. But I, at least, find his approach to the joys and sorrows of his life to have some application beyond the streets of Manhattan. “Can you declare yourself a success without the confirmation of others? That capacity, I’ve come to believe, is the key to happiness, or at least acceptance — which may be, when all is said and done, the definition of happiness. We inevitably fall short, no matter how successful we are in the eyes of the world; our ambition outstrips our capability. I myself must take the inventory of my achievements and determine how I’ve done. The examined life and the public life are by no means the same thing” (pp. 97f). I suppose that I don’t have to point out that this contrast between the examined life and the public life is even more striking in the age of social media.
A selected list of the essay titles — Mom and Dad, Time, Home, Failure, The Body, Books, God, Death — provides a hint of the breadth of this work. I found The Body particularly interesting. The essay begins with an account of the first summer that his son consistently defeated him on the tennis courts and then concludes with his recollection of the time that he, as a teenager, first defeated his own father. Perhaps this struck me because I remember that the last time my father played me in table tennis was the first and only time that I won a game against him. Or, more likely, it’s because I’m more and more aware that the body that I have is no longer capable of doing what it could do in a time far away.
Again, I’m not sure just why I checked this book out of the library. And I’ll say again that his perspective on the world both narrow and rather privileged. Perhaps I was more patient with him than some might be in large part because I’m also a white privileged male. In any case, his writing about life and life’s changes has me thinking more about my own life, albeit from a perspective decidedly beyond middle age.
However, given everything that’s going on today, I have to say that the quotidian problems Atlas discusses really are problems of privilege. Perhaps this isn’t fair to him — the world of the early 2000s is different from the world of today. However, even when he was writing he and I were both shielded from the damaging currents of society and culture. We’re less shielded today – while many will criticize us because we actively care about these challenges only when they hit us more directly, I feel the obligation not only to acknowledge my lack of attention in the past but also to invest myself in responding more directly to them now. I struggled to finish reading the book because I was more and more convinced that I need to be paying attention to other things.
The Men in my Life
by Vivian Gornick
I’m a little embarrassed to say that my approach to this book was in some ways similar to my approach to idle chit-chat at a dinner party, where I enjoy and participate in the conversation, but come away from it with little memory of the details.
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I enjoyed reading this book, and I really appreciated the way Gornick describes her encounters with these writers (the men in her life), but I remember only a few details of her rather vivid accounts. I’ve already described how Gornick brought to my mind memories about my reading of Loren Eiseley. However, I have to admit that she gave me my first meaningful introduction – in one case, my first introduction, period — to many of the men in her life. I’ve read at least one book by Philip Roth, Richard Ford, and V. S. Naipaul, and I’d heard the names of and knew just a little about most of the others. But I don’t remember encountering George Gissing’s name before reading this book. (Interestingly enough, though, just last week I stumbled on George Orwell’s brief essay about him, written in 1943.)
To go back to the dinner party analogy, I’d say that I left this particular party with a list of authors and books I really want to read — or should I say, rather, I feel like I should read? — someday, scribbled on the small piece of paper I happened to find in my jacket pocket.
I’ll close with one observation about language and culture: “Virginia Woolf had once complained that she couldn’t find the words to make an English sentence that would describe what illness felt like to her because as an Englishwoman she was constrained from taking liberties with the language. Exactly what outsider literature does in this country: fashions the language anew precisely so that it can express what it feels like to be ill. That, essentially, is what Jewish-American writing at its best has been about. In my view, it would never be about anything else. In the hands of a Saul Bellow or a Philip Roth, such expressiveness could — and did — explode a literary charge of epic dimensions” (p. 87).
A. J. Ayer: A life
by Ben Rogers
I’ve already said a bit about how I came to read this biography. Like many who studied philosophy in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, I read A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Like many who read the book, I thought the philosophical position Ayer developed in that book was wrong. Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned from reading this biography is that in the mid-1970s, about the time when I was reading this book, Ayer himself had reached a similar conclusion. Someone asked him to identify what he saw as the defects in the book, and he replied, “Well, I suppose the most important defect was that nearly all of it was false” (p. 337).
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Rogers points out that Ayer insisted that philosophy is one thing and life is another: “No philosopher, or at least no English-language philosopher, did more to insist that philosophy had little to do with life” (p. 2). Now, having read the book, I can say that I find his life much more interesting than his philosophy. I don’t have an overwhelmingly positive opinion of the man, but I did find the accounts of his interactions with other philosophers and critics of his time very interesting and even, at times, entertaining.
One example of the latter: At a party in 1934, Ayer got into a fierce argument. The disagreement was simple. Does the sentence, “Whereof one may not speak, thereon one must preserve silence” appear once or twice in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus? Ayer insisted that it appeared only once; his opponent, a banker and attorney named Sylvester Gates, argued that it was there twice. After the two agreed to a wager, Gates called a taxi and went home to retrieve his copy of the book. He returned, triumphant, with proof that the sentence appeared twice – once as the final sentence in the text and also in the preface. Ayer, however, did not give up, but instead insisted that the preface, strictly speaking, is not part of the book. The argument continued. As it happens, another guest at the party was the American jurist Felix Frankfurter. This was five years before he was appointed Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, but the group still deemed him qualified to sit as presiding judge to resolve the debate. Frankfurter ruled against Ayer. (In his memoirs, Frankfurter “remembered these Oxford friends as an ‘extremely clever, almost excessively clever young crowd’”; I wonder if he really intended to say obsessively clever.)
It’s not all that surprising that Ayer would go to the mat over this question. Wittgenstein and his book made a big impression on him as a young man. “The Tractatus is a very difficult book — at places almost incomprehensible; to have been converted by it at such a young age, and at a time when it was hardly known at Oxford, was stunning proof of Ayer’s precocity, and no book was ever to impress him in quite the same way — it did not so much change his views as help articulate and clarify them. Ayer’s encounter with Wittgenstein recalls his quick and easy assimilation of Russell and Moore at Eton; it was not so much an intellectual conversion as a homecoming” (p. 73).
Ayer also had a formative encounter when still young with Alfred Einstein. Years later, he wrote that he regarded Einstein as one of the greatest men he ever met because he talked “to me, a very young man of no importance, as though he could learn something from me” (p. 102). Ayer made a similar comment about Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore: Russell “seemed to me then [1937-38], and later, to have the great quality, which Moore and Einstein also had, of being able to talk to younger and less gifted people as though he could learn something from them” (p. 154). These observations are worth mentioning here in large part because many of Ayer’s students said much the same thing about Ayer. “Ayer was a brilliant teacher, and what marked him out was the enjoyment he took in disagreement and the way he immersed his students in it. ‘Freddie,’ as John Watling put it, ‘loved being contradicted — he was entirely different from Popper who claimed he welcomed criticism but in reality could not tolerate it. The more you voiced your opinion the better’” (p. 208).
I mentioned at the outset that my opinion of Ayer as a man is less than positive. Ayer, shall we say, had a way with women. I couldn’t count the number of times that Rogers reports him meeting a woman at a party or conference and moving fairly quickly into a sexual relationship with her. (I recognize that Ayer is by no means the only male intellectual to behave this way, then or now.) I think it’s telling somehow to read a comment by the cultural critic Leon Wieseltier, who studied with Ayer as a graduate student. Wieseltier reports, “I liked him enormously. He was like an eighteenth-century rationalist voluptuary — he could have been one of Diderot’s friends. I remember asking him about Camus: ‘I don’t know his work well, but he and I were friends: we were making love to twin sisters in Paris after the war’” (p. 312). I find it interesting that Ayer offered this in response to a question about Camus, and also interesting that Wieseltier offers this as an example of why he found Ayer so likeable. I guess it’s not all that surprising to read in Wieseltier’s Wikipedia entry that The Atlantic fired him after he admitted to sexual harassment of some of his colleagues.)
Shortly before he died, Ayer was asked “what he had ‘pursued above all.’” He responded, “I suppose truth. I suppose truth. I suppose that I care more about having got something right in philosophy, if I have got anything right, than having written elegantly. Although I like that too” (p. 358). I’m still thinking that he didn’t meet that goal, but I think it’s clear that he pursued it, at least in his philosophy.
On the whole, an interesting read, though as much for its account of significant conversations among British and American philosophers and critics as for its story of Ayer’s life.
A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the making of the planet, life, and you
by Sean B. Carroll
This is an informative and even entertaining account of the many elements of chance that have shaped the world and life on it. Carroll uses stories and real-life examples along with the results of scientific research to illustrate how conditions favorable to the development of the many different species involve a crucial amount of chance — it didn’t have to be this way.
Click here to read more.
Moreover, he describes how each individual human is also largely a product of chance events – there are over 8,000,000 possible combinations of the 23 chromosomes in a sperm cell, and the same number of possible combinations of chromosomes in an egg cell. What’s more, a healthy male releases something like 100 million sperm cells in a single ejaculation – the person that you are is formed by the particular sperm cell “fortunate” enough to get to the egg first.
Carroll also describes how chance events are involved in more negative elements of life – how particular mutations lead to maladies, how our body’s response to pathogens takes advantage of the chance mutations of immune cells.
A couple of random points to illustrate the general approach, the first rather significant in the discussion as a whole, and the other a small but, I think, telling factoid:
- 40 million years ago the earth’s climate was radically changed when the Indian tectonic plate, having traveled 4,000 kilometers, collided with the Asian tectonic plate, creating the Himalayas. The newly exposed rock from that collision increased the absorption of CO₂ from the atmosphere, which lowered the temperature of air and prompted increased Antarctic glaciation.
- The Tennessee statute at the root of the Scopes trial was passed in 1925, but wasn’t repealed until 1967.