web analytics

Quotes On the Front Page: Fidel Castro On Being Right, Nietzsche On Philosophers

Отсутствие исторического чувства есть наследственный недостаток всех философов. – Ф. Ницше

You may be able to convince me that I am wrong, but you cannot tell me that I am wrong without convincing me. – Fidel Castro

The Professional Fallacy of Historians

Back in 2006, when I wrote Tudors, Me, and an Elusive Ghost, I explained why I chose to specialise in 16th c. history, or even more narrowly, in Tudor history:

I chose to specialise in Tudor history because I loved England, the English language and culture, and because I adored Medieval and Early Modern History, but wanted to be closer to the modern times, thus I opted to research into the 16th c. It was an absolutely amazing period of time, as far as I’m concerned. The geographical and scientific discoveries, Renaissance and Baroque, the beginnings of cartography and research into the Solar system, on the one hand, – and Reformation, the Wars of Religion, the Inquisition, and slavery, on the other. The co-existence of the opposites has made the 16th c. irresistibly attractive. I don’t think I would want to study any other time, had I been given the choice once again.

In 2009 I am to admit that there are some corrections to be made. For example, I’ve always loved France and French language, and with my interest in 18th c. and the Enlightenment I could well go and study 18th c. French history. Arguably, as far as using the Russian archives goes, this would be a better period to study. But, looking back and around, I think I am the kind of person who never (or rarely) follows the beaten track. Sometimes it makes life harder, but usually yields good results in the long run.

I remember about the English Quinquecento – I purposely use the Italian term as it better denotes the exact date – each time I look at my watch and see “15:47”. 1547 was the year when Edward VI Tudor ascended the throne at the age of 9, upon Henry VIII’s death. From what I remember, it was my supervisor in Russia who offered me “The Privy Council under Edward VI” as a possible topic. The volumes of the Privy Council papers that I needed were not available either in Moscow or in St. Petersburg. But there were other sources, and my research turned into a “personal” history of the Privy Councillors. It surveyed their background, education, and cultural activities.

Little did I know, though, that I would find myself in the midst of the debate that is, frankly, somewhat ahistorical. To put it succintly, to this day there is bickering among historians regarding the degree of political skill and involvement on the part of Edward VI. He ascended the throne when he was 9, and died at the age of 15. It is difficult for our contemporary’s mind to ascertain a degree of intellect to this age, let alone any veritable raison d’etat.

Taken in the context of studies, this is a reverse of the situation when we explain things in the narrative by the almighty Author’s intent or life. Edward VI has long been hailed “the boy-king”, so in this scenario things are explained by the influence of his tutors and uncles. The paradox is that, as with the Author, if he or she is long dead, there is no way whatsoever to “know” anything exactly about the text, be it the meaning or composition. To state that whatever Edward wrote was influenced by his uncles means to be oblivious to the fact that people of all ages can be influenced by someone. Historical studies are influenced by other studies, as a matter of fact. But there is little doubt that Edward’s manuscripts were written with his own hand, and there must be the point when this begins to matter more than his age.

What an historian must also understand is that, although a boy, Edward VI was no ordinary kid, and not only because he was the only son of a father who had seven wives of which two were beheaded. He was an heir to the throne and a king in the making, and, comparing him to other young or less capable royal heirs, Edward VI’s life at court was rather fortunate. To understand how much worse it could be, we only need to consider the fate of Edward V in 1483.

And once again, Nietzsche’s phrase comes to mind: “Lack of historical sense is the family failure of all philosophers” because they had the common failing of starting out from man as he is now”. Looks like, as far as Edward VI studies are concerned, the lack of historical sense happened to be the family failure of historians themselves. It will never cease to amaze me how many academics were oblivious to this, as they were trying to wriggle past Edward’s works, and indeed Edward himself, because they didn’t see the forest for the trees – or the king for the boy. And so they turned a blind eye to the fact that this royal youngster was miles better versed in languages and history than the Royal Highnesses of today.

It’s not all that bad, of course: there is a posthumously published study by Jennifer Loach; a mammoth book on Edward’s involvement in the Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch; a provocative study by Stephen Alford that was laughed off by one established scholar. Thankfully, Prof John Guy did Alford’s study the justice:

It is bold, even radical, in its determination not to be distracted by conventional narratives of politics, and it explains extremely well how previous narratives have been constructed and why they don’t work. At the same time the book is sensitive to its competitors, and is skilfully positioned in the space between Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Tudor Church Militant and Jennifer Loach’s Edward VI (quoted from Copac).


However, the attitude seems to continue following the statement from an official review at Library Journal: “
The subject, however, is not one of universal interest, recommending this book for academic libraries with collections in the area of English history and the Reformation” (about MacCulloch’s book – JD).

Of course, there’s more to Tudor Studies than Edward VI – likewise, there’s more than Elizabeth or Reformation to Tudor Studies. But somehow mid-Tudor scholars have to keep reminding their colleagues that without Edward and Mary the English Quinquecento would perhaps be too grand – and too dull. And so, not unlike their subject, those who study Edward’s reign are sandwiched between their genuine interest in the topic and the duty of explaining why they are fascinated by something that is not of “universal interest”.

On Human Identities and Language

I pondered a lot on the problem I have with identifying myself or other people in one way or another. The generic “identity-search”, to which we are so often subjected these days, is usually a kind of labelling, with all consequences. To take myself as an example, since I am originally Russian, some people rather honestly marvel at the fact that I don’t drink much alcohol. This is not the most complimentary trait of the Russian character those people are looking for in me, but so it goes. On the other hand, I sometimes have to wear glasses that are round in shape. They date back to the time when I was head over heels in love with The Beatles and John Lennon, in particular. Eleven years of quasi-Britishness paid off this May when my Russian compatriots who came for Zenith match mistook me for an Englishwoman because of my glasses.

On both occasions, as you can deduce, I don’t feel obliged to drink because I am Russian, and I have been wearing the “British” glasses long before I adopted the second citizenship. This can be taken further and wider. One doesn’t have to subscribe to the code of conduct of a group they socially, culturally, nationally, religiously, etc. belong to (as an example, on Flickr there is a group called “gay but not GAY”). But the pressure to “find your identity” or “express your identity” seems to be mounting.

Interestingly, this pressure has to do with what Diane Arbus described in the following phrase: “the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be“. This isn’t non-sensical. The more one tries to follow the code of conduct of a group they identify themselves with, the more they become identifiable with the group. They will be less individual and more generic, as a result. This is why we are so obsessed with the quest for one’s identity: because we are constantly looking in the wrong direction. We assess the particular and specific, whereas it seems the New World is somewhere way off this track. On the other hand, the more inventive, the less specific an individual is, the less it is possible to shove him or her into a particular category. For this, Arbus had another beautiful quote:

Invention is mostly that kind of subtle, inevitable thing. People get closer to the beauty of their invention. They get narrower and more particular in it. […] Some people hate a certain kind of complexity. Others only want that complexity. But none of that is really intentional. I mean it comes from your nature, your identity. We’ve all got an identity. You can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take everything else away. I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don’t think of“.

So, identity is “what’s left when you take everything else away“. “Everything else” should be understood precisely as “everything else”. That is an interesting junction to Exercises in Loneliness-4, when I said that the last thing that remains, after all those socially demanded identities had been stripped off, is our human nature – however, this human nature, strictly speaking, should also be stripped off, if we were to reveal some kind of “true”, quintessential identity of one’s self.

In the poem The Word, which was obliquely inspired by various texts by Martin Heidegger, I raised the very problem of trying to apply a word to the infinite nature of a being. The problem is born in the ultimate complexity of the latter and the ultimate limitations of the former. Why is this? Supposedly, if our, human, language is produced by ourselves in the process of historical development of the mankind, then why should it be so difficult to describe anyone in one word – that is, to give them a fathomable identity?

Two viewpoints come to mind. First, is Nietzsche: in Human, All Too Human he asserts that the biggest flaw of all philosophers is that they do not recognise the evolution of a human character. They regard and study a man of the past from their, philosophers’, contemporary point of view. This phrase can be applicable to the point I am making in a variety of ways. We can remember the late Edward Said with his studies into how the Western thought “domesticated” the Eastern culture, whereby the pre-existing misunderstandings were aggravated by further misinterpretation. We can thereby also extend the notion of translation, and see it in a more general sense, as a multi-format interpretation, which will help explain why philosophers whom Nietzsche decried had this flaw: because they interpeted a man of the past within, and for, the context of their present time, whereas a correct approach would have been to interpret a man of the past in the context of the past. So, the first problem with “identifying” someone or something is that the researcher may be standing on the essentially wrong point of view, i.e. putting an object of enquiry into the context to which the object doesn’t belong. Notwithstanding our awareness of the historical evolution of the language and mankind, we tend to forget about it when it comes to identifying and interpreting.

And second comes Zizek with an array of quotes and interpretations, which can be found in the very first subchapter of his recent book, In Defense of Lost Causes. He juxtaposes two views on the Judeo-Christian injunction to “love thy neighbour”: the one, held by Levinas, involves “the ethical domestication of the Neighbour“; and the other is endorsed by Freud and Lacan who insist on “the problematic nature” of this injunction. If we bring in the above argument on translation, especially in connection with the “domestication” of ideas and cultures for “better” understanding of foreign “things”, it will become apparent why Freud, Lacan and Zizek have all found Levinas’s “ethical domestication” problematic: because such domestication excludes the possibility of the Neighbour to be unethical or inhuman. This doesn’t happen because the Neighbour cannot be inhuman in their behaviour, but rather because we, as the neighbours of the Neighbour, apriori consider the Neighbour human because we are. Just as we usually consider ourselves free from the Freudian Thing (“the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability“), so we believe that the Neighbour doesn’t have it either: “”man”, “human person” is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbour” (Zizek, p. 16).

And then comes this beautiful quote, which can be difficult to grasp, but an attempt is worth its own fruits:

…when one asserts the Neighbour as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards the unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality. on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow man, can sustain true universality. The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbour-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular” (Zizek, pp. 16-17).

What we read here is precisely the assertion of Arbus’s “the more specific, the more general“. The more “humanity” we invest in the Neighbour, the more general they will be, and hence, the less obvious will be their flaws or even danger. A true individuality resides where everything particular has been taken away – this becomes the identity, but it’s no longer a “human” identity, but rather an identity of someone as a subject: a subjective singularity that becomes a true universal singularity.

Yes, these categories are Platonic, as Zizek recognises, but they are important for the enquiry: only if we introduce these “extra-human”, “inhuman” (= not grounded in our actual experience) categories, will we be able to comprehend their “human” dimension. Zizek demonstrates this with the title of Walter Benjamin’s work, On Language in General and Human Language in Particular: language-in-general is introduced in order to provide “a minimal difference” between the particular and the general. He then shifts to a quote from G. K. Chesterton’s Napoleon of Nothing Hill, to show that “there is an inhuman core in all of us, or, that we are “not-all human”“.

What this means is that this inhuman core can be comprehended in its own terms, but that it cannot be properly described in human language precisely because the “inhuman” relates to the universal, and “human” to the particular. Hence, when trying to actually spell out one’s true identity, which is the very “inhuman core”, we are effectively domesticating this identity to the limitations of our, human, language. (Cue Heidegger’s Wozu Dichter? again). Add to this that the language itself can be limited by a huge variety of factors, and it will become apparent that (and why) all socially demanded or attributed “identities” are false.

One last question that remains is whether or not it is actually possible to perform some sort of trick to help us put the “inhuman” substances into “human” words without losing the touch with the “inhuman core” of those substances. To quote from another chapter in Zizek’s book, there are two possibilities. One is that an eternal Idea that survived its historical defeat regresses “from the level of Notion as the fully actualised unity of Essence and Appearance, to the level of the Essence supposed to transcend its Appearance“. Another is that “the failure of reality to fully actualize an Idea is simultaneously the failure (limitation) of this Idea itself continues to hold“. Therefore, “the gap that separates the Idea from its actualisation signals a gap within the Idea itself” (Zizek, p. 209).

Precisely what Idea are we pursuing in our identity-quest? The actual quest, may it be provoked by the demands of the society, is spurred by a somewhat selfish but very humane desire to comprehend oneself. So, while looking for an identity, we are actually trying to find out what a man is. And this is where we get back to Heidegger, to that place in Wozu Dichter? where he discusses the impoverishment of Time. It happened, on the hand, he argues, because God had died; but, on the other hand, it also happened because the mortal people haven’t fathomed their mortality. Mortals don’t comprehend (and hence don’t own) their essence, but they continue living because the language survives. I would like to come back to this thesis later, but at present it is this thesis that answers the question of why the identities are so magnetic, and yet why the gap between the “inhuman core” and the “human” language hampers the quest. The gap is in the very Idea of man, the way we like to understand it in this part of the world, but, contrary to what one would be tempted to assert, the gap has to do with death, not survival. And it is for the protection against death that we look for identities and cultivate them, so that they can be preserved in the human language and memory as the living identities.

Exercises in Loneliness – VII

I’ve been reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. It is an interesting book. It is easy to see why it was written; why it was written in such form and way; the content is much explained and restricted by the time when Woolf had been writing it. Her passionate appeal to write the history of a woman was received not only with accolade, but has brought much fruit in the form of the so-called “feminist studies”.

So many years and academic studies later, it is also clear that, had Virginia Woolf known everything we know these days about female authors of the past centuries, her take on female literature would probably have been different. Marguerite de Navarre had written Heptameron, a collection of novellas, clearly inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron. When Marguerite died in 1549, three daughters of Edward, Duke of Somerset (the unfortunate Good Duke of Edward VI’s reign) wrote Hecatodistichon (Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Navarre), which was published in France in 1550 and was promptly translated and augmented by the poems of The Pleiade (Ronsard and Du Belle, in particular). The first English translation of Euripides, of his tragedy Iphigenie in Aulis, was produced by Lady Lumley, the daughter of Henry Fitzalan, the 12th Earl of Arundel. Elizabeth I, as we know, was not overt on an occasional verse. Even this very brief look at female writing in the 16th c. shows that, although no Shakespeare’s sister would be able to become an actress, women were not always beaten by their fathers, but instead had the abilities which were recognised.

This is not to say that Virginia Woolf was deceiving herself or the women who would be reading her book. But recently, as I was reading Counsels and Maxims by Arthur Schopenhauer, I came across a chapter on loneliness. Written in what one could call a typically masculine style, the chapter is a blazing apology of solitude. The progress of one’s mind, says Schopenhauer, causes the regress in their necessity to communicate. Solitude is the haven of an outstanding, self-sufficient mind. Ordinary people are only so keen on communication because they are afraid to face themselves. Those who crave loneliness are strong people. Etc, etc…

Naturally perhaps, Schopenhauer didn’t say a word about women in that chapter. Many a feminist would probably point a finger at his chapter and sneer. Or perhaps on the contrary, they would cheer for him, because for some strange reason Woolf is speaking of exactly the masculine kind of solitude in her book. “A woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write” – is she not asking for women to have what had previously belonged exclusively to men?

What is quite obvious is that in order to give women money and rooms of their own it would take to break many centuries of tradition. There is no doubt that this tradition was stark and stifling, and that it still exists these days, when young teenage girls, still children themselves, decide to have children instead of seeking education and career. But the existence of this tradition may also very well suggest that there are two different kinds of solitude, a feminine and a masculine. There are also two rooms pertinent to each of these solitudes, and it may very well be that a masculine room will be a study, and a feminine room will remain a common room.

It would be lovely to think that when a woman says that she wants a room of her own she means that she wants to raise above the restrictions the society places on her gender and responsibilities entailed to it. She wants to acquire that sort of fortitude that a room of one’s own instills in the person who sits there. She wants to face herself. Her mind is strong enough not only to stand this solitude, but also to collect the fruits of such condition. And the fruit of solitude is the calmness of body and spirit, when the thought floats freely and effortlessly. The kind of calmness that gave us the works of Shakespeare.

But solitude, if we agree with Schopenhauer – and there is no reason not to agree with him – is a measure of self-sufficiency. The more self-sufficient one is, the happier they are in the room of their own. This is where Schopenhauer stumbles into a problem, at which Nietzsche had pointed in Human, All Too Human. “Lack of historical sense is the family failure of all philosophers”, he writes. Philosophers at the time of Nietzsche (from his point of view, anyway) had the common failing of starting out from man as he is now”. It is hard to disagree with him, but this lack of historical sense, this failure in logic, is the direct consequence of extreme self-sufficiency.

I often feel – and this in part explains my opposition to the sometimes inevitable necessity to categorise people even by their gender, not to mention other things – that ascribing a category to oneself is retreating to the room of one’s own, to the realm of self-sufficiency, where one takes an immense pride in being different from all the others. For to be different is to be singled out; to be singled out is to be on one’s own; one can only be truly on their own in their space, which can appropriately be called a room. Of course, these days probably nobody any longer have that “family failure” of ahistorical thinking, thanks to all the academic studies. But now, probably, they have another failure of not having the knowledge of life in all its diversity, which is taking place in the common room.

Dumas had once said that he used history as a hook to hang his stories on it. A person who has a room of their own, be they a man or a woman, often has the hook, but no credible story up their sleeve. And so I think: we can earn money; we can have a study; but we, both men and women, are in far greater need for a common room – to see life, as it happens, and to better cherish the fruits of solitude.

error: Sorry, no copying !!