Will Morrisey Reviews

Book reviews and articles on political philosophy and literature.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

    Archives

    Categories

    Meta

    Archives for February 2018

    Sinyavsky and the Bearable Heaviness of Dissent

    by

    Andrei Sinyavsky [“Abram Tertz”]: Strolls with Pushkin. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

    Originally published in The Rumson Reporter, August 1994.

     

    Andrei Sinyavsky rivals Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Russia’s most eminent living writer, although Solzhenitsyn is far better known in the United States. Like Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavksy spent time in a Soviet jail (for “anti-Soviet agitation”) and in exile. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, he is that rare bird, a Russian liberal democrat. He often uses the pen name “Abram Tertz”—camouflage he assumed under the Soviet regime.

    Aleksandr Pushkin, more or less unanimously acclaimed as the Russian poet of the nineteenth century, had his own run-ins with the political authorities of the day, suffering the humiliating semi-protection of Czar Nicholas. Pushkin died in a duel wherein he had the good fortune to be shot by a foreigner, thereby arousing strong patriotic passions in his countrymen, passions that have attached themselves to his name ever since. From the Christian Czarist Fyodor Dostoevsky to propagandists in the pay of the Comintern, Russians routinely appropriate Pushkin for their (cross-)purposes.

    In writing on Pushkin, Sinyavsky continues this tradition and addresses two principal themes, relevant both to Pushkin’s circumstance and his own. What constitutes freedom in Russia? What constitutes Russianness?

    As Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy writes in her informative introduction, Synyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin continues his closing speech at his 1966 trial. She notes that Pushkin, a political dissident, a probable atheist, a devotee of French culture who had an ancestor who was an Abyssinian prince, does not at first appear to be a prime candidate for First Icon of Russian Literature. But such is the freedom of artistic plasticity that he has become that, in the hands of writers who would have loathed him in life.

    Sinyavsky wants to save Pushkin from the hands of self-serving political cultists. Sinyavsky doesn’t want to worship Pushkin; he wants to stroll with him, an activity Pushkin himself would have much preferred to gestures of adoration. Strolling is leisurely, convivial, free—everything Russian politics so notoriously is not. Sinyavsky’s Pushkin is “an elusive and ubiquitous No Man”—that is to say, a comic Odysseus, not a tragic Achilles. “Lightness is the first thing,” the “condition of creativity”; Pushkin “turned lolling about into a matter of principle.” (Work is the opiate of the masses: You can’t subvert Marxism-Leninism more radically than that. Hence Sinyavsky’s funny line in a 1959 essay, What Is Soviet Realism?: “There is nothing to be done”—a dig at Lenin’s famous pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?). Flighty, womanizing, frivolous, Pushkin “touched on forbidden topics and secret subjects with free and easy grace.” He is the antidote to heavy, Russian sober-sidedness, from Dostoevsky/Solzhenitsyn in literature to Lenin/Stalin/Brezhnev in politics.

    Sinyavsky’s Pushkin is an anti-Machiavelli. For all his lightness of touch, Machiavelli proposed a grim project, the conquest of Fortune by means of tyrannical princes and contentious republicans unassisted by God. Villainy, Sinyavsky writes, “originates in vain attempts to correct fate arbitrarily, to impose the principle of envy on fate through blood and deception,” force and fraud. “The free man strolls,” Pushkin said, he does not seek domination. Pushkin is a Russian Epicurean.

    The problem with too-serious people, Sinyavsky argues, is that they have too damn many purposes or, worse still, one overriding one. In order to free himself from the tyranny of other people’s purposes, Sinyavsky’s Pushkin advances no cause, imposes no goals and indeed proposes none. He writes about nothing or, what is the same thing, about everything that is a trifle. Life is flux, but orderly flux—the change of seasons more than the shuffling or clash of atoms. Pushkin “became a poet the way some people become tramps,” with no grand project in view, “prefer[ring] solitude under shady bows to heroic deeds,” living the life of the “parasite and renegade.” “Pushkin all his life remained a lycée student,” hanging out with the guys and chasing girls. “Parasite” and “renegade” have been standard terms of abuse under the Soviet regime, as in “social parasites” (the bourgeoisie and its sympathizers, real or alleged) and “the renegade Trotsky,” targeted for murder by agents of Joseph Stalin, Man of Steel.

    Sinyavsky’s book is delightful (although, predictably and perhaps even designedly, it gives Solzhenitsyn indigestion). It also poses a (pardon the word) serious problem with respect to Russian liberalism.

    “Pushkin was the first civilian to attract attention to himself in Russian literature. A civilian in the fullest sense of the word, not a diplomat, not a secretary, a nobody. A goldbricker. A deadbeat. But he made more noise than any military man.” True, but a private noisemaker is likely to be heard and thus no longer private. Nor is he yet a citizen. A poet produces forms, makes something, and therefore implicates himself in the practice of ruling—if only indirectly, by influencing the cultural atmosphere—whether he wants to or not. “The poet is a czar,” Sinyavsky’s Pushkin recognizes. Poetry is a “despot.” It ordains. Religion traditional serves as a frame for governments, a subject for poetry; in a secularized society art becomes a substitute for religion.

    Yet Sinyavsky doesn’t want art to rule. He wants it to stroll, he wants it as an expression of freedom. He needs to set Pushkin free of all his cultists, but also needs to set him free of Sinyavsky. He wants freedom from the tyranny of all purposes. His policy amounts to a comprehensive détente or relaxation, in the hope that vigilant despots will also relax, loosen their Machiavellian grip on their subjects. His kind of declaration of independence might not provoke a war for independence in which his side would be defenseless against the Soviet regime.

    This may be possible for Rousseau, in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, precisely because he is solitary, outside of civil society. But take a convivial stroll with someone, even so free a spirit as Pushkin, and a destination will creep in, rules of engagement will be formulated. Solitary freedom will inevitably give way to civil liberty.

    Without an idea of civil liberty, Russian liberalism does not know how to govern. Which is why Russian liberals will always be an endangered species.

    It may be that Sinyavsky wants first to help Russians recover the experience of freedom simply, before going on to think about civil liberty and republican government. It is not easy to see, however, that he can get there from here.

    Plato–Short, Sweet, and Aporetic

    by

    Thomas L. Pangle, ed.: The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Dialogues. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

    Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 21, Number 3, Spring 1994. Republished with permission.

     

    Perplexingly inconclusive, Plato’s short Socratic dialogues appear to offer little promise to those who ask, How did the founder of political philosophy understand his own enterprise? The suspect genealogy of the dialogues makes scholarly neglect seem all the more reasonable. Is there really anything to learn here?

    As it happens, there is, and this collection of careful translations and commentaries makes the learning easier to begin and, better, harder to conclude. “To confront, to take seriously, to become captivated by, these shorter dialogues,” Professor Pangle writes, “is to discover a Socrates who shakes the foundations of many of our conventional assumptions about what and how Socrates and Plato might have thought.” It might be noted that some of the scholarly refusal to take these dialogues seriously as authentic Platonic works may stem from a reluctance to take seriously certain Socratic challenges to conventions. Whatever the historical evidence may be, a willingness to read these dialogues as authentic begins to separate thoughtful or potentially thoughtful students from ‘pure’ scholars. The contributors to this volume combine scholarship with thoughtfulness.

    Allan Bloom finds in the Hipparchus a confrontation between a philosopher and a democrat—the latter no fanatic, but simply an ordinary man who loves money in a ‘decent’ or law-abiding way. The dialogue shows how such decency poses a serious threat to the philosopher’s way of life. Both democrat and philosopher love gain. They differ radically in their conceptions of what is truly gainful.

    The conventional decency of law, upon which money rests, concerns Socrates in the Minos. Leo Strauss shows that law, associated with opinion but also intended to guide opinion, is highly problematic with respect to knowledge. At the same time, “The Minos raises more questions than it answers,” thereby offering readers not so much knowledge as doubt and wonder, neither of which conduce to lawmaking in any ordinary sense.

    This leads one to the quest for knowledge, a quest that cannot be sustained without a love of knowledge. Christopher Bruell emphasizes the distinction, in the Lovers, between the noble, which attracts the well-born, honor-loving, youths of Athens, and the good, associated more with the useful. Political philosophy requires study of the noble, although the study itself is more good than noble. When the noble know their own nobility, they transcend mere nobility; political philosophy constitutes “a needed preliminary to philosophizing.” In this sense, decent political life provides the necessary but not sufficient ground for philosophic life, which nonetheless is in tension with it.

    Given this dispensable indispensability of decent political life, can a philosopher or anyone else promote that life by teaching virtue? The Cleitophon, in Clifford Orwin’s words, depicts one of “those surprisingly rare occurrences in Plato, an encounter with a practicing statesman.” The statesman charges Socrates with the inability to teach citizen virtue. Orwin finds in the dialogue tension “between doing what is good for oneself and doing what is good for others.” Socrates avoids answering Cleitophon’s charge; this is “one of the few” dialogues “that never mentions philosophy,” perhaps because Cleitophon’s certitude with respect to the unmitigated goodness of justice cannot, and in a sense should not, be shaken. He requires clarity, answers, while Socrates would raise perplexities, questions. If a sound political regime provides the needed foundation for philosophic life, should a philosopher induce an able practitioner of the political life to philosophize, to examine his own moral guideposts?

    Does wisdom consist of answers or of questions? Thomas L. Pangle considers the Theages, one of the two central dialogues in the collection. the Theages depicts a private conversation, held in the portico of Zeus the Liberator, between Socrates and a father who is also a democratic statesman, understandably worried that his son wants “to become wise.” As Pangle remarks, wisdom may tempt men “to try to escape from the constraints of conventional fair play.” Theages, the son, soon reveals himself as a would-be tyrant; traditional democratic statesmanship has ‘naturally’ brought forth a child who threatens the tradition and the democracy. Socrates tactfully shows that philosophy, the love of wisdom, cannot offer a science of politics to would-be rulers. It can nonetheless strengthen the necessary pieties of political life by showing “how the traditional virtues can be made more consistent, intelligible, and self-conscious” in the face of democracy’s tendency to undermine itself by unrefined eroticism and immoderate ambition. The Theages is the Platonic answer to Aristophanes’ charges in the Clouds.

    The erotic and ambitious young democrat par excellence was Alcibiades. In the Alcibiades I Plato “depict[s] the profound transformation of an interlocutor in the course of a single conversation”—an event “almost unique among the dialogues,” in the words of Steven Forde. Socrates takes a thumotic soul and arouses its latent eroticism, particularly “to get [Alcibiades] to care earnestly for his self-perfection.” The private, though still social, “peering into the soul of another” yields self-knowledge, which includes moderation or good order of “soul and body and the parts of the soul within itself.” Statesmanship, by analogy but also by contrast, “is the proper ordering of the things belonging to many.” Forde regards this apparent resolution as questionable, given “the questionable proof of the soul” that are its foundation, and given the political career of Alcibiades, whose less-than-Socratic eroticism fascinated then repelled the Athenian demos.

    Thumos again figures in the Laches, the dialogue on courage. James H. Nichols, Jr., observes that Laches’ “commonsense, political conception of courage… rests on preserving the opinion that ridicule and disgrace, above all for not fighting bravely for the city, are more terrible than the risk of death.” Political courage thus differs profoundly from philosophic courage, which risks the city’s antagonism by unflinchingly challenging regnant opinion. Nonetheless, because “we humans are complex beings, compounded of soul and body, faced with varying situations in life,” we need to know how to apply intellectual virtue. True courage requires both natural bravery and prudence; political courage, substituting venerable opinions for prudence, will not always suffice. Neither philosophic nor political, divination—the product of “anxious forethought”—will not suffice for either the philosopher or the statesman.

    A discussion of prudence leads naturally to the topic of lying, one way of attempting to be prudent. Lying also relates to poetic myths. In his discussion of the Lesser Hippias, James Leake notes that “To regard lying as morally defensible or necessary to bring about the good, one must recognize that the good is of limited efficacy”—a recognition resisted by earnest youth of all ages—”not simply triumphant in human affairs or the cosmos.” This knowledge of limits, an instance of prudence and of moderation, forms “a necessary part of the art of politics or ruling insofar as it enables one to deal with those who are incapable of listening to reason”—enemies and friends alike. In this philosophy needs to be politic.

    Is beauty a kind of lie, or deception, and truth (like Socrates) ugly? It would be Epicurean to say so. One might read David R. Sweet’s commentary on the Greater Hippias as a suggestion that Plato anticipates Epicurus to some degree. In the dialogue, the unnamed stranger, who is Socratic, distinguishes precise speech and knowledge from conventional speech and “knowing beautifully.” “Hippias knows precisely how to speak beautifully”—and that is all he knows. The charm of beautiful things “acts as a deterrent to knowledge and prevents a man such as Hippias from seeing beneath the surface of things to the intelligible structure beneath.” The dialogue serves as “a chastening supplement to the Symposium,” which shows how beautiful things can lead the soul ‘upward.’

    Allan Bloom writes the collection’s last commentary, framing a book to which so many of his former students have contributed. One of the funniest dialogues, the Ion presents the spectacle of an utterly conventional cosmopolitan; panhellenic opinion of antiquity, like ‘global thought’ today, may well guide itself by a rather low common denominator. Bloom describes  the rhapsode Ion as book-bound; by questioning him, Socrates tests the claims made for authoritative books, specifically Homer’s books, as worthy educators of the Greeks. Socrates tests “the Greek understanding of things, particularly of the gods.” His “divine possession” argument amounts to “a tale designed to appeal to Ion’s needs and wishes”; small wonder Shelley took it seriously. In fact poetry is an art, an intelligible activity concerned with intelligible objects. Ion’s self-misunderstanding somewhat resembles that of political men. Like so many political men, people voice their fears and desires, especially with respect to their own futures. “Overcoming this concern with oneself” is philosophy’s precondition. Philosophy requires a concept of nature, permitting meaningful general speech. Philosophy permits the mind to see a cosmos or harmony, a kind of peace. Poetry, a veil for chaos or war, ultimately stops at the political level, the highest particularism.

    Plato’s Socrates carefully distinguishes the city from the philosopher. Gain-as-moneymaking versus gain-as-learning; decent laws versus knowledge, wonder, and doubt; citizen virtue versus questioning; politics versus self-perfection; political courage versus philosophic courage; poetic lies versus prudent lies; apparent beauty versus intelligibility; divine possession versus reason: Socrates explores these antinomies, defending philosophy while never forgetting the need for the city.

    Frost and Oliver: Poets of Nature

    by

    Why garden? Why poeticize?
    Robert Frost and his much younger contemporary, Mary Oliver, both distinguished themselves as poets of nature, and also as poets whose audiences have far exceeded college classrooms and highbrow bookstores. This 1993 essay compares two of their best-known poems, Frost’s “Mending Wall” and Oliver’s “Writing Poems.”

     

    Gardening, human beings govern nature with art. Human art mediates between the gardener and nature. Poetry mediates among the poet, nature, and readers.

    Robert Frost knows this. His neighbor tells him, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It is Frost’s neighbor’s father’s saying, a specimen of traditional or folk wisdom. “He will not go behind his father’s saying,” Frost says of him, who repeats himself, and his father. Were Frost’s neighbor a scientist, he would study cloning, an art of exact replication. Frost’s neighbor’s soul finds its deepest satisfaction in remembering. Memory can have the drawback of mischaracterization. Frost’s neighbor calls a wall a fence, and pronounces it good.

    Frost’s deepest satisfaction lies elsewhere. Frost wants the exact word, the one that fits the nature of the thing. Frost wants to go behind the sayings of the father. Frost knows of something older than fathers, and the conventions or traditions of fathers. Nature is older than the oldest human father, even older than the oldest remembered human father.

    “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Nature is what doesn’t love a wall. Nature in its entropy acts beyond human seeing and hearing, undoing the work of even the most vigilant and industrious men. Nature is somewhat mysterious, and behind it might be some greater mystery.

    Nature’s entropy does not so threaten human works as to force men into a grim struggle for survival. Mending walls is “just another kind of outdoor game.” Together, men and nature play the outdoor version of Penelope’s indoor game of weaving and unweaving. But in Frost’s outdoor game there are no threatening suitors, no need for a rescuing hero.

    Frost wants to know, Why play? He wants to know the reason for the game—what he’s walling in or out, and whether someone will take offense at his handiwork. His neighbor, “like an old-stone savage armed,” divides the world into his own and yours, us and them. He respects ancient divisions of politics and property. Frost is not so respectful, seeing the nature shared by all.

    A poem, as much an artifact as a wall, another sort of line built on another form of sand, traditionally marking out the wisdom of fathers, limning the spiritedness of political men. In the Iliad the Muse sings of the high-hearted rage of Achilles, indignant at an instance of unjust, conventional rule in a war sparked by erotic disappointment, that is, by both the frustration of erotic nature and an affront to convention. Is there also something that doesn’t love a poem?

    As a poet, Frost must wonder at the playful entropy of nature. Will it undo his artifacts? He approaches nature lightly, shrewdly, circumlocutiously, even as he questions human artifice and convention. He takes care not to question too blatantly. He lets his neighbor have the last word, lest a good neighbor become a savage and not merely resemble one, on occasion. The poet-gamesman plays the game in order to moderate the latent savagery of the convention—therefore ordinary, therefore natural—man.

    Mary Oliver takes a less prudent tone. She does not question convention. She dismisses it in two sentences, each a kind of negative command. “You do not have to be good” and “You do not have to walk on your knees” are thou-shalt-nots disputing efforts founded on another set of thou-shalt-nots. Eros replaces spiritedness or thumos, and does so directly, without conventional guides. Let “the soft animal of your body love what it loves”; “the world offers itself to your imagination” as a complaisant lover does. You are part of “the family of things,” a nature unmediated by the wisdom of fathers. This unusual family has no parents, only siblings. It is as pliable to desires as one’s imaginings are. Olivier assumes imaginings to be benign. She does not see that if all things constitute a family, all corporeal eroticism is incest. Or if she does, she regards that as just another taboo to be negated.

    Oliver’s optimism comes from her replacement of Frost’s natural law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of dissociation, with the law of love, the law of association. Bees go to rhododendron flowers in Eros’ “invisible line”; “otherwise death is everywhere.” It’s as if she’s taken Neoplatonism and made it corporeal, in the way Marx took Hegel’s dialectic and made it material. Her problem is even more acute than Marx’s, and idealism of corporeality being even less plausible than a materialist dialectic.

    The bees are like poets, Oliver supposes; they appear in a poem titled “Writing Poems.” Oliver wants poetry to be natural or erotic, not a wall against death but a beeline or a lifeline through it.

    Of these two poets, Frost is older, tougher, probably wiser. He knows that poems are artifacts, no matter how natural the impulse urging poets on. If nature is the deepest human satisfaction, and human beings can apprehend nature directly, what need is there for poems? Oliver’s left hand does not know what her writing hand is doing.

    Oliver wants to say, nature associates as well as it dissociates, lives as a precondition of dying. Poems are on the side of spontaneous life, the eros that always says yes. But she says this in a poem, not in a spontaneous outpouring. Idealism of the body leads to a didacticism of the erotic.

    The canny gamesman Frost smiles at Oliver, the earnest erotic. Eroticism is no substitute for moralism, he tells her; trying to make it that will only confuse the poet. Poetry must never go in a beeline. A one-liner isn’t a poem, and one-line poems teach aphoristically, with an indirectness resembling the dialogues composed by Plato, the wisest erotic. A poet who tries to make a poem go in a beeline will remove the reasons for poetry’s existence.

    This is also why gardeners exclude most animals from gardens. This goes for animal bodies soft and hard. Who rules? If not human beings, then it’s no longer a garden. (A garden governed by God would be another matter, and is another story.)

    The question, then, is: On what terms will human beings, whether poets or gardeners, govern nature?