The Whole Five Feet

Volume 29

The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

It's often said that Thomas Jefferson took scissors to his copy of the Gospels, excising all elements of the supernatural and leaving behind only Jesus' ethical philosophy. This, for him, was the real Jesus, one who ended just where everyone else's Jesus began. Several times this week, I thought of doing a similar cut-up job on Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. My version of the book would leave out all extended observations about plant life, about animals, about geological features -- everything that suggests that the book was written by the most important scientist since Newton. If this seems short-sighted to you, I would be more than happy to send you my scraps, which will be filled with passages like this:

The carnivorous beetles, or Carabidae, appear in extremely few numbers within the tropics: this is the more remarkable when compared to the case of the carnivorous quadrupeds, which are so abundant in hot countries. I was struck with this observation both on entering Brazil, and when I saw the many elegant and active forms of the Harpalidae re-appearing on the temperate plains of La Plata. Do the very numerous spiders and rapacious Hymenoptera supply the place of the carnivorous beetles? The carrion-feeders and Brachelytra are very uncommon; on the other hand, the Rhyncophora and Chrysomelidae, all of which depend on the vegetable world for subsistence, are present in astonishing numbers.

This business goes on unbroken for some time, which means the cutting job would be fairly straightforward. Once all the important science is removed, I would be left with my Voyage of the Beagle, a travel narrative worthy of Conrad. In it, an English naturalist, a skeptic and a rationalist, spends several years travelling through the wilds of South America and the Pacific Islands. He rides through the Argentine planes with Gauchos, who teach him to throw a laso. He stays for some time as the guest of a despotic Spanish general. On the shore of Tahiti he is met by the tattooed faces of the natives. His trip is occasionally slowed by the overthrow of local governments. Some locals think he possesses magic powers because of his compass and similar modern gadgets; others seem as worldly as a London gentleman. Our hero sees some areas untouched by the West and others where colonialism and slavery have done their worst. The same powers of observation he applies to fossil remains, he also applies to these diverse human societies. He finds most of them welcoming and hospitable and yet a little unnerving nonetheless. Only a page or two before the above passage about the Carabidae and the Harpalidae would have been, will be the following passage, typical of the book my cut-up job would leave behind:

An old Portuguese priest ... took me out to hunt with him. The sport consisted in turning into the cover a few dogs, and then patiently waiting to fire at any animal which might appear. We were accompanied by the son of a neighbouring farmer -- a good specimen of a wild Brazilian youth. He was dressed in a tattered old shirt and trousers, and had his head uncovered: he carried an old-fashioned gun and a large knife. The habit of carrying the knife is universal; and in traversing a thick wood it is almost necessary, on account of the creeping plants. The frequent occurrence of murder may be partly attributed to this habit.

In my Voyage, as in a Conrad novel, the well meaning Western narrator can't wholly be trusted. A bit of unease creeps in for me as I read those words specimen and wild applied to this Brazilian boy. At first this naturalist's habit of classification seems charming, but two curious facts about our scientist-narrator slowly emerge. The first is that this student of the natural order greatly prefers the civilized to the wild. The second is that he is quick to make judgments -- about animals, about climate, and about people -- that seem strikingly subjective and unscientific. And so we get the following description of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego:

These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make one�s self believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy: how much more reasonably the same question may be asked with respect to these barbarians!

The relationship between Darwin's theories and some of the last century's more chilling ideas about human progress remains a matter of great intellectual debate. I wouldn't attempt to wade into those waters, especially since I've already admitted to skimming all of the Origin of Species and large chunks of this book. Regardless, it should be said first of all that Darwin abhorred slavery and was shocked by the Spanish treatment of the South American natives. It should also be said that he was equally shocked by the natives treatment of their horses. Lastly, one can't avoid the fact that for Darwin British colonialism was a very different matter.

It is impossible not to look forward with high expectations to the future progress of nearly an entire hemisphere. The march of improvement, consequent on the introduction of Christianity throughout the South Sea, probably stands by itself in the records of history... these changes have now been effected by the philanthropic spirit of the British nation... It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag, seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity, and civilization.

There may be no meaningful connection between Darwin's ideas about evolution and his ideas about the march of (human) improvement. And either way it's not always fair to read historical documents through the lens of the present. But as I read this passage, I thought of the current state of some of the areas that have flown the British flag: Iraq, Pakistan, Zimbabwe. The curdling irony here is one of the most interesting features of my Voyage of the Beagle.

--CRB, September 5, 2007

Volume 31

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography was a revelation to me. It was long a staple of great books programs, but I was completely unfamiliar with it before I started reading. Unlike the other memoirs among the Classics -- Franklin's Autobiography, Augustine's Confessions -- which are at heart didactic works, Cellini's Autobiography doesn't seek to use its author's life as an example.

This is probably a good thing. Cellini was born in Florence in 1500. He began writing his life's story in 1558. In between, he became the most distinguished goldsmith in Renaissance Italy, as well as a leading sculptor. He flourished in an artistic circle that included Michelangelo. He fought in the Sack of Rome. He witnessed the arrival of the plague to Italy. He was patronised by multiple popes and one king of France. He was a rival to several cardinals. He was exiled from both Florence and Rome. He committed at least two murders -- one to avenge the murder of his younger brother -- and was generally quick to solve disputes with his dagger. He was brought up on charges of using one of his models after the Italian fashion (the original Italian is quite clear on the implication that he was a soddomitaccio, but the English translator demures). Another model bore him a daughter, whom he never saw after the first days of her life. Cellini recounts these facts unapologetically: he isn't offering a confession, but a justification.

All of the above has been confirmed by contemporary sources, but there is much in the book that defies credibility and much else that, though possible, has been proven untrue. Which may suggest that Cellini's memoirs -- like James Frey's and David Sedaris's and Augusten Burroughs' -- are really works of fiction. Certainly, the book reads like a novel -- a loose, baggy pre-modern monster of a novel. Its narrator -- who doesn't seem to be quite the same person as its author -- prefigures the scheming anti-heroes in Balzac and Stendhal. This might not be that remarkable, excpet that Cellini wrote only a few years after the appearance of Pantagruel and Gargantua and almost fifty years before the appearance of Don Quixote.

If the novel as an art form didn't really exist in Cellini's time, one consequence of this fact seems to be that considerable leeway was given to fictionalizing within nominally non-fiction works. Perhaps one might better say that, if there was no tradition of serious prose fiction, there was likewise no tradition of non-fiction. Many of the essays that I've read in the Classics would have been called short stories if they'd been written in another time. For that matter, most of the drama and the poetry in the Classics grapples with ostensibly historical facts. Readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey don't want to be told that there was no Trojan War, any more than readers of the Bible want to be told that there was no Garden of Eden. The earliest novels played on this fact, using epistolary, journalistic or other documentary forms to suggest a realistic basis for their fictions.

But narrative writing has always been drawn towards the imaginative, even in eras when its audience didn't hold the imagination in particularly high regard. We seem to be in such an era today. Memoirs dramatically outsell novels. The biopic has become the ubiquitous film genre. The quickest way to an Oscar is to play a historical character. Based on a true story is the highest accolade that can be attached to any book or movie. Readers clamor for the literal truth. And all the while writers continue to make everything up.

--CRB, September 17, 2007

Volume 32

Literary and Philosophical Essays

Leaving aside the novelists, dramatists and poets -- that is, taking only the non-fiction writers -- I've probably spent more time reading Immanuel Kant than I have any other author in the Shelf. For the past decade, I've returned to him every few months as a kind of guilty pleasure. Have I read most of his work? Well, no. Actually, I've mostly read about the first hundred pages of his Critique of Pure Reason. If this doesn't seem like a lot, I should explain that I've read those pages about two dozen times. Why do I keep reading the same pages over again? Because I still don't understand them.

Every time I read Kant, I have a familiar experience. For pages at a time I feel the unique rush that comes with encountering difficult and exciting ideas. Kant and I walk along together on fairly solid ground. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, that ground turns a little shaky beneath me; now I'm only grasping the gist of his ideas. This still offers a heady excitement. But with Kant, the gist is never enough. All at once, I take what seems like a safe enough step and find that I've walked off the cliff. I'm completely lost now. On page 10. So I turn back a few pages, to the last sentence I'm sure I understood, and I start the process over again. In this way, I struggle along until my stamina runs out. Then I put the book back on the shelf for a few months.

Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, which is included in this volume, didn't cause me quite so much trouble, but it caused me enough. Here is how the essay begins:

Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: Physics, Ethics, and Logic. This division is perfectly suitable to the nature of the thing, and the only improvement that can be made in it is to add the principle on which it is based, so that we may both satisfy ourselves of its completeness, and also be able to determine correctly the necessary subdivisions.

All rational knowledge is either material or formal: the former considers some object, the latter is concerned only with the form of the understanding and of the reason itself, and with the universal laws of thought in general without distinction of its objects. Formal philosophy is called Logic. Material philosophy, however, which has to do with determinate objects and the laws to which they are subject, is again two-fold; for these laws are either laws of nature or of freedom. The science of the former is Physics, that of the latter, Ethics; they are also called natural philosophy and moral philosophy respectively.

This is all fairly straightforward.  A reader unfamiliar with Kant may puzzle a moment over this distinction between nature and freedom, but all the rest makes perfect sense, and it's reasonable to assume that he'll explain his use of these terms. In the mean time, we're grateful that he's started at the very beginning and given us a few definitions to work with. Now here he is towards the end of the essay:

The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings in so far as they are rational, and freedom would be this property of such causality that it can be efficient, independently on foreign causes determining it; just as physical necessity is the property that the causality of all irrational beings has of being determined to activity by the influence of foreign causes.

It takes one -- at least, it takes me -- a little while to figure out what the hell we're talking about here. After a few readings, I understood that we were being given the distinction between freedom and nature that we'd been hoping for earlier. Roughly speaking, freedom is the ability to act according to one's rational will without the determining influence of irrational forces like instinct and the physical limits of nature. Notice how the terms break down at the hands of paraphrasis. Kant never speaks roughly, and his sentences can't be simplified without losing part of his meaning. But it's important to try to simplify them, because eventually you're going to wind up face to face with something like, Every rational being reckons himself qua intelligence as belonging to the world of understanding, and it is simply as an efficient cause belonging to that world that he calls his causality a will.  At which point, good luck.

I'm belaboring all of this because reading Kant last week brought me for the first time this year to the question of difficulty. Do I really mean to say that it was the first difficult reading I've encountered in the entire Shelf? Well, sort of. There have been a few works -- John Woolman's Journals come to mind -- that I found tedious. Others -- like much of the out-dated science writing -- felt irrelevant and therefore uninteresting. Lastly, some works that would easily interest a different reader -- say, Darwin talking about rocks -- simply didn't do a lot for me personally.

But with Kant I'm talking about something else. I don't find him irrelevant or boring. The questions with which he centrally concerned himself -- What is the proper basis for morality? What are the limits of human knowledge? -- are deeply important to me. And I find his treatment of these questions exhilarating, which is why I keep trying to read him. But his answers are difficult. And even if they could be simplified, Kant wouldn't be the one to do it.

All of which interests me because I've never been a fan of the Take your medicine school of the literary canon.  I don't like to think of any book as a monument to be scaled.  If you'd rather watch House than read Homer, then you should watch it and not worry about it. Even as I've given myself this year of assigned reading, it's been nice to occassionally remind myself which of these books I could just as easily throw across the room without being any worse off. But when I talk about Kant, I start to sound like a culture warrior. These ideas are important, I hear myself squealing, and they won't fit between the commercial breaks!

Recently, the stakes have been raised a bit in this old argument about the easy pleasures of mass media. It's no longer just that the classics are better for us. Television is the opiate of the people. Al Gore, for one, seems to think that it's Britney's fault that we're in Iraq. You might not like turning off American Idol, he says, but you owe it the world. It's an especially tempting argument to fall into when reading Kant, because he stressed that truly moral acts are committed not out of interest or preference but purely out of duty. Still, for my part, I know that I keep going back to Kant because I enjoy reading him, and that the difficulty is part of what I enjoy, and that -- in any other year -- this book would have gone back on the shelf the moment that enjoyment stopped.

--CRB, September 25, 2007

Volume 33

Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern

I told my friend Jake, who's a historian, that I was reading Herodotus -- specifically the sections of his Histories that describe his travels in Egypt -- as part of this volume of Voyages and Travels in the Classics.  He suggested that to include the father of history (also knowns as the father of lies) as a kind of proto-travel writer was to miss the point of what makes Herodotus a classic in the first place. The same goes, Jake said, for the Roman historian Tacitus. Tacitus' major works of history aren't included here. Instead, we're given the relatively minor Germania, a work of contemporary anthropology.

I have a half-formed theory about these decisions. A reading course like the Classics depends, in part, on the idea that readers should be given unmediated access to the great works of literary history. Instead of synthesis and interpretation, we're given primary documents. Instead of historical studies of an era, we're given the era in its own words. There is no volume of Histories in the Classics; the closest thing is a collection of American Historical Documents.  Of course, everything in the Classics is a kind of historical document.

But eventually, works of history themselves become historical objects -- primary documents of historiography. Herodotus and Tacitus still have something to tell us about the historical events they studied (the Greco-Persian Wars and the early Roman Empire, respectively). Each of them lived within a generation of the periods on which they focused, and such proximity is invaluable. But they have even more to tell us about their own time, about how ideas like history and culture were then conceived. Including their studies of contemporary foreign cultures is a means for the editors to split this difference.

I'm glad they did, because Herodotus is an awful lot of fun. He has a great instinct for narrative, which is a big part of what made him a model for later historians. Some of his stories sound a bit too good to be true, but that doesn't make them any less fascinating. This one appear early in the excerpt.

Now the Egyptians, before the time when Psammetichos became king over them, were wont to suppose that they had come into being first of all men; but since the time when Psammetichos having become king desired to know what men had come into being first, they suppose that the Phrygians came into being before themselves, but they themselves before all other men. Now Psammetichos, when he was not able by inquiry to find out any means of knowing who had come into being first of all men, contrived a device of the following kind: -- Taking two new-born children belonging to persons of the common sort he gave them to a shepherd to bring up at the place where his flocks were, with a manner of bringing up such as I shall say, charging him namely that no man should utter any word in their presence, and that they should be placed by themselves in a room where none might come, and at the proper time he should bring to them she-goats, and when he had satisfied them with milk he should do for them whatever else was needed. These things Psammetichos did and gave him this charge wishing to hear what word the children would let break forth first, after they had ceased from wailings without sense. And accordingly so it came to pass; for after a space of two years had gone by, during which the shepherd went on acting so, at length, when he opened the door and entered, both the children fell before him in entreaty and uttered the word bekos, stretching forth their hands. At first when he heard this the shepherd kept silence; but since this word was often repeated, as he visited them constantly and attended to them, at last he declared the matter to his master, and at his command he brought the children before his face. Then Psammetichos having himself also heard it, began to inquire what nation of men named anything bekos, and inquiring he found that the Phrygians had this name for bread. In this manner and guided by an indication such as this, the Egyptians were brought to allow that the Phrygians were a more ancient people than themselves.

The rest of the volume is given to Englishman in boats. The voyages of Sir Francis Drake offer rather harrowing descriptions of piracy on the open seas. But the most interesting of these later works is Walter Raleigh's description of his discovery of Guiana. The work was written largely to convince King James to release Raleigh from the Tower of London and send him back to Guiana, where he promised to capture the golden city of El Dorado for the crown. In the light of these pages, it seems more than appropriate that Raleigh should share this space with the father of lies.

--CRB, September 28, 2007

Volume 34

Discourse on Method by Rene Descartes

Descartes' Discourse on Method might have the lowest difficulty to intellectual-historical importance ratio of any work in the Shelf. In about sixty pages of lucid, readable prose, the whole world is changed. Descartes takes only a page or two to lay out the central problem his method hopes to address -- that is, his dissatisfaction with received knowledge.

From my childhood, I have been familiar with letters; and as I was given to believe that by their help a clear and certain knowledge of all that is useful in life might be acquired, I was ardently desirous of instruction. But as soon as I had finished the entire course of study, at the close of which it is customary to be admitted into the order of the learned, I completely changed my opinion. For I found myself involved in so many doubts and errors, that I was convinced I had advanced no farther in all my attempts at learning, than the discovery at every turn of my own ignorance.

Descartes' method for addressing this problem was at once simple and radical.  It had four steps:

The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.

The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.

The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.

And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.

Everyone knows what happened next.

I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, hence I am, was so certain and of such evidence, that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the Sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the Philosophy of which I was in search.

Less generally known perhaps, is the step that comes immediately after the famous cogito. After his own existence, the second thing of which Descartes in his radical skepticism can be absolutely certain is the existence of God. Basically, his argument goes like this. The one thing I know for certain, besides the fact that I think and therefore am, is that I am uncertain about what I know. This uncertainty implies that I am imperfect, which in turn implies the notion of imperfection. From here, we arrive quickly at a variation on St. Anselm's ontological proof: it is better to exist than not to exist, therefore existence must be one of the characteristic of a perfect being. Thus, if we can conceive of something that is perfect in every way -- i.e., God -- it must exist.

This is frankly a bit of a disappointment. It isn't just that the ontological proof is one of the flimsiest of the logical proofs for the existence of God. More than that, there's something fishy about Descartes' hurry to get there. He seems not really to have set out to answer the question, What can I prove for certain independent of received sources? but rather to answer the very different question Can I prove the existence of God independent of received sources?  Even if the answer is yes, you've stacked the deck by allowing yourself to ask the question.

Letters on the English by Voltaire

On the Inequality among Mankind & Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar by Jean Jacques Rousseau

To my mind, Rousseau has a much better solution to this problem in his Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar.  To begin with, he admits up front what he's really trying to do.  A neglect of all religious duties, his fictional vicar writes, leads to a neglect of all moral obligations. Once we've allowed for the practical efficacy of religion, the question for an Enlightenment rationalist becomes whether we can arrive at our belief in God without revelation. Rousseau's answer is not so unlike Descartes:

Had I been born on a desert island, or had never seen a human creature beside myself; had I never been informed of what had formerly happened in a certain corner of the world; I might yet have learned, by the exercise and cultivation of my reason, and by the proper use of those faculties God hath given me, to know and to love him. I might hence have learned to love and admire his power and goodness, and to have properly discharged my duty here on earth. What can the knowledge of the learned teach me more?

Though their conclusions are similar, Descartes and Rousseau have drastically different methods. While one builds a proof out of abstract logic, the other rolls up his sleeves and looks at the world. But they share an unwillingness to accept the knowledge they've inherited without testing it first. And they have no desire for their own writing to be accepted in such a way. My present design, then, Descartes writes, is not to teach the Method which each ought to follow for the right conduct of his Reason, but solely to describe the way in which I have endeavoured to conduct my own.  Or as Rousseau says, I will not enter into any disputation, or endeavor to refute you; but only lay down my own sentiments in simplicity of heart. Consult your own during this recital: this is all I require of you.

One of the most exhilirating traits of the great books -- of Descartes' and Rousseau's as much as Thoreau's or Emerson's -- is how insistently they turn you away from the great books and back towards the world, towards what Rousseau calls the the book of nature.  What can the knowledge of the learned teach us more?

Of Man, Being the First Part of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes famously took a harsher view of the state of nature:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Where Rousseau thought society was a corruption of men's natural tendency to be good and happy, Hobbes saw it as man's best chance at overcoming the conditions of his nasty and brutish life. Rousseau thought that religion wasn't necessary in the state of nature, because it was society that led us towards the immorality. But Hobbes had the surprisingly modern understanding that there could be no morality without society:

To this war of every man against every man [i.e., the state of nature] this also is consequent, that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude.

--CRB, September 30, 2007