Naphtha and Settembrini
Mike Morris
Thursday, the 23rd of July, 1992
Some more responses to John Wojdylo. His are the indented bits,
unless otherwise indicated:
Reader B sees science as something more than a scheme for producing
numbers. He sees the "scientific approach" as undermining the truth he
believes makes the fabric of all things. (He also sees science as a moral
philosophy.)
It's interesting to me that science seems to lead John Polkinghorne
to a different conclusion. He calls science, like a rational approach
to theology, ``corrigible''.
I like Polkinghorne's word ``corrigible'', but I would argue science
is in many ways the most dictatorial program we have. There's no
appeal from, no vote we can take to reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
or thirty-two feet per second per second.
What do you mean by evil "on the applied side" ?
Any program of social engineering administered by force of law.
Any legislation that has as its justification an essential injustice,
such as the all-too-common-at-present ignoring by assumption of the
relevance of the old-fashioned (and religious and unscientific)
possibility of human free will.
I asked if Mann pokes some fun at Settembrini:
Yes he does. A natural question is: How can it be that Mann creates such a
noble and honourable character, only to poke fun at him? Could it be that
Mann had been wavering between the two viewpoints (S + N) and wrote the novel
to work out his own position? (This would explain the somewhat positive
light with which he describes Naphtha at times, and the negative
descriptions of Settembrini -- Mann was wavering from one side to the
other as he was writing -- but the ending leaves a clear conclusion.)
I agree completely with this idea that Mann was wavering. I'm not
convinced of the clear conclusion, however. That is, I agree that Mann
prefers Settembrini, but by the time that preference is made manifest,
Settembrini has receded in the distance.
(... Oh dear -- I am SO judgemental, aren't I.)
Hey, I'm all for judgement. It's a lot more active and human and potentially
corrigible than a tepid non-judgementalism.
[Interesting and relevant extract from Kadarkay's _Georg Lukacs_, (1991)
deleted, in which Lukacs as a prototype for Naphtha is suggested. Thank
you, John.]
John warns:
[Beware of your sensibility when reading this book]
I can have a cast-iron stomach at need.
John continues:
By including this quote, I'm not trying to solve the problem of whether
or not Lukacs and Naphtha are the same person. The quote does, however,
support or help explain:
- my general assessment of what Mann thought were the important ideas
about Naphtha ;
- why Mann often spoke of Naphtha in a glowing way (Mann was
also impressed by similar things about Lukacs; and he had a
fascination with failed intellectuals -- he was one himself (I
have a quote from Hermann Hesse stating something to this effect.
I will fetch it if you want.);
I have a hunch, also , that -- given Mann's fascination with failed
intellectuals -- Naptha was spawned in Mann's mind before Settembrini.
I find the idea that Naphtha came first attractive.
John, I'm feeling pretty thick about here. I don't understand whether
you are telling me I've gotten something important wrong, or right.
You clearly outgun me in the reading you've done related to
_The Magic Mountain_. But, I'm finding myself mostly pleased
that so much of my intuition about N&S seems consonant with what you
have been saying. If N was the starting point for Mann, then S came about
because S was historically what N was reacting to. Should I be being
pleased?
My interest in him and his work ? I'm astounded at how so flawed a
writer and intellectual could have won the Nobel Prize. (Good luck to
him, though.) From an artistic viewpoint, I think the novel (MM) is clumsily
written; from the intellectual viewpoint, I find Mann's wavering
This leaves me wondering what you do like, John? Mann to me is
the conventional direction of development of the novel that
Joyce forsook. I like them both quite alot. But, hey, I like
everybody.
Naphtha and Settembrini always appear together. I have a hunch that
either Naphtha was conceived before Settembrini, or they were both
conceived together, as a dialectical opposite pair.
We are agreed in this hunch.
I said:
No, I think it's an evil program. But I also think that to say this I
have to carry about with me some powerful notion of what evil is,
and that no glorious moment of human achievement, no Napoleon
at Austerlitz, no Michelangelo painting the ceiling, is worth
this evil.
John responded:
Is it worth laying waste a country in the name of your good?
If not, then perhaps your notion of evil (and therefore, good) is not as
strong as you think.
A passionate intensity the important thing? That's an aesthetic
standard, not ethical.
I said:
Naphtha ultimately dismisses reason---he reasons that it's too logocentric.
And John:
No he doesn't. He's always "in communion" with two opposites, and he varies
between the two One of them happens to deny reason. He doesn't ever
consciously dismiss reason: he just thinks that he's being reasonable.
I'm willing to go away and think about it.
I don't think that the current situation with respect to legislation and
law is all that bad in the *general* sense. i.e. there's a huge problem
with aborigines in the system in Australia, but that's not going to be
solved by throwing the system out the window and introducing a Marxist
(god-help-us) or whatever system.
I'm not advocating more system, but less.
Look, John, some of your old postings with ``fuck'' or ``cunt''
every other word could get you arrested in this country right now.
At the moment, there are two ultra-feminist reporters at the local paper
who are crusading about U. of Waterloo's distribution of newsgroups
like alt.sex and alt.sex.bondage on UW computers. They complain
especially about ``offensive'' material and how pornography is
equivalent to ``violence against women''. So, with this Trouble
in River City kick going on, and the local Crown Attorneys furnishing
politically correct quotes, I'd bet you could get arrested real fast
making one of those old posts, especially if it were aimed at a female
target.
True, there's a Charter of Rights and Freedoms here, but I prefer to
call it a Charter of Fond Wishes and Desires if Society Were Only
Perfect. That's because the Supreme Court can, and routinely does,
let the government get away with unjust legislation if they find
there's a ``compelling interest''. Given that they knowingly trashed the
principle of presumption of innocence in favor of a law presuming
any man guilty of pimping who lives with, or is habitually in the company of
prostitutes---that is, they unanimously agreed this law was a violation of
the Charter and then overrode the Charter anyway because of the particular
evil of prostitution---, I don't believe the Charter protects Canadians
from much of anything.
If you were arrested for distributing ``obscene'' material under
this law, I would say that that arrest would constitute a crime.
I proposed that we choose our own offense. John countered:
Your proposition is questionable. First: They may very well be programmed
by society to feel like shit when they see it; or they may be desensitized
by overexposure to films like "Silence of the Lambs". In neither case
is a choice willed.
John, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Everybody believes it
and I don't know why. We are convinced that society does this programming,
that ``Silence of the Lambs'' ``desensitizes'' us, that the publication
of _American Psycho_ is likely to cause 13.67 new instances of violence
against women per week that it's on the best-seller lists, that reading
bowdlerized Grimm to children will keep them from growing up to
be violence-loving psychopaths. There are studies, aren't there?
Haven't scientists written down some sort of sociological or psychological
field equations?
I claim that these buffet forces that we take so much for granted
are an *assumption*. They are an assumption made by certain academic
practitioners of the so-called ``human sciences'' so that they
can pretend they do science just like the big boys. Now, I'm all
for making heuristic assumptions per se, I think corrigibility
a good quality. But when correlations (``I interviewed three people
and 2 of them agreed that pornography causes violence against
women'') start getting interpreted
in terms of hard (I mean legislative) statements about causality,
I draw the line. There has never been an experiment or study to
discount the possibility of human free will. There has never been
any success comparable to the 10-decimal-place predictive accuracy that
allows physicists to ignore old-fashioned notions like Divine Providence.
It's simply bad moral philosophy.
I said of Naphtha's death:
Sad for Settembrini, too, I should think.
John said:
He is not bound to feel remorse. You may feel sad if he doesn't, but so
what?
Well, my point is that I think he did feel sad, that he interpreted
Naphtha's death, the whole duel, as a personal failure.
Earlier, John had written:
Reader A: "He wished a position of influence so that he could realize
his vision of moral anarchy and desolation, for a transition to his
anti-intellectual new world that'd enslaved us all. Good riddance. May
he burn in hell."
I responded:
Reader M:
There is indeed more than one path to slavery. ``May he burn in hell''
betrays you.
And John said:
Tsk. Tsk. Reader A said it, not I.
I should have written: ``May he burn in hell'' betrays you, Reader A.
That's what I meant, that A isn't as free of the totalitarian impulse
(which B so openly displays) as A thinks he is.
Given that a man whose views can create untold destruction has shot himself,
why should Reader A feel remorse ?
Again, I wonder at these views that ``can create untold destruction''.
I've met up with a lot of views in my day, but I've never met up with
any as potent as this.
I'm afraid this sequence leaves me completely in the dark:
Incidentally, you are Left enough to have whistled (or at least hummed)
the tune to which the following line is sung in one of the verses:
"May the furrows of our fields
be filled with the blood of our enemies..."
Guess which popular tune they're sung to.
I'd like to know. And what you mean by this.
John asks me:
Do you really have a strong notion of good and evil?
Well, I said I *think* I do.
Why do you give evil a second chance? Why do you condemn your children
to facing this evil, just because you didn't have the guts to overcome
your pity? Your pity makes you, ultimately, evil's accomplice.
Nonsense. If Naphtha tried to kill my children I'd simply react
by slicing him up in little bits. If he tried to kill yours,
I think that the right thing for me to do would be to gun him down (I'm
dodging any consideration of whether I'd have the *gumption* to do
this). But the guy was just talking. Or thinking, writing, making films.
He didn't *do* anything, except kill *himself*. Not Settembrini or Castorp.
About Castorp:
Reader John: He doesn't choose; he's transfixed with his own indecision;
fights like some schizophrenic, first believing one thing, then another.
Yes. Except that I would call this indecision a choice, yes.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
INFIDEL
Responses to Mike Morris's Posts. 28/7/92
JW:
To answer a further query of Mr Morris's, I do believe that he has something
important wrong: it is his identification of all forms of absolute power
as being equally evil.
MM:
OK, but this is now moving beyond a discussion of Mann.
It always has been. Mann, after all, is dead and gone. What possible use is a
dead man to us?
JW:
Settembrini firing a pistol into the head of
Rochefoucault in the name of Justice is as evil as a Marxist/Leninist
shooting a round into the squalid brain of Nicholas II, or a hypothetical
Jewish scum in 1929 firing into the pretty head of Adolf Hitler, following
publication of that inspiring work, _Mein Kampf_, thereby averting World
War 2 and the loss of 60 million lives.
MM (27/7/92):
I find this last telling.
It was meant to be.
MM (27/7/92):
I think you are saying that you believe I am
morally relativistic ...
...not quite approaching moral annihilation...
...to the point that I am unwilling to judge anything
evil, that ``everything is permitted''. You are seriously in error
about this.
I'm glad that you have paid some attention to Kundera.
It's also heartening to find that you are not totally a moral relativist, to
the point that you are even willing to judge some things evil.Let us see to what
extent you are really willing to shake off the moral relativist tag, and to
whose detriment your reticence might accrue.
First some comments on past discussion.
MM (18/7/92):
[Regarding the role of the protagonists Naphtha and Settembrini in
Mann's "The Magic Mountain"]
I make it something like Progress/Reason v. Reaction/Spirit.
MM (19/7/92):
[Regarding Naphtha's views]
Exactly what I call philosophic right-wing-ism.
The Marxist Naphtha a protagonist for Progress/Reason? And a right-winger to
boot? I think that Mr. Morris has it the wrong way around, at least. Could
the source of this curiosity be related to Mr Morris's willingness to lump
Marx, Hegel AND Freud in his "left-leaning philosophical lineage"?
In the case of Thomas Mann's novel, the "Magic Mountain", more appropriate
categories are surely:
reason/transcendental values v. (reason in the service of) dogma/pantheistic
values & "materialism".
Generally speaking, the former recalls Settembrini, the latter Naphtha.
Naphtha was the idealist, hence
Mann's references to the Valkyrian scarp and `beauty of places unreachable
by humans' in connection with Naphtha. (c.f. Goethe's "Faust": Faust's
conversation with Wagner during their walk through the forest before the
Walpurgis Night (including a description of a 'jet black dog' (Wagner doesn't
pick up Faust's jibe at his idealism).))
Settembrini believed in the values won in
the French Revolution; in particular, a transcendental notion of Justice
(c.f the last conversation between the Settembrini and Naphtha before the
challenge). He was the realist. Every place is -- and must be -- reachable by
humans, capable of being made familiar, "human" -- not eventually, at some
unspecified future time, but NOW.
(There are connections here which I'm willing to discuss; e.g. why is
"transcendental" linked to "realism", but "materialism" with "idealism"? Is
pantheism realistic or is it idealistic? Can it be either ? )
Mr. Morris classes Hegel, Marx AND Freud within a leftward philosophical
lineage (19/7/92). What qualities of these three is he picking out and calling
"left"?
Hegel -- pantheistic in his idea of "destiny of nation" --
was a panderer to the Prussian aristocracy in the early 1800's -- what most
people would consider `right-wing' for those times --- consolidating his
position of power within the king's court by promoting his "destiny of the
nation" as a prophecy specifically about Prussia. But it need not be
interpreted in this "materialistic" way; i.e. in a way which specifies a
particular real entity (in this case, "Prussia") as the object of the belief.
Choosing the real entity causes the pantheistic belief to move from the
Realistic realm to the Idealistic realm. Attaching faith to the real entity
("it is PRUSSIA's destiny to be great...") is the definition of "materialism".
Hegel's idea is pantheistic but not necessarily materialistic; Hegel made it
materialistic in his lifetime, to his own dishonest advantage. To
make Mr. Morris's "left" category work for him, I suggest that he's referring
to Hegel's materialism when he classes Hegel's ideas in the "leftward leaning
philosophical lineage".
(Though "Left" does not necessarily mean "materialistic". Mr Morris is
reacting to recent so-called "feminist" (and other) ideological battles at his
campus, for instance, which are "materialistic" in the sense I shall describe
below. )
It's possible to "feel" that nations seem to have a destiny without being
sure that a particular nation has a particular destiny. This is the
"open-endedness" of "science" (i.e. reason, the TRANSCENDENTAL) which so
irked Naphtha.
Marxism -- pantheistic in its socialist ideal -- is always materialistic; the
socialist ideal is supposed to be arrived at by a process called "dialectic
materialism", which assigns faith to particular events in world history as
being portents of a prophecy. (See Kolakowski's "Main Currents of Marxism" --
do not dismiss Leszek Kolakowski's ironic tone as "non-objective": he is being
as objective as is possible.)
Naphtha's claim to be in the service of reason suffers from the same problem as
Marxism's claim to be "scientific".
Aside:
Sad that a Western academic such as Mike Morris couldn't recognize
that identity. It's only a year since the fall of communism in Russia. Have
we forgotten already what Marxism is? Did Western academics ever know it at all?
End of aside.
Aside:
Do not confuse the terms "universal" and "transcendental": a materialistic
pantheism can be universal (c.f. the Shinto religion, for instance). The
communist ideal is universal -- envisaged, indeed, by riff-raff,
to be of benefit to the whole world -- as are the transcendental ones of the
French Revolution.
End of aside.
Finally, Freud's logical systems are transcendental, "open-ended", since
one doesn't have to believe any of the connections he supposes without
experimental proof. Various sections of the community use Freud for their
own purposes, make his suppositions "fixed", "un-openended", unable to be
argued with and agreed upon by popular consent; distant, valkyrian,
materialistic, idealistic. This is what Mr Morris wants to pick up
in his category, it seems.
There is the possibility that Mr Morris is (errantly) referring to the roles
of the ego in the belief systems. The Kant v Hegel distinction. Transcendental
Vs pantheist. Broadly speaking, the Western Vs Eastern European literary
traditions.
Then Freud does not belong in the "left" group. His ideas are in the
transcendental pidgeon hole; he's as "Western" as you can get.
Now a brief counterpoint.
MM(21/7/92):
"I have to hold the ethical imperative higher than any aesthetic one."
This sounds disturbingly like the Western sovietologist who noted that since
almost no villages in the Soviet Union in the period 1930 to 1953 were
simultaneously being terrorised by Stalin's regime, there could not have been
much of a terror.
So the recommendation was to treat Stalin like "one of the boys".
Western observers have been notoriously slow to figure out the nature of
regimes from Stalin, through Ceausescu, to the Serbian military's ambitions
for the Balkans. (Serbian ambitions for Yugoslavia were known more than
18 months ago -- why weren't the Serbians pressured by the U.N then, thereby
avoiding the current tragedy in ex-Yugoslavia?)
It seems that there is some use for an "aesthetic imperative" after all.
End of counterpoint.
MM(23/7/92):
"I would argue that science is one of the most dictatorial programs we
have."
I must admit that I have seen more appropriate uses of the word "dictatorial".
The scientific literature or the scientific consensus may be "corrigible"
(MM (23/7/92)) but the objective truth is not. Any credible scientific
community will eventually have to face the facts. Just as Western governments
now have to face the fact of the Balkan War, and the danger of it spreading.
If facing up to facts is to be deemed as "dicatatorial", then maybe it'd be
better for all of us to take less notice of them, lest we be embroiled in the
unethical tyranny of Truth.
It strikes me as odd that Mr Morris uses the word "dictatorial" in connection
with "science". Surely the word is better used in connection with ignorance
and its consequences, among which can be included the tacit approval of
political dicatorships by ostensibly liberal Westerners.
29/7/92
Mike Morris writes:
MM(27/7/92):
If the only nasty thing Hitler had ever done was publish _Mein
Kampf_ (I'm talking about my impression of a book I have not (yet)
read), then I would say, regardless of the horror of the content of
the book, anyone would be criminally unjust to kill the man just for
having written a book.
It's nice of you to condascend to agreeing with the letter of the Law; a
sacrifice on your behalf, your readers know, as you have already told them of
your aversion to the dictatorial nature of Facts, and, I'm sure you agree,
Facts are vital in the implementation of Law.
In this case, howvever, I must agree with your evaluation that facts,are,indeed,
dictatorial, and that in the hypothetical case of the shooting of Hitler, the
fact of the crime is best ignored.
Before consigning the hypothetically-shot Hitler to the dustbin of history,
let's first consider how your picture of the situation in the above passage is
about what one would expect from the typical Western liberal claiming the self-
indulgent privilege of Right to Life.
There is nothing horrific in Mein Kampf; it's rather banal, actually. Le Pen
does much better in his campaigns for the French presidential elections. _Mein
Kampf_ tells of Hitler's vision, including a strong displeasure with Jews and
their influence on the country. Soon after Mein Kampf was published, Hitler
became leader -- with extraordinary powers - of one of the most powerful
nations on earth. Now the typical liberal claims that since Hitler had only
*thought* about doing nasty things to stinking Jews, that he'd only published
a book(he'd never actually killed any Jew! What a nice man in such a fine
suit!) that he can't be judged evil enough to be erradicated himself.
The good-fellow liberal therefore excuses Hitler's right hand man, Goebbels,
from crimes against humanity, since the good-fellow Goebbels killed almost
no-one with his own hands, he was, after all, just a good family man (as the
diaries show) "thinking, writing and making films" (Mike Morris 23/7/92).
MM (27/7/92):
[Regarding Naphtha's moral vision in the "Magic Mountain"]
No, I think it's an evil program. But I also think that to say this I
have to carry about with me some powerful notion of what evil is, and
that no glorious moment of human achievement, no Napolean at Austerlitz,
no Michelangelo painting the ceiling, is worth this evil.
And it's not worth excusing no pistol-packing Jewish punk like Misha Zeleny
from blowing the brains out of Adolf Hitler in 1929; Adolf's life is too
sacred. As sacred as your son's or daughters. Let him carry on in power --
my daughters are safe from the ideas in his book; after all, I taught them
how to read books like that properly, without getting too angry at the author,
even if his _publicly stated_ intentions differ from what is revealed in the
more intimate setting of the novel or memoir. (As long as they don't
step out the front door, in Germany in 1935, then it's O.K.)
MM (27/7/92):
If Naphtha tried to kill my children I'd simply react by slicing him up
in little bits. If he tried to kill yours, I think that the right thing
for me to do would be to gun him down... But the guy was just talking.
Or thinking, writing, making films. He didn't *do* anything ...
Neither did Goebbels, more or less. Shall we petition the Allied Powers for a
formal apology for their unjust treatment of Goebbels?
MM (27/7/92):
I would say that _Mein Kampf_ need not be beautiful (or even moral)
for its author to retain a Right to Life. I think Hitler lost that
Right when he killed, ...
Hitler never personally killed anyone (maybe only himself). He just thought
bad thoughts, remember? Just like everyone does. Just like Nick Ellis does.
(But Ellis does not admit it. He's a dishonest cunt. That's why his work
stinks.)
... not when he wrote.
He lost that right -- if anyone ever has it -- when he first stepped into
a position of influence, when his thoughts first began to be realized.
MM (27/7/92):
If your claim, John, is that the mass murders and war and crimes came
from the book, I strongly disagree.
This is a ridiculous reading of my point. Perhaps you need to retire from
academia, the workload is getting to you.
On second thought, sometimes you sound more like a wet-behind-the-ears college
boy than a geriatric academic.
MM (27/7/92):
My guess is that when I will read it, I will judge it to be both
morally evil and intellectually in error.
Deciding whether or not Naphtha's sayings were "intellectually
in error" seems to have drawn your attention away from the identity between
the Marxist claim to be "scientific" and Naphtha's claim to be in the service
of reason. A slight oversight?
Meanwhile the Serbians struck their first blow towards achieving their
ambitions in the Balkans.
Perhaps there are disadvantages in the (American) liberal world-view after all.
MM (27/7/92):
I am certain, though, even without reading it, that _Mein Kampf_
cannot be criminally unjust. It's just a book.
Laws, by definition, refer to human conduct, not to inanimate objects.
MM (27/7/92):
Now, in my way of thinking about moral judgments, I believe that
I can judge myself, and I believe that it is possible, if
difficult, for me to judge others.
How can you judge Hitler to be evil ? He loved Eva, he had perfectly real
human feelings, he loved his dog, walks in the Austrian countryside, evenings
by the fireplace in a snowy mountain chalet, a temper tantrum now and then...
How can you be so arrogant as to judge all these things that make up "Adolf
Hitler" ? He had "free will" so you judge him ... so what ? Once you've
judged the totallity of Adolf Hitler, how does that affect your relationship
with your children ? They like walks in the countryside too, you know.
You really are a bastard, aren't you.
MM (27/7/92):
This possibility of judgment stems first
from my belief in my own free will (inscrutability to any sort of
``scientific'' determinism when it comes to my moral choice)
So you can prove to me that you are not someone's marionette ? I await
your proof.
John Wojdylo
Sydney 1992
--
Tom Osborn, " As simple as possible,
School of Computing Sciences, but not more so ! "
University of Technology, Sydney,
PO Box 123 Broadway 2007, AUSTRALIA.
Mike Morris
Wednesday, the 29th of July, 1992
Some responses to John Wojdylo:
I said our discussion is moving beyond Mann. John said:
It always has been. Mann, after all, is dead and gone. What
possible use is a dead man to us?
Reading old books is living conversation with dead men.
I'm glad that you have paid some attention to Kundera.
It's also heartening to find that you are not totally a moral relativist,
to the point that you are even willing to judge some things evil. Let us
see to what extent you are really willing to shake off the moral
relativist tag, and to whose detriment your reticence might accrue.
I like Kundera, yes, especially for his common-sensical Enlightenment
rationalist critique of much of what has come since.
I find it interesting that the operative word is ``extent'', since
I find so far in what you are telling me a confusion of an
aesthetic standard, intensity of belief or its extremity (whether
or not I'm willing to kill for my judgments), for ethical judgment. I have
just tried to explain to you how I thought it was possible to judge someone
morally evil and still not think it right to kill them.
Also I think I understand precisely to whose detriment you think my
reticence accrues. I think you're wrong about it.
The Marxist Naphtha a protagonist for Progress/Reason? And a right-winger to
boot? I think that Mr. Morris has it the wrong way around, at least. Could
the source of this curiosity be related to Mr Morris's willingness to lump
Marx, Hegel AND Freud in his "left-leaning philosophical lineage"?
First of all, I opposed Progress/Reason to Reaction/Spirit as Mann's
dichotomy. I'm flabbergasted that you took me to mean that Progress/Reason
was Naphtha and Reaction/Spirit was Settembrini. I meant it, of course
John, precisely the other way around. I'm sorry if I gave you any other
impression.
Now, Hegel, Marx, and Freud are clearly vastly complex thinkers, Marx
and Freud in particular having spawned schools of ``Marxists'' and
``Freudians'' within which almost anything together with its opposite
can be found. I did not mean for anything that these thinkers may be
be summarized by handy labels. I did mean, however, to give my label
meaning by something I see common in these thinkers.
In Hegel, he is willing to offer absolution for the Terror in exchange
for a dialectical endpoint of history. The Terror becomes a necessary
step inn the historical process. Marx believes he has discovered
the scientific laws by which history works. Again, present terror
is traded for future social justice. And Freud, again sees scientific
law in the operation of human psychology. The common element in all
three is the trade-off of a mysterious but morally sound human free will
for a more scientific-seeming human determinism.
Settembrini is more left than Naphtha. Naphtha isn't interested in social
justice at all, even as an epistemological endpoint. He's only interested
in the beauty, the intensity, the significance, of human suffering. He's
willing to bring back the Inquisition to cause this suffering, too.
I don't see that Naphtha was ``materialist'' in the slightest. His
idealism goes in another direction. Equally inhuman, I agree, but
different. Naphtha is closer to Auschwitz than the gulag.
I had said:
I have to hold the ethical imperative higher than any aesthetic one.
John responded:
This sounds disturbingly like the Western sovietologist who noted that since
almost no villages in the Soviet Union in the period 1930 to 1953 were
simultaneously being terrorised by Stalin's regime, there could not have been
much of a terror.
So the recommendation was to treat Stalin like "one of the boys".
Western observers have been notoriously slow to figure out the nature of
regimes from Stalin, through Ceausescu, to the Serbian military's ambitions
for the Balkans. (Serbian ambitions for Yugoslavia were known more than
18 months ago -- why weren't the Serbians pressured by the U.N then, thereby
avoiding the current tragedy in ex-Yugoslavia?)
It seems that there is some use for an "aesthetic imperative" after all.
John, I haven't a clue what you mean here. I don't understand how you
seem to think that holding an ethical imperative high means I have
to kill or terrorise anybody. Can't I mean just that the ethical imperative
says I can't kill or terrorise anyone even if I think they're ugly or
standing in the way of artistic progress (i.e., what I called the
right-wing, or aesthetic imperative) and even if I think they're
stupid or standing in the way of social-engineering legislation
(i.e., what I called the left-wing, or epistemological imperative)?
I said:
I would argue that science is one of the most dictatorial programs we have.
I believe I explained what I meant by ``dictatorial'' here. Since ``left''
is an extension of the scientific program from particles and planets to
human beings, I believe in that direction it becomes especially dictatorial.
It's not hard to see the Romantic side of the lineage I gave for the
right as a reaction to this scientific dictatorship.
I said:
If the only nasty thing Hitler had ever done was publish _Mein
Kampf_ (I'm talking about my impression of a book I have not (yet)
read), then I would say, regardless of the horror of the content of
the book, anyone would be criminally unjust to kill the man just for
having written a book.
John responded:
It's nice of you to condescend to agree with the letter of the Law; a
sacrifice on your behalf, your readers know, as you have already told them of
your aversion to the dictatorial nature of Facts, and, I'm sure you agree,
Facts are vital in the implementation of Law.
I didn't condescend to agree. There's no other letter of the Law I
agree with more passionately with.
You seem to elide the Fact that before the Holocaust happened,
*it hadn't yet happened*. So, I'm a little confused about what Facts
you are referring to.
There is nothing horrific in Mein Kampf; it's rather banal, actually. Le Pen
does much better in his campaigns for the French presidential elections. _Mein
Kampf_ tells of Hitler's vision, including a strong displeasure with Jews and
their influence on the country. Soon after Mein Kampf was published, Hitler
became leader -- with extraordinary powers - of one of the most powerful
nations on earth. Now the typical liberal claims that since Hitler had only
*thought* about doing nasty things to stinking Jews, that he'd only published
a book (he'd never actually killed any Jew! What a nice man in such a fine
suit!) that he can't be judged evil enough to be erradicated himself.
Pardon me if I don't believe that you can read _Mein Kampf_, or *any other
book*, and predict the future course of human history based on your reading.
Are you advocating that Ralph Mannheim (the translator in English) ought
to be executed or what? If all Goebbels had done was ``think, write,
and make nasty films'' the Allied Powers committed a crime in executing him,
yes. But neither you nor I actually believes this was the extent of the
charge against him.
And it's not worth excusing no pistol-packing Jewish punk like Misha Zeleny
from blowing the brains out of Adolf Hitler in 1929; Adolf's life is too
sacred. As sacred as your son's or daughters. Let him carry on in power --
my daughters are safe from the ideas in his book; after all, I taught them
how to read books like that properly, without getting too angry at the author,
even if his _publicly stated_ intentions differ from what is revealed in the
more intimate setting of the novel or memoir. (As long as they don't
step out the front door, in Germany in 1935, then it's O.K.)
Again the confusion between a book and an action. To the extent that my
daughters are in danger from Hitler of stepping out their front door the
man deserves criminal punishment, my daughters and I are justified
in defending ourselves.
You seem to think that 1935 was a necessary consequence of 1929. If
you think that, I am at a loss wondering how you think any moral judgment
is possible. There's only your gun v. my gun.
I said:
If Naphtha tried to kill my children I'd simply react by slicing him up
in little bits. If he tried to kill yours, I think that the right thing
for me to do would be to gun him down... But the guy was just talking.
Or thinking, writing, making films. He didn't *do* anything ...
John said:
Neither did Goebbels, more or less. Shall we petition the Allied Powers for a
formal apology for their unjust treatment of Goebbels?
Perhaps you could elaborate on the ``more or less''?
I said:
I would say that _Mein Kampf_ need not be beautiful (or even moral)
for its author to retain a Right to Life. I think Hitler lost that
Right when he killed, ...
John responded:
Hitler never personally killed anyone (maybe only himself).
I think he did. Quite causally. It's _Mein Kampf_ that didn't.
I continued:
... not when he wrote.
John said:
He lost that right -- if anyone ever has it -- when he first stepped into
a position of influence, when his thoughts first began to be realized.
Here, now, I think I agree, except I would say it's when he acted, when
he killed.
I said:
If your claim, John, is that the mass murders and war and crimes came
from the book, I strongly disagree.
And John objected:
This is a ridiculous reading of my point. Perhaps you need to retire from
academia, the workload is getting to you.
On second thought, sometimes you sound more like a wet-behind-the-ears
college boy than a geriatric academic.
You do ad hominem so well, John.
For the record, and for future such outbursts, I'm 32. I do research in
general relativity theory. Right now, I'm also teaching intermediate
quantum mechanics. And, I'm a postdoc.
My problem is that I am still reading the same thing into your point.
Perhaps you would care to elaborate in a direction that would disabuse me
of my opinion?
Meanwhile the Serbians struck their first blow towards achieving their
ambitions in the Balkans.
Perhaps there are disadvantages in the (American) liberal world-view
after all.
Perhaps, yes. It certainly doesn't promise an eradication of evil
in the way that so many fundamentalisms do.
But I do not think that Americans are very liberal, John.
I said:
I am certain, though, even without reading it, that _Mein Kampf_
cannot be criminally unjust. It's just a book.
John responded:
Laws, by definition, refer to human conduct, not to inanimate objects.
Well, then, let me rephrase to eliminate the metaphor: I am certain,
though, even without having read it, that the writing and publication
of _Mein Kampf_ could not have been criminally unjust. It was just a book.
How can you judge Hitler to be evil ? He loved Eva, he had perfectly real
human feelings, he loved his dog, walks in the Austrian countryside, evenings
by the fireplace in a snowy mountain chalet, a temper tantrum now and then...
How can you be so arrogant as to judge all these things that make up "Adolf
Hitler"? He had "free will" so you judge him ... so what ? Once you've
judged the totality of Adolf Hitler, how does that affect your relationship
with your children ? They like walks in the countryside too, you know.
You really are a bastard, aren't you.
Such a sweet way of putting it. My children aren't mass murderers, you
know. Let me rather ask you, John, how *you*
can judge him evil, since it is *your* characterization of the man that
is so sympathetic?
So you can prove to me that you are not someone's marionette? I await
your proof.
You see, I'm not the one wanting to kill people here, to make laws
to control those puppet strings. You seem to be. Therefore, I should
think the burden of proof is quite on you. Since you don't have such proof,
and since the old-fashioned model of human free will works better to explain
the observations, (I am willing to expand on this point at great length,
John---which would you like first, my McDonald's gedanken-experiment
demonstrating the impossibility of human determinism, or my Brothers Grimm
argument demonstrating the danger of scientific inference for a system so
complex as a human being?) it makes me kinda wonder at your own no doubt
very high moral purpose in sending those policemen after me merely because
you were able to translate some primitive moral conceptions into equations.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
INFIDEL
Monday August 3, 1992
> Wednesday, the 29th of July, 1992
>Some responses to John Wojdylo:
Some responses to Michael Morris...
> I said our discussion is moving beyond Mann. John said:
> It always has been. Mann, after all, is dead and gone. What
> possible use is a dead man to us?
>Reading old books is living conversation with dead men.
One's description of one's conversation tells others about oneself. One's
existence is defined by the way one describes those things familiar to us all.
And I prefer to speak with live people than dead ones.
> I'm glad that you have paid some attention to Kundera.
> It's also heartening to find that you are not totally a moral relativist,
> to the point that you are even willing to judge some things evil. Let us
> see to what extent you are really willing to shake off the moral
> relativist tag, and to whose detriment your reticence might accrue.
>I like Kundera, yes, especially for his common-sensical Enlightenment
>rationalist critique of much of what has come since.
>I find it interesting that the operative word is ``extent'', since
>I find so far in what you are telling me a confusion of an
>aesthetic standard, intensity of belief or its extremity (whether
>or not I'm willing to kill for my judgments), for ethical judgment.
There is no confusion - the agenda is clear. Your conception of "ethical
judgement" precludes you to judge on anything but facts pertaining to a
particular case - not on historical pattern. i.e. ethical judgement on
aesthetic grounds.
I'm suprised that you say you have read Kundera yet you did not understand
Kundera's support for ethical judgements on aesthetic grounds in the
novel "Unbearable Lightness...". -- a fundamental feature of the novel;
it's what he means by Nietschze's myth of eternal return.
We will see your role in a certain kind of "return" presently.
>I have
>just tried to explain to you how I thought it was possible to judge someone
>morally evil and still not think it right to kill them.
You still have not explained what you mean by "judge"; i.e.
how you live with judging Hitler to be evil whilst still being able to live
with your daughters and yourself.
You have, on the the other hand, stated that it is "your gun against mine" -
indeed, if you were standing at the street corner on which I was about to gun
down Hitler, you would gun me down before I had a chance to complete my act.
You would thus be doing Hitler a favour and participating in the cause
of the Holocaust.
>Also I think I understand precisely to whose detriment you think my
>reticence accrues. I think you're wrong about it.
We shall see.
> The Marxist Naphtha a protagonist for Progress/Reason? And a right-winger to
> boot? I think that Mr. Morris has it the wrong way around, at least. Could
> the source of this curiosity be related to Mr Morris's willingness to lump
> Marx, Hegel AND Freud in his "left-leaning philosophical lineage"?
>First of all, I opposed Progress/Reason to Reaction/Spirit as Mann's
>dichotomy. I'm flabbergasted that you took me to mean that Progress/Reason
>was Naphtha and Reaction/Spirit was Settembrini. I meant it, of course
>John, precisely the other way around. I'm sorry if I gave you any other
>impression.
I do not accept apologies from scum who threaten to kill me.
>Now, Hegel, Marx, and Freud are clearly vastly complex thinkers, Marx
>and Freud in particular having spawned schools of ``Marxists'' and
>``Freudians'' within which almost anything together with its opposite
>can be found. I did not mean for anything that these thinkers may be
>be summarized by handy labels. I did mean, however, to give my label
>meaning by something I see common in these thinkers.
Of course. We are speaking in "broad brushstrokes". There is a tacit
understanding that any such brushstroke can be elaborated upon when
necessary.
>In Hegel, he is willing to offer absolution for the Terror in exchange
>for a dialectical endpoint of history. The Terror becomes a necessary
>step inn the historical process.
Wrong. There is no need for "Terror" in the Hegel philosophy of "destiny
of a group". It can appear as a perfectly mundane feeling that you have every
morning when you read the newspaper over breakfast.
>Marx believes he has discovered
>the scientific laws by which history works. ...present terror
>is traded for future social justice.
I would like you to find for me one reference by Marx to the necessity for
terror. I believe that you will not find such a reference.
>And Freud, again sees scientific law in the operation of human psychology.
Replace "scientific law" with "a kind of determinism to be substantiated
by experimental observation"; then I agree with you.
>The common element in all
>three is the trade-off of a mysterious but morally sound human free will
>for a more scientific-seeming human determinism.
I think that the word "science" is carrying you astray. Tell me: does
the notion of destiny inherent in the Greek writings (such as "Sophocles'
'King Oedipus'") fit into your idea of 'scientific-seeming human determinism'?
No ? Then neither should Hegel, since he is of the same pantheist lineage
as the pre-Socratics, Confucious and Spinoza.
On the other hand, your assertion that the notion of "human free will"
is "morally sound" is a curious one, considering that it would lead you
to shoot the assassin who would eliminate a man that wields dictatorial
powers and who has admitted to a pathological hatred of various sections
he perceives to exist in his society.
Instead of believing that the assassin is doing you and your daughters a
favour --- or, indeed, having no opinion, and leaving the situation to
run its course without your interference -- you condemn him - and do Hitler a
favour instead.
>Settembrini is more left than Naphtha.
You may, of course, believe whatever you want; curious, though, that
you overlook the facts that in the novel, Naphtha is the only one of the two
who speaks against the "bourgeois revolution" and against the bourgeoisie,
who wishes another revolution to overturn the "bad" things of the French
revolution, that Naphtha is likely modelled on a Marxist propagandist, and
that Settembrini was the protagonist for "bourgeois values" (quote from
Naphtha; see dialogue en route to the valkyrian scarp ) (this why
the duel had to be fought).
Even one with an elementary knowledge of modern history should question
your belief that Settembrini is more left than Naphtha, if one is
using any of the commonly accepted definitions of "left".
>Naphtha isn't interested in social
>justice at all, even as an epistemological endpoint. He's only interested
>in the beauty, the intensity, the significance, of human suffering.
Stalin too had grotesque images of his love of the beauty of suffering.
>He's willing to bring back the Inquisition to cause this suffering, too.
>I don't see that Naphtha was ``materialist'' in the slightest. His
>idealism goes in another direction. Equally inhuman, I agree, but
>different. Naphtha is closer to Auschwitz than the gulag.
Just as Lukacs was Hitler's propagandist and Goebbels a stool for Stalin.
Believe whatever you want. I just hope you don't vote.
>I had said:
> I have to hold the ethical imperative higher than any aesthetic one.
>John responded:
> This sounds disturbingly like the Western sovietologist who noted that since
> almost no villages in the Soviet Union in the period 1930 to 1953 were
> simultaneously being terrorised by Stalin's regime, there could not have been
> much of a terror.
> So the recommendation was to treat Stalin like "one of the boys".
> Western observers have been notoriously slow to figure out the nature of
> regimes from Stalin, through Ceausescu, to the Serbian military's ambitions
> for the Balkans. (Serbian ambitions for Yugoslavia were known more than
> 18 months ago -- why weren't the Serbians pressured by the U.N then, thereby
> avoiding the current tragedy in ex-Yugoslavia?)
> It seems that there is some use for an "aesthetic imperative" after all.
>John, I haven't a clue what you mean here.
Well, you see, according to the Facts, "almost no villages in the Soviet Union
in the period 1930 to 1953 were simultaneously being terrorised by Stalin's
regime", so, according to the Facts, "there could not have been much of a
terror".
An aesthetic view would have us look at various other factors which do not
necessarily causally link the regime with its acts, but which indicate
the nature of the regime. Factors such as the brutality of acts (unofficially
or officially) sanctioned by the regime, impressions held by the local
population etc. etc.
Ethical imperatives such as the one you give below guarantee that I (e.g.
"the president") cannot act on the aesthetic impression of ugliness we
perceive about Stalin's (etc.) regime.
Got it?
>I don't understand how you
>seem to think that holding an ethical imperative high means I have
>to kill or terrorise anybody.
I did not mean this. You, Mr Morris, however, allow certain situations to
occur through your inaction.
>Can't I mean just that the ethical imperative
>says I can't kill or terrorise anyone even if I think they're ugly or
>standing in the way of artistic progress
Stalin did wonders for the Soviet art scene. Mayakovski and every other
artist in Russia knew that all you had to do to get a decent wage was to
make art that approved of the State. Mayakovski shot himself in the end. So
sad that the aesthetic imperative got the better of him in the end.
>(i.e., what I called the
>right-wing, or aesthetic imperative) and even if I think they're
>stupid or standing in the way of social-engineering legislation
>(i.e., what I called the left-wing, or epistemological imperative)?
>I said:
> I would argue that science is one of the most dictatorial programs we have.
>I believe I explained what I meant by ``dictatorial'' here. Since ``left''
>is an extension of the scientific program from particles and planets to
>human beings, I believe in that direction it becomes especially dictatorial.
"The extension of the scientific program ... to human beings" is an empty
concept (proof: see Popper's `The poverty of historicism').
It seems that our discussion has ended.
------------------------------------------
I will reply to your points below in order to round things off.
>I said:
> If the only nasty thing Hitler had ever done was publish _Mein
> Kampf_ (I'm talking about my impression of a book I have not (yet)
> read), then I would say, regardless of the horror of the content of
> the book, anyone would be criminally unjust to kill the man just for
> having written a book.
>
>John responded:
> It's nice of you to condescend to agree with the letter of the Law; a
> sacrifice on your behalf, your readers know, as you have already told them of
> your aversion to the dictatorial nature of Facts, and, I'm sure you agree,
> Facts are vital in the implementation of Law.
>I didn't condescend to agree. There's no other letter of the Law I
>agree with more passionately with.
In this case you must be either lying or confused because you have already told
your readers that you are (a) averse to dictatorships (b) science (= "Facts")
is "dictatorial" => you are averse - to some extent at least - to Facts.
Since Facts -- ho-hum -- are "vital in the implementation of Law" there are
situations when the Law, to you is dictatorial, i.e. you are averse to it.
What, pray tell, motivates you to overcome your aversion to Law --
hence spawns your hypocracy -- in the case of shooting "Hitler" ? i.e. why
should I allow you the privilege of having it both ways while believing what
you say?
Maybe if I'd written this in the first place with a stress-energy tensor
thrown in you would have grasped it somewhat better.
>You seem to elide the Fact that before the Holocaust happened,
>*it hadn't yet happened*. So, I'm a little confused about what Facts
>you are referring to.
No need to be confused. I'm referring to the African tribe that was wiped out
some time ago -- which nobody knew about, so it didn't exist , despite
each tribesman suffering excrutiating pain in the process; or Robespierre (who
gets guillotined over and over ad infintium); or the Christ that keeps geting
nailed to the cross. Napolean; or Ivan the Terrible. Or Stalin; or Beria;
Charlemagne perhaps. Obenfuehrer Fritsche (warden of Auschwitz in 1942.) Le Pen.
Terreblanche. etc. etc. etc.
Shall I write down a few stress-energy tensors to help you understand?
>Are you advocating that Ralph Mannheim (the translator in English) ought
>to be executed or what?
Poor dear. You really do seem baffled.
>If all Goebbels had done was ``think, write,
>and make nasty films'' the Allied Powers committed a crime in executing him,
>yes.
Goebbels committed suicide alongside Hitler in 1945. Please keep your
aversion in check and do yourself the favour of ascertaining the facts.
> There is nothing horrific in Mein Kampf; it's rather banal, actually. Le Pen
> does much better in his campaigns for the French presidential elections. _Mein
> Kampf_ tells of Hitler's vision, including a strong displeasure with Jews and
> their influence on the country. Soon after Mein Kampf was published, Hitler
> became leader -- with extraordinary powers - of one of the most powerful
> nations on earth. Now the typical liberal claims that since Hitler had only
> *thought* about doing nasty things to stinking Jews, that he'd only published
> a book (he'd never actually killed any Jew! What a nice man in such a fine
> suit!) that he can't be judged evil enough to be erradicated himself.
>Pardon me if I don't believe that you can read _Mein Kampf_, or *any other
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>book*, and predict the future course of human history based on your reading.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Hitler's memoir's were a record of his beliefs -- at least, his ambitions.
There's nothing in them that'd made me suppose that following his ascension
to power as dictator, he'd have given every Jew a pay rise and
a paid holiday to the Riviera.
You choose to ignore all possibilities of a link between memoirs and
ambitions; you thus keep the hope alive that Hitler would actually have been
fair to Jews following his ascension. By the same token you suppose that
Le Pen would make as good a president as Mitterand, Terreblanche as good
as Botha, and Alksnis as good as Gorbachev. I'm sure one can find Canadian
examples.
It seems that your reticence accrues to the detriment of all fair-minded
people.
As I said before, I hope you don't vote.
You're an ignorant bastard, bewitched and made clueless by your own babbling
rationalism. I have nothing more to say to you.
>You see, I'm not the one wanting to kill people here, to make laws
>to control those puppet strings. You seem to be. Therefore, I should
>think the burden of proof is quite on you. Since you don't have such proof,
>and since the old-fashioned model of human free will works better to explain
>the observations, (I am willing to expand on this point at great length,
>John---which would you like first, my McDonald's gedanken-experiment
>demonstrating the impossibility of human determinism, or my Brothers Grimm
>argument demonstrating the danger of scientific inference for a system so
>complex as a human being?) it makes me kinda wonder at your own no doubt
>very high moral purpose in sending those policemen after me merely because
>you were able to translate some primitive moral conceptions into equations.
> Mike Morris
> (msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
John Wojdylo
Sydney 1992
--
Tom Osborn, " It is sorrow, not malice
School of Computing Sciences, which kills worlds ".
University of Technology, Sydney,
PO Box 123 Broadway 2007, AUSTRALIA. Kate Braverman, 1985.
Mike Morris
Responses to John Wojdylo. Part 1 of 2.
I had said:
Reading old books is living conversation with dead men.
And John replied:
One's description of one's conversation tells others about oneself.
One's existence is defined by the way one describes those things
familiar to us all.
And I prefer to speak with live people than dead ones.
Well, this does set the tone, doesn't it, John?
At first I thought I'd just skip over the remark, but it strikes me as
so willfully contrary that again, I just don't understand what you're about.
And this seems to happen alot. I'm willing to call it miswriting on my
part, John: I do not consider myself good at writing, I find writing
the most intellectually demanding task I know. So, I am willing to assume
that if something has not been communicated well it is I who have miswritten
and I am consequently willing to go on rephrasing it in fifty different
ways to explain it, in order to reach either a mutually agreeable assertion or
a mutual understanding of our disagreement.
Now, I would say that calling reading books a ``conversation'' is a metaphor
for what I do when I read a book and for what the books themselves do.
They talk amongst themselves and to me. I talk back. New books rewrite old
books as old books author new ones. This metaphor of life, particularly the
usage ``The Great Conversation'' to describe the vitality of the very
greatest of books, is not original to me, but comes by way of
Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins.
I crave both kinds of conversation, the literal and the metaphorical.
The context of my remark was in opposition to yours that Thomas Mann
is dead. There is a biological sense in which you are right, but there is
another sense in which any discussion about characters from _The Magic
Mountain_ breathes life both into and from Mann. Mann's book is good enough
to be a multiplier of our experience. Like life itself.
For if you are not in agreement with me about this, how can you point to
Hitler in 1929 as illustration of anything? He's dead, too.
I said:
I find it interesting that the operative word is ``extent'', since
I find so far in what you are telling me a confusion of an
aesthetic standard, intensity of belief or its extremity (whether
or not I'm willing to kill for my judgments), for ethical judgment.
John responded:
There is no confusion - the agenda is clear. Your conception of "ethical
judgement" precludes you to judge on anything but facts pertaining to a
particular case - not on historical pattern. i.e. ethical judgement on
aesthetic grounds.
What? Since by now I am clueless as to what *you* mean by ``aesthetic
grounds'', I don't know whether you are saying that I, in eschewing
ethical judgment based on ``historical pattern'', am using an aesthetic
standard or no. I claim I am not using an aesthetic standard. I also
claim historical pattern recognition is more ``scientific'' (though, remember,
I think it pseudoscience) than ``artistic''. So, where's the aesthetics?
I'm suprised that you say you have read Kundera yet you did not understand
Kundera's support for ethical judgements on aesthetic grounds in the
novel "Unbearable Lightness...". -- a fundamental feature of the novel;
it's what he means by Nietschze's myth of eternal return.
I think in _Immortality_ Kundera clearly holds an ethical
standard of judgment above an aesthetic standard. I'm thinking
of Kundera's opposition to the romanticism of Rilke and others
with respect to Goethe and Goethe's ``failure'' to respond with a grand
and poetic passion to Bettina's ``love''.
Certainly I would agree with you that in _Unbearable Lightness..._,
Kundera is concerned with ethics and with aesthetics. I would not so
much agree that he grounds ethics in aesthetics as aesthetics in ethics.
I said:
I have just tried to explain to you how I thought it was possible to
judge someone morally evil and still not think it right to kill him.
John said:
You still have not explained what you mean by "judge"; i.e. how you
live with judging Hitler to be evil whilst still being able to live
with your daughters and yourself.
Well, John, as I've said before, Hitler killed. He was a criminal
*in addition to* being a man who thought or expressed some evil
thoughts. If you will tell me which Hitler you are now referring to,
i.e. the fictional one you suggested whose only blemish is that he has
published _Mein Kampf_, or the historical Hitler who killed, then maybe
I could tell you why at most I'd argue with the first, but be ready to
gun down the second when and if he tried to kill, and feel myself
at one and the same time dutiful towards my wife, my son, my daughter,
and my conscience. My point is that there are two different people
you are presenting me to judge.
You have, on the other hand, stated that it is "your gun against mine" -
indeed, if you were standing at the street corner on which I was about to gun
down Hitler, you would gun me down before I had a chance to complete my act.
You would thus be doing Hitler a favour and participating in the cause
of the Holocaust.
This is quite the leap from *my* statement that if *you* believe Auschwitz
was a necessary consequence of the publication of _Mein Kampf_ that
*you* have no basis for making any kind of moral judgment at all because
*you* then would have no understanding of moral responsibility, that
*you* would be left with only whose gun is bigger (or whose budget for
hiring ad men is bigger, which is the fashionable version of this) as the only
possible remaining metric.
It is in the nature of human determinism that it destroys human
responsiblity. Isn't this elementary?
I apologized for and explained a miscommunication:
First of all, I opposed Progress/Reason to Reaction/Spirit as Mann's
dichotomy. I'm flabbergasted that you took me to mean that Progress/Reason
was Naphtha and Reaction/Spirit was Settembrini. I meant it, of course
John, precisely the other way around. I'm sorry if I gave you any other
impression.
John graciously accepted, acknowledging my politeness in not charging
him directly with a misreading:
I do not accept apologies from scum who threaten to kill me.
Regarding my grouping of Hegel, Marx, and Freud in one intellectual
lineage I call ``left'', John said:
Of course. We are speaking in "broad brushstrokes". There is a tacit
understanding that any such brushstroke can be elaborated upon when
necessary.
Yes, and elaboration seems to be necessary in this case. But first, it's
still not clear to me that you understand what I'm claiming for my usage of
``left'', ``right'', and ``liberal''. I am *not* claiming that these
labels describe the individual thinkers of each lineage. I am claiming
that the lineages as a whole, or in other words the common threads which
I think connect the thinkers within each lineage, describe my *labels*.
After all, I listed Rousseau on the right. He's certainly father
of much that is revolutionary on the left. But I meant only
Rousseau in his aspect as a reaction of spirit/passion against
Voltaire's rationalism.
My labels are based on a split that occurred mostly in the early nineteenth
century. They therefore have very little to do with any, say, modern
journalist's usage of ``left'', ``right'', and ``liberal''. I think
that all three political philosophies get used in justifying the political
programmes of all North American political parties that I am aware of.
Also, you should be aware that I think reasons from the left, right,
and liberal philosophies can get used to justify the same legislation.
I'm thinking of the sense in which Plato, in the _Laws_, says that
every properly legislated piece of legislation ought to have a preamble
to explain *why* it has been legislated. Now, almost everyone but a
holdout anarchist would agree that legislating against murder is
justified. But, I claim there are different justifications that different
people do give. For instance, if you think murder should be criminal
only because God said so, then *I* would say your appeal is fundamentally
to authority (for authority's sake) which is not so much an appeal to
justice, but to an aesthetically satisfying completion of your metaphysics.
I'd call this justification for legislating against murder right-wing.
If you think murder ought to be legislated against because the legislation
will deter murderers from murdering, then I'd say your appeal is
primarily epistemological, a use of law to engineer society in a certain
way. I'd call your reasoning of the left. If you think murder ought to be
legislated against because it is unjust that anyone should be unjustly
killed (because people have a Right to Life), and that punishing the
injustice is itself just, then I'd say you have a liberal, ethically-based
reason for your law. Same law in all three cases.
In other words, it should be clear that I do not consider ``left'', ``right'',
or ``liberal'' to be paths leading inexorably to the gulag, to Auschwitz,
or to bourgeouis bliss. I do think the gulag is linked to left and
Auschwitz to right (because the Russians persecuted those who stood in
the way of their grand social-engineering experiment---eventually this
became Stalinism---, and because The Fatherland and Purity of the Race
are primarily aesthetic conceptions), just as I have already admitted
that anarchy is linked to liberalism. But these links and the consequent
mountains of skulls in each case are by way of caricature.
Yes, the danger of liberalism is precisely that in fearing to do
evil oneself (or in fearing to allow one's government to exercise
unjust power), one will be so pusillanimous in responding to evil in others,
that their dark designs will flourish for longer than if you were
more willing to bend the rules to stop them. Mostly I think
that this is an untested danger.
Also I've been known to comment that every artist has to have
some of the right-wing in him. I am thus not surprised at your pointing
to Kundera's ``immorality of kitsch'' stance. It's like Pound's
``immorality of bad art'' dictum. The ethical question for me of
course is what length they're willing to go to to eradicate ``kitsch
art'' and promote ``excellent art''. Pound was willing to extol Italian
fascism for its potential to patronize the arts in a way that Renaissance
princes once did. I don't think Kundera goes that far.
Here's a Yeats poem that illustrates perfectly what I
mean by the tension between aesthetics and ethics:
The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
Doesn't mean he's really going to go out and strangle crying babies, just
that the impulse is there.
Now, some specifics. I said:
In Hegel, he is willing to offer absolution for the Terror in exchange
for a dialectical endpoint of history. The Terror becomes a necessary
step in the historical process.
John responded:
Wrong. There is no need for "Terror" in the Hegel philosophy of "destiny
of a group". It can appear as a perfectly mundane feeling that you
have every morning when you read the newspaper over breakfast.
Then I said:
Marx believes he has discovered
the scientific laws by which history works. ...present terror
is traded for future social justice.
And John responded:
I would like you to find for me one reference by Marx to the necessity for
terror. I believe that you will not find such a reference.
Let's start with a normative reading of both, shall we? From Bertrand
Russell's chapter on Hegel in _A History of Western Philosophy_:
``I come now to a singular feature of Hegel's philosophy,
which distinguishes it from the philosophy of Plato or
Plotinus or Spinoza. Although ultimate reality is timeless,
and time is merely an illusion generated by our inability to
see the Whole, yet the time-process has an intimate relation
to the purely logical process of the dialectic. World history,
in fact, has advanced through the categories, from Pure Being
in China (of which Hegel knew nothing except that it was) to
the Absolute Idea, which seems to have been nearly, if not
quite, realized in the Prussian State. I cannot see any
justification, on the basis of his own metaphysic, for the
view that world history repeats the transitions of the
dialectic, yet that is the thesis which he developed in his
_Philosophy of History_.'' [p. 735]
Now, Russell on Marx:
``Marx's philosophy of history is a blend of Hegel and
British economics. Like Hegel, he thinks that the world
develops according to a dialectical formula, but he totally
disagrees with Hegel as to the motive force of this development.
Hegel believed in a mystical entity called ``Spirit,'' which
causes human history to develop according to the stages of
the dialectic as set forth in Hegel's _Logic_. Why Spirit
has to go through these stages is not clear. One is tempted
to suppose that Spirit is trying to understand Hegel, and at
each stage rashly objectifies what he is reading. Marx's
dialectic has none of this quality except a certain inevitableness.
For Marx, matter, not spirit, is the driving force. But it is
matter in the peculiar sense that we have been considering,
not the wholly dehumanized matter of the atomists. This means
that, for Marx, the driving force is really man's relation
to matter, of which the most important part is his mode of
production. In this way Marx's materialism, in practice, becomes
economics.
The politics, religion, philosophy, and art of any epoch in
human history are, according to Marx, an outcome of production,
and, to a lesser extent, of distribution. I think he would not
maintain that this applies to all the niceties of culture, but
only to its broad outlines.'' [p. 784,5]
OK, armed with that, look at the last few pages of Hegel's _Philosophy of
History_ and you will see The Terror explicated dialectically as a natural
antithesis to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Or, look at Marx's
Preface to the First Edition of _Das Kapital_. There, you find
explicit the belief that he is following a scientific programme:
``The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they
occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing
influence, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under
conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in
its normality. In this work I have to examine the capitalist
mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange
corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic
ground is England. That is the reason why England is used as the
chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas.
If, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the
condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers,
or in optimistic fashion comforts himself with the thought that
in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him,
``De te fabula narratur!''
Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower
degree of development of the social antagonisms that result
from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a
question of those laws themselves, of these tendencies working
with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that
is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed,
the image of its own future.''
Do I need to underline, John, ``laws themselves...working with iron
necessity towards inevitable results'', as the one reference you requested
of me? Now, I agree with you that I'm probably not going to find anyplace
in Marx where Marx explicitly condones mass murder, say. But I think it
implicit that ``inevitable results'' doesn't mean political happiness
so much as what actually had been observed to happen, namely suffering.
I also agree with you that Hegel's Spirit and Prussianism are part
and parcel of the right, but it's the marionette strings that matter
to me here. Both Hegel and Marx are pointing to a necessity, away from
human choice. I think every step away from human choice, every marionette
string, is only one more illusion that man is being relieved of yet
another jot of moral responsibility for what he does.
(continued in part 2 of 2)
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
Mike Morris
Wednesday, the 5th of August, 1992
Continued responses to John Wojdylo. Part 2 of 2.
Finally, I listed Freud:
And Freud, again sees scientific law in the operation of human psychology.
And John amended my claim:
Replace "scientific law" with "a kind of determinism to be substantiated
by experimental observation"; then I agree with you.
Then I am glad to say we agree on this one. But your eagerness to insert
this expansion, as though it made any real difference, tells me
you'd like to hear my Brothers Grimm argument:
A sociologist notes the problem of violence in modern culture and
hypothesizes that reading children unbowdlerized Grimm, with all
of its violence unexpurgated, causes these children to grow up to be
violent adults. This sociologist is allowed the experimental programme
of his dreams: Nanotechnology is used to create many, many physically
(genetically and environmentally) exact duplicate trials where a child
is read bedtime stories by his parents. All variables are controlled so as
to make *everything* perfectly the same, except in 10,000 trials the child
is read bowdlerized Grimm and in another 10,000 trials, he is read
unbowdlerized Grimm. In every case (10,000 out of 10,000) where the child
was read the original Grimm, the child grows up to be an ax-murderous adult.
In every case (10,000 out of 10,000) where the child was read sanitized
Grimm, he grows up to be a fine, upstanding citizen.
Question: Are we justified epistemologically in outlawing unbowdlerized
Grimm, assuming that a society with less adult violence is to be
preferred to a society with more adult violence?
[You will recognize, John, that no sociologist has had, or will
ever have, data this clean, although physicists have them all the
time. You will recognize also, John, that this hypothesis is a plausible
one, albeit this one has been opposed by Bruno Bettelheim in _The Uses
of Enchantment_, of a ``politically correct'' nature that goes hand in hand
with fashionable notions that pornography causes violence against women,
that Holocaust revisionist literature leads to racial violence, that
lots of ``fucks''s in one's postings cause others uncontrollably to feel
anger and to write flames, wasting net bandwidth.]
Answer: I didn't tell you about the fact that in these
20,000 trials, the parents always told the child that he would be loved
as long as he behaved like the characters in the stories. In another
20,000 trials, the parents said precisely the opposite: ``You must
never behave like the characters in this story, or we won't love
you anymore.'' In the second 20,000, all of the times the kid was
read bowdlerized Grimm, he grew up violent. All of the times he
was read unbowdlerized Grimm he grew up kind and gentle.
False Conclusion: So, we missed the important cause is all. We
thought the important thing was violence in the stories. It isn't.
It's parental reinforcement.
Answer: No, I didn't tell you about a further set of 40,000 trials
in which...
Conclusion: The whole meaning of scientific inference is
in doubt when you're trying to discover
laws about a system as complex as a human being.
It is completely unclear what ``experimental evidence''
in support of sociological or psychological hypotheses would be.
I said of Hegel, Marx, and Freud:
The common element in all
three is the trade-off of a mysterious but morally sound human free will
for a more scientific-seeming human determinism.
John responded:
I think that the word "science" is carrying you astray. Tell me: does
the notion of destiny inherent in the Greek writings (such as "Sophocles'
'King Oedipus'") fit into your idea of 'scientific-seeming human
determinism'? No ? Then neither should Hegel, since he is of the
same pantheist lineage as the pre-Socratics, Confucious and Spinoza.
I agree partways with this objection. I would not call fate, of the moral
universe of fate and free will in the old tragedy, ``scientific'', and
I would agree that there is a sense in which ``Spirit'' in Hegel is
closer to this old fate than to scientific determinism. On the other
hand, his historical movement is dialectical, thus logically necessary,
and I see Marx's determinism as coming out of Hegel's so I see Hegel's
determinism as the beginning of the modern lineage I gave. And, there's
nothing deterministic about the other two lineages, so I will not insist
that ``left'' is so much scientifically deterministic as simply deterministic.
Although I'll add that the only fashionable manifestation of this
detrminism in the pop culture that I've run acrosss is the
``scientific'' kind of determinism.
On the other hand, your assertion that the notion of "human free will"
is "morally sound" is a curious one, considering that it would lead you
to shoot the assassin who would eliminate a man that wields dictatorial
powers and who has admitted to a pathological hatred of various sections
he perceives to exist in his society.
All depends on whether you think the publication of a hateful book
alone justifies this assassination. Remember, John, there are plenty
of hateful books published all the time. Why are you not arguing the
*assassination* of the authors of any of these? Are you telling me you
can predict that none of them will become mass murderers? That the context
is different, so fining them will be enough? My point, again, is that
in 1929 you are clueless about Auschwitz. It was ``unthinkable''.
I declared:
Settembrini is more left than Naphtha.
John responded:
You may, of course, believe whatever you want; curious, though, that
you overlook the facts that in the novel, Naphtha is the only one of the two
who speaks against the "bourgeois revolution" and against the bourgeoisie,
who wishes another revolution to overturn the "bad" things of the French
revolution, that Naphtha is likely modelled on a Marxist propagandist, and
that Settembrini was the protagonist for "bourgeois values" (quote from
Naphtha; see dialogue en route to the valkyrian scarp ) (this why
the duel had to be fought).
I understand the language, but using ``bourgeois'' does not a Marxist
make. Sorry, strike that, I'll grant you he may be modelled on Lukacs, a
Marxist (I think he's Nietzsche, too, by the way). Being a Marxist
does not a left-winger make is more to my point. You yourself
challenged me to find Marx advocating Terror. He doesn't. I think
we are therefore agreed that Naphtha is far from Marx. As I put it,
Naphtha wants human suffering because he thinks it beautiful. If Naphtha is
Marxist, he's a right-winger, Nietzschean. Something of what
Allan Bloom calls ``the Nietzscheanization of the Left''.
Even one with an elementary knowledge of modern history should question
your belief that Settembrini is more left than Naphtha, if one is
using any of the commonly accepted definitions of "left".
Well, I'm not using a commonly accepted definition, am I? I'm using
a definition that helps me sort something out that the usual usages
do not, that enlightenment liberalism and a belief in the Rights of Man
is distinct from the *two* nineteenth-century reactions to it. If it'd
make you feel better, we could agree to call my right=chartreuse,
left=beige, and liberal=mauve, for the purposes of the present discussion.
Stalin too had grotesque images of his love of the beauty of suffering.
Again, understand that it does not surprise me to find the impulse
of the right hand in hand with the left. I just believe that the *main*
impulse for the persecutions and murders in the Soviet Union (which
predated Stalin) was the engineering of a ``better world'', which I claim again
springs from an epistemological justification, whereas the extermination
of Jews by Hitler came from a bizarre aesthetic notion (this was certainly
dressed up with all kinds of deterministic sociological theories
of the Nazis' own making, so you might say they were left, too). Both
Beauty above the Good and Truth above the Good can destroy the Good. It's
simple really.
I asked for an elaboration, and John wrote:
Well, you see, according to the Facts, "almost no villages in the
Soviet Union in the period 1930 to 1953 were simultaneously being
terrorised by Stalin's regime", so, according to the Facts, "there
could not have been much of a terror".
John, I don't buy the syllogism. There's nothing necessarily
ethical about sophistry.
An aesthetic view would have us look at various other factors which do not
necessarily causally link the regime with its acts, but which indicate
the nature of the regime. Factors such as the brutality of acts
(unofficially or officially) sanctioned by the regime, impressions held
by the local population etc. etc.
Why do you consider brutality something to be judged aesthetically
and not morally?
Ethical imperatives such as the one you give below guarantee that I (e.g.
"the president") cannot act on the aesthetic impression of ugliness we
perceive about Stalin's (etc.) regime.
Got it?
Not at all. It's not ugliness that'd make me want react to Stalinism.
I said:
I don't understand how you
seem to think that holding an ethical imperative high means I have
to kill or terrorise anybody.
John responded:
I did not mean this. You, Mr Morris, however, allow certain situations to
occur through your inaction.
Understood. Liberalism does not claim to be able to eradicate
every evil. But I'm much more fearful of those programs
that claim they can.
"The extension of the scientific program ... to human beings" is an empty
concept (proof: see Popper's `The poverty of historicism').
My gosh, we agree.
But empty as it is, this doesn't stop every political party from
trying to justify its agenda ``scientifically''.
It seems that our discussion has ended.
Well, I won't say I'm unhappy to regain the time it's
been taking to prepare these articles, but I will say that
I count your suggestion of Lukacs as the model for Naphtha
as a gain of more interest to me than much that I've learned
in this place.
In this case you must be either lying or confused because you have
already told your readers that you are (a) averse to dictatorships
(b) science (= "Facts") is "dictatorial" => you are averse - to some
extent at least - to Facts. Since Facts -- ho-hum -- are "vital in
the implementation of Law" there are situations when the Law, to you
is dictatorial, i.e. you are averse to it.
Do you understand the sense in which I said science is dictatorial?
It, much like the moral question of whether or not we ought to gas
innocent people, is undemocratic. Taking a vote on it won't make
it otherwise. Like voting to use law to violate a person's Right
to Free Speech doesn't make such a law any less a crime.
There's a difference between Facts which are real Facts, like the
14 decimal places in the spin-down rate of the binary pulsar, and
Facts which are False, like ``pornography causes violence against
women''.
Part of my whole point is that liberalism is not allegience to 100% absolute
democracy.
What, pray tell, motivates you to overcome your aversion to Law --
hence spawns your hypocracy -- in the case of shooting "Hitler" ? i.e. why
should I allow you the privilege of having it both ways while believing what
you say?
I'm not averse to Law, just Unjust Law. I claim we can know the difference.
Maybe if I'd written this in the first place with a stress-energy tensor
thrown in you would have grasped it somewhat better.
See how enjoyable having a little biographical detail to work with
can be?
I said:
You seem to elide the Fact that before the Holocaust happened,
*it hadn't yet happened*. So, I'm a little confused about what Facts
you are referring to.
John responded:
No need to be confused. I'm referring to the African tribe that was
wiped out some time ago -- which nobody knew about, so it didn't exist,
despite each tribesman suffering excrutiating pain in the process; or
Robespierre (who gets guillotined over and over ad infintium); or the
Christ that keeps getting nailed to the cross. Napoleon; or Ivan the
Terrible. Or Stalin; or Beria; Charlemagne perhaps. Obenfuehrer
Fritsche (warden of Auschwitz in 1942.) Le Pen. Terreblanche. etc. etc. etc.
Shall I write down a few stress-energy tensors to help you understand?
Probably it wouldn't help. I know something about most of these except
for Le Pen. How many people did he kill?
As I said: You seem to elide the Fact that before the Holocaust
happened *it hadn't yet happened*. The Fact that there were moral
choices yet to be made that didn't have to be made in the way
that they were made. Anything less I would consider to be a move
to absolve the criminals of the crime, a move to relieve them
of the responsibility for having made the choice they did, a move
to relieve us of the responsibility for making future choices.
I asked:
Are you advocating that Ralph Mannheim (the translator in English) ought
to be executed or what?
John responded:
Poor dear. You really do seem baffled.
Well, I am relieved, but I fail to understand why you think _Mein
Kampf_ once was dangerous and is not now. Or is it only its capacity
as an indicator of Hitler's intent that you are interested in? Then my
question becomes: Are there any modern authors of hateful books
you are advocating should be executed?
I said:
If all Goebbels had done was ``think, write,
and make nasty films'' the Allied Powers committed a crime in executing him,
yes.
John corrected me:
Goebbels committed suicide alongside Hitler in 1945. Please keep your
aversion in check and do yourself the favour of ascertaining the facts.
Yes, I was ignorant about the mode of Goebbels' death. Now that you have
enlightened me, I fail to understand your original point about Goebbels'
being persecuted by the Allies, except in the sense that he might have
been tried and executed solely for ``thinking, writing, and making
nasty films''. My point still stands.
Hitler's memoirs were a record of his beliefs -- at least, his ambitions.
There's nothing in them that'd made me suppose that following his ascension
to power as dictator, he'd have given every Jew a pay rise and
a paid holiday to the Riviera.
You choose to ignore all possibilities of a link between memoirs and
ambitions; you thus keep the hope alive that Hitler would actually have been
fair to Jews following his ascension. By the same token you suppose that
Le Pen would make as good a president as Mitterand, Terreblanche as good
as Botha, and Alksnis as good as Gorbachev. I'm sure one can find Canadian
examples.
Yeah, I'm not saying you have to hand the guy a gun and offer
your own head (or anyone else's) as a test of whether he's nasty
or not. I am saying the only test of whether he's a murderer or not
is if he murders, not if he writes a murderous memoir. I also am
saying that gunning him down might be the moral response
to a murderer, it's not the moral response to a memoirist who
is not a murderer.
Le Pen has an absolute, inalienable, Creator-endowed Right to Life
until he were to forfeit that Right by committing murder. This doesn't
mean he has a Right to Be President of France.
It seems that your reticence accrues to the detriment of all fair-minded
people.
John, since you do not seem to be out there assassinating Le Pen,
I fail to see the operative difference between my reticence and
yours.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
INFIDEL
Mike Morris writes:
> Wednesday, the 5th of August, 1992
>
>
>Responses to John Wojdylo. Part 1 of 2.
Mike,
I've been thinking about your young son recently. I was thinking how
nice it would be to introduce him to the ways of the world; I mean,
I crave his little botty. Oh yes. I would have him lie down on a nice
bed, I'd massage his rectal muscles just right -- young ones are so
much more malleable than old ones that have passed a ton of shit
-- and I'd just pop it in nicely. Wouldn't your son like that ?
Did you know that popping it in and out of young boys' botties makes
a sweet little poop -- whoops, popping -- sound like a lolly-pop being
withdrawn from the mouth , a baby's mouth, as the case may be ? Pop pop pop
pop pop...
In the abscence of any decent poetry, I'd read to your son one of Joe
Green's poems. Yum yum.
I'd also like to lick your daughter's arse and have her fart while my
tongue gently carresses her rectal muscles. I'd reach up to her
pre-pubescent tits and -- in the abscence of any real nipples -- pinch
her gently just hard enough so she let's out a little "ouch". I'd
treat her to some Pushkin. It's important to start your kids right at an
early age.
Then I'd ask nicely for both your son and daughter to stand at
attention before me, and, carefully, as in a game of "Twister", we
arrange ourselves in the following position: Young Master Morris
places his petite arse on Young Miss Morris's nose (very gently, mind
you, supporting himself in the right way on the rim of the bed) while
I gently ease the head of my erect penis into Miss Morris's surprised
and puzzled cuntlet. I take the head of Master Morris's penis, and
masticate it in just the right way so that he comes -- yes, even young
ones can ejaculate -- by which time, as per my instructions, Young
Master Morris would have passed shit and farts into the mouth and nose
of Young Miss Morris.
I would also like your wife to participate, I would like to measure
the length of her erect clitoris to see if it may be useful in a joyful
act of sodomy on her young son. Of course, I would ask politely for
your permission before inserting my penis into your wife's cunt;
courtesy pays. Oh yes. I am interested in your person, yes, yes, yes.
John Wojdylo
Melbourne
August 1992
Mike Morris
Tuesday, the 11th of August, 1992
Yes, John, amazing how impotent it all is, isn't it?
If you should ever find your way north for a visit, I'd be glad to
buy you a beer.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
INFIDEL
> Tuesday, the 11th of August, 1992
>Yes, John, amazing how impotent it all is, isn't it?
This is de Sade's flaw.
The most potent art is that in which it seems that nothing happens.
>If you should ever find your way north for a visit, I'd be glad to
>buy you a beer.
Given that Kundera would have spewed if he'd heard your view of his work
(your relegating his aesthetic considerations), and your persistence with
personalizing a reading of a novel (as a sincere relationship with the author) ,the reasons to avoid each other in a drinking hole are significant.
However, as Canada can be a rather colder place than Melbourne (where I
am working at present), and pubs with a fireplace remind me of Japan, I
may take up your offer were I to stray that far from civilization.
Regards,
JW