191. TMM - Snow - The heart of TMM

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The Magic Mountain 

Chapter 6

Snow

There are so many reasons this is my favorite part of the book. The description of this particularly snowy winter at the beginning is wonderful. I still love snow, or at least my memory of snow from my youth. And the same goes for skiing. I only went skiing a handful of times, but it was always such an unusually natural experience. For me, skiing was more about being out in the Colorado mountains in the snow than it was about mastering the “sport.” You just had to know enough to stay upright and get where you wanted to go. If my family hadn’t moved to SoCal, I probably would have transitioned to cross country skiing. Instead I gave it up.


I’m sure my, rented, equipment in the early 1960s was more advanced than what Hans was using in the first decade of the century, but my skis were also wood. In fact I refused to use metal skis. But enough of that. While snow and skiing does strike a cord with me, that’s not why this section is the heart of the book. 


P563 ...When he would stop -- not moving a muscle, so that he could not hear even himself -- the silence was absolute, perfect, a padded soundlessness, like none ever known or perceived anywhere else in the world. There was not a breath of wind to brush softly against the trees, not a rustle, not the call of a bird. It was primal silence to which Hans Castorp listened as he stood there, leaning on one pole, his head tilted to the side, his mouth open; and silently, unrelentingly the snow went on falling, drifting down in a gentle hush.

My fondest memory from my years living in Boulder is of precisely this silence. And speaking of silence, HERE is something on that topic from George Gissing, Sara Maitland, and me. But now to the point, 

P564 ...A colloquy with Naphta and Settembrini was not exactly a canny experience, or at the least led into uncharted and dangerous regions; and if we can speak of Hans Castorp’s sympathy with the vast winter wilderness, it is because he found it to be, notwithstanding the devout awe it awakened, a suitable arena where he could resolve his tangle of ideas, a convenient spot for someone who, without knowing quite how it had happened, found himself burdened with the duties of “playing king” in regard to the state and conditions of the homo Dei.
...

P565 “Ah, my pedagogic Satana, [Settembrini] with your ragione and ribellione,” he thought, “I like you. True, you’re a windbag and organ-grinder, but you mean well, mean better than that caustic little Jesuit and terrorist, that Spanish torturer and flogger with his flashing glasses. And I like you better, too, although he’s almost always right when you two argue and scuffle pedagogically for my poor soul, like God and the Devil struggling over a man in the Middle Ages.” [So now that’s been spelled out.

Hans is lost in the storm now and, leaning against the hut, has started to dream,]
P580 ...it was the same with this landscape now, transforming itself, opening onto an ever-growing radiance. Blue floated. The glistening curtain of rain fell away -- and there lay the sea, a sea, the Mediterranean, deep deep blue, sparkling with silver, a marvelously beautiful bay... what a bliss of light, of deep pure sky, of sun-drenched water. Hans Castorp had never seen it before, not anything even like it... he had never reached the Mediterranean -- Naples, Sicily, Greece. And yet he remembered it... a cry went up within, as if he had always carried this blue sunshine now spreading before him secretly in his heart, hiding it even from himself. And this “always” was wide , infinitely wide, as wide as the sea there on his left, where the sky settled down upon it in soft violet hues.

This reminds me of a wonderful dream I had just in the past few days. I can recall almost nothing except that it was a dream in which I could fly, or at any rate, gravity did not limit my movement. It was a fun dream. 

P583 [About the people populating this idyllic landscape,] “It’s all so very charming,” Hans Castorp thought, touched to the quick. “They’re all so pleasant, so winning. How pretty, healthy, clever, and happy they are. It’s not just their well-formed bodies -- a cleverness and warmth comes from within them, too. That is what moves me, makes me love them so -- the spirit and purpose... that lies at the basis of their being and allows them to live together like this.”...he meant the dignity, bordering on gravity, though totally fused with good cheer, which alone defined their every deed, an ineffable spiritual influence, earnest yet never gloomy, devout yet always reasonable -- though not lacking a certain ceremonial quality...

P584 ...Just below where... [Hans] was sitting, a pretty lad... stood with his arms crossed on his chest... And the boy looked directly at him, turned his eyes up toward him, and, watching the watcher, his gaze passed back and forth between Hans Castorp and the scenes on the shore. Suddenly... he looked beyond and behind him, into the distance, and in a flash that smile of courteous, brotherly deference... vanished from his... almost childlike face, and, without so much as a frown, it took on a grave expression, an inscrutable blank look of deathlike reserve, as if it were made of stone...

He looked in the same direction. Towering behind him were... the columns of a temple gate, and he was sitting on the open stairway that led to it. With a heavy heart he stood up and descended... [he] found himself at an opening in the rows of columns, before him a group of statuary: two stony female figures on a pedestal, a mother and daughter, it appeared. The one was seated -- an older, dignified matron clad in a heavily pleated tunic and drape... her vacant, starless eyes truly mild and godlike, yet with a plaintive set to the brows; held in her maternal embrace, the other figure, a young woman with a round face, stood with arms and hands buried in the folds of her cloak.

Hans Castorp... felt himself compelled to circle behind the figures and move on through the next double row of columns. The metal doors to the sanctuary stood open, and the poor man’s knees almost buckled under him at what he now saw. Two half-naked old women were busy at a ghastly chore among flickering braziers -- their hair was gray and matted, their drooping witches’ breasts had tits long as fingers. They were dismembering a child held above a basin, tearing it apart with their bare hands in savage silence... They devoured it piece by piece, the brittle little bones cracking in their mouths... Hans Castorp was caught frozen in the gruesome, icy spell. He wanted to cover his eyes with his hands and could not. He wanted to flee and could not. They... had seen him now and... damned him soundlessly with the filthiest, lewdest curses of his hometown dialect... Trying desperately to pull himself away, he slipped and fell... he found himself lying in the snow, his head resting on one arm, his legs stretched out before him, his skis still on.

P586 It was not a genuine awakening; he simply lay there blinking, relieved to be rid of those repulsive women... he went on dreaming... no longer in visions, but in thoughts hardly less perilous and tangled.

“I thought so -- it was only a dream... A very enchanting, very dreadful dream. At some level, I knew all along that I was making it up myself... knew it ahead of time almost. But how can a person know something like that, make it up, to exhilarate and terrify himself? Where did I get that beautiful bay with those islands, and the temple precincts... We don’t form our dreams out of just our own souls. We dream anonymously and communally, though each in his own way. [Here’s another thing I like about Mann, who else considers dream creation the same way I do? Was he influenced by Carl Jung? If dreams draw upon a collective unconscious then that would explain the “communally” here. Or you could go all the way and assert a pantheistic origin to such dreams.This sent me to Wiki to look up “logos” and I found this, “Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different ways. The sophists used the term to mean discourse; Aristotle applied the term to refer to "reasoned discourse"[5] or "the argument" in the field of rhetoric, and considered it one of the three modes of persuasion alongside ethos and pathos.[6] Stoic philosophers identified the term with the divine animating principle pervading the Universe. Within Hellenistic Judaism, Philo of Alexandria (c.  20 BC – c.  50 AD) adopted the term into Jewish philosophy.[7] The Gospel of John identifies the Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos),[8] and further identifies Jesus Christ as the incarnate Logos. The term is also used in Sufism, and the analytical psychology of Carl Jung.” As usual, I follow the Stoics here, but the other associations are equally interesting.] The great soul, of which we are just a little piece, dreams through us... dreams in our many different ways its own eternal, secret dream -- about its youth, its hope, its joy, its peace, and its bloody feast. [So pantheism it is. I would have said that it dreams “story.” And now I’m going to have to link back to that other, other blog again for the Devi myth. You can go HERE and find my account of this creation story just before Section 6.] Here I lie against my column, with real remnants of my dream still inside my body [that’s a mind-body dualism problem, but he is still semi-dreaming here] -- both the icy horror of the bloody feast and the previous boundless joy, my joy in the happiness and gentle manners of that fair humanity... I have experienced so much among the people up here, about kicking over the traces, about reason. I have passed on with Naphta and Settembrini into these dangerous mountains. I know everything about mankind. I have known flesh and blood, I gave Pribislav Hippe’s pencil back to ailing Clavdia. But he who knows the body, who knows life, also knows death... You have to hold it up to the other half, to its opposite. Because our interest in death and illness is nothing but a way of expressing an interest in life -- just look at how the humanistic faculty of medicine always addresses life and its illness so courteously in Latin. But that is only an adumbration of one great, urgent concern, which in fullest sympathy I shall now call by its name: life’s problem child, man himself, his true state and condition. I know quite a bit about him... I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous, reasonable, and respectful community of men -- while the ghastly bloody feast went on in the temple behind them. Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror? What a fine and gallant conclusion for them to draw! I shall hold to their side, here in my soul, and not with Naphta, or for that matter with Settembrini -- they’re both windbags. The one is voluptuous and malicious, and the other is forever tooting his little horn of reason and even imagines he can stare madmen back to sanity -- how preposterous, how philistine! It’s mere ethics, irreligious, that much is certain. And yet I’m not going to take little Naphta’s side, either, with his religion that’s nothing more than a   guazzabuglio [jumble] of God and the Devil, good and evil, just made for someone to tumble headlong into its void and perish mystically there... Their arguments and contradictions are nothing but a guazzabuglio, the hubbub and alarum of battle, and no one whose head is a little clear and heart a little devout will let himself be dazed by that. With their questions of ‘true aristocracy’! With their nobility! Death or life -- illness or health -- spirit or nature. Are those really contradictions? I ask you: Are those problems? No, they are not problems, and the question of their nobility is not a problem, either. Death kicks over its traces in the midst of life, and this would not be life if it did not, and in the middle is where the homo Dei’s state is found -- in the middle between kicking over the traces and reason -- just as his condition is somewhere between mystical community and windy individualism. I can see all that from my column here. And in that state let him commune with himself, fine, gallant, genial, and respectful -- for he alone is noble, and not that set of contradictions. Man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they. More noble than death, too noble for it -- that is the devotion of his heart. There, I have rhymed it all together, dreamed a poem of humankind. I will remember it, I will be good, I will grant death no dominion over my thoughts. For in that is found goodness and brotherly love, and in that alone. Death is a great power. You take off your hat  and tiptoe past his presence... He wears the ceremonial ruff of what has been, and you put on austere black in his honor. Reason stands foolish before him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. Lust, my dream says, not love. Death and love -- there is no rhyming them, that is a preposterous rhyme, a false rhyme. Love stands opposed to death -- it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts. And form, too, comes only from love and goodness: form and cultivated manners of man’s fair state, of a reasonable, genial community -- out of silent regard for the bloody banquet. Oh, what a clear dream I’ve dreamed, how well I’ve ‘played king’! I will remember it. I will keep faith with death in my heart, but I will clearly remember that if faithfulness to death and to what is past rules our thoughts and deeds, that leads only to wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts. And with that I shall awaken. For with that I have dreamed my dream to its end, to its goal. [Freud and Jung proved the danger (of offending) in interpreting someone else’s dreams, but I do think Mann is slightly off here. Settembrini contrasts Western thought with Lao-tzu, but I would rather contrast it with Buddhism and Hinduism. I'm going to send you to my other, other blog again HERE, but just in case, there are a couple passages I have to quote. Here is a quick description of Kali,

...Hindu texts referring to the goddess are nearly unanimous in describing her as terrible in appearance and as offensive and destructive in her habits. Her hair is disheveled, her eyes red and fierce, she has fangs and a long lolling tongue, her lips are often smeared with blood, her breasts are long and pendulous, her stomach is sunken, and her figure is generally gaunt. She is naked but for several characteristic ornaments: a necklace of skulls or freshly cut heads, a girdle of severed arms, and infant corpses as earrings. She is usually said to have four arms. The upper left hand holds a bloodied cleaver, the lower left hand, a freshly cut human head; the upper right hand makes the sign “fear not,” and the lower right hand, the sign of conferring boons.

But that's not all. Here is a passage that describes Kali (as she is worshipped in Bengal) in the context of dharma and moksa. This provokes the kind of debate that Naphta and Settembrini have been having but in a non-Christian context. This quote will end with my reaction to how appropriate this was in the previous context of dealing with the thought of Michel Foucault and his annoying cohort. But I feel my reaction is just as appropriate here,

Kali is a very dangerous being. She vividly and dramatically thrust upon the observer things that he or she would rather not think about. Within the civilized order of Hinduism, the order of dharma, of course, blood and death are acknowledged. It is impossible not to acknowledge their existence in human life. They are acknowledge, however, within the context of a highly ritualized, patterned, and complex social structure that takes great pains to handle them in “safe” ways, usually through rituals of purification...

p152

Kali puts the order of dharma in perspective, perhaps puts it in its place, by reminding the Hindu that certain aspects of reality are untameable, unpurifiable, unpredictable, and always threatening to society’s feeble attempts to order what is essentially disorderly: life itself.

To her devotees Kali is known as the divine mother. In the light of what I have said, I would suggest that she is mother to her devotees because she gives birth to a wider vision of reality than the one embodied in the order of dharma. The dharmic order is insufficient and restrictive without a context, without a frame, as it were. Kali frames that order of dharma, as maya, prakrti, and sakti out of control, as death and blood out of place, Kali makes that order attractive indeed.

Yet the wider vision that she presents may be understood in a more positive way as well. The Hindu religious tradition consistently affirms a reality that transcends the social order. From the perspective of moksa, final release from the endless round of births and deaths, the order of dharma is seen as a contingent good, a realm that must finally be left behind in the quest for ultimate good. Standing outside the dharmic order, indeed threatening it, Kali may be understood in a positive way as she who beckons humans to seek a wider, more redemptive vision of their destiny.

Depending upon where one is in one’s spiritual pilgrimage, then, Kali has the power either to send one scuttling back to the womb of dharma or to provoke one over the threshold to moksa. In either role she might be understood as the mother who gives her children shelter.

Wow! I can’t believe how apropos this turned out to be.

This can be read as taking the dialectic in TMM to a whole other level, or I may be underestimating the Christian based dialectic (I don’t think so). Or it can be viewed as taking our search for the Meaning of Life to another level. This, I think, is the true meaning of Hans’s dream. Everyone (most everyone) adores Parvati and the other auspicious goddesses, but you need to give Kali her due, because she is also part of the dream/life. This is the dualism Settembrini should be unhappy with, but should treat with the respect Hans just assigned to Death.] I’ve long been searching for that truth: in the meadow where Hippe appeared to me, on my balcony, everywhere. The search for it drove me into these snowy mountains. And now I have it. My dream has granted it to me so clearly that I will always remember... My heart is beating strong and knows why... It beats for human reasons and because my spirit is truly happy. The truth of my dream has refreshed me -- better than port or ale, it courses through my veins like love and life, so that I may tear myself out of my dreaming sleep... Awake, awake!...”

P588 ...It wasn’t five yet... Amazing! Could it be that he had lain there in the snow for only ten minutes or a little longer, had fantasized all those daredevil thoughts, those images of happiness and horror...? It seemed that life meant well by its highly confused problem child.

P589 ...He... was in Dorf by half past five; he stored his equipment at the grocer’s, rested a bit in Herr Settembrini’s garret, and gave him a full report of how he had been overtaken by the snowstorm. The humanist was duly horrified. He... lit the sputtering fire of his little alcohol stove and brewed some strong coffee for the exhausted engineer -- which did not prevent Hans Castorp from falling asleep in his chair.

P590 An hour later he was cradled in the highly civilized atmosphere of the Berghof, He did justice to his supper. His dream was already beginning to fade. And by bedtime he was no longer exactly sure what his thoughts had been.

Exactly. It’s a rare dream you can retain in any detail. And he gets the sense of time -- or rather the timelessness -- in a dream right as well. And then there’s dream logic.

Many people maintain that there’s no need to read past section 15  of The Birth of Tragedy. Even Nietzsche came to believe this, but I disagree. And yet I wouldn’t have a real problem with Mann ending TMM here. Though that would mean losing one of my favorite characters in the book.

I mention The Birth of Tragedy because of the following passage, 

That this effect should be necessary, everybody should be able to feel most assuredly by means of intuition, provided he has ever felt, if only in a dream, that he was carried back into an ancient Greek existence. Walking under lofty Ionic colonnades, looking up towards a horizon that was cut off by pure and noble lines, finding reflections of his transfigured shape in the shining marble at his side, and all around him solemnly striding or delicately moving human beings, speaking with harmonious voices and in a rhythmic language of gestures -- in view of this continual influx of beauty, would he not have to exclaim, raising his hand to Apollo: ‘Blessed people of Hellas! How great must Dionysus be among you if the god of Delos considers such magic necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!’

To a man in such a mood, however, an old Athenian, looking up at him with the sublime eyes of Aeschylus, might reply: ‘But say this, too, curious stranger: how much did this people have to suffer to be able to become so beautiful! But now follow me to witness a tragedy, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both deities!’

This is from my blog, HERE.

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190. TMM - Operationes Spirituales cont. - Bourgeoisiosity

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: TMM - Operationes Spirituales 

The Magic Mountain 

Chapter 6

Operationes Spirituales cont.


P529 An interesting passage here about the similarities between Loyola’s doctrines and those of Frederick the Great. I would quibble that Loyola was Basque and not Spanish. Naphta continues,


P532 ...what all, in his opinion, did not oppose asceticism and the kingdom of God! Not only our ties to family and homeland did so, but also those to health and life. Asceticism was even his basis for reproaching the humanist whenever he trumpeted peace and happiness; Naphta would belligerently accuse him to his face of love of the flesh... and love of physical comfort... call it utter bourgeois irreligion to ascribe the least value to life and health.

Then there was the great colloquy on health and sickness, which arose out of differences that became apparent one day, very close to Christmas...

Actually the dispute had started over Karen Karstedt... who had died recently... Naphta began to speak of pius excesses of charity witnessed in the Middle Ages...

P533 Settembrini... spoke about modern, progressive forms of humanitarian nursing... 

P534 [Settembrini goes on to talk about illness,] ... The sick person was just that, sick, both by nature and in his mode of experience. Illness battered its victim until they got along with one another: the senses were diminished, there were lapses of consciousness, a merciful self-narcosis set in -- all means by which nature allowed the organism to find relief, to adapt mentally and morally to its condition, and which a healthy person naively forgot to take into account... [Ferge objects as this sounds like an insult to his pleural shock. Then Settembrini launches into a claim that madmen can be brought back to reality by, “confronting his fiddle-faddle with a pose of unrelenting reason.”]
...
P537 ...Naphta now went on to discuss... the general biases that induced humanists to honor health on principle and dishonor and belittle sickness whenever possible -- a position... that revealed a remarkable and almost praiseworthy self-abnegation on Herr Settembrini’s part, since he was himself ill. Such an attitude... arose from a regard and reverence for the body, which could only be justified if the body still existed in its original God-given state, rather than in a state of humiliation... For although created immortal, it had become subject to decay and abomination as part of the general impairment of nature brought about by Original Sin, was now mortal and corruptible, and should be regarded merely as a prison, the stocks in which the soul was entrapped, its sole purpose being to awaken within us a feeling of shame and confusion... as Saint Ignatius had put it. [Hans brings up Plotinus again and Settembrini demands he not confuse the two points of view.]

Naphta now proceeded to prove that the awe in which the Christian Middle Ages had held the suffering human body was derived from religious affirmation in the face of the afflictions of the flesh. For festering sores were not only conspicuous reminders of the body’s sunken state, but also, in reflecting the venomous corruption of the soul, they awakened a desire for edifying spiritual compensation; whereas the bloom of health was a deceptive phenomenon, an offense to the conscience that it was best to disavow by bowing low in profound humility before human frailty... Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? That was the voice of the Spirit, and it would be the voice of true humanity for all eternity.

P538 No, that was a benighted voice, in Herr Settembrini’s opinion... The voice of a world upon which the sun of reason and humanity had never risen. Yes indeed, his own body might be venomous, but he had kept his mind healthy and uninfected enough to defy Naphta’s priestley views concerning the body and to ridicule what he called the soul. He went on to celebrate the human body as the veritable temple of God, whereupon Naphta declared our stuff to be nothing more than a curtain between us and eternity, which resulted in Settembrini forbidding him ever to use the word “humanity” again -- and so on.

P538 [The subject of flogging comes up -- which again makes me think that Mann has Dostoevsky in mind to some extent,] ...It was not surprising that Herr Settembrini, invoking the dignity of man in sterling words, spoke out against the brutal practice... nor was it any more surprising... that Naphta spoke out in favor of the bastinado. According to him, it was absurd to jabber on about the dignity of man in this instance, for our true dignity was based in the Spirit and not the flesh, and since the human soul was only too inclined to suck its entire love of life from the body, the administration of pain to the body was a highly commendable means by which to spoil the soul’s desire for sensual pleasure and... drive it back out of the body into the spiritual realm, thereby restoring the latter’s dominion... Saint Elizabeth had been disciplined by her father confessor... until he drew blood, “transporting her soul,” as legend put it, “to the third choir of angels,” and she had herself laid the rod to an old woman who was too sleepy to make her confession. [Foucault would have made a beeline to a SF gay bathhouse named “The third choir of angels.” See HERE in my other, other blog.] Would anyone venture in all earnestness to declare as barbaric and inhumane the self-flagellation practiced among members of certain orders and sects, and in general by people of more profound capacities, in order that they might strengthen their own spiritual principles? ...

P540 ...Naphta asked... how else intractable criminals should be handled if not with stocks and cudgels... A humane prison was a half-measure, an aesthetic compromise, and although Herr Settembrini was a master of beautiful rhetoric, he understood nothing about aesthetics... the conception of human dignity that sought to ban corporal punishment had its roots, to hear Naphta tell it, in the liberal individualism of the era of bourgeois humanism, in the Enlightenment absolutism of the ego, which was about to atrophy and be replaced by a wave of newer, less namby-pamby social concepts, ideas of submission and obedience, of bridles and bonds, and since such things were not to be had without holy cruelty, flogging would thus be regarded with quite a different eye.

[They move on to the subject of cremation, which Settembrini approves of and Naphta doesn’t. Wehsal brings up torture. But they get nowhere with that so Hans brings up capital punishment. Settembrini argues against capital punishment, “basing his argument on scientific determinism.”]

P546 Whereupon “youth in search of light” [the phrase Settembrini has just used] was forced to watch as Naphta took each argument, one after the other, and wrung its neck. He ridiculed the philanthropist's reluctance to shed blood, his reverence for life, claimed that such a reverence for life belonged to only the most banal rubbers-and-umbrellas bourgeois periods, but that the moment history took a more passionate turn, the moment a single idea, something that transcended mere “security,” was at work, something supra-personal, something greater than the individual -- and since that alone was a state worthy of mankind, it was, on a higher plane, the normal state of affairs -- at that moment, then, individual life would always be sacrificed without further ado to that higher idea, and not only that, but individuals would also unhesitatingly and gladly risk their own lives for it. His good adversary’s philanthropy... was aimed at robbing life of all its difficult and deadly serious aspects; its goal was the castration of life, and the same went for the determinism of its so-called science. The truth was... that determinism could never abolish the concept of guilt -- indeed it could only add to its terrible gravity. 

Recalling that this was written in the 1920s, with the sacrifices of the Great War in the recent past and with the ‘30s and ‘40s up next, it is hard to argue with Naphta here. 
...

...The criminal was as imbued with guilt as he was with self. For he was what he was, and was neither able nor willing to be anything else -- and that was his guilt. Herr Naphta removed guilt and merit from the empirical world to the metaphysical. Our deeds, our actions were predetermined, of course, that was not where our freedom lay -- but in being. Man was as he wanted to be, and would never cease to want to be until his extermination. “For the life of him” he had gladly slain others, and so it was not too high a price to exact life from him. Let him die then, for he had satisfied the deepest lust of his heart.

The deepest lust?

The deepest.
...

P547 Settembrini responded with a subtle remark: “It seems some generalizations reflect on the person making them. You feel a desire to kill, do you?”

“That’s no business of yours. If I did, however, I would laugh right in the face of any ignorant humanitarian who tried to keep me on a diet of pap until I died in my bed. It is nonsense... for a murderer to outlive his victim. The two of them, eye to eye, are alone together in a way that two people are alone in only one other similar circumstance, the one receptive, the other active -- and they share a secret that will unite them forever. They belong together.”

Settembrini confessed coolly that he lacked the requisite organ for this murderous mysticism... He felt an insurmountable need for tidiness that kept him out of that realm where a reverence for human misery... reigned, not only in physical but also in a psychological sense, a realm where... virtue, reason, and health meant nothing, but where vice and illness were held in extraordinary honor.

Naphta agreed that virtue and health were not part of the religious condition. Much would be gained my making it clear that religion had absolutely nothing to do with reason and morality. For... religion had nothing to do with life. Life was based on conditions and principles that belonged in part to epistemology and in part to ethics -- the former being time, space, and causality; the latter, morality and reason. All such matters were not only foreign and of no significance to religion as such, but also inimical to it; for they were the constituents of life, or so-called health, which was to say, ultraphilistine, utter bourgeois existence -- to which the religious world was ordained to be the absolute opposite, indeed the very genius of opposition... There was a “bourgeoisiosity” of life, whose monumental genius was indisputable, a philistine majesty, which one might well consider worthy of respect, as long as one realized that ... it was the incarnation of irreligiosity. 

This might be the place to put another link to Pirenne. One of his points I found most surprising was that the extreme, fundamentalist, forms of Protestantism and pre-Protestant heresy rose from the bourgeoisie. See Proto-Protestantism (Bourgeois asceticism threatens the Church in the 11th century) HERE; Cathars heresy HERE; John Wycliffe & the beguines (mysticism in the 14th century) HERE; Luther HERE. Though it was not clear to me how much this was the result of lay education (and starting with Luther, the printing-press) and how much it was a reaction against 'the  "bourgeoisiosity” of life.' (I've nearly repeated myself in a very slightly different context. Last time I was talking about the City of God.)

P548 [Hans jumps in here,] ... the opposition between life and religion could be traced to that between time and eternity. Because progress occurred only within time; there was no progress in eternity, no politics or eloquence, either. There one laid one’s head back onto God... and closed one’s eyes...

[Naphta about Settembrini] ...The decisive factor of the humanist’s view of the world was that God and the Devil were two different persons or principles and that “life” was the bone of contention between them -- very much after the medieval model, by the way. In reality... they were one, were united in their opposition to life, to the bourgeoisity of life, to ethics, reason, virtue; they were the single religious principle that they represented together. 

Again, I have to say Naphta makes a good point here. Also, I don’t think this was the first time I, for just an instant, thought “he” was going even further in saying that “they were one.” The Manichean heresy is one of the most pernicious in Catholic history, and yet if you don’t posit both a good and an evil power it seems that you are left with your monotheistic God being responsible for evil as well. 


“What a revolting hodgepodge...” Settembrini cried. God and evil, the holy and the criminal all jumbled together, No judgement, no will, no capacity to reject what was vile. He wondered if Herr Naphta knew just what he was repudiating... by jumbling up God and the Devil and denying the ethical principle in the name of his depraved Holy Duality. He was repudiating... values, every standard of value. Fine -- good and evil did not exist, only a morally chaotic void. [This is what I was saying was the conclusion to be drawn from A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Or very like] The individual, in all the dignity of his critical faculties, did not exist, just an all-devouring, all-leveling community, and a mystical submersion in it. The individual --

P549 How charming -- Herr Settembrini was back to calling himself an individualist. To be that... one needed to know the difference between morality and blessedness, which the gentleman, as a good illuminatus and monist, most certainly did not. Wherever life was stupidly regarded as an end in itself, with no questions asked about a meaning or purpose beyond it, what one found were social ethics, species ethics, vertebrate ethics, but not individualism -- that resided solely in the realm of the religious and mystical, in that so-called chaotic void. Just what was Herr Settembrini’s morality, what was its point? It was bound to life, and so merely utilitarian -- unheroic, miserly so. Its sole objective was for a person to grow old, rich, happy, and healthy -- period; he considered a philistine gospel of reason and work to be ethics. But as far as he, Naphta, was concerned, he once again took the liberty of calling that a shabby bourgeoisiosity of life. 

This is why I think this is the ultimate book for a “Meaning of Life” book club. Plus, how often do you get to say or write “bourgeoisiosity?” 


Settembrini begged for moderation here... because he found it intolerable that Herr Naphta kept talking about the “bourgeoisiosity of life” in such a... disdainful , aristocratic tone, as if the opposite -- and everyone knew what the opposite of life was -- was somehow more noble.

...Hans Castorp... his mind reeling... admitted haltingly that he had always imagined death wearing a starched Spanish ruff, or at least in some sort of semi-uniform with a high stiff collar, whereas life always wore a little, normal, modern collar. And then aghast... at the drunken dreaminess of his words, he assured them that was not what he had meant to say. But was it not true that there were people... whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar?... they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death. 

Funny that he denies his true opinion only to add something Settembrini would find even worse.

P550 [Settembrini,] ...”Fit for life,” had he said?... “Worthy of life” -- that was the term he should have used instead. And then his thoughts would order themselves in a true and beautiful manner. “Worthy of life -- and at once... one was reminded of the term “worthy of love,” which was so intimately related to the former that one could say that whatever was worthy of life was truly worthy of love. And joined together, the two terms -- “worthy of love” and “worthy of life” -- became what one called noble.

[Hans thinking,] ...Because say what one might, what one would... for example that illness was a higher level of life and so possessed a kind of solemnity -- this much was certain: illness meant an overemphasis on the physical, sent a person back to his own body, cast him back totally upon it, as it were, detracted from the worthiness and dignity of man to the point of annihilation by reducing man to mere body. Illness, therefore, was inhuman.

Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to be human was to be ill. Indeed, man was ill by nature, his illness was what made him human, and whoever sought to make him healthy and attempted to get him to make peace with nature, to “return to nature” (whereas he had never been natural), that whole pack of Rousseauian prophets -- regenerators, vegetarians, fresh-air-freaks, sunbath apostles, and so forth -- wanted nothing more than to dehumanize man and turn him into an animal. Humanity? Nobility? The Spirit was what distinguished man -- a creature set very much apart from nature, with feelings very much contrary to nature -- from the rest of organic life. Therefore, the dignity and nobility of man was based in the Spirit, in illness. In a word, the more ill a man was the more highly human he was, and the genius of illness was more human than that of health. It was astonishing how someone who played the philanthropist could close his eyes to such basic truths of humanity. Herr Settembrini was forever going on about progress. As if progress, to the extent such a thing existed, was not due solely to illness. As if those who were healthy had not always lived from the achievements of illness. There had always been people who had willingly entered into illness and madness in order to win knowledge for mankind -- and knowledge, having been wrested from madness, became health and, once obtained by heroic sacrifice, its possession and use were no longer conditioned by illness and madness. That was the true death on the cross. 

One can imagine Michel Foucault sitting bolt upright upon reading this passage. But I suppose he is talking about the Christian “truth” here.[

P551 “Aha,” Hans Castorp said to himself, “you improper Jesuit with your permutations and interpretations of the Crucifixion. It’s clear enough why you did not become [my translation says “became”] a priest, a handsome Jesuit with a little moist spot! Well, lion, roar,” he thought, turning toward Herr Settembrini. And “roar” he did, declaring everything Naphta had said to be chicanery, humbug, confusion. “Admit it... your Spirit is illness... Go ahead and explain how illness and death are noble, but health and life are sordid... “ And like a knight entering the lists, he championed the nobility of health and life, the nobility that had been granted by nature and did not need to fear Spirit. “Form!” he said. And Naphta grandiloquently responded, “Logos!” But he who would not hear of the logos, said, “Reason!” And the man of the logos defended “Passion!” Confusion reigned... But there was no clarity, no order, not even of a dualistic and militant sort; for it was all not only contradictory, but... the disputants not only contradicted one another, but also themselves... [Hans wonders,] how did Naphta actually achieve such bloody, unconditional certainty, since he admitted he did not believe in pure knowledge as such, in unbiased research, in short, not even in truth, in objective, scientific truth... In that regard, it was Herr Settembrini who was pious and strict, and Naphta who was lax and slovenly, referring truth back to man and declaring that whatever profited man was true. To make truth that dependent on man’s own interests -- was that not itself philistine utilitarianism, a bourgeoisisity of life? So that you could not call it ironclad objectivity, there was more freedom and subjectivity to it than Leo Naphta would have been willing to admit -- it was in its own way just as “political” as Herr Settembrini’s didactic statement that freedom was the law of brotherly love. And that clearly meant that his freedom, like Naphta’s truth, was tied to just one thing: man. But that made it decidedly more devout than free -- yet another juxtaposition of terms that tended to slip away when you began defining things... Herr Settembrini was afraid of the “absolute Spirit,” wanted to restrict “spirit” to democratic progress, and nothing else -- was horrified by militant Naphta’s religious licentiousness, which made a jumble of God and the Devil, the holy and the criminal, genius and illness, which recognized no values, no judgements of reason, no will. Who, then, was actually free, and who devout? What constituted man’s true state and condition: obliteration in all-devouring, all-leveling community, which was a simultaneously voluptuous and ascetic act; or “critical subjectivity,” where bombast and strict bourgeois virtue were at loggerheads? ... there was no lack of inner contradictions, making it all extraordinarily difficult for a civilian to exercise responsibility, not merely to decide between opposites, but also to keep them apart as neat, separate specimens -- until a civilian was sorely tempted to plunge headlong into Naphta’s “morally chaotic void.” ...and Hans Castorp thought he saw that the disputants would have been less embittered, if during their dispute each had not been the harasser of his own soul.
...

P554 ...Hans Castorp... retired to his balcony -- his ears full of the hubbub and alarums of two armies, one from Jerusalem, the other from Babylon, advancing under the dos banderas and joining now in the confused tumult of battle.

I was working out at the gym and thinking about health and Spirit when an ad for one of 24 Hour Fitness’s special programs came over the speakers. The slogan for the program was, “Love your body. Love your life.” I thought I could hear Naphta screaming in his grave.

And HERE is where Pirenne discusses the Cluniac reforms of the 10th century that sound very like the religious position Naphta is advocating.


Next up, finally, "Snow."

Jump to Next: The Magic Mountain - Snow

189. TMM - Into Operationes Spirituales - Leo Naphta backstory

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: TMM -  The City of God cont.

The Magic Mountain 

Chapter 6

An Outburst of Temper/Something Very Embarrassing

P491 [Hans, after Joachim makes it clear he’s on the point of bolting,] “...Can it be that he’ll leave me alone up here...” And then he thought, “How horrible... so horrible and absurd that I can feel my face turning cold and my heart pounding irregularly, Because if I stay behind up here alone... then it will be -- my heart’s standing absolutely still now -- it will be for good and all, because I’ll never, ever find my way back to the flatlands alone.”
...

P495 [Joachim to Behrens,] “...It’s all arranged. I will be joining the seventy-sixth [regiment] as an ensign on the first of October.”

“No matter what the risk?” Behrens asked...

“Yes, sir, Director Behrens, sir,”...

Hans is not leaving with Joachim.



An Attack Repulsed

James Tienappel arrives to fetch Hans home. After a confusing stay of eight days Tienappel flees at first light without even saying goodbye to Hans.


P521 And that was the end of the attempt by the flatlands to reclaim Hans Castorp. The young man admitted quite openly to himself that such total failure, which he had seen coming, was of decisive importance for his relationship to the people down there. For the flatlands it meant a final shrug, the abandonment of any claim; for him, however, it meant freedom finally won, and by now his heart no longer fluttered at the thought.


Operationes Spirituales

Once again, I find I am reading this with new eyes, since I have now read Temple Grandin’s account of Kosher slaughter practices HERE p41. We are finally getting some background on Leo Naphta,

P521 ... His father, about whom he spoke with respect... had been the village shohet -- a profession very different from that of a Christian butcher... He held an office, a spiritual office. Having been examined in his godly skills by the rabbi, who then authorized him to slaughter acceptable animals according to the Law of Moses and the regulations of the Talmud, Elia Naphta was himself filled with a quiet religiosity... Leib [Leo] was a mere boy, but he saw that the methods of those clumsy goyim, though excusably charitable, were also profane, that they did not honor sacred things in the same way his father’s solemn pitilessness did; and so the idea of piety became bound up with cruelty... For he saw quite clearly that his father had... [chosen his profession] for star-eyed, spiritual reasons. [Elia is killed in a pogrom and the family flees.]

P523 ...From his mother he had acquired incipient lung disease; from his father... in addition to a frail physique, he had inherited an exceptional mind -- intellectual gifts that very early on were joined with haughtiness, vaunting ambition, and an aching desire for more elegant surroundings, a passionate need to move beyond the world of his origins. As a lad of fourteen or fifteen, he had obtained books and impatiently and unsystematically gone about educating himself outside of school and providing his mind with nourishment... [Autodidactism is a recurring theme in Mann’s life and books. A district rabbi takes Leo on as a private pupil,] Over time it became clear that he had nursed a viper at his bosom... The honest old scholar suffered every abuse imaginable as a result of young Leo’s intellectual obstinacy, captiousness, skepticism, contrariness, and cutting dialectical logic... In short, there came a day -- at just the same time that Leo’s mother, Rachel, lay dying -- when the master threw Naphta out, and forbade the boy ever to enter his study again.

P524 [Leo, at sixteen, ends up sitting next to a Jesuit on a park bench,] ...The Jesuit, a well-traveled man with cultured manners, a pedagogue by passion, a judge of men, a fisher of men, sat up and took notice at the first sardonic, clearly articulated answers the wretched young Jewish lad gave to his questions. A caustic, tormented spirituality drifted toward him in those words; probing deeper he discovered both knowledge and a maliciously elegant mode of thought... They spoke about Marx, whose Kapital Leo Naphta had studied in a popular edition, and then moved on to Hegel...

P526 ... Like many gifted Jews, Naphta was by instinct both a revolutionary and an aristocrat -- a socialist, yet obsessed with the dream of participating in a proud, elegant, exclusive, closely circumscribed world. The first statement that the presence of a Catholic theologian had elicited from him... had been a declaration of love for the Roman church, which he saw as an elegant and yet spiritual power -- that is, anti-worldly, anti-material, and thus revolutionary. And his homage was genuine, rooted deep within his nature; for, as he himself explained, Judaism -- thanks to its earthy, practical character, its socialism, its political spirituality -- was far nearer to the Catholic sphere, was incomparably more closely related to it, than to the self-absorption and mystical subjectivity of Protestantism; this meant that it was decidedly less intellectually disruptive for a Jew to convert to the Roman church than for a Protestant to do so.

...The priest saw to it that, even before his baptism, the lad was given temporary shelter and spiritual nourishment at the Stella. Leo moved in -- but only after first abandoning, with the cool callousness of an intellectual aristocrat, his younger brothers and sisters to charity and a fate suited to their lesser talents.

P528 [After graduation he becomes a novice,] ... His days and part of his nights were filled with operationes spirituales, with examinations of conscience, with introspection, deliberation, and meditation, and he went about it with such malicious, peevish passion that he found himself ensnared in a thousand difficulties, contradictions, and disputes. He was the despair -- and the great hope -- of his father confessor, whose life he daily made a hell with raging dialectics and a total lack of simplicity. “Ad haec quid tu?” Leo would ask, ["What can you do to these"??] his eyes flashing behind his glasses. And driven into a corner, there was nothing the priest could do except admonish him to pray for his soul to find peace -- “ut in aliquem gradum quietis in anima perveniat.” Except that, once achieved, such “peace” resulted in a total dulling and deadening of the personality, until a man was a mere tool and his peace that of the graveyard, the eerie external tokens of which Brother Naphta could study in the hollow eyes of faces all around him -- and which he would never succeed in achieving, except by way of physical ruin. 

I suppose we have to assume this is the way Naphta told his story to Hans. So that he is to some extent proud of the trouble he makes for his mentors. Not judging, by the way. This reminds me of some of my stories from university. 
...

...But when both hemorrhages and fever persisted, he had come up here for a long-term cure... and was now into its sixth year...
...

We'll get to the next debate next time. 

Jump to Next: The Magic Mountain - Operationes Spirituales cont.