In the past two years, I’ve written several times about Heidegger — always somewhat reluctantly because I’ve never been sure that I really understand “Being and Time.” I’ve read Hubert Dreyfus’s “Being in the World” and watched some of his Cal Berkeley lectures on Heidegger and understood that material. But the text itself never seemed to be what Dreyfus was teaching. Every secondary source on Heidegger seems to shy away from part two of “Being and Time” which seems strange to me, given that Heidegger promises three parts for volume one of the work, then only delivered two-thirds of the first half … now I’m being told to ignore one of those thirds.

For anyone who’s never waded into Heidegger, it’s very muddy water.  Heidegger loves weird jargon and uses it inconsistently. He also has a talent for taking something very simple and making it seem opaque. But I don’t want to get into the details because philosophers argue about this stuff nonstop and I really don’t want to join in.

I come here not to debate Heidegger but to bury him. This weekend I took a step back and examined the Heidegger biography more closely.  I’m 100 percent convinced that this guy was a Nazi — not just a Nazi-sympathizing careerist, but a full-on Hitler worshiping party member who ratted out colleagues to the Gestapo, preached the importance of National Socialism to impressionable students and remained a badge wearing member of the party until the end of the war.

This BBC documentary is very illuminating on the subject. I also highly recommend Walter Kaufmann’s book “Nietzsche, Heidegger and Buber” for details on his Nazi past and how it was reflected in his philosophy. Some other sources (deeply flawed but including important details) are Emanuel Faye’s recent book on Heidegger (which is pretty close to a complete travesty, actually, but he provides critical evidence of Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies throughout the war) and Rudiger Safranski’s intellectual biography of Heidegger (whose conclusions are more sympathetic to Heidegger but his biographical material is equally damning.)

I believe that the details of Heidegger’s Nazi past shifts the burden onto his admirers to justify why anyone should continue down his philosophical path. Many philosophers have attempted to do just that for decades but I believe that what we now know shifts the burden of proof and requires answers to five questions:

Can you defend Heidegger’s scholarship? Nietzsche scholar and translator Walter Kaufmann once tried to have a serious conversation with Heidegger about why their interpretations of Nietzsche were polar opposites. Basically Heidegger disregarded everything Nietzsche ever published and relied on his unpublished notebooks (which, incidentally, was the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche.) Kaufmann, who actually translated the notebooks as well as a dozen Nietzsche books and knew full well which notebook fragments had value in Nietzsche scholarship and which were doodles he abandoned, wanted to confront Heidegger about this. Heidegger tried to pull a fast one, saying that the “truly valuable” Nietzsche writings were in notebooks deemed illegible. This was complete nonsense — how do you know they’re valuable if you can’t read them — but also turned out to be a flat lie, when they were translated a few years later and were found to be nothing special. Kaufmann says that this style is evident throughout Heidegger’s entire corpus — including Being and Time. Kaufmann’s attack on Heidegger’s scholarship is a serious charge and I believe that Heidegger scholars have a responsibility to shed light on it.

Enough of the Delphic interpretation — can you demonstrate that “Being and Time” as it exists holds together as a coherent philosophic work? There’s a lot of great writing about “Being and Time,” but great second or third hand scholarship cannot repair a deeply flawed, nearly incomprehensible original. Heidegger only delivered 2/3 of his promised first half of “Being and Time.” So who knows what the thing was supposed to me … but even though Heidegger moved beyond the ideas, he never repudiated or seriously elaborated on the text and boasted after World War 2 that the book was the only serious work of philosophy in the 20th century. Never mind that the guy was an asshole, “Being and Time” is his magnum opus.  If the work as it exists doesn’t add up, it calls into question why any of his work deserves serious scholarship.

Next, can you prove that their are any original and vital insights from “Being and Time” that remain relevant today? As far as I understand it, the two insights of “Being and Time” are 1) that people are at their best when they are immersed in flow and 2) the “I” does not equal the “one.” But are these genuine philosophical insights? A person cannot be immersed in flow all day long, every day. Adapting to a technological culture is all about managing the tedious moments so that you can find moments for flow. And many contemporary humans find this flow when immersed in highly technological activities, ones that Heidegger found dehumanizing. Maybe Heidegger found his days in a wooded cabin chopping wood deeply authentic, I’d find them a version of hell. As for the “I” not equaling the “one,” it’s hardly an original thought. I also think that  Heidegger’s ideas on authenticity are absolute nonsense … Kaufmann argues persuasively that they’re actually polemics for the Catholic faith, which Heidegger had not yet abandoned when he started the project. In other words, he stole many ideas from Kierkegaard, then masked them in secular language without adapting them to secular life. Also Heidegger, who is trying to make a case that man is never a static be, but is rather always becoming, doesn’t account for the fact that being might be different in other eras, other cultures or even within the same person depending on the progress of the becoming. His form of philosophy is to bully his experience onto all of humanity.

Fourth question: why should we study Heidegger’s views on poetry when he clearly has a tin ear for the art form? Thankfully Wittgenstein never tortured us with bad poetry when he called for a philosophy of description. Emerson, on the other hand, was both a skilled poet and someone who inspired great poets. Even Nietzsche seems to have more credibility on the subject. Is there anything original Heidegger has to say about poetry?

Fifth and final question: can you justify Heidegger’s view on technology as being anything more than standard issue Luddite-ism?  One example: Heidegger said in his final interview that we should be horrified by the photos of earth taken from outer space. The vast majority of humanity thinks the exact opposite. Rather than being horrified by our new understanding of humanity’s place in the galaxy, many people find it awe inspiring.

Heidegger found technology to be dehumanizing. Today, that’s a common critique, but it’s far less interesting than applying what Wittgenstein had to say about primitive language to the way technology is being used today. We now live in a world with a language that consists of nothing but pointing.  Wittgenstein’s thoughts on how we understand simple commands can be seen in action with AI technologies like Siri on the iPhone.

Heidegger’s style of critique invites further alienation of his readers from the world around us while Wittgenstein’s philosophy gives us a deeper understanding of it. I believe the burden of proof is on the Heidegger scholars and apologists to disclose why anyone should keep reading him.

So Wittgenstein has this very strange parable in Philosophical Investigations that goes:

If I am inclined to suppose that a mouse has come into being by spontaneous generation out of grey rags and dust, I shall do well to examine those rags very closely to see how a mouse may have hidden in them, how it may have got there and so on. But if I am convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these things, then this investigation will perhaps be superfluous. But first we must learn to understand what it is that opposes such an examination of details in philosophy.

This reminds me of another parable, from David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College speech,  and given how Wittgenstein obsessed DFW was at times,  I get the feeling that he was looking here for an opportunity to recast the parable:

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other’s an atheist, and they’re arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. the atheist says, “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God-and-prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught off away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I couldn’t see a thing, and I was totally lost, and it was fifty below, and so I did, I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out, ‘God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me!’ ”And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled: “Well then, you must believe now,” he says. “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist rolls his eyes like the religious guy is a total simp: “No, man, all that happened was that a couple Eskimos just happened to come wandering by, and they showed me the way back to the camp.” … The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties… because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

Let me return now to Wittgenstein, or more accurately to Stanley Cavell’s exegesis of Wittgenstein in “The Claim to Reason.”  He writes about the Wittgenstein parable:

(This) is an examination that exposes one’s convictions, one’s sense of what must and what cannot be the case; so it requires a breaking up of one’s sense of necessity, to discover truer necessities. To do that I have to get into the state of mind in which I am “inclined to suppose” that something I take to be impossible may be happening. Which means that I have to experiment in believing what I take to be prejudices, and consider that my rationality may itself be a set of prejudices. This is bound to be a painful prospect. And it is likely to lead to ridiculous postures. But no more ridiculous than the posture of looking for an explanation in a region in which you have no inclination to suppose it may lie. (We might call such an activity “academic”.) – So it is I, as I stand, who oppose such an examination of details in philosophy. It was always a mark of Honor in a philosophy to be opposed. But it would miss the point to take reassurance from that; for that would mean that you conceive yourself to be exempt from the fear and pain which naturally oppose serious philosophy. “Psychophobia”, I learn from a recent text in psychoanalysis, means both “fear of one’s inner life” and “fear of ghosts” It can motivate intellectuality as well as anti-intellectuality. And philosophy can be the fruit, or work in the root, of either.

What I find fascinating about these two parables is that, rather than making a case for the metaphysical or supernatural, they point out just how rigorous and courageous a scientific mind needs to be.  A scientific mind unwilling or unable to examine the rags falls prey to even greater prejudices than one who would conclude that a mouse was created out of rags or God sent Eskimos to the rescue.

According to Google Analytics, there are roughly five of you out there keeping up with the Emerson Project. I ran a book proposal based on the project by my agent today and she said don’t bother, it’s been done, she can’t sell it.

This puts me in a tough position because for writers like Emerson, reading isn’t enough for me. I need to write something about the text to reach an understanding of it. But what’s the point of writing if no one is reading?

Harold Bloom wrote a book about Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gnosis, entitled The American Religion which I mention not to start a conversation but to end one. There are endless avenues of thought one could take from Emerson’s “The Lord’s Supper,” none of which I’m remotely qualified to lead. It’s not easy to find The American Religion these days, but check your local library if you’re interested in a discussion of Emerson and Gnosis (which shouldn’t be confused with Gnostic Christianity.)

Emerson makes a case in this work that Jesus never intended the Last Supper to be celebrated as frequently as it is — or even beyond the people in the room. He also claimed that the Last Supper mirrored how Passover was celebrated in those days, which is a controversial conclusion. In his recent book “Christianity,” historian Diarmaid McCullough states that there was nothing quite like the Eucharist in Christ’s time.

Nonetheless, the history of the Eucharist is fascinating and Emerson raises some important points. The critical “do this in remembrance of me” line is only in the Gospel of Luke, not Matthew, Mark or John. It’s also true that Jesus teaches a ritual washing of feet that could just as easily be adopted as a physical symbol of the faith.

McCullough points out that the details of the Eucharist were so zealously guarded in the early days of Christianity that wild rumors about it start to spread throughout Rome:

There arose reports of incest from their talk of love-feasts, of cannibalism from the language of eating and drinking body and blood. As they attracted converts, many unsympathetic outsiders became convinced that Christian success must be the result of erotic magic, strong enough to tear wives away from non-Christian husbands; after all, a number of Christian accounts of martyrdom did indeed describe women leaving their husbands or fiancés for Christian life or death.

Up until the 4th century, priests were free to improvise the text of the Eucharist. It was much later that the Catholic Church invented Transubstantiation, the belief that the host was literally transformed into the Body of Christ.

So what’s the problem with the ritual? Emerson, the great lover of poetry, should have an appreciation for the metaphor. But Emerson sees it as a confusing metaphor that distances worshipers from God:

For the service does not stand upon the basis of a voluntary act, but is imposed by authority. It is an expression of gratitude to Christ, enjoined by Christ. There is an endeavor to keep Jesus in mind, whilst yet the prayers are addressed to God. I fear it is the effect of this ordinance to clothe Jesus with an authority which he never claimed and which distracts the mind of the worshipper.

Emerson’s other major complaint is that the Eucharist was an Eastern ritual inappropriate for Westerners. He explains it this way:

I should choose other ways which, as more effectual upon me, he would approve more. For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.

Emerson also objected to the form in particular, which he called alien to the spirit of Christ. What Emerson finds appealing in Christianity is this:

What I revere and obey in it is its reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the rest it gives to mind, the echo it returns to my thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason through all its representation of God and His Providence; and the persuasion and courage that come out thence to lead me upward and onward. Freedom is the essence of this faith

Emerson seems to object most to the ritual oppression of the Eucharist. He refrains from saying a few words about “the unfavorable relation in which it places that numerous class of persons who abstain from it merely from disinclination to the rite.” But it’s clear that he’s troubled by the power and punishment inherent in the Eucharist.

For elaboration, I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche’s second essay in “The Genealogy of Morals.” Nietzsche suggests that the forgetful human animal takes a great deal of conditioning to make and keep promises. A critical element of this conditioning is punishment by creditors — and this cruelty is extremely pleasurable for the one who inflicts pain on the bad debtor:

In punishing the debtor, the creditor participates in a right of the masters: at last he, too, may experience for once the exalted sensation of being allowed to despise and mistreat someone as ‘beneath him’ — or at least, if the actual power and administration of punishment has already passed to the ‘authorities,’ to see him despised and mistreated. The compensation, then, consists in a warrant for and title to cruelty.

This cruelty plays out as a deeply pleasurable ritual:

To the extend that to make suffer was in the highest degree pleasurable, to the extent that the injured party exchanged for the loss he had sustained, including the displeasure caused by the loss, an extraordinary counterbalancing pleasure: that of making suffer — a genuine festival, something which, as aforsesaid, was prized the more highly the more violently it contrasted with the rank and social standing of the creditor.

Now think back to the early days of the Christian Church. As McCullough points out, there was great dismay among early Christians that their faith was being taken away from them. McCullough wrote:

In its early years, Christianity was a small community which found it easy to guard its character as an elite consisting of “spiritual athletes” proclaiming the Lord’s coming again.

There has been a tension from the first days of the faith about elitism vs. inclusivity. The Gospels have many examples of Jesus calling for a tiny elite of the saved … and so it becomes necessary to have markers of acceptance into the church as a way of rewarding the most devout and creating tools of punishment for sinners who walk among them.

The Eucharist therefore becomes the way the Church both maintains an elite and creates an inclusive pathway. You cannot be just a spectator to Christ, you must follow the rules of the church to have the right to the Eucharist. And if you choose not to take it — even to this day in many Churches — you will stand out as a sinner.

So what’s the problem with this? I think Nietzsche and Emerson are in agreement on this point, as articulated by Nietzsche:

Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; in concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance. If it happens that punishment destroys the vital energy and brings about a miserable prostration and self-abasement, such a result is certainly even less pleasant than the usual effects of punishment — characterized by dry and gloomy seriousness.

Emerson and Nietzsche part company on the question of God, but it seems to me that what Emerson desires is a form of religious worship freed of the Nietzschean power structure. If you take the ascetic priest out of religion and remove the tools of reward and punishment, religion becomes something closer to philology, a study of texts for meaning.  At that point, you either feel the hand of God or you don’t.

That doesn’t sound like the American Religion to me, at least not the way it is practiced today. But it does sound like America’s “religious” views on nearly everything else: dubious of authority, distrustful of experts and obsessed with personal freedom. Emerson helped shape the American culture even if his religious gambit ended in his isolation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lecture on Transcendentalism begins with a worthwhile clarification of his earlier works:

What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the sense are not final, and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.

Emerson then makes the radical claim:

Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

Is this true? Let me use Ludwig Wittgenstein as a stalking horse. In his Tracticus Logico Philosophicus, Wittgenstein begins:

1. The world is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.

1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

This is the most materialist statement anyone can make, it’s a pure definition.  But after offering a sophisticated proof of this worldview, Wittgenstein concludes:

6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science–i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy–and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person–he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy–this method would be the only strictly correct one.

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Later in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that we must do away with all explanation and description alone must take its place. This seems to echo both Emerson and Heidegger in their elevation of poetry over philosophy. But actually Wittgenstein has something else in mind – making language as understandable as possible so that we can make philosophical questions evaporate.

Or, to put it in Emersonian language, Wittgenstein aims to turn idealists into materialists.

In this spirit, I’m going to pass over the remainder of “The Transcendentalist” in silence.  I converted from an idealist to a materialist long ago. Wittgenstein wins.

I’ve run into a problem with my planned Pascal Project for 2012 — the version of Pascal’s PENSEES that I’ve read is an unreliable composition. Having read more deeply about Pascal and his work, it’s become clear to me that the order of the notebook fragments in this translation suggest a form that Pascal never intended.  Having thumbed through Honor Levi’s more recent translation, I’ve lost my initial enthusiasm for the project.

This is because Pascal’s PENSEES is a far more religious work than the unreliable translation would suggest. (By the way, this also points out a major problem for ebooks.  I bought an Amazon Kindle ebook … which, remarkably, has no credited translator. I cannot research the validity and historical use of a translation that is completely uncredited.)

Many philosophers have argued that Pascal shouldn’t be read like a philosopher at all. From the earlier translation, I disagreed with this assessment.  But based on the Levi translation, I see their point. It’s difficult to tell in the real PENSEES where Pascal is writing his genuine beliefs and where he’s setting up others thoughts for discussion. The other problem is that the PENSEES is an extremely short work — only about 180 pages in the Levi translation.  I don’t believe that I can execute a Montaigne-like project with such thin material.

So, I’m still planning to have a Montaigne-like project for 2012, it’s just not going to be about Blaise Pascal.  I’ve considered Benedict de Spinoza, but he’s a philosopher’s philosopher and not easy to write about in essay form. I could do a Nietzsche project, but his corpus is too large and rattling around in Nietzsche’s head for three months might shake my sanity. Schopenhauer is a possibility — but his essays and aphorisms won’t take me very far, while THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION is too much. Stay tuned.

In advance of my Pascal project, which will begin on January 1, here’s a little background about one of the most fascinating thinkers in history. There are few English-language biographies of Blaise Pascal, but one recent work entitled PASCAL’S WAGER by James A. Connor is wonderful and concise, I highly recommend it. I’m going to quote a couple passages from the book that help explain why Pascal is worthy of a three-month long examination. Here’s Connor’s introduction:

This is the story of Blaise Pascal, the man who invented the modern world, or at least a good chunk of it. He lived thirty-nine years of the seventeenth century, and was perpetually sick. From childhood on he was in pain every day, but along the way he invented one of the first calculating machines, the very first public transportation system, probability theory, decision theory, and much of the mathematics of risk management, and proved the existence of the vacuum—all of which set the stage for quantum physics, the insurance industry, management science, racing forms, the computer, Powerball lotteries, Las Vegas, the vacuum pump, the concept of outer space, the jet engine, the internal combustion engine, the atomic bomb, mass media, and on and on. You cannot walk ten feet in the twenty-first century without running into something that Pascal’s thirty-nine years of the seventeenth century did not affect in one way or another.

Pascal was also a religious mystic. His sister Jacqueline, who became a Jansenist nun at the Benedictine abbey of Port-Royal, played a major role in his spiritual life. She was also an early feminist, who argued vehemently for the right of self-determination for women. Later in his life—on Monday, the 23rd of November, 1654, the feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr—after enjoying a serious bout of worldliness, which Jacqueline chided him for, he sat alone in his room, buried in depression, and suddenly, from half past ten in the evening until half past twelve, he had a direct encounter with God that changed him. Fire! he said. Certitude. Certitude. Joy. Peace. He told no one about this, but he wrote it out as a short poem, a memorial of the event, and pinned it to the inside of his coat, next to his heart. No one would ever have known about it, except that his nephew found it after Pascal died.

Like his family and most of his friends, Pascal was a Jansenist, a member of a steel-rod sect within Catholicism that was declared a heresy in his own lifetime and that demanded a life of penance—if not for your own sins, then for the sin of Adam, which you inherited when your parents had too much fun conceiving you. Jansenism, like the more hard-core Calvinism, followed Augustine in laying the sin of Adam onto the shoulders of every human born of a mother and a father, a sin that was passed on through the pleasure of sex, like an STD. And because of that sin, the human race has forever been wretched and vile, so that only the very few, those selected by God, can be saved. This was called God’s mercy.

Amazingly, this variant of Christianity produced wave after wave of ferocious Christians, who in their zeal saw themselves as a holy remnant in an increasingly sinful church. Pascal suffered under this vision, received mystical insights under it, and wrote his greatest works, the Provincial Letters and the Pensées, in defense of it. However, in the middle of this dry, rigorous plain that he found himself crossing, he retained enough puckish sense of humor to invent a proof for the rationality of faith based on gambling.

I can guess why modern Americans keep Pascal at arms length. If you find the great inventor, scientist and mathematician Pascal fascinating, you’re probably turned off by his religious zealotry.  Conversely, if you’re a person of faith, his rationality seems out of place … and what on earth does faith have to do with gambling?

It’s Pascal’s oddness — and his relentless ambition — that I find irresistible. His father worked as a tax collector and had difficulty keeping track of all the calculations.  So Blaise invented a calculator. He had the nerve to challenge Aristotle — still considered in the 17th century the pinnacle of all wisdom — and disproved his claim that nature abhors a vacuum. And as for his precocity in mathematics — his father forbade him from learning about math until he was 16 years old. So what did Blaise do? He reinvented the work of Euclid from scratch, without a scrap of instruction.

Here’s how Connor describes Pascal’s personal discovery:

Étienne set about the task of educating his children, and along the way created an innovative regimen of homeschooling. He proved to be quite a capable teacher, a man who was ahead of his time in understanding the psychology of education. It was his maxim, according to Gilberte, that he would always keep his lessons at a level just above the level of the work his students were capable of. His children had to strive to understand that which was in sight but which was just beyond their grasp. This  way, Étienne built up the confidence of his children by giving them problems that they could solve, but only with sweat. Each solution then became another triumph and allowed their minds to grow, leaving them secure in the knowledge that they could solve whatever puzzles were laid before them.

Homeschooling, however, had its drawbacks, for Blaise was never allowed to attend school and thus never learned the art of fine negotiation that most children learn on the playground. Thus he remained ignorant, at least experientially, of many of the subtleties of human life. He never attended school or matriculated at a university. He never married or even seriously courted. Although Étienne introduced his children to the intellectual life in a profound way, he failed to give them the kind of emotional training one needs to live a fully human life. Had Antoinette been alive, that might have been different.

One source of Étienne’s pedagogical method was his own experience of mathematics—how it could become an all-consuming fascination that could distract the mathematician from other kinds of study. He was also concerned that, given Blaise’s fragility, he not tax his son’s strength. He therefore refused to allow Blaise to study mathematics until he was sixteen. He did not want him to be caught by this great passion too early, until he had been firmly grounded in grammar and in languages, especially the classics and classical literature. Instead, he presented his children with little problems in natural science.

At the dinner table one evening someone struck a porcelain plate with a fork, and Blaise asked why the plate hummed. What was the cause of the sound? Why did the sound stop when you put your hand to the plate? After dinner, Blaise went about the house striking dishes with various kinds of silverware and found that different plates made different sounds, each with its individual pitch and timbre. In this one moment, Étienne introduced his son to experimental science, and encouraged him at each step.

The problem, however, was that Blaise was in fact as precocious a child as Gilberte indicated. He was curious and, when given a boundary by his father, could not help but try to jump over it. When Blaise was about eight years old, he spent much of his free time lying in front of the fire in his room, drawing diagrams in charcoal and working out calculations on the stones in front of the fireplace. He knew that he was breaking his father’s rules against studying mathematics, and he tried to keep his work secret. At first, he tried to draw a perfect triangle, and then a perfect circle. As he came closer and closer to this, he began to develop his own language for his new geometry. He called a line a “bar,” and a circle a “round,” and, using his new vocabulary, he set about re-creating Euclid’s ideas.

He actually managed to reconstruct several of Euclid’s theorems before his father walked in on him and found him drawing on the stones. Unseen, Étienne watched from a distance for a long time and then approached. Gilberte does not say who was more disconcerted at the discovery. Blaise had been caught disobeying his father’s orders, but for Étienne it was a happy capture, for he found his son busy working on a project much beyond his level of maturity. Suddenly he realized that Blaise was not just precocious, but a prodigy. What could he do with such a son? What should he do? Both thrilled and fearful, nearly in tears, according to Gilberte he left his son alone by the fire, to continue re-creating the work of a man he had never read. Étienne said nothing about disobedience.

So as you might expect, when a mind like this decides to focus on matters of religion and philosophy, the approach will be radical and organic. Pascal’s PENSEES is not a completed work, rather it’s a well-organized notebook from which he had planned to develop his theory of God. But even in this form, you can sense Pascal’s internal rivalry with Augustine, Montaigne and Descartes. Pascal isn’t interested in writing a personal reflection on faith, he wants to tie his entire life’s work into this proof.

Nietzsche used Pascal as a punching bag in many of his books.  In THE ANTICHRIST Nietzsche wrote that Pascal “believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his Christianity.”  But in ECCE HOMO, Nietzsche declares his love for Pascal and no doubt saw him as a one-off kindred spirit, the other side of the coin that flipped on the side of faith.

The fact that both men lost their creative and analytic capabilities too young makes them worthy counterparts and as I did with Montaigne, I’ll be juxtaposing their thoughts throughout my reading of the PENSEES. But I also believe it’s possible to read Pascal in an entirely fresh way today, outside of rationality vs. faith debates.

Perhaps it’s possible to remove the metaphysics from Pascal’s thoughts about intuition. Maybe, given what we now know about the mind, we can read Pascal differently today, that what Daniel Kahnemann describes as thinking fast and slow can be applied to Pascal’s descriptions of rationality and intuition.

That’s where this journey will begin in January. I have no idea where it will end.

For 2012, my new writing project will be to tackle Blaise Pascal’s PENSEES in the same style that I approached Montaigne’s essays last year.  PENSEES is broken down into 923 thoughts, some of them only a sentence in length, others approaching a genuine essay.  I’m going to tackle 10 a day until the project is complete.

Why Pascal? His ability to straddle the mathematical and intuitive, scientific and religious, is unparalleled. Because I want to keep going with this Montaigne-inspired thought that we can repair our fractured political discourse and learn how to listen to each other across the divide, I think that Pascal has much to teach me. Also, Pascal was basically obsessed with Montaigne and was desperate to compete with him. I think it’s appropriate to take up his work next in line.

I was also inspired by a note from an editor at a major publishing house who thought it might be interesting for me to take on writer who, unlike Montaigne, hasn’t been the subject of American cultural interest. Pascal remains obscure to many Americans and that’s a shame, because he was a fascinating guy. There are few English-language biographies of Pascal and not many translations of the PENSEES either.

T.S. Eliot once wrote that:

Pascal is one of those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it. The history of human opinions of Pascal and of men of his stature is a part of the history of humanity. That indicates his permanent importance.

So I’m going to take my shot. I hope you follow along, starting January 1st.

In addition to the Kurt Andersen piece in Vanity Fair this month, there’s also a beautiful essay by Christopher Hitchens about his continual struggle to persevere in the face of cancer.  The most poignant paragraph is this:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

The passage reminds me of one of Nietzsche’s most famous aphorisms — without music life would be a mistake. For Hitchens, a life without writing and expression would be a mistake and I agree with him.

Curiously, the hook for this essay is another Nietzsche aphorism: whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Hitchens debunks the phrase thoroughly, writing in closing that we should “dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.” But is Hitchens being fair to Nietzsche?

First, I think it’s important to clearly define what Nietzsche meant.  The aphorism first appears in “Twilight of the Idols” in this form:

From the military school of life — whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

The opening phrase made me think that, perhaps, Nietzsche was approaching the idea ironically or that he intended it to be facile.  But the aphorism reappears later in “Ecce Homo” in this form:

He guesses what remedies avail against what is harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; whatever doesn’t kill him makes him stronger.

This is a section where Nietzsche describes the ideal man, who turns out to be Nietzsche himself. Some other phrases from this section shed light on the aphorism’s intent:

For a typically healthy person, conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more.

And also:

For it should be noted it was during the years of my lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement.

The way that I read Nietzsche’s aphorism, he isn’t saying that whatever doesn’t kill him makes him physically stronger, rather he’s saying that whatever doesn’t crush his spirit makes his will stronger. And I don’t think that Hitchen’s actions since finding out that he has terminal cancer conflict with Nietzsche’s description of his own decay.  Hitchens has, in fact, written some of his best, most lasting work in his waning days.

Perhaps the problem is that Hitchens misunderstands Nietzsche’s history. It’s still a matter of controversy whether Nietzsche’s insanity was brought on by syphilis or whether he had the disease at all. His father died from a degenerative mental condition that he could have inherited. What we do know is that Nietzsche’s eyesight was in rapid decline for roughly 10 years before his dramatic breakdown in Turin. He also suffered from debilitating pain that seems to have been alleviated by his relocation to a warmer climate.

It’s these conditions that Nietzsche cites when he talks about his lowest vitality. As to the argument by Hitchens that “Twilight of the Idols” was written when he was in a state of madness, the book’s remarkably lucid analysis of Socrates would argue against that — and the fact that Nietzsche felt obliged to revisit the “stronger” aphorism in “Ecce Homo” indicates that there is genuine philosophical thought behind it.

In the middle of Hitchens’ essay is a disturbing anecdote about a polite Bible Belt radio host who asks Hitchens if he is a fan of Nietzsche (Hitchens says he finds some of Nietzsche enlightening, but he wouldn’t consider himself a follower.) The radio host then mentions Nietzsche’s madness and rumors of syphilis, all very calmly and politely, setting up the shiv he stabs into Hitchens at the close of the program:

Just as it became too late, and I heard the strains of music and the words that this would be all we would have time for, my host stole a march and said he wondered how much of my own writing on god had perhaps been influenced by a similar malady! I should have seen this “gotcha” coming, but was left wordless.

The essay is a response to the host’s tricky brutality. As a postscript, I’d like to add that both Hitchens and Nietzsche have written more words of insight their declining days than most men could in several lifetimes. Hitchens should wear that association with Nietzsche proudly, because his will is indomitable as well.

Extending on my essay from yesterday, there were a few spots where my analysis took some big leaps in the interests of telling the story quickly rather than completely.  You might wonder, for example, how Benjamin went from talking about the political meaning of reproducible art to his theory that it leads to a permanent war economy.

A key building block in this argument is a quote from Italian futurist poet Marinetti, who wrote numerous, bizarre tracts about the aesthetic beauty of war.  Benjamin finds this quote of his especially clarifying about the aims of fascists:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic…. Accordingly we state:…War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others…. Poets and artists of Futurism!…remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art … may be illumined by them!”

Before dismissing these horrifying thoughts, think of the movie “Apocalypse Now” and the sheer beauty of it all, from the helicopter attack to the slow crawl up river, to the nightmarish Do Long Bridge sequence. “Apocalypse Now” is a ravishing looking film — and it’s not so much about war as a work of art as it is art as a work of war.

For a more contemporary frame, think of the Modern Warfare games, with the stunning animation and decadent environments. The ability to step into iconic locales with the heavy metal of modern war is an intoxicating experience. Unlike the critical, detached experience most works of art present to us these days, the aesthetics of destruction has a primal, porn-like allure. Fighting with virtual tanks on a virtual plain is one thing, rolling down the Champs Elise in a tank quite another.

Benjamin is horrified by this prospect, but accepts it completely.  He writes:

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production—in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

This quote is especially meaningful today, given the fragile state of the world economy. The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in an era of continuous peace and prosperity, based on the theory that countries with McDonalds don’t go to war with one another. Steven Pinker’s new book advances the theory that modernism has decreased human violence every century. Even Benjamin’s quote holds out the hope that once we learn how to harness technology effectively, the need to massive war will die out.

But the recent failures of technology to take advantage of our full economic potential — and the subsequent failures to reform our financial sector to return to prior levels of production — raise the specter of a new era of violent spasm. If human beings fail to take advantage of our techne for progressive means, we will inevitably use it for destruction.

It still seems like a very large leap from sampling songs to World War III, but the value of Benjamin’s thesis isn’t one of prophesy, rather it’s in risk management. People desire meaning and sacred ritual. If we cannot find it in our art, religion or culture — and if our political economy cannot continue the march of progress — we will become vulnerable to the same dark forces that brought state ritual and power to Germany in the 1930s.

Justice and art are the best long term defenses against fascism. Both require vision and courage … which may be the essential elements lacking in our culture today.