Philosophy – My Own RE:public

Catharine Macaulay

Yes, I did say I was done with family ties! But then along came Catherine Macaulay in an LRB piece by Colin Kidd (Vol. 45 No. 17 · 7 September 2023). No, she is not related to Lord Macaulay who is the great-uncle of G. M(acaulay). Trevelyan. What all did have in common, though, were their ambitious writing down of the ‘big’ histories of a (then) ‘big’ England. And this Catharine did so well before those blokes – in a multi-volume affair written over twenty years titled The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution (1763-1783). (Only much later came Lord (Th. Babington) Macaulay also making it to five volumes with his The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848) and Trevelyan, of course writing in the first half of the 20th century, had diverse titles to his credit but could also not resist a History of England in 1928, and in one tome.)

Kidd’s review of Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings edited by Max Skjönsberg for the Cambridge University Press series of Texts in the History of Political Thought comes for me as a wonderful introduction. Encouraged to look around, I discern some sense of renewed interest in Macaulay, and it is hardly surprising; for, however well-situated, however intelligent, the horizon for a woman in the 18th century was far and her opportunities limited in scope and only those with the most pertinacious of character and originality of thought have left their mark.

by Robert Edge Pine oil on canvas, circa 1775

For further information, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a lengthy entry, which interestingly mentions the “Blue Stockings” portrait (above r.) in which Catharine Macaulay is seated left beneath Apollo and behind her stands, with goblet in hand, Hannah More whose acquaintanceship and name was to live on (via Zachary) in that other Macaulay/Trevelyan tribe. Further, a first taste of her original voice can be read at the Online Library of Liberty (new to me!) in a text written in 1790 (in response to Edmund Burke) on republicanism and the Revolution in France.

Keeping up with the Joneses

… or, more precisely, the Duncan-Joneses.

With the regularity in which people, ideas, situations intersect in my readings and observations, I have often been taken aback. That, perhaps, the blessing – or the curse – of being widely informed! Regrettably; not deeply, rather tending to the shallow.

A case in point:

In David Edmonds’ book about the Vienna Circle that I have written on in the previous post, there is an examination of the difficulties many of its members had as they sought refuge from the Nazi terror that was taking over much of the Continent. Therein quoted were some fragments of correspondence between Karl Popper and Austin Duncan-Jones, Professor of Philosophy at Birmingham [pp 240-242 in the German edition read by me], in which the former was invited there as a guest lecturer.

The Shakespearean scholar, Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones, died in October. This I noted with sadness, not because I know her work – for which I am sorry because her ‘hatchet job’ on William S. – his character that is – sounds terrific and original – but because I know her to be the mother of Emily Wilson – and that means an awful lot.

The point is: I wondered about the name. And, lo and behold, the first mentioned Prof. Duncan-Jones is the father of the second said.

And all this means? Professors of Philosophy beget those of Literature beget those of Classics? Perhaps. Or that an academic career in the UK has, or once had, an awful lot to do with family and class? I don’t know. Mostly, just a very interesting generational chain of circumstance and one from which, in this familial instance, very many have benefited – and continue to.

The death of Prof. Duncan-Jones was reported upon by some of the more culturally attentive British media and noted by me in a Twitter thread (begun by Bee Wilson and retweeted by Emily), and The New York Times has now run an obituary.

Last waltz in Vienna

The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle – by David Edmonds.

An immensely interesting book just read in German translation. What begins as a lively intellectual romp of the highest niveau ends – as one always knows it will – in animosity and some enmity, in flight and exile and the tragedy of war and the holocaust and, for one, in his murder.

*written by David Edmonds, pub. C.H. Beck (2021)*

The Vienna Circle was a group of scientists and philosophers that formed in the first decades of the 20th century; meeting and publishing regularly in changing constellations and degrees of exclusivity, united by a shared antipathy to the metaphysical zeitgeist and in search of a more stringentphilosophy of science based on modern logic (inspired firstly by Ernst Mach and later by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus) and an empirical methodology (finding fulfillment only under the stringency of verificationism) – to become known as logical empiricism. Their ranks included people like: Otto Neurath, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann …and, yes, Moritz Schlick … And in their orbit: Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Alfred Tarski …. Many were political, many Jewish or with Jewish associations of some sort and to various degrees.

As the people, so not the place. It is an irony of fate (and for some just a matter of birth), that this exquisite group of argumentative rational thinkers should congregate in Vienna, a place that by the 1930s was being increasingly consumed by unreason, as the dark shadows of nationalism and antisemitism fell about them – from within and soon from without with the Anschluß into the German Reich in 1938. Edmonds’ book distinguishes itself in its conjuring of the growing atmosphere of, first, disquiet and then angst, often illustrated through vignettes surrounding the main players and their complicated and sometimes compromised situations.

Women don’t get the short shrift by Edmonds either. Notable is the tenacity of Rose Rand (born in Lemberg – now Lviv), as a young woman actively participating within the ‘circle’ (including the writing of protocols) during the early thirties as Austria imploded, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered in her émigré status as she struggled to keep her ambitions alive – making ends meet mostly through teaching and translating the works of others – first in England and then the United States where she died – alone, as she seems to have been most of her life – in 1980.

Rand didn’t leave Austria until 1939 and it was then – or so it is presumed- with the assistance of another woman: the philosophy professor Susan Stebbing. As apparent by the fore linked SEP entry, she, a formidable intellect who made major contributions to analytical philosopher – and an argumentative voice in the logical positivism debate.

And then there is the remarkable Tess Simpson. As the long time secretary of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) and its successor the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), Simpson was instrumental in helping many of the Vienna Circle (amongst many others) find safe haven. [This organization continues their work to this day as Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA)] David Edmonds has previously written on Simpson for The Jewish Chronicle here, and his 2017 Radio 4 documentary, “Miss Simpson’s Children” is (as I write) still available.

For me, alone an introduction to these three women made this book a wonderful read. But there is, of course, so much more.

Happy Birthday Bertie!

To be remembered: Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970). Born 15o years ago today; renowned mathematician and logician, a founder of analytic philosophy, a prolific (and accessible) writer and commentator of the 20th century, a Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, an influential public intellectual and a voice for peace – and as such one with particular resonance at this time.

Because birthdays, one’s own or that of another, always seem to inspire reflection on the passing years, Russell’s short essay contemplating (and so titled) “How to Grow Old” (from his 1956 collection Portraits from Memory and Other Essays at the Internet Archive) is a fitting read. It’s simple and entertaining and it’s message is timeless, and begins by restating its purpose as actually being concerned with how not to grow old. In a nutshell: genetic disposition is one thing, health issues another, but the greatest dangers lay in nostalgia and regret, and clinging to the past and to a world of youth that is no longer yours. Rather, one should look to the future and pursue a broad range of interests, the more impersonal the better. His essay nears its end with the difficult contemplation of death that faces us all, and described with the metaphorical river of life.

[…]Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.[…]
from the essay “How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell.

*Bertrand Russell by Lady Ottoline Morrell, vintage snapshot print 1920, © National Portrait Galle*ry, London

Sometimes referred to as Mr. Russell, with sly, good-humored respect one may presume, but for Virginia Woolf (and for our photographer above, Ottoline Morrell), more often than not, he was just plain Bertie – another of the brilliant, mercurial, imperfect figures that entered her sphere through family and acquaintance. So, as Woolf may well have proclaimed should she have encountered him on any 18th May: Happy Birthday, Bertie!

Dynamite!

Only a few days ago I completed reading, in German translation, Sue Prideaux’s quite wonderful Nietzsche biography I am Dynamite! Explosive is it not, neither in the physically reactive sense nor posing as celebrity exposé, but rather a fabulously choreographed display of fireworks in a night sky – tantalising in sight and sound, a vivid array playing against the dark expanse; up there with a whoosh, brilliant and pointed in the ascent, hanging tenuously in the heavens, then falling fast and with a fizz, fading to nothing…

Should God be dead, nothing beckons from an afterlife thus denied, but neither Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche nor his legacy are nothing.

Like many – or most – I have not read Nietzsche and, like just about as many, those thoughts I have had in passing have been heavily compromised by the association of his person and philosophy with Hitler and Nazis and everything that implies – a false premise it now seems clear to me, neither of his making nor intent. Also, I should say, I have been just as aware of enough voices over the years pleading a case for Nietzsche and seeking to free him from the abuses of history, but these included complex philosophical arguments beyond most (read as: me!), and so one is (again, read as: I am!) left with the baggage of Halbwissen.

For that reason I don’t dare delve too deep here, but because I enjoyed reading it so much, I must put down some words of recommendation, and insist that Prideaux’s book is absolutely not an academic philosophical treatise, though the philosophy is there for those who wish to look, and only demands an interest in the subject – sympathy for him is assured to follow; for all but the most hardened anti-Nietzchean.

No, not sympathy for the devil, but for a long dead, white man (characteristics seriously out of vogue!) of stellar intellect; an original thinker and non-conformist who struggled with physical and mental disabilities most of his life (the precise nature of which remain unclear), burdened with a despicable family – most especially sister Elisabeth, so instrumental in the perversion of his ideas and work. And charming and funny he could be – I’m sure Prideaux didn’t invent these traits; she found them and relays them on to her readers.

Should God be dead, what is there but to live a life; joyful and rich in experience and pleasures. And these pleasures Nietzsche seeks, in his writing life, in the choices he makes, and the friendships he fosters.

In speaking of these friendships, it is interesting that threesomes seemed to play an important part in Nietzsche’s life – and were always doomed to failure; whether with his mother and sister or in his relationship with Lou Andreas-Salomé and Paul Rée. (How I want to believe Andreas-Salomé could have saved him, but probably not.) But what I found especially fascinating, was the saga (it had to be a saga I suppose!) surrounding Nietzsche’s quite extraordinary friendship with Richard and Cosima Wagner. So wonderfully rendered by Prideaux; to be imagined, the brilliance of this triumvirate and their quest for a Dionysian alternative to the rational Zeitgeist. Alas, short-lived; away from the idyllic Tribschen, and driven by their conceits and obsessions with all things Bayreuth, the Wagners’ anti-Semitic, anti-French, even anti-European sentiments, which had increasingly irritated Nietzsche, are intensified to embrace a virulent German nationalism that was contrary to all the cultural ideals to which the three had once aspired. Conspired. Suffice to say, it becomes clear that the relationship is not going to end well, and it doesn’t.

Four more for thought

Feuer der Freiheit. Die Rettung der Philosophie in finsteren Zeiten (1933 – 1943) by Wolfram Eilenberger

… may be translated into English as something like: Fire of Freedom (liberty) or Flames of Liberty – The Saving of Philosophy in Dark (gloomy, sinister) Times …

Recently published in Germany, this new book from Wolfram Eilenberger is conceptually very similar to Time of the Magicians that I wrote about a short time ago. When Feuer der Freiheit will be published in English I don’t know, that it will, given the international success of the aforesaid, I am very confident.

Briefly I will say, that this time Eilenberger invites us to follow the paths of four women, and in the ten years from 1933-43. Until I read the book, I can only divulge who the subjects are: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil and Ayn Rand. Hannah Arendt, of course, arose in Time of the Magicians in terms of her relationship with Heidegger, and does so again in our own gloomy present – though far removed from the very sinister 30’s – where her star has risen on both sides of the Atlantic. Madame de Beauvoir has survived her contradictions and the ruthlessness of competing feminist movements to retain icon status (and on her own!). Simone Weil; one can but wonder, for she died so young, but I can’t help but think of the unstable genius of Wittgenstein or Benjamin. And, just as for Cass Sunstein in this review for a recent biography of Ayn Rand (limited access at The New York Review of Books), I too as a young thing had an inexplicable attraction to The Fountainhead, and in extension to its author.

I very much look forward to seeing how Eilenberger interweaves the lives of this extraordinary group in a very extraordinary time. For anyone who can read German more than a bit, I suggest this review by Jens Bisky in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and, if you can really read German, don’t wait for the translation, be like me and put the book on your reading list now. Popular it may well be, and personality driven, but I would warrant place enough is given to an exposition of the philosophical ideas driving his subjects.

Magical mystery tour de force

*“Time of the Magicians”, by Wolfram Eilenberger, trans. Shaun Whiteside*

Whilst in the midst of reading Wolfram Eilenberger’s book Zeit der Zauberer (2018) in German, I was interested to see that now a couple of years later an English translation has been published by Penguin Press. Not that many German non-fiction works get that far. And not that many as well reviewed – a very good review indeed by Jennifer Szalai at the NYT that hopefully encourages some good sales and thoughtful reading on that side of the Atlantic.

Certainly, I enjoyed the book immensely, and Eilenberger’s interwoven portrait of four extraordinary men – Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Wittgenstein – formulating their ideas into interconnecting but individual philosophies amidst the ruins, so to speak, of the First World War and the disintegrating Weimar Republic, is told in a very winning and readable way; some German critics found it to be too so. (Enough of the Feuilletonisten here have a tendency I think to want to keep “high” culture just that!) Believe me, an awful lot of German writers struggle with what one may call ‘accessibility’ – that is, not just informing and hoping for the best, but presenting difficult subject matter such that it reads as a narrative thereby capturing the attentive reader. This, then, foremost is an immensely readable book.

Cover “Zeit der Zauberer” by Wolfram Eilenberger

There is no denying that some of the stuff is indeed difficult, or as difficult as one wants to make it; one could go barmy trying to extricate the precise and nuanced meaning, especially in terms of the references to primary sources, and the stringency of formulation and terminology is a hurdle for those without a pertinent academic background (like, guess who!). My reading, then, concentrated on the living in the time, and I conquered my irritations at just how many ways these guys came up with of saying approximately the same thing and all in the interest of justifying their (to be fair, ‘our’) existence. When I was really irritated I would mumble something along the lines of: What hocus-pocus! But they were, after all, magicians of a special sort; all occupied with their own very special brand of magical thinking!

A philosophical mix – or fix!

Some balm for the tormented psyche (or tortured soul in shifted state)! Of which there are enough in these days of late! A bit of philosophising can never go astray; here, then, a very nice podcast (this from Spotify, but only because I can embed it here which doesn’t apply to other platforms like Apple from which it is also available) that has come my way by chance. It is somehow consoling to reflect upon the fact that so many of our trials and tribulations, that we recognise as particular to our own time, have in fact been pondered upon by our ancestors since antiquity.

The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast

Aimed at teachers and students in the United Kingdom, some of the subject matter is fairly dense, some not so, and mostly accessible to an enquiring mind, and there could be worse ways in which to while away an hour or so. Here is the website with some further information, and from which it is easier to explore and dive into episodes of particular interest.