The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - Introduction

 

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a complex interweaving of tales narrated by a young army officer called Alphonse van Worden, who kept a diary of his experiences in the Sierra Morena in 1739, recording both the events which he witnessed and the stories he was told by the company in which he found himself. In 1769 or thereabouts, his diary was sealed by him (so the story goes) in a casket; forty years later, it was found by a French officer while out looting after the fall of the city of Saragossa. He didn’t know much Spanish, but he realized that what he had come upon was a story about brigands, ghosts, cabbalists, smugglers, gypsies, haunted gallows and no doubt much else besides. It was an intriguing mystery: intriguing enough to persuade him to keep the book in his possession, to attempt to hang on to it when he was captured and, later, to inveigle his captor into translating it for him. The same intriguing mystery awaits the reader of this translation: or rather the same complicated web of mysteries. The French officer of the foreword was careful not to spoil the story by revealing too much about it in his preface, and in this introduction I shall be just as discreet; but without giving away too much, I can suggest where the mysteries of the book are to be found.

There are in fact three enigmatic aspects to the book: its author, its composition and its contents. Its author, Count Jan Potocki (1761–1815), was a member of a very great Polish family who lived at a time of considerable literary and political turbulence throughout Europe. His life was spent in travelling, writing, political intrigue and scholarly research. He received a solid education in Geneva and Lausanne, had two spells in the army as an officer in the engineers, and spent some time on a galley as a novice Knight of Malta. He was among the first to make an ascent in a balloon (in 1790), which brought him much public acclaim; he was a tireless political activist, consorting with patriots in Poland, Jacobins in France and the court of Alexander I of Russia. He appears to have been a freemason. All this activity cannot easily be ascribed to a single set of beliefs: at certain times he applauded, at others condemned the French Revolution; he fought against the Russians yet served the Tsar, and accepted a commission to fight alongside the Austrians while declaring himself their political enemy. His travels at different periods of his life took in Italy, Sicily, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt, France, Holland, England, Germany, Russia, even Mongolia; he wrote lively accounts of most of these journeys, and while on them engaged in historical, linguistic and ethnographical researches. His published writings helped found the discipline of ethnology. He compounded his scholarly activity with an interest in publishing, establishing an independent press in Warsaw in 1788 and a free reading room there four years later. As well as writing and publishing scholarly works and pamphlets, he wrote a play, a set of sketches (‘parades’), and, of course, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. He married twice, and had five children; he was divorced from his second wife in 1808. There were rumours of incest. By 1812, politically disillusioned and in poor health, he had retired to his castle at Uladówka in Podolia. On 2 December or 11 December 1815 (depending on the source), he committed suicide, although whether out of political despair, mental depression or a desire to be released from a highly painful chronic condition is not clear. Many stories are told about his death. He is said to have fashioned a silver bullet himself out of the knob of his teapot (or the handle of a sugar-bowl bequeathed to him by his mother); he had it blessed by the chaplain of the castle, and then used it to blow out his brains in his library (or his bedroom), having written his own epitaph (or, according to other sources, drawn a caricature of himself). The macabre stories about his end, his equivocal political career and personal life, his polymathy and his restless wanderings all contribute to the composite picture of an Enlightenment thinker and a romantic figure par excellence, commensurate with his one great literary work.

The controversies surrounding the composition of his novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa are scarcely less dramatic than those surrounding his life. For a long time its authorship was disputed; indeed, the editor of a very recent partial translation still maintains (against conclusive evidence) that Potocki may not have written it. Its publishing history is highly complex. A set of proofs of the first ten or so days appeared in St Petersburg in 1805; this was followed by the story of Avadoro, the gypsy chief, extracted from the framework of the novel, which appeared almost certainly with Potocki’s permission in Paris in 1813; the following year saw a republication of the first ten days, linked to the story of the gypsy chief. If one looks closely at these Paris publications, it is clear that Potocki had still not completely decided in which form to publish his novel, nor whether it would please the public; his death in 1815 put an end to further flotations on the book market of the French capital. But that did not prevent his published work from being plagiarized three times in the next quarter-century, and even becoming the subject of a lawsuit.

It is not clear when Potocki conceived of his novel or when he finished it; the best informed opinion seems to suggest that he began it in the 1790s and completed it in the last year of his life. If one looks, however, at the details included in the first day, one sees that the outcome of the novel is already carefully prepared, which suggests that by 1805 Potocki knew more or less where he wanted to go. The whole text was composed in French; but in spite of assiduous researches in Polish family archives, not all of it appears to have survived in this form. About a fifth of the text is only available in a Polish translation from a lost French manuscript of the whole book, made by Edmund Chojecki in 1847. For a long time, it was hoped that a complete original version would be discovered; but in 1989 René Radrizzani cut the Gordian knot of speculations as to what and where this might be by publishing the complete story in French for the first time, having supplied a French translation of the missing parts from Chojecki’s Polish version. Radrizzani’s French edition includes all the variants relating to the different surviving manuscripts and printed versions; there are, however, only one or two (very minor) points where they are necessary for the understanding of the text, and these have been recorded in footnotes. Critical controversy still rages in France, and it is possible that a new edition by a much respected Potocki scholar may appear in the near future; but, even if it does, it is unlikely to modify much of Radrizzani’s text, although it might bring new manuscripts to bear on Chojecki’s Polish version and make different editorial choices with respect to the existing material. Like the author’s life, the text of his masterpiece leaves many questions unanswered, or unanswerable.

What is the novel about? At a simple level, it is a novel of frames; the preface, supposedly written in 1809, encapsulates the narrative of Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer about to join the Spanish army, who for two months in 1739 is diverted from his journey to Madrid, and obliged to spend this time in the company of the Muslims, cabbalists, Spanish noblemen, thieves and gypsies whose stories are recorded by him as they are told to him. These story-tellers adopt the first person not only to tell their own tales, but also to relate stories they have heard from others: at one point even, the gypsy chief Avadoro (or Pandesowna, as he is also known) tells a story within a story within a story within a story, much to the annoyance of one of the more literal-minded members of his audience. These stories are loosely linked to events in European history between about 1700 and 1740, although it is not necessary to know about the historical background to understand them. An epilogue, also written by Alphonse van Worden in about 1769, closes the novel and ties up the loose ends. All this self-conscious and often highly sophisticated story-telling may suggest that the book is demanding, even difficult to read, in the way that modern experimental fiction can be: but this is not the case. It cannot be denied that by the middle of the novel there are several different stories being related at the same time, and that their enmeshment is such that the characters in the novel themselves are made to complain about its complexity. But, this fact apart, Potocki’s novel has much in common with other epics of entertaining story-telling such as Boccaccio’s Decameron or The Thousand and One Nights, with which its first readers compared it. Like those works, each story is complete in itself, even though there is an overall design which enhances the pleasure of reading by the many coincidences, patterns and recurrent figures which help bind the whole text together.

Potocki seems at one time to have thought of his work in terms of the Gothic novel (‘à la Radcliffe’, as he said in a letter to a friend), and indeed there is no shortage of macabre, sinister, ghastly and horrific events; but it also has affinities with many other literary modes: the picaresque, in the story of Avadoro-Pandesowna’s semi-criminal youth; the adventure story, in its evocation of inexhaustible gold-mines and grand international conspiracies; the pastoral, in its disabused portrayal of court life and its celebration of the beauties of nature; the libertine novel, in its imaginative exploration of the erotic; the conte philosophique, in the dry satirical tone of much of the text and its moral, political, religious and scientific discussions; the fantastic, in its intermingling of the supernatural and the ordinary (although how much remains supernatural at the end is for the reader to decide); the Bildungsroman, in the process by which the naïve Alphonse van Worden is brought to maturity. These affinities have led critics to compare it to Don Quixote, Gil Blas, even Nathan der Weise; but as well as all of this, it is a novel of portraits, a veritable gallery of eccentrics, boors, wits, fools, pedants, philosophers, tricksters, boon companions, cowards and brave men, coquettes and (more rarely) virtuous women. Some of these portraits are just vignettes, others are extensive and profound; some add their colourful voices to the rich texture of the novel, others are no more than the objects of picturesque description.

Leitmotifs run through the work, adding to its pleasure. There are erotic encounters involving sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes four participants, some told naively, some urbanely, some with a tortured conscience; authoritarian fathers (van Worden, Velásquez, Soarez) repeatedly appear to imprint on their sons their own strange philosophies of life; characters are metamorphosed or transform themselves from Christians into Muslims or Jews, from men into women, from beautiful girls into hideous corpses. Dreadful scourges in the shape of implacable persecutors (the principino, Sedekias, Busqueros) haunt the lives of the protagonists. There is a great deal of impersonation and acting, of illusion and delusion, throughout the novel: much of this has to do with strange, convoluted, even barbaric and cruel rites of initiation, which the major characters – Alphonse van Worden, Juan Avadoro-Pandesowna, the Great Sheikh of the Gomelez – all undergo. Other, more mysterious, patterns can be traced, not only in the succession and balance of the stories, but also in the recurrent tableaux, which, as some scholars have pointed out, seem to have affinities with the tarot pack. These motifs are there to be enjoyed, whatever significance may be attached to them by critics.

Does the book have a message? Certain commentators have seen in it an answer to Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme, a sort of Enlightenment celebration of reason and toleration. Others have opted for the rationalism implicit in the younger Velásquez’s mathem-atization of the human being; yet others for the materialism to which the elder Hervas turns in despair at the end of his life. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa could be seen as a novel of social and political conservatism, or a savage indictment of the social order and of all political activity, or a plea for pragmatism and liberalism. In a certain sense, all of these apparently contradictory views are true, for different parts of the text can be used to support different theories about it. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the contrast between the heartfelt confession of Enrique de Velásquez, the proponent of selflessness, and the measured Mephistophelian speeches of Don Belial, who propounds a philosophy based on egoism. A recurrent moral theme is that of honour: various versions are explored, and all are subtly and mercilessly satirized. There is the lunatic delicacy of the Walloon officer Juan van Worden, who will fight any number of duels to satisfy a nightmare punctiliousness about aristocratic honour which is almost never shared by his reluctant adversaries; we encounter the bandit Zoto, whose scrupulous and much-praised observance of the niceties of brigandry and murder perplexes Juan’s naïve son; Pedro de Velásquez’s obsession with science and mathematics spills over into his bizarre courtship of the person known as Rebecca de Uzeda; the sanguinary fanaticism of the Gomelez family contrasts with the Uzedas’ readiness to submit to any requirements of outward observance, in a spirit akin to that of the Vicar of Bray; yet more relaxed ethical postures can be detected in such figures as the Knight of Toledo and Señora Uscariz. Do all these value systems have a single root, in the same way that the novel suggests (at certain points) that all religions spring indifferently from one source? Do they constitute the bundle of contradictions – integrity and duplicity, flesh and spirit, rigidity and suppleness, youth and maturity, indulgence and asceticism, prolixity and silence, folly and wisdom – which go to make up the human being? Could this be the hidden message of the book?

Every reader will no doubt find certain passages or aspects more significant than others. There are moments when a reader may detect a lyrical or passionate note breaking through Potocki’s characteristically witty, detached, satirical prose, which is dominated by the humane, worldly-wise, ironic voice of Avadoro-Pandesowna. On two occasions, it seems to me, his tone changes: once, towards the end of his life story, when he speaks of the loves of a young man, in which the individual figures of his mistresses merge into a composite evocation of the tenderness, excitement, adventure and pleasures of love; the other occasion, and to my mind the more telling, when he describes a specifically Spanish mode of social intercourse. The French had at this time, as is well known, the reputation for brilliant, flirtatious, urbane conversation between social equals of different sexes in the context of the salon (Carlos de Velásquez practises it in this novel); at the same time, the Spaniards were known for their taciturnity. Avadoro’s father, the implausible progenitor of the articulate figure whose narrative voice dominates the novel, scarcely utters a single word in the whole of his adult life; his granddaughter, the mysterious elfin Ondina, is almost as uncommunicative. But between these zones of silence, the gypsy chief himself revels in speech, both his own and that of others, which he relays to his motley band of listeners. This celebration of polyphony, of unfettered human intercourse, has been linked to the enlightened, tolerant exchanges of freemasonry, but Avadoro-Pandesowna offers it as a specifically Spanish experience, arising from the institution of the highway inn, which makes no distinction of class, is not bound by the stiff etiquette of Spanish polite society, brings together all sexes and ages, is unpredictable, jolly, communal; if Potocki’s novel has a message, this seems to me to be it. It is to this that Avadoro-Pandesowna gives expression in his nostalgic description of the Spanish hostelry on the twelfth day:

The beasts were at the rack in the stables and the travellers were at the other end in the kitchen, separated from the stable by two stone steps. At that time, this was the normal arrangement in nearly all Spanish inns. The whole building was but one long room of which the greater part was occupied by the mules and the lesser by the humans. But it was all the merrier for that. As the zagal (muleteer) saw to the pack animals, he kept up a steady stream of repartee with the innkeeper’s wife, who replied with all the liveliness of her sex and station until the more serious-minded innkeeper came between them and interrupted the exchanges. They soon started up again, however. The inn rang to the sound of the castanets played by the maids, who danced to the raucous singing of a goatherd. Travellers made each other’s acquaintance and invited each other to supper. Everyone gathered round the stove, said who they were, where they were going and sometimes told stories. Those were the good old days; now our inns are more comfortable, but the boisterous social life which the travellers of those days led had a charm I cannot describe to you.

Not just here, but for much of the novel, we are vicariously transported into the atmosphere of an early-eighteenth-century Spanish hostelry (or, if we abandon the fictional framework, an inn in 1780, when Potocki visited Spain), listening to the stories of men and women, some rich, some poor, some law-abiding, some criminal, some naïve, some worldly-wise; how can such a cornucopia of narratives be brought to an end? Some critics have said that the resolution of this particular novel is disappointing, but it may be that no novel of this sort can resolve the problem of an ending which must be indefinitely deferred if the entertainment is to continue: for when the voices are stilled and the party breaks up, silence, solitude, absence, even a sort of death supervenes. But for as long as the book remains open, inviting the reader into the imaginary hostelry of its pages, it can prove itself to be the most lively and entertaining of companions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

JAN POTOCKI was born in Poland in 1761 into a very great aristocratic family, which owned vast estates. He was educated in Geneva and Lausanne, served twice in the army and spent some time as a novice Knight of Malta. During his lifetime he was an indefatigable traveller and travel-writer, an Egyptologist and pioneering ethnologist, an occultist and an historian of the pre-Slavic peoples. He was a political activist and probably a freemason, although he seems to have espoused a bafflingly wide range of political causes, some of them patriotic. Among his other exploits were an ascent in a balloon over Warsaw with the aeronaut Blanchard and the provision of the first free press in that city.

Potocki was proficient in many different languages, and his extensive travels led him through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Caucasus and China. He married twice (the first marriage ending in divorce) and had five children: scandalous rumours surrounded both of his marriages. In 1812 he retired to his estates in Poland, suffering from chronic ill health, melancholia and disillusionment. He committed suicide in 1815. Although the exact details of his end are uncertain, the most credible story is that he blew his brains out with a silver bullet, which was modelled from the knob of his sugar-bowl and first blessed by the castle chaplain.

IAN MACLEAN is Reader in French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Queen’s College.

Experience and ownership

We explore the nature of mind – its fabric and its field of experience – by looking inwards and thus develop the quality of insight. As we reflect upon the nature of experience and how it works, anattā (not-self) slowly becomes a bit more understandable and meaningful. 

With perceptions – the sound of a bird chirping or the sight of a cloud floating by overhead – it is easy not to have a sense of ownership. We don’t feel that we own the song of a bird or that a certain cloud is ‘ours’. With feeling it’s usually trickier. When there’s a physical sensation in the body, like an ache or a pain, we usually experience it as ‘mine’: an ache in ‘my’ back or a pain in ‘my’ knee. Yet when that is explored, insight deepens. There can be moments of revelation, a clear knowing that the sense of ‘my-ness’ (mamaṃkara) has been added onto the bare sensation of pain arising, abiding and passing away. We see that very feeling of ownership as merely another mental impression, like a sound or a sight or a taste. 

Mental formations (thoughts and emotions), in a similar way to feeling, may seem even more personal at first: ‘my’ story, ‘my’ memories, ‘my’ ideas, ‘my’ fears, ‘my’ excitement, ‘my’ love, ‘my’ hate. As insight deepens, this is explored as well. The selfless nature of thoughts and emotions can also be revealed and experienced. Remembering our story is simply ‘remembering’; it is a mental image from the past. It too arises and passes away. Emotions then are another layer to be examined. Eventually their empty nature becomes clear as well: ‘This regret, excitement, jealousy... is just a pattern of perception, a pattern of consciousness. It arises, abides for a while, and passes away.’ It is as if we are digging down, deeper and deeper – from sensations to perceptions to thoughts, then emotions – through layer upon layer of experiences that seem more and more personal, more totally ‘who and what I am’. And when the nature of sensations, perceptions, thoughts and emotions are recognized as empty of self, awareness continues beyond into the exploration of decision-making and choosing.

Yet even if these other experiences are seen as not-self, somebody seems to be making a choice. Someone seems to be saying, ‘Go this way, don’t go that way.’ It feels like a person. It feels like an ‘I’ who decides. After all, isn’t there a ‘me’ creating karma? But we can dig deeper into that, too. What happens when a decision is being made? Is it really an ‘I’ who is doing the deciding, the choosing, the intending and the acting? What is the stuff that choosing is made of? These are questions we can ask ourselves as we explore this mind.

THE ANATOMY OF DECISION 

Let’s take a look at the process of making a decision, for example, when we’re driving to reach a destination. First, the mind is aware of arriving at a crossroads. 

Then there is a perception of possibilities – left, right or straight ahead. Next there is the memory of a plan (‘need to go south’). The memory (‘need to go south’) maps on to the perception (‘this is a crossroads’), and intelligence is engaged. The idea arises: ‘turn right to go south.’ With that thought, the hands and arms move, turning the steering wheel to the right. 

As we watch this process unfold, we can ask ourselves, ‘Who is deciding?’ We reflect, ‘Perception is not-self. Memory is not-self. Thinking is not-self. Physical action is not-self.’ So there we are, turning right at the crossroads. Someone seems to have made that decision. It certainly looks like ‘I’ am the one who chose to go right. But when the process is separated out into its constituent parts, that ‘I decided’ is only an apparent reality. Each of its elements is not-self – no ‘I’, no ‘me’, no ‘mine’ – can be found. Thus even decision-making is not-self. Right at its very core, there is no person; there is just mind, awake to the present. 

When there is a strong influence from avijjā (delusion, not seeing clearly), choices are guided by desire, craving, compulsion, fear, aversion, unconscious habits. Those apparent choices are guided by ‘me’ chasing after what ‘I’ like, or ‘me’ running away from what ‘I’ am afraid of, or ‘me’ opposing and attacking what ‘I’ don’t like, or me opinionating about the world. Such actions are reactive, acquisitive, conflicted, afflicted and lead easily to dukkha. 

With avijjā, when it is not recognized that the mind is what matters, then the world is the locus of all our hopes and is blamed for all our suffering. As Jean Paul Sartre famously wrote, through the voice of one of his characters, ‘Hell is other people,’ although I’m not sure if he meant that ironically or literally. 

The crucial relevance of this mind, and how its attitude can be changed for the better, is not recognized and the only way that any happiness can be found is taken to be by rearranging the world: by getting what we like and getting rid of what we don’t like. This is a sorry prison; no exit indeed.

But when there is vijjā (awakened awareness), choices are guided by mindfulness and wisdom (sati-paññā), attunement to the time, place and situation. There is no ‘self’ involved. If an action is taken and it works well, there is no ‘self’ to get drunk on it. And if an action doesn’t work, there is clear comprehension: ‘This road is closed. Let’s take a detour.’ There is no sting of failure. The experience is that of freedom and ease in all circumstances, ‘wide open, free as air,’ as the Buddha put it. When the mind learns to consider, choose and act based on mindfulness and wisdom rather than on self-view and blind habit, the heart is freed. It is no longer imprisoned by the traumas of longing for success, fear of failure, desperation for approval, fear of criticism. Rather, we do what we do, based on mindfulness and wisdom, and let the world make of it what it will. 

When there is success and things go well, we can enjoy it but not take it as a personal achievement, carrying it around like a big prize. There is just the sweet taste of things going well. And when things go badly and fall apart, we often learn deeply significant lessons from the experience. We can remind ourselves, there is just the bitter taste of things going badly – it’s just a taste, empty and ownerless. We don’t have to take it personally. Besides, something that might seem like a ‘success’ may lead to all kinds of trouble, while a so-called ‘failure’ may provide unique, precious and wonderful opportunities. 

In the final analysis then the nature of the subject – the feelings of ‘I’ the experiencer, ‘I’ who remembers, ‘I’ who thinks, ‘I’ who plans, ‘I’ who decides, and ‘I’ who acts – is revealed as completely empty, like a lump of foam or a water bubble or a mirage, like the layers of the onion or a conjuring trick – there is a shape but it is empty, void of substance.

Mind Is What Matters 

Ajahn Amaro 

Do Jews Think Differently?”: Aspects of Jewish Self-Glorification

“What hollow, offensive self-glorification! Here it is ‘proved’ that the nation of Kant was really educated to humanity by the Jews only, that the language of Lessing and Goethe became sensitive to beauty, spirit, and wit only through Boerne and Heine!”                 
                     
Heinrich von Treitschke, A Word About Our Jewry, 1879.

As indicated by the above quote from the nineteenth-century German historian and politician Heinrich von Treitschke, self-glorification has long been a noted feature of Jewish ethnocentrism and has frequently contributed to anti-Jewish feeling in host populations. It is almost entirely absent, however, from existing studies of anti-Semitism. Primarily, this absence can be explained by way of the fact anti-Semitism is, in the received wisdom, something that Jews are subjected to by hostile host populations for irrational reasons, rather than something that Jews have a role in causing or provoking. Jewish behavior, especially the kind of behavior involving traits that are negative or antagonistic to outgroups, is therefore remarkably neglected in Jewish historiography and social science studies concerning Jews. A secondary explanation for the neglect of Jewish self-glorification in the development of anti-Semitism, or even simply as an aspect of the Jewish identity or personality, is the scarcity of serious studies of Jewish ethnocentrism. The following essay attempts to address this gap by exploring aspects and examples of Jewish self-glorification, and puts forward the hypothesis that Jewish self-glorification should be regarded as an example of both positive and negative ethnocentrism — that it reinforces in-group loyalties and self-esteem while weakening the loyalties and self-esteem of outgroups.

Jews have a joke among themselves that goes something like this: A class of schoolchildren is asked to produce an essay about giraffes; little Tom Smith hands in a piece on the neck; little John Baker writes about its diet; others write about the tail, the environment, and so on. Then little Benny Cohen hands in his paper, and it is titled “The Giraffe and the Jews.”

The joke, little-known among non-Jews, conveys an important truism — that, for Jews, everything, no matter how distant or abstract, often comes back to the idea and feeling of being Jewish. In other words, it is a joke about Jewish ethnocentrism. That non-Jews aren’t very familiar with the joke speaks to the fact that Jewish ethnocentrism is something that is very frequently discussed and celebrated by Jews, but also something that is frequently downplayed, obscured, or even denied when queried by outgroups.  As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that there is very little objective scholarly literature that explicitly deals with the way in which Jews see and regard one another, and how they regard themselves as Jews. More generally, it has been noted that Jews are averse to being objectively studied at all, and are notoriously unresponsive to census questions, resulting in a persistent inability to accurately determine their population size in almost every Diaspora country.[1] This aversion to censuses has been explained as a cultural relic of reactive past responses to persecution, although there is a case to be made that it developed over time for more proactive, deliberate and strategic reasons, such as assisting in the avoidance of military service in the Russian Empire, and the evasion of quantitative population restrictions in Jewish residence charters issued in early modern Europe.[2]

Jewish Ethnocentrism

In addition to census avoidance, it is notable that there is a general air of hostility towards other forms of gathering data about Jews and their behavior. It is especially interesting that, while studies of Jewish ethnocentrism carried out in the last fifty years are rare, objective studies of Jews have frequently been regarded as controversial or even as examples of prejudice. The quintessential case in this regard is of course that of Kevin MacDonald, but as Sander Gilman has demonstrated in Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence (1996), there have also been very negative responses to work carried out on Jewish intelligence and behaviors by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending, Charles Murrary, and Richard Lynn. One could speculate that Jews are averse to objective studies of their aptitudes and behaviors because they are aware that at least some of these findings would reflect negatively on their group and provide some cause for revising the prevailing understanding of anti-Semitism and contemporary Jewish politics. Jews, it could be argued, are averse to studies of Jewish ethnocentrism because they are probably aware that such studies would reveal them to be highly ethnocentric, a fact that could prove extremely problematic if it became widespread cultural knowledge in a host population.

The small number of studies that have explicitly and directly examined Jewish ethnocentrism have unanimously concluded that Jews are a highly ethnocentric group that scores very highly in both positive (ingroup self-esteem) and negative (hostility to outgroups) ethnocentrism. Jewish children identify themselves as Jews as early as five years of age.[3] Smooha’s 1987 study of Jewish ethnocentrism in Israel, published in the Routledge journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, found it to “contain an excessive or unjustified element of superiority,” and “an unwarranted expectation of Jews to be treated preferentially.” Smooha’s findings “clearly expose ethnocentric excesses among the Jews,” and indicated that by certain metrics “virtually all Israeli Jews are racist.” It was found that while Arab ethnocentrism in Israel was “mainly reactive and transformable,” “Jewish ethnocentrism looks both genuine and intractable.”[4] In a more recent study (2003), Brown et al. examined ingroup romantic preferences among American Jewish and non-Jewish White undergraduates and found that Jews had a “significantly greater” preference for their own group, and that the stronger a respondent identified as a Jew, the stronger was the respondent’s preference for a Jewish romantic partner.[5] These respondents were also more likely to more favorably evaluate the Jewish people as a whole “on every target rating.” In short, Jewish identity is very strongly linked to positive ethnocentrism and endogamy (marrying within one’s group).

A particularly interesting aspect of the study by Brown et al. is the response to increasing rates of intermarriage among American Jews. Jewish intermarriage has been raised as evidence by some scholars objecting to analyses of Jewish ethnocentrism, most notably and recently by Nathan Cofnas.[6] However, as Brown et al. note, given more than a century of intense assimilation and acceptance by the host population and a population size of only around 3%, “an endogamy rate [among Jews] of 50% is surprisingly high.” They add that intermarriage rates are highest in those areas where the number of eligible in-group partners is very low, and point out that their study of college students indicates that ethnocentric preferences remain very strong in Jews, even the young. Cofnas has also posited that intermarriage and subsequent gene dilution should be regarded as evidence against Kevin MacDonald’s theory that Jews have acted to facilitate the continued genetic distinctiveness of the Jewish gene pool in the United States. Here it is worth considering the Judaic scholar Simon Rawidowicz who coined the term “the ever-dying people” to describe the Jews. In every generation, he noted, there are concerns (real or imagined) about Jewish survival. Yet this very concern about survivability was what helped to ensure that the community would continue to live, and even thrive. In plain terms, Jews, still enjoying a “surprisingly high” rate of endogamy, can afford the collateral damage of moderate levels of intermarriage, and in some respects the panic it causes can even be beneficial in facilitating the continued genetic distinctiveness of the Jewish gene pool among the strongly-identified and highly ethnocentric core of the population.

Jewish Self-Glorification

As a highly ethnocentric population, Jews would be expected to exhibit high levels of self-esteem at group level. Individual self-esteem has been linked to both sense of ethnic identity, and to ethnic self-esteem,[7] and although direct studies of the extent and nature of Jewish self-esteem are almost non-existent one study of Jewish adolescents has indicated a strong correlation between feeling Jewish and feeling good about oneself and one’s group.[8] In fact, one 1968 study found that Jewish individuals with low personal self-esteem could boost their overall self-esteem by adopting a stronger group identity and, in a sense, drawing on the self-esteem of simply being Jewish.[9] Similarly, a 1981 study found that Jews, as a group, had higher self-esteem than both Protestants and Catholics, who were roughly equal in self-esteem.[10] A more anecdotal indicator of Jewish self-esteem at the group level is the very strong group reaction towards those Jews who are even slightly critical of Jewish identity and “being Jewish,” most obviously in the form of the obviously excessive “self-hating Jew” accusation that is often made against Jewish defectors from the self-esteem norm. It is especially interesting that scholars who oppose work on Jewish ethnocentrism are also prominent in making Jewish “self-hatred” accusations, and Sander Gilman is again notable in this regard with his Jewish Self-Hatred (1986). This policing of positive perspectives of Jews among the in-group and outgroup is an excellent example of the dual function of Jewish self-glorification, which is arguably the most flamboyant and contentious aspect of Jewish positive ethnocentrism and high Jewish self-esteem.

Self-glorification is commonly defined as the exaltation of oneself and one’s abilities, though one could add that it entails excessive or unjustified elements of superiority. Individually, high levels of self-glorification are correlated strongly with psychopathy.[11] A small number of studies have found that groups demonstrating feelings of exaggerated self-love and superiority were more prone to desires or attempts to dominate other groups.[12] It is interesting in this respect that Patai (1996) quotes Menahem Nahum, an eighteenth century rabbi as follows: “All nations, with the exception of Israel, lack understanding [intelligence], and because they lack understanding no country can forgo Jewish leadership.”[13] Jews have exhibited excessive or unjustified elements of superiority for many centuries, most evidently in the foundational texts of their religion which posit Jews as favored by a sole universal deity, destined to dominate other groups, and establish moral hierarchies in which outgroups can be treated badly. Even in the New Testament of Christians, one finds the statement that “Salvation is from the Jews (John 4:22), and Jesus is mentioned as comparing a non-Jew to a dog (Matthew 15:26).

Later, in their interactions with Western culture, Jews frequently had recourse to the exaltation of themselves and their real or imagined abilities. Patai argues that by the twentieth century such forthright confessions of supremacist thinking had evolved into a more guarded “environmentalist explanation of Jewish superiority.” These explanations follow a formulation that asserts Jewish superiority from a less aggressive stance, often accompanied by claims that Jews simply don’t have the cultural baggage of their hosts. As an example, Patai cites French Jews of the nineteenth century who claimed superiority over Frenchmen because they didn’t have the religious and cultural baggage of a Catholic upbringing. This compares remarkably well with a writer in the Times of Israel who, commenting on the activities of the Jewish politician Alan Shatter in promoting divorce and contraception in Ireland, has argued that Shatter’s Jewishness “appeared to put him at an advantage, freeing him from the baggage that weighed on his Catholic counterparts.” Similarly, David Dresser and Lester Friedman, Jewish scholars of the media, maintain the position that Jewish filmmakers have a unique, untainted objectivity because of their Jewishness. They write that “Jewish artists’ marginality allows them a vantage point denied other, more culturally absorbed, creative thinkers.”[14]

Environmentalist explanations of Jewish superiority, and therefore examples of Jewish self-glorification, are certainly alive and well in the present. On October 5th, Norman Lebrecht, the Jewish British commentator on music and cultural affairs, published a piece at The Spectator titled “Do Jews Think Differently?,” in which he argues that Jews possess “a common ancestral way of thinking” that has allowed them to “change the world as we know it.” He insists that there exists “a way of thinking that has allowed Jews to see the world from an oblique angle,” and continues “Do Jews think differently? The moment I asked that question, there could be only one answer. … Some dissenting Jew, somewhere, right now, is about to change the way the world revolves.” Lebrecht refers at length to his recently published Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947 (Simon & Schuster, 2019), in the course of which he profiles 36 Jews who he claims are responsible (in a positive sense) for modernity. Lebrecht is a strongly identified Jew who clearly has a high level of self-esteem at the group level. He also has a history of producing texts that have advanced Jewish self-glorification. For example, in a 2011 Occidental Observer review essay (of Lebrecht’s Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World), Brenton Sanderson argues that

The focus here is on alerting us to fact of Mahler’s towering genius, and how this genius was inextricably bound up with his identity as a Jew. Overlaying this, as ever, is the lachrymose vision of Mahler the saintly Jewish victim of gentile injustice. Lebrecht’s new book is another reminder of how Jewish intellectuals have used their privileged status as self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture to advance their group interests through the way they conceptualize the respective artistic achievements of Jews and Europeans. … This betokens an acknowledgement of the importance of ethnic role models in the promotion of ethnic pride and group cohesion, and how ethnocentric Jews, like Lebrecht, have hyped the former to promote the latter. This form of Jewish intellectual activity is clearly directed at influencing ‘social categorization processes in a manner that benefits Jews.’

The unique aspect of Jewish self-glorification is not just the production of books like Lebrecht’s, but the scale and uniformity of such production, and the resulting broader cultural impact. Other groups have at times produced self-glorifying texts, for example, Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), and Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001), but these are extreme rarities, these authors have also written about unrelated subjects, and these texts do not appear to be accompanied by particularly high levels of ethnic self-esteem or associated factors of ethnocentrism in their respective ethnic groups. By contrast, Lebrecht’s book is simply part of a steady production of texts in which Jews celebrate themselves, often with extremely tendentious claims and outlandish and misplaced self-congratulation. Lebrecht’s latest text, for example, is almost a reprint of Jacques Picard’s Makers of Jewish Modernity: Thinkers, Artists, Leaders, and the World They Made (Princeton, 1998), and this in turn is part of a tradition that includes Heinrich Graetz’s 11-volume Geschichte der Juden (1853-1870), Cecil Roth’s The Jewish Contribution to Civilization (1938), Fredric Bedoire’s The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture (2004), and Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006) ( see here for an examination of how Spinoza has been a particular focus for Jewish self-glorification).

A fundamental problem with many of these texts, and a contributing factor to anti-Semitism, is that they very frequently involve Jews taking exclusive credit for accomplishments in which their role has been disputed, minor, or even entirely absent. Heinrich von Treitschke’s 1879 complaint at the opening of this essay concerned the efforts of the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz to promote the idea that Jews were due credit for the work of Kant and the literature of Lessing and Goethe. It is noteworthy that the effort to claim credit for the work of Goethe is ongoing among Jews today, most prominently in two works, Klaus Berghahn’s Goethe in German-Jewish Culture (2001) and Karin Schutjer’s Goethe and Judaism (2015). Efforts have also been made, on the flimsiest of evidence, to suggest that Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (1605), was Jewish, and as Sanderson has noted, there have been claims that Shakespeare’s works were actually written by a Jewish woman named Amelia Bassano Lanier. Jews have also attempted to demonstrate the Plato’s “dependence on Moses” (see, for a modern example, Carlos Fraenkel’s Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza).

Richard Popkin (1923–2005), a Manhattan-born Jewish academic working in the history of philosophy, was particularly notable for his efforts in Jewish self-glorification. While working on raising the profile of Spinoza via dubious methodologies, Popkin employed equally questionable methods and arguments to raise the profile of another Enlightenment-era Jew, Isaac La Peyrere. Popkin wrote: “I have tried for over a decade to make him one of the central figures in modern thought, but have not yet succeeded in completely rescuing him from obscurity.”[15] Even though La Peyrere’s accomplishments are regarded as marginal by almost every non-Jewish academic in the field, Popkin was at the forefront of efforts in the 1970s to displace Thomas Hobbes with La Peyrere as the most influential and significant critic of the idea of Mosaic authorship of the Old Testament, an attempt which ultimately failed because of a resolute scholarly consensus on the “archetypal originality” of Hobbes’ critique of religion. Popkin later turned his attention to linking La Peyrere to Spinoza, even though he admitted “no document attesting to this has been found,” and that in relation to Spinoza’s supposed use of La Peyrere’s works “one can only speculate.” Elsewhere, Popkin devoted himself to “proving” the “Jewish inheritance” of Isaac Newton, whom he wished to present as a “follower of Maimonides.”[16]

The Zionist thinker Walter Goldstein wrote in 1942, in relation to figures like Goethe, Mozart, Bach, Schiller, Lessing and Kant, that the meaning of the Diaspora was to “absorb the alien and learn from it — but to learn from it for us, for our own purpose”[17] [emphasis in original]. Trends in modern Jewish academia and culture suggest that a quite literal absorption is taking place, whereby almost every major figure of Western culture is being reinterpreted by Jews as owing much of their accomplishment to Jewish sources. Other major European figures and events that have been subjected to revisionist interpretations for Jewish self-glorification include John Milton (Jeffrey Shoulson’s 2012 Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity), Leonardo Da Vinci (Leonardo Da Vinci’s Musical Gifts and Jewish Connections, 2010), and the scientific revolution (André Neher’s 1986 Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century). Dante Alighieri is now said to have been influenced by Kabbalah (Mark Mirsky’s 2003 Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah), while Louis Pasteur’s revolutionary research on immunization is now said to have been based on the Talmud. Other figures claimed as Jews, or to have been heavily influenced by Jews and Judaism, include Pythagoras (Louis Feldman’s 1996 Jewish and Gentile in the Ancient World), Christopher Columbus, Rembrandt (Steven Nadler’s 2003 Rembrandt’s Jews), and John Locke (Yechiel Leiter’s 2018 John Locke’s Political Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible).

Another aspect of Jewish self-glorification is implicit in claims that certain aspects of modern society would not exist without Jews, and even that outgroups need Jews in order to survive. A good example in this regard is the blurb for Norman Lebrecht’s latest book, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, in which it is argued: “Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth.” These incredibly hyperbolic claims are demonstrably false from a factual point of view. The case of Siegfried Marcus is worth discussing. The earliest form of the automobile was pioneered by François de Rivaz around 1808, and the four-stroke petrol internal combustion engine that still constitutes the most prevalent form of modern automotive propulsion was in fact patented by Nikolaus Otto in the 1860s. While some have claimed that Siegfried Marcus had developed a fully functioning motor car by the 1870s, there is remarkably little evidence for this. By contrast, in 1885, Karl Benz developed a petrol or gasoline powered automobile, and this is also considered to be the first “production” vehicle as Benz made several other identical copies. In either event, it is clear that Benz was operating independently of anything Marcus was building, and that Marcus himself was dependent on technological innovations developed by non-Jews in order to pursue his project. In short, without Siegfried Marcus we would indeed have the motor car, and since the chain of modern production goes back through the Benz technological genealogy, it can be confidently asserted that we did in fact have the motor car without Siegfried Marcus.

The same pattern can be ascertained in every example given in the blurb for Lebrecht’s book, and it is particularly ironic that Lebrecht should include Landsteiner who was an excellent example of a defector from the Jewish norm of high ethnic self-esteem. Landsteiner, a convert to Catholicism, took legal action in 1937 against an American publisher who had included him in the book Who’s Who in American Jewry and was highly ambivalent about his Jewish origins. One assumes that, had he been alive today, he would have taken legal action against Lebrecht also. The inclusion of Landsteiner in Lebrecht’s book is, however, indicative of another aspect of Jewish self-glorification — a tendency to exaggerate the Jewishness of the subject so that his ‘world-changing’ achievement is held to be the natural expression of his Jewish origins and identity.

This pattern is observed even in circumstances where there is ample evidence that the subject distanced themselves from Jews and Judaism, and even held hostile attitudes towards them. The best example in this regard is Spinoza, who was exiled from the Amsterdam Jewish community and later survived an assassination attempt arranged by the same Jews. Spinoza also wrote very disparagingly of Judaism and Jews in his 1670 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in which he expressed his thoughts on Judaism. According to Spinoza, Judaism “commands the hatred of the enemy,” and is “carnal and particularistic.”[18] Spinoza argued that Mosaic Law was “merely national,” and was “a particularistic and tribal law that serves no other end than the earthly or political felicity of the Jewish nation.” Claims that Judaism was a universal religion were seen as nonsense by Spinoza, who saw in the God of Israel only “a tribal God who is not the God of all mankind.” He stated that, in relation to the Jews “it is the hatred of the Nations that above all keeps them in existence as a people.”[19] Such statements and contexts haven’t prevented Spinoza from being adopted by an extraordinary Jewish academic cottage industry as the quintessential Jewish genius who saved outgroups and ushered in modernity with his putative Jewish brilliance.[20]

A further aspect of Jewish self-glorification is the promotion or exaggeration of Jewish figures whose accomplishments would ordinarily (without Jewish self-glorification efforts) be regarded as moderate to mediocre. Lebrecht’s book is again a useful example because he cites figures like Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust as world-changing. While these authors produced works that are unquestionably unique and, if nothing else, interesting, their status as world-changing is hyperbolic by any objective standards. The works of both authors, which equally orbit the same themes of neuroticism and paranoia, did not resonate in the mass cultural consciousness in the same way that some of their non-Jewish literary contemporaries did (Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Eliot, and Yeats to name just a few). And, in any event, there are questions as to why novelists (especially those of long-winded niche texts like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time) should be considered world-changing at all, especially in a century that saw multiple major wars, massive innovations against disease, and the development of the television and aircraft. Lebrecht’s focus on Jews is instead highly revealing of a certain type of Jewish perspective prominent in strongly identified Jews exhibiting high levels of ethnocentrism and ethnic self-esteem. From the perspective of these extraordinarily ethnocentric individuals, only Jews matter — regardless of the meaning or meaninglessness of their work or achievement. Perhaps the quintessential example in this regard is the reception by Jews of the Jewish Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko. Sanderson (2011) comments:

For critics like [Klaus] Ottmann, Rothko’s genius is indisputable and he possessed an “extraordinary talent” that enabled him to transfer his metaphysical “impulses to the canvas with a power and magnetism that stuns viewers of his work. … In fact Rothko’s skill in achieving this result — whether intentional or not — perhaps explains why he was once called “the melancholic rabbi.” For prominent Jewish art historian Simon Schama, Rothko’s “big vertical canvasses of contrasting bars of colour, panels of colour stacked up on top of each other” qualify Rothko as “a maker of paintings as powerful and complicated as anything by his two gods — Rembrandt and Turner.” For the ethnocentric Schama “these [Rothko’s] paintings are equivalent of these old masters … Can art ever be more complete, more powerful? I don’t think so.”

In trying to explain these aspects of Jewish self-glorification, one can’t escape the possibility that the most ethnocentric strata of Jews have indeed retained the same perspective of Menahem Nahum, the eighteenth-century rabbi who insisted that all nations, with the exception of Jews, lack “understanding” and that no country can forgo Jewish leadership. It is likely that the level of ethnic self-esteem in such individuals is so high that they, in some sense, simply find it inconceivable that outgroups could succeed, let alone outperform Jews. Such a perspective would certainly go some way to explaining what appears to be an obsessive search for the often-imagined Jewish origins of leading Western figures and their accomplishments, and an equally obsessive search for Jewish figures who can be successfully boosted in the popular consciousness of outgroups, and positioned as lightning rods for Jewish ethnic pride.

Adaptive Qualities of Contemporary Jewish Self-Glorification

There are a number of features of Jewish self-glorification that could be regarded as highly adaptive in the contemporary social and cultural environment. Most obviously, by creating and sustaining an environment in which the in-group is seen as uniquely gifted and tasked with a world-historical mission, Jews promote high levels of ethnic cohesion and discourage defection. The most remarkable example of this dynamic at play can be found during the Middle Ages when some Jews opted for suicide over conversion to Christianity. The argument could be made that, for those choosing suicide, it was psychologically easier to die as a member of a gifted chosen people than to defect to a status that, in elements of Jewish theology, was less than human.

High self-esteem is also very strongly correlated with the General Factor of Personality (GFP), which in turn is associated with high degrees of social success and effectiveness.[21] In essence, by promoting high levels of in-group self-esteem, Jews make themselves more effective as individuals in acquiring, and helping to expand, positions of social, economic, and political influence for the broader group. In short, high self-esteem produces better and more effective activists. The generally higher level of self-esteem found among Jews, when compared to Catholics and Protestants[22], would indeed suggest an elevated GFP and social effectiveness in general. It could also be reasonably posited that feelings of high ethnic self-esteem would provide encouragement and justification for psychological aggression and various forms of activism against outgroups, assumed to be intellectually or morally wrong in issues of inter-ethnic dispute, and this aggression could extend to attempts at cultural and political domination. An interesting case study in this respect is the Jewish New Left of the 1960s and their self-concept as engaging in “heroic action” against outgroup norms. Both Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin quite literally used superhero allegories to describe themselves and their activities, with Rubin comparing himself to the Lone Ranger and Hoffman claiming “I’m just the guy who flies around in a cape and has the hots for Lois Lane.”[23] In such cases, highly narcissistic Jews act aggressively in the cultures of outgroups at least partly, or ostensibly, in the belief that Jewish heroic “assistance” is required for the outgroup’s own good — with the outgroup patronizingly seen as incapable or unready to even understand what that “good” is. Some degree of self-deception among Jews would be required in such cases, and this is discussed further by the present writer elsewhere.

A further adaptive quality of contemporary Jewish self-glorification is that there is always a possibility that outgroups, in whole or in part, might be convinced by the cultural atmosphere of Jewish self-glorification, accept it as truth, and willingly submit themselves to Jewish leadership. This can occur on an individual level, in which outgroup members are so accustomed to believing that Jews are uniquely talented or gifted that they are more prone to following certain Jewish ‘guru’ figures, or it can occur on a more broad ethnic basis in which Jews in general are regarded as a special people by outgroups. In the former case, there are certainly no shortage of examples of Jews of moderate significance gaining very widespread followings and acclaim from outgroup members, with all the allusions to “Jewish genius” one might expect from such a scenario. In the latter case, Jews have long held a privileged status as victims and gurus on the Left (though this is now waning), and Jews and Israel continue to hold Christian Zionists and aspects of the European Right in thrall, and are indeed regarded by many as “the apple of God’s eye.” Examples of non-religious ethnic Europeans producing texts glorifying Jews include Paul Johnson’s 1987 A History of the Jews and Thomas Cahill’s 1998 panegyric The Gifts of the Jews.

Yet another adaptive quality of Jewish self-glorification, and related to the one above, is that it can act to simultaneously reduce ethnic pride among outgroups and elevate Jewish prestige. If highly ethnocentric Jews can successfully disseminate the falsehood that the outgroup’s accomplishments are in fact Jewish accomplishments, then there will be a clear diminishment in the level of ethnic self-esteem in the outgroup. A similar effect can be accomplished by culturally “spamming” the outgroup with discussions of Jewish genius and exceptionalism, and these can be exacerbated further by combining such efforts with cultural “spamming” depicting Jews as the blameless victims of irrational violence perpetrated by the same outgroup. In this case, the Jews become intellectual and moral heroes, boosting in-group self-esteem, while the outgroup is paralyzed by a twin sense of inferiority and guilt.

The converse, of course, is that Jews have been prominent in promoting White guilt—in effect glorifying their own past while vilifying the people and culture of the West. Mainstream media messages promoting White guilt are ubiquitous, and Jewish involvement with the media and projects such as “Whiteness Studies” is notorious.

Maladaptive Qualities of Jewish Self-Glorification

The most obvious maladaptive quality of Jewish self-glorification is its potential to provoke anti-Semitism, as seen in the quote opening this essay. It is especially interesting that the rise of modern forms of anti-Semitism coincided with the rise of European nationalisms, which could in some sense be regarded as a form of political activity designed to raise ethnic self-esteem. Jewish attempts to assert cultural superiority over the highly-accomplished and pride-filled Germans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appear to have been an especially volatile source of ethnic friction.

Jewish self-glorification is also something that needs to be carefully expressed, and even highly ethnocentric Jews appear to be aware of safe limits to the expression of their ethnic pride. For example, Cecil Roth in his The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation wrote:

The Jew is distinguished, perhaps, by a slightly greater degree of intellectualisation, possibly by a freshness of outlook, natural in one whose approach tends to be external; and, in consequence, by a faculty for synthesis and for introducing new ideas. He is apt to show, in fact, certain characteristics inevitable in persons who belong, through the circumstances of their history, to a single sociological group. To say more is hazardous. [emphasis added]

Not only is Roth’s comment an excellent example of an environmentalist explanation of Jewish superiority, but his caution is also extremely noteworthy. Jewish self-glorification can be hazardous because the very point of contending for credit for a particular invention/accomplishment is a potential point of ethnic conflict. Additionally, Jewish self-glorification takes the risk of publicly posturing Jews as a group, a position that is normally avoided and downplayed by Jews in almost every other cultural scenario. Jews must also exercise caution in what exactly the claim credit for. Claiming Karl Marx, for example, despite his baptism and some anti-Semitic remarks, is an endeavor not without risk, and the same can be said for texts like Neal Gabler’s 1998 An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Jewish claims of responsibility for creating “modernity” and the “modern world” also assume a level of cultural consensus that these are in fact good things worth taking the credit for. One imagines that if a cultural consensus was reached that “modernity” was bad, or negative for Europeans, texts like Norman Lebrecht’s latest book would quietly disappear.

Most catastrophically, Jewish self-glorification efforts can potentially be identified for what they truly are, with these efforts failing and then in fact coming to reflect badly on Jews. Writing in the 1970s, Dutch Spinoza expert, Hubertus G. Hubbeling, expressed awareness of the fundamental and longstanding difference between Jews and non-Jews in interpretations of Spinoza’s importance. Hubbeling, with barely concealed irritation at the specifically Jewish character of the effort to exaggerate Spinoza’s significance, wrote towards the end of his Spinoza’s Methodology that:

there are some Jewish writers who emphasize very strongly the importance of Spinoza’s contribution to the development of democratic ideas. Joseph Dunner, for example, places him above Locke in this respect. L. Feuer makes of Spinoza the first democratic political philosopher: ‘The political philosophy of Spinoza is the first statement in history of the standpoint of democratic liberalism’ … According to the opinion of the present writer Spinoza’s importance is exaggerated here.[24] [emphasis added]

If the full implications and impact of Jewish self-glorification became common knowledge, fuelling anti-Semitism, it would clearly have a deleterious effect on the Jewish position in Western culture and society.

Conclusion

Although Jewish self-glorification is almost entirely absent from existing studies of anti-Semitism, it has played an important role in generating inter-ethnic friction over historical time. Jewish self-glorification, which continues to thrive both in Israel and the Diaspora, should be regarded as an extreme example of both positive and negative ethnocentrism — that it reinforces Jewish in-group loyalties and self-esteem while weakening the loyalties and self-esteem of outgroups. At time of this writing, Jewish self-glorification is highly adaptive for Jews who occupy a position of cultural prestige in almost all sections of Western culture and society, and who use self-glorification to secure this prestige and expand it further. Jewish self-glorification has been highly successful in boosting Jewish activism against outgroups, and together with victimhood narratives, which are themselves a form of historical glorification, have succeeded in paralyzing European outgroups with a twin sense of inferiority and guilt. Attempts to further lower European ethnic pride, through accusations of putative historical evils or by co-opting, relativizing, or universalizing their ethnic achievements will continue to be a key point of inter-ethnic conflict between Europeans and Jews. A crucial task for those interested in improving the prospects of the European peoples will therefore rest to some extent in finding ways to elevate group pride and creating a cultural consensus to diminish that of the Jews.

[1] Saxe, L. et al. “Measuring the Size and Characteristics of American Jewry: A New Paradigm to Understand an Ancient People,” in Rehbun, U (ed) The Social Scientific Study of Jewry. Sources, Approaches, Debates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 37-8.

[2] See, for example, the Charter Decreed for the Jews of Prussia (April 17, 1750) by Frederick II, which outlined the number of Jews, by occupation, permitted to reside in Berlin.

[3] Hartley, E. L., Rosenbaum, M., & Schwartz, S. (1948). Children’s Perceptions of Ethnic Group Membership. The Journal of Psychology, 26(2), 387—397.

[4] Smooha, S. (1987). Jewish and Arab ethnocentrism in Israel. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 10(1), 1—26.

[5] Brown, L. M., McNatt, P. S., & Cooper, G. D. (2003). Ingroup romantic preferences among Jewish and non-Jewish White undergraduates. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 27(3), 335—354.

[6] Cofnas, N. (2018). Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy. Human Nature, 29(2), 134—156, (153).

[7] Rosenberg, M. (1989) Society and the adolescent self-image (Rev. ed), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[8] Markstrom, C. A., Berman, R. C., & Brusch, G. (1998). An Exploratory Examination of Identity Formation among Jewish Adolescents According to Context. Journal of Adolescent Research, 13(2), 202—222.

[9] Rutchik, A. (1968). Self‐Esteem and Jewish Identification. Jewish Education, 38(2), 40—46.

[10] Rovner, R. A. (1981). Ethno-Cultural Identity and Self-Esteem: A Reapplication of Self-Attitude Formation Theories. Human Relations, 34(5), 427—434.

[11] Hofer, P. (1989). The Role of Manipulation in the Antisocial Personality. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 33(2), 91—101.

[12] De Keersmaecker, J., Onraet, E., Lepouttre, N., & Roets, A. (2017). The opposite effects of actual and self-perceived intelligence on racial prejudice. Personality and Individual Differences, 112, 136—138.

[13] Patai, R. (1996) The Jewish Mind Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 324.

[14] Dresser, D and Friedman, L. (2004) American Jewish Filmmakers University of Illinois, 7.

[15] Popkin, R.H. (1978) ‘Spinoza and La Peyrere’ in R. Shahan and J. Biro, Spinoza: New Perspectives Norman, Oklahoma.

[16] Popkin, R.H. (1990) Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology Boston: Kluwer.

[17] Quoted in Biemann, A (2012) Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme Stanford, California.

[18] Strauss, L. (1965) Spinoza’s Critique of Religion New York, 18.

[19] Donagan, A. (1988) Spinoza New York, 9.

[20] See, for example, Harry Wolfson’s two-volume The Philosophy of Spinoza, Joseph Dunner’s Baruch Spinoza and Western Democracy, Lewis Feuer’s Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, Leon Roth’s Spinoza, Descartes, and Maimonides, the many works of Richard Popkin, Margaret Jacob’s The Radical Enlightenment, Marjorie Glicksman Grene’s Spinoza and the Sciences, Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life and his Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind, Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650—1750, Michael Mack’s Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud, Steven Nadler’s A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, and Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

[21] Erdle, S., Irwing, P., Rushton, J. P., & Park, J. (2010). The General Factor of Personality and its relation to Self-Esteem in 628,640 Internet respondents. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(3), 343—346.

[22] Rovner, R. A. (1981). Ethno-Cultural Identity and Self-Esteem: A Reapplication of Self-Attitude Formation Theories. Human Relations, 34(5), 427—434

[23] Jezer, M. (1993) Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel Rutgers University Press.

[24] Hubbeling, H.G. (1964) Spinoza’s Methodology Royal Van Gorcum, Netherlands.

Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/

Not to create illusion of ownership..

 We talk about letting go, we use that kind of language, but notice how it also implies that there has been a holding on, a ‘me’ who has been doing some holding. But more truly, in a more real and complete way, it is not so much a matter of letting go but of training the heart not to grasp, not to identify, not to create that illusion of ownership in the first place.

A sound arises and passes with no remainder. A word is spoken – we hear it, it arrives, it is known, it is gone. There is silence before the word and silence after it. There does not need to be any kind of remainder. We don’t need to let go of a sound. A sound comes and goes on its own. We know we can’t own it, hold it or keep it. So rather than letting go, recognize the truth – nothing is ever really owned or possessed by an ‘I’ or a ‘me’. The practice is sustaining that awareness of the inexorable, incessant flow – the change, the modulation of perceptions, patterns of consciousness, patterns of nature, arising, blossoming, dissolving, following their own laws.

A star a cloud or a sunset can’t be possessed, but it can be known. In the same way, just allow the feelings of the body – emotions, moods, thoughts – to be ownerless, to arise, take shape, be fully received and known, and then let them dissolve. Be that unlocated, non-possessive heart of awareness. Be that quality of knowing which participates in all experience, but without confusion, without possessiveness. Develop this so that the layers of attachment and identification, the layers of self-view, are seen more and more clearly, and let go of.
In the Udāna, the Inspired Utterances, the Buddha says there is that sphere of being, that āyatana, where there is no earth, no water, no fire, no wind, where there is neither this world nor another world, there is no infinite consciousness, infinite space or nothingness. And in that realm of being, that āyatana, there is no moon, no sun, no stars. There is neither a coming nor a going, nor a standing still. There is no basis, there is no development, no support. This, just this, is the end of dukkha.

When we hear those words they can make us feel insecure and threatened. No sun? No moon? No stars? No development? No support? What is that! You can feel a kind of spiritual vertigo, being suddenly knocked off balance. But all that is happening here is an unplugging, a dissolving of our familiar patterns of identification and clinging – our clinging to a ‘me’ who is here in this place, experiencing this world which seems to exist around me in three-dimensional space. So these words from the Buddha are threatening to the ego, to the habits of identification with time and three-dimensional experience, but to the heart itself they are greatly liberating, freeing. In that āyatana, that realm of being, there is neither a coming nor a going nor a standing still. ‘Place’ does not apply. ‘Here’ and ‘there’ do not apply. Past and future do not apply.

Luang Por Chah used to expound on this teaching by asking, ‘If you can’t go forwards and you can’t go back and you can’t stay still, where do you go?’ This is similar to the question about still/flowing water – it’s a conundrum, a puzzle that confuses the thinking, rational mind. There is no solution when we are identified with the body, with time and space, the sense world. If you tried to give Ajahn Chah a clever answer and say that you could go sideways or up a tree, he would tell you, ‘No, you can’t go sideways, or up or down either. Where do you go?’ The only way to solve the conundrum is to let go of identification with the body, with time and place. If there are clinging and identification with the body, with three-dimensional space, the conundrum is insoluble; there is no answer, no solution. But if we really take to heart this daily reflection that the body is not self, feelings are not self, perceptions are not self, that is not who and what we are…

If there is non-identification with physical form, with the sense world, with perceptions, then there is awareness – non-identification is that unentangled participating in experience. This participation is not tied to a personality, an individuality, a physical spot; this awareness, this knowing, is unlocated.

(...)

In the last message that Luang Por Chah sent Ajahn Sumedho, the letter Luang Por sent just before he had his stroke and lost his ability to move and speak and teach, he said: ‘Whenever you have feelings of love and hate for anything whatsoever, these will be your partners in building pāramī, spiritual virtues. The Buddha Dhamma is not to be found in moving forwards, nor in moving backwards, nor in standing still. This, Sumedho, is your place of non-abiding.’
This was Luang Por Chah’s final instruction to his disciple who was setting up monasteries in the West. It wasn’t a list of ‘do this and don’t do that’. It wasn’t an exhortation to always remember to follow the traditions. He just reminded him of this one central, crucial principle: non-abiding, non-clinging. When the heart attunes itself to the Dhamma in this radical and complete way, it is able to respond to every situation. When we need to be conservative, we can be conservative. When we need to be creative, we can be creative. When we need to hold steady, we hold steady. When we need to adapt, we adapt. Through that non-clinging there is a supreme attunement to time, place, situation, to what each moment demands.

So that was the most appropriate and best advice to Ajahn Sumedho as he was starting up these new monasteries in the West – to let go of progress, to let go of degeneration, even to let go of holding steady. The Buddha-Dhamma is not to be found in moving forwards, nor in moving backwards, nor in standing still. It is here in the place of non-abiding, non-identification, no-thing-ness. It is here in the place of complete openness and receptivity.

The Breakthrough

Buddhist Meditation as a Means of Liberation

Ajahn Amaro

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers?

 There is a wonderful book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by the scientist Robert Sapolsky, who spends his time partly at Stanford University in California and partly living among troops of baboons in Kenya. He has spent a lot of time with baboons in the last few decades. Much of his book is about baboon life and politics, and he gives all his baboons wonderful biblical names – Rebecca and Obadiah, Ebenezer and Hepzibah. 

The thesis of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers is that if you are a zebra, you are on the menu for the average lion out on the savannah. When you see a lion coming towards you, you need stress and you need to get stressed fast. You want your heart to start beating, you want that adrenalin to go pumping, you need to get lots of energy to your legs and you want to start running. And you want maximum stress as the lion starts to chase after you. You need to get your system cranked up as much as you possibly can in that stressed situation. You need to have your anxiety levels very, very high. You need to become afraid, because fear is what is going to save you. The zebras who are nonchalant about lions are the ones who end up as breakfast. The ones who have high levels of anxiety survive.

So zebras need to be afraid. They need to move quickly. They can shut off their digestive and reproductive functions, get as much sugar into the system as possible, get the heart beating rapidly and pump the whole system with adrenalin, so they can move as quickly as possible. And within a couple of minutes one of two results will have happened: either they will have got away or they will have been caught and killed. So they only need to stay stressed for a couple of minutes, and if they get away they don’t need to keep the stress reaction going, because the lion has given up and gone after somebody else – somebody else is currently being turned into breakfast and so the worries of Zebra #1 are over. There is no need to sustain the stress reaction because the worst has just happened to someone else. There is no need to be afraid any more, so the stress switches off. 

Sometimes on television wildlife documentaries you will see an animal such as a zebra get caught by lions. Its guts are ripped open and the lions are chewing on it. Meanwhile three or four other zebras are happily grazing nearby, just casually glancing over: ‘Oh, look – there’s cousin George being eaten.’ It’s quite disturbing, isn’t it? You think, ‘Don’t they care? How can they be so callous?’ But it’s because they know that if cousin George is being eaten, they are not being eaten, so they don’t worry about it. And because they apparently can’t project into the future, they never think, ‘Tomorrow that could be me.’ They don’t make a problem out of it. Hence zebras don’t get ulcers.

As human beings, however, we have the capacity to reflect: ‘Ooh – George got it yesterday, and if you do the statistics, how much longer is it going to be until I’m on the menu?’ We human beings can remember the past and we can imagine a future, so we don’t get that stress reaction going for just two minutes – we can keep it going for a couple of months or years, so we get ulcers. The stress reaction is sustained through our papañca, through our conceptual thought and our capacity to remember and imagine. Memory and thought are useful things, and the imagination and the ability to project into the future have their purpose, but when these abilities overspill their boundaries and we start incessantly imagining, or we can’t let go of painful things that have happened in the past or stop anticipating painful or difficult things that might happen in the future, we create ongoing anxiety. Humans maintain the stress reaction hour after hour, day after day, week after week. We make ourselves ill with anxiety, restlessness, rage, rapacity and depression, the different ailments which beset society.

So if you want to avoid ulcers you need to work on papañca. Papañca is the habit of buying into our thoughts, believing in them and creating images of past and future, and going off and inhabiting them – building castles in the air and going to live there. That is what causes us so much distress. 

This conceptual proliferation, papañca, is actually not the end of the whole sequence described in the sutta. The last part of the sequence is what’s called papañca-sanñā-sankhā – ‘the multiplicity of thoughts and perceptions that the mind produces and which beset the heart’. That is a brief translation. Papañca-sanñā-sankhā is the whole array of thoughts and perceptions which are prone to prolixity. So by the time you get to the end of the process and have reached papañca-sanñā-sankhā, there is ‘me here and the world out there’, and the state of tension between the two – either tension with something I want which I haven’t got, or something I’m afraid is going to get me and want to get away from. There is a duality. And that subject-object duality is rigidly fixed into place, ‘me here’ and ‘the world out there’, and there is the state of tension and dukkha arising from that. 

This whole process, from the beginning with the simple perception through to the end with ‘me here’ and ‘the world out there’, happens very quickly. So learning to track this process and seeing how it begins requires the development of mindfulness and wisdom. The mind has to be trained not to follow the habitual pathways of papañca. 

When you see the mind has wandered off into some kind of conceptual labyrinth, into trains of thought and association, take the trouble to follow it back. This is the practice I described earlier of following the string of thoughts and associations back to its origin. It might not seem a terribly fruitful exercise, but in my experience it is very revealing. Over and over again we realize that the mind gets caught up in excitements or fantasies, fears and anxieties, or gets lost in rewriting the past, and that all this is completely void of substance. 

I used to be very fond of rewriting how things might have been in the past. I spent an amazing amount of time in my early monastic life re-scripting how things could or should have been. Often it would be fifteen or twenty minutes before the wisdom factor would wade in and say, ‘But it didn’t actually happen that way. That didn’t happen, it wasn’t that way, so there is no need to get upset, there is no need to get excited, no need to get worried. It didn’t happen, and it was ten years ago that it didn’t happen!’ 

But our mind does that, doesn’t it? We go back and revisit mistakes we made, glorious moments, or things which were memorable or painful – we re-inhabit them and bring them to life. Whenever we are aware that the mind is caught up in a proliferation, we need to take the trouble to catch that process like netting a butterfly. Catch that thought. Actually, a butterfly is a very appropriate symbol, since the Greek word ‘psyche’ means not just ‘the mind’ but ‘butterfly’. So a psychologist is someone who studies this very butterfly nature.

So we catch that particular fluttering piece of papañca, and then we follow the sequence of thoughts and associations back to where they came from. Every time we will notice that it was started by just a random thought that popped into the mind – there was a smell from the kitchen which triggered the memory of a particular food, or the sight of somebody’s shawl triggered the memory of Aunt Matilda’s dress. Following it back, we realize that it was just a smell, just a sound, just a random memory. That is all. When we get to the source, the origin, it is utterly unburdensome, uncomplicated. 

The string of the papañca-sanñā-sankhā leads to ‘me here’ and ‘the world out there’, and there is a solidly, definitely divided experience. The further you trace it back to the source, the less there is a sense of a ‘me here’ and ‘the world out there’. There is just hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. ‘In the heard there is only the heard’, in the hearing there is only the hearing. The same with seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. There is no sense of self embedded within that. It is just the world as it is experienced.

There is a great master of the Korean Buddhist tradition called Chinul who developed this method. The English translation of the Korean term he used for it is ‘tracing back the radiance’. There is a book of Chinul’s teachings, translated by Robert Buswell, which bears this title. The book is a very helpful guide to using the quality of mindfulness and careful attention to unpick the tangles of papañca, and to keep bringing the mind back to the simplicity of knowing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and then acknowledging how the world feels. What is the experience of the world when it is simply this way, when the heart is simply open to sense perception? 

When we do this, when this is carried through, there is a wonderful simplicity, an easefulness and a sense of integration. So I would really encourage this straightforward exercise. It also reveals the tracks down which the mind moves. You can become familiar with your own mental habits: whether you are a greed type or an aversion type, or whether you are a really good complainer. You realize how even a pleasant feeling or a pleasant sound can lead to criticizing, complaining or grumbling if you are that type. Or if you are a greed type, even a painful feeling can lead to something you are fantasizing about acquiring. So this simple process can help us get to know the patterns in which our mind moves, the patterns of conditioning; and by becoming familiar with those patterns we can free the heart from them.

We tend to think, ‘I am in here, the world is out there, and I am perceiving the world.’ But I find extremely helpful to keep recognizing that we don’t experience the world – we experience our mind’s representation of the world. This is something that the Buddha pointed to (e.g. at S 2.26, S 35.116): ‘That in the world by which one is a perceiver of the world, a conceiver of the world – this is called ‘the world’ in the Noble One’s discipline. And what is it in the world though which one does that? It is with the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body and the mind.’ That is ‘the world’ in terms of the Buddha’s teaching. Obviously we can talk about this planet as being the world, or the stars and galaxies and space being the world. In some ways that usage of the term is fair enough. It is reasonable. But it is important to recognize that when we are trying to live in the reflective way, develop the qualities of wisdom and understanding and free the heart, the most helpful way of understanding the world is just exactly as I have been describing – the world is sights, sounds, smells, taste, touch. That is the world because that is the world as we know it. 

I’m not saying that the whole world is an illusion conjured up by us as individuals. There is a substrate. There is a basis on which our perceptions are formed. But what we know about the world is constructed from the information that our senses weave together. That is the coordinating capacity of the mind. The mind is the sixth sense which draws the first five senses together and coordinates them. The world the mind creates is the world that we know. The world is put together by our minds. These perceptions are all we can know. All we have ever known has been through the agency of this mind. 

This shouldn’t be seen as a limitation. But we should recognize that this is the programme, this the world we live in and the world from which we learn. And that world is formed, coloured and shaped by the language we have learned and the experiences that we have had.

I feel that Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers should be required reading.

The Breakthrough

Buddhist Meditation as a Means of Liberation

Ajahn Amaro

Standing in the midst of an eternity

 THE LIVING PRESENT

When I returned to North America from my travels among traditional peoples in Indonesia and Nepal, I quickly found myself perplexed and confused by many aspects of my own culture. Assumptions that I had previously taken for granted, or that I had since childhood accepted as obvious and unshakable truths, now made little sense to me. The belief, for instance, in an autonomous “past” and “future.” Where were these invisible realms that had so much power over the lives of my family and friends? Everybody that I knew seemed to be expending a great deal of effort thinking about and trying to hold onto the past—obsessively photographing and videotaping events, and continually projecting and fretting about the future—ceaselessly sending out insurance premiums for their homes, for their cars, even for their own bodies. As a result of all these past and future concerns, everyone appeared (to me in my raw and newly returned state) to be strangely unaware of happenings unfolding all around them in the present. They seemed utterly oblivious to all those phenomena to which I had had to sensitize myself in order to communicate with indigenous magicians in the course of my fieldwork: the lives of other animals, the minute gestures of insects and plants, the speech of birds, the tastes in the wind, the flux of sounds and smells.… My family and my old friends all seemed so oblivious to the sensuous presence of the world. The present, for them, seemed nothing more than a point, an infinitesimal now separating “the past” from “the future.” And indeed, the more I entered into conversation with my family and friends, the more readily I, too, felt my consciousness cut off, as though by a sheet of reflective glass, from the life of the land.…

There is a useful exercise that I devised back then to keep myself from falling completely into the civilized oblivion of linear time. You are welcome to try it the next time you are out of doors. I locate myself in a relatively open space—a low hill is particularly good, or a wide field. I relax a bit, take a few breaths, gaze around. Then I close my eyes, and let myself begin to feel the whole bulk of my past—the whole mass of events leading up to this very moment. And I call into awareness, as well, my whole future—all those projects and possibilities that lie waiting to be realized. I imagine this past and this future as two vast balloons of time, separated from each other like the bulbs of an hourglass, yet linked together at the single moment where I stand pondering them. And then, very slowly, I allow both of these immense bulbs of time to begin leaking their substance into this minute moment between them, into the present. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the present moment begins to grow. Nourished by the leakage from the past and the future, the present moment swells in proportion as those other dimensions shrink. Soon it is very large; and the past and future have dwindled down to mere knots on the edge of this huge expanse. At this point I let the past and the future dissolve entirely. And I open my eyes.…

I FIND MYSELF STANDING IN THE MIDST OF AN ETERNITY, A VAST and inexhaustible present. The whole world rests within itself—the trees at the field’s edge, the hum of crickets in the grass, cirrocumulus clouds rippling like waves across the sky, from horizon to horizon. In the distance I notice the curving dirt road and my rusty car parked at its edge—these, too, seem to have their place in this open moment of vision, this eternal present. And smells—the air is rich with faint whiffs from the forest, the heather, the soil underfoot—so many messages mingling between different elements in the encircling land. The jagged snag of a single withered oak tree standing alone in the field does not, in this eternity, seem really dead. It is surrounded by an admiring clump of low bushes, and a large boulder reposes at the edge of these bushes, dialoguing with the old tree about shadows and sunlight.

Stepping closer, I see that the crumbling bark around the oak’s trunk is crossed by two lines of ants, one moving up the trunk and the other heading down into the soil. From this closer vantage I see, too, that the shadows on the boulder are not really shadows at all, but patches of lichen spreading outward from various points on the rock’s surface, in diverse textures and hues—dull blacks and crinkly grays and powdery, deep reds—as though through them the rock was expressing its inner moods. I scratch my leg. Strangely, the vividness of this world does not dissipate. I stomp on the ground, spin around, even stand on my head. But the open present does not disperse. Several jet black crows race out of the woods, chasing each other in swoops and sudden dives; one of them lands on the crumbling snag. “Kahhr! … Kahr! Kahr!” Now it glides down to the ground just in front of me—“Kahr!”—and stands there looking at me, sideways, through a purple eye. The lids blink swiftly, like shutters. It hops around me and the big beak opens. “Kawhhr!” I try to reply, “Cawr!” and the bird steps forward. Crow does not hop, I see, but walks, clumsily, on this ground. I can see the tiny feathers covering the nostrils on its beak as the breeze picks it up off the ground, feel myself swoop through the swirling breeze toward the forest edge.…

Things are different in this world without “the past” and “the future,” my body quivering in this space like an animal. I know well that, in some time out of this time, I must return to my house and my books. But here, too, is home. For my body is at home, in this open present, with its mind. And this is no mere illusion, no hallucination, this eternity—there is something too persistent, too stable, too unshakable about this experience for it to be merely a mirage.…

THE UNSHAKABLE SOLIDITY OF THIS EXPERIENCE IS CURIOUS indeed. It seems to have something to do with the remarkable affinity between this temporal notion that we term “the present” and the spatial landscape in which we are embedded. When I allow the past and the future to dissolve, imaginatively, into the immediacy of the present moment, then the “present” itself expands to become an enveloping field of presence. And this presence, vibrant and alive, spontaneously assumes the precise shape and contour of the enveloping sensory landscape, as though this were its native shape! It is this remarkable fit between temporal concept (the “present”) and spatial percept (the enveloping presence of the land) that accounts, I believe, for the relatively stable and solid nature of this experience, and that prompts me to wonder whether “time” and “space” are really as distinct as I was taught to believe. There is no aspect of this realm that is strictly temporal—for it is composed of spatial things that have density and weight, and is spatially extended around me on all sides, from the near trees to the distant clouds. And yet there is no aspect, either, that is strictly spatial or static—for every perceivable being, from the stones to the breeze to my car in the distance, seems to vibrate with life and sensation. In this open present, I am unable to isolate space from time, or vice versa. I am immersed in the world.

(...)

It was only toward the end of his investigations regarding the phenomenology of “time consciousness” that Edmund Husserl was led to suggest that the experience of time is rooted in a deeper dimension of experience that is not, in itself, strictly temporal.28

Husserl’s assistant, the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, returned again and again to the analysis of temporal experience. In his massive and influential work Being and Time, Heidegger disclosed, underneath the commonplace Aristotelian idea of time as an infinite sequence of “now points,” a forgotten sense of time as the very mystery of Being, as that strange power—essentially resistant to all objectification or representation—that nevertheless structures and makes possible all our relations to each other and to the world. This mystery cannot be represented, precisely because it is never identical to itself; primordial time, for Heidegger, is from the first outside-of-itself, or “ecstatic.” Indeed, the past, the present, and the future are here described by Heidegger as the three “ecstasies” of time, the three ways in which the irreducible dynamism of existence opens us to what is outside ourselves, to that which is other.29Yet Heidegger gradually came to suspect that this implicit, preconceptual sense of time could not be held apart from our preconceptual experience of space. Hence, in an important essay written late in his career, Heidegger alludes to a still more primordial dimension, which he calls “time-space”—a realm neither wholly temporal nor wholly spatial, from whence “time” and “space” have been artificially derived by a process of abstraction.30

Meanwhile, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, continually deepening his own investigations of perceptual experience, also came, in his final work, to assert an experiential realm more originary than space and time, from which these two dimensions have been derived. In the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes of “this very time that is space, this very space that is time, which I will have rediscovered by my analysis of the visible and the flesh.”31 Yet this analysis was cut short by his sudden death in 1961.

So all three phenomenologists—Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—came independently, in the course of their separate investigations, to suspect that the conventional distinction between space and time was untenable from the standpoint of direct, preconceptual experience. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were both striving, toward the end of their lives, to articulate a more immediate modality of awareness, a more primordial dimension whose characteristics are neither strictly spatial nor strictly temporal, but are rather—somehow—both at once.

We have seen that such a mode of experience is commonplace for indigenous, oral peoples, for whom time and space have never been sundered. The tradition of phenomenology, it would seem, has been striving to recover such an experience from within literate awareness itself—straining to remember, in the very depths of reflective thought, the silent reciprocity wherein such reflection is born. No single one of these thinkers was entirely successful in reconciling time and space. Yet their later writings provide tantalizing clues, talismans for those who are struggling today to bring their minds and their bodies back together, and so to regain a full-blooded awareness of the present.

(...)

It is this strange asymmetry of past and future in relation to the present that Heidegger describes in his late essay “Time and Being.” While in Being and Time Heidegger wrote of the centrifugal, ecstatic character of time—of time as that which draws us outside of ourselves, opening us to what is other—in this later essay he stresses the centripetal, inward-extending nature of time, describing time as a mystery that continually approaches us from beyond, extending and offering the gift of presence while nevertheless withdrawing behind the event of this offering. Such descriptions may sound strange, even uncanny, to our ears, and yet we should listen to them closely. For as Heidegger’s thought matured, he increasingly sought to loosen human awareness from the bondage of outworn assumptions, precisely by wielding common words in highly unusual ways, shaking terms free from their conventional usages. Thus past and future are here articulated as hidden powers that approach us, offering and opening the present while nevertheless remaining withdrawn, concealed from the very present that they make possible. In Heidegger’s description, both the past and the future remain hidden from the open presence that they mutually bring about.39 And yet the way the future conceals itself in its offering is quite different from the manner in which the past is concealed in its giving. Specifically, the future, or that which is to come, withholds its presence, while the past, or that which has been, refuses its presence.40 The future withholds, while the past refuses. In his most complete description of the vicissitudes of time, Heidegger puts the matter thus:

What has been, which, by refusing the present, lets that become present which is no longer present; and the coming toward us of what is to come, which, by withholding the present, lets that be present which is not yet present—both [make] manifest the manner of an extending opening up which gives all presencing into the open.41

The strange character of Heidegger’s language here is part of his project: he is trying to avoid the use of nouns, of nominative forms that would freeze the temporal flux. It is precisely this strangeness that enables his words to approach, and to open us onto, the silent structuration of this mystery we call time. If we ponder these words from within the open presence of the land around us, we are led to ask: Where can we perceive this withholding and this refusal of which Heidegger speaks? Where can we glimpse this refusal and this withholding that open and make possible the sensuous presence of the world around us?

We have already noticed the magic by which the horizon encloses and yet holds open the visible landscape: precisely by concealing, or better, withholding, that which lies beyond it. Thus, the horizon may indeed be felt as a withholding. But it is hardly a refusal. The horizon’s lips of earth and sky may touch one another, but they are never sealed; and we know that if we journey toward that horizon, it will gradually disclose to us that which it now withholds.

Where, then, can we locate the refusal to which Heidegger alludes? Do we perceive such a refusal anywhere around us? More important: how do we even know what we are looking for? Here again, Heidegger provides a clue. In “Time and Being,” he writes of the past and of the future as absences that by their very absence concern us, and so make themselves felt within the present.42 This description aids us a great deal. Now at least we can say what we are searching for in our attempt to locate, or place, the past and the future. We are hunting for modes of absence which, by their very way of being absent, make themselves felt within the sensuous presence of the open landscape. Or in Merleau-Ponty’s terminology (the terminology of The Visible and the Invisible) we could say we are searching for certain invisible aspects of the visible environment, certain unseen regions whose very hiddenness somehow enables or makes possible the open visibility of the land around us. The beyond-the-horizon is just such an absent or unseen realm.

And so we must now ask: Is there another unseen aspect, another absent region whose very concealment is somehow necessary to the open presence of the landscape?

Of course, there are those facets that I cannot see of the things or bodies that surround me—the sides of the trees that are facing away from me, or the other side of that lichen-covered rock. Yet these concealments are all analogous, in a sense, to that which lies hidden beyond the horizon. The other side of that rock, for instance, is withheld from my gaze, but it is not refused, for I can disclose it by walking over there, just as I can disclose what lies beyond the horizon by making a longer journey.

What of my own body? Well, most of my body is present to my awareness, and visible to my gaze. I can see my limbs, my torso, and even my nose, although my back, of course, is hidden beyond the horizon of my shoulders. The back of my body is inaccessible to my vision, and yet I know that it exists, that it is visible to the crows perched behind me in the trees, as I know that the fields and forests hidden beyond the horizon are yet visible and present to those who dwell there.

Yet while pondering the unseen aspect of my body, I soon notice another unseen region: that of the whole inside of my body. The inside of my body is not, of course, entirely absent; but it is hidden from visibility in a manner very different from the concealment of my back, or of that which lies beyond the horizon. It is an instance, I suddenly realize, of a vast mode of absence or invisibility entirely proper to the present landscape—an absence I had almost entirely forgotten. It is the absence of what is under the ground.

(...)

MARTIN HEIDEGGER, WHOSE CAREFUL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PAST and the future have helped us to recognize these realms as actual dimensions of the perceptual field, did not write of only two temporal dimensions, however, but of three, including that of the present. In Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that the present has its own ecstasy, its own proper transcendence, its own “ ‘whither’ to which one is carried away.”54 The implication is that phenomena can be hidden not just within the past or the future, but also within the very thickness of the present, itself—that there is an enigmatic, hidden dimension at the very heart of the sensible present, into which phenomena may withdraw and out of which they continually emerge. Thus in “Time and Being,” Heidegger writes that “even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing.”55 As though, paradoxically, there is a modality of absence entirely native to the present, out of which the present, itself, comes to presence: “In the present, too, presencing is given.”56Is there, then, yet another mode of absence or invisibility entirely endemic to the open landscape? I have already noticed, here within the perceivable present, the hidden nature of what lies behind the tree trunks and stones that surround me, which corresponds to the unseen character of that which lies on the other side of these nearby hills, and ultimately to those lands entirely beyond the horizon of the perceivable present, from whence numerous entities enter the visible terrain and into which various phenomena withdraw, recede, and finally vanish from view. I have acknowledged as well the concealed character of that which rests inside the trunks of these trees, inside the stones and the hills, which corresponds, ultimately, to the unseen nature of the under-the-ground, from whence beings sprout and unfurl, and into which they also crumble, decompose, and are submerged. Is there some other obvious style of absence, in the very thickness of the present, that is unique to itself, and not a mere modification of the under-the-ground or the beyond-the-horizon? Some mode of concealment that is, paradoxically, already out in the open, from whence the visible landscape itself continually comes to presence?

Perhaps I am pushing my method too far, here, in trying to place not only the withholding of presence by the future and the refusal of presence by the past, but also this concealment of presence from within the present itself. For now, more than ever, I feel confused,—unable to grasp, or to conceive of, what it is that I am searching for. Even as I gaze out across the wooded hills, my mind seems muddled by these questions, by ideas and associations that keep me from directly sensing and responding to the animate earth around me. I try to relax, and so begin to breathe more deeply, enjoying the coolness of the breeze as it floods in at my nostrils, feeling my chest and abdomen slowly expand and contract. My thinking begins to ease, the internal chatter gradually taking on the rhythm of the in-breath and the out-breath, the words themselves beginning to dissolve, flowing out with each exhalation to merge with the silent breathing of the land. The interior monologue dissipates, slowly, into the rustle of pine needles and the stately gait of the clouds.

A butterfly glides by, golden wings navigating delicate air currents with a few momentary flutters before they settle on a white flower. The seedstalks of the grasses bounce in the breeze, while clustered wildflowers tremble on their stems, awaiting the humming insects that motor haphazardly from one to the other. Fragrant whiffs from new blossoms in the overgrown orchard by the creek stir not only the winged beings, but my own flaring nostrils as they reach me from afar, drifting like spiderwebs on the faint winds. My sensing body now vividly awake to the world, I gradually become conscious of a third mode of invisibility, of an unseen dimension in which I am so thoroughly and deeply immersed that even now I can hardly bring it to full awareness.…

It is the invisibility of the air.

The Spell of the Sensuous

David Abram