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The sickening fumes of inner corruption
Nov. 10th, 2012 02:24 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 6. High today: 10.
Whenever I'm cleaning, I think: "One must imagine Sisyphus a cleaning lady." Sometime this year, or maybe last year, I thought this while I was cleaning at the cottage--the border between inside and outside being fairly porous at the cottage, I spend a relatively large amount of time cleaning there (someone this summer remarked on how clean the cottage is, which I found funny, because I think of the cottage as being basically dirty--but because it's basically dirty, I clean it a lot, and so it's mostly clean)--and it struck me that I'd always been taking that last line of The Myth of Sisyphus--"one must imagine Sisyphus happy"--the wrong way, and that's why it had always seemed so opaque. If you understand it as the inverse of that idea of Nietzsche's I like, that you only have a problem about meaning if you're unhappy with life, then it makes perfect sense: if Sisyphus is going to keep rolling that damn rock, you have to imagine he's happy about it. Or else....
The first time I remember being annoyed by a reviewer saying "anyone who thinks they got a innellect gotta read this book"--the idea of intellectuals always makes me think of Mariel Hemingway's character in Creator saying to Peter O'Toole's character, "They say I got this innellect"--I was reading a review of one of John Ralston Saul's books in the Globe, which I've felt at least for a long time that was by Stan Persky, but I'd hate to say it was and be wrong about it ... oh, but look, I'd be right; here the bloody thing is--it's a review of The Unconscious Civilization, and it ends like this: "The Unconscious Civilization is a kind of intellectual last chance for both young geniuses and old hedgehogs everywhere. Notwithstanding Saul's praise of doubt, I've seldom felt so certain that this is a book that one must read." Well, see, I'm pretty certain, and I was pretty certain then (having by that time had a look at Saul's doorstop Voltaire's Bastards and not having seen anything different in Persky's review of The Unconscious Civilization), that young geniuses shouldn't waste their time reading Saul's books, but ought to skip right to the books Saul reads. (But of course wastes of time are all relative. In those days I was spending a lot of time playing minesweeper, in the little box of an "apartment" where I very distinctly recall sitting and reading that review. (That was my first apartment, and it had one thing going for it: bats lived in the basement of the building, and at night they would come swooping up the stairs and looping around the hall, and go back down, over and over and over. This did make doing laundry a bit unnerving.)) One of the main things Strauss and Kojeve argue over is the role of the political intellectual in relation to the philosopher--I don't remember what it is they argue about, but the idea is that the intellectual mediates between the universal thought of the philosopher and the particular political situation, and does this for the sake of the politician, who can't see how to make use of the philosopher (who doesn't want to be made use of anyway) ... or something like that. (I would hazard a hazardous guess that Kojeve is not so big on this distinction as Strauss is, and if so, I'd tend toward his side of the matter, even while feeling a strong sympathy with the Straussian philosopher's antipathy for political impurification. (Anyone like some sentences?) Anyway, Saul strikes me as someone who fits that intellectual bill perfectly, which means that he may be useful if you want to know what to think, because you yourself happen to be a bit lacking in intellect. (For that matter, Persky's second-last paragraph suggests an even less flattering possibility: "His scathing criticism, for instance, of the current corporate obsession with 'aligning basic education with the needs of the job market' tallies with everything I've experienced in two decades of classroom teaching. 'What the corporatist approach seems to miss is the simple role of higher education - to teach thought,' Saul reminds us. 'A student who graduates with mechanistic skills and none of the habits of thought has not been educated. Such people will have difficulty playing their role as citizens.' Amen." Amen indeed; Saul, at least in Persky's portrayal, is reciting the Young Intellectual's liturgy--although it's hard for me to say how old it might've seemed already in 1996. That was the year after Mike Harris became premier of Ontario, which got the kids--me included, of course--chanting it hard. (I am certainly open to the possibility that I'm being unfair to Saul, and I will admit that it is highly probable that reading Saul is in any event more useful than playing minesweeper ... or, for that matter, reading me, or, quite possibly, writing me. I don't know about you, but I'm beginning to find me a bit insufferable. Again.))
Anyway, to make a short story long, today I was reading this thing in The New Criterion, linked off of aldaily, lamenting the death of books, and one of the many quoteable things it says is this: "An intellectual might be defined as someone who elaborates justifications for his own tastes and preferences, as metaphysics was once defined as the finding of bad reasons for what we all believe on instinct." That has nothing much in particular to do with the Strauss/Kojeve idea of an intellectual, but it's another bill that fits for a large number of cases, and a simpler, and less insulting (I mean to the reader, not to the intellectual), reason to steer clear of them if you can help it.
Ugh. Fresh air! Fresh air!
Whenever I'm cleaning, I think: "One must imagine Sisyphus a cleaning lady." Sometime this year, or maybe last year, I thought this while I was cleaning at the cottage--the border between inside and outside being fairly porous at the cottage, I spend a relatively large amount of time cleaning there (someone this summer remarked on how clean the cottage is, which I found funny, because I think of the cottage as being basically dirty--but because it's basically dirty, I clean it a lot, and so it's mostly clean)--and it struck me that I'd always been taking that last line of The Myth of Sisyphus--"one must imagine Sisyphus happy"--the wrong way, and that's why it had always seemed so opaque. If you understand it as the inverse of that idea of Nietzsche's I like, that you only have a problem about meaning if you're unhappy with life, then it makes perfect sense: if Sisyphus is going to keep rolling that damn rock, you have to imagine he's happy about it. Or else....
The first time I remember being annoyed by a reviewer saying "anyone who thinks they got a innellect gotta read this book"--the idea of intellectuals always makes me think of Mariel Hemingway's character in Creator saying to Peter O'Toole's character, "They say I got this innellect"--I was reading a review of one of John Ralston Saul's books in the Globe, which I've felt at least for a long time that was by Stan Persky, but I'd hate to say it was and be wrong about it ... oh, but look, I'd be right; here the bloody thing is--it's a review of The Unconscious Civilization, and it ends like this: "The Unconscious Civilization is a kind of intellectual last chance for both young geniuses and old hedgehogs everywhere. Notwithstanding Saul's praise of doubt, I've seldom felt so certain that this is a book that one must read." Well, see, I'm pretty certain, and I was pretty certain then (having by that time had a look at Saul's doorstop Voltaire's Bastards and not having seen anything different in Persky's review of The Unconscious Civilization), that young geniuses shouldn't waste their time reading Saul's books, but ought to skip right to the books Saul reads. (But of course wastes of time are all relative. In those days I was spending a lot of time playing minesweeper, in the little box of an "apartment" where I very distinctly recall sitting and reading that review. (That was my first apartment, and it had one thing going for it: bats lived in the basement of the building, and at night they would come swooping up the stairs and looping around the hall, and go back down, over and over and over. This did make doing laundry a bit unnerving.)) One of the main things Strauss and Kojeve argue over is the role of the political intellectual in relation to the philosopher--I don't remember what it is they argue about, but the idea is that the intellectual mediates between the universal thought of the philosopher and the particular political situation, and does this for the sake of the politician, who can't see how to make use of the philosopher (who doesn't want to be made use of anyway) ... or something like that. (I would hazard a hazardous guess that Kojeve is not so big on this distinction as Strauss is, and if so, I'd tend toward his side of the matter, even while feeling a strong sympathy with the Straussian philosopher's antipathy for political impurification. (Anyone like some sentences?) Anyway, Saul strikes me as someone who fits that intellectual bill perfectly, which means that he may be useful if you want to know what to think, because you yourself happen to be a bit lacking in intellect. (For that matter, Persky's second-last paragraph suggests an even less flattering possibility: "His scathing criticism, for instance, of the current corporate obsession with 'aligning basic education with the needs of the job market' tallies with everything I've experienced in two decades of classroom teaching. 'What the corporatist approach seems to miss is the simple role of higher education - to teach thought,' Saul reminds us. 'A student who graduates with mechanistic skills and none of the habits of thought has not been educated. Such people will have difficulty playing their role as citizens.' Amen." Amen indeed; Saul, at least in Persky's portrayal, is reciting the Young Intellectual's liturgy--although it's hard for me to say how old it might've seemed already in 1996. That was the year after Mike Harris became premier of Ontario, which got the kids--me included, of course--chanting it hard. (I am certainly open to the possibility that I'm being unfair to Saul, and I will admit that it is highly probable that reading Saul is in any event more useful than playing minesweeper ... or, for that matter, reading me, or, quite possibly, writing me. I don't know about you, but I'm beginning to find me a bit insufferable. Again.))
Anyway, to make a short story long, today I was reading this thing in The New Criterion, linked off of aldaily, lamenting the death of books, and one of the many quoteable things it says is this: "An intellectual might be defined as someone who elaborates justifications for his own tastes and preferences, as metaphysics was once defined as the finding of bad reasons for what we all believe on instinct." That has nothing much in particular to do with the Strauss/Kojeve idea of an intellectual, but it's another bill that fits for a large number of cases, and a simpler, and less insulting (I mean to the reader, not to the intellectual), reason to steer clear of them if you can help it.
Ugh. Fresh air! Fresh air!
