121. Zen Physics - IV. Adventures in Ontology

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Zen Physics

Chapter 5. A Change of Mind
p53 [This follows several case studies of people whose memories of their pasts were erased in various ways] Erode memories and you wear a person away, bit by bit. Erase all memories and you erase a person completely. Then replace the lost memories with fresh ones and you create someone new. In the event of such extreme memory erasure and substitution, there is surely justification in speaking of the death of one individual and the coming into being of another. And, most tellingly, it is precisely in these terms, and without any hesitation, that people to whom catastrophe has happened describe their inner experience.

p54 Selves are defined by memories. So, if a brain’s memory chain is badly disrupted or destroyed, the brain will feel very different... if all of a brain’s memories are lost, the accompanying self is lost too.

Instances of total, permanent amnesia challenge us to reevaluate our concept of death. For if we consider the most relevant aspect of death to be “what it feels like” (the subjective experience) rather than “what it looks like” (the objective view) then total memory loss does seem to qualify as an event remarkably similar -- and, indeed, ontologically identical -- to death as we normally understand it. If the experience of being a particular person, say person A. is contingent upon having a particular stock of memories, then if this stock is irretrievably lost the feeling of being person A. must be lost as well. Person A. as a psychological entity, has effectively died -- died, that is, as far as the victim and the victim’s family and friends are concerned...

Yet the brain, as a result of its evolutionary heritage, is a resilient organ. And, if it remains fully functional, then no sooner has it been deprived of one complete set of memories than it begins to lay down a fresh set, like a camcorder that keeps on running. This reacquisition of memory takes place automatically, just as it does in the case of an infant. Moreover, it involves an actual physical change in the brain -- a major regrowth and rearrangement of neural connections. As the brain that once generated the feeling of being a person builds up its new collection of archives so, at a conscious level, it begins to give rise to the feeling of being a different individual, person B. And, significantly, this is not a problem or a concern either for person A or for person B. At the time at which the old memories are lost (which in an accident is more or less instantaneous), person A ceases to exist and so cannot subsequently experience any regrets, sadness, fear, or loss at what has happened... Person B, on the other hand, emerges gradually as new memories are acquired and, having no recollection or sense of attachment to person A, has no cause to be troubled by A’s demise. B’s main problem will be that, as an adult rather than an infant, she will almost inevitably have commitments carried over from her previous “life” to which she has to readjust...

p56 When I talk about “you,” I implicitly refer to a particular body and brain, and to what I perceive as being a certain, unique, reasonably consistent personality that is projected to the outside world. But as far as you are concerned, “you” are what it is like to be a certain stream of consciousness. My view (which forms part of my stream of consciousness!) [I take no responsibility for that exclamation point.] is of a specific organic machine and its persona, its outward face. [The choice of the word “face” here reminds me how peculiar it was that Oliver Sacks, who has been mentioned several times already, couldn’t recognize faces.] Your view -- your direct experience -- is of being the subjective entity that the machine gives rise to. It cannot be emphasized enough that these two phenomena -- the machine and the feelings of this machine -- must be considered with the utmost care with regard to both how they are distinct and how they interrelate. The brain and the mind belong to two different categories of existence, different facets of reality.  [It annoys me when authors use jargon like “ontology” but I can see now that in this case it is unavoidable since ontology is central to what he’s examining, at least in this part of the book.] And although all the evidence of science is that there is a clear dependent relationship (in particular, “you” cannot exist without a brain -- or an adequate substitute for a brain) there is nothing prima facie that insists there must be a unique correspondence between the feeling of being you and a particular brain, or vice versa.
...
p59 [I’m passing over a long passage about our subjective experience of time, how we are not conscious of (literally) any periods of time when we are unconscious or deeply asleep. Subjectively there are no gaps in our stream of consciousness.] ...From your internal perspective... “you” are never unconscious -- for this represents a contradiction in terms. There has never been a moment in your life when subjectively you have not been present. And nothing will or can happen in the future to change this fact.

“The feeling of being you” is a persistent phenomenon. It is simply not possible from your point of view to know or experience or even conceive what it would be like not to be you. And this applies to everyone else. It is true even for people who have suffered the most profound forms of amnesia...

p60 The persistence of “you” is a phenomenon of vital concern to us... Our overwhelming desire is to stay who we are now, not to become some other “you” that our present self wouldn’t be able to identify with and that would inevitably involve us becoming someone else. [Not sure this is 100% true. I suspect many people, at one time or another, would opt for becoming a different person -- and forgetting their present identity -- as an alternative to physical suicide. Again Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was playing with this idea.] The thought of changing triggers our anticipatory fear of death, of losing our present selves. What we fail to properly recognize, though, is that we are always changing. And when we do become someone else -- as happens every moment, whether we realize it or not -- then we no longer hanker for the preservation of the self we used to be. The desire for self-preservation automatically transfers to whatever new “you” we have become.
...
[Inevitably, he moves on to multiple personality syndrome (MPS)] ...In cases of MPS it is as if a group of individuals is vying for control of a single body. Different members of the group take it in turn to become conscious [not quite my understand] and decide what the body will do and say. Talking to someone with MPS can be disconcertingly like trying to hold a telephone conversation with a number of people fighting over a single receiver -- you can converse with only one at a time and can never be sure who will answer next.
...
The account of a man with MPS from The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes is amazing but it isn’t quite my interest here. 


p62 ...In most cases, the original or root personality is seldom aware that the newer personalities exist, though the latter are often aware of each other and of the original. One way to check for true separateness is to look for consistently differing brain wave patterns among the separate personalities... Frank Putnam did this and discovered differences as great as those between separate individuals in... (EEGs), visually evoked cortical responses, and galvanic skin responses... And... 3-D scans have shown that entirely distinct regions of the brain are active depending upon which character is in charge.
...
The core personality of someone with MPS may suddenly and alarmingly find that several hours or even days have elapsed without their knowledge. In an instant, it will seem to them as if they have leapt forward in time and been transported to a different, possibly unknown place... For a lost slice of their lives, they were literally not themselves; an alternative personality had taken control of their body, with a character and set of memories of his or her own.
...
p64 [I’m jumping into the middle of a long story about a woman with MPS] ... As far as B1 [the core personality] was concerned, Sally did not exist. But Sally knew all about B1 -- her every thought, action, and dream. Sally could recall B-1’s dreams better than B1 could herself, because Sally was there all the time, in the background, watching and monitoring B1 even when B1 had control of the body...

...to confound Sally and prevent her listening in on conversations Prince [the psychotherapist] didn’t want her to hear, he would sometimes communicate with B1 in French, a language in which B1 was fluent but Sally could not understand a word.

p65 Then B4 appeared... The ever-present, ever-watchful Sally (she claimed that she never slept) [but how would she know?] reacted strongly to B4’s arrival, regarding her as another, unwelcome rival for control of the body. Although Sally knew about B4’s actions, she did not, as it happened, have access to her thoughts. Even so, from listening to what B4 said, it didn’t take Sally long to realize that B4 was making up her own version of events from the last six years, [when B4 had been dormant] and Sally started referring to her as “the idiot.”

Prince discovered that by putting either B1 or B4 into a deep hypnotic trance, yet another personality, B2, emerged who claimed to be both B1 and B4. Because B2 appeared to combine the virtues of B1 and B4 without their excesses, Prince decided that B2 was in some sense the real or whole Christine Beauchamp [not the patient’s real name]. Therefore he explained to B1 and B4 that he wished to awake B2 from the deep trance as a unified, fully conscious individual. But this immediately created problems. Although B1 and B4 were components of B2, they effectively ceased to exist as independent entities when B2 was present. To B1 and B4, life as B2 was the equivalent of death. 

p66 [They eventually give in] The epilogue is that B2 proved quite stable, though on occasions, at times of strain, she would temporarily split back into B1, B4, and Sally. And when B1 and B4 did emerge, it was for them as if they had woken from a coma; months would have gone by as if in the wink of an eye. As for Sally, she returned to the state she had occupied since 1898 -- an intraconsciousness, a passive, aware cohabitant alongside Christine.
...
It is so easy to get distracted by the oddness of MPS. Darling seems to have missed an important part of the stories he’s told us here: As I thought, “Sally” is a case of two personalities being aware in the same body at the same time. Even when she was not in control of the body she continued to “exist” as a self-aware stream of consciousness. “Sally” seems to be a special case even in the peculiar world of MPS, but I don’t think it is that unusual for personalities to be aware of the doings of at least the core personality. Just for a laugh we could call this non-Cartesian dualism.  

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120. Zen Physics - III. - "current of being"

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Zen Physics

Chapter 4. Remember Me?

p37 To be a person, one must have a memory -- a unique, accessible set of recollections -- because to be a person means to hold one’s life story and be actively, intimately involved with it. We must be able to see who we are now in terms of who we have been at different, successive stages along our journey from early childhood. We must hold the script to the inner drama that is ourselves, to know our own narrative. For if we cannot do this, we are without an identity or self.

...
p38 ...In the case of people who recover fully after having been in a coma for several months there has been an almost complete replacement of their constituent atoms in the period during which they were unconscious. Yet, upon waking, they have no sensation of being any different or of any time having passed.
...
p39 [Account of 20th century encephalitis lethargica epidemic] ...More than four decades had elapsed during which all the substance of their bodies and brains had been replaced many times over. But upon resuming relatively normal consciousness [after L-dopamine treatment], the patients were in no doubt as to who they were. It was for them as if there had been no vast temporal chasm. And for this very reason, they were confused, disoriented, by what they found -- or did not find -- in the new world into which they had been catapulted. One profoundly affected patient... knew it was 1969, because during her trance she had absorbed news of current events such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the assassination of Kennedy, but she felt with overwhelming conviction that it was 1926.

In his remarkable account of such cases in his book Awakenings, the neurologist Oliver Sacks supports the argument, first expressed by Leibniz (“Quis non agit non existit”), that we must be active or we cease, in any ontological sense, to exist [“Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.” -Wiki  Also, that Leibniz link is interesting if you read what I wrote about Ada Lovelace HERE.] -- that activity and actuality are one and the same... Most of us stiffen up if we remain in the same position for a couple hours. Six weeks with a broken leg in a cast and we need at least a few days to recoup the strength in our muscles and the flexibility in our joints. Yet some of the sleeping-sickness victims, having been virtually motionless for half a lifetime, were, within a few seconds of their “unfreezing,” jumping up, walking about with great energy, and chattering excitedly to anyone who would listen. The only satisfactory conclusion Sacks could draw was that during their trance there had been no subjective duration for the victims whatever. It was as if the “current of being” (Sacks’s phrase) had been abruptly turned off and, more than forty years later, turned back on again. In between, for the victims, time had stood still and memory remained intact. Nothing was added to it, but nothing was subtracted either.

I’ve only had a few experiences with unconsciousness (outside sleep) but it has been my experience that there was not, from the subjective point of view, any lapse at all. By which I mean that the interval between “conscious” states was filled with a confused, admittedly timeless, period of dreaming. “I” continued to be self-aware though in a dream state, just as I seem to pass my nights of sleep. Given that people on certain medications don’t recall their dreams, the ability to remember that state would seem to have a chemical component. Something like L-dopamine in our brains would seem to give us what we think of as a “normal” experience of time.

I can’t recall if Darling comes back to this later, but this would be one instance of what he argues is our brains limiting (by constraining us to linear time) the consciousness of our minds. 


p40 ...most of us cannot remember anywhere near everything that has happened to us... those who actually possess... [an eidetic or photographic memory] know that it can be a blight and a handicap -- in fact... a crippling neurological disorder...
...
...the eminent neurologist A.R. Luria documented an actual case of total recall in his astonishing book, The Mind of a Mnemonist. The subject was a Russian man, Sherashevsky, who could remember -- or, more to the point, could never forget -- any detail, however small, of the experiences of his life: every sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch, every thought and impression, every way of looking at and analyzing a situation... he had no sense of discrimination. He could not focus on a specific problem or situation because as soon as he turned his attention to it, his mind was choked full of irrelevancies. Every trivial item spawned the recollection of a thousand others. He could not follow through a particular chain of reasoning, or make decisions, or take an interest in one topic over any other. In fact, he could not function normally at all and spent many of his days in abject depression and misery.
...
p41 For survival reasons, a normal memory is selective and patchy, even if, to its owner, it doesn’t seem to be that way. The brain holds on to what it needs and quickly forgets what is irrelevant. Having organized itself, during childhood, around a particular worldview, the brain tends to consolidate mainly those memories that appear to fit in with and enhance this system of belief. Normal memory, then, is heavily biased towards a particular conception of reality. It is gappy, but good in parts, and may be exceptionally good with regard to some specific life episodes.

p42 [Descriptions of experiments by Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the 1950s] ...Depending on exactly where on the cortex the mild pulsing current from the probe was allowed to flow, the patient would react in a highly specific, often comical way... if the probe made contact somewhere on the lateral side of the temporal lobe, it would often trigger in the patient a particular, vivid reliving of a past event, as if the play button of a tiny video recorder had been pressed. Touching one spot on the cortex might cause one patient to hear her mother and father singing Christmas carols around the piano as they did in her youth; stimulation of another point nearby might spark off the recollection of a winter walk through fresh-fallen snow, or of a childhood incident in the schoolyard, or of an encounter with a menacing stranger. Each episode would seem strikingly realistic and detailed (much more so than a normal recollection), and each could be played again from the start, exactly as before, by an identical touch of the probe.

The movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind clearly borrowed from the results of this experiment.

...
p49 [Following an account of Sacks’s patient Jimmie who has been unable to create new memories since 1945 and of Alzheimer's] An erosion of memory is an erosion of selfhood. Thus, the victim of Korsakov’s syndrome (Jimmie) is still a person, but one whose evolution has come to an end -- a person robbed of a future, trapped in stasis, without the possibility of further development or change. An Alzheimer’s patient, on the other hand, is a person in rapid, irreversible decline, a person whose death [of self] is occurring bit by bit, to the distress of everyone concerned, during life. 

The movie Memento played very cleverly with Korsakov’s syndrome or something very like it.

Such conditions graphically expose the importance of our memories, insubstantial things that they are, in binding us together and helping maintain the impression that we exist as coherent, enduring selves. Deprived of them, as the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume remarked, “we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different sensations, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Hume recognized that personal identity -- the one thing we so desperately want to believe is real -- is no more than a masterful sleight of the brain. And modern neurology fully concurs.
...
Under equilibrium conditions -- the normal, everyday situation in which changes to our warehouse of memories are small and gradual -- the brain can easily sustain the illusion of self. So we who are this self are generally convinced of its permanence. But faced with a sudden or rapid depletion of its memory store, through accident or disease, the brain can no longer cope. It becomes deprived of the means by which to project a convincing feeling of selfhood, a feeling that by its very nature must be based upon security and stability... the fear experienced by the Korsakov’s victim or the Alzheimer’s patient who can no longer recognize her own face or surroundings is simply a heightened form of the same fear we all feel when we contemplate the prospect of death. It is the raw fear of losing our selves.

Death would lose its sting if we had no fear of it. But how can we overcome this fear when confronted with the almost incontrovertible evidence that we are merely the narratives running inside our brains? ... in death we all confront the ultimate form of amnesia -- total neurological destruction and, with it, the ending of everything we are... 

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119. Zen Physics - II. Boundaries of the self + SOMA in transition

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Zen Physics

Chapter 3. Heads and Tales
p27  We would rightly regard someone who habitually spoke of himself as being a robot or a machine as being crazy. Yet this is precisely what science seems to be telling us about ourselves. The brain? An organic computer. Love? A process in those neurological systems that underpin mood. Anger? An activation of neural impulses in the amygdala-hypothalamus structures. And self-consciousness as a whole? A fairly recent, emergent phenomenon of matter.

All of this may be true. We may, in one sense, be awesomely complex machines. But such a description fails to do proper justice to the human condition, because we are not only objects in the world but also objectifiers -- and both aspects of our nature, the outer and the inner, need to be encompassed by any credible worldview.
...
p28 … In mechanistic terms, as well as the appearance of the brain-body machine, there is the feeling of what it is like to be that machine -- the subjective experience of being a certain someone. Consciousness, we might say, is the symmetry-breaking factor between the objective and the subjective.

…since there is no reason to suppose there are any great differences between the subjective experiences of one person and those of any other, language is in fact a useful way of telling each other what we are feeling. 

I have to take issue with this. I’m surprised he doesn’t mention Synesthesia here at it so wonderfully demonstrates that the world we experience isn’t necessarily the world as it really is since some people experience it very differently. 

...
p29 ...the bodily I, by itself, is too simplistic a notion to capture all the possibilities of what we might consider ourselves to be. There is the question, for instance, of whether we are our bodies or whether we simply own them. The reductionist, the materialist, would claim the former, the Cartesian the later.
...
p30 ...What really matters to us is not what happens to our bodies when we die, but what happens to us. The implication is clear: we instinctively consider ourselves to be something more, or at least something very different, than just the material contents of our bodies and brains. We are the “what it is like to be” experience that our bodies give rise to...
...
p32 ...Few people in their right minds would choose to be a jellyfish -- or an ant, a worm, or a grasshopper. To be any of these, most of us might imagine, would probably be not much better or worse than being nonexistent...

But isn’t that the goal of the Desert Fathers and other contemplative types? To lose the “I”. 

...
p33 Much of what we believe about ourselves derives from how others relate and react to us. And, for this reason, total isolation from society can prove devastating. In 1988, a French woman, Veronique Le Guen, spent a record-breaking 111 days alone underground, 250 feet below the surface at Vaat-Negre in southern France. Deprived of a clock, natural light, and any form of contact with others, Le Guen had only her diary for company. In one of the entries she described herself as being “psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life.” It was an experience from which she never properly recovered, and in January 1990, at the age of thirty-three, she committed suicide. Her husband said, “She had an emptiness inside her which she was unable to communicate.”

This is very problematic. How did she come to take part in such an extreme experiment? Was it the social isolation or the conditions of her sunless, probably dank living conditions that caused her problems? I’m assuming she was taking lots of vitamin D. How did her psychology, both before and after the experiment, compare with the suicidal woman Michel Foucault wrote about? 

I’m sure this experience would be difficult for anyone, but this is a messy case to use as a precedent like this. 


Regular, close social interaction is vital to our self-definition, to bringing the fuzzy edges of our psychological bounds back into focus (Footnote: Mystics and ascetics often choose isolation for the very reason that it encourages a breakdown of conventional self-boundaries. [My point from before, but now I’m thinking of people (the elderly or the insane living on the street) who also lack any real social feedback.]) (This is strangely analogous  -- and I wonder if it may [be] more than that -- to the situation in quantum mechanics {see Chapter 10} where repeated observations of an atomic nucleus serve to prevent it from decaying.) We assimilate the responses of our fellow humans both to our appearance and our behavior. And this results in a feedback loop. Our appearance and behavior are subject to change according to the internal image we hold of ourselves. And any modifications in how we appear outwardly affect people’s responses to us, which may result, again, in further alterations to our inner beliefs about ourselves...
...
p35 You and I are different not because different things are happening to us right now, but because, throughout our lives, our brains have acquired different narratives and ways of responding to the world. We are the products of our life stories. Your story is different than mine. But what is crucial in defining and distinguishing between us is not so much the differences between the actual events and surroundings that you and I have encountered, as it is the different way in which our brains have interpreted and remembered what has happened to us. An essential part of being human involves trying to make sense of the world, seeking and finding meaning (whether it is there or not). We have to do this from one moment to the next, every second of our lives. So, inevitably, a lot of what we remember is not what actually happened -- whatever this may mean -- but rather a kind of myth or confabulation that helps us sustain the impression that we know what is going on. We tell ourselves white lies all the time to bridge the gaps in our understanding of an impossibly complex world... we lay down these countless little fictions in our memories and subsequently treat them as if they were factual... We are as much a myth as the stories we tell ourselves...


SOMA in transition
Earlier this year I saw an exhibition of Janet Delaney’s photography of San Francisco’s SOMA district from 30 years ago. These pictures were taken when the neighborhood was in a transition from the Skid Row/light industrial wasteland it was then to the up-and-coming (semi-gentrified but still Skid Row in sections) place it has become today. The current building boom has again put pressure on the older, rundown sections that still remain, so, again, people are either sad or irate at the prospect of losing what is already there.

What strikes me about Delaney’s photos is the focus on two areas: What is now the Moscone Convention complex (in her photos some of it is under construction, some is being cleared, and the rest hasn't even been doomed to conversion yet); and the little side streets of Hallam and Langton. I just happen to have important associations with the new built environment in both areas. 

I can’t recall now when I stopped attending the MacWorld Expo’s at Moscone -- sometime in the late ‘90s I believe. But in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s I all but lived at Moscone for the duration of the Expo. At first I gathered with thousands of other attendees for the doors to be thrown open on the first morning of the show. Later, I help set up and man the BMUG booth, so I was there before the show opened and stayed after it closed. MY participation expanded to the parties associated with the show. Many good times were had. Much equipment -- both hardware and software -- was purchased. I signed books and schmoozed. I made friends.

More recently I’ve worked a number of conventions in my new “greening” capacity. The Oracle and Salesforce conventions are huge and dull, but the VMWorld show was interesting. The people watching at such a nerd-centric event was... interesting. IT trolls really shouldn’t be let out during the day. But it was at this show that I first learned about cloud computing and virtual machines, which at least got me interested in computers again.

The point is, there were many people who didn’t want to see Moscone built, the project was delayed for years and years, and at the time, I didn’t imagine the convention center had anything to do with me, yet I can scarcely imagine my life in this city without Moscone Center. If you could pluck all the memories, all the connections related to Moscone Center and Yerba Buena Garden out of my memory (something like the movie Dark City, perhaps) the effect would be devastating. And I’m not one of the union workers who have made a living (or at least a good portion of my living) working events there for the past 30 years. 

A convention center is an odd sort of civic amenity; it probably sits empty the majority of the time. Only the full time staff (not many people, I would imagine) really “own” the place. It isn’t like a sports stadium that is beloved by thousands of diehard fans. And yet it can touch the lives of so many locals and outsiders; all the incredibly disparate groups that hold events there for a day or a week at a time. And of course all the workers drawn in as needed plus the businesses on the periphery that benefit from the periodic flow of conventioneers. Such an unpredictable, yet powerful, economic catalyst. 

Because SF is a popular destination for tourists in any case, I think (I know) that family members are likely to come along with the convention goer. And that means more business for restaurants and shops. It must have been so frustrating for the proponents as they slowly fought to overcome all the arguments against building the original phase of the center. Once the South Hall was in operation, it was easier to get the North Hall approved. There’s now a West Hall and a plan for still more expansion so still larger conventions can be booked. 

I doubt I’ve ever been at Moscone (not counting the Metreon and Garden) more than 10 days in any year, and yet, over the decades the effect on just my life has truly amounted to something. I would not have predicted it.


Hallam street was the scene of a huge fire back in the ‘80s that, more than likely, destroyed buildings where Michel Foucault had enjoyed “limit-experiences” and “un-thought.” He would have been dismayed, but it cleared the land for a new era of buildings and I happen to know several people who have settled in these new structures. The Brainwash cafe and laundromat (a favorite of mine) is just across Folsom at Langton and I know someone who lives on that little street as well. As always happens with cities, each iteration of a neighborhood is replaced by something new. Are today's Hallam and Langton better than thirty years ago? I can't answer that except to say that the buildings probably house more people and are more fire and earthquake resistant. 

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118. Zen Physics - I. Soul and Self

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Jump back to Previous: Faust - XII. "F. As Developer"

This is either an obvious choice of a book to squeeze in here or an even stranger choice than usual. I'm really not sure which. This next book begins with a summary of Western and then Eastern thought -- much of this you will recognize from one or another, or even several, of the books I've already blogged. I think Darling does a good job of reviewing all this and of drawing some logical conclusions. At least that's my recollection from reading this the first time quite a while back. We'll see if I feel the same way this time through.


Between the time I wrote the above and now (when I'm finally publishing this), there's been a change in the plan. Starting with my post 123., I will be blogging not just Zen Physics but also a second book, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Two fairly contemporary works of non-fiction. Something of a change of pace for me. I added the second book because the two are so complementary (at least in my mind). These books seem to feed off each other and to tie in with much of what I've blogged in the past. That they are also a welcome review of my university philosophy education, is an added bonus (again, for me).

Zen Physics: the science of death, the logic of reincarnation

by David Darling - HarperCollins - c1996

Introduction
p xi It may happen in five minutes or in fifty years, but at some point you will die. There is no escaping it. And then what? Will it be the end? Is death a void, a nothingness that goes on forever? Or is it merely a phase transition -- the start of a new kind of existence, beyond our old bodies and brains? This is the ultimate question a human being can ask: the question of his or her own destiny.

p xiii Two main conclusions will be presented [in this book], both of which are remarkable and both of which, were it not for the force of evidence supporting them, might seem entirely beyond belief. The first is that a form of reincarnation is logically inescapable. There must be life after death. And there must, moreover, be a continuity of consciousness, so that no sooner have you died in this life than you begin again in some other. The second and even more significant conclusion is that far from giving rise to consciousness, the brain actually restricts it. Mind, it will become clear, is a fundamental and all-pervasive property of the universe.


Part 1.
You and Other Stories

Chapter 1. Our Greatest Fear

p 4 [There’s an account of what happens to the body after death here that Hans Castorp (or at least Thomas Mann) would have loved but I find less interesting.]

p 9 The basic materialist view of death, now widely held by scientists and layfolk alike, seems, on the face of it, bleak beyond despair. “We” -- our minds -- appear to be nothing more than outgrowths of our living brains, so that inevitably we must expire at the moment our neural support structures collapse. Death, from this perspective, amounts to a total, permanent cessation of consciousness and feeling -- the end of the individual... it is hardly surprising that, in an increasingly secular society, the fear of death -- of losing everything, including ourselves -- has become so deep and widespread. Yet exactly what are we afraid of?

Epicurus pointed out the irrationality of fearing the end of consciousness in his Letter to Menoeceus:

Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living. 

...
p 10 Ironically, one of the possibilities we tend to dread the most -- that death represents a one-way trip to oblivion -- turns out to be something we need have no fear of at all. Socrates even enjoined us to look forward to it. In his Apology he explained:

Death is one of two things. Either it is an annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything, or . . . it is really a change -- a migration of the soul from this place to another. Now if there is no consciousness but only a dreamless sleep, death must be a marvelous gain . . . because the whole of time . . . can be regarded as no more than a single night. 


Chapter 2. The Soul is Dead, Long Live the Self
p 15 It would be immensely reassuring... if a theory like that of the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes were to be scientifically vindicated. Descartes believed strongly in the separate existence of the body and the soul. And he went so far as to identify the seat of the soul as the pineal gland, a neurological structure he chose because it was both centrally located and the only bit of the brain he could find that was not duplicated in the two cerebral hemispheres. The tiny pineal gland, in Descartes’s view, served as the meeting place, or interface, between the material brain and the immaterial soul, which he equated with the mind or ego.

p 16 ...the problems for any seat-of-the-soul hypothesis start as soon as we focus on the exact means by which the brain and the soul might interact. The brain is demonstrably built of ordinary matter, whereas the soul is presumed to consist of something else entirely -- “mind stuff,” or res cogitans, as Descartes called it. Crucially, the soul is held to be not merely tenuous, with an elusive nature similar to that of photons (light quanta) or neutrinos (particles capable of passing straight through the Earth without being absorbed), but actually nonphysical. In its very conception the soul stands outside the normal scheme of physics. And so, from the outset, we are at a loss to understand how it could possibly influence or be influenced by material objects, including the brain.

By the same token, the soul could not be expected to leave any trace on a detector or measuring device... The fact is, the soul as it is normally presented is not a phenomenon open to scientific investigation. Nor is there any logic in claiming, on the one hand, that the soul is nonphysical or supernatural and, on the other, that it can have physical effects...

This reminds me of the invisible man problem. Since an invisible man’s eyes would not stop photons, he would be rendered blind. 

It pains me to try to be “fair” to Descartes, but what is said here about mind is very close to what we could also say about “dark matter.” It would appear that the universe is full of a great deal of stuff we are only aware of because it has a gravitational effect on the fraction of the universal “stuff” we can see. Dark matter apparently has mass but is as invisible to us as is the soul. 


p 17 We have a strong tendency to feel as if we are something extra beyond our bodies and brains -- that we are, in effect, an intelligent life force dwelling within an organic shell. This makes it easy to go along with the suggestion of dualists such as Descartes, that the mind is not just an upshot of the functioning of the brain but, on the contrary, is a deeper and further fact. In the dualist’s scheme, each of us has -- or is -- a “Cartesian ego” that inhabits the material brain. And from this position, in which the mind is held to be distinct from the living  brain, it is a short (though not inevitable) step to the assertion that the mind is capable of an entirely independent existence, as a disembodied soul.

p 18 [Unfortunately,] It is a consensus fast approaching unanimity in scientific circles that “we” (ourselves) are not more than the consequences of our brains at work. In the modern view, we are mere epiphenomena or, more charitably perhaps, culminations, of the greatest concentration of orchestrated molecular activity in the known cosmos. And though it is true we don’t yet know exactly how the trick is done -- these are still frontier days in the brain sciences -- it is widely held to be only a matter of time before those who are teasing apart the circuitry of the human cortex lay bare the hidden props of the illusion. The situation is as brutally materialistic as that. There is not the slightest bit of credible evidence to suggest there is more to your self, to the feeling of being you, than a stunningly complex pattern of chemical and electrical activity among your neurons. No soul, no astral spirit, no ghost in the machine, no disembodied intelligence that can conveniently bail out when the brain finally crashes to its doom. If science is right, then you and I are just the transitory mental states of our brains.

We think of ourselves as being definite people, unique individuals. But, at birth, within the constraints of our genetic makeup, we are capable of becoming anyone. For the first year or two of life outside the womb, our brains are in the most pliable, impressionable, and receptive state they will ever be in. At the neural level this is apparent in the fact that we are all born with massively overwired brains that contain many more embryonic intercellular links than any one individual ever needs... the infant brain has, on average, about 50 percent more synaptic connections than has an adult brain... It is as if a wide selection of the potentialities of the human race, acquired over millions of years, are made available to each of us at birth.

This should remind you of Gerald Edelman in 104. “A New View of the Mind” Part 2.

 ... Each brain loses the potential to become anyone, but gains, instead, the much more useful ability to conceive of itself as being a certain someone.
...

p 20 With the rudiments of a belief system in place, the brain starts to interpret and evaluate everything that comes to its attention in terms of this resident catechism of received wisdom. Every sensation and perception, every incident and event, every word, gesture, and action of other people, is construed within the context of what the brain understands the world and itself to be like. Thus the brain steadily becomes more and more dogmatic, opinionated, and biased in its thinking. It tends to hold on to -- that is, to remember -- experiences that comply with and support its acquired worldview, while at the same time it tends to reject or deny anything that seems incongruous with its system of beliefs... And in this way the brain builds for itself an island of stability, a rock of predictability, in the midst of a vast ocean of potentially fatal chaos and inexplicable change.

We are inventions of our genes, our culture, our society, our particular upbringing, but oddly enough we’re not aware of being so utterly contrived. ...we tend greatly to underestimate the extent to which we ourselves are caught up, constrained, and molded by the paradigms imposed upon us. Our indoctrination begins at such an early age and is so all-pervasive that the rules and theories we acquire become hard-wired into our brains. In particular, the power of our closest caretakers to shape us is awesome... Subsequently, we fail to recognize that the beliefs about the world and about ourselves which we carry around with us like sacred relics are tentative, and possibly completely wrong...

p 21 ...Having encoded a particular model of reality, the brain, without “us” even realizing it, gives a spin to every sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch that enters through our senses. In fact, the conditioning begins even before the conscious brain goes into action. Evolution has furnished us with a range of sensory repression systems that save us from having to be aware of and thereby hopelessly overloaded and distracted by every minutia of our surroundings... the brain is able to deploy its attention, its executive power, where most needed by having the bulk of sensory input weeded out at a lower level.

Human vision, for instance, is an active process in which signals and perception are highly filtered, screened, and manipulated before they ever reach the higher centers of the cortex. [Autism would seem to be a failure of this screening system.] We may feel as if we are directly and immediately aware of whatever images fall upon our retinas, but we are mistaken. Most of the handling of data from our eyes takes place at a subconscious level through a variety of largely independent specialized subsystems. And, strange though it may seem, some of the visual subsystems in our brains produce an output that “we” cannot see. They contribute to brain function and even to our awareness of the world, but no amount of introspection can make us aware of the subsystems themselves. One of the ways this is made most strikingly clear is by the strange neurological condition known as blind sight. Following some kinds of injury to the visual cortex, people may become blind in one half of their visual field. But although they claim an inability to see anything in their blind half, they sometimes seem capable of absorbing information from that half...
...
p 23 In medieval Europe, society was rigidly structured. Everyone knew their place in the scheme of things -- a scheme based on lineage, gender, and social class. There was virtually no chance of escaping one’s birthright, whether as a peasant or a feudal lord, no scope for social mobility. To appreciate more readily the mentality of this time we have to recognize that our modern emphasis on the fundamental, overriding importance of the individual is not universal. Medieval attitudes lacked this emphasis, in large measure because of the overarching importance of the Church of Rome. The medieval faith in Catholicism was absolute. But what mattered in this faith was not the individual’s role but the broad cosmic sweep of holy law and salvation. Personalities, individual differences and opinions, were considered irrelevant and undesirable in the face of such totalitarian religious belief. And this downplaying of the personal is reflected in the fact that medieval times produced virtually no autobiographies and very few biographies -- and then only inaccurate, stereotypical lives of saints. In these writings, the psychology of the person makes no appearance; all that comes across is a cardboard cutout of a man or woman, an anodyne approximation to the Christian ideal, unashamedly embellished with archetypal miracle tales.

This was the culture that Naphtha (in The Magic Mountain) and Dostoyevsky (in The Brothers Karamazov) revered and craved. 


By the end of the Middle Ages, however, a change was evident. Instrumental in this was the rise of Protestantism, particularly in its most extreme form -- Puritanism [I think Calvinism is more to the point]. John Calvin preached that some, “the Elect,” were predestined to enter heaven, while most were doomed to spend eternity in hell, it had the effect at the time of casting the individual into sharp relief, of differentiating between one person and another. And, in general, Protestantism of every kind argued for the private nature of religion. Catholics did not need, and were not expected, to face God alone. Priests, nuns, saints, the Virgin Mary, and all manner of rituals were on hand to intercede for the masses, so that the masses didn’t have to think too hard or deeply for themselves, didn’t have to become too involved as individuals or worry too much about the implications to themselves of the great issues of life, death, and redemption. [This sounds like Ivan's “The Grand Inquisitor.” ] Protestantism, by contrast, sought to diminish the gap between the layperson and God, while Puritanism sought to close it completely. The Puritan faced God alone --- in the privacy of the individual mind.

p 24 And there were soon to be other factors at work in the West, helping to turn the spotlight even more fully on each man and woman, forcing the self out of hiding. Not the least of these was the Industrial Revolution and, at its heart, that great engine -- literally and figuratively -- for change. Suddenly, the old agricultural lifestyle in which son did like father, and daughter like mother, generation after generation, and in which it was frowned upon and futile for the individual to act any differently from the rest, was swept away. And in its place was development (often for the worse for those who lived in the new slums) and technological progress, the rise of personal ambition, of the entrepreneur, the winner and loser, and a new emphasis on individuality and concern for one’s own welfare. Suddenly, it was good and potentially profitable to be an individual, to go one’s own way, to be different from the crowd. And that attitude has not altered to this day.

In the modern West, we revere the self, we set it up on a pedestal. There has never before been a culture, a time, in which people focused so obsessively on the well-being and elevation of their egos. And what do these egos turn out to be? Nothing, says science, but artifacts of the brain. We -- our feelings of being someone in the world -- survive as long as the brain lives. And when the brain dies . . .

Our prospects look bleak. The very mode of inquiry that has helped shape the modern world and that we have come to rely upon so much informs us that, in effect, we are the dreams of carbon machines. There is no real substance to us, no deeper, further fact to being a person than just one feeling after another after another. Impressions, sensations, thoughts, emotions, continually well up into awareness and the sequence of these experiences, bound together by that fragile thing called memory, is projected by the brain as you and me.

p 25 Our choice of how to respond seems simple. We can despair or we can deny…

This is what Nietzsche foresaw as the eventual failure of the Socratic/
Alexandrian/Scientific path. This is what Dostoyevsky hopped to keep out of Russia. This is what Settembrini and Naphtha battled about. And when it comes to social roles, this is what Ford Madox Ford's Christian Tietjens saw as the end of Toryism.


But there is a third option -- one that appeals both to the intellect and to the heart. And this is to recognize that although, at one level, selves may not be as substantial as they normally appear, at another level they are real and important objects of inquiry. The very same situation applies to atoms, because modern physics has revealed beyond reasonable doubt that atoms consist almost entirely of empty space. And even the supposedly tangible nuggets of matter inside atoms -- quarks (which make up protons and neutrons) and electrons -- give no sign whatever of having any extension. Knowing this, it might seem incredible that, in large numbers, atoms can give such a convincing impression of solidity. And yet, in the everyday world, solid they undeniably are…

The soul -- whether it exists or not -- appears to lie outside the realm of scientific inquiry. But this is not true of the self. We can probe the self in many different ways and, as a result, hope to learn more about what it means to have a self -- and to lose it. 

Jump to Next: Zen Physics - II. Boundaries of the self

117. Faust - XII. "F. As Developer"

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Faust - XI. "The Ethics of F.'s Last Actions"

Goethe's Faust

"Faust as Developer" - Marshall Berman 

p 715-6 - “Almost four hundred years after his debut [in “Johann Spiess’s Faustbuch of 1587 and Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus a year later”], Faust continues to grip the modern imagination. Thus The New Yorker magazine, in an anti-nuclear editorial just after the accident at Three Mile Island, indicts Faust as a symbol of scientific irresponsibility and indifference to life: ‘The Faustian proposal that the experts make us is to let them lay their fallible human hands on eternity, and it is not acceptable.’ ...“

“It [Faust] starts in an intellectual’s lonely room, in an abstracted and isolated realm of thought; it ends in the midst of a far-reaching realm of production and exchange, ruled by giant corporate bodies and complex organizations, which Faust’s thought is helping to create... In Goethe’s version of the Faust theme, the subject and object of transformation is not merely the hero, but the whole world. Goethe’s Faust expresses and dramatizes the process by which, at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth, a distinctly modern world-system comes into being.”

p 716-7 - “The vital force that animates Goethe’s Faust... is an impulse that I will call the desire for development... What this Faust wants for himself is a dynamic process that will include every mode of human experience, joy and misery alike, and that will assimilate them all into his self’s unending growth; even the self’s destruction will be an integral part of its development.”

He quotes lines 1765-75 where Faust claims to want to savor the whole of human experience, a passage I was originally excited about but that didn’t seem to go anywhere. 

(Also, let me just note here that it has been hell differentiating between Faust the work and Faust the person for the purposes of italicizing. If you are ever tempted to write an iconic book or poem or play, please don't use your character's name for the title. Thank you.)


“...The only way for modern man to transform himself, Faust and we will find out, is by radical transforming the whole physical and social and moral world he lives in, Goethe’s hero is heroic by virtue of liberating tremendous repressed human energies... But the great developments he initiates... turn out to exact great human costs... human powers can be developed only through what Marx called ‘the powers of the underworld,’ dark and fearful energies that may erupt with a horrible force beyond all human control. Goethe’s Faust is the first, and still the best, tragedy of development.”

This brings us back to the nature vs politics debate: is the volcanic imagery about natural sciences or political-economic sciences? 


p 718-9 - “...Why should men let things go on being the way they have always been? Isn’t it about time for mankind to assert itself against nature’s tyrannical arrogance, to confront natural forces in the name of ‘the liberal mind which cherishes all rights’? (10202-05) Faust has begun to use post-1789 political language in a context that no one has ever thought of as political. He goes on: It is outrageous that, for all the vast energy expended by the sea, it merely surges endlessly back and forth -- ‘and nothing is achieved.’ (10217)... Faust’s battle with the elements appears as King Lear’s, or, for that matter, as King Midas’ whipping of the waves. But his Faustian enterprise will be less quixotic and more fruitful, because it will draw on nature’s own energy and organize that energy into fuel for new collective human purposes and projects...”

That there are currently a multitude of attempts being made to harness tidal and wave energy as the latest form of Alternative Power, only adds to the relevance of Faust and this analysis. 

“...We are witnessing the birth of a new social division of labor, a new vocation, a new relationship between ideas and practical life... The romantic quest for self-development... is working itself out through a new form of romance [Atlas Shrugged], through the titanic work of economic development. Faust is transforming himself into a new kind of man... In his new work, he will work out some of the most creative and some of the most destructive potentialities of modern life; he will be the consummate wrecker and creator, the dark and deeply ambiguous figure that our age has come to call ‘the developer.’”

p 723-4 - “At this point [after line 11272], Faust commits his first self-consciously evil act. He summons Mephisto and his ‘mighty men’ and orders them to get the old people [Philemon and Baucis] out of the way. He does not want to see it, or to know the details of how it is done. All that interests him is the end result: he wants to see the land cleared next morning, so the new construction can start. This is a characteristically modern style of evil: indirect, impersonal, mediated by complex organizations and institutional roles... Faust has been pretending not only to others but to himself that he could create a new world with clean hands; he is still not ready to accept responsibility for the human suffering and death that clear the way... It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works.”

I can’t believe how much this guy is reading into what is presented about Faust’s reclaimed world, though I tend to agree with him. 


p 725 - “For the developer, to stop moving, to rest in the shadows, to let the old people enfold him, is death. And yet, to such a man, working under the explosive pressures of development, burdened by the guilt it brings him, the bells’ promise of peace must sound like bliss. Precisely because Faust finds the bells so sweet, the woods so lovely, dark, and deep, he drives himself to wipe them out.”

“Commentators on Goethe’s Faust rarely grasp the dramatic and human resonance of this episode. In fact , it is central to Goethe’s historical perspective. Faust’s destruction of Philemon and Baucis turns out to be the ironic climax of his life. In killing the old couple, he turns out to be pronouncing a death sentence on himself. Once he has obliterated every trace of them and their works, there is nothing left for him to do. Now he is ready to pronounce the words that seal his life in fulfillment and deliver him over to death... Once the developer has cleared all the obstacles away, he himself is in the way, and he must go... Goethe shows us how the category of obsolete persons, so central to modernity, swallows up the man who gave it life and power.”

p 726 - “...Faust banishes Care from his mind, as he banished the devil not long before. But before she departs... her breath strikes him blind... she tells him that he has been blind all along; it is out of darkness that all his visions and all his actions have grown...”


I only read Faust because my new edition of The Magic Mountain claimed it (along with The Birth of Tragedy) were important influences on Mann. When I finished reading Goethe I have to admit that I was very little the wiser. Mainly I thought that the early nineteenth century must have had better drugs than I had realized because it really is just a crazy series of stories.

But what all these scholars found in Faust was very interesting. Rarely have they agreed with each other, but everyone seemed to find something of value. There has been a bias against the bourgeoisie in most of the books I've written about -- The Brothers K., for example -- and some I haven't quite written about -- like Parade's End -- but keep referring to. Faust has made it much clearer to me what Dostoyevsky and Ford were incensed about and why. But when it comes back to The Magic Mountain, it is not Settembrini but Naphtha who abhors the Mephistophelean world -- this, again, supports my suspicion that it is Naphtha who speaks for Mann in that book.

While Dostoyevsky's The Brothers K. now gets my vote as the most significant book of philosophy from the second half of the nineteenth century, this edition of Faust -- including all the LitCrit -- has probably changed the way I view the world more than any other book. An interesting question is how much of this is Goethe? I really don't know.

Another interesting question is what am I going to blog next. It may finally be time to tackle The Magic Mountain itself. There may be a pause in the posting here.

Jump to Next: Zen Physics - I. Soul and self

116. Faust - XI. & "The Ethics of F.’s Last Actions"

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Faust - X. Various

Goethe's Faust

"The Ethics of Faust’s Last Actions" -- Hans Rudolf Vaget 



p 704-5 - “...Jane Brown was hardly exaggerating when she observed in 1986 that Act IV has ‘traditionally been considered the least accessible part of a generally inaccessible work.’”

“A considerable part of the interpretive difficulty... has been self-induced, arising from the persistent and apparently irresistible temptation on the part of progressive-minded interpreters in the East and West [Germany, I believe] to enlist Goethe in the service of a truly epochal project, whose purport has been, ultimately, to legitimize socialist utopian thought. Indeed, this was widely held to be the politically ‘correct’ task of the historical moment. Now that that moment has passed and socialism has begun rapidly to disappear from the historical agenda, it may be the appropriate time to revisit Act IV and take a fresh look at its peculiar political implications for Faust as a whole.”

p 706 - “No school has been more thoroughly committed to the task of historical interpretation than the Marxists, and no one has had a higher stake in an ideologically coherent reading of Faust than the Faust scholars of the former GDR. The importance of articulating a politically ‘correct’ interpretation... becomes immediately apparent if we recall that the GDR defined its national identity with distinct reference to the progressive cultural heritage of German history; it prided itself on being not only the guardian but also the executor... of that heritage... Alexander Abussch actually decreed in December, 1961 that the vision of the dying Faust anticipates the GDR’s historical role of trying to drain the foul swamp of capitalism in Germany and to create the new land of the socialist state...”

“The lynchpin of that orthodoxy [of GDR Faust interpretation]... is the assertion that feudalism is overcome and destroyed by Faust... feudalism had to be overcome and succeeded by Faust’s superior, forward-looking means of production as articulated in Act V. Without this crucial step, the fundamental assumption of all Marxist Faust interpretations would be untenable -- the assumption of a historically inevitable progression from feudalism to capitalism and beyond to a vision of socialism... There is indeed a long German tradition of reading ideas of progress and perfectibility into Faust, and of thereby adjusting Goethe’s text, again and again, to the political agenda of the state -- be it the Second or the Third Reich, or the ‘first socialist state on German soil.’”

“The sudden disappearance from the historical scene of the state that claimed to be the heir and executor of Faust’s utopian vision naturally casts a ghostly pall on the whole GDR project... It is now, one would think, a closed chapter not only of German history but also of Faust exegesis...”

p 707 - “Act IV, in a certain sense, represents Goethe’s last word on Faust. It was written... after Act V.. Goethe felt prompted to reconsider the question of how Faust acquired the land over which he rules... His sketches of 1816 called for Faust to acquire his land through a war of conquest fought in medieval Greece against the {‘monks’}, i.e. a religious authority. In 1831, Goethe decided to have Faust get involved in a civil war in the German empire and help the Emperor win it.”

“...There is evidence... to suggest that this final revision of the Faust material was triggered by the July Revolution of 1830 [“The French Revolution of 1830, also known as the July Revolution, Second French Revolution or Trois Glorieuses in French, saw the overthrow of King Charles X, the French Bourbon monarch, and the ascent of his cousin Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who himself, after 18 precarious years on the throne, would in turn be overthrown.” -Wiki]. It led Goethe once more to contemplate the issues of revolution and restoration; it further led him critically to reconsider the doctrine and religion of Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825)...

“Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon... was a French early socialist theorist whose thought influenced the foundations of various 19th century philosophies, including the philosophy of science and the discipline of sociology. His thought played a substantial role in influencing positivism, Marxism and the ideas of Thorstein Veblen.

Although he was born an aristocrat, in opposition to the feudal and military system, he advocated a form of technocratic socialism, where the economy would be managed by industrialists and technical specialists who would occupy positions of leadership based on technical merit. Simon believed that such an arrangement would lead to a national community of cooperation and technological progress that would eliminate the poverty of the lower classes. He felt that men of science, rather than the church, should be the leaders in society. Simon held the belief that those who are fitted to organize society for productive labour are entitled to rule it.” 

About the Saint-Simonians, “Bazard, a man of stolid temperament, could no longer work in harmony with Enfantin, who desired to establish an arrogant and fantastic sacerdotalism with lax notions as to marriage and the relations between the sexes.”

“After a time Bazard seceded and many of the strongest supporters of the school followed his example. A series of extravagant entertainments given by the society during the winter of 1832 reduced its financial resources and greatly discredited it in character.”

“French feminist and socialist writer Flora Tristan (1803–1844) claimed that Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, anticipated Saint-Simon's ideas by a generation.” - Wiki


...with its revolutionary program of social engineering, and to rethink the issue of land ownership, which he was reading about just then, in Niebuhr’s Roman History.” 

[“Barthold Georg Niebuhr (27 August 1776 – 2 January 1831) was a Danish-German statesman and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography. Classical Rome (rather than Greece) caught the admiration of German thinkers.”

“France's revolution of July in the same year was a terrible blow to him, and filled him with the most dismal anticipations of the future of Europe. Niebuhr died, aged 54, in Bonn.”

“Niebuhr's Roman History counts among epoch-making histories both as marking an era in the study of its special subject and for its momentous influence on the general conception of history. Leonhard Schmitz said: “The main results arrived at by the inquiries of Niebuhr, such as his views of the ancient population of Rome, the origin of the plebs, the relation between the patricians and plebeians, the real nature of the ager publicus, and many other points of interest, have been acknowledged by all his successors.” -Wiki]

“...a different set of questions needs to be raised -- different from the favorite preoccupation of so many Faust scholars with their clouds, volcanos, and waves [the Nature rather than Historical interpretation]...”

p 708 - “When news of yet another revolution in Paris reached Weimar in the summer of 1830, Goethe was haunted by the thought that the French Revolution, the political trauma of his life, was rearing its head again. He viewed the events of July, 1830 as the greatest intellectual challenge... that he would have to encounter at the end of his life...”

I have to observe here that, regardless of what Goethe may have written previously, the return to Germany and the Emperor makes internal sense since it reconnects with those previous sections and is consistent with the notion that the future of Romantic Germany does not lie in Classical Greece. 


“... in the introductory exchanges of “High Mountains’ it is Mephistopheles who argues for the volcanic theory of the earth’s origin. Given the well-known associations in Goethe’s mind of ‘Vulkanismus’ with revolution and, conversely, of ‘Neptunismus’ with {a} theory of evolution, we can see that the political dice were loaded from the outset... We are led to realize that Faust’s and Mephistopheles’ fraudulent rescue actions in Act I merely postponed the present crisis...”

p 708-9 - “...Mephistopheles tempts Faust; Faust rejects what is offered and demands something else instead. For the reader, everything depends on the realization that Faust’s rejection of a life of leisure and his desire for land and power are perfectly consistent and all of a piece... He has no intention of governing the multitudes of a modern metropolis, for fear of having to deal with insurrection -- ‘And all one does is raising rebels' (10159) [That doesn't sound quite right but I don't have the text to confirm]. Nor is he attracted to the pleasure-seeking life-style of the aristocracy; this option he rejects as ‘Tawdry and up-to-date! Sardanapal!’ (10176). The latter lacks the dimension of activity, the former that of complete, unchallenged domination.”

“...He has conceived the idea of claiming land from the sea and of controlling ‘such elemental might unharnessed, purposeless!’ (10219). He desires nothing less than the dominion of the sea and of nature. This project -- in a certain sense representative of the ambition of Western man since the Renaissance -- will offer him both creative activity and the delicious enjoyment of the exercise of power:”

Earn for yourself the choice, delicious boast,
To lock the imperious ocean from the coast
{10228-9}

Sway I would gain, a sovereign’s thrall!
Renown is naught, the deed is all.
{10187-8}

This assumes the existence of “waste” land that no one has previous claim on and that serves no natural purpose. The Zionists really should have gone this route though even then there would have been environmental collateral damage. 


“...Faust means ‘Landeigentum,’ landed property, specifically that stretch of land by the sea... He needs the land for carrying out his project; in addition, by owning it he acquires feudal rights and power over the people living there... Landed property will give him the opportunity to control the vast, aimless forces of the sea and to claim additional territory over which he intends to rule with no resistance from any ‘rebels.’ So many optimistic voices to the contrary notwithstanding, there is really no evidence that Faust’s motivation is in any way generous, idealistic, or specifically ‘philanthropic.’”

p 711 - “...Let us further recall in this context that Faust commentators have again and again associated the ‘Gegenkaiser’ [rival Emperor] with Napoleon. Goethe’s unpatriotic admiration for the upstart emperor of the French is well known. Napoleon may indeed be viewed as the great contemporary rival to the legitimate emperor of the old Holy Roman Empire.”

p 712 - “It appears that the political configuration of Act IV is deliberately designed to contradict Faust’s overtly non-political motivation and to plant questions in the readers’ mind about the political and moral basis of his drive for power. Clearly, legitimacy and justice play no role here... But Goethe seems to have had no interest in portraying Faust as the agent of progress and the grave-digger of the feudal system... Goethe, it would appear, consciously departs from the Elizabethan model, and assigns Faust a place at the side of the old, legitimate, yet unworthy ruler...”

p 713 - “...Forced labor within the realm, and the inseparable triad of trade, war, and piracy (11187) in external relations, make this an evil empire by any civilized standards. What we are made to witness here is the inevitable outgrowth of a drive for power that appertains to Faust’s striving from the beginning and that unmasks its pernicious propensity toward unchecked excess only now, in the last stage of Faust’s career.”

p 714 - “... The enforced expropriation of the old couple [Philemon and Baucis] {is regarded} as a sacrifice necessary for the good of the collective. At this point, GDR orthodoxy fully reveals its moral insensitivity and political opportunism. Goethe’s Faust, by means of some bizarre interpretive moves, is used to justify and make palatable the socialist policy of expropriation and collectivization.”

I think Goethe would have loved this. 


“...What weighed on Goethe’s mind was a French forerunner of socialist collectivization, namely the ‘doctrine’ of the Saint-Simonians. In the last years of his life, Goethe informed himself quite thoroughly about the latest ideology from France. His contemplation of its tenets formed part of that {‘intellectual challenge’} of coping with the revolution of 1830. It was the Saint-Simonians who had called, among many other things, for a change in the laws governing land-ownership; they confidently declared this to be the last step to a new Golden Age. Here we find a remarkable parallel to Faust’s behavior in Act V. Before he announces his own vision of a Golden Age -- a liberated people on liberated land -- he orders, chillingly and incongruously, the expropriation of Philemon and Baucis!”

“... [Faust] as the irresponsible and dangerous social engineer that Goethe had come to see in the French reformer and his many disciples... Faust arrogantly claims to know what is good for the masses and takes the lead on the road toward that goal -- 'To bring to fruit the most exalted plans,/One mind is ample for a thousand hands’ (11509f.) -- he essentially echoes the Saint-Simonians. Like the French reformers, Faust places the supposed concerns of the masses... above the liberty and the dignity of the individual, whose existence is justified only to the extent that he/she contributes to the ‘improvement’ of humanity. Very much in the spirit of the Saint-Simonians, Faust is bent on controlling land and on exploiting nature... Faust’s last speech... still bears the imprint of an authoritarian, power-hungry mind.”

p 715 - From Goethe’s last letter to von Humboldt “The world is ruled to-day by bewildering wrong counsel, urging bewildering wrong action”  [Our critic,] “...It is time to recognize that Faust’s last speech -- the most politically exploited lines in all of German literature -- is to be counted among those misguided teachings of the day.”

This is really another iteration of the Burke vs Mary Shelley’s parents debate. Faust’s Brave New World (and Saint-Simon’s, apparently) would be yet another sort of Frankenstein’s creature.


I have to confess that this is the only aspect of Faust's "Faustian" striving that I find seductive. To be able to create a totally new society without reference to tradition or the views of others would certainly tempt me. My goal would not be personal wealth, but the realization of a sustainable and economically healthy urban development... but I would undoubtedly fall prey to all of Faust's sins and more. It does give one pause.

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