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Discourses on Minerva is the personal blog of a pilgrim scholar, journalist, and cultural critic. Here I have more liberty to speak freely on the subjects that matter to us today: Culture, Politics, Religion, and Literature. Visit the About page for more details.

Satire is not the same as comedy, though it is easy, especially in our deracinated world, to conflate the two. Teaching and explaining satire, however, is exhilarating. For satire, I think, tells us much about the intellectual culture and current we live in.

It is not the norm that satire appears at the birth of literary and intellectual culture. On the contrary, it is often at the end—during the nadir—of an intellectual current that satire emerges and manifests the final bang of the dying star. The great satirists of antiquity, Aristophanes and Apuleius, are case in point. Aristophanes arrived on the scene at the end of the pathological cosmos of Greek literature. The pathos of Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides reached its final desecration at the hands of Aristophanes; and, at the same time, the emergence of a new intellectual current—Socratic philosophy—was bubbling up.

What was true for Aristophanes is also true for Apuleius. The Golden Ass is satirical gold, but it represented the manifestation of the end of Roman mythology; the imperial mythos that so moved the Augustan poets finds no salvation in Apuleius, who brutally mocks the Roman myths. Apuleius also wrote when the pagan mythology of Rome was cracking and an upstart religion from Palestine was making headway across the Mediterranean.

Likewise, Miguel de Cervantes and his brilliant novel Don Quixote satirizes the end of the end of the medieval world of chivalry and knightly heroism. The modern world has now come in full force. We should not forget that the world of heroic literature that is the bleeding heart of medieval literature—from Beowulf, the Song of Roland, to Jerusalem Delivered—reached its final gloriously inglorious end in Don Quixote. And we should also remember that a new movement was romping around with even greater force and fervor than before: the Protestant Reformation.

This is not to say satire is bad. On the contrary, satire has historically represented the last great energy and creativity of a dying epoch—that final hurrah before the current that gave birth to it evaporates and something new takes its place. After all, no one denies—save the fanatics out to decapitate everything male and European—that there is great literary merit and genius to Aristophanes, Apuleius, and Cervantes. Moreover, they were all poets.

Clint Margrave, then, stands in fine company when considering the systematic flow of the literary spirit throughout human history. He is a poet. And now with Lying Bastard, a brilliant and dark satirical deconstruction of our postmodern world’s most sacred cows, he strikes home with a bang. There is no denying that Lying Bastard is a satirical novel. And when placing it within the general arc of the rise and fall of literary creativity, one can begin to understand its possible importance.

I have defined a classic, in other writings, as dealing with the enduring themes of the human condition: love and strife. More than mere antiquity, the classics of universal acclaim tend to have that feature to them. Margrave’s book, one might say, certainly deals with a certain aspect of love and strife—even if unconventionally and in ways one might immediately recognize. Whether it enters that elite club is something posterity will decide.

Berlin Saunders, one of our main protagonists, is an adjunct professor of English who struggles with the insufferable bad faith of academic careerism. Must one put on a façade just to get by working as a teacher who doubles as an impromptu hospital attendant? Moreover, what is the role of an English department? Surely to teach English. If so, why is the English department often a psychological field hospital—the new church of healing?

“[T]he English department was just a big hospital and it was no coincidence that the majority of people working in it were called doctors.” Witty statements like this add a comedic charm to Margrave’s book. As Saunders struggles with his life, he also begins to form a bond with an Iraq War veteran, who has a lot of writing potential, named Adam Rowan. Saunders and Adam begin to form a special teacher-student relationship. Their relationship breathes a new life into Saunders and may well release the creativity capacity of Adam—though Saunders does not want to give too much praise to his right-wing student.

Lying Bastard is a work of the zeitgeist. Disgruntled intellectuals. Returning war veterans just beginning their higher education. A school shooting. The fraud of academicians. Societal exploitation. Frustration on the part of everyone we meet. All satires are a product of their time. Yet Clint Margrave’s book stands apart from the other works of the zeitgeist that have become nauseatingly repetitive of sacred tropes we now must have for faux critical acclaim: strong female characters, LGBTQI+ attractions, and irredeemably villainous white males. Margrave’s book is a work of the zeitgeist, but it is notably critical of the zeitgeist. Lying Bastard exposes the shallow authenticity that supposedly guides our world. More acutely, Margrave undresses the inauthenticity that passes for authenticity. But he is asking a very serious question: Can we be authentic?

It is undeniable that the current intellectual current of our dying world is postmodernism, itself rooted in the philosophies of existentialism. In a meaningless world, how do we find meaning? We lie to others and to ourselves about our own importance. We embrace activistic struggles for change. We play dress-up revolution in the streets (there is an irony in that most revolutionaries are members of the establishment and schooled at all the elite institutions of the West). In short, our world is built on a web of lies and false deceits—or what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith.” This is not conspiratorial. This is a simple fact that only the naïve or the self-deluded deny. Bad faith is everywhere, and bad faith permeates Margrave’s book.

It is, therefore, appropriate that Margrave’s title gives nod to this reality (and other things like a grown man who is a bastard lying on the floor faking his death to get by) and that in our culminating end-scene our school shooter calls out Saunders for his inauthenticity, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” Existentialism, and even postmodernism, began as movements seeking authenticity and a pastoral approach to life in the midst of cosmic meaningless and exploitation. It is ironic, then, that the end result of these movements has been a cynical inauthenticity where saying anything and becoming part of the latest fad movement is considered brave, heroic, and, in a word, “authentic.” (Even though most people who return a modicum of common sense and rational skepticism see through the façade.)

The disintegration of our current world should not come as a surprise to us. We are living in the final throes of the postmodern age. We can (and should) look to literature for clues to the times we are living in.

When an intellectual current is fading, satire often emerges in its final days. So Clint Margrave’s Lying Bastard arrives on the scene and takes aim at our inauthentic age wittily, charmingly, and sometimes frustratingly…

Read the rest of my review of Clint Margrave’s Lying Bastard here: Review: Clint Margrave’s “Lying Bastard” (Merion West, 10 Nov. 2020)

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Liberal society—if we can call it a society—is stagnating. Moreover, it should be obvious to any observer over the “whimpification” of liberal society: liberals are weak; liberals are cowards; liberals capitulate to extremist forces; liberals are unwilling to employ the effective use of power; liberals blame other people for their problems; liberals do not take responsibility for their mistakes, misdeeds, or irresponsibility.  Why is this so?

To understand the decadence of liberalism one must understand its metaphysics.  Political science, to this end, with its superficial description over external laws, legal systems, political mechanisms, and so forth, is never going to be a truly intellectual discipline for understanding the nature of the political or political philosophy because it rejects the study of philosophy which served as the foundation for what we now call political ideology.  Any attempt to study politics, political movements, political ideologies, without philosophy is doomed to failure; it is destined only to produce superficial understandings of political traditions as is the case with understanding liberalism and the asinine assertions that liberalism stands for individualism, civil rights, the rule of law, religious toleration, constitutional government, property rights, and representative politics—what exactly does any of this tell us about the deep underpinnings, the metaphysics, of liberalism?  Everything political science ascribes to liberalism are secondary or tertiary, not liberalism in of itself, its first principle, its fundamental nature; political science, in other words, describes what has grown out of the metaphysical center but fails to address the metaphysical center.

Understanding liberalism requires us to go back to those figures who are universally seen as the “classical” liberal fathers: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, and John Stuart Mill (not to discount important French liberals but they happen to get the short stick so we’ll bypass them for the sake of brevity; I already mentioned some of them in this post on liberalism anyway).  In reading their works one will find a similar theme—that metaphysical center—which undergirds the “liberal project.”  That is freedom from harm.  Freedom from harm is the central axiom of liberalism—classical and modern.  It is what links Locke to Rawls.

For those who have read Locke, as opposed to being lied about Locke, Locke’s description of the state of nature is not a rosy and benign one.  It is not the outright “war of all against all” as described by Hobbes, but the state of nature is no paradise in Locke’s thought experiment either.  After all, people left the state of nature for commonwealth society and this is what Locke wants to explain.

Admittedly, one might argue, Locke makes the distinction between the “state of war” and the “state of nature.”  The state of nature is good, insofar that the state of nature is not the state of war.  This line of argumentation would maintain that it is not the state of nature we are abandoning for commonwealth society but the intolerable state of war.  That may be true but Locke’s argumentation in the first four chapters of Two Treatises is not a progressive one-way street.  He is very clear, in his description of the slip from the state of nature into the state of war, that the starting point of the state of nature necessarily and always backslides into the state of war.  If we were otherwise stuck in a state of nature of stasis there would have never been a reason to leave; but, as Locke says, we did leave the state of nature—and we did so because the state of nature exhausts itself into the state of war.  And this state of war is intolerable.  The only solution to the state of war is the commonwealth society.

What Locke presents in the first few chapters of Two Treatises is interesting for readers to recognize.  Locke asserts that the law of nature is self-preservation.  That is the only true “natural right” anyone has in Locke’s thought—though this right to self-preservation manifests itself in various ways.  Property, by technicality, is not a natural right in-of-itself; property is a natural right only insofar that it is tied to the law of self-preservation.

But what is the problem in the state of nature and state of war in Locke?  It is that we are fundamentally burdened with the responsibility of being judge, jury, and executioner of the law of nature in the state of nature/state of war.  This burden of responsibility is so great it inhibits us from pursuing the more comfortable end of self-preservation through acquisition of goods or property to have a bodily pleasing or pleasant life.  (Here, Locke is in total agreement with Hobbes that the practical manifestation of The Good is a bodily pleasing life; Locke may have been a dualist, but the practical application of his philosophy is physicalist.)  Furthermore, as Locke says, fear of war and violent death also propels men out of the state of nature.  Fear, or insecurity, and the burdensome responsibility of being personal executive of the law of nature (which prevents the enjoyment of leisure and the fruits of labor) propel men into civil society.

This stems from Locke’s metaphysical center—the freedom from harm.  Man is compelled to act, per Locke (as with Hobbes, Spinoza, and Mill) through the want to escape harm—bodily harm.  The drive for material acquisition and wealth is the want to escape the discomforts (harm) of poverty.  The drive to foster compromise and the establishment of the rule of law in civil society is the want to escape bodily conflict that may lead to death.  The drive claim property for oneself is the want to escape the discomforts of poverty too.  These are all derivative outgrowths of self-preservation but what is the end of self-preservation?  What does self-preservation aim for?  Escaping harm.

The reality of liberalism as the flight from harm necessarily, inevitably—as we see today—leads to the freedom from responsibility (i.e. sacrifice).  This desire to free oneself of responsibility of being judge, jury, and executioner of the law of nature in the state of nature was already identified by Locke (and others) as one of the reasons for man leaving the state of nature—however benign or chaotic it was.  The logic of Locke becomes inescapable.  What drives “progress” is the abdication of responsibility and its transference to civil government.  Rather than take responsibility for oneself, one’s life, one’s action, etc., the individual refuses to take responsibility because responsibility is itself harmful.

I am not arguing that Locke qua Locke argues against responsibility.  I am arguing, as is clear in the logic of Locke’s political philosophy, that the abdication of responsibility necessarily manifests itself within the Lockean framework.  If the flight from harm and the want for material comfort and lack of distress or worry is what motivates man in the liberal vision, then it logically and necessarily follows that man will renege all responsibilities that he regards as painful or harmful.  It is my argument that this will eventually exhaust itself into the welfare state and the civil government providing for its citizens because a government which nurses, or provides, is a government that frees the individual from their own work and responsibilities to achieve material comfort on their own which requires harmful (physically laborious or time-consuming) work, inability to enjoy leisure time (as that time would be spent working), and sacrifice.

As responsibility is seen as a constraint on individual want, the individual comes to jettison responsibility precisely because responsibility is seen as harmful; as well as being constrictive to free choice and movement.  If I have an obligation, or responsibility, I am forced to do X instead of whatever else I may wish to do instead.  In running an opportunity-cost analysis I find my responsibility more detrimental (i.e. harmful) than doing Y or Z.  Therefore, as I am motivated to avoid that which is most harmful (the responsibility), I reject my responsibility and pass it off to government (which was established to take on the responsibilities of being the arbiter of the law of nature according to Locke).

Therefore, liberal societies are in a state of catatonic paralysis.  This desire to be free from harm leads to a freedom from responsibility.  Anyone familiar with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” will immediately see a connection to this theme of freedom from.  Roosevelt was not an aberration of liberalism but its culminating fulfillment; the same is true of the welfare state.  Moreover, liberals are generally seen as “weak-kneed.”  Rather than fight, or struggle, which entails the possibility of harm, they seek compromise to avoid harm (freedom from harm).  In time this spirit of compromise exhausts itself in capitulation.  Rather than fight to conserve, preserve, and pass on (which is often harmful), liberals capitulate and “hope for best.”  Liberalism promises freedoms to do whatever you want to do; free from responsibility if something “goes wrong” (i.e. harmful). The end point of liberalism’s movement is a society without responsibility because it creates individuals who do not take responsibility because responsibility is seen as harmful and, therefore, fundamentally antagonistic to the liberal dream of freedom from harm which entails freedom from responsibility.

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Postmodernism is back with a vengeance.  Celebrated and despised, postmodernism is sometimes cast as the bogeyman of all that is wrong with the modern world or defended as exposing the shallowness of the modern world.  Which is it?

There are multiple strands of postmodernism.  For the sake of brevity, we will examine three; wherein the first two strands have explicit political overtures.  First is the strand of postmodernism associated with French deconstructionism—the notorious culprit and the focus of criticism from the likes of Jordan B. Peterson.  This postmodernism, by the standard of critics and proponents alike, purports to the illusory of truth, the inability to communicate, and that the result of this inability to derive truth and understanding—or the inability to communicate truth and therefore inability to have understanding—leads to a world of power conflict.  Definitions do not matter because we can’t agree upon definitions.  The first strand of postmodernism is an attack on empirical philosophy, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism and all other philosophies that defend essences. This enters philosophy of language in a denial of the essence of language.

This “public face” of postmodernism is two things. First, it is a sort of neo-Sophistry returning to the ideas of Protagoras of pre-Socratic times. For as Protagoras famously said: There is no Truth; if there was Truth we could not know it; if we could know Truth (individually) we could never communicate it to others. Second, it is a sort of revised Augustinian deconstruction of cultural myths and systems akin to what the venerable bishop of Hippo had done in Confessions and City of God. Conventional postmodernism wants to have its cake and eat it too, in many ways; it claims there is no truth, or that truth could not be known and communicated, yet it busily embarks on its on campaign of deconstruction and systematic assertions to the contrary.

A second strand of postmodernism, associated with the general philosophy of romanticism, also a notorious culprit for all the ills afflicting the Enlightenment if you follow Jonah Goldberg, simply asserts the shallowness and hollowness of modern life.  This second strand does not promote deconstructionism of the Derridean and Foucauldian sense; rather, it articulates the view that there is truth, but that truth is not embodied in modern ideology, outlook, and construction.  Romantic postmodernism, faut de mieux, therefore stands in contrast to deconstructionist postmodernism or neo-sophist postmodernism of the first strand. We might consider this second-strand of systematic critique and deconstruction associated with postmodernism as an authentic Augustinianism which deconstructs prevailing the establishment mythos in a bid to show its hollowness in favor of something far more truthful.

If the first strand of postmodernism is more neo-Sophistry than it is cultural criticism and deconstruction, then the second strand of postmodernism is more cultural criticism and deconstruction than it is neo-Sophistry. Both stands of postmodernism, however, have a common foe that is focused on: Namely, individualist, rationalist, economistic, liberalism.  Or in Marxian terms: liberal capitalism.  In conservative and populist terms: corporate capitalism.  Both seek to show the vacuousness of modern (i.e. liberal) philosophy and politics; but from there they diverge significantly.

Stephen R.C. Hicks, a philosopher, published a book called Explaining Postmodernism long before the rise of Jordan Peterson.  Hicks’ thesis is not shocking.  His assertion is that postmodernism grew up out of the rubble of orthodox Marxism; specifically, the May 1968 crisis and the long messianic expectation of Marxist intellectuals that the Marxist end of history would realize itself.  This group of Marxist intellectuals, who had sided with the Soviet Union, were too embarrassed to admit their faults following the Soviet Union’s suppression of the democratic socialist uprising in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).  Growing discontent with the Stalinist project, coupled with Nikita Khrushchev’s public condemnation of the crimes of Stalin, led to a crisis of the intellectual left.  The leftists who abandoned the Marxist project became the anti-Stalinist left—a phenomenon that was largely American and to a lesser extent English/British.  The leftists who remained stalwarts of Marxism, mostly French and German, reorganized themselves around the Frankfurt School and psychoanalysis; becoming the “postmodernists” of literary and sociological fame.  According to Hicks, this group of still pro-Soviet and Marxist intellectuals had to begin to play language games to defend orthodox Marxism while paradoxically undermining it at the same time.  Thus, the birth of “post-Marxism.”  Per Hicks, the postmodern Marxists inverted traditional Marxian language to save the Marxist hope.  Peterson, who has cited Hicks, has more recently expanded this view of postmodernism.

Peter Augustine Lawler, a famous postmodern conservative before his death, argued in his book Postmodernism Rightly Understood, a different narrative of the rise of postmodernism—one that contemporary intellectuals, like Peterson, and celebrity online writers and pundits, like Goldberg, fail to recognize.  Lawler asserted that postmodernism—especially in the American context—was really a return to “realism.”  That is, a rejection of the naïve utopian idealism of postwar American liberalism; perhaps best typified (rightly or wrongly) by Francis Fukuyama.  This postmodern realism is critical of liberal globalism as a front for empire; a topic that goes back to at least the writings of Carl Schmitt.  Lawler’s postmodernism is, therefore, not the post-Marxist postmodernism that Hicks and Peterson critique; rather, it is a postmodernism that conservatives could latch onto—a devastating critique of the failure, excess, and shallowness of “Enlightenment liberalism.”

The third strand of postmodernism is more a literary movement than it is political.  Postmodern literary criticism takes the subversive approach to textual analysis—most often to “reinterpret” the conventionally accepted understanding of texts in question.  Now this often does lend itself to a sort of neo-Marxist interpretation of texts, but this type of textual revisionism is not solely the property of the far-left.  The far-right also engages in, and benefits from, literary postmodernism in presenting revisionist interpretations of texts too.  The most obvious example is rightwing critics and exegetes presenting counter-narratives of the “orthodox” reception of liberal texts: Namely that classical liberal philosophy leads to the wonders of the “rule of law,” “property rights,” and “tolerance,” etc.

This third strand of postmodernism, literary postmodernism, is also tied to deconstructionism. But the French deconstructionists were not the first to engage in textual criticism. Deconstruction of texts is an old literary enterprise which Greeks, Romans, and Christians engaged in during Antiquity and Late Antiquity. The deconstruction offered in literary postmodernism attempts at either showing the bankruptcy of the “orthodox” interpretation or show the actual meaning of the text that has been glossed over by propaganda, mythology, and ideology.

In fact, postmodernism is probably best understood as a form of revisionist literary criticism which then moves in a multitude of different, often uncontrollable, directions.  In this respect, post-Marxist postmodernism and romantic postmodernism both owe their origins to literary postmodernism—for it is the impetus of literary revisionism which permitted the rise of both strands of politicized postmodernism to emerge; primarily through means of criticism toward the establishment post-Second World War consensus.  Some postmodernists have certainly gone to the extreme—by deconstructing language altogether and arguing that there are no definitions and essences and therefore no means of communication other than power-imposition.  Other postmodernists are simply post-modern in the sense that they critique modern life as hollow and generally meaningless; such persons may be on the left or right and offer succinct reasons as to why modern life is shallow and what should be done to counteract this.

Postmodernism is not as monolithic as its critics often portray or caricature it as. Moreover, postmodernism is “post-” (after) modern because all postmodernisms (however it manifests itself) consider the modern, liberal, “Enlightenment” ideology and mythos as bankrupt. It is true that leftwing postmodernism is the poster child of postmodernism. But there are many rightwing postmodern movements too. Many conservatives, in fact, may be more postmodern than meets the eye.

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Plato was a moralist. An ethicist. He was concerned with the primacy of action, of engagement, in a world that was deeply iconoclastic, barbarous, and savage. Love of wisdom allows for the creation of that space where ethical and loving life is possible. This means that eros must remain to any understanding of the self, world, and politeia. It also means, however, that the energy of love be directed—though not subverted—to productive ends. Eros was on trial in Plato’s time. In the course of the dialogue, Plato attempts to defend and exonerate Eros from the de-mythologizers. We are left to judge if he succeeded.

As part of my usual column at TIC, this essay focuses on my academic concentration: the Classics and Plato. In this essay I offer a reading of Symposium as Plato’s attempt to re-mythologize and defend Eros against the de-mythologizers (especially Eryximachus) and those who would threaten to subjugate Eros to pettier pursuits (Pausanians and Phaedrus), and expose the insufficiency of the playwrights (Aristophanes and Agathon), even though “Plato stands on the side of the poets rather than the ‘philosophers.’ In fact, the dialogue is a mythological drama about the fate of love and its place in the new world born of technology, the political, and the philosophical.”

You can read the essay here: Plato’s “Symposium”: The Drama and Trial of Eros.

You can read my academic commentary on understanding Plato’s Republic here: Savagery, Irony, and Satire in Plato’s Republic.

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Martin Heidegger rose to prominence with the publication of his magisterial ontological treatise Being and Time.  The work opens with a reflection on the nature of being, “Being is the most universal concept,” Heidegger declares, and that the question of being “has today been forgotten.”  Why did Heidegger write his seemingly incomprehensible work and to whom was it directed against?

As a German philosopher Heidegger is situated in the post-Hegelian, post-Nietzschean, post-romantic tradition of philosophy.  He is also situated in the post-Cartesian crisis: the crisis of ontology and our (human) relationship to the world.  Heidegger was instrumental on Sartre, in fact, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is more a response to Heidegger’s Being and Time than it is a rebuttal to Hegel and Christian ontology as sometimes presented; Sartre read little Hegel and most of what he knew of Hegel and Freud, when Being and Nothingness was published, had come second hand through Heidegger.  Like many of the existentialists who came after Heidegger, Being and Time deals with the problem of existential ontology: self-consciousness in a world of facticity and materiality.  It also deals with the crisis of atomization, liberalization, and uprootedness from the world and relationships.  All of this can be traced back to Bacon’s functional separation of man from world and Heidegger, believing doctrinal Christianity cannot “put back together” (so to speak) the world Bacon deconstructed, embarked on his own to overcome the challenges presented by Bacon, Descartes, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

Heidegger’s work is multifaceted which adds to its complexity, and no less its genius.  It is a work influenced by Greek and Christian philosophy, though it rejects the eudemonistic teleology of Greco-Christian anthropological thought.  It affirms the importance of a world of relationships, relationships with the world and other humans, but recognizes the inherent problems of selfhood and others.  It launches a critique of Hegel, between the lines, though itself is a work of revisionist Hegelianism.  As a work of revisionist Hegelianism it is also indebted to Nietzsche, the greatest of the revisionist Hegelian critics of the 19^th century; though Heidegger also rejects Nietzsche.  In English the work is difficult to translate because of Heidegger’s implementation of new terms that don’t read well in German, but German definitions afford a certain understanding superior to English concepts and words that don’t invoke the same meaning as Heideggerian German does; thus many English translations retain the use of Heidegger’s original German terminology with attempts to explain what they mean in elaborate footnotes or bypass any attempt to translate the meaning at all.

At its heart Being and Time is a work that wants to recapture the tradition of metaphysical ontology as the only basis of universality.  In other words, Heidegger knows something that the ancients knew: In order for their to be Truth there has to be Nature.  While he sidesteps the question of God, he does not sidestep the question of metaphysical ontology.  Thus, the work is one which is attempting to confront nihilistic relativism to reassert basic universal truths that we can know.  At the same time, Heidegger’s work is a rebuke of Hegelian historicism and the monistic materialistic yet functionally dualist worldview stemming from Bacon and Descartes.  Heidegger believes that philosophy’s absorption into the philosophy of history (historicism) had done significant harm to philosophy qua philosophy.  Likewise, the existential dilemma that people now find themselves—namely the crisis of uprootedness and “feeling alone”—was largely a byproduct of the reductionist materialist philosophy of the new science which, paradoxically, placed man as a subjective being in conflict with the world (and other subjective beings) which had unleashed cataclysm to the “meaning of human existence.”  Yet, Heidegger is still indebted, in certain ways, to Hegel’s philosophy: Dialectical Ontology especially.

Thus, Heidegger’s work is firmly in the tradition of German anti-nihilist romanticism.  He attempts to put together the “synthesis” that will resolve the crisis of modern philosophy, which is primarily the crisis of nihilism: living an unmeaningful life, the denial of truth, and the absorption of philosophy to history.  Heidegger, like Hegel, is engaged in the project of constructive critique.  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in this respect.

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The opening chapters of Heidegger’s Being and Time establishes the structural reality of existential being.  Again, Heidegger is attempting several things in his great treatise, but the boiled down “to the point” project is that Heidegger is attempting to recover the philosophy of metaphysical ontology (being) and, by this recovery, avoid the problems of nihilism, relativism, and establish the foundation for universal truth again (related to the nature of being).  So it would only be natural, pardon the pun, that Heidegger attempts to establish the foundation of being in the early parts of his work.

Having established that being exists, and exists in the world, therefore denying Buddhist and Gnostic anthropologies that assert true reality as the immaterial realm of spirit and that this life is illusory, Heidegger moves into a radical revision of classical anthropology.  Apart from a few sects of ancient Greek philosophy, Greco-Roman-Christian anthropology maintained that man was a social and relational animal.  Man exists in a world with others, thrives in this world with others, and his very nature and well-being is dependent upon forming relations with others.  Being-in-the-World as “Being-With” is Heidegger’s revised account of man’s relationality.

Since man exists in the world, man, by default, automatically has a relationship with the objects of the world.  The I, returning to the I-Not I distinction in German romantic philosophy, is always with the Other.  Being-in-the-World presupposes two things.  That I exist in the world (of objects) implying a connection with the world which establishes my “roots” in the world (bodenständigkeit), and that I exist in relationship with others.  Here Heidegger challenges the ontological philosophy of reductionist materialism and atomism head on.  I am not opposed to the world per se, i.e. seeking conquest of the world which prevents any sort of connection or attachment to the world (bodenständigkeit).  Furthermore, I cannot exist as an isolated, solitary, cut-off (atomized) being from others; others exist and I must acknowledge this reality.  To deny this reality is to deny reality itself.

As such, the mitsein (being-with) is a fundamental reality to the existential nature of being.  Being is not merely individuated, isolated, or atomized (as Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and the classical liberals maintained).  Rather, being exists with the intention of being-with-others; hence why, materially, I exist in the world (perhaps refer back to Genesis 2 where Adam exists in the garden, though “alone” without a human companion, he still exists with-others: the world, animals, etc.) and why, ontologically, I exist with others (I am not the only human in the world because existence requires the other).  Being alone is not good, in the classical sense, because being alone is a privation of the fullness of being which entails being-with; St. Augustine argued in Confessions that evil (that which is not good) is a privation of nature (that which exists and that which exists is good), thus, to be alone (being-alone) as a privation of being-with is something that is to be avoided as it is a privation of man’s ontic nature.

There is much more to Heidegger and Being-With, but this is the most basic understanding of Heidegger’s ontological anthropology.  Being-in-the-World automatically ensures Being-With.  Minimally, we can say that Being-With includes a relationship to the world; worldness.  I am not the world, however.  Thus, the I-Not I distinction remains.  As such, the world that exists and I am in is pluralistic.

Moreover, as I exist I cannot have come into being without the other (it takes two to reproduce).  Thus, Being-in-the-World not only entails being-with-the-world, it also presupposes and includes being-with-others.  However, the other is not I either.  So while I exist with others this relational existence with others is equally pluralistic.

In establishing the structural reality of Being-in-the-World, Heidegger challenges, based on existential reality, the liberal claims of ontology: That man is equivalent (or reducible) to world (thus destroying the I-Not I or Human-World distinction), and that man is an atomized, isolated, and solitary creature.  Heidegger engages in a sort of charming ironic criticism between the lines too.  Facticity, he is arguing, cannot be atomistic or monistic.  The facticity of existence should affirm the opposite of what the classical liberals arrived at.  That is, facticity affirms plurality and the social/relational nature of man’s existential existence.

That said, the crisis of the present is that we have deceived ourselves into the liberal privation.  As such, man is cut-off (uprooted) from the world.  And man is cut-off from others.  This privation of connectivity with the world and this privation of relationships with others has led man into his petty, sorry, and nihilistic mode of being which Heidegger is trying to counter and show us a path out of.  But to do this he needs to challenge the reductionist and atomized account of the world.

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The decline of cultural Christianity, along with intellectual Christianity, has brought with it a debased Atheism without consciousness, inspiration, or stories. It has also been met by a renewed and vigorous neo-“paganism.” The romantic mind of these new pagans, many associated with the so-called Alt-Right, present the portrait of a redeemed paganism that was—ironically—the product of Christianity. Anyone with a true familiar with the pagan classics would know that their gods were not these wondrous beings painted in naked glory by the likes of Catholic painters during the Baroque period and the height of the Counter Reformation.

Theogony: Sexual Violence and The Lust for Domination

The oldest account of the Greek gods comes from the pen of the poet Hesiod, who happens to my namesake alias. Theogony, a short but incredibly vivid and image-soaked poem, literally means “birth of the gods.” Or the genealogy of the gods. Because that is what the work does; Hesiod gives us an account of the origins of the gods and alludes to, or contains, even if just a half sentence or single sentence, many of the Greek classical myths.

There are two lines of gods presented in Theogony. One line self-propagated without sex. The other line, born from the sexual intercourse of Uranus and Gaia, produce the titans and, eventually, the Olympian deities. Needless to say, the line of gods born from sex—and often violent sex—engage in their own lust for domination throughout the poem leading to castration, filicide, and rebellion.

Uranus’ birth from Gaia’s fertile womb leads to the conjugal union of the two and the forced copulation of the primordial deities which will eventually produce the line of Titans and Olympians of mythological fame. The song of the muses which Hesiod opens with sets the pattern for future Greek poems; “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” Homer’s opening may be more famous, but Hesiod’s is equally poetic and memorable:

Muses of Helicon, let us begin our song with them,
who hold the great and holy mountain of Helicon,
and around its violet-like spring and altar of exceedingly
strong Cronus, dance on dainty feet, and
who, after bathing their soft skin in the Permessos
or the spring of the Horse or holy Olmeios
on the peak of Helicon, form their dances, beautiful
dances that arouse desire, and they move erotically (Theog. 1-8).

That Hesiod opens with the muses of songs of praise, but transitions to celebrate erotic dance and sex, also sets the tone for the rest of the poem. The gods of whom the muses of Helicon sing their praises of, are gods of lust, rape, and patricide. Moreover, Hesiod’s poem is about the gods. Man factors not in his theogony. Homer’s two epics, by contrast, deal with men—though the gods are always and everywhere present and interfering with the affairs of men because men are, in the pagan outlook, mere puppets of the gods as Plato said.

The opening eighth of Hesiod’s poem sings the praises of Zeus; but it is slowly revealed that Zeus has usurped his throne in the heavens by “conquering his father Cronos by power” (73). Cronos, too, had conquered Uranus by power as the poem goes on to tell. In sum, the singing of the muses to the gods is a celebration of unadulterated ambition and power. Gods who meekly submit, remain in the place of their birth, and do not struggle to attain power for themselves, are gods unworthy of being gods! Hesiod’s poem reflects the Thrasymachian worldview of dog-eat-dog power dynamics. Above all, he celebrates it!

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Fall of the Titans,” ca. 1638

Concerning the first line of gods that come into being, there are Chaos, Eros, Gaia, and Uranus, along with lesser primordial deities like Thalassa, the primordial goddess of the sea who goes unmentioned. Most of the lesser primordial deities are born from Gaia’s uncontrollable wetness which shoot out of her like fertilized eggs waiting to give birth to life; “She bore the large mountains, pleasant haunts of the goddess / Nymphs who dwell up along the woody mountains, / and he produced the unplowed / open waters raging / with swell, Pontos, without philotês” (129-132).

But it is the copulation between Gaia and Uranus that gives birth to some of the other gods like Tethys, the goddess of fresh water who is seductively beautiful and a prefiguration of white-foamed and naked Aphrodite who will burst forth from Thalassa’s womb in rapturous and energetic birth. From the “wide bosom” of Gaia and Uranus will also come the titans, and from them, the future Olympians of whom the muses—and Hesiod—sing their praises of.

The marital union of Gaia and Uranus is a cruel and vicious one at that. Uranus constantly penetrates into Gaia at will, then hides their children deep within her tummy which causes her ceaseless pain. Uranus is terrified of his children and what they might do to his kingship over the cosmos so thinks that by keeping them locked up in Gaia’s womb they will not pose a threat to him. However, “cunning” Gaia fashions for his children a sickle to overthrow their “reckless father.” Only the titan Cronus, who is the eventual father of Zeus, obeys.

Seizing the sickle fashioned by his mother, Gaia, Cronus ascends to the world and is hidden by his “monstrous” and “laughing” mother who just as much wants to kill Uranus as Cronus. The ascension of Cronus to the kingship of the gods is through an act of patricide. Something that was common in the ancient Greek and Roman world at the same time as the later human philosophers and historians praised the importance of filial piety and pater familias; you have in the account of the gods and the account of the philosophers two far different visions of the good life and what humans should honor. And just as Cronus will seize his throne by patricide, he will lose his throne by patricide.

Waiting for Uranus like a crouching tiger waiting to ambush its prey, Cronus attacks his father at his first opportune chance:

Great Uranus came, bringing the night,
and spread out around Gaia, desiring philotês,
and was extended. His son reached out from ambush
with his left hand, and in his right he held the sickle,
long and serrated and the genitals of his father
he quickly reaped and threw them behind his back
to be carried away. But they did not flee from his hand fruitlessly.
As many drops of blood spurted forth,
all of them Gaia received (176-184).

The blood which spurted forth onto Gaia’s fertile body gave birth to the giants and other monsters of antiquity which the demi-god heroes like Hercules and Bellerophon would slay. But even more graphic is the birth of Aphrodite; the first of the Olympian gods fathered by Cronus’ act of sexual violence and Uranus’ chopped off penis which fell through the aethereal air and into Thalassa’s open bosom—which is the sea—where it swirled about from which the frenzied movement of blood-drenched sperm  impregnated the primordial goddess of the deep sea:

As soon as Cronus lopped off the genitals
with the sickle, they fell from the mainland into the much-surging sea, so that the sea
carried them for a long time. Around them a white
foam from the immortal skin began to arise. In it, a maiden
was nurtured. First, she drew near holy Kythera,
and from there she arrived at Kypros surrounded by water.
From within, a majestic and beautiful goddess stepped, and
all around grass grew beneath her slender feet. Aphrodite
[foam-born goddess and fair-wreathed Kythereia]
gods and men call her because she was nurtured in foam (187-197).

The reality of the “birth of the gods” from Hesiod’s poem is one of complete bloodshed, of sexual violence, and divine rape.

George Cruikshank, “Venus Rising from the Froth,” 1880; still idealized, but Cruikshank’s painting captures more of the dark and chaotic drama involved in Aphrodite/Venus bursting forth from the chaos of the sea and white foam entailed in her birth from the chopped off penis of Cronus which had fallen into Thalassa’s open and fertile body than most other idealized portraits.

Olympus may have subsequently been assumed by the titans, by their funny-business in birthing the Olympian gods comes full circle. What was seized in sexual violence and patricide will be lost in sexual violence and patricide. The Olympians, led by Zeus, convene a war council where “their spirit craved war” (665). War erupts, and violence falls over the whole earth:

They moved wretched battle,
all of them, females and males, on that day,
Tritan gods and those who were born from Cronos and those
whom Zeus from Erebos beneath the earth brought into light.
These were dreadful and strong, possessing excessive force.
A hundred arms shot forth from their shoulders,
for all of them alike, and each had fifty heads
grown out from their shoulders on sturdy limbs.
Then, they settled themselves against the Titans in the dire fray,
holding huge rocks in their sturdy hands.
From the other side, the Titans strengthened their ranks
eagerly, and both sides were revealing the works of forceful
hands, and the boundless sea resounded dreadfully, and
the earth screamed loudly, and wide Uranus groaned when
heaved, and from the foundations lofty Olympus shook
beneath the fury of the immortals. The heavy pounding
of their feet reached murky Tartaros, as did the shrill screams
of the terrible pursuit and powerful missiles.
Thus they hurled mournful darts at one another.
The sound of both reached starry Uranus
as they cried out. They clashed with a great war cry (666-686).

While the earth cried aloud in the tumultuous battle being raged, the victorious Olympians ascend to their thrones on Olympus in displacing the old gods. Hesiod’s poem is a triumph of the depraved imagination. It is the triumph of the lust for domination born by sexual violence and vengeance. Conceived in blood and hatred, that primordial original sin infects and taints all the Olympian deities who engage in their bloodlust, wanton sexual advances, and divine rapes and alluring of men and women to their sexual demise.

Peter Paul Rubens, “Saturn Devouring His Son,” 1636. Before Zeus overthrew the Titans, Cronus, fearful of his children, ate them in an act of filicide appropriate for someone who had engaged in patricide. Fearing his sons might turn on him, he turned on them first before Zeus killed his father and seized his throne. Saturn is the Latin equivalent of Cronus.

From Pious Fatalism to Divine Decree

Hesiod’s account of the gods is remarkable for its brutal realism. Hesiod isn’t bothered with offering any defense of the immorality of the gods. He celebrates it. He, and the muses, sing the praises of the strong gods who overcame their lot at birth to ascend to power. Saint Augustine might have realized that these stories—in their Roman form—were about the sanction of sexual violence through authoritative power, “Have I not read in you of Jupiter at once both thunderer and adulterer? Of course the two activities cannot be combined, but he was so described as to give an example of real adultery defended by the authority of a fictitious thunderclap acting as a go-between” (Confessions, i.xvi.25),[1] but contemporary and succeeding generation of Greek poets and chroniclers tried to shelter and augment the open depravity of the gods into tales of pietistic fatalism (Homer) or the inescapable sanction of divine decree (Pseudo-Apollodorus).

Unless your knowledge of the Iliad is from the Wolfgang Peterson’s epic Troy (2004), you have a very poor understanding of the rich mythology and theodicy in Homer’s epic. The “rage of Achilles” is not simply because of his exploits in war; it is because of his demi-god status. Indeed, the fact that Achilles has divine lineage running through his blood makes him a rage-filled killer like the rest of the Olympian gods. The Gods are everywhere in Homer’s epic. The human characters whom we may identify with, like Hector or Andromache, are mere playthings to the desires and jealous rivalries of the gods.

The origin of the Trojan War is through the Judgement of Paris, but there is more to it than that. Concerning the very genus of the war, the Olympians were celebrating the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. These gods who are obsessed with sex intend to have wanton sexual pleasure in the celebration of a sexual union. All but the god Eris is invited because Eris is the god of strife. There is a certain irony in Eris being denied an invitation. All the gods are mischievous and cause strife. So why should Eris be denied?

Eris is so outraged at his spurning that he tosses the “Apple of Discord” into the banquet where Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite quarrel with one another over it. Taking the apple to Zeus to decide who is the most beautiful and desirable of the goddesses, Zeus balks at this responsibility knowing his decision will cause enmity between him and the two goddesses not chosen. Denying this providential responsibility, he passes the decision unto the great Trojan womanizer Paris, who is hardly the dashing and handsome Orlando Bloom portrayed in the film.

Paris’ decision to choose Aphrodite was because Aphrodite promised him Helen of Troy. Paris got to satisfy his carnal lusts which sizzled within him like crackling oil in a frying pan. But with Athena and Hera spurned, they conspire against Aphrodite by taking their vengeance out on Paris.

The gods who ally with the Greeks against the Trojans did so not so much to crush the Trojans but to get revenge on Aphrodite and her cohorts. Athena and Hera are beautiful goddesses too, but Aphrodite is the most voluptuous and consuming of all the beautiful gods. Her beauty is the classic femme fatale. Her beauty is not only seductive, it is deadly. Those who fall into her bosom die to themselves as they are consumed by her.

Herbert Draper, “The Pearls of Aphrodite,” 1907.

Homer’s Trojan War is not a mere contest between earthly powers. It is a divine rivalry moved by jealousy and the need for revenge. In killing Paris, destroying Troy, and depriving Aphrodite of her human judge and lover, Athena and Hera believe they will complete their revenge on Aphrodite.

The outcome of the Trojan War was the utter destruction of Troy—though Aeneas and a band of wayfaring pilgrims manage to sail their way to Carthage, Sicily, and finally to Livinian shores to found Rome. But the burning of Troy was horrendous even in Greek memory. While it is from the pen of the Roman poet Virgil that we get the most graphic of the descriptions of the fall of that great city, the violence unleashed in rage as Aphrodite and her party is defeated is all consuming. It made Sodom and Gomorrah look tame by comparison.

If Homer’s account of the gods was unsatisfactory as it relied on the virtues of a pious fatalism accepting, with humility and spilled loins and ripped out hearts, that humans were the puppets of the gods, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ chronicling of the Greek myths show us the continue advancement of the Greek stories and the human relationship with their violent gods. Pseudo-Apollodorus was a 1^st century A.D. chronicler whose anthology of Greek stories is only remembered to us thanks to Christianity—and Christianity’s relationship to the Greek gods is something I will briefly touch on at the end of this discourse.

Moving from Hesiod’s open celebration of unrestrained violence, rape, and filicide, to Homer’s pious acceptance of the battles of the gods, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ account of the origins of the gods and Trojan War sees the final exhaustive movement of the theogony and theodicy given to us by those most venerable of Greek poets. Instead of concentrating on the bloodlust and sexual violence as in Hesiod, or the pious fatalism of Homer, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ anthologized stories of the Greek myths and gods indicate an impasse at the pious fatalism of Homer but the development of a rich but unconvincing theodicy akin to supralapsarian Calvinism.

Returning to the Judgement of Paris, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ anthology tells us that in the three naked goddesses displaying themselves in front of Paris’ eyes in all their glory each gave him a promise. Athena promised Paris that she would grant him victory in war. Hera promised Paris that she would grant him a universal kingdom stretching over all men. But Aphrodite’s promise of Helen to Paris was the only thing that could quench Paris’ need to ejaculate into a woman’s vagina or mouth. Paris chose Aphrodite because only she offered him an outlet for his sexual deviancy.

However, just prior to this judgement Pseudo-Apollodorus informs us that the choice of Aphrodite was necessary for Zeus to enact his divine will to depopulate the earth and destroy Troy. This indicates a wrestling with the immorality of the gods which Saint Augustine also reflected upon in Confessions and City of God when he engaged in his cultural criticism of the pagan deities. The Greeks, however, did not go the route that we know Saint Augustine went in seeing the stories for what they were: openly violent, sexual, and bloodthirsty tales of grand displays of male libido and female seduction which sanctioned the actions of the powerful and absolved them of their sins. Instead, the Greeks double-downed in their theogony and developed a blood-sanctioned theodicy since they couldn’t do away with their gods.

Rather than absolve the gods, however, this development makes them even more contemptible and condemnable. Athena and Hera are blatant liars to Paris. They cannot offer him the things they promised because it is not Zeus’ will. Aphrodite is to be chosen as the most beautiful to set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that will lead to a seven year war, the death of tens of thousands, the destruction of a city, and the chucking of the infant Astyanax from the walls of Troy as he falls down to the rocks below and cracks his head and insides to prevent him from seeking revenge for the death of Hector. This is made tragic given that Hector, the human embodiment of piety and filial warmth, offered up a prayer to the gods to watch over his son. It wasn’t to be.

Georges Rochegrosse, “Andromache,” 1887.

Sanctioning the Rule of the Powerful

It is obvious to any reader of the Greek classics that the story of the Greek gods is highly anthropomorphized. Their gods are radically different from the metaphysical and ontological God of the philosophers and of Christianity. Their gods are humans with human emotions, sexual needs, and faults; the difference being their place of authority over us and their super-human strength which Saint Augustine noted was the cement which sanctioned the abuse of power and the free display of lusts.

We know why the gods had to subdue Aphrodite and Zeus’ will be satisfied: Because the Greeks had defeated the Trojans. In the same manner, as the story of the gods moved from Athens to Rome, we know why Aphrodite (Venus) turned out to be the victor over Hera (Juno) and Minerva (Athena): Rome had defeated Greece and become the power over the Mediterranean. In the same way this story of human power is seen in Aeneas causing the death of Dido and slaying Turnus. Dido, reflective of Carthage, is in fact killed by Aeneas for Dido thrusts his sword into her breasts as she collapses on a burning pyre while cursing eternal vengeance onto his children. It is a beautiful moment in which Virgil, with the benefit of hindsight, ‘foretells’ the defeat of Carthage and her burning at the hand of Rome. Likewise, Turnus, who has Greek lineage, is slayed and is therefore a foreshadowing of what the fate of Greece will be in her contest with Rome.

The Greek (and Roman) gods who are depicted in their naked beauty and charms by Catholic and later Romantic painters are not the gods of the Greek classics. Anyone who has read the classic poetry and tragedies of the Greek writers knows this. But debauched and uneducated neo-“pagans” of today are so far removed from the gods they romanticize it is hard not to find irony in their anti-Christianity since their view of the gods is the baptized, beautified, and Christianized spirits of deification. Looking at Titian’s Venus or Rubens’ Venus may strike us as something charming, remarkable, and indeed beautiful. But that’s because the Christian emphasis on subjectivity and beauty as a gateway to God took away the blood, castrated penises, and predatory sexual advances and scheming found in Hesiod, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Pseudo-Apollodorus.

Those who wish to opine for a return to the old gods ought to know what the old gods were like. Not the docile and tamed versions of flowing hair, milky breasts, and perfect pigmentation bequeathed to posterity by Christianity when they painted tamer portraits of the Greek gods. The Greek classics are rich in many ways; but one thing that stands out is the centrality of bloodshed, sex, and violence. As Fustel de Coulanges showed in his grand study of antiquity, The Ancient City, the ancient city was indeed dark, hollow, and filled with blood in the streets. The Greek theodic tradition in poetry and tragedies affirms this in a spectacular imagery of divine violence.

[1] Confessions citation and notation is from Henry Chadwick’s translation.

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Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece War and Peace is nothing short of a literary masterpiece. 2019 also marks the 150^th anniversary of the work’s publication in book form, which came out in 1869. I have also written a long-winded 10,000-word commentary on the book for the occasion which can be read here. As such, I will not address in the same detail the significant literary themes which I discussed in my academic commentary since this will be more of a general synopsis and overview of the characters and Tolstoy’s reflective criticism on philosophy of history.

At about 1300 pages (most translated editions), the work is towering and the reading a laborious but joyful undertaking. Given the length and content of the work I will be devoting Tuesdays and Fridays this month to dealing with some of the topics of the book. As such, I will be providing short character contrasts alongside broader themes contained in the book.

To start we shall look at the two heroes of the story: Count Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei Bolkansky.

Tolstoy casts the struggle of each character as the same. All the characters featured are fighting their own internal war to find peace, joy, and meaning in life. Thus, each character is trying to live, to find, that meaningful life—as Pierre says toward the end of the novel having finally come to his revelatory moment, “Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one’s sufferings.”

Pierre Bezukhov is first introduced as the spirited but illegitimate child of Count Bezukhov, he floats the circles of high society (having been invited to attend Anna Pavlovna’s party in the beginning of the book) which keeps him at an arms distance. He is not only struggling to find meaning in life, he is struggling to find acceptance in society. As an illegitimate child Pierre occupies a territorial limbo. He partakes in high society events because of his connections and friendships, but he is still an outsider; both in lineage and political ideas.

The high society of Russia is vehemently opposed to the French revolution and to Napoleon Bonaparte whom they refuse to call emperor. He is, until the Franco-Russian alliance following the Russian defeat at Friedland in 1807 and the subsequent Treaty of Tilsit, referred to as a madman, usurper, monster, and antichrist. As Anna Pavlovna says, “Russia alone must save Europe.” Pierre, by contrast, is a supporter of the Jacobin ideas of universal rights, liberation, and republican governance—it matters not the Reign of Terror and bloodshed spilled, the very ideas of universal humanity and prosperity are intoxicating. And this becomes a constant theme throughout the book which infects every major character—the struggle with falling in love with ideas instead of embodying concrete love in life.

When Pierre is legitimized as the heir to the Bezukhov fortune he finds new acceptance by high society. The Kuragin family, led by Helene, pursues after him—primarily for his wealth. The Kuragin family is depicted as obsessed and embodying the values of objects and objectification. Helene is case and point, but the contrast of Helene and Natasha will come later. Pierre, when he is courted by Helene, even acknowledges that he’s not sure he truly loves her but the two marry anyway. It is not a good marriage. It is marriage marred by distrust, alienation, and infidelity.

Pierre, from start to finish, understands that life is about service—love of others. In his famous reunion with Andrei after a two-year absence following the Battle of Austerlitz he says as much, imploring his friend to live more than just for oneself. However, the stumbling and generally incompetent Pierre can never actualize this. He is, at first, in love with the ideas of serving other through primarily political ends. This is alienating because one is always kept at a distance in the political process. Politics is depersonalizing. Pierre is in love with the idea of serving (or helping) others but not actually engaged in the nitty-gritty of real service to others: the concrete, physical, and intimate helping in person and not through impersonal mechanism and constructs (which is the realm of the political).

Trying to find meaning in his life following the duel with Dolokhov, Pierre turns to Freemasonry to help guide his life. I will explore the theme of Freemasonry with Pierre in greater detail in another post. It is suffice to say here that the importance of Freemasonry is that it, paradoxically, points Pierre in the right direction of Christian love of others (love of fellow man in a very intimate way, which is what charitable love—agape—is) but is also intoxicated by the abstract ideas and esoteric secrets of Freemasonry. He has taken one step forward but two steps backward, so to speak. Freemasonry breaks him from the edifices of the impersonal for a more declarative concrete engagement with others, but it also places new edifices over him; best seen when he is pondering the signs of square and its meanings. The most important contributions Freemasonry passes to Pierre is that “No one can attain truth by himself” and that belief in God is necessary for true joy and joyful services of others to be realized in life.

So, Pierre is leaving the realm of ideas and moving into the realm of the concrete. This is a good movement. He also becomes a sort of missionary to others, namely Andrei. Pierre’s movement to love and service of others is completed after the Battle of Borodino and his reunion with Natasha, whom he is in love with and eventually marries. It is this relationship of love with another person that Pierre has been struggling to actualize in life. The happiness found in love, sanctified through marriage, is the key to human meaning and happiness in the world. This is a standard and Christian outlook; and War and Peace is the quintessential Christian story. It is also the universal story because the story of the struggle for love in life is the human story. Sacrifice and love of others is what brings joy—Pierre finally experiences this joy in his marriage to Natasha.

Prince Andrei Bolkansky is the foil and perfect contrast to Pierre. When Andrei is introduced he seemingly has everything. He is handsome. He is married. His wife is pregnant. He comes from a good family. He is the aide-de-camp to General Mikhail Kutuzov, the greatest of the Russian generals. Yet, Andrei is hollow on the inside.

Andrei is seeking glory to find meaning in his life. As such, he begins the story as an Achilles literary archetype. He seeks glory in battle to find the immortality he craves. Yet, Andrei is not himself. He is depersonalized in this pursuit. Like Pierre, Napoleon is his hero. But Napoleon is Andrei’s hero for different reasons. Where Pierre finds Napoleon’s conquest of Europe through the distorted lens of bringing liberation to others, Andrei looks at Napoleon as the man he needs to become to find meaning and happiness in life. Up to the Battle of Austerlitz, Andrei seeks his “Toulon moment.” Andrei abandons his own identity in pursuit of becoming a cookie-cutter replication of Napoleon. His idolization of Napoleon is shattered during the Battle of Austerlitz when he looks up at the heavens, wounded, and concludes all was vanity and he opens himself up to the majestic beauty of the infinite.

Andrei’s Austerlitz moment is the beginning of a long and arduous transformation. Andrei was really serving himself—his pursuit of glory was for himself and himself only; though when he meets with Pierre in 1807 at Bald Hills he asserts otherwise. Andrei is confused, but Andrei always accomplishes what he sets his mind to. Right or wrong. Foolish or wise. Here is another contrast with Pierre. Pierre has great plans but can never execute them. Andrei makes his plans and devotes himself to them and realizes them. Believing his vain pursuit of glory was for others (though not realizing it was for himself), he sinks into isolation at Bald Hills as he becomes a sort of ascetic monk isolated and locked away from the world. But in his talk with Pierre he becomes more and more animated; he is experiencing a resurrection to new life. “His meeting with Pierre formed an epoch in Prince Andrei’s life. Though outwardly he continued to live in the same old way, inwardly he began a new life.” In this transformative conversation with Pierre Andrei comes to agree that Pierre was right; love of others, love of the world, relationships, not love of self is what brings meaning into life. Andrei subsequently struggles to achieve precisely that.

Where Pierre moves to embody love through service to others and marriage, Andrei’s becoming an image of Christ is through the struggle to forgive. In the heartwarming turned heart wrenching relationship of he and Natasha, Anatole Kuragin intruded and seduced the young Natasha which ruined their marriage plans. Andrei, in the events leading up to the Battle of Borodino, is seeking out Anatole to confront him—either in a duel or to kill him outright.

Andrei and Anatole have their meeting in a hospital during the Battle of Borodino. Anatole has lost a leg and is pain. Andrei recognizes him and could easily punish Anatole for his crimes. Instead, he comes to forgive him. As he thinks to himself, “Compassion, love of our brothers, for those who love us and for those who hate us, love of our enemies; yes, that love which God preached on earth and which Princess Marya taught me and I did not understand—that is what me sorry to part with life, that is what remained for me had I lived. But it is too late know it!” Beside Anatole, and others, Andrei weeps for all the errors, he, Anatole, and all men make in life.

But the movement from hollow and vain Achilles to an image of Christ is not yet complete until he comes face-to-face with Natasha. Natasha and other aristocrats escaping Napoleon’s invading forces pick up the wounded of Borodino and she finds Andrei among them. She begs him for forgiveness to which Andrei replies he already has. Although Andrei dies he does experience the loving joy that comes in love of others through forgiveness. In this respect Andrei becomes an image-bearer of Christ’s love and forgiveness.

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Johann Fichte was a student of Kant’s philosophy. Although little known in the English-speaking world, Fichte was one of the most important philosophers in 1790s and early 1800s until his death in 1814. If English-speakers have any awareness of Fichte, it will likely be through his “Address to the German Nation,” given during the Napoleonic Wars, which was part speech on the need for education and educational reform as well as a call for German unity against the French occupiers, or as one of many names mentioned by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. Fichte, apart from being a philosopher, a metaphysician and epistemologist, was also a political philosopher and civil servant. His work of political economy, Der Gessloschen Handelstatt, led him to becoming an advisor to the Prussian minister of Commerce in 1800. In fact, Fichte’s “Address to the German Nation” is the logical derivative of his larger philosophical projects.

Fichte considered himself a Kantian, a Kantian in spirit, as all the post-Kantian idealists did. That is, while they disagreed with the substance of Kant’s limited metaphysic and epistemology, they nevertheless took up the project of defending mind, consciousness, reason, against its potential enemies: the materialists and solipsists.

In 1794 Fichte entered the world of philosophical dialectic with the writing of his Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) In the introduction he laid out the two main schools in which all philosophies could be boxed in to. One school he called the dogmatists. The other school he called the idealists. The dogmatists were those scientistic materialists, materialists stretching as far back as the pre-Socratics, to the materialists of today, now known as the empiricists. The dogmatists were those whom Fichte opposed; for these mechanical materialists were dogmatic in their insistence that all life and laws could be reduced to the determinacy of the laws of motion. According to Fichte this reductive materialism moves us to an acceptance of determinism which has sweeping implications—all in the negative—as it relates to ethical life.

Fichte, in this sense, also wishes to actualize the Kantian ethical imperative. Fichte was, in a word, a moralist. He believed humans had duties and responsibilities to each other, to act, in the Kantian manner, in a way in which we would wish our actions to become universalized throughout the world. The dogmatists, in reducing knowledge to properties of mechanical laws of motion which deny free will and, therefore, responsibility, leave no room for morality. For morality hinges upon responsibility; for ethics is not a singular, solipsistic, endeavor. Ethics involves the other. That means ethics involves relationships with others. Which means ethics involves how we interact with others.

The idealists, whom Fichte considered himself part of, would have included the likes of Plato, Plotinus, Augustine—the broader Christian tradition—and, most importantly, Kant. The idealists, Fichte claimed, were concerned the perception. Today we call this phenomenology. From perception arises the concern for consciousness. From consciousness self-consciousness. From self-consciousness the subject, from the subject other subjects as we come to recognize that other thinking-subjects (persons), exist, and from this moral responsibility.

Fichte’s philosophy is grounded in the self. Which he calls the ego. And the ego is desire, movement, energy, creativity, moving to moral joy which is found in absolute knowledge and absolute freedom which is tied to responsibility; but we’ll get to that issue later.

Fichte’s break with Kant rested with Kant’s assertion that the human mind was cut off from the thing in itself; the noumenal realm. According to Fichte, while this does provide a clear foundation for some knowledge, it is nevertheless insufficient to achieve what Kant had earlier set out to achieve: to ward off the dangers of the mechanical philosophers. Accordingly, if objects (the things in themselves) remain separate and known to us, the mechanical philosophers will seize this opening and maintain that the objects (those things in themselves in the noumenal world) are the cause of our sensations and this once again reduces humans to objects. For if the mind cannot perceive or have experience of these things-in-themselves this means we cannot be sure that everything exists and can be perceived through the mind as Kant argued. Thus, Fichte is a true son to the Kantian tradition. He wants to produce a philosophy of mind, which is the philosophy of ego, which is all-encompassing and all-knowing, which will prevent any crack and crevice for the mechanical materialists to exploit. Like Kant, Fichte is concerned with (re)establishing a foundational philosophy for the apperceptive unity of the I and Not-I to exist. Things as they are must be tied to self.

Fichte’s philosophy is therefore not only grounded in the self, it is grounded in the heroic self, the heroic ego which strives for encounter and conquest, to encounter and conquer the noumenal world, the world of others, the world of the Not-I, the world of objects and other egos different than that of my own. In this way too, he hopes to resolve the Cartesian solipsistic dilemma even though, in his own life, Fichte was accused of being a solipsist.

The charges that Fichte was a solipsist rest on unfamiliarity of the Christian psychological and ontological tradition which Fichte was, himself, unknowingly inheriting. In the Christian tradition humans are images of the Trinity. The Trinity is simultaneously pluralistic yet united, three in one, Father (Memory), Son (Intellect), and Spirit (Love). Fichte’s movement of ego to Absolute ego, or the Absolute-I, which is the unity of the I with the Not-I, i.e. ego with other egos, follows this basic Christian framework. There must be a unitive link that binds egos together into the Absolute, just as the three persons of the Trinity are bounded together by, and through, love. This binding together is knowledge. I come to know you, that which I am not, the Not-I, through knowledge. This knowledge is achieved through encounter and engagement. Recognition.

The ego, Fichte, asserts, is moved by an insatiable quest, a desire, for knowing. Roland Kany and Dieter Hienrich, two contemporary scholars of German idealism, have written how Fichte inherits and builds upon “Augustine’s original insight of man,” the se cogitare and se nosse. Man thinks so as to come to know. His thinking is motivated by deep existential impulses and desires. Man is, as Spinoza said, in riffing from Augustin, a creature of desire. Thus, Augustine’s will which seeks after God is now the Fichtean ego seeking after the absolute (the temporalization of God).

The ego encounters other egos (the not-I) and in these encounters grows mutual recognition and understanding. It is in the phenomenal realm, nature, that the I-Not-I encounter develops; the social ego begins to emerge through these encounters of the I and Not-I to the point of the I and Not-I fusing together as one, two become one, in absolute knowledge of each other, to form the Absolute-I.

The ego’s transformation to absolute ego, the I to Absolute I, is by the I’s conquest of the unknown. That engagement, encounter, and recognizing the unknown—the noumenal, or the Not-I—leads to its absorption into the self. Self-knowledge is only possible through this coming to understanding of the totality of the whole. Fichte’s epistemology of the heroic ego is like the adventurous traveler, who is the ego, climbing—indeed struggling—up the mountain top to get to the peak to look over the vast horizon of wholeness. Only in completing this journey does the ego absorb all, understand all, and becomes one with totality. At the mountain top the ego is transformed into the absolute ego which has broken down the barrier of the unknown and that which was previously unknown has now revealed itself to the heroic ego.

This ego-to-ego-to Superego, or I-Not-I-to-Absolute-I movement, is simultaneously the movement to absolute knowing where the thing-in-itself (the not-I) previously unknown and unknowable to me becomes known, and the unveiling of oneself to the other (and vice-versa) like two loves unclothing to share their most intimate secrets with each other. I know you and you know me, and this only came about by encounter and recognition; not the domination and exploitation of putting the other up on the rack of scientific interrogation as Bacon speculated. This is, as Fichte asserts, the very heart—desire—of the ego. That two become one in absolute knowledge. It is a mutual journey; it entails the other to participate as much as it does the self.

This I-Not-I to Absolute-I movement is only possible in the phenomenal realm of nature. In Fichte’s reimagining, nature is that barrier that separates the I and Not-I, nature is the barrier to the noumenal realm that must be slowly broken down and penetrated into through this dialectic of encounter and adventure. As this barrier is broken down, and the ego becomes socialized and loving, the I and Not-I grow closer together and fuse as one, becoming the Absolute-I. This is the restoration of the apperceptive unity that was lost in Bacon and Descartes.

Moreover, and in agreement with Kant, the I-Think knows through consciousness. Fichte’s epistemology is not only grounded in the self, it is founded upon self-consciousness; the logical exhaustion of any epistemology grounded in the self. I come to know through coming to know the other not as object but as subject; I can truly come to know its essence, its inner self, itself; because we are now one. This occurs in the mind, the ego, the absolute ego. Not as a detached observer but as an intimate participater. That participation, of course, was through the encounter and recognition of the I and Other. If this sounds familiar to Hegel’s dialectic of master-slave, of I and Other, in the Phenomenology you would be correct; for Hegel, a contemporary of Fichte who taught as the same university, was influenced by Fichte though Hegel subsequently took Fichte’s I-Not-I encounter and historicized it.

Fichte’s alteration of the Kantian gives of mind and the phenomenal realm of space and time is at once a stronger return to nature than with Kant but also a stronger sublation of nature through the ego-to-ego encounter en route to the harmonization of the ego-to-ego dialectic of encounter and recognition. Nature, the space existing as a barrier to the free creativity of the go, must be made in our image. Much like how Freud said where id is ego shall be, where nature is I shall be. Nature, at once, is that which allows for the encounter of the I and Not I to move to Absolute I, and nature is that space which allows for the moral community, the ethische Gemeinshaft, to actualize itself. But in this development to moral community nature is altogether overcome in the realization of moral community.

This returns us to Fichte’s ethical imperative. If the reductive deterministic materialists are right, there is no moral order. All is atoms, particles, in motion following the laws of motion until they dissipate in atrophy.

The unity which is achieved in the movement to Absolute I, or Absolute Ego, is not merely based on the newfound and absolute knowledge we have of each other, but based on the responsibilities and duties we now share to each other. In order to retain this unity I have responsibilities to you as you have responsibilities to me, because it is through responsibilities to each other that the eternal iteration of the I-You encounter perpetuates itself. The I-Other becoming I-You which is really I to myself as two have become one, relationship is the continuous and eternal dialectic of engagement which self-perpetuates the unity now shared. Again, if Fichte had drawn upon Christian theology more explicitly he would have had better grounds to defend himself against charges of atheism; charges Fichte disputed and charges his son, a famous Lutheran theologian and philosopher himself, always defended his father from. For if the unity of love which binds the Trinity together ceased, the Trinity would fall apart. In the same manner, the love which now perpetuates and holds the Absolute I together must perpetuate itself through the duties and responsibilities we share to one another otherwise that unity which fused I and Not-I together would dissipate.

All self-consciousness, freedom, and reason, is bound together through rational engagement and counter. We subsequently become accountable to the other because in being accounted to the other I am also accountable to myself; I have a responsibility to the other which means I, the ego, have a duty within me to uphold these responsibilities. My well-being, as well as the other’s, depend upon this. To shirk responsibility is to become detached. To embrace responsibility is to become engaged. True freedom, according to Fichte, is the freedom to choose responsibility. It is the freedom to be dutiful and loving to those who constitute the Absolute-I. And, in total knowledge, I know I have these responsibilities which led me to action. Responsibility upholds the unity of relations which have been forged in the I-Not-I, ego-to-ego, movement to Absolute-I: The moral community manifested on earth.

Furthermore, this synthesis of egos leas to the moral joy consummated in love. The “I replacing God” is the Fichtean temporalization of divinization. I embody divinity and the Absolute I is the embodiment of divinity realized as all I’s, as part of the Absolute-I, becomes the Godhead incarnate in the world. The I-Not-I have become Absolute-I in love.

However, Fichte’s philosophy posed new problems. These problems were subsequently dealt with Friedrich Schelling, a student of Fichte. But before we can move to Schelling we need to pivot to intellectual precursors and influences on Schelling: Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

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